Insight Editions · No. 66
Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers
From Structuralism to Postmodernity
John Lechte
John Lechte profiles fifty twentieth-century thinkers and traces the movement from early structuralism through semiotics, post-structuralism, modernity, and postmodernity.
A study guide to Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers by John Lechte. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
From Structure to the Postmodern
The book's argument map: from structure to the event
How the fifty fall
| Ch | Orientation | Thinkers | Main thread |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-7 | Early structuralism | Bachelard, Bakhtin, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, Freud, Mauss, Merleau-Ponty | Epistemological breaks, dialogism, the gift, the unconscious |
| 8-18 | Structuralism | Althusser, Benveniste, Bourdieu, Chomsky, Dumézil, Genette, Jakobson, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Metz, Serres | Language as a system of differences applied to myth, mind and film |
| 19 | Structural history | Braudel | The longue durée |
| 20-24 | Post-structuralism | Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Levinas | Excess, difference, power and the other |
| 25-32 | Semiotics | Barthes, Eco, Greimas, Hjelmslev, Kristeva, Peirce, Saussure, Todorov | Signs, codes and myth |
| 33-35 | Second-generation feminism | Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Pateman | Sexual difference and the sexual contract |
| 36-40 | Post-Marxism | Adorno, Arendt, Habermas, Laclau, Touraine | Reason, action, hegemony, social movements |
| 41-46 | Modernity | Benjamin, Blanchot, Joyce, Nietzsche, Simmel, Sollers | Reproduction, money, chance, the exception |
| 47-50 | Postmodernity | Baudrillard, Duras, Kafka, Lyotard | Simulation, the witness, the differend |
What "structure to singularity" means in practice
Lechte's fifty are not a greatest-hits list of celebrities. They are a map of a problem: once meaning is treated as a system of differences (Saussure), every later project either extends that system (Lévi-Strauss, Greimas, early Barthes) or names what the system cannot hold (Bataille's excess, Derrida's supplement, Levinas's Other, Lyotard's differend, Irigaray's unsymbolised feminine). The middle chapters (semiotics, feminism, post-Marxism) are the hinge where sign theory meets politics and sexual difference.
How to use the chapter map
Read 1-7 as the conditions of possibility (break, gift, unconscious, body). Read 8-18 as the high structuralist moment. Braudel alone gets structural history because the longue durée is the historical twin of synchronic structure. 20-24 open the system. 25-32 refine the sign. 33-40 politicise. 41-50 aestheticise modernity's shock and postmodernity's loss of metanarrative credit.
How to travel the fifty
About this book
Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity by John Lechte, 1994. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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Preface and the Nine Orientations
Why this choice of fifty
Collinson made explicit a canon that has "already formed us"; Lechte must distil thinkers "not yet widely known, but who are becoming so". Most readers know that idealism sits somewhere in Plato; few know that difference is the key notion in Saussure. The selection follows the post-war structuralist orientation, largely French, but no thinker is reduced to a movement. "Contemporary" means intellectual contemporaneity, so Saussure, Freud and Nietzsche belong, and so do unsympathetic figures such as Adorno and Habermas. The book is "a way in", not a substitute: "After Heidegger, I am not providing learning; I am trying to let learning take place."
The nine groups and their short notes
| Group | Thinkers | What the group note claims |
|---|---|---|
| Early structuralism | Bachelard, Bakhtin, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, Freud, Mauss, Merleau-Ponty | The total social fact and the epistemology of science shift explanation from essence to relations; the present changes the meaning of the past |
| Structuralism | Althusser, Benveniste, Bourdieu, Chomsky, Dumézil, Genette, Jakobson, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Metz, Serres | Differential relations explain culture; structure is not prior to their realisation |
| Structural history | Braudel | The longue durée: slow geographic change, knowable only through its patterns |
| Post-structuralist thought | Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Levinas | Writing as source, not copy; otherness; the rhizome against the tree |
| Semiotics | Barthes, Eco, Greimas, Hjelmslev, Kristeva, Peirce, Saussure, Todorov | Social life as signification: a struggle for prestige becomes a sign of that struggle |
| Second generation feminism | Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Pateman | Patriarchy and the social contract as deep structures; a feminine language, law and mythology |
| Post-Marxism | Adorno, Arendt, Habermas, Laclau, Touraine | No determinant economy, no universal class; radical democracy |
| Modernity | Benjamin, Blanchot, Joyce, Nietzsche, Simmel, Sollers | Modernity as change in consciousness: Baudelaire's "transitory, the fleeting and the contingent" |
| Postmodernity | Baudrillard, Duras, Kafka, Lyotard | The subject/object split questioned; "incredulity toward metanarratives"; reproduction over production |
The book's arc: from essences to relations and beyond
Lechte defends the groupings as orientations only, a way to see the "global significance" of the collection.
