Twentieth-Century French Philosophy Twentieth-Century French Philosophy

Twentieth-Century French Philosophy Twentieth-Century French Philosophy Key Themes and Thinkers Alan D. Schrift ß 2006 by Alan D. Schrift blackwell publishing 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Alan D. Schrift to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2006 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schrift, Alan D., 1955– Twentieth-Century French philosophy: key themes and thinkers / Alan D. Schrift. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-3217-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4051-3217-5 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-3218-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4051-3218-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, French–20th century. I. Title. B2421.S365 2005 194–dc22 2005004141 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 11/13pt Ehrhardt by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed and bound in India by Gopsons Papers Ltd The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com To Pascale, my partner in all things French Contents Preface x Chronology xvii Part I 1 1 The Early Decades 5 2 Phenomenology on the Way to Existentialism 19 3 Existentialism and its Other 32 4 Structuralism and the Challenge to Philosophy 40 5 After Structuralism 54 6 Conclusion 75 Part II 83 Key Biographies in Brief 85 Appendix 1: Understanding French Academic Culture 188 Appendix 2: Bibliography of French Philosophy in English Translation 209 Works Cited and Consulted 271 Index 285 Epigraph But from the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries onward – the Napoleonic university was established at pre- cisely this time – we see the emergence of something like a sort of great uniform apparatus of knowledge, with its different stages, its different extensions, its different levels, and its pseudopodia. The university’s primary function is one of selection, not so much of people (which is, after all, basically not very important) as of knowledges. It can play this selective role because it has a sort of de facto – and de jure – monopoly, which means that any knowledge that is not born or shaped within this sort of institutional field – whose limits are in fact relatively fluid but which consists, roughly speaking, of the university and official research bodies – that anything exists outside it, any knowledge that exists in the wild, any knowledge that is born elsewhere, is automatically, and from the outset, if not actually excluded, disqualified a priori. That the amateur scholar ceased to exist in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a well-known fact. So the university has a selective role: it selects knowledges. Its role is to teach, which means respecting the barriers that exist between the different floors of the university apparatus. Its role is to homogenize knowledges by establishing a sort of scientific community with a recognized status; its role is to organize a consensus. Its role is, finally, to use, either directly or indirectly, State apparatuses to centralize knowledge. We can now understand why something resembling a university, with its ill-defined extension and frontiers, should have emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or in other words at the very time when this disciplinarization of knowledges, this organization of knowledges into disciplines, was going on. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended Preface Just what is ‘‘the Sorbonne’’? Is it a building? An institution? Does it operate under the auspices of the French government or does it function as an independent agency? And the E´ cole Normale Supe´rieure? Is that like a high school? Or a university? Or an institute of advanced study? As I began to work on an introduction to twentieth-century French philosophy, I came to realize that not only I, but also many people who considered themselves relatively well informed about recent French philosophy, did not really know the answers to many questions like these. More importantly, as my research evolved, I came to recognize that the answers to questions concerning the various academic institu- tions in France told a great deal about the history of philosophy in France in the twentieth century. For example, the supposed faddishness that is often noted as characteristic of French philosophy is not, I came to recognize, so much the consequence of ‘‘intellectual fashion’’ or personal choices as it is the result of the highly centralized and regulated system of academic instruction and professional certification that has marked the intellectual formation of virtually every significant French philosopher. To give an example, consider the following: in the four decades preceding 1960, almost no books on Nietzsche were published by philosophers in France. During the 1960s, beginning with Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie in 1962, books, essays, and journal issues devoted to Nietzsche’s work appear frequently. While many have wondered what sparked the Nietzsche explosion in France in the 1960s, and a ‘‘natural’’ hypothesis would be to assume that this interest arose in response to the publication in Germany of Heidegger’s two-volume Nietzsche in 1961, a knowledge of French academic practices suggests another explanation: Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals appears on the reading list of the agre´gation de philosophie – the annual examination that must be passed by anyone hoping for an academic career in philosophy – in 1958, the first time his work appears on that examination’s reading list in over thirty years. His works reappear on the Preface xi reading lists for several of the following years, which means that many philosophy instructors whose teaching prepares students for this examination, as well as all students finishing their higher education during these years, would be spending considerable time reading Nietzsche’s work. That so much published scholarship would follow from so many students and teachers reading Nietzsche’s works in preparation for this examination is not at all surprising, and examples like this one, I would argue, explain a great deal about so-called French scholarly fads. (The agre´gation de philosophie is discussed in some detail in appendix 1.) One of the primary goals of this text is to provide some of the institutional and academic background that helps to explain how philosophy in France has developed during the twentieth century. It is my conviction that the relative lack of awareness among English-language students and scholars of the French academic system and the role it has played in the intellectual formation of French philosophers has resulted in a lack of attention to many significant factors that have influenced the historical unfolding of philosophy in France. This lack of attention is most apparent in the cases of post-1960 ‘‘poststructuralist’’ French thinkers and it manifests itself in a number of ways. First, there is the general sense that while many of these thinkers respond to some extent to their structuralist predecessors, they are inspired more directly by German philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel, in particular. By chronicling the entire century and recalling some of the lively philosophical debates in the century’s first six decades, I hope to correct the conjoined misconceptions that ‘‘French Philosophy’’ began with existentialism and functions in large part in response to the German master thinkers. A second, related point, concerns a ‘‘cult of genius’’ that has sur- rounded many of the leading French philosophers of the century, a cult that some of these thinkers have themselves cultivated, with the result that the interlocutors with whom they were engaged and the teachers from whom they learned are often completely eclipsed from view. The fault is not always with the French, however, as their eager English- speaking audience is all too happy to ignore the hints that they themselves sometimes give. So, to take a well-documented example, in Michel Foucault’s inaugural address upon taking his position at the Colle`ge de France, he credited Georges Dume´zil, Georges Canguilhem, and Jean Hyppolite for the roles they played in his intellectual evolution. Yet how many scholars who have published on Foucault, and students who have studied his work, would have to confess to not having xii Preface read a word written by any of these three? There has been, throughout the twentieth century, a number of great ‘‘teachers’’ whose influence on French philosophy has been enormous – teachers like Alain, Wahl, Koje`ve, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Hyppolite, or Janke´le´vitch – and by highlighting the roles they have played, I think a better sense of the evolution of French thought can be garnered. A third and final point is also worth mentioning. The enormous popularity of the major figures in contemporary French philosophy – Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Kristeva, Irigaray, Lacan, et al. – has not only led to many very influential figures from earlier in the century being largely if not totally forgotten, but has also eclipsed the significant work of a range of other contemporary philosophers.

Load more