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French literature
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The mid-20th century. Approaching the 21st century
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Jean
Coctea
Vercors
Jean-Paul Sartre
Albert Camus
Simone de Beauvoir
Francoise Sagan
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Nathalie Sarraute
Eugène Ionesco
Jacques Prévert
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Jacques Lacan
Michel
Foucault
Jacques Derrida
Gilles Deleuze
Félix Guattari
Marguerite Duras
Georges Perec
Claude Simon
Georges Simenon
Frédéric Mistral
Robert Merle
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Jean Baudrillard
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"The Little Prince"
Illustrated by Antoine de Saint Exupery
Henri Bergson
"Creative Evolution"
Gabriel Marcel
Emmanuel Levinas
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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The mid-20th century
The German
Occupation and postwar France
France’s defeat by German troops in 1940 and the
resultant division of the country were experienced as a
national humiliation, and all French citizens were
confronted with an unavoidable choice. Some writers
escaped the country to spend the remaining years of the
war in the safety of exile or with the Free French
Forces. Others, faithful to political options made
during the previous decade, moved directly into
collaboration. Still others, out of pacifist convictions
or a belief that art could remain aloof from politics,
tried to carry on as individuals and as writers,
ignoring the taint of passive collaboration with the
occupying forces or the Vichy government. Jean
Cocteau and Jean Giono were among this last group
and later were criticized for their conduct. Giono, in
fact, was briefly imprisoned, as was
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose reputation
was seriously damaged by his anti-Semitism.
Several
writers joined the military, as well as the
intellectual, resistance.
André Malraux served on many fronts and
commanded a group of underground Resistance fighters in
World War II in France, projecting the image of the
writer as a man of action; he was to serve as a minister
under Charles de Gaulle in the postwar government and
the Fifth Republic.
The
German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was decisive
for the French Communist Party, which was to gain
considerably through its organized opposition to
fascism. The events of the 1930s and ’40s strengthened
the conviction that intellectuals could not remain
politically uncommitted. After 1945, existentialism,
depicting humanity alone in a godless universe, provided
intellectual scaffolding for this view of individuals as
free to determine themselves through such choices.
Mean
while, the Occupation brought prestige and an attentive
audience to writers who upheld the honour of their
defeated country. The poetry of resistance reached a
wide public, notably in the works of the Communist
activists
Paul Éluard and
Louis Aragon, whose poems were often
transmitted orally through the occupied zone. A
flourishing clandestine press included the newspaper
Combat and the Editions de Minuit, whose first book was
Le Silence de la mer (1941; The Silence of the Sea) by
Vercors
(Jean-Marcel Bruller). Translated and reprinted in
Allied countries, Vercors’s short novel, like
Aragon’s collection
of poems Le Crève-Coeur (1941; “Heartbreak”; Eng. trans.
Le Crève-Coeur), became an emblem of French resistance
and was instrumental in restoring French pride and
prestige. Printed at the end of the war, Camus’s fable
La Peste (1947; The Plague), an allegory of the
Occupation, returned to the issues of resistance and
collaboration to present both a humane understanding of
the pressures and limits set by circumstance and a moral
judgment that to fail to recognize and fight evil is to
become part of it.
Jean Cocteau

born , July
5, 1889, Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris,
France
died October 11, 1963, Milly-la-Forêt, near
Paris
French poet, librettist, novelist, actor,
film director, and painter. Some of his most
important works include the poem L’Ange
Heurtebise (1925; “The Angel Heurtebise”);
the play Orphée (1926; Orpheus); the novels
Les Enfants terribles (1929; “The
Incorrigible Children”; Eng. trans. Children
of the Game or The Holy Terrors) and La
Machine infernale (1934; The Infernal
Machine); and his surrealistic motion
pictures Le Sang d’un poète (1930; The Blood
of a Poet) and La Belle et la bête (1946;
Beauty and the Beast).
Heritage
and youth
Cocteau grew up in Paris and always
considered himself Parisian by speech,
education, ideas, and habits. His family was
of the solid Parisian
bourgeoisie—cultivated, wealthy, and
interested in music, painting, and
literature.
Cocteau’s
earliest memories had to do with the
theatre, in popular forms, such as the
circus and the ice palace, as well as
serious theatre, such as the tragedies
performed at the Comédie-Française. At age
19 he published his first volume of poems,
La Lampe d’Aladin (“Aladdin’s Lamp”).
Cocteau was
the product of the years immediately
preceding World War I, years of refined
artistic taste that were devoid of political
turmoil. His real exploration of the world
of the theatre began when he encountered the
Ballets Russes, then under the direction of
Sergey Diaghilev. When Cocteau expressed a
desire to create ballets, Diaghilev
challenged him to “étonne-moi” (“surprise
me”). This famous remark seems to have
guided the poet not only in his ballets,
such as Parade (1917), with music by Erik
Satie, and Le Boeuf sur le toit (1920; “The
Ox on the Roof”), with music by Darius
Milhaud, but also in his other works; and it
is sometimes quoted in his plays and films.
During
World War I, Cocteau served as an ambulance
driver on the Belgian front. The landscape
he observed there was later used in his
novel Thomas l’imposteur (1923; Thomas the
Imposter or The Imposter). He became a
friend of the aviator Roland Garros and
dedicated to him the early poems inspired by
aviation, Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (1919;
The Cape of Good Hope). At intervals during
the years 1916 and 1917, Cocteau entered the
world of modern art, then being born in
Paris; in the bohemian Montparnasse section
of the city, he met painters such as Pablo
Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani and writers
such as Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire.

Portrait of Jean Cocteau by Amedeo
Modigliani.
Influence of Radiguet
Soon after the war, Max Jacob introduced
Cocteau to the future poet and novelist
Raymond Radiguet. The 16-year-old Radiguet,
who appeared to be a prodigy, advocated an
aesthetic of simplicity and of classical
clarity, qualities that would become
characteristic of Cocteau’s own work. The
example of Radiguet counted tremendously for
Cocteau; and when Radiguet died in 1923, at
age 21, the older man felt bereft of a
friendship that had been based upon a
constant interchange of ideas,
encouragement, and enthusiasms.
An
addiction to opium, brought on by Cocteau’s
grief over his lover’s death, necessitated a
period of cure. Jacques Maritain, a French
Thomist philosopher, paid his first visit to
Cocteau in the sanatorium. Through Maritain,
Cocteau returned briefly to religious
practice. These complex experiences
initiated a new period in his life, during
which he produced some of his most important
works. In the long poem L’Ange Heurtebise
the poet engages in a violent combat with an
angel that was to reappear continually in
his works. His play Orphée, first performed
in 1926, was destined to play a part in the
resurrection of tragedy in contemporary
theatre; in it, Cocteau deepened his
interpretation of the nature of the poet.
The novel Les Enfants terribles, written in
the space of three weeks in March 1929, is
the study of the inviolability of the
character of two adolescents, the brother
and sister Paul and Elisabeth. In 1950
Cocteau prepared the screenplay for a film
of this work, and he was also the film’s
narrator.
Cocteau had
enlarged the scope of his work by the
creation of his first film, Le Sang d’un
poète, a commentary on his own private
mythology; the themes that then seemed
obscure or shocking seem today less private
and more universal because they have
appeared in other works. Also in the early
1930s Cocteau wrote what is usually thought
to be his greatest play, La Machine
infernale, a treatment of the Oedipus theme
that is very much his own. In these two
works he moved into closer contact with the
great myths of humanity.
Filmmaking in the 1940s
In the 1940s Cocteau returned to
filmmaking, first as a screenwriter and then
also as a director in La Belle et la bête, a
fantasy based on the children’s tale, and
Orphée (1949), a re-creation of the themes
of poetry and death that he had dealt with
in his play.
Also a
visual artist of significance, Cocteau in
1950 decorated the Villa Santo Sospir in
Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and began a series of
important graphic works: frescoes on the
City Hall in Menton, the Chapel of
Saint-Pierre in Villefranche-sur-Mer, and
the Church of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples in
Milly-la-Forêt. His adopted son, the painter
Édouard Dermit, who also appears in his
later films, continued the decoration of a
chapel at Fréjus, a work Cocteau had not
completed at his death at age 74.
Wallace Fowlie
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Vercors

born Feb.
26, 1902, Paris, France
died June 10, 1991, Paris
French
novelist and artist-engraver, who wrote Le
Silence de la mer (1941; The Silence of the
Sea), a patriotic tale of self-deception and
of the triumph of passive resistance over
evil. The novella was published
clandestinely in Nazi-occupied Paris and
served to rally a spirit of French defiance.
Bruller was
trained at the École Alsacienne and worked
as a graphic artist and engraver until he
was drafted into the French army after the
outbreak of World War II. While recovering
from a broken leg, he joined the Resistance,
taking the nom de guerre Vercors (from the
geographic region of that name). In 1941 he
cofounded Éditions de Minuit, an underground
press devoted to boosting morale among the
French and maintaining a literary resistance
movement. Thousands of copies of Le Silence
de la mer, the first book published by the
press, circulated throughout occupied
France. It was later widely translated and
in 1948 was made into a motion picture.
Vercors, an
outspoken leftist, continued to write
fiction, plays, and essays, but he never
matched the initial success of Le Silence de
la mer. His later works included Le Sable du
temps (1946; “The Sand of Time”), Plus ou
moins homme (1950; “More or Less Man”),
Sylva (1961), Tendre Naufrage (1974; “Tender
Castaway”), Les Chevaux du temps (1977; “The
Horses of Time”), and a collection of
memoirs.
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Sartre
The war transformed the literary scene, eclipsing
some writers and lending prestige—for the time
being, at least—to those who had made the right
moral and political choices. During the Occupation,
Jean-Paul Sartre had continued to explore the
questions of freedom and necessity, and the
interrelationship of individual and collective
responsibility and action, in plays such as Les
Mouches (1943; The Flies) and Huis-Clos (1944; No
Exit, also published as In Camera) and in the
treatise L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and
Nothingness). After Liberation, the writer and his
ideas set the tone for a postwar generation that
congregated in the cafés and cellar clubs of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The myth of this
disillusioned youth, its district of Paris, its
innocence, its jazz clubs, and its worship of Sartre
were captured in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours
(1947; Froth on the Daydream).
Sartre’s patronage of
Jean Genet, Cocteau’s discovery, helped confirm the
reputation of Genet, whose novels of prison fantasy
and homosexual desire added to the radical ferment
of the 1940s (among them Notre-Dame-des Fleurs
[1943; Our Lady of the Flowers] and Querelle de
Brest [1947; Querelle of Brest]) and whose plays
would give new direction to drama in the 1950s.
Jean-Paul Sartre

French philosopher and author
born June 21, 1905, Paris, France
died April 15, 1980, Paris
Main
French novelist, playwright, and exponent of Existentialism—a philosophy
acclaiming the freedom of the individual human being. He was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but he declined it.
Early life and writings
Sartre lost his father at an early age and grew up in the home of his
maternal grandfather, Carl Schweitzer, uncle of the medical missionary
Albert Schweitzer and himself professor of German at the Sorbonne. The
boy, who wandered in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris in search of
playmates, was small in stature and cross-eyed. His brilliant
autobiography, Les Mots (1963; Words, 1964), narrates the adventures of
the mother and child in the park as they went from group to group—in the
vain hope of being accepted—then finally retreated to the sixth floor of
their apartment “on the heights where (the) dreams dwell.” “The words”
saved the child, and his interminable pages of writing were the escape
from a world that had rejected him but that he would proceed to rebuild
in his own fancy.
Sartre went to the Lycée Henri IV in Paris and, later on, after the
remarriage of his mother, to the lycée in La Rochelle. From there he
went to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, from which he was
graduated in 1929. Sartre resisted what he called “bourgeois marriage,”
but while still a student he formed with Simone de Beauvoir a union that
remained a settled partnership in life. Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs,
Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (1958; Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter,
1959) and La Force de l’âge (1960; The Prime of Life, 1962), provide an
intimate account of Sartre’s life from student years until his middle
50s. It was also at the École Normale Supérieure and at the Sorbonne
that he met several persons who were destined to be writers of great
fame; among these were Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil,
Emmanuel Mounier, Jean Hippolyte, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. From 1931
until 1945 Sartre taught in the lycées of Le Havre, Laon, and, finally,
Paris. Twice this career was interrupted, once by a year of study in
Berlin and the second time when Sartre was drafted in 1939 to serve in
World War II. He was made prisoner in 1940 and released a year later.
During his years of teaching in Le Havre, Sartre published La Nausée
(1938; Nausea, 1949), his first claim to fame. This novel, written in
the form of a diary, narrates the feeling of revulsion that a certain
Roquentin undergoes when confronted with the world of matter—not merely
the world of other people but the very awareness of his own body.
According to some critics, La Nausée must be viewed as a pathological
case, a form of neurotic escape. Most probably it must be appreciated
also as a most original, fiercely individualistic, antisocial piece of
work, containing in its pages many of the philosophical themes that
Sartre later developed.
Sartre took over the phenomenological method, which proposes careful,
unprejudiced description rather than deduction, from the German
philosopher Edmund Husserl and used it with great skill in three
successive publications: L’Imagination (1936; Imagination: A
Psychological Critique, 1962), Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions
(1939; Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, 1962), and L’Imaginaire:
Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (1940; The Psychology of
Imagination, 1950). But it was above all in L’Être et le néant (1943;
Being and Nothingness, 1956) that Sartre revealed himself as a master of
outstanding talent. Sartre places human consciousness, or no-thingness
(néant), in opposition to being, or thingness (être). Consciousness is
not-matter and by the same token escapes all determinism. The message,
with all the implications it contains, is a hopeful one; yet the
incessant reminder that human endeavour is and remains useless makes the
book tragic as well.
Post-World War II work
Having written his defense of individual freedom and human dignity,
Sartre turned his attention to the concept of social responsibility. For
many years he had shown great concern for the poor and the disinherited
of all kinds. While a teacher, he had refused to wear a tie, as if he
could shed his social class with his tie and thus come closer to the
worker. Freedom itself, which at times in his previous writings appeared
to be a gratuitous activity that needed no particular aim or purpose to
be of value, became a tool for human struggle in his brochure
L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946; Existentialism and Humanism,
1948). Freedom now implied social responsibility. In his novels and
plays Sartre began to bring his ethical message to the world at large.
He started a four-volume novel in 1945 under the title Les Chemins de la
liberté, of which three were eventually written: L’Âge de raison (1945;
The Age of Reason, 1947), Le Sursis (1945; The Reprieve, 1947), and La
Mort dans l’âme (1949; Iron in the Soul, 1950; U.S. title, Troubled
Sleep, 1950). After the publication of the third volume, Sartre changed
his mind concerning the usefulness of the novel as a medium of
communication and turned back to plays.
What a writer must attempt, said Sartre, is to show man as he is.
Nowhere is man more man than when he is in action, and this is exactly
what drama portrays. He had already written in this medium during the
war, and now one play followed another: Les Mouches (produced 1943; The
Flies, 1946), Huis-clos (1944; In Camera, 1946; U.S. title, No Exit,
1946), Les Mains sales (1948; Crime passionel, 1949; U.S. title, Dirty
Hands, 1949; acting version, Red Gloves), Le Diable et le bon dieu
(1951; Lucifer and the Lord, 1953), Nekrassov (1955), and Les Séquestrés
d’Altona (1959; Loser Wins, 1959; U.S. title, The Condemned of Altona,
1960). All the plays, in their emphasis upon the raw hostility of man
toward man, seem to be predominantly pessimistic; yet, according to
Sartre’s own confession, their content does not exclude the possibility
of a morality of salvation. Other publications of the same period
include a book, Baudelaire (1947), a vaguely ethical study on the French
writer and poet Jean Genet entitled Saint Genet, comédien et martyr
(1952; Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, 1963), and innumerable articles
that were published in Les Temps Modernes, the monthly review that
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir founded and edited. These articles were
later collected in several volumes under the title Situations.
Political activities
After World War II, Sartre took an active interest in French political
movements, and his leanings to the left became more pronounced. He
became an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union, although he did not
become a member of the Communist Party. In 1954 he visited the Soviet
Union, Scandinavia, Africa, the United States, and Cuba. Upon the entry
of Soviet tanks into Budapest in 1956, however, Sartre’s hopes for
communism were sadly crushed. He wrote in Les Temps Modernes a long
article, “Le Fantôme de Staline,” that condemned both the Soviet
intervention and the submission of the French Communist Party to the
dictates of Moscow. Over the years this critical attitude opened the way
to a form of “Sartrian Socialism” that would find its expression in a
new major work, Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Eng. trans., of
the introduction only, under the title The Problem of Method, 1963; U.S.
title, Search for a Method). Sartre set out to examine critically the
Marxist dialectic and discovered that it was not livable in the Soviet
form. Although he still believed that Marxism was the only philosophy
for the current times, he conceded that it had become ossified and that,
instead of adapting itself to particular situations, it compelled the
particular to fit a predetermined universal. Whatever its fundamental,
general principles, Marxism must learn to recognize the existential
concrete circumstances that differ from one collectivity to another and
to respect the individual freedom of man. The Critique, somewhat marred
by poor construction, is in fact an impressive and beautiful book,
deserving of more attention than it has gained so far. A projected
second volume was abandoned. Instead, Sartre prepared for publication
Les Mots, for which he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature,
an offer that was refused.
Last years
From 1960 until 1971 most of Sartre’s attention went into the writing of
a four-volume study called Flaubert. Two volumes with a total of some
2,130 pages appeared in the spring of 1971. This huge enterprise aimed
at presenting the reader with a “total biography” of Gustave Flaubert,
the famous French novelist, through the use of a double tool: on the one
hand, Karl Marx’s concept of history and class and, on the other,
Sigmund Freud’s illuminations of the dark recesses of the human soul
through explorations into his childhood and family relations. Although
at times Sartre’s genius comes through and his fecundity is truly
unbelievable, the sheer volume of the work and the minutely detailed
analysis of even the slightest Flaubertian dictum hamper full enjoyment.
As if he himself were saturated by the prodigal abundance of his
writings, Sartre moved away from his desk during 1971 and did very
little writing. Under the motto that “commitment is an act, not a word,”
Sartre often went into the streets to participate in rioting, in the
sale of left-wing literature, and in other activities that in his
opinion were the way to promote “the revolution.” Paradoxically enough,
this same radical Socialist published in 1972 the third volume of the
work on Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille, another book of such density
that only the bourgeois intellectual can read it.
The enormous productivity of Sartre came herewith to a close. His
mind, still alert and active, came through in interviews and in the
writing of scripts for motion pictures. He also worked on a book of
ethics. However, his was no longer the power of a genius in full
productivity. Sartre became blind and his health deteriorated. In April
1980 he died of a lung tumour. His very impressive funeral, attended by
some 25,000 people, was reminiscent of the burial of Victor Hugo, but
without the official recognition that his illustrious predecessor had
received. Those who were there were ordinary people, those whose rights
his pen had always defended.
Wilfrid Desan
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Camus
At this period,
Sartre’s name was linked with that
of
Albert Camus, then editor in chief of Combat,
whose novel L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, also
published as The Outsider) explored similar issues
of the social attribution of identity. The two broke
off relations after Sartre’s critique of
Camus’s
L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel).
Sartre moved
toward the existentialist Marxism of his Critique de
la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical
Reason) and
Camus toward a stoical humanism, his
later fiction (La Chute, 1956; The Fall) showing
evidence of his isolation, his creative unease, and
his distress over France’s war with Algeria.
Albert Camus

