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French Critical Theory

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lightbulbAbout this topic
French Critical Theory refers to a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in France in the mid-20th century, characterized by its critique of modernity, capitalism, and traditional social structures. It encompasses various intellectual traditions, including structuralism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis, emphasizing the role of language, power, and ideology in shaping human experience and society.
lightbulbAbout this topic
French Critical Theory refers to a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in France in the mid-20th century, characterized by its critique of modernity, capitalism, and traditional social structures. It encompasses various intellectual traditions, including structuralism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis, emphasizing the role of language, power, and ideology in shaping human experience and society.

Key research themes

1. How has French critical theory reexamined and transformed the practice and concept of critique in literary and cultural studies?

This research theme investigates the evolution of critique as a methodological and theoretical practice within French critical theory, tracing its genealogy, reassessments, and the emergence of postcritical or alternative modes of interpretation. It matters because it reflects broader shifts in humanities scholarship about the limits and possibilities of critique as a tool for cultural analysis, revealing tensions between suspicion, empowerment, and artistic or political engagement.

Key finding: The volume collectively redefines critique not merely as suspicion or demystification but as a complex academic genre with specific rhetorical moves and affective orientations. It documents a postcritical turn that seeks... Read more
Key finding: This paper elucidates Michel Foucault’s genealogical history of critique from the ancient practice of parrhesia to contemporary politics, emphasizing a shift from merely discrediting truth claims to presenting a politics of... Read more
Key finding: This paper identifies a ‘double movement’ in Foucault’s conception of critique: critique simultaneously questions truth about its power effects and power about its discourses of truth. This bifurcation reveals the dual role... Read more
Key finding: The edited collection synthesizes contemporary shifts beyond traditional critical theory by examining new paradigms such as posthumanism, post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and ecological criticism. It demonstrates how French... Read more

2. In what ways have French theorists integrated cybernetics and information theory into the development of French theory and structuralism?

This research explores the intellectual cross-pollination between early cybernetic science, information theory, and French postwar theory, especially structuralism. It matters because it recontextualizes French theory as partly shaped by technological and scientific discourses around communication and control, revealing surprising origins of key structuralist concepts and their evolution, which influence contemporary critiques of knowledge and power.

Key finding: The essay situates structuralism and later French theory within the historical emergence of cybernetics and information theory, highlighting Claude Lévi-Strauss's engagement with Shannon-Weaver communication models. It argues... Read more
Key finding: The review synthesizes Geoghegan’s work uncovering a genealogy linking information theory and French theory, emphasizing the role of progressive-era technocracy, philanthropy, and colonial context in shaping cybernetic... Read more
Key finding: This review highlights Geoghegan’s detailed analysis of the intertwined intellectual, social, and political histories behind cybernetics and French theory, tracing the institutionalization of communication sciences within US... Read more

3. How have French theorists engaged with politics and power, particularly in postwar contexts such as colonialism, psychiatry, and social movements?

This theme addresses French theory's sustained concern with political power, repression, and emancipation, especially through analyses of historical and social institutions like psychiatry, colonial Algeria, and political upheavals post-1968. These works matter for understanding how criticism is historically embedded and how theoretical concepts like power, subjectivity, and social reproduction emerged in relation to concrete political struggles and intellectual responses within French contexts.

Key finding: This chapter situates France Bučar’s synthesis of Marxist emancipatory criticism and Weberian systems theory within the geopolitical backdrop of socialist Yugoslavia and Cold War Europe. It argues that Bučar’s critical... Read more
Key finding: Through intellectual history and archival analysis, this book review reveals how institutional psychotherapy in postwar France functioned as a ‘laboratory’ blending psychiatry, philosophy, and political theory. It emphasizes... Read more
Key finding: This paper traces Pierre Bourdieu’s key sociological concepts—habitus, symbolic capital, field, practice, reflexivity—to his empirical and intellectual work in colonial Algeria. It demonstrates how the crisis and turbulence... Read more
Key finding: This article critically debunks the myth that French theory constitutes the radical intellectual wing of the 1968 political uprisings, evidencing that leading French theorists like Foucault, Derrida, and Bourdieu were largely... Read more