Collinson model and the disagreement wager
Lechte copies Collinson's two-part entry (life + ideas) but adds a third: the structuralist contact zone and his own objection. The motto "to (be able to) disagree with me is to understand me" licenses incomplete, angled portraits of living projects. "Contemporary" is intellectual, not chronological: Nietzsche and Saussure sit beside Lyotard because difference and the sign still organise the field. Adorno and Habermas are included precisely as unsympathetic interlocutors, so the book is not a fan club of French theory.
Orientation notes unpacked
- Early structuralism: total social fact and science's breaks shift explanation from essence to relations; the present rewrites the past's meaning.
- Structuralism: differential relations explain culture; structure is not a prior skeleton waiting to be filled.
- Structural history: Braudel's slow time.
- Post-structuralist thought: writing as source; otherness; rhizome against tree.
- Semiotics: social life as signification (a prestige struggle becomes a sign of that struggle).
- Second-generation feminism: patriarchy and contract as deep structures; feminine language/law/mythology.
- Post-Marxism: no determinant economy, no universal class; radical democracy.
- Modernity: change in consciousness (Baudelaire's transitory, fleeting, contingent).
- Postmodernity: subject/object questioned; incredulity toward metanarratives; reproduction over production.
Preface wager: from essence to relation
Preface map: from structure to postmodernity
Lechte's preface and section opens frame fifty short essays as a path, not a museum. Early French epistemology (Bachelard, Canguilhem, Cavailles) prepares the break with consciousness philosophy. Structuralism proper (Saussure's heirs in anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory) yields to post-structural difference, feminist reconstructions, critical theory, and literary postmodernity. Readers should track recurring operators: sign, subject, power, gift/exchange, narrative, other.
Intro: four movements
Gaston Bachelard
A postman turned professor
Born at Bar-sur-Aube, Bachelard worked in the postal service (1903-13), taught physics at the Collège de Bar-sur-Aube (1919-30), took the agrégation in philosophy in 1922 and published his doctoral thesis, Essai sur la connaissance approchée, in 1928. In 1940 he took the Sorbonne chair of history and philosophy of science, held until 1954.
Three elements that made him central
- Epistemology inside science. Scientists who misunderstand their own practice impede its use. "The space in which one looks ... is philosophically very different from the space in which one sees": seen space is always represented space, so Bachelard calls for "a systematic study of representation".
- Rationalism and realism in dialogue. The New Scientific Spirit names two metaphysical bases: rationalism (theory, interpretation) and realism (material for interpretation). Naive empiricism stagnates; inflated rationalism becomes sterile idealism. His rule: "Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation." A profound rationalism is always an applied rationalism, though theory can run ahead of experiment, as with Einstein.
- A non-evolutionary history of science. Relativity did not grow out of Newton; "the new enveloped the old", and "intellectual generations are nested". Mass was once a quantity of matter; with Einstein mass is a function of velocity. Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry are discontinuous. "Structure does not come from accumulation alone"; what is new in science "is always revolutionary".
Bachelard's dialectic of argument and experiment produces discontinuity, not accumulation
Against Descartes: application is complication
Scientific thought is "in its essence, process of objectification", a view his former student Bourdieu shared, and it sees phenomena relationally: in Hilbert's system properties are "purely relational and in no way substantial". There are no Cartesian simple ideas; "Application is complication", and every push for simplicity (the hydrogen spectrum) proved an over-simplification. His remedy, named in 1936, is surrationalisme: rationalism revitalised by matter, as Surrealism revitalised realism through dream. The assimilation of the irrational always reorganises reason, a dialectic Lechte sees again in Kristeva's semiotic and symbolic.