born Nov.
7, 1913, Mondovi, Alg.
died Jan. 4, 1960, near Sens, France
French
novelist, essayist, and playwright, best
known for such novels as L’Étranger (1942;
The Stranger), La Peste (1947; The Plague),
and La Chute (1956; The Fall) and for his
work in leftist causes. He received the 1957
Nobel Prize for Literature.
Early years
Less than a year after Camus was born,
his father, an impoverished worker of
Alsatian origin, was killed in World War I
during the First Battle of the Marne. His
mother, of Spanish descent, did housework to
support her family. Camus and his elder
brother Lucien moved with their mother to a
working-class district of Algiers, where all
three lived, together with the maternal
grandmother and a paralyzed uncle, in a
two-room apartment. Camus’s first published
collection of essays, L’Envers et l’endroit
(1937; “The Wrong Side and the Right Side”),
describes the physical setting of these
early years and includes portraits of his
mother, grandmother, and uncle. A second
collection of essays, Noces (1938;
“Nuptials”), contains intensely lyrical
meditations on the Algerian countryside and
presents natural beauty as a form of wealth
that even the very poor can enjoy. Both
collections contrast the fragile mortality
of human beings with the enduring nature of
the physical world.
In 1918
Camus entered primary school and was
fortunate enough to be taught by an
outstanding teacher, Louis Germain, who
helped him to win a scholarship to the
Algiers lycée (high school) in 1923. (It was
typical of Camus’s sense of loyalty that 34
years later his speech accepting the Nobel
Prize for Literature was dedicated to
Germain.) A period of intellectual awakening
followed, accompanied by great enthusiasm
for sport, especially football (soccer),
swimming, and boxing. In 1930, however, the
first of several severe attacks of
tuberculosis put an end to his sporting
career and interrupted his studies. Camus
had to leave the unhealthy apartment that
had been his home for 15 years, and, after a
short period spent with an uncle, Camus
decided to live on his own, supporting
himself by a variety of jobs while
registered as a philosophy student at the
University of Algiers.
At the
university, Camus was particularly
influenced by one of his teachers, Jean
Grenier, who helped him to develop his
literary and philosophical ideas and shared
his enthusiasm for football. He obtained a
diplôme d’études supérieures in 1936 for a
thesis on the relationship between Greek and
Christian thought in the philosophical
writings of Plotinus and St. Augustine. His
candidature for the agrégation (a
qualification that would have enabled him to
take up a university career) was cut short
by another attack of tuberculosis. To regain
his health he went to a resort in the French
Alps—his first visit to Europe—and
eventually returned to Algiers via Florence,
Pisa, and Genoa.
Camus’s literary career
Throughout the 1930s, Camus broadened
his interests. He read the French classics
as well as the writers of the day—among them
André Gide, Henry de Montherlant, André
Malraux—and was a prominent figure among the
young left-wing intellectuals of Algiers.
For a short period in 1934–35 he was also a
member of the Algerian Communist Party. In
addition, he wrote, produced, adapted, and
acted for the Théâtre du Travail (Workers’
Theatre, later named the Théâtre de l’Équipe),
which aimed to bring outstanding plays to
working-class audiences. He maintained a
deep love of the theatre until his death.
Ironically, his plays are the least-admired
part of his literary output, although Le
Malentendu (Cross Purpose) and Caligula,
first produced in 1944 and 1945,
respectively, remain landmarks in the
Theatre of the Absurd. Two of his most
enduring contributions to the theatre may
well be his stage adaptations of William
Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (Requiem pour
une nonne; 1956) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s
The Possessed (Les Possédés; 1959).
In the two
years before the outbreak of World War II,
Camus served his apprenticeship as a
journalist with Alger-Républicain in many
capacities, including those of leader-
(editorial-) writer, subeditor, political
reporter, and book reviewer. He reviewed
some of Jean-Paul Sartre’s early literary
works and wrote an important series of
articles analyzing social conditions among
the Muslims of the Kabylie region. These
articles, reprinted in abridged form in
Actuelles III (1958), drew attention (15
years in advance) to many of the injustices
that led to the outbreak of the Algerian War
in 1954. Camus took his stand on
humanitarian rather than ideological grounds
and continued to see a future role for
France in Algeria while not ignoring
colonialist injustices.
He enjoyed
the most influence as a journalist during
the final years of the occupation of France
and the immediate post-Liberation period. As
editor of the Parisian daily Combat, the
successor of a Resistance newssheet run
largely by Camus, he held an independent
left-wing position based on the ideals of
justice and truth and the belief that all
political action must have a solid moral
basis. Later, the old-style expediency of
both Left and Right brought increasing
disillusion, and in 1947 he severed his
connection with Combat.
By now
Camus had become a leading literary figure.
L’Étranger (U.S. title, The Stranger;
British title, The Outsider), a brilliant
first novel begun before the war and
published in 1942, is a study of
20th-century alienation with a portrait of
an “outsider” condemned to death less for
shooting an Arab than for the fact that he
never says more than he genuinely feels and
refuses to conform to society’s demands. The
same year saw the publication of an
influential philosophical essay, Le Mythe de
Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), in which
Camus, with considerable sympathy, analyzed
contemporary nihilism and a sense of the
“absurd.” He was already seeking a way of
overcoming nihilism, and his second novel,
La Peste (1947; The Plague), is a symbolical
account of the fight against an epidemic in
Oran by characters whose importance lies
less in the (doubtful) success with which
they oppose the epidemic than in their
determined assertion of human dignity and
fraternity. Camus had now moved from his
first main concept of the absurd to his
other major idea of moral and metaphysical
“rebellion.” He contrasted this latter ideal
with politico-historical revolution in a
second long essay, L’Homme révolté (1951;
The Rebel), which provoked bitter antagonism
among Marxist critics and such near-Marxist
theoreticians as Jean-Paul Sartre. His other
major literary works are the technically
brilliant novel La Chute (1956) and a
collection of short stories, L’Exil et le
royaume (1957; Exile and the Kingdom). La
Chute reveals a preoccupation with Christian
symbolism and contains an ironical and witty
exposure of the more complacent forms of
secular humanist morality.
In 1957, at
the early age of 44, Camus received the
Nobel Prize for Literature. With
characteristic modesty he declared that had
he been a member of the awarding committee
his vote would certainly have gone to André
Malraux. Less than three years later he was
killed in an automobile accident.
Assessment
As novelist and playwright, moralist and
political theorist, Albert Camus after World
War II became the spokesman of his own
generation and the mentor of the next, not
only in France but also in Europe and
eventually the world. His writings, which
addressed themselves mainly to the isolation
of man in an alien universe, the
estrangement of the individual from himself,
the problem of evil, and the pressing
finality of death, accurately reflected the
alienation and disillusionment of the
postwar intellectual. He is remembered, with
Sartre, as a leading practitioner of the
existential novel. Though he understood the
nihilism of many of his contemporaries,
Camus also argued the necessity of defending
such values as truth, moderation, and
justice. In his last works he sketched the
outlines of a liberal humanism that rejected
the dogmatic aspects of both Christianity
and Marxism.
John
Cruickshank
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Beauvoir
The conflicts submerged in the euphoria of
liberation surfaced during the Cold War and were
intensified by the colonial wars of the 1950s. In
her novel Les Mandarins (1954; The Mandarins),
Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s lifelong partner)
vividly depicted the moral, political, and personal
choices confronting French intellectuals in a world
defined by the battle for hegemony between
Washington and Moscow. However, her analysis of
women’s situation, Le Deuxième Sexe (1949; The
Second Sex), a succès de scandale on its first
appearance, was to be a more influential
achievement. The publication in 1958 of her Mémoires
d’une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful
Daughter) marked the beginning of a sequence of
autobiographical works that tracked the different
phases of her own life and the exchanges within it
between public and private experience. After
Sartre’s death she gave a moving account of his
later years in La Cérémonie des adieux (1981;
Adieux, A Farewell to Sartre). The posthumous
publication in the 1990s of their letters and
diaries from the war years later brought the
relationship between the couple, and their
relationships with others, into more-complex and
sometimes surprising perspectives.
Simone de Beauvoir

French writer
in full Simone
Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir
born Jan. 9, 1908, Paris, France
died April 14, 1986, Paris
Main
French writer and feminist, a member of the
intellectual fellowship of
philosopher-writers who have given a
literary transcription to the themes of
Existentialism. She is known primarily for
her treatise Le Deuxième Sexe, 2 vol. (1949;
The Second Sex), a scholarly and passionate
plea for the abolition of what she called
the myth of the “eternal feminine.” This
seminal work became a classic of feminist
literature.
Schooled in private institutions, de
Beauvoir attended the Sorbonne, where, in
1929, she passed her agrégation in
philosophy and met Jean-Paul Sartre,
beginning a lifelong association with him.
She taught at a number of schools (1931–43)
before turning to writing for her
livelihood. In 1945 she and Sartre founded
and began editing Le Temps modernes, a
monthly review.
Her novels expound the major Existential
themes, demonstrating her conception of the
writer’s commitment to the times. L’Invitée
(1943; She Came To Stay) describes the
subtle destruction of a couple’s
relationship brought about by a young girl’s
prolonged stay in their home; it also treats
the difficult problem of the relationship of
a conscience to “the other,” each individual
conscience being fundamentally a predator to
another. Of her other works of fiction,
perhaps the best known is Les Mandarins
(1954; The Mandarins), for which she won the
Prix Goncourt. It is a chronicle of the
attempts of post-World War II intellectuals
to leave their “mandarin” (educated elite)
status and engage in political activism. She
also wrote four books of philosophy,
including Pour une Morale de l’ambiguité
(1947; The Ethics of Ambiguity); travel
books on China (La Longue Marche: essai sur
la Chine [1957]; The Long March) and the
United States (L’Amérique au jour de jour
[1948]; America Day by Day); and a number of
essays, some of them book-length, the best
known of which is The Second Sex.
Several volumes of her work are devoted to
autobiography. These include Mémoires d’une
jeune fille rangée (1958; Memoirs of a
Dutiful Daughter), La Force de l’âge (1960;
The Prime of Life), La Force des choses
(1963; Force of Circumstance), and Tout
compte fait (1972; All Said and Done). This
body of work, beyond its personal interest,
constitutes a clear and telling portrait of
French intellectual life from the 1930s to
the 1970s.
In addition to treating feminist issues, de
Beauvoir was concerned with the issue of
aging, which she addressed in Une Mort très
douce (1964; A Very Easy Death), on her
mother’s death in a hospital, and in La
Vieillesse (1970; Old Age), a bitter
reflection on society’s indifference to the
elderly. In 1981 she wrote La Cérémonie des
adieux (Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre), a
painful account of Sartre’s last years.
Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography, by Deirdre
Bair, appeared in 1990.
Simone de Beauvoir revealed herself as a
woman of formidable courage and integrity,
whose life supported her thesis: the basic
options of an individual must be made on the
premises of an equal vocation for man and
woman founded on a common structure of their
being, independent of their sexuality.

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Toward the nouveau roman
The popular literary
event of 1954 was Bonjour tristesse (“Hello,
Sadness”; Eng. trans. Bonjour Tristesse). Published
when its author, Françoise Sagan (pseudonym of
Françoise Quoirez), was only 19 years old, this
novel of adolescent love was written with
“classical” restraint and a tone of cynical
disillusionment and showed the persistence of
traditional form in the preferred fictions of the
novel-reading public. The Naturalist novel survived
in the work of Henri Troyat and others, while its
assumptions about the role of the author and the
nature of fictional “reality” continued to be taken
for granted by a host of novelists and their
readers.
These assumptions, challenged in the interwar
years in the Joycean novel, had already found
opposition in the prose fictions of
Samuel Beckett,
Joyce’s disciple and fellow Irishman, who published
his first major text in French in 1951. Molloy (Eng.
trans. Molloy) was the first of a trilogy exploring
the constitution of the individual subject in
discursive form, setting out the framing limits of
identity constituted by language, history, social
institutions, family, and the forms of storytelling
(the other two volumes in the trilogy are Malone meurt [1951; Malone Dies] and L’Innommable [1953;
The Unnameable]). As the century progressed, it
became increasingly clear that
Beckett’s work was
seminal in the understanding of the material
operations of writing: where writing comes from, how
words work, and the extent to which all individuals
live in language.
In the mid-1950s, however, critical attention was
focused on the group dubbed the nouveaux romanciers,
or new novelists: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon,
Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, and Robert Pinget.
Marguerite Duras (Marguerite Donnadieu) is sometimes
added to the list, though not with her approval. The
label covered a variety of approaches, but, as
theorized in Robbe-Grillet’s Pour un nouveau roman
(1963; Towards a New Novel), it implied generally
the systematic rejection of the traditional
framework of fiction—chronology, plot, character—and
of the omniscient author. In place of these
conventions, the writers offer texts that demand
more of the reader, who is presented with
compressed, repetitive, or only partially explained
events from which to read a meaning that will not,
in any case, be definitive. In Robbe-Grillet’s La
Jalousie (1957; Jealousy), for example, the
narrator’s suspicions of his wife’s infidelity are
never confirmed or denied, but the interest of the
writing is in conveying their obsessive quality,
achieved by the replacement of a chronological
narrative with the insistent repetition of details
or events. Duras’s Moderato cantabile (1958; Eng.
trans. Moderato Cantabile) favours innovative
stylistic structuring over conventional
characterization and plot, her purpose not to tell a
story but to use the play of form to represent the
movements of desire—complex, ambiguous, and
disruptive.
The nouveau roman (French: “new novel”) was open
to influence from works being written abroad,
notably by William Faulkner, and from the cinema.
Both Robbe-Grillet and Duras contributed to the
nouvelle vague, or New Wave, style of filmmaking.
The nouveau roman was taken up by the literary
theorist Jean Ricardou and promulgated by him
through the avant-garde critical journal Tel Quel.
(Founded in 1960 by Philippe Sollers and other
writers, Tel Quel reflects the transformation and
politicization of Parisian and international
intellectual modes in that decade.) Its scope
narrowed over the years, and texts written in this
mode were increasingly concerned with emphasizing
their status as language games divorced from the
real.
Françoise Sagan

pseudonym
of Françoise Quoirez
born June
21, 1935, Carjac, France
died September 24, 2004, Honfleur
French
novelist and dramatist who wrote her first
and best-known novel, the international
best-seller Bonjour Tristesse (1954), when
she was 19 years old.
Educated at
private and convent schools in France and
Switzerland, Sagan attended the Sorbonne.
She wrote the manuscript of Bonjour
Tristesse in three weeks; it was made into a
film in 1958. Among the novels that followed
Bonjour Tristesse are Un Certain Sourire
(1956; A Certain Smile), Aimez-vous Brahms?
(1959), Les Merveilleux Nuages (1961;
Wonderful Clouds), Un Profil perdu (1974;
Lost Profile), De guerre lasse (1985;
Engagements of the Heart, or A Reluctant
Hero), and Un Sang d’aquarelle (1987;
Painting in Blood). Most of Sagan’s novels
feature aimless people who are involved in
tangled, often amoral relationships. Almost
all her protagonists are young women
involved sexually with older, world-weary
men or, less frequently, middle-aged women
and their young lovers. Her plays, which
resemble her novels in content, were
generally well received. They include
Château en Suède (1960; Castle in Sweden)
and L’Excès contraire (1987; Opposite
Extremes). She also wrote film scripts,
short stories, and nonfiction.
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Alain Robbe-Grillet

born Aug.
18, 1922, Brest, France
died Feb. 18, 2008, Caen
representative writer and leading
theoretician of the nouveau roman (“new
novel”), the French “anti-novel” that
emerged in the 1950s. He was also a
screenwriter and film director.
Robbe-Grillet was trained as a statistician
and agronomist. He claimed to write novels
for his time, especially attentive “to the
ties that exist between objects, gestures,
and situations, avoiding all psychological
and ideological ‘commentary’ on the actions
of the characters” (Pour un nouveau roman,
1963; Toward a New Novel; Essays on
Fiction). Robbe-Grillet’s world is neither
meaningful nor absurd; it merely exists.
Omnipresent is the object—hard, polished,
with only the measurable characteristics of
pounds, inches, and wavelengths of reflected
light. It overshadows and eliminates plot
and character. The story is composed of
recurring images, either actually recorded
by an objective eye or drawn from
reminiscences and dreams.
If
Robbe-Grillet’s fiction, with its
timetables, careful inventories of things,
and reports on arrivals and departures, owes
anything to the traditional novel, it is to
the detective story. His first work, Les
Gommes (1953; The Erasers), deals with a
murder committed by the man who has come to
investigate it. Le Voyeur (1955; The Voyeur)
deals with the murder of a young girl by a
passing stranger. In La Jalousie (1957;
Jealousy), a jealous husband views the
actions of his wife and her suspected lover
through a louvre shutter (jalousie). Among
his later novels are Dans le labyrinthe
(1959; In the Labyrinth), Instantanés (1962;
Snapshots), La Maison de rendez-vous (1966;
The House of Assignation), Projet pour une
révolution à New York (1970; Project for a
Revolution in New York), Topologie d’une
cité famtôme (1976; Topology of a Phantom
City), Un Régicide (1978; “A Regicide”), and
Djinn (1981). Robbe-Grillet continued to
write into the early 21st century; novels
from this period include La Reprise (2001;
Repetition) and Un Roman sentimental (2007;
“A Sentimental Novel”), the latter of which
concerns incest and pedophilia. His
autobiography, Le Miroir qui revient (Ghosts
in the Mirror), was published in 1984.
Robbe-Grillet’s techniques were dramatized
in the motion pictures he directed, among
them L’Immortelle (1963; “The Immortal”),
Trans-Europ-Express (1966), and L’Homme qui
ment (1968; The Man Who Lies). His
best-known work in the medium, however, is
the screenplay for Alain Resnais’s film
L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961; Last
Year at Marienbad). Ultimately,
Robbe-Grillet’s work raises questions about
the ambiguous relationship of objectivity
and subjectivity.
Robbe-Grillet was the recipient of numerous
honours. In 2004 he was elected to the
French Academy.
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Nathalie Sarraute

