(1) Why There Is No Poststructuralism in France: The Making of an Intellectual Generation, Johannes Angermüller, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015
(2) Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers, Alan D. Schrift, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008
(3) Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation (The History of Continental Philosophy Book 6), ed. Alan D. Schrift, Routledge, 2013
(4) After Poststructuralism: Transitions and Transformations (The History of Continental Philosophy 7), ed. Rosi Braidotti, Routledge, 2013
(5) Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy (The History of Continental Philosophy 8), ed. Todd May, Routledge, 2013
(6) Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (Transversals: New Directions in Philosophy), John Mullarkey, Continuum, 2007
John Mullarkey’s Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (Mullarkey 2006) is without doubt the most ambitious and fully developed attempt that has been made to date to argue for a paradigm break within the development of contemporary French thought. Post-Continental Philosophy brings together four philosophers, two of whom are also discussed in this book. They are Gilles Deleuze, Michel Henry (1922-2002), Alain Badiou and François Laruelle. As Mullarkey himself points out at the very beginning of the introduction, his work does not address something that is, or which has already occurred, but rather something that ‘is unfolding, an event in the making’ (Mullarkey 2006: 1). More precisely, the book takes as its premise the claim that a certain moment in the ongoing development of French thought might be accorded the status of an ‘event’. The moment he identifies is 1988, a year which sees the publication in French of important texts by each of the philosophers he discusses: Deleuze’s The Fold (Deleuze 2006), Badiou’s Being and Event (Badiou 1988; 2005b), Henry’s Voir l’invisible [Seeing the Invisible] (Henry 2009), and an important discussion between Laruelle and Derrida on the possibility of a science of philosophy (Mullarkey 2006: 11). The event that he identifies is a change in philosophical thought which is centred on the question of immanence. More precisely this ‘event’ marks an attempt by philosophy to articulate ‘an embrace of absolute immanence over transcendence . . . to make immanence supervene on transcendence’ (Mullarkey 2006: 1). Post-Continental Philosophy argues, both persuasively and powerfully, that this attempted embrace of immanence leads to a realignment of French thought with naturalism and with the life sciences, with mathematics and with the reaffirmation of ‘philosophy as a worldly and materialist thinking’ (Mullarkey 2006: 2 ). (Ian James, 2014, p. 4-5)
(7) The New French Philosophy, Ian James, Polity, 2014
In each case, albeit in different ways, the emergence of the 'new' or the possibility of change or transformation can be understood as an 'erosion from the outside', as an exposure to an instance of excess, an excess over the finite limits of conceptual or categorical determination. (Ian James, 2014, p. 3)
Cf. Ferenczi vs. R.N.
The argument of this book is that, beginning in the 1970s, the French philosophers discussed all, in different but decisive ways, making a break from the thought of the preceding generation. The difficulty in making such an argument is that attention to the difference and specificity of each thinker must be balanced with what they might, however loosely, share. The danger, of course, will be that quite divergent developments of thought will be assimilated to a unified paradigm which in fact blurs or misrepresents the specificity of each
thinker.
