Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers by Alan D. Schrift (Blackwell Publishing) (Hardcover) To understand the evolution of recent French thought, both the philosophical debates and the figures behind them must be examined. This unique book addresses positions such as vitalism, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, structuralism, and feminism, and provides concise biographies of the influential philosophers who shaped these movements, including entries on over eighty thinkers.
The discussion and cross-referencing of ideas and figures, together with an appendix on the distinctive nature of French academic culture, provide readers with an unparalleled resource for coming to grips with recent French philosophy in a single engaging and concise text.
Excerpt: 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 Ecole Normale Sup?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 hooks 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 agregatlon 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 examin¬ation's reading list in over thirty years. His works reappear on the reading lists for several of the following years, which means that many philosophy instructors whose teaching prepares students for this exam¬ination, 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 agregation de philosophic 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 phil¬osophy in France has developed during the twentieth century. It is Schrift's 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 them-selves sometimes give. So, to take a well-documented example, in Michel Foucault's inaugural address upon taking his position at the College de France, he credited Georges Dum?zil, Georges Canguilhem, and Jean Hyppolite for the roles they played in his intellectual evolu¬tion. Yet how many scholars who have published on Foucault, and students who have studied his work, would have to confess to not having 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, Kojeye, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Hyppolite, or Jankel?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. These two eclipses have different causes and reflect different phenomena. The latter - those important figures in France who have not yet been or are only just being "discovered" by an English-speaking audience include figures like Jacques Bouveresse, Gilles-Gaston Granger, Jules Vuillemin, Clement Rosset, and Alain Badiou, who for differing reasons have just never caught on sufficiently to justify the expense of translating and publishing their work. (That this is changing in the case of Badiou's work is worth noting.) But it is the former the "forgetting" of earlier influential figures that is, I think, more intellectually interesting, as it has a great deal to do with the abrupt and rather odd dismissal of all things existentialist that followed the rise of structuralism.
To be sure, much of this had to do with a typically Oedipal French intellectual gesture, namely, the exiling of Jean-Paul Sartre from theo¬retical relevance. One could certainly argue that no intellectual force exercised so dominant an influence on French thought this century as did Sartre, which makes his disappearance all the more suspect. But not only has Sartre been overlooked. In addition, almost everything that had any connection with him - and this was quite a lot - has also been ignored for quite a while. I mean here not only Sartre's major "exist¬ential" interlocutors Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir, but also the religious critics to whom he was responding such as the Personalist Edouard Mounier or the Catholic Gabriel Marcel, and the various Marxist controversies that he was a party to during the 1940s and 1950s. And then there was his influence on and support for the challenges to colonialism raised by, among others, Frantz Fanon, Aime C?saire, and Albert Memmi. Things are changing recently for the better in this regard, and there is now, to be sure, some renewed interest in the work of Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and the so-called "black existentialists." There is even renewed interest in Sartre's political as well as existentialist philosophical writings in circles other than those focused on teaching undergraduate existentialism classes, where Sartre's popularity has never waned. But there are still important figures and developments, particularly in the first decades of the twentieth century, and in the years between World War II and the rise of structuralism, that need to be recalled if the French twentieth century is to be told philosophically. That is what this text seeks to do.
In part one, Schrift offers a narrative account of developments in French philosophy through the twentieth century. His focus in this narrative is twofold: first, Schrift recalls the evolution of French thought from its spiritualist and positivist roots in the nineteenth century through several major developments: the introduction of phenomenology, both Hegel¬ian and Husserlian; the two responses to phenomenology: existential¬ism's "philosophy of the subject" and what the French call epistemologie's "philosophy of the concept"; the emergence of the human sciences and structuralism's challenge to philosophy; and the various ways that philosophical thinking reemerged after structur¬alism. Throughout this narrative, Schrift emphasizes two features that are often overlooked as one tells the "official story" of how French phil¬osophy moves from Bergson to existentialism to structuralism to postmodernism: the role played by French academic institutions and practices on the specific philosophical developments that emerge, and France's indigenous philosophical tradition's contribution to what is too quickly seen as appropriations of the thought of a succession of German philosophers.