All papers in French Critical Theory

Cet article propose une réflexion épistémologique sur la trame des interrelations ville/nature à partir des interstices des trottoirs de Montevideo. Cette réflexion sur le détail en paysage, qui mêle histoire de l'art et littérature, se... more
The introduction highlights the mixed reception of Pierre Clastres in Amazonian anthropology, especially in France, despite his international influence. Though unfinished and controversial, his work still informs debates on power and the... more
Koronatopia est un essai philosophique né dans le contexte troublé de la pandémie de Covid-19, peu après l’exil de l’auteur de Turquie vers la Suisse. Écrit en kurde, sa langue maternelle longtemps réprimée, ce livre est à la fois un acte... more
Recenzie la Jean-François Braunstein, Religia woke. Cum a căzut pradă Occidentul unei mișcări iraționale, traducere de Emanuela Jalbă-Șoimaru, Editura Humanitas, București, 2024
Le soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarder fixement. La Rochefoucauld, Maximes On voudrait parfois être une tête de Méduse pour changer en pierre un groupe comme celui-là et puis appeler les gens. […] Il s!agit là d!une sortie hors de... more
La thèse est consacrée au voyage en Chine (1974) de Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva et Marcelin Pleynet, représentants de la revue Tel Quel, avec Roland Barthes et son éditeur François Wahl. La question principale porte sur... more
It is an honor to be invited to Athens, birthplace of democracy. I myself have had the opportunity to study and investigate the Athenian democracy as translator of Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Pierre Lévêque's Cleisthenes the Athenian. But as... more
(forthcoming from SUNY Press: https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Maurice-Blanchot) This thesis studies the political and critical writings of Maurice Blanchot from 1933 to 1949, a period in which he underwent a number of fundamental... more
Tous droits réservés © Spirale magazine culturel inc., 2010 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous... more
What kind of experience is “literary experience,” and what might it have in common with psychedelics? This essay exposes a poetics of experience embedded within psychedelics and shows its common ground with the literary space of a poem in... more
This article offers a conceptual investigation into the notion of problematic as developed by Louis Althusser, positioning it within the internal coherence of his theoretical system. By placing this concept in dialogue with other central... more
This essay aims to reassess the historical significance of structuralism and contextualize its relevance within the emergence of French theory during the 1960s. The genesis of this French theory cannot solely be attributed to the... more
Roland Barthes découvre le monde arabe en 1949, quand il enseigne comme vacataire à l'université d'Alexandrie. Si ce séjour lui donne l'occasion de rencontrer Greimas, qui l'initie à Saussure et à la sémiologie, le jeune professeur... more
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan investigates the role of cybernetics in the making of modern critical theory within the intensive Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. This purposeful examination explores how laboratory ideals of... more
Le 22 septembre 2024 est mort Fredric Jameson, le plus grand penseur marxiste américain de la littérature et de la culture. De nombreux hommages ont été rendus à cet auteur d’une trentaine de livres et de douzaines d’articles sur la... more
Vu d'Allemagne : les théories littéraires en France From abroad, some views on literary researches in France Joseph Jurt Cet article, écrit par un professeur suisse qui enseigne dans une université allemande, vise à faire le point sur le... more
Une image anonyme surgit tout-à-coup au milieu d’un vide-grenier par un matin pluvieux d’octobre 2013. un indice ténu, une inscription, une marque motiva une enquête sur l’identité des personnages présents sur cette photographie. lors de... more
Le journal intime de Julio Ramón Ribeyro s'intitulant La tentación del fracaso (Ribeyro, 2003), il ouvre naturellement tout un éventail de possibilités pour traiter le sujet de la défaite. L'écrivain péruvien va construire une grande... more
Tenant un journal pendant son voyage en Chine en 1974, Roland Barthes note chaque jour, voire plusieurs fois par jour, ce qu’il voit, ce qu’il visite et découvre, ce qu’il ressent, ce qui l’ennuie, etc. Nous proposons donc d’étudier ses... more