A very preliminary rehearsal of this book’s argument might run as follows: in different and sometimes directly opposing ways, and beginning in the 1970s, the philosophers treated in this book explicitly distance themselves from the linguistic paradigm which informed much of what has gone under the name of structuralism and poststructuralism and which can be associated with diverse terms: with the order of signifiers, signifieds and of the symbolic, or with the categories of discourse, text, and writing (or arche-writing). They do so in the name of a systematic attempt to radically rethink questions of materiality and the concrete, together with questions of worldliness, shared embodied existence and sensible-intelligible experience. They can all be said to rethink the status of the ‘real’, of worldly appearance, or to re-engage in new and highly original ways with the question of ontology. (ibid, p. 4)
This book differs from Mullarkey insofar as it takes the idea of a break from the linguistic, textual or discursive paradigm of (post-) structuralism as its initial premise and locates the beginnings of this break in the 1970s.6 The broad shift towards a thinking of immanence is certainly a result of this, but not all the thinkers discussed here can easily be said to be thinkers of radical or absolute immanence (at least not to the same degree) and, as will become clear, a range of other important philosophical shifts can be seen to follow on from this break: a re-engagement with the question of ontology as has already been mentioned, but also a sustained renewal with the question of the subject and of subjectivity, with questions of community, politics and political change, and with questions relating to the aesthetic and aesthetics. Within the logic of the break from structuralism and/or post-structuralism, the thought of both Deleuze and Henry arguably offer indispensable resources to some of the thinkers treated here (e.g. the influence of Deleuze and Henry on Laruelle or of Henry in particular on Marion).7 To this extent, it could be argued that they represent an important, and specifically French, trajectory of thought which can be traced from Bergson. (ibid, pp. 5-6)
... what this brief survey of Mullarkey’s and Hallward’s accounts shows is the extent to which any attempt to characterize ‘French philosophy today’ and to articulate what is or is not ‘new’ within this tradition is itself a philosophical argument which entails philosophical decisions and judgements. (ibid, p. 7)
As has been indicated, the principal argument of this book is that, despite their obvious differences from each other and despite the fact that this remains a field defined by major lines of conflict, argument and polemical opposition, all the thinkers treated have come to reaffirm what one might call the ‘materiality of the real’ in the wake of the preceding generation’s focus on language and signification. (ibid, p. 7)
What links all the thinkers who have been included here is a specific set of continuities and discontinuities with the work of the preceding generation of philosophers. It is on the basis of continuity (marks of influence, continued concerns, instances of repetition) and of discontinuity (specific gestures of critical distance, differentiation, and ruptures or breaks) with the generation of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Lyotard that this study identifies something which could be called the ‘New French Philosophy’. (ibid, p. 8)
The fact that an affirmation of materialism can be identified across all the thinkers discussed here and aligned in each instance with an unambiguous break with or distancing from a linguistic, structuralist, textualist or discursive paradigm is striking. (ibid, p. 12)
What might be even more striking in relation to the polemics of Badiou, Rancière, Nancy and Laruelle in the 1970s is that the questions of materialism and materiality were, of course, already central to the (post-)structuralism they sought to repudiate. (ibid, p. 12)
Such a linguistic materialism is perceived by all the thinkers here to be unable to account for a more fundamental materiality: of givenness in the auto-affection of the flesh (Marion), of sense of and embodied existence (Nancy), of technical prosthetics and their constitution of a temporal world (Stiegler), of plasticity (Malabou), of the sensible and its distribution (Rancière), of immanent inconsistent multiplicity (Badiou) and, finally, of the absolute immanence of the One (Laruelle).
The call for a new materialism articulated in the thought of the seven philosophers treated in this book is developed in different ways by each. (ibid, p. 12)
Linking many of these philosophical innovations is also a sustained attempt to re-engage with the question of the subject and to resituate something which might still be called subjectivity within a presymbolic/linguistic and material dimension. All of these philosophers can be said to engage in diverse ways with the question posed by Jean-Luc Nancy namely, ‘Who comes after the subject?’ (Nancy 1991f). (ibid, p. 13)
It may also be that if, in the wake of the Cold War, the orthodoxies of liberal capitalism have enjoyed a significant degree of global hegemony, then our future crises (political, economic, environmental) are likely to be crises of these ideological and philosophical orthodoxies as well as of the political forms they represent.