née
Nathalie Ilyanova Tcherniak
born July
18, 1900, Ivanova, Russia
died Oct. 19, 1999, Paris, France
French
novelist and essayist, one of the earliest
practitioners and a leading theorist of the
nouveau roman, the French post-World War II
“new novel,” or “antinovel,” a phrase
applied by Jean-Paul Sartre to Sarraute’s
Portrait d’un inconnu (1947; Portrait of a
Man Unknown). She was one of the most widely
translated and discussed of the nouveau
roman school. Her works reject the
“admirable implements” forged by past
realistic novelists such as Honoré de
Balzac, particularly the use of biographical
description to create full-bodied
characters.
Sarraute
was two years old when her parents were
divorced, and her mother took her to Geneva
and then to Paris. Except for brief visits
to Russia and an extended stay in St.
Petersburg (1908–10), she lived in Paris
thereafter, and French was her first
language. She attended the University of
Oxford (1921) and graduated with a licence
from the University of Paris, Sorbonne
(1925); she was a member of the French bar,
1926–41, until she became a full-time
writer.
Sarraute
challenged the mystique of the traditional
novel in her theoretical essay L’Ère du
soupçon (1956; The Age of Suspicion) and
experimented with technique in Tropismes
(1939 and 1957; Tropisms), her first
collection of sketches. In this work she
introduced the notion of “tropisms,” a term
borrowed from botany and meaning elemental
impulses alternately attracted and repelled
by each other. Sarraute described these
impulses as imperceptible motions at the
origin of our attitudes and actions, and
forming the substrata of such feelings as
envy, love, hate, or hope. Within this
aggregate of minute stirrings, Sarraute
portrays a tyrannical father pushing his
aging daughter into marriage (Portrait d’un
inconnu), an elderly lady enamoured of
furniture (Le Planétarium, 1959; The
Planetarium), and a literary coterie
reacting to a newly published novel (Les
Fruits d’or, 1963; The Golden Fruits). Later
works include Elle est là (1978; “She Is
There”), L’Usage de la parole (1980; “The
Usage of Speech”), and an autobiography,
Enfance (1983; Childhood).
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Theatrical experiments
In the 1940s and early
’50s, drama found immediate subject matter in the
overt clash of politics, ethics, and philosophies,
public and personal, that were the substance of
everyday life. Jean Anouilh’s many plays
(exemplified by Antigone [1944; Eng. trans.
Antigone]) are lucid, classical moralities, showing
that there is a price to be paid for loyalty to
people and beliefs. Henry de Montherlant’s
historical dramas explored the heroic inconsistency
of human behaviour and the fascination of secular
and religious idealism.
Sartre’s expressed aim for
his theatre throughout the 1940s and 1950s was to
show systems of values in conflict. From Les Mouches
(produced 1943; The Flies), written for a France
suffering Nazi oppression, to Les Séquestrés
d’Altona (1959; The Condemned of Altona, also
published as Altona), staged when France had become
the oppressor in Algeria, his work gives form to the
conflicting imperatives of personal survival and
collective responsibility and the impossible choices
set for the revolutionary by the competing
discourses of family, religion, nation, and class.
This was an outstanding moment for the French
stage. At the same time, government policy to
provide state financial aid after the war led to the
encouragement of great drama in the provinces (the
Avignon Festival, founded by the great director Jean
Vilar in 1947 to reach a younger public with more
vibrant and modern acting and staging techniques)
and the establishment of remarkable and innovative
theatre companies in Paris, such as the Théâtre
National Populaire and the Compagnie Jean-Louis
Barrault–Madeleine Renaud. The work and the theories
of Jarry, Cocteau, and Artaud now began to bear
their fruit. The plays of Anouilh and, to a lesser
extent, those of
Sartre still conveyed their
intentions effectively from the author’s script.
Playwrights such as Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco,
Arthur Adamov, and
Samuel Beckett focused to a great
degree on the realization of text in performance.
Though Genet’s Les Bonnes (The Maids) appeared in
1947 and Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald
Soprano) in 1949, public recognition of the new
theatre did not come until 1953, with Roger Blin’s
production of
Beckett’s En attendant Godot (1952;
Waiting for Godot). (Blin is notable for his early
presentation of plays by
Beckett, Genet, and other
important dramatists.) Their antecedents as diverse
as the fool of Shakespearean drama and the tramp of
silent comedy, Vladimir and Estragon are locked
together in lyrical, violent, and trivial exchanges
that model the devastating absurdity of latter-day
Western humanism in a highly stylized dramatic form
that brings together musical composition, high
tragedy, pantomime, and knockabout farce.
Recognition, when it came, certainly answered fully Artaud’s requirement for a theatre that would shock
its spectators into awareness of the darkness that
shaped their world. Le Balcon (1956; The Balcony), Genet’s violently erotic representation of the
spectacular fascination of power and its corrupting
effect on revolutionary impulses, waited two years
before the censor would admit it to the stage. Les Nègres (1958; The Blacks), less visual in its
obscenity, was no more careful of the audience’s
sensibilities, tearing apart the verbal and social
discourses that create and sustain racial
oppression.
Eugène Ionesco

born Nov. 26,
1909, Slatina, Rom.
died March 28, 1994, Paris, France
Romanian-born French dramatist whose one-act
“antiplay” La Cantatrice chauve (1949; The
Bald Soprano) inspired a revolution in
dramatic techniques and helped inaugurate
the Theatre of the Absurd. Elected to the
Académie Française in 1970, Ionesco remains
among the most important dramatists of the
20th century.
Ionesco was
taken to France as an infant but returned to
Romania in 1925. After obtaining a degree in
French at the University of Bucharest, he
worked for a doctorate in Paris (1939),
where, after 1945, he made his home. While
working as a proofreader, he decided to
learn English; the formal, stilted
commonplaces of his textbook inspired the
masterly catalog of senseless platitudes
that constitutes The Bald Soprano. In its
most famous scene, two strangers—who are
exchanging banalities about how the weather
is faring, where they live, and how many
children they have—stumble upon the
astonishing discovery that they are indeed
man and wife; it is a brilliant example of
Ionesco’s recurrent themes of
self-estrangement and the difficulty of
communication.
In rapid
succession Ionesco wrote a number of plays,
all developing the “antilogical” ideas of
The Bald Soprano; these included brief and
violently irrational sketches and also a
series of more elaborate one-act plays in
which many of his later themes—especially
the fear and horror of death—begin to make
their appearance. Among these, La Leçon
(1951; The Lesson), Les Chaises (1952; The
Chairs), and Le Nouveau Locataire (1955; The
New Tenant) are notable successes. In The
Lesson, a timid professor uses the meaning
he assigns to words to establish tyrannical
dominance over an eager female pupil. In The
Chairs, an elderly couple await the arrival
of an audience to hear the old man’s last
message to posterity, but only empty chairs
accumulate on stage. Feeling confident that
his message will be conveyed by an orator he
has hired, the old man and his wife commit a
double suicide. The orator turns out to be
afflicted with aphasia, however, and can
speak only gibberish.
In contrast
to these shorter works, it was only with
difficulty that Ionesco mastered the
techniques of the full-length play: Amédée
(1954), Tueur sans gages (1959; The Killer),
and Le Rhinocéros (1959; Rhinoceros) lack
the dramatic unity that he finally achieved
with Le Roi se meurt (1962; Exit the King).
This success was followed by Le Piéton de
l’air (1963; A Stroll in the Air). With La
Soif et la faim (1966; Thirst and Hunger) he
returned to a more fragmented type of
construction. In the next decade he wrote
Jeux de massacre (1970; Killing Game);
Macbett (1972), a retelling of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth; and Ce formidable bordel (1973; A
Hell of a Mess). Rhinoceros, a play about
totalitarianism, remains Ionesco’s most
popular work.
Ionesco’s
achievement lies in having popularized a
wide variety of nonrepresentational and
surrealistic techniques and in having made
them acceptable to audiences conditioned to
a naturalistic convention in the theatre.
His tragicomic farces dramatize the
absurdity of bourgeois life, the
meaninglessness of social conventions, and
the futile and mechanical nature of modern
civilization. His plays build on bizarrely
illogical or fantastic situations using such
devices as the humorous multiplication of
objects on stage until they overwhelm the
actors. The clichés and tedious maxims of
polite conversation surface in improbable or
inappropriate contexts to expose the
deadening futility of most human
communication. Ionesco’s later works show
less concern with witty intellectual paradox
and more with dreams, visions, and
exploration of the subconscious.
Les Chaises (English: The Chairs) is
an absurdist "tragic farce" by Eugene
Ionesco. It was written in 1952 and debuted
the same year.
The play concerns two characters, known as
Old Man and Old Woman, frantically preparing
chairs for a series of invisible guests who
are coming to hear an orator reveal the old
man's discovery which is implied as being
the meaning of life, this is never actually
said. The guests supposedly include
"everyone" implying everyone in the world;
there are other implications that this is a
post-apocalyptic world. The Old Man, for
example, speaks of the destruction of Paris.
The invisibility of the guests implies that
the Old Man and Old Woman are the last two
people on the planet. As the “guests”
arrive, the two characters speak to them,
and reminisce cryptically about their lives.
A high point in the happiness of the couple
is reached when the invisible emperor
arrives. Finally, the orator arrives to
deliver his speech to the assembled crowd.
Played by a real actor, the orator's
physical presence contradicts the
expectations set up by the action earlier in
the play.
The old
couple then throw themselves out of the
window into the ocean; they commit suicide
because they claim at this point, when the
whole world is going to hear the Old Man's
astounding revelation, life couldn't get any
better. As the orator begins to speak, the
invisible crowd assembled in the room and
the real audience in the theatre discover
that the orator is a deaf-mute.
At the end
of the play, the sound of an audience fades
in. Ionesco claimed this sound of the
audience at the end was the most significant
moment in the play. He wrote in a letter to
the first director, “The last decisive
moment of the play should be the expression
of ... absence,” He said that after the
Orator leaves, "At this moment the audience
would have in front of them ... empty chairs
on an empty stage decorated with streamers,
littered with useless confetti, which would
give an impression of sadness, emptiness and
disenchantment such as one finds in a
ballroom after a dance; and it would be
after this that the chairs, the scenery, the
void, would inexplicably come to life (that
is the effect, an effect beyond reason, true
in its improbability, that we are looking
for and that we must obtain), upsetting
logic and raising fresh doubts." The oddity
here is that in the version of The Chairs
published by Puffin, we are told that "When
first produced, the curtain fell during the
moaning of the dumb Orator. The blackboard
was omitted." This implies the 'last
decisive moment' was ignored by the director
whom Ionesco had written to highlighting its
importance.
Rhinoceros (French original title
Rhinocéros) is a play by Eugène Ionesco,
written in 1959. The play belongs to the
school of drama known as the Theatre of the
Absurd. Over the course of three acts, the
inhabitants of a small, provincial French
town turn into rhinoceroses; ultimately the
only human who does not succumb to this mass
metamorphosis is the central character,
Bérenger, a flustered everyman figure who is
often criticized throughout the play for his
drinking and tardiness. The play is often
read as a response to the sudden upsurge of
Communism, Fascism and Nazism during the
events preceding World War II, and explores
the themes of conformity, culture,
philosophy and morality.
This piece
is divided into three acts, each showing a
stage in the onset of rhinoceritis.
Act I
Loose rhinos cause the first shock and
surprise the characters. Jean can't believe
what he saw was real and states "it should
not exist." The grocer lets out a cry of
fury when he sees the housekeeper leave with
her bloodied cat: "We can not allow our cats
to be crushed by rhinos or anything else."
As with the start of any extremist movement,
people are initially afraid.
Act II
People are beginning to turn into
rhinoceroses and to follow the rhinoceritis
movement. This is where the first opposition
is clearly made, as Botard, an old-fashioned
French schoolmaster and staunch adherent of
the Enlightenment, remarks that it is "a
nonsense story," "It is a shameful
machination". He does not believe that
rhinoceritis is real . Yet, he too will turn
into a rhinoceros despite these prejudices,
saying that even the most resistant are
misled by the rhetoric of the dictatorship.
People are starting to turn into rhinoceros:
in the case of Mr. Bœuf, followed by his
wife: "I can not leave him like that," she
said to justify herself. The firefighters
are overwhelmed by the increasing number of
rhinos in the city.
Jean, at
first concerned and disturbed by the
presence of rhinos in the city, transforms
into a rhino under the desperate eyes of his
friend Bérenger. Thus we witness the
metamorphosis of a human being into a
rhinoceros. Jean is at first sick and pale,
he grows a bump on his forehead, breathes
loudly and has a tendency to growl. He then
gets greener and greener and his skin begins
to harden, his veins become prominent, his
voice becomes hoarse, and his bump grows
into a horn. Jean stops his friend from
calling a doctor, he paces in his room like
a caged beast, his voice becomes more and
more hoarse and he starts bellowing.
According to him, there is nothing
extraordinary in the fact that Bœuf had
become a rhinoceros, "After all, rhinos are
creatures like us, who have a right to life
just like us". He who was so learned, so
well-read, suddenly proclaims "Humanism has
expired! You are an old ridiculous
sentimentalist."
Act III
Finally, everyone becomes a rhinoceros
except for Bérenger, Dudard (a male
co-worker), and Daisy (another co-worker and
a "scientist", with whom Bérenger had been
hopelessly in love). Dudard trivializes the
transformation and becomes a rhino because
his duty is "to follow [his] leaders and
[his] peers, for better or for worse."
Bérenger and Daisy agree to resist
rhinoceritis and marry to restore the human
race. Soon afterwards, however, Daisy
refuses to "save the world" and follows the
rhinos, suddenly finding them beautiful, as
she admires their enthusiasm and energy.
After much hesitation, Bérenger decides not
to surrender: "I am the last man, I will
stay till the end! I do not give up!" He
ends up weeping because now he cannot become
a rhinoceros even if he wanted to.
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Postwar poetry
New currents in the novel and the
theatre were easier to define than those in poetry,
where the lack of a broad readership was, in itself,
an encouragement to fragmentation. The works of
Jacques Prévert and the songs of Georges Brassens
and Jacques Brel did achieve the status of popular
poetry; but, apart from Saint-John Perse, there was
no major figure in the tradition of
Claudel
and
Valéry, and the poetry of the post-Surrealist
generation appeared to have no clear formal or
ideological direction. In contrast to the tendency
to abstract and symbolic language that characterized
the poetry of René Char and Pierre Emmanuel
(pseudonym of Noël Mathieu), the prose poems of
Francis Ponge developed a materialist discourse that
aimed to allow the object to “speak” for itself,
foregrounding devices such as wordplay that
emphasized the act of poetic perception and the role
of writing in the object’s construction. This
fascination with structures of perceiving, the forms
that communicate them, and the relationship of poet
and poetry to the lived, material “real” is the
great preoccupation of Yves Bonnefoy, arguably the
major French poet of the second half of the century.
Bonnefoy published his first important collection,
Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve (On the
Motion and Immobility of Douve), in 1953. A similar
focus on the capacity of poetry to engage poet and
readers in the joint search for meaning in the
external world is to be found in the work of poets
such as Philippe Jaccottet, Eugène Guillevic, and
Michel Deguy.
On the whole, the intellectual bourgeoisie that
might have provided the larger audience for poetry’s
investigations into the working of words was at this
point more interested in formal experiments in the
visual arts, especially the cinema. A younger
generation, from the late 1960s, was more open to
fantasy and the imagination but impatient of formal
discipline. The “do-it-yourself” poetry that
appealed to this group’s egalitarian instincts was
as ephemeral as the little magazines in which it
appeared during the 1970s, and the “crisis of verse”
that Jacques Roubaud described in his study of
French versification, La Vieillesse d’Alexandre
(1978; “Alexander in Old Age”), remained unresolved.
Roubaud’s own poetry, including Trente et un au
cube (1973; “Thirty-one Cubed”), looked to Japanese
literature as the inspiration for work that was
structured yet free from the burden of European
rhetoric. He was associated with OuLiPo (Ouvroir de
Littérature Potentielle; “Workshop of Potential
Literature”), an experimental group of writers of
poetry and prose formed by Raymond Queneau and
inspired by Alfred Jarry, who saw the acceptance of
rigorous formal constraints—often mathematical—as
the best way of liberating artistic potential.
Queneau, most widely known as the author of Zazie
dans le métro (1959; Zazie in the Metro), had
already in 1947 offered the example of his stylistic
demonstrations in Exercices de style. In his Cent
mille milliards de poèmes (1961; One Hundred Million
Million Poems), the reader was invited to rearrange
10 sonnets in all the variations possible, as
indicated by the title. OuLiPo’s attachment to the
serious pleasures of word games, and their
engagement in sometimes unbelievably demanding
forms, has perhaps its best illustration in the
prose works of Georges Perec, discussed below. This
renewal of interest in the playful aspects of
literary composition was consistent with
contemporary critical theory—the revision by
Ferdinand de Saussure and, later, Roland Barthes, of
the relation between language-systems and meaning.
Jacques Prévert

born Feb. 4, 1900, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Fr.
died April 11, 1977, Omonville-la-Petite
French poet who composed ballads of social
hope and sentimental love; he also ranked
among the foremost of screenwriters,
especially during the 1930s and ’40s.
From 1925 to 1929 Prévert was associated
with the Surrealists Robert Desnos, Yves
Tanguy, Louis Aragon, and André Breton and
renewed, in their style, the ancient
tradition of oral poetry that led him to a
highly popular form of “song poems,” which
were collected in Paroles (1945; “Words”).
Many were put to music by Josef Kosma and
reached a vast audience of young people who
liked Prévert’s anticlerical, anarchistic,
iconoclastic tones, crackling with humour.
He lashed out at stupidity, hypocrisy, and
war, and he sang of lovers in the street and
the metro and of simple hearts and children.
Most popular is his Tentative de description
d’un dîner de têtes à Paris-France (1931;
“Attempt at a Description of a Masked Dinner
at Paris, France”).
Prévert
mastered the art of the small sketch that
catches the reader off guard. He used free
verse, irregular verse, occasional rhymes,
puns, cascades of words intentionally in
disarray, enumerations, antithesis, and
other devices.
He also
wrote for a group of politically militant
dramatists with whom he eventually visited
the Soviet Union (1933). Prévert wrote many
excellent film scripts. His best ones, made
for the director Marcel Carné, are Drôle de
drame (1937; “Odd Drama”), Les Visiteurs du
soir (1942; “The Visitors of the Evening”),
and Les Enfants du paradis (1944; “The
Children of Paradise”). Collections of his
poems include Histoires (1946; “Stories”),
Spectacle (1951), Grand bal du printemps
(1951; “Grand Ball of Spring”), Charmes de
Londres (1952; “Charms of London”),
Histoires et d’autres histoires (1963;
“Stories and Other Stories”), and Choses et
autres (1972; “Things and Other Things”).
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The 1960s: before the watershed
In the early
1960s, free of colonial entanglements, France
enjoyed a period of perceived increasing stability
and affluence, managing for the time being to avoid
facing the consequences of the processes of
decolonization, which were already creating the
conditions of far more radical sociocultural change.
Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (1961; The
Wretched of the Earth), appearing with a preface by
Sartre, made a considerable stir, but there was as
yet no effective audience for its sharp analyses of
the damage done to European culture and morality by
Europe’s destructive treatment of the Third World.
Because of its focus on French policy in Algeria,
Genet’s corrosively satiric drama Les Paravents
(1961; The Screens) premiered in Berlin and was not
performed on the French stage until 1966, four years
after the war in Algeria ended. Despite le
fast-food, le marketing, and le rock, French culture
was confident that it preserved an individual
character, and the French enjoyed the defense
offered against such transatlantic imports by René
Etiemble in his polemic Parlez-vous franglais?
(1964; “Do You Speak Frenglish”). The technocratic
middle class, which benefited most from the
country’s prosperity, was open to new ideas in
science, and its materialist outlook found
expression in Jacques Monod’s Le Hasard et la
nécessité (1970; Chance and Necessity). Monod, who
won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for
1965, rejected earlier ideologies, including
religion, and drew on science for a view of the
human place in the universe. The new technology
seemed to promise endless growth and the erosion of
class divisions. Other thinkers and creative writers
doubted the value of society’s new directions.
The most significant developments in literature
seemed to be outside the field of imaginative
literature, though more often than not they drew for
their inspiration and power on the radical writings
of recent generations, and they themselves quickly
engendered literary innovations. In regard to these
innovations, the journal Tel Quel was particularly
instrumental.
Structuralism
Learning to live with uncertainty and to take
pleasure in the abandonment of absolutes was the
determining mode of thought in the 1960s and ’70s,
and in this French thinkers set the international
agenda. Structuralism, based on the analytic methods
of the linguistic theorist Ferdinand de Saussure,
proposed that phenomena be considered not in
themselves but in terms of their working
relationship to the organized structures within
which they exist. The structural anthropology of
Claude Lévi-Strauss resulted in popular texts on
social and cultural practices that forced Western
cultures to reconsider themselves in the light of
the other cultures they had exploited in order to
flourish. Among Lévi-Strauss’s influential works are
Tristes Tropiques (1955; “Sad Tropics”; Eng. trans.
Tristes Tropiques) and Le Cru et le cuit (1964; The
Raw and the Cooked). The semiology (the science of
signs) of Roland Barthes gave impetus to the study
of the political nature of language and the attempt
to understand the ways in which a society’s
discourses speak through and constitute both writers
and readers. His works include Le Degré zéro de
l’écriture (1953; Writing Degree Zero) and
Mythologies (1957; Eng. trans. Mythologies). The
latter offers readings of the icons of contemporary
culture and has become a basic text in the academic
discipline known as cultural studies. Barthes made a
crucial distinction between the “writerly” and the
“readerly” text, emphasizing the scope a “readerly”
text gives to plural, disruptive readings. Le
Plaisir du texte (1973; The Pleasure of the Text)
pursued the concept of the subversive pleasure of
reading. The “death of the author” trumpeted by
early Barthes turned out eventually to have been
much exaggerated, and his own later interest in
autobiography certainly went some way to disproving
it; but the issues the provocative concept
raised—the autonomy of the individual subject, the
nature of creative inspiration—were important ones.
Claude Lévi-Strauss

