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PUBLISHED Major eruptions can thus deliver climatic `shocks? often linked to famine, disease, and conflict. It is possible indeed to treat historical eruptions that induced sudden climatic changes as potential `revelatory crises? that tested the resilience and vulnerability of societies, exposing political, economic and ideological tensions and fault-lines that might otherwise have remained latent or hidden to us. With advances in ice-core science improving the dating of past eruptions, which are discernible in annual layers of polar ice when elevated sulphate levels are detected, and with advanced Earth System modelling recreating post-volcanic climate effects with ever greater detail, it has become possible to identify and extract insights from previously unrecognized co-occurrences between eruptions and periods of societal stress in the first millennium BCE.

PUBLISHED This article argues for the integration of environmental perspectives into historical studies of territorialization. Using the case of the Western Expedition for the Drainage of Marshlands in Polesia (1873-1902), it shows that the transformation of the environment was one of many means by which the government of the Russian Empire sought to integrate the imperial territory and to develop regions that were considered backward. Three factors shaped these territorialization efforts in Polesia: firstly, the desire to foster economic development in rural areas; secondly, the role of the state as landowner; and, thirdly, a widespread consensus regarding the economic uselessness of wetlands. The canal network built by the Western Expedition improved conditions for commercial forestry in Polesia and connected the region to important transport routes. Yet, canal construction and river straightening measures were contested, as they subordinated existing land and water use practices to the interests of the central government. The example of the Western Expedition demonstrates that the concept of the ?ecosystem engineer? can help to analytically grasp the ecological dimension of imperial rule. At the same time, the case is symptomatic of a new paradigm in the relationship between state and nature in modern Russia: Environmental change was not a side effect of the state?s territorialization efforts, but an actively applied means of spatial consolidation.

PUBLISHED

This article argues that Foucault's 1964 paper “La folie, l'absence d'œuvre” ought to be understood as a response to Derrida's 1963 paper “Cogito et histoire de la folie”. I clarify the chronology of the exchange between these two thinkers and follow commentators Bennington and Flynn in emphasising themes other than the status of madness in Descartes. I undertake a thematic investigation of Foucault's 1961 characterisation of madness as the absence of an œuvre and the role of this characterisation in Derrida's 1963 paper. Then I turn to an investigation of Foucault's substantial change in position on these key themes with his 1964 paper. I argue that Foucault seeks to minimise the initial importance he attributed to his characterisation of madness as the absence of an œuvre, altering his understanding of the relation between madness and language as well as shifting the event that silences madness from Descartes to Freud. Derrida's reconsideration of Foucault's Folie et déraison in 1991 treats Freud as the new locus of the exchange. This is an implicit recognition by Derrida of Foucault's “La folie, l'absence d'œuvre” and confirmation of its place within the exchange.