Madame de Pompadour's famous quip, "Après nous, le deluge," serves as fitting inspiration for this lively discussion of postwar French intellectual and cultural life. Over the past thirty years, North American and European scholarship has been significantly transformed by the absorption of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories from French thinkers. But Julian Bourg's seamlessly edited volume proves that, historically speaking, French intellecutal and cultural life since World War Tw...

Expression in Contested Public Spaces: Free Speech and Civic Engagement addresses how people express themselves and their differences, in ways that amplify the many voices central to the mission of democracy. This book investigates in what ways and in what discursive forms people interrupt the status quo or unjust practices to advance positive social change. The chapters feature research activity, engaged scholarship, and creative expression to boldly frame the issues of free spee...

Though Michel Foucault is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, little is known about his early life. Even Foucault’s biographers have neglected this period, preferring instead to start the story when the future philosopher arrives in Paris.Becoming Foucault is a historical reconstruction of the world in which Foucault grew up: the small city of Poitiers, France, from the 1920s until the end of the Second World War. Beyond exploring previously unexam...

Though Michel Foucault is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, little is known about his early life. Even Foucault’s biographers have neglected this period, preferring instead to start the story when the future philosopher arrives in Paris.Becoming Foucault is a historical reconstruction of the world in which Foucault grew up: the small city of Poitiers, France, from the 1920s until the end of the Second World War. Beyond exploring previously unexam...

Michel Foucault’s work has profoundly affected the teaching of such diverse disciplines as literary criticism, criminology, and gender studies. Arguing that definitions of abnormal behavior are culturally constructed, Foucault explored the unfair division between those who meet and those who deviate from social norms. Foucault’s deeply visual sense of scenes such as ritual public executions, lends itself well to Moshe Süsser’s dramatic illustrations.

In 1968, Michel Foucault agreed to a series of interviews with critic Claude Bonnefoy, which were to be published in book form. Bonnefoy wanted a dialogue with Foucault about his relationship to writing rather than about the content of his books. The project was abandoned, but a transcript of the initial interview survived and is now being published for the first time in English. In this brief and lively exchange, Foucault reflects on how he approached the written word throughout his life,...

A bestseller in France following its publication in 1999, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an extraordinary set of reflections on “the gay question” by Didier Eribon, one of France’s foremost public intellectuals. Known internationally as the author of a pathbreaking biography of Michel Foucault, Eribon is a leading voice in French gay studies. In explorations of gay subjectivity as it is lived now and as it has been expressed in literary history and in the life and work o...

'This beautifully written and lucidly argued study is the most persuasive account of Bourdieu's work yet to be published. Lane illuminates much that can puzzle a foreign readership by expertly situating Bourdieu within a French context. At the same time he points to those aspects of Bourdieu's writing which are of particular relevance to contemporary debates on questions of citizenship and globalisation. He gives a fascinating account of Bourdieu's astonishingly prescient analyses of the i...

In May 1968, Gilles Deleuze was an established philosopher teaching at the innovative Vincennes University, just outside of Paris. Félix Guattari was a political militant and the director of an unusual psychiatric clinic at La Borde. Their meeting was quite unlikely, yet the two were introduced in an arranged encounter of epic consequence. From that moment on, Deleuze and Guattari engaged in a surprising, productive partnership, collaborating on several groundbreaking works, including ...

The French revolts of May 1968, the largest general strike in twentieth-century Europe, were among the most famous and colourful episodes of the twentieth century. Julian Bourg argues that during the subsequent decade the revolts led to a remarkable paradigm shift in French thought - the concern for revolution in the 1960s was transformed into a fascination with ethics. Challenging the prevalent view that the 1960s did not have any lasting effect, From Revolution to Ethics demonstrates tha...

In his private life, as well as in his work and political attitudes, Michel Foucault often stood in contradiction to himself, especially when his expansive ideas collided with the institutions in which he worked. In Francois Caillat's provocative collection of essays and interviews based on his French documentary of the same name, leading contemporary critics and philosophers reframe Foucault's legacy in an effort to build new ways of thinking about his struggle against society's mechanism...

Along with the theoretical or traditionally historical question “What is literature?”, the critical and political question “What can literature do?” begs an answer. What value do contemporary society and culture ascribe to literature? What utility? What role? “My confidence in the future of literature”, wrote Italo Calvino, consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it”. Is this still relevant to us today?