French Theory Was Born in the Colonies, Not the Cafés
The Poison and the Cure the Life and Afterlife of French Theory
Two new books reassess the postwar French thinkers who reshaped the humanities. Emily Eakin's memoir-history follows the craze as it crossed into American academia, while Onur Erdur traces the movement's roots to decolonization and the Algerian War, arguing that colonial experience shaped thinkers like Derrida. Both accounts push back against charges that theory spawned fake news and cancel culture.
Well, that is why we have the word 'theory.' We don't have to decide.
- kikdij
I studied philosophy in French university, and it's the first time I ever hear of "French Theory". Apparently, it's a "French" movement invented by US people to characterize things rather different, like phenomenology and structuralism.
- vixen99
Thank you for a very welcome short review!
For someone with zero philosophical training, can anyone convince me that indeed the writings of the folk described are not "charged with meretricious obscurity, italicized neologisms and occasional quasi-mathematical formulae and a travesty of scientific inquiry". I accept that the huge amount of time and energy devoted to it as noted in the review will of course inevitably have generated some interesting writing and avenues of thought.
In my naivety I am open to argument but don't such potential arguments have to use statements with pretty much fixed meaning - a concept denied by the French theorists? Seems to me that Roger Scruton was on track in writing of “a boiling tide of nonsense” that would “eliminate the possibility of rational argument” and “annihilate meaning.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinkers_of_the_New_Left and Fools and as a follow-up in 2015, 'Fools, Frauds and Firebrands', available in the eu.archive.
https://dn760005.eu.archive.org/0/items/scruton-roger-fools-...