The night side: imagination
Books on fire, water, air and earth (The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Water and Dreams, Air and Dreams, The Poetics of Space) treat imagination as more fundamental than image-perception: an activity of the will, semi-conscious reverie rather than Freudian dream-work, so closer to Jung than to Freud. Lechte finds a closure here: the subject is "his Majesty the ego". Dominique Lecourt put the split as "the Day is to the Night": concept (masculine, seeing) against image (feminine, night).
| Day: science | Night: imagination |
|---|---|
| Concepts | Images |
| Surrationalism revives thought | Surrealism revives the image |
| Open, relational, unfinished | Archetypes, the four elements, a sovereign ego |
Lechte's verdict: Bachelard's work embodies synthesis (relations between differences) rather than unity (which erases relations), a synthesis he could not see himself, so "the Night might well be seen to take precedence over the Day".
Epistemological break and poetic image
Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962): philosophy of science and of poetic imagination as twin tracks. Scientific mind advances by epistemological breaks against everyday opinion and prior science (obstacle/rupture); applied rationalism; approximate knowledge. Night books on fire, water, air, earth: material imagination and reverie. Mentor figure for Canguilhem, Althusser, Serres. Against continuous progress myth; science is rectified error. Lechte: precursor of French epistemology that structuralists inherit.
Bachelard: science and reverie
Epistemology, no, and the elements of reverie
Three moves made Bachelard a hinge for structuralists. First, epistemology is where science grasps its own practice: "The space in which one looks ... is philosophically very different from the space in which one sees." Defective self-understanding blocks application. Second, the Philosophy of No treats scientific advance as organised negation of prior common sense and of earlier scientific "obstacles" (substantialism, animism, naive realism). Third, surrationalism (1936) revitalises rationalism through matter, as Surrealism revitalised realism through dream; every phenomenon is a fabric of relations, not a simple substance.
The parallel oeuvre on imagination (fire, water, air, earth; La Terre et les reveries de la volonte) separates creative imagination from mere image-perception. Imagination is willful activity whose products science cannot predict from "reality" alone. Althusser translated Bachelardian discontinuity into the epistemological break; Canguilhem and Foucault took the history of concepts and knowledges as the working method.
Bachelard: from post to epistemology of science
Mikhail Bakhtin
An obscure, spiralling career
Born in November 1895, he took a degree in classics and philology at Petrograd (1918). In 1929 he was arrested for alleged links with the underground Orthodox Church and served six years' internal exile in Kazakhstan as a bookkeeper. From 1936 he taught at the remote Mordovia State Teachers College until 1961. By the 1960s he was a cult figure: the 1929 Dostoyevsky book was rediscovered and the Rabelais thesis of the 1940s appeared in 1965. He died in March 1975, with a project on the philosophical bases of the human sciences unfinished. His work moves in a spiral, reworking concepts; books signed by Voloshinov (Freudianism; Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) and Medvedev (The Formal Method) are suspected to be his.
- Three periods. Early essays on ethics and aesthetics; books on the history of the novel; posthumous essays returning to the novel.
Carnival: ambivalent laughter
Carnival laughter has no object: it is not parody, irony or satire but ambivalence, which Kristeva read as a logic where actor is spectator, destruction is creation, death is rebirth. Carnival is neither an official holiday nor "bread and circuses"; the people are the carnival, and Church and Crown are subject to its laws. Everyone is subject and object of laughter, so there is "no life outside the carnival", and laughter is one of the "essential forms of truth concerning the world". It embraces lowness: the open body, defecation, copulation, womb and tomb; the body becomes "finished" and private only in the Renaissance. The mask reveals rather than hides: "connected with the joy of change and reincarnation", unlike Rousseau's mask of hypocrisy. Seriousness cannot contain laughter, so laughter "cannot be theorised"; academic seriousness rests on repressing ambivalence.
Carnival's ambivalent logic, which Kristeva set against the true/false logic of science
Polyphony and the dialogical word
In Dostoyevsky, "the other's discourse gradually, stealthily penetrates the consciousness and the speech of the hero". The word is translinguistic, an intersection of meanings, and the polyphonic novel (The Brothers Karamazov, with Ivan's Grand Inquisitor and Smerdyakov's confession) differs from the monological text, which has one homogeneous logic and invites ideological appropriation; Tolstoy is mostly monological. The author is "a third party in a quarrel", the site of the mise-en-scène. Against Saussure, Bakhtin says langue ignores speech genres and that utterances need their context and time.