born Nov.
28, 1908, Brussels, Belg.
died Oct. 30, 2009, Paris, France
French social anthropologist and leading
exponent of structuralism, a name applied to
the analysis of cultural systems (e.g.,
kinship and mythical systems) in terms of
the structural relations among their
elements. Structuralism has influenced not
only 20th-century social science but also
the study of philosophy, comparative
religion, literature, and film.
After
studying philosophy and law at the
University of Paris (1927–32), Lévi-Strauss
taught in a secondary school and was
associated with Jean-Paul Sartre’s
intellectual circle. He served as professor
of sociology at the University of São Paulo,
Brazil (1934–37), and did field research on
the Indians of Brazil. He was visiting
professor at the New School for Social
Research in New York City (1941–45), where
he was influenced by the work of linguist
Roman Jakobson. From 1950 to 1974 he was
director of studies at the École Pratique
des Hautes Études at the University of
Paris, and in 1959 he was appointed to the
chair of social anthropology at the Collège
de France.
In 1949
Lévi-Strauss published his first major work,
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
(rev. ed., 1967; The Elementary Structures
of Kinship). He attained popular recognition
with Tristes tropiques (1955; A World on the
Wane), a literary intellectual
autobiography. Other publications include
Anthropologie structurale (rev. ed., 1961;
Structural Anthropology), La Pensée sauvage
(1962; The Savage Mind), and Le Totémisme
aujourd’hui (1962; Totemism). His massive
Mythologiques appeared in four volumes: Le
Cru et le cuit (1964; The Raw and the
Cooked), Du miel aux cendres (1966; From
Honey to Ashes), L’Origine des manières de
table (1968; The Origin of Table Manners),
and L’Homme nu (1971; The Naked Man). In
1973 a second volume of Anthropologie
structurale appeared. La Voie des masques, 2
vol. (1975; The Way of the Masks), analyzed
the art, religion, and mythology of native
American Northwest Coast Indians. In 1983 he
published a collection of essays, Le Regard
éloigné (The View from Afar).
Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism was an effort
to reduce the enormous amount of information
about cultural systems to what he believed
were the essentials, the formal
relationships among their elements. He
viewed cultures as systems of communication,
and he constructed models based on
structural linguistics, information theory,
and cybernetics to interpret them.
|
Lacan and Foucault
The teaching and writing, much of it dating to the
1930s, of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (Écrits
[1966; Ecrits: A Selection]) influenced many major
thinkers in the 1960s and ’70s. Lacan proved to be a
major influence on avant-garde French feminism, and
he led Freudian thought in fresh directions through
his work on the part played by language and
unconscious desire in the formation of a human
subject that must always be seen as open,
incomplete, and in process. Michel Foucault has
perhaps been even more influential than Lacan, his
studies carrying into the context of public and
private life his explorations of the relations of
power to forms of knowing. In the early 1960s,
writing in an accessible fashion on gripping topics
such as madness, Foucault showed how the individual
subject is formed inside the discourses of society’s
institutions. Louis Althusser linked Marxism,
structuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis in his
Freud et Lacan (1964; reprinted in Writings on
Psychoanalysis:
Freud and Lacan), which was
published in the year that Foucault delivered his
lecture
Nietzsche,
Freud,
Marx.
Jacques Lacan

born April 13, 1901, Paris, France
died Sept. 9, 1981, Paris
French psychoanalyst who gained an
international reputation as an original
interpreter of Sigmund Freud’s work.
Lacan earned a medical degree in 1932 and
was a practicing psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst in Paris for much of his
career. He helped introduce Freudian theory
into France in the 1930s, but he reached
prominence only after he began conducting
regular seminars at the University of Paris
in 1953. He acquired celebrity status in
France after the publication of his essays
and lectures in Écrits (1966). He founded
and headed an organization called the
Freudian School of Paris from 1964 until he
disbanded it in 1980 for what he claimed was
its failure to adhere with sufficient
strictness to Freudian principles.
Lacan emphasized the primacy of language as
constitutive of the unconscious, and he
tried to introduce the study of language (as
practiced in modern linguistics, philosophy,
and poetics) into psychoanalytic theory. His
major achievement was his reinterpretation
of Freud’s work in terms of the structural
linguistics developed by French writers in
the second half of the 20th century. The
influence he gained extended well beyond the
field of psychoanalysis to make him one of
the dominant figures in French cultural life
during the 1970s. In his own psychoanalytic
practice, Lacan was known for his
unorthodox, and even eccentric, therapeutic
methods.
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Michel Foucault

French philosopher and historian
in full Paul-Michel Foucault
born October 15, 1926, Poitiers, France
died June 25, 1984, Paris
Main
French philosopher and historian, one of the most
influential and controversial scholars of the post-World War
II period.
Education and career
The son and grandson of a physician, Michel Foucault was
born to a solidly bourgeois family. He resisted what he
regarded as the provincialism of his upbringing and his
native country, and his career was marked by frequent
sojourns abroad. A distinguished but sometimes erratic
student, Foucault gained entry at the age of 20 to the École
Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris in 1946. There he studied
psychology and philosophy, embraced and then abandoned
communism, and established a reputation as a sedulous,
brilliant, and eccentric student.
After graduating in 1952, Foucault began a career marked
by constant movement, both professional and intellectual. He
first taught at the University of Lille, then spent five
years (1955–60) as a cultural attaché in Uppsala, Sweden;
Warsaw, Poland; and Hamburg, West Germany (now Germany).
Foucault defended his doctoral dissertation at the ENS in
1961. Circulated under the title Folie et déraison: histoire
de la folie à l’âge classique (“Madness and Unreason: A
History of Madness in the Classical Age”), it won critical
praise but a limited audience. (An abridged version was
translated into English and published in 1965 as Madness and
Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.)
His other early monographs, written while he taught at the
University of Clermont-Ferrand in France (1960–66), had much
the same fate. Not until the appearance of Les Mots et les
choses (“Words and Things”; Eng. trans. The Order of Things)
in 1966 did Foucault begin to attract wide notice as one of
the most original and controversial thinkers of his day. He
chose to watch his reputation grow from a distance—at the
University of Tunis in Tunisia (1966–68)—and was still in
Tunis when student riots erupted in Paris in the spring of
1968. In 1969 he published L’Archéologie du savoir (The
Archaeology of Knowledge). In 1970, after a brief tenure as
director of the philosophy department at the University of
Paris, Vincennes, he was awarded a chair in the history of
systems of thought at the Collège de France, France’s most
prestigious postsecondary institution. The appointment gave
Foucault the opportunity to conduct intensive research.
Between 1971 and 1984 Foucault wrote several works,
including Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (1975;
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison), a monograph
on the emergence of the modern prison; three volumes of a
history of Western sexuality; and numerous essays. Foucault
continued to travel widely, and as his reputation grew he
spent extended periods in Brazil, Japan, Italy, Canada, and
the United States. He became particularly attached to
Berkeley, California, and the San Francisco Bay area and was
a visiting lecturer at the University of California at
Berkeley for several years. Foucault died of a septicemia
typical of AIDS in 1984, the fourth volume of his history of
sexuality still incomplete.
Foucault’s ideas
What types of human beings are there? What is their essence?
What is the essence of human history? Of humankind? Contrary
to so many of his intellectual predecessors, Foucault sought
not to answer these traditional and seemingly
straightforward questions but to critically examine them and
the responses they had inspired. He directed his most
sustained skepticism toward those responses—among them,
race, the unity of reason or the psyche, progress, and
liberation—that had become commonplaces in Europe and the
United States in the 19th century. He argued that such
commonplaces informed both Hegelian phenomenology and
Marxist materialism. He argued that they also informed the
evolutionary biology, physical anthropology, clinical
medicine, psychology, sociology, and criminology of the same
period. The latter three disciplines are part of what came
to be called in French les sciences humaines, or “the human
sciences.”
Several of the philosophers of the Anglo-American
positivist tradition, among them Carl Hempel, had faulted
the human sciences for failing to achieve the conceptual and
methodological rigour of mathematics or physics. Foucault
found fault with them as well, but he decisively rejected
the positivist tenet that the methods of the pure or natural
sciences provided an exclusive standard for arriving at
genuine or legitimate knowledge. His critique concentrated
instead upon the fundamental point of reference that had
grounded and guided inquiry in the human sciences: the
concept of “man.” The man of this inquiry was a creature
purported, like many preceding conceptions, to have a
constant essence—indeed, a double essence. On one hand, man
was an object, like any other object in the natural world,
obedient to the indiscriminate dictates of physical laws. On
the other hand, man was a subject, an agent uniquely capable
of comprehending and altering his worldly condition in order
to become more fully, more essentially, himself. Foucault
reviewed the historical record for evidence that such a
creature actually had ever existed, but to no avail. Looking
for objects, he found only a plurality of subjects whose
features varied dramatically with shifts of place and time.
The historical record aside, would the dual “man” of the
human sciences perhaps make its appearance at some point in
the future? In The Order of Things and elsewhere, Foucault
suggested that, to the contrary, a creature somehow fully
determined and fully free was little short of a paradox, a
contradiction in terms. Not only had it never existed in
fact, it could not exist, even in principle.
Foucault understood the very possibility of his own
critique to be evidence that the concept of man was
beginning to loosen its grip on Western thought. Yet a
further puzzle remained: How could such an erroneous, such
an impossible, figure have been so completely taken for
granted for so long? Foucault’s solution emphasized that in
the emerging nation-states of 17th- and 18th-century Europe,
“man” was a conceptual prerequisite for the creation of
social institutions and practices that were then necessary
to maintain an optimally productive citizenry. With the
advent of “man,” the notion that human character and
experience were immutable gradually gave way to the notion
that both body and soul could be manipulated and reformed.
The latter notion lent the technologies of modern policing
their enduring rationale. For Foucault, the epitome of the
institutions of “discipline”—a mode of domination that
sought to render each instance of “deviance” utterly
visible, whether in the name of prevention or
rehabilitation—was the Panopticon, a circular prison
designed in 1787 by the philosopher and social reformer
Jeremy Bentham, which laid each inmate open to the scrutiny
of the dark eye of a central watchtower. Among contemporary
instruments of discipline, the surveillance camera must be
counted one of the most representative.
Although this discipline operated on individuals, it was
paired with a current of reformism that took not individuals
but various human populations as its basic object. The
prevailing sensibility of its greatest champions was
markedly medical. They scrutinized everything from sexual
behaviour to social organization for relative pathology or
health. They also sought out the “deviant,” but less in
order to eradicate it than to keep it in acceptable check.
This “biopolitics” of the reformers, according to Foucault,
contained the basic principles of the modern welfare state.
A thinker more inclined to strict materialism might have
added that in both discipline and biopolitics the human
sciences served an ideological function, cloaking the
apparatuses of arbitrary domination with the sober aura of
objectivity. Foucault, however, opposed the materialist
tendency to construe science—even the most dubious
science—as the simple handmaiden of power. He opposed any
identification of knowledge—even the most mistaken
knowledge—with power. Rather, he called for an appreciation
of the ways in which knowledge and power are always
entangled with each other in historically specific
circumstances, forming complex dynamics of what he termed
pouvoir-savoir, or “power-knowledge.”
For Foucault, domination was not the only outcome of
these dynamics. Another was “subjectivation,” the
historically specific classification and shaping of
individual human beings into “subjects” of various
kinds—including heroic and ordinary, “normal” and “deviant.”
The distinction between the two came somewhat late to
Foucault, but once he made and refined it he was able to
clarify the status of some of his earliest observations and
to identify a theme that had been present in all his
writings. His understanding of subjectivation, however,
changed significantly over the course of two decades, as did
the methods he applied to its analysis. Intent on devising a
properly specific history of subjects, he initially pressed
the analogy between the corpus of statements about subjects
produced and presumed true at any given historical moment
and the artifacts of some archaeological site or complex. He
was thus able to flesh out the sense of his frequent
allusions not simply to “discourses” but also to their more
inclusive cousins, épistémès. He was able to reveal the
inherently local qualities of past conceptions of being
human and able further to reveal the frequent abruptness of
their coming into being and passing away. This “archaeology
of knowledge” nevertheless had its shortcomings. Among other
things, its consideration of both power and power-knowledge
was at best partial, if not oblique.
By 1971 Foucault had already demoted “archaeology” in
favour of “genealogy,” a method that traced the ensemble of
historical contingencies, accidents, and illicit relations
that made up the ancestry of one or another currently
accepted theory or concept in the human sciences. With
genealogy, Foucault set out to unearth the artificiality of
the dividing line between the putatively illegitimate and
its putatively normal and natural opposite. Discipline and
Punish was his genealogical exposé of the artifices of
power-knowledge that had resulted in the naturalization of
the “criminal character,” and the first volume of Histoire
de la sexualité (1976; The History of Sexuality) was his
exposé of the Frankensteinian machinations that had resulted
in the naturalization of the dividing line between the
“homosexual” and the “heterosexual.” Yet even in these
luminous “histories of the present” something still remained
out of view: human freedom. In order to bring it into focus,
Foucault turned his attention to “governmentality,” the
array of political arrangements, past and present, within
which individuals have not simply been dominated subjects
but have been able in some measure to govern, to be, and to
create themselves. He expanded the scope (and lessened the
bite) of genealogy. No longer focused exclusively on the
dynamics of power-knowledge, it came to encompass the
broader dynamics of human reflection, of the posing of
questions and the seeking of answers, of “problematization.”
It could thus chart the possibilities, past and present, of
ethics—the “reflective practice of freedom”—a domain in
which human beings could exercise their power to conceive
and test the modes of domination and subjectivation under
which they happened to live.
Foucault’s increasing concern with ethics led him to a
far-reaching revision of the design of the subsequent
volumes of The History of Sexuality. Originally conceived as
a study of the social construction of the “female hysteric”
in the 19th century, the second volume was released after
much delay as a study of carnal pleasure in ancient Greece;
the third volume dealt with the “care of the self” in later
antiquity. In later work, a concern with ethics led Foucault
to study how people care for one another in social relations
such as friendship. It led him finally to an elegant
meditation, unpublished at his death, on the conduct of
modern philosophy, the title of which is that decidedly
open-ended question to which Immanuel Kant and Moses
Mendelssohn had been asked to respond some 200 years before:
“What Is Enlightenment?”
Foucault appropriately placed himself in the critical
tradition of philosophical inquiry stemming from Kant, but
his thought matured through the multiplicity of its
engagements. He rejected both Hegelianism and Marxism but
took both quite seriously. The work of the French modernist
writers Raymond Roussel, Georges Bataille, and Maurice
Blanchot galvanized his conviction that neither a proper
epistemology nor a proper metaphysics could be founded on a
general and ahistorical conception of the “subject.” The
writings of Friedrich Nietzsche directed him to the history
of the body and of the collusion between power and
knowledge. It also offered him the prototypes for both
archaeology and genealogy. In the work of the French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze he discerned elements of a
general epistemology of problem formation. His conversations
with the American scholars Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow
stimulated his turn toward ethics and the genealogy of
problematization. Special mention must finally be made of
his teacher and mentor, Georges Canguilhem. In Canguilhem, a
historian of the life sciences, Foucault found an
intellectual example independent of the phenomenological and
materialist camps that dominated French universities after
World War II, a sponsor for his dissertation, and a
supporter of his larger investigative project. Owing less to
Nietzsche than to Canguilhem, Foucault came to regard human
life as an often discontinuous, often disruptive and clumsy,
and sometimes despotic quest to come to terms with an
ever-recalcitrant environment. A history of systems of human
thought would thus have to be a persistently local history.
It would have to recognize that all ideas are normative, no
matter what their content. It could be a history of truth,
but it also would have to be a long—and in its own way
tragic—history of error.
Foucault’s influence
Foucault has been widely read and discussed in his own
right. He has galvanized an army of detractors, the less
attentive of whom have misread his critique of “man” as
radically antihumanist, his critique of power-knowledge as
radically relativist, and his ethics as radically
aestheticist. They have not, however, prevented him from
inspiring increasingly important alternatives to established
practices of cultural and intellectual history. In France
and the Americas, Foucault’s unraveling of Marxist
universalism has continued both to vex and to inspire
activists of the left. The antipsychiatry movement of the
1970s and ’80s owed much to Foucault, though he did not
consider himself one of its members. His critique of the
human sciences provoked much soul-searching within
anthropology and its allied fields, even as it helped a new
generation of scholars to embark upon a cross-cultural
dialogue on the themes and variations of domination and
subjectivation. Foucault’s elucidation of the dense and
minute dimensions of discipline and biopolitics likewise has
had a noticeable impact on recent studies of colonialism,
law, technology, gender, and race. The first volume of The
History of Sexuality has become canonical for both gay and
lesbian studies and “queer” theory, a multidisciplinary
study aimed at critical examinations of traditional
conceptions of sexual and gender identity. The terms
discourse, genealogy, and power-knowledge have become deeply
entrenched in the lexicon of virtually all contemporary
social and cultural research.
Foucault has attracted several biographers, some of whom
have been happy to flout his opposition to the practice of
seeking the key to an oeuvre in the psychology or
personality of its author. Yet, in their favour, it must be
admitted that Foucault’s personal life is a worthy subject
of attention. He regularly made the issues that most
troubled him personally—emotional suffering, exclusion,
sexuality—the topics of his research. His critiques were
often both theoretical and practical; he did not merely
write about prisons, for example, but also organized
protests against them. In 1975, while in Spain to protest
the impending executions of two members of ETA, the Basque
separatist movement, by the government of Francisco Franco,
Foucault confronted police officers who had come to seize
the protest leaflets he had prepared. He also publicly
attacked Jean-Paul Sartre at a time when Sartre was still
the demigod of Parisian intellectuals.
Although he despised the label “homosexual,” he was
openly gay and occasionally praised the pleasures of
sadomasochism and the bathhouse. He was something of a
dandy, preferring to shave his head and dress in black and
white. He declared that he had experimented with drugs. Even
more scandalously (at least to the French), he declared that
his favourite meal was “a good club sandwich with a Coke.”
Foucault cultivated his celebrity as “an all-purpose
subversive,” but neither his thought nor his life contain
the substantive principles of an activist program. Foucault
was skeptical of conventional wisdom and conventional
moralism—but not without exception. He was an ironist—but
not without restraint. He could be subversive and could
admire subversion—but he was not a revolutionary. He
dismissed even the possibility of providing an answer to
Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s great, abstract question “What is to
be done?” Rather, he insisted upon asking, more concretely
and more locally, “What, in a given situation, might be done
to increase human capacities without simultaneously
increasing oppression?” He was not confident that an answer
would always be forthcoming. But whether the situation at
hand was common or simply his own, he sought in all his
endeavours to remove himself to a vista distant enough that
the question might at least be intelligently posed.
James Faubion
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La Nouvelle Critique (French New Criticism)
The new and subversive critical tendencies of the
1960s demanded more of the reader, who was to become
an active participant in decoding the text, not a
passive recipient. The term New Criticism (not to be
confused with the Anglo-American New Criticism,
developed after World War I, whose proponents were
associated with the maintenance of conservative
perspectives and structures) covers a wide range of
very different practices and practitioners, from
Georges Poulet and Jean-Pierre Richard to the
Marxists Lucien Goldmann and Pierre Macherey and,
later, Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva. Their
new modes of reading, which challenged the
conservative traditions embedded in the
universities, contributed to the build-up of a wider
demand for radical change. The New Critics despised
the university establishment and met with opposition
from it about the time that Barthes’s Sur Racine
(1963; On Racine) was published. The confrontation
was symptomatic. The educational system was itself
rigid and outdated; a liberal university admissions
policy was combined with a teaching method based
largely on formal lectures, and the vast student
body was without any say in the running of a system
that seemed to be largely irrelevant to its needs.
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Approaching the 21st century
The events of 1968 and their aftermath
During the
student revolt in May 1968, streets, factories,
schools, and universities became the stage for a
spontaneous performance aimed at subverting
bourgeois culture (a show with no content, occluding
real life, according to Guy Debord, La Société du
spectacle, 1967; The Society of the Spectacle).
Posters and graffiti, the instruments of subversion,
were elevated to a popular art form. Theatre
experimented with audience participation and
improvisation, a movement that continued into the
1970s. Rock music and comic books flourished. In the
late 1960s television, which had been closely
controlled by the government under de Gaulle, began
to play an increasing role in cultural life;
discussion programs and spin-offs from serials or
adaptations increasingly replaced newspapers in
guiding taste. The immediate aftermath of the May
Events was a closing of conservative ranks, but this
was short-lived. May 1968 has become the newest icon
in France’s revolutionary cultural tradition.
Derrida and other theorists
The philosopher Jacques Derrida (L’Écriture et la
différance [1967; Writing and Difference])
contributed to the contemporary cult of uncertainty
with his poststructuralist project to “deconstruct”
the binary structures of thinking on which Western
culture appeared to be based and to expose the
hierarchies of power sustained by such simple
oppositions (such as the favouring of speech over
writing or masculine over feminine). Derrida
challenged the conventional cultural markers of
authority, attacking “logocentrism” (the belief in
the existence of a foundational absolute word or
reality) and “phonocentrism” (lodging authenticity
and truth in the voice of the speaker). In their L’Anti-Œdipe: capitalisme et schizophrénie (1972;
The Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia),
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari gave a radical
thrust to the analysis of individual desire, to be
considered not in Freudian terms of repression and
lack but as the source of transformative, liberating
energy. Foucault continued his enquiries into the
social forces and institutions that call individual
subjectivity into existence, in volumes such as Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (1975;
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) and
Histoire de la sexualité (1976–84; The History of
Sexuality). Pierre Bourdieu, who founded the
sociology of knowledge, published La Reproduction
(1970; Reproduction in Education, Society, and
Culture), his seminal investigation into the social
processes that ensure the transmission of “cultural
capital” in ways that reproduce the established
order.
Jacques Derrida

