French Theory
Publisher
:
Editions La Découverte
Parution date
:
2003
EAN
:
9782707137449
Description
French Theory examines the tremendous impact of cutting-edge French thinkers like Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, and Kristeva on American culture over the last thirty years. Cusset explores how vastly different strands of difficult and often contradictory modes of thought were collectively embraced by American society and placed under one unifying rubric: French theory. America has had a unique love/hate relationship with French Theory, its enigmatic ideas and language as often ridiculed as revered. Interestingly, these dense, theoretical texts did not solely affect academic departments, but rather infiltrated many diverse groups of the American culture: the Black Panthers, Hollywood, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, artists experimenting in electronic music, pop art, and cyberpunk novels, and so on. Taking into account the political, social, artistic and critical implications of these thinkers and their effects on the American consciousness, Cusset deftly traces the dramatic rise of French Theory across the nation’s university departments and well beyond. The result is a stimulating book, filled with vivid portraits, about the brilliant French theorists-turned- stars and the Americans who championed them.
It is also the first French take on this unique cross-cultural phenomenon, and one of the very first attempts, in any language, at a historical and political assessment of this French-rooted yet American-bred wave of intellectual radicalism. The book tracks French Theory’s roots back to High Modernism and the European exiles in New York during WW2, and extends its consequences all the way to the current U.S. neo-conservatism (as an extreme ideological reaction against it). Cusset also highlights the ever-widening transatlantic gap, since French Theory has been expelled from France in favor of a conservative universalism originally promoted by the Nouveaux philosophes, while Foucault and Derrida were gradually becoming the key references of political activists and university humanists around the world, from Sao Paulo to Tokyo.
Jacques Derrida has written that he “strongly believe[s] this book shall be the key reference on this subject on both sides of the Atlantic.”
Author
François Cusset : François Cusset is the former director of the French Publishers’ Agency. He has written one other book, the critically acclaimed Queer Critics (Presses Universitaires de France, 2002).
|