The chronotope
Inspired by Einstein, the chronotope is the "intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships in literature".
| Genre | Chronotope |
|---|---|
| Greek romance (2nd-6th c. AD) | Adventure time: storms, shipwreck and illness delay the lovers across many places |
| Idyll (Rousseau) | Time fused to one corner of the world where fathers lived and children will live |
| Polyphonic novel | Heterogeneous, almost unrepresentable time that makes space fluid |
Dialogism, carnival, chronotope
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975): classics/philology Petrograd 1918; self-imposed obscurity under Stalin; Mordovia Teachers College from 1936 (purge interruption). Polyphony and dialogism in Dostoevsky: voices not reduced to author's; carnival and grotesque body in Rabelais; chronotope as time-space of narrative; utterance as living ideological sign. Disputed authorship of Voloshinov/Medvedev texts. Transmission to West via Kristeva/Todorov in 1960s-70s Paris. Against monologic authority of a single truth-voice.
Bakhtin: literature as social dialog
Dialogue, carnival, disputed authorship
Bakhtin's path is a spiral, not a line: concepts are reworked across decades under Stalinist pressure. Arrested 1929 for alleged underground Orthodox links; six years' exile in Kazakhstan as a bookkeeper; Mordovia Teachers College from 1936 (one purge interruption); cult rediscovery in the 1960s; unfinished late projects on the human sciences; death March 1975.
Three periods organise the corpus: early ethical/philosophical essays; the Dostoevsky book (polyphony, dialogism); the Rabelais book (carnival, grotesque body, unofficial culture). Contested attribution surrounds Freudianism and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Voloshinov) and The Formal Method (Medvedev). The word is translinguistic: intersection of meanings, not a fixed point. Parody, irony, and Dostoevsky's dialogical word include the other's word inside themselves. Polyphony has no single centre; the epic and Tolstoy lean monological (one logic, easy for ideology). Carnival's double logic (death/birth, crown/decrown) is Bakhtin's counter to closed epic structure.
Bakhtin: monologue versus dialogue
Georges Canguilhem
Career and influence
Born at Castelnaudary, he passed through the École Normale Supérieure with Sartre, Nizan and Aron, a student of Alain, then took a medical degree to work on the history of science. His Strasbourg wartime course on norms became his 1943 medical thesis. In 1955 he succeeded Bachelard at the Sorbonne. On Foucault's 1961 jury he said his protégé spoke of madness with a poet's talent, and he defended him against Sartre's camp. In a 1956 lecture he attacked the clinical psychologist Daniel Lagache, calling positivist psychology "philosophy less its rigour ... ethics less its demands ... medicine without verification", a text Jacques-Alain Miller reprinted in the Cahiers pour l'analyse, clearing ground for Lacan.
History of science without retrospective illusion
- The old view. The past is a continuous lead-up to the present, and an established science guarantees truth; this assumes a static present.
- Canguilhem's view. Science is an open system that "makes and remakes its own history at every instant"; a side issue can become central, as non-cellular fermentation did once enzyme physiology developed.
- Middle regions. He works on biology and medicine, less formalised than mathematics and more dependent on environment. "It is in the present that problems provoke reflection"; no history is neutral, and error is as revealing as truth. The aim is to know how the true and the false are constituted at a given moment.
The normal and the pathological
On the Normal and the Pathological (1943, enlarged 1966) asks how biology and medicine establish the normal.
| Position | Normal vs pathological |
|---|---|
| Classical Greeks | Harmony against dys-harmony: a discontinuity |
| Claude Bernard (19th c.) | Quantitative: disease is hyper- or hypo-normal; continuity; physiology explains pathology |
| René Leriche (20th c.) | Health is "the silence of the body in its organs"; knowledge starts from disease |
| Canguilhem | Boundary imprecise but not continuous; "the patient calls him": the distinction has only clinical significance |
Against positivism's "know in order to act", he stresses technique and the conditions of existence, so the distinction stays provisional. A statistical average is not a norm: a monster can constitute its own norm in its environment. "Taken separately, the living being and his environment are not normal: it is their relationship that makes them such."
Canguilhem's normativity: disease as the stimulus for new norms
Health is not the absence of disease but the capacity to overcome organic crises and "establish a new order"; a life with no illness might even be harmful. Humans are normative because they create norms, and "norms are relative to each other in a system". Hence his opposition to Talcott Parsons, whose closed society treats deviance past a threshold as pathology. A plurality of norms implies discontinuity; continuous history, like the transcendental subject, is a closed system. The principle of questioning, as in Kant on the Enlightenment, joins Foucault to Canguilhem.
