French Theory

French Theory refers to a body of postmodern philosophical, literary and social theories, where the concept of deconstruction holds a central place, in line with post-structuralism The term emerged in American universities and research work in the 1970s, from a school of thought born in the 1960s in France, and owes much, in terms of dissemination, to the journal Semiotext(e), founded by Sylvère Lotringer in 1974 at Columbia University.

French Theory met with particular enthusiasm in American humanities departments from the 1980s, where it contributed to the emergence of cultural studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies. French Theory has also had a strong influence in the arts and in the activism world. In American academic research, it is at times conflated with post-structuralism.

The main authors associated with this movement are, in France: Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Rancière, René Girard and Monique Wittig; and in the US: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stanley Fish, Edward Said, Richard Rorty, Fredric Jameson, Avital Ronell, and Donna Haraway.

The impact of the work of these French authors gave birth in the United States to an intellectual movement called French Theory. Following the Sokal affair, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont published Fashionable Nonsense in 1997, which criticized the lack of rigor and relevance of remarks by certain philosophers linked to French Theory, when they attempted to use the so-called hard sciences in their arguments. The book resulted in media coverage in France, critical of French Theory and the theorists associated with it.

An English name for a French corpus

According to intellectual historian François Cusset, the grouping of these French authors in the US under the term French Theory appears highly artificial in France. This gathering in the same philosophical school erases the singularities and strong theoretical divergences of their respective works. According to Cusset, the only similarities are similar critical approaches:

• the critique of the subject, of representation and of historical continuity;
• rereading of Freud, Nietzsche and Heidegger;
• the criticism of the "critical" itself, that is, from the German philosophical tradition.

French Theory was born from the conjunction of several factors in the U.S., including:

• the "pre-existence" of intellectual or political currents, within American universities, whose theories were close or easily assimilated;
• Americanization, reorganization and de-contextualization of original French concepts;
• the transmission of ideas through specific modes of publication (excerpts published in academic and alternative journals rather than full translations of the works);
• the preponderance of cross-interviews between French authors (giving the impression of a homogeneous corpus);
• translation difficulties.

Legacy

In France, from the mid-1970s, French Theory gradually faded from an intellectual landscape marked by the disappointments (on the left) of the post-May 68 period. Strong media personalities under the title of the New Philosophers led French debate towards various forms of struggle for rights and the conquest of the political apparatus for humanitarian ends. Intellectuals who claimed to be followers of Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, and others disappeared from the forefront as the academic community gradually lost interest in them. It is paradoxically in this context that French Theory gained popularity in the US. In the 2000s, French Theory reappeared in France under the influence of translations of American works, taking different forms of accusatory questioning of the French model (gender studies, post-colonial studies, etc.), which pose the philosophical and political question of difference, power and the imposition of norms.

References

Bibliography

• Johannes Angermuller, Why There Is No Poststructuralism in France. The Making of an Intellectual Generation, London, Bloomsbury, 2015.
• Johannes Angermuller, The Field of Theory. Rise and decline of structuralism in France, Paris, Hermann, 2013.
• François Cusset, French Theory : Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. and the mutations of intellectual life in the United States, ed. La Découverte, Paris, 2003.
• Mike Gane, French Social Theory, ed. Sage (Baudrillard Studies), London, 2003.
• Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen (eds.), French Theory in America, New York, Routledge, 2001.
• Francesca Manzari and Stéphane Lojkine, introductory course in French Theory, Aix-Marseille University, ALLSH Faculty, HBM6U03D, HBMU12, 2020 program : presentation and online program.
• Glyn Williams, French Discourse Analysis: The Method of Post Structuralism, London, Routledge, 1999.

External links

• The lesson of French Theory on Erudit.org