French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"20th-century French philosophy has been very popular in post-war American academia, much like German philosophy has been in French 20th century philosophy." --Sholem Stein |
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French Theory : Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis (2003) is a book by François Cusset, translated to English as French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States.
Blurb
During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock ‘n’ roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation.
Outside the academy, “French theory” had a profound impact on the era’s emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At the same time in academic departments across the country, their poststructuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America’s cultural and intellectual fabric.
French Theory is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. François Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today-showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life.
French summary
Selon François Cusset, le regroupement de ces auteurs français aux États-Unis sous le terme French Theory apparaît en France très artificiel. Ce rassemblement dans une même école philosophique gommerait les singularités et fortes divergences théoriques de leurs œuvres respectives. Selon Cusset, les seules similitudes qui apparaissent sont des démarches critiques semblables :
- la critique du sujet, de la représentation et de la continuité historique ;
- la relecture de Freud, Nietzsche et Heidegger ;
- la critique de la « critique » elle-même, c'est-à-dire de la tradition philosophique allemande.
La French Theory serait née de la conjonction aux États-Unis de plusieurs facteurs, dont :
- la « préexistence » de courants intellectuels ou politiques, au sein des universités américaines, dont les théories étaient proches ou facilement assimilables ;
- l'« américanisation », réorganisation et dé-contextualisation des concepts français originaux ;
- la transmission des idées au travers de modes de publication spécifiques (extraits publiés dans des revues universitaires et marginales plutôt que traduction intégrale des œuvres) ;
- la prépondérance des entretiens croisés entre auteurs français (donnant l'impression d'un corpus homogène) ;
- les difficultés de traduction ;
- les usages non concordants des citations dans les travaux universitaires.