French philosopher
born July 15, 1930, El Biar, Algeria
died October 8, 2004, Paris, France
Main
French philosopher whose critique of Western philosophy and
analyses of the nature of language, writing, and meaning
were highly controversial yet immensely influential in much
of the intellectual world in the late 20th century.
Life and work
Derrida was born to Sephardic Jewish parents in
French-governed Algeria. Educated in the French tradition,
he went to France in 1949, studied at the elite École
Normale Supérieure (ENS), and taught philosophy at the
Sorbonne (1960–64), the ENS (1964–84), and the École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (1984–99), all in Paris.
From the 1960s he published numerous books and essays on an
immense range of topics and taught and lectured throughout
the world, including at Yale University and the University
of California, Irvine, attaining an international celebrity
comparable only to that of Jean-Paul Sartre a generation
earlier.
Derrida is most celebrated as the principal exponent of
deconstruction, a term he coined for the critical
examination of the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or
“oppositions,” inherent in Western philosophy since the time
of the ancient Greeks. These oppositions are
characteristically “binary” and “hierarchical,” involving a
pair of terms in which one member of the pair is assumed to
be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or
derivative. Examples include nature and culture, speech and
writing, mind and body, presence and absence, inside and
outside, literal and metaphorical, intelligible and
sensible, and form and meaning, among many others. To
“deconstruct” an opposition is to explore the tensions and
contradictions between the hierarchical ordering assumed or
asserted in the text and other aspects of the text’s
meaning, especially those that are indirect or implicit.
Such an analysis shows that the opposition is not natural or
necessary but a product, or “construction,” of the text
itself.
The speech/writing opposition, for example, is manifested
in texts that treat speech as a more authentic form of
language than writing. These texts assume that the speaker’s
ideas and intentions are directly expressed and immediately
“present” in speech, whereas in writing they are
comparatively remote or “absent” and thus more easily
misunderstood. As Derrida points out, however, speech
functions as language only to the extent that it shares
characteristics traditionally assigned to writing, such as
absence, “difference,” and the possibility of
misunderstanding. This fact is indicated by philosophical
texts themselves, which invariably describe speech in terms
of examples and metaphors drawn from writing, even in cases
where writing is explicitly claimed to be secondary to
speech. Significantly, Derrida does not wish simply to
invert the speech/writing opposition—i.e., to show that
writing is really prior to speech. As with any
deconstructive analysis, the point is to restructure, or
“displace,” the opposition so as to show that neither term
is primary.
The speech/writing opposition derives from a pervasive
picture of meaning that equates linguistic meaning with the
ideas and intentions in the mind of the speaker or author.
Building on theories of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure, Derrida coined the term différance, meaning both a
difference and an act of deferring, to characterize the way
in which linguistic meaning is created rather than given.
For Derrida as for Saussure, the meaning of a word is a
function of the distinctive contrasts it displays with
other, related meanings. Because each word depends for its
meaning on the meanings of other words, it follows that the
meaning of a word is never fully “present” to us, as it
would be if meanings were the same as ideas or intentions;
instead it is endlessly “deferred” in an infinitely long
chain of meanings. Derrida expresses this idea by saying
that meaning is created by the “play” of differences between
words—a play that is “limitless,” “infinite,” and
“indefinite.”
In the 1960s Derrida’s work was welcomed in France and
elsewhere by thinkers interested in the broad
interdisciplinary movement known as structuralism. The
structuralists analyzed various cultural phenomena—such as
myths, religious rituals, literary narratives, and fashions
in dress and adornment—as general systems of signs analogous
to natural languages, with their own vocabularies and their
own underlying rules and structures, and attempted to
develop a metalanguage of terms and concepts in which the
various sign systems could be described. Some of Derrida’s
early work was a critique of major structuralist thinkers
such as Saussure, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss,
and the intellectual historian and philosopher Michel
Foucault. Derrida was thus seen, especially in the United
States, as leading a movement beyond structuralism to
“poststructuralism,” which was skeptical about the
possibility of a general science of meaning.
In other work, particularly three books published in
1967— L’Écriture et la différence (Writing and Difference),
De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology), and La Voix et le
phénomène (Speech and Phenomena)—Derrida explored the
treatment of writing by several seminal figures in the
history of Western thought, including the philosophers
Edmund Husserl and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Other books, published in 1972,
include analyses of writing and representation in the work
of philosophers such as Plato (La Dissémination
[Dissemination]) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Husserl,
and Martin Heidegger (Marges de la philosophie [Margins of
Philosophy]). Glas (1974) is an experimental book printed in
two columns—one containing an analysis of key concepts in
the philosophy of Hegel, the other a suggestive discussion
of the thief, novelist, and playwright Jean Genet. Although
Derrida’s writing had always been marked by a keen interest
in what words can do, here he produced a work that plays
with juxtaposition to explore how language can incite
thought.
One might distinguish in Derrida’s work a period of
philosophical deconstruction from a later period focusing on
literature and emphasizing the singularity of the literary
work and the play of meaning in avant-garde writers such as
Genet, Stéphane Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, and James Joyce.
His later work also took up a host of other issues, notably
the legacy of Marxism (Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette,
le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale [1993;
Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International]) and psychoanalysis (La
Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà [1980; The Post
Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond]). Other essays
considered political, legal, and ethical issues, as well as
topics in aesthetics and literature. He also addressed the
question of Jewishness and the Jewish tradition in
Shibboleth and the autobiographical Circumfession (1991).
Criticism
Although critical examination of fundamental concepts is a
standard part of philosophical practice in the Western
tradition, it has seldom been carried out as rigorously as
in the work of Derrida. His writing is known for its extreme
subtlety, its meticulous attention to detail, and its
tenacious pursuit of the logical implications of supposedly
“marginal” features of texts. Nevertheless, his work has met
with considerable opposition among some philosophers,
especially those in the Anglo-American tradition. In 1992
the proposal by the University of Cambridge to award Derrida
an honorary doctorate generated so much controversy that the
university took the unusual step of putting the issue to a
vote of the dons (Derrida won); meanwhile, 19 philosophers
from around the globe published a letter of protest in which
they claimed that Derrida’s writing was incomprehensible and
his major claims either trivial or false. In the same vein,
other critics have portrayed Derrida as an antirational and
nihilistic opponent of “serious” philosophical thinking.
Despite such criticism, Derrida’s ideas remain a powerful
force in philosophy and myriad other fields.
Major Works
Most accessible to a general reader are the early interviews
in Positions (1972; Positions, trans. by Alan Bass, 1981),
and a later selection, including a letter and discussion
concerning the Cambridge honorary degree, in Points de
suspension, ed. by Elisabeth Weber (1992; Points …:
Interviews, 1974–1994,1995). “Circonfession,” in Geoffrey
Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (1991;
Jacques Derrida, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington, 1993),
combines theoretical discussion by Bennington with playfully
disruptive autobiographical remarks by Derrida.
Representative selections with introductory commentary can
be found in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. by
Peggy Kamuf (1991). Derrida’s classic critique of the
treatment of speech and writing in Western philosophy
appears in the more difficult essays of L’Écriture et la
différence (1967; Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan
Bass, 1978), and Marges de la philosophie (1972; Margins of
Philosophy, 1982), as well as in the celebrated De la
grammatologie (1967; Of Grammatology, 1976), which focuses
on the work of Saussure and Rousseau. La Dissémination
(1972; Dissemination, 1981) contains a crucial essay on
Plato. Limited Inc (1988) is a polemical exchange with the
American philosopher John Searle about the theory of speech
acts; the volume includes an afterword, “Toward an Ethic of
Discussion,” that clearly articulates Derrida’s positions on
many contemporary theoretical issues.
Discussions of literature can be found in Acts of
Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (1992), which includes an
important interview as well as key essays on Joyce, Franz
Kafka, Ponge, Paul Celan, and William Shakespeare. Donner le
temps (1991; Given Time, 1992) is an exemplary analysis of a
prose poem by Charles Baudelaire. Psychoanalysis is covered
in essays on Freud and Jacques Lacan in La Carte postale: de
Socrate à Freud et au-delà (1980; The Post Card: From
Socrates to Freud and Beyond, 1987). Spectres de Marx:
l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle
Internationale (1993; Specters of Marx: The State of the
Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, 1994)
treats the legacy of Marxism. La Vérité en peinture (1978;
The Truth in Painting, 1987) is an advanced discussion of
aesthetic theory and avant-garde artistic practice. L’Autre
cap: suivi de la democratie ajournée (1991; The Other
Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, 1992) is a more
straightforward reflection on issues confronting the new
Europe. Politiques de l’amitié (1994; Politics of
Friendship, 1997) explores philosophical reflections on
friendship and the importance of friendship for a politics
of the future.
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Gilles Deleuze

born January 18, 1925, Paris, France
died November 4, 1995, Paris
French writer and antirationalist philosopher.
Deleuze began his study of philosophy at the Sorbonne in
1944. Appointed to the faculty there in 1957, he later
taught at the University of Lyons and the University of
Paris VIII, where he was a popular lecturer. He retired from
teaching in 1987.
Two of Deleuze’s early publications, David Hume (1952;
with Andre Cresson) and Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962),
were historical studies of thinkers who, though in different
ways, emphasized the limited powers of human reason and
mocked the pretensions of traditional philosophy to discern
the ultimate nature of reality. In the 1960s Deleuze began
to philosophize in a more original vein, producing two major
works, Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of
Sense (1969). In the former he argued against the
devaluation of “difference” in Western metaphysics and tried
to show that difference inheres in repetition itself.
A central theme of Deleuze’s work during this period was
what he called the “Eleatic-Platonic bias” of Western
metaphysics—i.e., the preference, which originated with the
pre-Socratic school of Eleaticism and the subsequent
philosophy of Plato, for unity over multiplicity (“the one”
over “the many”) and for sameness over difference. According
to Deleuze, this bias, which manifests itself in the
characteristic philosophical search for the abstract
“essences” of things, falsifies the nature of experience,
which consists of multiplicities rather than unities. In
order to do justice to reality as multiplicity, therefore, a
completely new set of philosophical concepts is required.
Deleuze also criticized traditional metaphysics for its
“arboreal” or “treelike” character—i.e., its conception of
reality in terms of hierarchy, order, and linearity—and
compared his own thought, by contrast, to the structure of a
rhizome, an underground plant stem whose growth is aimless
and disordered.
Following the student uprising in Paris in May 1968,
Deleuze’s thought became more politically engaged.
Anti-Oedipus (1972), the first volume of a two-volume work
(Capitalism and Schizophrenia) written with the radical
psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (1930–92), is an extended
attack on traditional psychoanalysis and the concept of the
Oedipus complex, which the authors contend has been used to
suppress human desire in the service of normalization and
control. The book concludes with a rather naive celebration
of schizophrenia as a heroic expression of social
nonconformity. In the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus
(1980), which they present as a study in “nomadology” and
“deterritorialization” (the former term suggesting the
nomadic lifestyle of Bedouin tribes, the latter a general
state of flux and mobility), Deleuze and Guattari condemn
all species of rationalist metaphysics as “state
philosophy.”
In 1995, depressed by chronic illness and his generally
deteriorating health, Deleuze committed suicide.
Richard Wolin
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Félix Guattari

born April 30, 1930, Colombe, France
died August 29, 1992, near Blois
French psychiatrist and philosopher and a leader of the
antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which
challenged established thought in psychoanalysis,
philosophy, and sociology.
Trained as a psychoanalyst, Guattari worked during the
1950s at La Borde, a clinic near Paris that was noted for
its innovative therapeutic practices. It was at this time
that Guattari began analysis with the celebrated French
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose reevaluation of the
centrality of the “unconscious” in psychoanalytic theory had
begun attracting many disciples. In the mid-1960s Guattari
broke with Lacan, whose thinking he felt remained too
closely tied to Freud’s, and founded his own clinics, the
Society for Institutional Psychotherapy (1965) and the
Centre for Institutional Studies and Research (1970).
Inspired by the student uprising in Paris in May 1968,
Guattari collaborated with the French philosopher Gilles
Deleuze (1925–95) to produce a two-volume work of
antipsychoanalytic social philosophy, Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. In volume 1, Anti-Oedipus (1972), they drew
on Lacanian ideas to argue that traditional psychoanalytic
conceptions of the structure of personality are used to
suppress and control human desire and indirectly to
perpetuate the capitalist system. Schizophrenia, they
continued, constitutes one of the few authentic forms of
rebellion against the system’s tyrannical imperatives. In
place of traditional psychoanalysis, they recommended a new
technique inspired by the antipsychiatry movement, “schizoanalysis,”
in which individuals are analyzed as libidinally diffuse
“desiring machines” rather than as ego-driven Freudian
subjectivities.
Volume 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand
Plateaus (1980), is characterized by a self-consciously
disjointed, paratactic style of philosophical inquiry,
reflecting the authors’ conviction that the “linear”
organization of traditional philosophy represents an
incipient form of social control. The work is presented as a
study in what Deleuze and Guattari call
“deterritorialization”—i.e., the effort to destabilize the
predominant, repressive conceptions of identity, meaning,
and truth. The authors conclude by glibly dismissing Western
metaphysics as an expression of “state philosophy.”
Ever conscious of the most minute fissures in the social
order and searching for creative ways to undermine fixed
ideas and inherited truths, Guattari became an advocate of
“molecular revolutions” in life and thought. In so doing,
Guattari joined the French philosopher and historian Michel
Foucault in proclaiming the death of the traditional
(Marxist) intellectual, who aimed at a “total social
revolution.” Instead, new inspiration would derive from the
struggles of heretofore marginalized groups, including
homosexuals, women, environmentalists, immigrants, and
prisoners. Guattari’s third and final work cowritten with
Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, was published in 1991.
Richard Wolin
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Feminist writers
The Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF;
Movement for the Liberation of Women) developed
within the radical thinking and action that marked
1968 and produced feminist extensions of the work of
Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze. Combining the
disciplines of literary theory and psychology to
explore language as an instrument for radical
change, Julia Kristeva wrote the highly influential
La Révolution du langage poétique (1974; Revolution
in Poetic Language). Its account of two new areas of
discourse, the semiotic and the symbolic, proposed
new ideas on the formation of identity, especially
the mother-child relationship, which have
transformed ideas of women’s function and
significance.
Simone de Beauvoir’s work provided
inspiration for large sectors of the movement.
Autobiography or autobiographical fiction were
popular modes, combining lively linguistic
experiment with innovative analyses of individual
experience, focusing especially on hitherto taboo
areas, such as female sexuality and the family and
its discontents. Among writers in this vein were Violette Leduc in La Bâtarde (1964; “The Bastard”;
Eng. trans. La Bâtarde) and Marie Cardinal in Les
Mots pour le dire (1975; The Words to Say It).
Creative writers in the realist mode addressed a
widening popular readership with accounts of the
lives of women trapped in slum housing and dead-end
jobs. Notable works in this mode include Christiane
Rochefort’s Les Petits Enfants du siècle (1961;
“Children of the Times”; Eng. trans. Josyane and the
Welfare) and Claire Etcherelli’s Élise; ou, la vraie
vie (1967; Elise; or, The Real Life). But an equally
significant impact was made by writers looking for
ways of transforming masculine language for
women-generated versions of feminine subjectivity.
The texts of
James Joyce and Samuel Beckett lie
behind Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine, a kind of
writing that emblematizes feminine difference. This
writing is driven and styled by a “feminine” logic
opting for openness, inclusiveness, digression, and
play that Cixous opposes to a “masculine” mode that
is utilitarian, authoritarian, elitist, and
hierarchical. In the 1970s Cixous expressed the
theory of the new style in texts such as La Jeune
Née (1975, in dialogue with Cathérine Clément; The
Newly Born Woman), and she has continued to practice
it in prose fictions of varying value, such as
Dedans (1969; Inside), awarded the Prix Médicis,
Révolutions pour plus d’un Faust (1975; “Revolutions
for More Than One Faust”), and Angst (1977; Eng.
trans. Angst). The radical lesbian writer Monique
Wittig made language experiments of a slightly
different kind in prose fictions that push the
boundaries of genre and model women’s struggle for
self-designation inside forms of language and social
institutions that are the product of masculine
priorities and values. The novel L’Opoponax (1964;
The Opoponax) is a brilliant account of the making
of a feminine subject, from childhood to
adolescence. Le Corps lesbien (1973; The Lesbian
Body), a violent, sadomasochistic, and lyrical text
of prose fiction, is a unique attempt to evoke in
its own language the body of female desire.
In the theatre, feminism also made its own space.
Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1972; Eng. trans.
India Song) found new configurations of space and
sound to describe the protean nature of gendered
desire. Cixous’s Portrait de Dora (1976), initially
a radio play, is a psychodrama of the patient’s
escape from the interpretative webs of Freudian
desire. In contrast, her epics in the mid-1980s on
the Cambodian and Indian struggles were tailor-made
for founding director Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du
Soleil, a troupe known for spectacular performances
in large-scale venues.
Marguerite Duras

