By Francois Cusset, Jeff Fort
“A nice tale, jam-packed with twists and turns. . . . Careers made and ruined, departments torn aside, writing courses became sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media assaults, the total ball of wax. learn it and chortle or learn it and weep. i will infrequently watch for the movie.” —Stanley Fish, reconsider, ny instances “In any such tricky style, packed with traps and hindrances, French concept is successful and a striking e-book in each recognize: it really is reasonable, balanced, and knowledgeable. i'm convinced this publication turns into the reference on each side of the Atlantic.” —Jacques Derrida “The Atlantic Ocean has facets, and so does French thought. Reinvented in the US and betrayed in its personal kingdom, it has turn into the main radical highbrow flow within the West with international achieve, rewriting Marx in gentle of past due capitalism. Breathtakingly relocating from side to side among the 2 cultures, Francois Cusset takes us via a stunning highbrow experience that illuminates the previous thirty years, and plenty of extra many years to come.” —Sylvere Lotringer over the last 3 a long time of the 20 th century, a disparate team of radical French thinkers completed a fantastic point of impression and repute within the usa. in comparison by means of at the least one journalist to the British rock ‘n’ roll invasion, the coming of works by way of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and F?lix Guattari on American beaches within the past due Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties brought on a sensation. open air the academy, “French thought” had a profound impression at the era’s rising id politics whereas additionally turning into, within the Nineteen Eighties, the objective of right-wing propagandists. even as in educational departments around the kingdom, their poststructuralist kind of radical suspicion remodeled disciplines from literature to anthropology to structure. by means of the Nineties, French conception was once woven deeply into America’s cultural and highbrow cloth. French idea is the 1st entire account of the yank fortunes of those not going philosophical celebrities. Fran?ois Cusset appears to be like at why the US proved to be such fertile flooring for French conception, how such not easy writings may possibly turn into so generally influential, and the certainly American readings of those works. Reveling within the gossipy heritage, Cusset additionally offers a full of life exploration of the various provocative serious practices encouraged via French thought. finally, he dares to polish a shiny mild at the exultation of those thinkers to evaluate the relevance of severe idea to social and political activism today-showing, eventually, how French idea has turn into inextricably certain with American lifestyles. Fran?ois Cusset, a author and highbrow historian, teaches modern French notion in Paris on the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and at Columbia University’s Reid corridor. His books contain Queer Critics and l. a. D?cennie. Jeff castle is assistant professor of French on the collage of California, Davis. He has translated works by means of Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, and Jean-Luc Nancy.
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Extra resources for French theory: how Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States
Sample text
ANDRE MALRAUX, The Conquerors The American adventure with French theory has its deepest roots in a history that is itself too old, chaotic, and multiple to trace its contours in only a few pages-much less to exhaust all those contextual factors, such as political history and the memories of the exiled, with which in tellectual history maintains a curious relationship, one that is fragile, uncertain, and very different from the causalism applied to other parts of the larger historical narrative.
The United States did not yet exist on their world map. Aragon hoped that "America afar [would] crumble with its white buildings amid absurd prohibitions," and Breton, true to himself both before and after the war, went from disgust to abomination in describ ing their "bargain basement pragmatism" and their "imperialist plans. "6 Prehistories 21 And yet, whereas Breton and Max Ernst were more interested in Amer indian and West Indian art than in the America of Charles Sheeler and Edward Hopper, the young successors of these latter, from Arshile Gorky to Robert Motherwell, and soon Jackson Pollock and Willem de Koon ing, drew a decisive inflection for their work from these contacts-how ever distant they may have been.
One of the rare circles of nonacademic intellectuals in American history, the group formed around Dwight McDonald, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, and Edmund Wil son, and was soon joined by the younger Norman Mailer and William Styron. T his intellectual circle was not attached to a party but was ener getic in its political engagements. Combining literary verve and political courage, they continually animated debate in postwar New York, invit ing major European writers to contribute to their journals, including Sartre, Arendt, and the latter's former husband, Gunther Anders.