Normal, pathological, concept of life
Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995): medical training plus philosophy; The Normal and the Pathological: norms are not statistical averages alone; the living being establishes norms, disease is another way of life. History of concepts (reflex, milieu) against presentist textbook science. Supervisor of Foucault's madness thesis; with Bachelard and Cavaillès forms the French epistemology line. Life-force doctrine carefully reworked: life as polarised activity facing environment. Dies 1995.
Norms of life
Normal and pathological; concepts in life sciences
Canguilhem (1904-1995), agrégé and physician, succeeds Bachelard at the Sorbonne and shapes Foucault's history of sciences. The Normal and the Pathological argues that the pathological is not a mere quantitative variation of the normal; norms are lived by organisms that establish their own life values in environments. Health is not statistical average but normative capacity to institute new norms.
History of science becomes history of concepts (reflex, milieu, regulation) rather than chronology of discoveries. Epistemological history asks how problems are reconstituted. Against continuum narratives, discontinuities matter. Althusser and Foucault inherit the lesson that science's philosophy is internal to its conceptual transformations. Medical thesis work and Resistance-era commitments sit beside the epistemological oeuvre.
Canguilhem: norms and concepts of life
Jean Cavaillès
Logician and combatant
Cavaillès's life: philosophy and resistance intertwined
Born to a Protestant family, he heard Husserl's Descartes lectures in 1929, studied in Germany on a Rockefeller bursary, and at Strasbourg in 1938 completed a mathematics doctorate on axiomatic method and formalism, with a minor thesis on set theory: an anti-intuitionist case that mathematics develops purely through concepts, owing nothing to existence. Mobilised in 1939 as a corps franc and then cipher officer, he escaped in Belgium in June 1940, taught at Strasbourg relocated to Clermont-Ferrand, and joined the Sorbonne in 1941. Co-founder of Libération-sud, he was arrested in August 1942, escaped in December, went to London, was arrested again by German counter-espionage in 1943, disowned by Vichy, tortured, and executed in February 1944. He was made a Companion of the Liberation and Knight of the Legion of Honour. Sur la logique et la théorie de la science was written in internment; he never wrote its planned introduction.
Against the transcendental ego
Kant and the Port-Royal grammarians lodged logic in a founding consciousness: form fixed, content contingent. Husserl kept the same split. Cavaillès: "In a philosophy of consciousness logic is transcendental or it does not exist." The intuitionists tie axioms to the physical world through consciousness. Bolzano (1817) showed that science need not mediate between mind and reality, opening another path: a theory of science is a theory of unity, but a unity of movement, "a conceptual becoming which cannot be halted".
- Structure. Science is the "science of science"; its movement is structure, the manifestation of science to itself, and revelation equals what is revealed.
- Demonstration. There is no purely "pure" mathematics against "applied" physics; true science never leaves what it demonstrates, and a proof is true by the necessary movement of logic.
- Enchaining. Instead of content poured into a formal container, science is a chain of logical links with no beginning or end.
Phenomenology can show a consciousness of progress but not the progress of consciousness. Progress is "the perpetual revision of existing content through deepening and erasure", and consciousness is immediately in the idea, not a generator standing apart from it.
Philosophy of the concept, Resistance
Jean Cavaillès (1903-1944): invisible precursor of structuralism. Protestant family; agrégation 1927; Husserl Descartes lectures 1929; Rockefeller Germany, meets Husserl 1931; Strasbourg logic; doctorate axiomatic method and set theory 1938 (anti-intuitionist: maths develops concepts, owes nothing to Existentialist existence). Mobilised 1939; escapes POW; Liberation-sud co-founder; arrested, escapes again; London meets Simone Weil; executed by Nazi firing squad 1944 age 41; twice decorated. Sur la logique: replace philosophy of consciousness (Sartre/phenomenology) with philosophy of concepts. For Canguilhem: living proof a man of action can be structuralist.
Cavaillès: concept against consciousness
Concept against consciousness; demonstration as science
Cavailles (1903-1944) is an invisible precursor of 1960s structuralism: Rockefeller study in Germany, Husserl meetings, Strasbourg doctorate on axiomatic method and set theory, anti-intuitionist formalism. Dual decoration for Resistance bravery; shot by a Nazi firing squad at 41. For Canguilhem he proved a man of action could be structuralist in philosophy.