born April
4, 1914, Gia Dinh, Cochinchina [Vietnam]
died March 3, 1996, Paris, France
French novelist, screenwriter, scenarist,
playwright, and film director,
internationally known for her screenplays of
Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and India Song
(1975). The novel L’Amant (1984; The Lover;
film, 1992) won the prestigious Prix
Goncourt in 1984.
Duras spent
most of her childhood in Indochina, but at
the age of 17 she moved to France to study
at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, from
which she received licences in law and
politics. She favoured leftist causes and
for 10 years was a member of the Communist
Party. She began writing in 1942. Un Barrage
contre le Pacifique (1950; The Sea Wall),
her third published novel and first success,
dealt semiautobiographically with a poor
French family in Indochina. Her next
successes, Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952; The
Sailor from Gibraltar) and Moderato
cantabile (1958), were more lyrical and
complex and more given to dialogue.
This
splendid instinct for dialogue led Duras to
produce the original screenplay for Alain
Resnais’s critically acclaimed film
Hiroshima mon amour, about a brief love
affair in postwar Hiroshima between a
Japanese businessman and a French actress.
She directed as well as wrote the 1975 film
adaptation of her play India Song, which
offers a static, moody portrayal of the wife
of the French ambassador in Calcutta and her
several lovers. Some of her screenplays were
adaptations of her own novels and short
stories.
Duras
turned regularly to a more abstract and
synthetic mode, with fewer characters, less
plot and narrative, and fewer of the other
elements of traditional fiction; her name
was even associated with the nouveau roman
(“new novel”) movement, though she denied
such a connection. The semiautobiographical
story of L’Amant, about a French teenage
girl’s love affair with a Chinese man 12
years her senior, was revised in the novel
L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North
China Lover). Among her other novels were
L’Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas (1962; The
Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas), Le
Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964; The
Ravishing of Lol Stein), Détruire, dit-elle
(1969; Destroy, She Said), L’Amour (1971;
“Love”), L’Été 80 (1980; “Summer 80”), and
La Pluie d’été (1990; Summer Rain).
Collections of her plays were included in
Théâtre I (1965), Théâtre II (1968), and
Théâtre III (1984).
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Other literature of the 1970s
After 1968,
literature became committed to the search for
different themes, perspectives, and voices. The
women’s movement, with its insistence on seeking out
a diversity and proliferation of voices, was highly
influential; another important factor, not
unconnected with this, was the rise of writing in
French from France’s former colonies. Other
influences must include, in academia, the commitment
of critical theory to the business of finding fresh
angles and lines of investigation and, on the wider
popular front, the exponential expansion of the
media and its unprecedented demand for fresh
stories, images, and forms. Within this growing
commitment to the fashionable, the history of the
novel became one of quickly displaced trends and
meteoric rises (and disappearances). At the same
time, several writers with established reputations
continued to demonstrate their merit (Beauvoir,
Duras, Beckett—the latter in powerful pieces of
increasingly minimalist prose), and they were joined
by others. Georges Perec, one of the best-known
members of OuLiPo, had first made his mark in 1965,
with the novel Les Choses: une histoire des années
soixante (Things: A Story of the Sixties), a
devastatingly comic account of a young couple in
thrall to consumerism and the rhetorics of
advertising. He followed this with other discourse
games, such as La Disparition (1969; A Void), a text
composed entirely without using the letter e, and La
Vie: mode d’emploi (1978; Life: A User’s Manual),
his most celebrated work, constructed in the form of
a variant on a mathematical puzzle. Michel Tournier
caught the public imagination with work that set up
an adult relationship with the heritage of
children’s stories. Vendredi; ou, les limbes du
Pacifique (1967; Friday; or, The Other Island) was
followed by Le Roi des Aulnes (1970; The Ogre, also
published as The Erl-King), an extraordinary
combination of myth and parable. His short stories
collected in Le Coq de bruyère (1978; The Fetishist
and Other Stories) and the novel Gaspard, Melchior,
Balthasar (1980; The Four Wise Men) were subversive
rewritings of ancient tales. Other writers provided
more direct responses to the political and economic
frustrations of the decade: J.M.G. Le Clézio’s
apocalyptic fictions, for example, evoked the
alienation of life in technological, consumerist
society.
In the 1970s writers began to confront the events
of the Occupation. Perec’s W; ou, le souvenir
d’enfance (1975; W; or, The Memory of Childhood) is
an autobiography formed of the alternating chapters
of two seemingly unconnected texts, which eventually
find their resolution in the concentration camp. The
novels of Patrick Modiano used a nostalgic
fascination with the war years to explore problems
of individual and collective identities,
responsibilities, and loyalties.
Georges Perec

born March
7, 1936, Paris, France
died March 3, 1982, Ivry
French writer, often called the greatest
innovator of form of his generation.
Perec was orphaned at an early age: his
father was killed in action in World War II,
and his mother died in a concentration camp.
He was reared by an aunt and uncle and
eventually attended the Sorbonne for several
years. His best-selling first novel, Les
Choses: une histoire des années soixante
(1965; Things: A Story of the Sixties),
concerns a young Parisian couple whose
personalities are consumed by their material
goods. In 1967 he joined the Ouvroir de
Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of
Potential Literature). Known in short as
OuLiPo, the group dedicated itself to the
pursuit of new forms for literature and the
revival of old ones. Perec’s novel La
Disparition (1969; A Void) was written
entirely without using the letter e, as was
its translation. W; ou, le souvenir
d’enfance (1975; W; or, the Memory of
Childhood) is considered a masterpiece of
innovative autobiography, using alternating
chapters to tell two stories that ultimately
converge. By far his most ambitious and most
critically acclaimed novel is La Vie: mode
d’emploi (1978; Life: A User’s Manual),
which describes each unit in a large
Parisian apartment building and relates the
stories of its inhabitants.
Perec’s
work in other areas includes a highly
acclaimed 1979 television film about Ellis
Island. Je me souviens (1978; “I Remember”),
a book of about 480 sentences all beginning
with the phrase “I remember” and recording
memories of life in the 1950s, was adapted
for the stage. At his death, Perec was
working on a detective novel, which, edited
by Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud, was
published as 53 Jours (1989; 53 Days). A
collection of essays, Penser/Classer (1985;
“To Think, to Classify”), was published
posthumously.
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Historical fiction
The frustrations of the times may have added to the
attraction of the historical novel, which remained
popular throughout the second half of the century.
Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980 became the first
woman elected to the Académie Française, had shown
that the genre could move beyond escapism. Mémoires
d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian) and L’Oeuvre au
noir (1968; The Abyss), evoking the making and
unmaking of order in Europe, offered portraits of
men who grappled with the limitations of their time.
In addition to proffering rich evocations of the
past, Yourcenar’s accounts had contemporary
political resonance. History proved able to
accommodate a vast range of fiction, from popular
romance and fictionalized biography to the
linguistic and narrative experiments of writers such
as Pierre Guyotat, whose Éden, Éden, Éden (1970;
Eden, Eden, Eden), a novel about war, prostitution,
obscenity, and atrocity, set in the Algerian desert,
was banned by the censor for 11 years; Florence
Delay in her stylish novel L’Insuccès de la fête
(1980; “The Failure of the Feast”); and, especially,
Nobel Prize-winning author Claude Simon, many of
whose works, notably La Route des Flandres (1960;
The Flanders Road), Histoire (1967; “Tale”; Eng.
trans. Histoire), and Les Géorgiques (1981; The
Georgics), not only evoke deeply human experiences
of loss and longing but also explore forms of memory
and remembering and questions of subjectivity and
historical truth. Historical fiction was sustained
by the prestige of historiography, in the shape of
Michel Foucault’s studies of sexuality and attitudes
to death, and the narrative and materialist social
history associated with the journal Annales, founded
in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
Claude Simon

in full
Claude Eugène Henri Simon
born
October 10, 1913, Tananarive [now
Antananarivo], Madagascar
died July 6, 2005, Paris, France
writer
whose works are among the most authentic
representatives of the French nouveau roman
(“new novel”) that emerged in the 1950s. He
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1985.
The son of
a cavalry officer who was killed in World
War I, Simon was raised by his mother in
Perpignan, France. After studies at Paris,
Oxford, and Cambridge, he traveled widely
and then fought in World War II. He was
captured by the Germans in May 1940,
escaped, and joined the French Resistance,
managing to complete his first novel, Le
Tricheur (1945; “The Trickster”), during the
war years. Later he settled in his hometown
in southern France, where he bought a
vineyard and produced wine.
In Le Vent
(1957; The Wind) Simon defined his goals: to
challenge the fragmentation of his time and
to rediscover the permanence of objects and
people, evidenced by their survival through
the upheavals of contemporary history. He
treated the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War
in La Corde raide (1947; “The Taut Rope”)
and Le Sacre du printemps (1954; “The Rite
of Spring”) and the 1940 collapse of France
in Le Tricheur. Four novels—L’Herbe (1958;
The Grass), La Route des Flandres (1960; The
Flanders Road), La Palace (1962; The
Palace), and Histoire (1967)—constitute a
cycle containing recurring characters and
events. Many critics consider these novels,
especially La Route des Flandres, to be his
most important work. Later novels include La
Bataille de Pharsale (1969; The Battle of
Pharsalus), Triptyque (1973; Triptych), Les
Géorgiques (1981; The Georgics), and Le
Tramway (2001; The Trolley).
Simon’s
style is a mixture of narration and stream
of consciousness, lacking all punctuation
and heavy with 1,000-word sentences. Through
such masses of words, Simon attempted to
capture the very progression of life. His
novels remain readable despite their seeming
chaos.
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Biography and related arts
There was a corresponding interest in biography,
autobiography, and memoirs. The novelists Julien
Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier),
and Yourcenar (discussed above) were among several
figures of an earlier generation who began in the
1970s to publish journals and memoirs rather than
fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s
1950s recollections of his Provençal childhood met
with great success. The vogue would gather momentum
in the last decades of the century, in texts which,
increasingly, became technically innovative, such as
Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland
Barthes), a contradictory, self-critical portrait;
and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983; Childhood).
Genre boundaries blurred: in Barthes’s Fragments
d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments), criticism and self-analysis became
fiction and writing became an erotic act.
Detective fiction
Detective fiction, a genre sometimes exploited by
the nouveau roman, had an outstanding practitioner
in Georges Simenon, the inventor of Inspector Maigret, who during the 1970s also turned to
autobiography. The gangster novels of Albert
Simonin, like the parodies of Frédéric Dard (better
known as San-Antonio), made imaginative use of
Parisian argot, but the chief attraction of the
thriller for more “literary” writers was its form,
which they, like a number of filmmakers, adopted as
a framework for the investigation of questions of
identity or moral and political dilemmas. In Patrick
Modiano’s Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; “The
Street of Dark Shops”; Eng. trans. Missing Person),
for example, a detective who has lost his memory
looks for his identity in the darkness of the
wartime past.
The 1980s and ’90sThe closing years of the
century were a time of adjustment to political,
economic, and social changes. The slow recognition
that France was no longer a major player in global
politics was accompanied by a reassessment of the
leading part the country still played on the
cultural stage—not least in Europe, where cultural
politics became increasingly important in France’s
bid for power in the new European Union.
Conservative commentators sometimes lamented that
French culture at times appeared to be marginal and
history to be “happening elsewhere” (as a character
remarked in Alain Jouffroy’s novel L’Indiscrétion
faite à Charlotte [1980; “Charlotte and the
Indiscretion”]).
Georges Simenon

in full
Georges-Joseph-Christian Simenon
born Feb.
13, 1903, Liège, Belg.
died Sept. 4, 1989, Lausanne, Switz.
Belgian-French novelist whose prolific
output surpassed that of any of his
contemporaries and who was perhaps the most
widely published author of the 20th century.
Simenon
began working on a local newspaper at age
16, and at 19 he went to Paris determined to
be a successful writer. Typing some 80 pages
each day, he wrote, between 1923 and 1933,
more than 200 books of pulp fiction under 16
different pseudonyms, the sales of which
soon made him a millionaire. The first novel
to appear under his own name was
Pietr-le-Letton (1929; The Strange Case of
Peter the Lett), in which he introduced the
imperturbable, pipe-smoking Parisian police
inspector Jules Maigret to fiction. Simenon
went on to write 83 more detective novels
featuring Inspector Maigret, as well as 136
psychological novels. His total literary
output consisted of about 425 books that
were translated into some 50 languages and
sold more than 600 million copies worldwide.
Many of his works were the basis of feature
films or made-for-television movies. In
addition to novels, he wrote three
autobiographical works—Pedigrée (1948),
Quand j’étais vieux (1970; When I Was Old),
and Mémoires intimes (1981; Intimate
Memoirs), the last after the suicide of his
only daughter—and a critically well-received
trilogy of novellas about Africa, selections
of which were published in English as
African Trio (1979).
Despite
these other works, Simenon remains
inextricably linked with Inspector Maigret,
who is one of the best-known characters in
detective fiction. Unlike those fictional
detectives who rely on their immense
deductive powers or on police procedure,
Maigret solves murders using mainly his
psychological intuition and a patiently
sought, compassionate understanding of the
perpetrator’s motives and emotional
composition. Simenon’s central theme is the
essential humanity of even the isolated,
abnormal individual and the sorrow at the
root of the human condition. Employing a
style of rigorous simplicity, he evokes a
prevailing atmosphere of neurotic tensions
with sharp economy.
Simenon,
who traveled to more than 30 countries,
lived in the United States for more than a
decade, starting in 1945; he later lived in
France and Switzerland. At the age of 70 he
stopped writing novels, though he continued
to write nonfiction.
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Fiction and nonfiction
Postcolonial literature
As the century closed, on the far side of the
distress caused by the gradual demise of the old
regime, it was possible to see new and vital trends
emerging. Pierre Nora, writing in 1992 the closing
essay to his great project of national cultural
commemoration, Les Lieux de mémoire (Realms of
Memory), begun in 1984, was struck by the elegiac
tone of the finished work and commented that a
different tone might have emerged if he had invited
his contributors to focus on more marginal groups.
Indeed, an important contribution was being made to
French cultural life not only by Francophone writers
from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and the
Caribbean but by descendants of immigrants in France
itself. Fiction, autobiography, and drama produced
by the children of North African immigrants born and
brought up in France (known as les beurs, from the
word arabe in a form of French slang called verlan)
began to find publishers and audiences from the
early 1980s. Their insights into the tensions of
cross-cultural identity and the patterns of life in
the underprivileged working-class suburbs of Paris,
Nancy, and Lyon began to enrich the cultural capital
of a mainstream readership that was increasingly
learning to see itself as formed in the
crosscurrents of internationalism and the
anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, far-right National
Front (Front National), as delineated in works such
as Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle part (1985; “Zeida
from Nowhere”) or her Poème-fleuve pour noyer le
temps présent (1995; “Stream-of-Consciousness Poetry
to Drown the Present In”). The French also began to
come to terms with the Algerian conflict, as
evidenced by the success in France of Albert Camus’s
posthumously published Le Premier Homme (1994; The
First Man), an autobiographical novel based on his
father’s childhood in Algeria, in a working-class
European colonist milieu. Assia Djebar, one of the
turn of the century’s outstanding novelists, is
painfully positioned in terrain that is both
European and transatlantic. Having established—in
novels such as L’Amour, la fantasia (1985; Fantasia:
An Algerian Cavalcade)—her reputation as both ardent
defender and critic of her native Algeria, which
emerged from colonial oppression with gender
repressions still intact, she divided her working
life between Europe and the United States, producing
fictions that look to the Algerian motherland but
are also alert to the hierarchies of power on the
frontiers of the new Europe, as in Les Nuits de
Strasbourg (1997; “Strasbourg Nights”).
Regional literature
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive
regional traditions. The Occitan renaissance
organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last
quarter of the 19th century and relaunched several
times, most significantly after World War II, by the
Institute of Occitan Studies, is still productive.
Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of
France”), Robert Merle’s saga of the Wars of
Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in
the 16th and 17th centuries), helped keep the
Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the
forefront of the popular imagination. Writing in
Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has
revived, and writing in French focused on the Breton
landscape remains significant, especially for
poetry. Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set
its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Frédéric Mistral

born Sept.
8, 1830, Maillane, France
died March 25, 1914, Maillane
poet who led the 19th-century revival of
Occitan (Provençal) language and literature.
He shared the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1904 (with José Echegaray y Eizaguirre) for
his contributions in literature and
philology.
Mistral’s
father was a well-to-do farmer in the former
French province of Provence. He attended the
Royal College of Avignon (later renamed the
Frédéric Mistral School). One of his
teachers was Joseph Roumanille, who had
begun writing poems in the vernacular of
Provence and who became his lifelong friend.
Mistral took a degree in law at the
University of Aix-en-Provence in 1851.
Wealthy
enough to live without following a
profession, he early decided to devote
himself to the rehabilitation of Provençal
life and language. In 1854, with several
friends, he founded the Félibrige, an
association for the maintenance of the
Provençal language and customs, extended
later to include the whole of southern
France (le pays de la langue d’oc, “the
country of the language of oc,” so called
because the Provençal language uses oc for
“yes,” in contrast to the French oui). As
the language of the troubadours, Provençal
had been the cultured speech of southern
France and was used also by poets in Italy
and Spain. Mistral threw himself into the
literary revival of Provençal and was the
guiding spirit and chief organizer of the
Félibrige until his death in 1914.
Mistral
devoted 20 years’ work to a scholarly
dictionary of Provençal, entitled Lou Tresor
dóu Félibrige, 2 vol. (1878). He also
founded a Provençal ethnographic museum in
Arles, using his Nobel Prize money to assist
it. His attempts to restore the Provençal
language to its ancient position did not
succeed, but his poetic genius gave it some
enduring masterpieces, and he is considered
one of the greatest poets of France.
His
literary output consists of four long
narrative poems: Mirèio (1859; Mireio: A
Provencal Poem), Calendau (1867), Nerto
(1884), and Lou Pouèmo dóu Rose (1897; Eng.
trans. The Song of the Rhône); a historical
tragedy, La Reino Jano (1890; “Queen Jane”);
two volumes of lyrics, Lis Isclo d’or (1876;
definitive edition 1889) and Lis Oulivado
(1912); and many short stories, collected in
Prose d’Armana, 3 vol. (1926–29).
Mistral’s
volume of memoirs, Moun espelido (Mes
origines, 1906; Eng. trans. Memoirs of
Mistral), is his best-known work, but his
claim to greatness rests on his first and
last long poems, Mirèio and Lou Pouèmo dóu
Rose, both full-scale epics in 12 cantos.
Mirèio,
which is set in the poet’s own time and
district, is the story of a rich farmer’s
daughter whose love for a poor basketmaker’s
son is thwarted by her parents and ends with
her death in the Church of Les
Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Into this poem
Mistral poured his love for the countryside
where he was born. Mirèio skillfully
combines narration, dialogue, description,
and lyricism and is notable for the springy,
musical quality of its highly individual
stanzaic form. Under its French title,
Mireille, it inspired an opera by Charles
Gounod (1863).
Lou Pouèmo
dóu Rose tells of a voyage on the Rhône
River from Lyon to Beaucaire by the barge
Lou Caburle, which is boarded first by a
romantic young prince of Holland and later
by the daughter of a poor ferryman. The
romance between them is cut short by
disaster when the first steamboat to sail on
the Rhône accidentally sinks Lou Caburle.
Though the crew swims ashore, the lovers are
drowned. Although less musical and more
dense in style than Mirèio, this epic is as
full of life and colour. It suggests that
Mistral, late in life, realized that his aim
had not been reached and that much of what
he loved was, like his heroes, doomed to
perish.
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Robert Merle