In part two, Schrift provides biographical notes for a significant number of the philosophers who have, in my opinion, played important roles in the history of philosophy in France throughout the twentieth century. These notes are not, however, what one typically finds in a biography. Rather than rehearse the personal details of these thinkers' lives, Schrift focuses instead on the central factors in their intellectual formation: where and when they were born, where they went to lycee, where they prepared for the competitive entrance examination to the Ecole Normale Sup?rieure, who they studied with, who they went to school with, on what they wrote their various theses and under whose direction, where they taught, etc. Attending to these details reveals how "small" the French philosophical world is in terms of the available routes one could follow on the way to a successful academic career, and shows the enormous influence played by some philosophers who, while largely unknown outside the French academy, occupied positions of institutional power that determined what several generations of students would learn.
In the first appendix, Schrift discusses the major academic institutions that have marked the education and careers of all philosophers in France. While some of these institutions will be familiar - the Sorbonne or the Ecole Normale Sup?rieure, the College de France or the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes the ways in which they each place certain limitations on their students and faculties may not be well known. Nor will their respective relations with each other be likely to be familiar to many readers. In some cases, these relations and limitations are impor¬tant, and their changes over the century might make one's position at one or another of these institutions quite different, depending on when one taught or studied there. Other institutions, like the agr?gatlon de philosophie, or the prestige and influence of certain Parisian lycees, may not be known at all to many readers. For this reason, although it appears as an appendix, many readers might profit from reading this section before parts one and two, as some familiarity with French academic culture will help make sense of certain details in the historical narrative and the biographical notes.
In the second appendix, Schrift produce a very compre¬hensive bibliography available of French philosophy in English transla¬tion. For authors who have had only a few works published in English translation, their texts appear as part of their biographical notes. But for authors whose works have been widely translated into English, Schrift lists all of their translated books plus the titles and bibliographical information of their initial French publication.
Surveying the entirety of the developments in the twentieth century in French philosophy would be a task for an encyclopedia rather than a short introduction. Schrift highlights those develop¬ments that are either most philosophically significant or most important in terms of the roles played by certain academic institutions on the intellectual formations of French philosophers. This has led my account to pay what some will no doubt regard as insufficient attention to the influence of the ideas of Marx and Freud on developments in philosophy. The reason for this is that this narrative chooses to focus on academic philosophy: while Marx and Freud are very much a part of the twentieth-century intellectual world out of which almost all the philosophers Schrift discusses have arisen, they were not allowed into the philosophical cur¬riculum of the university (or even the classe de philosophie) prior to the late 1960s, and even then, they are only barely present. From this perspective, then, Schrift draws a distinction between, for example, what Althusser might be "teaching" his students - Spinoza, Rousseau, Machiavelli - and what he's working on with his colleagues - how to read Capital. Emphasizing the world of academic philosophy has also led to a selectivity that might appear somewhat arbitrary, especially as concerns those figures whose biographical notes included. In making the decisions as to who to include, Schrift tries to include not only all the major philosophers whose work has been well received by the English-speaking philosophical audi¬ence, but also those philosophers whose work, and teaching, has been influential on the development of generations of French philosophy students, including some students who subsequently became important philosophers in their own right. Such a list could have extended indefinitely, and while some well-known figures in philosophy and related fields have been omitted (Jean Baudrillard, Michel de Certeau, Vincent Descombes, Dominique Janicaud, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Edgar Morin, Alexis Philonenko, and Jacques Ranciere, among many others), Schrift tries to at least mention them in connecting them either to developments or to philosophical colleagues whose philosophical inter¬ests they shared. Hopefully, the story these biographies of intellectual formation tell, along with the historical narrative that precedes them and the notes on French academic institutions that follow them, is a good one, which is to say, an honest story, informative and insightful, sometimes predictable and other times surprising. Not the whole story, by any means; but a story worth telling.