Towards a Marxist feminism that accounts for the interlockedness of sex, race and class
Despite Jean-Paul Sartre and Cornelius Castoriadis placing the imagination centre stage in their respective conceptual theories, little work has been done to bring them into conversation on this issue or, indeed, any other. This is... more
After the linguistic and the affective turn, the new materialist turn and the performative turn, the cognitive turn and the posthuman turn, among other recent theoretical, critical and post-critical turns that are currently transforming... more
This anthology discusses Jacques Rancière’s political thinking from the perspective of political theory. It particularly focuses on the relationship between democracy, governance and statehood. The first contributions discuss key... more
Este trabajo pretende introducir una propuesta de interpretación del texto clásico de Étienne de La Boétie sobre la servidumbre voluntaria desde la perspectiva que sobre el Estado y el poder desarrolla Foucault a finales de los años... more
First of all, I'd like to thank you for being here, and to express my regrets not being able to be with you tonight. As discussed with Bohdan, I do hope that this virtual seminar is just a first step to a more extensive and a more real... more
In 2017-2018, Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay set out to write twenty papers based on outlandish premises, and proceeded to submit them to peer-reviewed journals. Seven of them were accepted, another seven were given... more
La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre... more
Lien vers l'article : https://hal.science/hal-04060079
Las preguntas y las traducciones han sido preparadas por Víctor Conejo Abril, Oscar Quejido Alonso y Ana Velasco Lázaro. Queremos agradecer la revisión de las traducciones a Danfeng Jin y a Eduardo Valls Oyarzun.
The formalized reality of the constitutional nation state as we know it emerged in the European context a few centuries ago, solidifying not only territorial arrangement, but also linguistic, religious and/or cultural boundaries between... more
Es fällt nicht leicht, in einem Klima, in dem der Mord als strategisches Kalkül mit einer allgemeinen Enthumanisierung harmonisiert, etwas über feministische Anarchie zu schreiben, zumal Schlagwörter für alle Ewigkeit mit unverwandelbarem... more
Récits exemplaires Laurence GIAVARINI (dir.), Construire l'exemplarité. Pratiques littéraires et discours historiens‚ XVI e-XVIII e siècles (2008) Hugo O. BIZZARRI, Martin ROHDE (dir.), Tradition des proverbes et des exempla dans... more
La mère écrite de Barthes et Le deuil UDC 821.133.1.09 Barthes, R. Original scientifi c paper Reçu le 25 octobre 2013 Accepté pour la publication le 14 mars 2014 Le Journal de deuil de Barthes, lieu de rémanence (et non seulement de... more
Assembling a distinctive genealogy of cybernetic thought situated in relation to Progressive Era technocracy, industrial capitalism, (de)colonial relations, and eugenic machinery, Code uncovers the vital interdependence of informatics,... more
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
, Linz 'No,' Tau-indi said patiently, 'they didn't make me into a laman. I chose my gender. Didn't you choose to be a man? Or do they say, you have a penis, so you're a man? What about people with both? What about people who don't want... more
Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Éditions Léo Scheer. Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Éditions Léo Scheer. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites... more
¿Cómo circulan las teorías y los paradigmas críticos? Como los viajeros de avión o de barco, las ideas pueden tener accidentes en el trayecto, pueden perder su equipaje, pueden encontrar amigos o detractores en su destino. Para pensar... more
Dentro del amplio terreno de la recepción italiana de la biopolítica, en los últimos años se ha destacado la corriente Neooperaísta con autores como Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Franco Berardi y Maurizio Lazzarato. Esta corriente ha... more
This article critically examines the widespread assumption that there is such a profound connection between French theory and the political events of 1968 that the former merits the title of “68 thought.” It begins by a materialist... more
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