Robert Merle (28 August 1908 - 28 March
2004) was a French novelist.
Born in
Tébessa in French Algeria, he moved to
France in 1918. A professor of English
Literature at several universities, during
World War II Merle was consripted in the
French army and assigned as an interpreter
to the British Expeditionary Force.[1] He
ended up in Dunkerque where he was not
evacuated but captured by the Germans. Merle
used his experiences in his 1949 novel
Week-end at Zuydcoote that won the Prix
Goncourt. It was filmed in 1964.
He has also
written a 13 book series of historical
novels, Fortune de France. Recreating 16th
and 17th century France through the eyes of
a fictitious Protestant doctor turned spy,
he went so far as to write it in the
period's French making it virtually
untranslatable.
His novels
Un animal doué de la raison (A Sentient
Animal, 1967), a stark Cold War satire
inspired by John Lilly's studies of dolphins
and the Caribbean Crisis, and Malevil
(1972), a post-apocalyptic story, were both
translated into English and filmed, the
former, in 1973, as The Day of the Dolphin.
It starred George C.Scott and had a
screenplay by Buck Henry. It bore very
little resemblance to Merle's story.
He died of
a heart attack at his home La Malmaison in
Grosrouvre near Paris.
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Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century
were in thrall to postmodernism, which has been
variously described as a radical attack on all
authoritarian discourse and a return to conservatism
by the back door. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s La
Condition postmoderne (1979; The Postmodern
Condition) declared the end of the modes and
concepts that had fueled 18th-century scientific
rationalism and the industrial and capitalist
society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of
universal moral value and absolute worth. Societies
were to be seen instead as collections of games or
performances, played within arbitrary sets of rules.
Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the
inscription of consumer society and its discourses
into private and public lives had a subversive
impact at the moment of their first production
through such works as Pour une critique de
l’économie politique du signe (1972; For a Critique
of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the
1980s his work was perceived as a product of
conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert
that history had no more use and that value
judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe
n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The Gulf War Did Not Take
Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties
to the Gulf War; this posturing, Baudrillard argued,
had replaced meaningful political thought and
action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable,
traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of
Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued
his analytical and empirical studies of cultural
institutions, including broadcasting and television
(Sur la télévision [1996; On Television]). A society
traditionally split between elite and mass culture
was given a new positive account of the nature of
the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s
L’Invention du quotidien (1980; The Practice of
Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for
people to understand and control the discourses that
shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Jean-Francois Lyotard

born August
10, 1924, Versailles, France
died April 21, 1998, Paris
French
philosopher and leading figure in the
intellectual movement known as
postmodernism.
As a youth,
Lyotard considered becoming a monk, a
painter, and a historian. After studying at
the Sorbonne, he completed an agrégation
(teaching degree) in philosophy in 1950 and
joined the faculty of a secondary school in
Constantine, Algeria. In 1954 he became a
member of Socialisme ou Barbarie (“Socialism
or Barbarism”), an anti-Stalinist socialist
group, contributing essays to its journal
(also called Socialisme ou barbarie) that
were vehemently critical of French colonial
involvement in Algeria. In 1966 he began
teaching philosophy at the University of
Paris X (Nanterre); in 1970 he moved to the
University of Paris VIII
(Vincennes–Saint-Denis), where he was
appointed professor emeritus in 1987. In the
1980s and ’90s he taught widely outside
France. He was professor of French at the
University of California, Irvine, from 1993
and professor of French and philosophy at
Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.,
from 1995.
In his
first major philosophical work,
Discourse/Figure (1971), Lyotard
distinguished between the meaningfulness of
linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of
plastic arts such as painting and sculpture.
He argued that, because rational thought or
judgment is discursive and works of art are
inherently symbolic, certain aspects of
artistic meaning—such as the symbolic and
pictorial richness of painting—will always
be beyond reason’s grasp. In Libidinal
Economy (1974), a work very much influenced
by the Parisian student uprising of May
1968, Lyotard claimed that “desire” always
escapes the generalizing and synthesizing
activity inherent in rational thought;
instead, reason and desire stand in a
relationship of constant tension.
In his
best-known and most influential work, The
Postmodern Condition (1979), Lyotard
characterized the postmodern era as one that
has lost faith in all grand, totalizing
“metanarratives”—the abstract ideas in terms
of which thinkers since the time of the
Enlightenment have attempted to construct
comprehensive explanations of historical
experience. Disillusioned with the grandiose
claims of metanarratives such as “reason,”
“truth,” and “progress,” the postmodern age
has turned to smaller, narrower petits
récits (“little narratives”), such as the
history of everyday life and of marginalized
groups. In his most important philosophical
work, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute
(1983), Lyotard compared discourses to
“language games,” a notion developed in the
later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889–1951); like language games, discourses
are discrete systems of rule-governed
activity involving language. Because there
is no common set of assumptions in terms of
which their conflicting claims or viewpoints
can be adjudicated (there is no universal
“reason” or “truth”), discourses are for the
most part incommensurable. The basic
imperative of postmodern politics,
therefore, is to create communities in which
the integrity of different language games is
respected—communities based on
heterogeneity, conflict, and “dissensus.”
Richard Wolin
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Jean Baudrillard

born July
29, 1929, Reims, France
died March 6, 2007, Paris
French sociologist and cultural theorist
whose theoretical ideas of “hyperreality”
and “simulacrum” influenced literary theory
and philosophy, especially in the United
States, and spread into popular culture.
After
studying German at the Sorbonne, Baudrillard
taught German literature in secondary
schools (1956–66), translated German
literary and philosophical works, and
published essays in the literary review Les
Temps Modernes. At the same time, he
attended the University of Paris X at
Nanterre, where in 1968 he completed a
dissertation in sociology, Le Système des
objects (The System of Objects), under the
direction of Marxist historian Henri
Lefebvre. Baudrillard taught (1966–68) in
the sociology department at Nanterre, which
was one of the centres of the May 1968
student revolts, with which he was in
sympathy. He then moved to the University of
Paris IX (now the University of Paris at
Dauphine), from which he retired in 1987.
Baudrillard’s early work—including The
System of Objects, La Société de
consommation (1970; The Consumer Society),
and Pour une critique de l’économie
politique du signe (1972; For a Critique of
the Political Economy of the Sign)—combines
Marxist political economy and a semiotics
(theory of signs) influenced by Roland
Barthes in a critique of everyday life in
consumer society, in which, according to
Baudrillard, things have symbolic value in
addition to values derived from Marxian use
and exchange. In Le Miroir de la production;
ou, l’illusion critique du matérialisme
historique (1973; The Mirror of Production)
and L’Échange symbolique et la mort (1976;
Symbolic Exchange and Death), Baudrillard
broke with Marxism to develop an account of
postmodern society in which consumer and
electronic images have become more real (hyperreal)
than physical reality and in which
simulations of reality (simulacra) have
displaced their originals, leaving only “the
desert of the real.” This phrase was quoted
in the popular American science-fiction film
The Matrix (1999), whose hero hides
contraband in a copy of Baudrillard’s
Simulacra and Simulation (originally
published as Simulacres et simulation,
1981). An accomplished photographer,
Baudrillard asserted that “every
photographed object is merely the trace left
behind by the disappearance of all the
rest.”
Among
Baudrillard’s other major works are Oublier
Foucault (1977; Forget Foucault); Amérique
(1986; America), based on a trip to the
United States; La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu
lieu (1991; The Gulf War Did Not Take
Place); Jean Baudrillard: Photographies
1985–1998 (1999), a collection of his images
and related essays; and L’Esprit du
terrorisme (2002; The Spirit of Terrorism:
And Requiem for the Twin Towers). The first
issue of The International Journal of
Baudrillard Studies appeared in early 2004.
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Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic
pastiches of adventure, detective, and spy stories
pleased both critics and the reading public. New
themes emerged in the terrain in between modes and
disciplines. Photography and writing joined to
produce the photo-roman, concerned with exploring
the relationship between the image, especially
images of the body, and the narrative work that goes
into its construction and interpretation. Good
examples of the photo-roman are Barthes’s La Chambre
Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s
Vice (1991). Gay writing, already becoming more
political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in
Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé
la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My
Life). The quality and variety of women’s writing
was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the
autobiographical fiction of Annie Ernaux, who, in La
Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s
Place) and Une Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s
Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class
allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more directly
personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her
account of an abortion she underwent in her early
20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La
Porte au fond (“The Door at the Back of the Room”),
appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic,
Le Livre de Prométhéa (1983; The Book of
Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and
innovative—achieved its writer’s ambition to make a
distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject,
within but not consumed by the inherited forms of
writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s
autobiographical novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover)
and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North
China Lover) voiced their author’s own version of
the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985;
“Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s.
Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the edge of
popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and
fantasy, engaging in confident negotiation with the
myths and forms of both maternal and paternal
inheritance. Chantal Chawaf’s sensually charged
prose offers a highly original version of the blood
rhythms of the body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans.
Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of
life in the contemporary world. Sylvie Germain’s
magic realism works on landscapes steeped in
history, where the past painfully but also
productively encloses the present. Her novel La
Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The Weeping
Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike,
surreal evocation of a city haunted by its sorrowful
history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias)
reworks the apocryphal tale in a France that is
simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern.
Michel Houellebecq appears less pleased with the
burden imposed on his present by the past,
especially by the liberal generation of the 1960s,
which he holds responsible for everything noxious in
the modern world. The narrative personae of his
highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la
lutte (1994; Whatever) and Les Particules
élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also
published as Atomised) are splenetic victims of
their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in
their own image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie
Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel of
Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it
is an imaginative political and moral satire
depicting the blackly comic world of a young working
woman with a highly materialistic lifestyle who
begins to turn into a pig—and finds her
transformation both appropriate and satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what
poets were good for in the modern world (A quoi bon
encore les poètes). His work and that of such
well-established figures as Philippe Jaccottet (La
Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were
well-recognized at the turn of the century, and
Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems
(Poésies) in 2000. Martin Sorrell’s bilingual
anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has
shown the flourishing state of women’s poetry. In
it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and
Jeanne Hyvrard offer their own insights into the
problematic of gender roles and the challenge of
finding a female poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a
special preoccupation with the political condition
of women across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of
scripted drama at the end of the 20th century. The
directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and
early 1980s (inspiring spectacular and innovative
staging developments in nontraditional venues that
took theatre to new audiences in Paris and the
provinces and gave great scope to actors for
developing their own stagecraft and improvisatory
skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of
Culture subsidies supported the work of Michel
Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are
concerned with individuals struggling with the
institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of
which contemporary consumer society and their own
identities are woven. The quick exchanges of
Vinaver’s play L’Émission de télévision (1990; The
Television Programme, published in Plays) express
the anxieties of a world in which realities are
constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and
groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial
world. His Dans la solitude des champs de coton
(1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written
two years before his death from AIDS and now
translated and performed across the world, is a
brilliant two-actor play that embodies the central
theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is
focused in the deal—in confrontations and
negotiations between unequal individuals, client and
dealer, in struggles for power, which are also
struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language,
and what is acted out on the Koltesian stage are the
rhetorical performances by which people live—on the
edge of darkness, at the frontiers of disorder.
Close to the surface of the language of the deal and
constantly piercing its skin is the violence that,
in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial
world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of
current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be
tested. At the close of the century, the most modern
of creative writers in this respect remained
Irish-born
Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural
traditions. Although
Beckett died in 1989, more than
a decade before the close of the 20th century, his
importance, influence, and presence had never been
greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an
increasingly minimalist but always materialist mode,
variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of
language, vision, and movement in order to explore
the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s
drama enshrines the serious nature of play. In so
doing, it brings into focus what have always been
the best parts of the French contribution to the
Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that
penetrates the patterns and structures of the
historical moment, the synthetic imagination that
clarifies those patterns for others to see, in all
their force and intensity—and the driving desire to
see them otherwise.
Robin Caron Buss Jennifer Birkett
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APPENDIX
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Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry
"The Little Prince"
Illustrated by Antoine de Saint Exupery

born June 29, 1900, Lyon
died July 31, 1944, in flight over the
Mediterranean
French aviator and writer whose works are
the unique testimony of a pilot and a
warrior who looked at adventure and danger
with a poet’s eyes. His fable Le Petit
Prince (The Little Prince) has become a
modern classic.
Saint-Exupéry came from an impoverished
aristocratic family. A poor student, he
failed the entrance examination to the École
Navale. In the course of his military
service, he obtained his pilot’s license
(1922). In 1926 he joined the Compagnie
Latécoère in Toulouse and helped establish
airmail routes over northwest Africa, the
South Atlantic, and South America. In the
1930s he worked as a test pilot, a publicity
attaché for Air-France, and a reporter for
Paris-Soir. In 1939, despite permanent
disabilities resulting from serious flying
accidents, he became a military
reconnaissance pilot; after the fall of
France (1940) he escaped to the U.S. In 1943
he rejoined the Air Force in North Africa
and was shot down on a reconnaissance
mission.
Saint-Exupéry found in aviation both a
source for heroic action and a new literary
theme. His works exalt perilous adventures
at the cost of life as the highest
realization of man’s vocation. In his first
book, Courrier-Sud (1929; Southern Mail,
1933), his new man of the skies, airmail
pilot Jacques Bernis, dies in the desert of
Rio de Oro. His second novel, Vol de nuit
(1931; Night Flight, 1932), was dedicated to
the glory of the first airline pilots and
their mystical exaltation as they faced
death in the rigorous performance of their
duty. His own flying adventures are recorded
in Terre des hommes (1939; Wind, Sand and
Stars, 1939). He used his plane as an
instrument to explore the world and to
discover human solidarity in the fraternal
efforts of men to accomplish their tasks.
His language is lyrical and moving, with a
simple nobility. Pilote de Guerre (1942;
Flight to Arras, 1942) is a personal
reminiscence of a reconnaissance sortie in
May 1940 accomplished in a spirit of
sacrifice against desperate odds. While in
America he wrote Lettre à un otage (1943;
Letter to a Hostage, 1950), a call to unity
among Frenchmen, and Le Petit Prince (1943;
The Little Prince, 1943), a child’s fable
for adults, with a gentle and grave reminder
that the best things in life are still the
simplest ones and that real wealth is giving
to others.
The growing sadness and pessimism in Saint-Exupéry’s
view of man appears in Citadelle (1948; The
Wisdom of the Sands, 1952), a posthumous
volume of reflections that show Saint-Exupéry’s
persistent belief that man’s only lasting
reason for living is as repository of the
values of civilization.
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Henri Bergson
"Creative Evolution"