In light of this, it could be said that the task of philosophical renewal taken up by the seven thinkers presented here is as much orientated towards the future as it is predicated on a logic of continuity and discontinuity with the past. Tiiey might all be united by a shared sense that the destruction or deconstruction of metaphysics, subjectivity, or traditional notions of being, truth and knowledge, is a necessary (and unfinished) but certainly not sufficient gesture to meet the demands of contemporary thinking. (ibid, p. 14)
但是 你要理解 這七個人 包括信奉毛左的那個傻逼Badiou 都沒有生活在共產極權暴政下 意思是說 西方新左 是可恥戲論 共匪甚至不用收買他們 他們就舔個不停
The French philosophies presented here are highly ambitious in their attempt to renew the claims, possibilities and transformative power of philosophical thinking. The renewal of philosophical thinking, however, can only be achieved in the transformation of the techniques of thought itself. (ibid, p. 16)
It might be concluded, then, that the break from the linguistic
paradigm and the categories of discourse, text and writing has led
these French philosophers to renew the practice and techniques of
philosophy. This renewal perhaps finds its most significant expression
in the realignment of philosophy with technological and scientific
paradigms, anthropological, neuroscientific, mathematical or that of
‘science’ conceived in more general structural terms (Laruelle).1 (ibid, p. 187)
If it is possible to speak of the ‘New French Philosophy’, then this may
be so only insofar as philosophy itself has sought to radically renew
itself in the wake of the anti-foundationalism of post-structuralism,
postmodernism and deconstruction. All these philosophies seek in
various ways to move beyond the anti-foundationalist or deconstructive
moment and do so in the name of what might be called the
groundless or non-foundational ground of the real, conceived variably
as givenness, sense, technicity, plasticity, the sensible, the multiple
or the One. (ibid, p. 187)
This variably configured real can perhaps be called a
ground, but not in the sense of providing any solid foundation or
bedrock to thought and knowledge. Rather, as Laruelle might put it,
it is a matter of leaving the illusory ground of metaphysical foundations
in favour of ‘a real base - the only real base’, that of the real
itself. The question then is not exactly one of the philosophical determination
of the real in the service of a foundational gesture. Rather,
it becomes a question of how thought may best position itself up
against, approach or ‘reach’ the real. (ibid, pp. 187-188)
It is a question of what renewed technique of thought might best accomplish this repositioning of, or approach to, the real. The task of thought which these philosophers take up, and the demand of thought to which they respond, is one of thinking material immanence and worldly, shared existence. They do so by way of techniques which affirm themselves as resolutely material. Only on this basis can philosophy renew itself and move beyond the closure of the metaphysics of the past to the opening of new forms in the future. (ibid, p. 188)
你要理解 物優先於心 意思是說 這個世界 優先於你的心 意思是說 外優先於內 意思是說 事件優先於反思 意思是說 你註定永遠遲到 但是 請你不要遲到太久 至於 有沒有可能 你可以預見 明天的世界 這件事很罕見 你可以自許 但不要強求 極可能你做不到 雖然尼采和卡夫卡和德勒茲曾經做到 意思是說 我們通常的命運 是渾然不覺的遲到者而已 你能夠努力 要努力的是 去觀察 去接觸 去疑惑 去試著理解 (make sense of) 這個世界 最重要的是 讓這個世界穿透你 我先前說過 再看你能剩下甚麼 那剩下的 就是你的再出發點 正常情況下 剩下不多 意思是說 一無所有 是你的再出發點
依此 後結構主義 和心理治療 要講的是 拆掉龍天樓 行走荒野 找到 你的路 找到 家 找到 你在歷史中的 和自然中的 家
(8) French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour, Christopher Watkin, Edinburgh University Press, 2016
What we are witnessing in French thought today is a series of returns to the human after the human. (Watkin, 2016, p. 4)
Watkin 不喜後人類，意思是說，當代法國哲學，不喜，也不需，後人類，意思是說，他們以為人類，玩得起 AI 和 Singularity，他們顯然，沒有看過 Blade Runner 1982 / 2049，你要理解，後人類，不是後人類哲學，是後人類「世界」，意思是說，那個世界，已經沒有人了，我先前說過，人文學，如值其名 (worth its salt)，必與這個世界，足夠相應，面對，明天，後天，即將發生的，後人類世界，我問你，人文學，拿什麼，相應，
