French Philosophy Since 1945: Problems, Concepts, Inventions, Postwar French Thought

After World War II, philosophy in France entered a particularly rich period whose influence is still strong in many areas today. New styles were invented, new problems were formulated, and new critical functions were engaged, reaching into many domains around the world.

In French Philosophy Since 1945, the fourth and final volume of The New Press Postwar French Thought series, Etienne Balibar and John Rajchman provide a fresh map and analysis for understanding this singular period in the history of ideas. Organized around a series of interconnected questions, featuring many different and sometimes opposed voices, this anthology collects the writings of celebrated philosophers along with work by thinkers highly regarded in France but not as well known to a U.S. audience for the first time. With new translations by Arthur Goldhammer, French Philosophy Since 1945 contextualizes this material within a larger intellectual and political history and chronology, identifying antecedents and distinguishing four main phases or moments. Indispensable for understanding the development of postwar French philosophy as a whole, this anthology also includes a comprehensive chronology outlining developments in the field since 1945.

Etienne Balibar, Professor Emeritus, Université de Paris I, and Distinguished Professor at University of California, Irvine, is one of Europes leading political philosophers. He is the author of Masses, Classes, and Ideas, We the People of Europe?, and Spinoza and Politics and is a co-author of Reading Capital. He is based in Paris.

John Rajchman is an associate professor at Columbia University and a visiting professor at Princeton University. The author of Truth and Eros, Constructions, and The Deleuze Connections, he has also written widely about contemporary art and architecture and contributed a foreword to The Chomsky-Foucault Debate (The New Press). He lives in New York.

Series Preface

Permissions

Introduction

I. In Search of a New Critique

Jules Vuillemin, The Kantian Heritage and the Copernican Revolution (1954)

Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant's Anthropology (1961)

Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965)

Louis Althusser, "Marxism and Humanism" (1967)

Jacques Derrida, "The Ends of Man" (1972)

Michel Foucault, "What Is Critique?" (1978)

Gilles Deleuze, "On Four Poetic Formulas" (1993)

Claude Imbert, For a History of Logic (1999)

II. Histories of Truth

Jean Cavaillès and Albert Lautman, "Mathematical Thought" (1946)

Jacques Lacan, "Intervention on Transference" (1952)

Michel Foucault, "Alexander Koyré: The Astronomical Revolution, Copernicus, Kepler, Borelli" (1961)

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967)

Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (1962)

Michel Foucault, "Elements for a History of Truth" (1974)

Pierre-Francois Moreau, "Image, Idea" (1975)

Julia Kristeva, "The True-Real" (1979)

Gilles Deleuze, "The Powers of the False" (1985)

Alain Badiou, "Veracity and Truth" (1988)

III. Questions of Difference

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (1950)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (1953)

Gilles Deleuze, "Bergson's Conception of Difference" (1956)

Jacques Derrida, "Différance" (1968)

Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1983)

Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1995)

Jacques Derrida, "As If It Were Possible, 'Within Such Limits'" (2001)

Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (1983)

IV. Event

Victor Goldschmidt, The Stoic System and the Idea of Time (1953)

Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (1960)

Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, "The Errors of Classical Economics: Outline of a Concept of Historical Time" (1968)

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1969)

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968)

Michel Foucault, "Eventalization" (1978)

Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I (1987)

Alain Badiou, "The Event as Trans-Being" (1998)

V. Subject

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)

Georges Bataille, "Sovereignty" (1954)

Georges Canguilhem, "What Is Psychology?" (1958)

Jacques Lacan and Jeffrey Mehlman, "Responses to Students of Philosophy Concerning the Object of Psychoanalysis" (1966)

Maurice Blanchot, "The Absence of the Book" (1969)

Jacques Bouveresse, "The Myth of Interiority" (1976)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

Maurice Florence aka Michel Foucault, "Foucault" (1984)

Emmanuel Levinas, "Outside the Subject" (1987)

Luce Irigaray, "Love Between Us" (1989)

Jacques Derrida, "'Eating Well,' or the Calculation of the