French philosopher
in full Henri-Louis Bergson
born Oct. 18, 1859, Paris, France
died Jan. 4, 1941, Paris
Main
French philosopher, the first to elaborate what came to be
called a process philosophy, which rejected static values in
favour of values of motion, change, and evolution. He was
also a master literary stylist, of both academic and popular
appeal, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1927.
Early years
Through his father, a talented musician, Bergson was
descended from a rich Polish Jewish family—the sons of
Berek, or Berek-son, from which the name Bergson is derived.
His mother came from an English Jewish family. Bergson’s
upbringing, training, and interests were typically French,
and his professional career, as indeed all of his life, was
spent in France, most of it in Paris.
He received his early education at the Lycée Condorcet in
Paris, where he showed equally great gifts in the sciences
and the humanities. From 1878 to 1881 he studied at the
École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the institution
responsible for training university teachers. The general
culture that he received there made him equally at home in
reading the Greek and Latin classics, in obtaining what he
wanted and needed from the science of his day, and in
acquiring a beginning in the career of philosophy, to which
he turned upon graduation.
His teaching career began in various lycées outside of
Paris, first at Angers (1881–83) and then for the next five
years at Clermont-Ferrand. While at the latter place, he had
the intuition that provided both the basis and inspiration
for his first philosophical books. As he later wrote to the
eminent American Pragmatist William James:
I had remained up to that time wholly imbued with
mechanistic theories, to which I had been led at an early
date by the reading of Herbert Spencer. . . . It was the
analysis of the notion of time, as that enters into
mechanics and physics, which overturned all my ideas. I saw,
to my great astonishment, that scientific time does not
endure. . . that positive science consists essentially in
the elimination of duration. This was the point of departure
of a series of reflections which brought me, by gradual
steps, to reject almost all of what I had hitherto accepted
and to change my point of view completely.
The first result of this change was his Essai sur les
données immédiates de la conscience (1889; Time and Free
Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness), for
which he received the doctorate the same year. This work was
primarily an attempt to establish the notion of duration, or
lived time, as opposed to what Bergson viewed as the
spatialized conception of time, measured by a clock, that is
employed by science. He proceeded by analyzing the awareness
that man has of his inner self to show that psychological
facts are qualitatively different from any other, charging
psychologists in particular with falsifying the facts by
trying to quantify and number them. Fechner’s Law, claiming
to establish a calculable relation between the intensity of
the stimulus and that of the corresponding sensation, was
especially criticized. Once the confusions were cleared away
that confounded duration with extension, succession with
simultaneity, and quality with quantity, he maintained that
the objections to human liberty made in the name of
scientific determinism could be seen to be baseless.
Philosophical triumphs
The publication of the Essai found Bergson returned to
Paris, teaching at the Lycée Henri IV. In 1891 he married
Louise Neuburger, a cousin of the French novelist Marcel
Proust. Meanwhile, he had undertaken the study of the
relation between mind and body. The prevailing doctrine was
that of the so-called psychophysiological parallelism, which
held that for every psychological fact there is a
corresponding physiological fact that strictly determines
it. Though he was convinced that he had refuted the argument
for determinism, his own work, in the doctoral dissertation,
had not attempted to explain how mind and body are related.
The findings of his research into this problem were
published in 1896 under the title Matière et mémoire: essai
sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (Matter and Memory).
This is the most difficult and perhaps also the most
perfect of his books. The approach that he took in it is
typical of his method of doing philosophy. He did not
proceed by general speculation and was not concerned with
elaborating a great speculative system. He began in this, as
in each of his books, with a particular problem, which he
analyzed by first determining the empirical (observed) facts
that are known about it according to the best and most
up-to-date scientific opinion. Thus, for Matière et mémoire
he devoted five years to studying all of the literature
available on memory and especially the psychological
phenomenon of aphasia, or loss of the ability to use
language. According to the theory of psychophysiological
parallelism, a lesion in the brain should also affect the
very basis of a psychological power. The occurrence of
aphasia, Bergson argued, showed that this is not the case.
The person so affected understands what others have to say,
knows what he himself wants to say, suffers no paralysis of
the speech organs, and yet is unable to speak. This fact
shows, he argued, that it is not memory that is lost but,
rather, the bodily mechanism that is needed to express it.
From this observation Bergson concluded that memory, and so
mind, or soul, is independent of body and makes use of it to
carry out its own purposes.
The Essai had been widely reviewed in the professional
journals, but Matière et mémoire attracted the attention of
a wider audience and marked the first step along the way
that led to Bergson’s becoming one of the most popular and
influential lecturers and writers of the day. In 1897 he
returned as professor of philosophy to the École Normale
Supérieure, which he had first entered as a student at the
age of 19. Then, in 1900, he was called to the Collège de
France, the academic institution of highest prestige in all
of France, where he enjoyed immense success as a lecturer.
From then until the outbreak of World War I, there was a
veritable vogue of Bergsonism. William James was an
enthusiastic reader of his works, and the two men became
warm friends. Expositions and commentaries on the Bergsonian
philosophy were to be found everywhere. It was held by many
that a new day in philosophy had dawned that brought with it
light to many other activities such as literature, music,
painting, politics, and religion.
L’Évolution créatrice
(1907; Creative Evolution), the greatest work of these years
and Bergson’s most famous book, reveals him most clearly as
a philosopher of process at the same time that it shows the
influence of biology upon his thought. In examining the idea
of life, Bergson accepted evolution as a scientifically
established fact. He criticized, however, the philosophical
interpretations that had been given of it for failing to see
the importance of duration and hence missing the very
uniqueness of life. He proposed that the whole evolutionary
process should be seen as the endurance of an élan vital
(“vital impulse”) that is continually developing and
generating new forms. Evolution, in short, is creative, not
mechanistic.
In this developing process, he traced two main lines: one
through instinct, leading to the life of insects; the other
through the evolution of intelligence, resulting in man;
both of which, however, are seen as the work of one vital
impulse that is at work everywhere in the world. The final
chapter of the book, entitled “The Cinematographical
Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion,” presents
a review of the whole history of philosophical thought with
the aim of showing that it everywhere failed to appreciate
the nature and importance of becoming, falsifying thereby
the nature of reality by the imposition of static and
discrete concepts.
Among Bergson’s minor works are Le Rire: essai sur la
significance du comique (1900; Laughter: An Essay on the
Meaning of the Comic) and, Introduction à la metaphysique
(1903; An Introduction to Metaphysics). The latter provides
perhaps the best introduction to his philosophy by offering
the clearest account of his method. There are two profoundly
different ways of knowing, he claimed. The one, which
reaches its furthest development in science, is analytic,
spatializing, and conceptualizing, tending to see things as
solid and discontinuous. The other is an intuition that is
global, immediate, reaching into the heart of a thing by
sympathy. The first is useful for getting things done, for
acting on the world, but it fails to reach the essential
reality of things precisely because it leaves out duration
and its perpetual flux, which is inexpressible and to be
grasped only by intuition. Bergson’s entire work may be
considered as an extended exploration of the meaning and
implications of his intuition of duration as constituting
the innermost reality of everything.
Later years
In 1914 Bergson retired from all active duties at the
Collège de France, although he did not formally retire from
the chair until 1921. Having received the highest honours
that France could offer him, including membership, since
1915, among the “40 immortals” of the Académie Française, he
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.
After L’Évolution créatrice, 25 years elapsed before he
published another major work. In 1932 he published Les Deux
Sources de la morale et de la religion (The Two Sources of
Morality and Religion). As in the earlier works, he claimed
that the polar opposition of the static and the dynamic
provides the basic insight. Thus, in the moral, social, and
religious life of men he saw, on the one side, the work of
the closed society, expressed in conformity to codified laws
and customs, and, on the other side, the open society, best
represented by the dynamic aspirations of heroes and
mystical saints reaching out beyond and even breaking the
strictures of the groups in which they live. There are,
thus, two moralities, or, rather, two sources: the one
having its roots in intelligence, which leads also to
science and its static, mechanistic ideal; the other based
on intuition, and finding its expression not only in the
free creativity of art and philosophy but also in the
mystical experience of the saints.
Bergson in Les Deux Sources had come much closer to the
orthodox religious notion of God than he had in the vital
impulse of L’Évolution créatrice. He acknowledged in his
will of 1937, “My reflections have led me closer and closer
to Catholicism, in which I see the complete fulfillment of
Judaism.” Yet, although declaring his “moral adherence to
Catholicism,” he never went beyond that. In explanation, he
wrote: “I would have become a convert, had I not foreseen
for years a formidable wave of anti-Semitism about to break
upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow
were to be persecuted.” To confirm this conviction, only a
few weeks before his death, he arose from his sickbed and
stood in line in order to register as a Jew, in accord with
the law just imposed by the Vichy government and from which
he refused the exemption that had been offered him.
Influence
Although it did not give rise to a Bergsonian school of
philosophy, Bergson’s influence has been considerable. His
influence among philosophers has been greatest in France,
but it has also been felt in the United States and Great
Britain, especially in the work of William James; George
Santayana; and Alfred North Whitehead, the other great
process metaphysician of the 20th century.
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Gabriel Marcel

born December 7, 1889, Paris
died October 8, 1973, Paris
philosopher, dramatist, and critic, usually regarded as the
first French Existential philosopher.
Early life and influences
Marcel was the only child of Henry Marcel, a government
official, diplomat, and distinguished curator. Gabriel’s
mother died suddenly when he was four, leaving him with a
sense of deep personal loss and yet of a continuing
mysterious presence; the event made death and the
irrevocable an early urgent concern for him. He was brought
up by his maternal grandmother and his aunt—a devoted woman
of stern upright character, who became his father’s second
wife and who had a major influence on his early development.
He was, much to his distress, the centre of constant
familial attention and care, and, despite his brilliant
scholastic achievements, his family’s incessant demands for
ever better academic performance, together with the rigid,
mechanical quality of his schooling, filled him with a
lifelong aversion toward depersonalized, forced-fed modes of
education. He found some consolation in travelling to
foreign places on his vacations, and when his father became
French minister to Sweden he accompanied him. These
vacations were the beginning of his lifelong passion for
travel and of the fulfillment of a deep inner urge to make
himself at home in the new and to explore the unfamiliar. In
later life he became versed in several foreign languages and
literatures and played a significant role in making
contemporary foreign writers known in France.
Religion played no role in Marcel’s upbringing. His
father was a lapsed Catholic and cultured agnostic, who
never bothered to have him baptized, and his
aunt-stepmother, of nonreligious Jewish background, was
converted to a liberal, humanist type of Protestantism.
Reason, science, and the moral conscience were held to be
sufficient guides, superseding traditional religion. Despite
abundant parental love and solicitude, Marcel, in later
life, looked back to this period as one of spiritual
“servitude” and “captivity” that impelled him (without his
knowing it) into a personal religious quest and to a
philosophical inquiry into the conditions of religious
faith.
Areas of his work
His search took three paths: music, drama, and philosophy.
Hearing, playing, and composing music assumed an important
role in the shaping of Marcel’s mind from an early age, and
composers such as J.S. Bach and Mozart played a more
decisive role in his spiritual development than did great
religious writers such as Augustine and Blaise Pascal. As a
composer, his favourite mode was improvisation on the piano,
for him a communion with a transcendent reality and not the
mere expression of his private feelings and impressions.
Only a small number of Marcel’s improvisations have been
transcribed or recorded; in 1945, however, he became a
composer in the ordinary sense, devoting himself to the
scored musical interpretation of poetry, ranging from that
of Charles Baudelaire to that of Rainer Maria Rilke.
Playwriting provided another early and significant mode
of expression. Henry Marcel frequently performed
accomplished readings of dramatic works for his family. From
an early age, Gabriel invented dialogues with imaginary
brothers and sisters, and he wrote his first play at the age
of eight. His own family situation had provided the living
matrix for his later dramatic presentations of intertwined
and irreconcilable aspirations, frustrations, and conflicts
of definitely individual characters. The dramatic
delineation of the chaotic and unpleasant aspects of human
life complemented the expression of a transcendent harmony
in his music, and both touched on key experiences and themes
which were to be explored later in his philosophical
meditations. They were unconsciously concrete illustrations
of his philosphy before the fact, not deliberately contrived
examples after the fact; they dealt with what were to be
Marcel’s main philosophical concerns as they emerged in the
dramatic spiritual crises and relations of his
full-dimensioned real-life characters, not with a
disingenuous manipulation of animated concepts as in the
conventional “play of ideas.”
Marcel dealt with themes of spiritual authenticity and
inauthenticity, fidelity and infidelity, and the
consummation or frustration of personal relationships in his
early plays, such as La Grâce, Le Palais de sable, Le Coeur
des autres, and L’Iconoclaste. In Le Quatuor en fa dièse his
musical, philosophical, and dramatic dispositions merge to
render vividly the sense of the interpenetration of persons
whose lives are bound up with one another. He appended one
of his most significant philosophical essays (“On the
Ontological Mystery”) to the play Le Monde cassé, in which
the “broken world” of the title is displayed in the empty
life and relations of the charming, despairing, and yet
still hoping woman who is its protagonist.
Philosophical development
Philosophy, an early passion with Marcel, was the only
subject that aroused his whole-hearted participation during
his preparatory education. At 18, he was at work on his
thesis for a diploma in higher studies, “The Metaphysical
Ideas of Coleridge in Their Relations with the Philosophy of
Schelling,” and he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.
Although he passed examinations to become a teacher of
philosophy in secondary schools (1910), he never completed
his doctoral dissertation—on the necessary conditions for
the intelligibility of religious thought. He taught
philosophy only intermittently, usually earning his living
as a publisher’s reader, editor, writer, and critic.
At first, philosophy for Marcel meant a highly abstract
type of thought that sought to transcend the everyday
empirical world. Gradually, over a long period of probing
and searching, he came to shape a concrete philosophy that
sought to deepen and restore the intimate human experience
left behind by abstract thought. This philosophical
“conversion” occurred when he was working for the French Red
Cross, during World War I, trying to trace soldiers listed
as missing. In place of the information on file cards he
came to see real, though invisible, persons—presences—and to
share in the agony of their grieving relatives. What Marcel
called his “metapsychical” experiments—investigations of
possible communications by means of telepathy, clairvoyance,
prophecy, and spiritualism—also played a role in his
philosophical conversion. For him these experiences
convincingly challenged the conventional naturalistic and
materialistic bent of contemporary philosophy, indicating a
realm beyond that of ordinary sense-experience, and
promising freedom from conformist biases and prohibitions in
his philosophical quest.
Originally Marcel intended to express his philosophical
reflections in the conventional treatise form, but as he
came to see his philosophical vocation as essentially
exploratory and the philosopher’s situation to be always in
search and en route (homo viator), he abandoned this format
as too didactic. Instead he published his philosophical
workbooks, his day-to-day journals of philosophical
investigations (such as Metaphysical Journal and the later
shorter philosophical diaries in Being and Having and
Presence and Immortality). He also wrote essays on
particular themes and occasions (as in Homo Viator); these
were usually a more rounded development of themes explored
initially in various journal entries, such as exile,
captivity, separation, fidelity, and hope, which were also a
response to the particular situation of the French people
during the German occupation of 1940 to 1944.
The decisive event in Marcel’s spiritual life was his
conversion to Roman Catholicism on March 23, 1929. The
culmination of years of philosophical inquiry into the
meanings and conditions of personal existence and faith, the
action represented his realization that he had to choose a
particular form of faith, that there is no faith in general.
Despite his apparent affinity with Protestantism, which
seemed more in keeping with his essentially nonconformist
character and his need for intellectual freedom, he chose
Catholicism, which he came to understand as a universal
faith, not a special ecclesiastical institution or a
partisan, exclusivist stance. After that decisive occasion
he continued as an independent philosopher with a specific
spiritual disposition, never as a theological apologist or
spokesman for an official Catholic philosophy. And he
continued in his plays, as well as in his philosophy, to
explore and illuminate the dark and negative aspects of
human existence.
Basic themes and method
Marcel’s contribution to modern thought consisted of the
exploration and illumination of whole ranges of human
experience—trust, fidelity, promise, witness, hope, and
despair—which have been dismissed by predominant schools of
modern philosophy as not amenable to philosophical
consideration. These explorations were buttressed by a
remarkable reflective power and intellectual rigour, a
metaphysical capacity par excellence.
His early central concept of “participation,” the direct
communion with reality, was gradually elaborated to
elucidate everything from the elemental awareness of one’s
own body and sense-perception to the relation between human
beings with ultimate being. The full, open relation between
beings, thus conceived, is essentially “dialogical,” the
relation between an I and a thou, between the whole of a
person and the fullness of what he confronts—another being,
a “presence,” and a “mystery,” rather than an “object” of
detached perception, thought, and expression. Such a
relation requires an opening up to what is other than
oneself, disponibilité (approximately “availability,”
“readiness,” “permeability”) and also an entering into,
involvement, or engagement—dispositions demonstrable in
everyday existence. The opposite is also ubiquitous—the
refusal to open up and engage oneself, to give credit, to
trust or hope, the disposition toward negation, despair, or
even suicide. This possibility, for Marcel, is an essential
characteristic of the human condition: man may deny as well
as affirm his existence and either fulfill or frustrate his
need to participate in being.
Marcel’s method of thought and expression in dealing with
these matters is an open, intuitive one. He probes the
meaning of such terms as hope, fidelity, or witness and
sketches the reality that they indicate through a sensitive
description of the mind, action, and attitude of the hoper,
faithful one, or witness. He makes use of concrete metaphors
and real-life instances to evoke and embody the
difficult-to-express experiences and realities he is
exploring.
In his own unique way, Marcel was an outstanding example
of one of the central emphases of mid-20th-century
philosophy—Phenomenology. Marcel’s use of this intuitive
method was original and was developed independently of the
work of the great German Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and
his followers, just as his notion of the I–thou relation was
developed independently of Martin Buber and other dialogical
thinkers, and just as his exploration of Existential themes
occurred long before his reading of Kierkegaard and the
bursting forth of Existential philosophy on the
mid-20th-century European scene. Marcel may justly be called
the first French Phenomenologist and the first French
Existential philosopher (though he deprecated the term
Existentialism).
Marcel was married in 1919 to Jacqueline Boegner (died
1947), whom he called “the absolute companion of my life.”
Their only child was an adopted son, Jean-Marie, the
relation to whom may have inspired Marcel’s later
reflections on “creative paternity” and the spirit of
adoption.
Seymour Cain
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Emmanuel Levinas

French philosopher
born
December 30, 1905 [January 12, 1906, Old Style], Kaunas,
Lithuania
died December 25, 1995, Paris, France
Main
French philosopher renowned for his powerful critique of the
preeminence of ontology (the philosophical study of being)
in the history of Western philosophy, particularly in the
work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976).
Lévinas
began his studies in philosophy in 1923 at the University of
Strasbourg. He spent the academic year 1928–29 at the
University of Freiburg, where he attended seminars by Edmund
Husserl (1859–1938) and Heidegger. After completing a
doctoral dissertation at the Institut de France in 1928,
Lévinas taught at the École Normale Israelite Orientale (ENIO),
a school for Jewish students, and the Alliance Israelite
Universelle, both in Paris. Serving as an officer in the
French army at the outbreak of World War II, he was captured
by German troops in 1940 and spent the next five years in a
prisoner of war camp. After the war he was director of the
ENIO until 1961, when he received his first academic
appointment at the University of Poitiers. He subsequently
taught at the University of Paris X (Nanterre; 1967–73) and
the Sorbonne (1973–78).
The
principal theme of Lévinas’s work after World War II is the
traditional place of ontology as “first philosophy”—the most
fundamental philosophical discipline. According to Lévinas,
ontology by its very nature attempts to create a totality in
which what is different and “other” is necessarily reduced
to sameness and identity. This desire for totality,
according to Lévinas, is a basic manifestation of
“instrumental” reason—the use of reason as an instrument for
determining the best or most efficient means to achieve a
given end. Through its embrace of instrumental reason,
Western philosophy displays a destructive and objectifying
“will to domination.” Moreover, because instrumental reason
does not determine the ends to which it is applied, it can
be—and has been—used in the pursuit of goals that are
destructive or evil; in this sense, it is responsible for
the major crises of European history in the 20th century, in
particular the advent of totalitarianism. Viewed from this
perspective, Heidegger’s attempt to develop a new
“fundamental ontology,” one that would answer the question
of the “meaning of Being,” is misguided, because it
continues to reflect the dominating and destructive
orientation characteristic of Western philosophy in general.
Lévinas
claims that ontology also displays a bias toward cognition
and theoretical reason—the use of reason in the formation of
judgments or beliefs. In this respect ontology is
philosophically inferior to ethics, a field that Lévinas
construes as encompassing all the practical dealings of
human beings with each other. Lévinas holds that the primacy
of ethics over ontology is justified by the “face of the
Other.” The “alterity,” or otherness, of the Other, as
signified by the “face,” is something that one acknowledges
before using reason to form judgments or beliefs about him.
Insofar as the moral debt one owes to the Other can never be
satisfied—Lévinas claims that the Other is “infinitely
transcendent, infinitely foreign”—one’s relation to him is
that of infinity. In contrast, since ontology treats the
Other as an object of judgments made by theoretical reason,
it deals with him as a finite being; its relationship to the
Other is therefore one of totality.
Lévinas
claims that ethics can be given a theological foundation in
the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex. 20:13).
He explores the ethical implications of this mandate in
religious studies such as Difficult Freedom: Essays on
Judaism (1963) and Nine Talmudic Readings (1990). Among
Lévinas’s other major philosophical works are Existence and
Existents (1947), Discovering Existence with Husserl and
Heidegger (1949), Difficult Freedom (1963), and Otherwise
than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974).
Richard Wolin
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty

born March 14, 1908, Rochefort, Fr.
died May 4, 1961, Paris
philosopher and man of letters, the leading exponent of
Phenomenology in France.
Merleau-Ponty studied at the École Normale Supérieure in
Paris and took his agrégation in philosophy in 1931. He
taught in a number of lycées before World War II, during
which he served as an army officer. In 1945 he was appointed
professor of philosophy at the University of Lyon and in
1949 was called to the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1952 he
received a chair of philosophy at the Collège de France.
From 1945 to 1952 he served as unofficial co-editor (with
Jean-Paul Sartre) of the journal Les Temps Modernes.
Merleau-Ponty’s most important works of technical
philosophy were La Structure du comportement (1942; The
Structure of Behavior, 1965) and Phénoménologie de la
perception (1945; Phenomenology of Perception, 1962). Though
greatly influenced by the work of Edmund Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty rejected his theory of the knowledge of other
persons, grounding his own theory in bodily behaviour and in
perception. He held that it is necessary to consider the
organism as a whole to discover what will follow from a
given set of stimuli. For him, perception was the source of
knowledge and had to be studied before the conventional
sciences.
Turning his attention to social and political questions,
in 1947 Merleau-Ponty published a group of Marxist essays,
Humanisme et terreur (“Humanism and Terror”), the most
sophisticated defense of Soviet communism in the late 1940s.
He argued for suspended judgment of Soviet terrorism and
attacked what he regarded as Western hypocrisy. The Korean
War disillusioned Merleau-Ponty and he broke with Sartre,
who defended the North Koreans.
In 1955 Merleau-Ponty published more Marxist essays, Les
Aventures de la dialectique (“The Adventures of the
Dialectic”). This collection, however, indicated a change of
position: Marxism no longer appears as the final word on
history, but rather as a heuristic methodology. Later he
returned to more strictly philosophical concerns.
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