Sur la logique et la theorie de la science ends by calling for a philosophy of the concept to replace philosophies of consciousness (Sartre, phenomenology). Structure is science's manifestation to itself; revelation is not separate from what is revealed. Demonstration grasps the whole scientific enterprise: mathematics is not a pure a priori container into which physics pours content. Science never leaves what it demonstrates; truth is the necessary movement of logic, enchaining, structure speaking of itself. That non-humanist rigor, joined to Resistance death, made him a moral and methodological emblem for later readers.
Cavailles: from consciousness to concept
Sigmund Freud
Life and positivist roots
Born to a Jewish family, he moved to Vienna at 4 and lived for nearly fifty years at Berggasse 19, until the Anschluss forced him to London in 1938; he died there in 1939. Top of his Gymnasium every year, he took his medical degree in 1881 and in 1885 studied under Charcot at the Salpêtrière (hysteria, hypnosis), setting up practice in 1886. In Brücke's laboratory, and through Helmholtz and Fechner, he absorbed the medical positivism and the doctrine of a life force visible in the "bound" and "unbound" energy of the posthumous "Project for a scientific psychology" (1895). With Breuer's Studies in Hysteria (1895), Anna O's "talking cure" released tension through meaning.
Laplanche's chiasmus and the Emma case
Jean Laplanche, Lacan's student, reads the corpus from the Project through Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) to "The economic problem of masochism" (1924) as a chiasmus: what was life (homeostasis) becomes death (Thanatos), and what was death (unbound energy) becomes life (Eros).
Emma (Project, 1895): trauma works retrospectively, through displacement
The Emma case shows the shift. The later scene is traumatic as memory but innocent as event; the earlier is traumatic as event but innocent as memory until puberty gives it significance. Trauma cannot be attributed to a physical event; it has a retrospective meaning, so a quantitative (and later behaviourist) model fails. Anglo-American critics who read Freud's sexuality as biology miss its symbolic level.
Dreams, repression, Oedipus
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) rejects any pre-given dream code: a dream is the fulfilment of a wish, disguised, approaching an idiolect. Sexuality must be disguised because it belongs to signs, "imbricated in all the displacements of social and cultural life".
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Displacement | A manifest element is minor or absent in the latent dream-thoughts; a circuitous path |
| Condensation | Meagre manifest content against a wealth of thoughts |
| Overdetermination | Each element yields multiple lines of association |
| Repression | Defence against painful memory; after Lacan, the structural condition of the subject in language |
| Symptom | A compromise formation when repression breaks down; with unconscious repetition, it calls for interpretation |
The unconscious par excellence is sexual trauma, known only by its effects; obscenity is where symbolic and unconscious cross. In the Oedipus complex the son wants the father gone to possess the mother; in Totem and Taboo the sons of Darwin's primal horde kill and devour the father, then out of guilt renounce his women and found the law.
The unstable ego
Freud's ego sits between the id (reservoir of affect) and super-ego (ego-ideal). Is the ego the whole personality, or an agency distinguishing itself from the other two? Narcissism, where the ego makes itself an object, undoes self-identity; American ego-psychology made it a centre of full self-awareness. Laplanche and Pontalis confirm the ambiguity. His legacy: an oeuvre that hides none of its false starts and "calls for interpretation".
Unconscious, drive, afterlife in France
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): founder of psychoanalysis; Lechte places him as condition for Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Althusser's overdetermination. Unconscious as structured field of wishes; dream-work (condensation, displacement); Oedipus; drive beyond instinct; beyond-the-pleasure-principle and death drive; culture as renunciation (Civilization and Its Discontents). French return via Lacan rewrites Freud through linguistics; feminists contest penis envy and feminine as lack. Vienna to London exile 1938; dies 1939.
Freud as matrix for later thought
Dream-work, sexuality as disguise, Laplanche's chiasmus
Freud must be read as an odyssey of unstable concepts (life, death, pleasure, ego) under endless interpretation. Laplanche tracks a chiasmus from the 1895 Project through Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) to "The economic problem of masochism" (1924): early "life" as homeostasis becomes Thanatos; early "death" as unbound energy becomes Eros.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, displacement makes manifest elements insignificant or absent in latent thoughts; condensation packs meagre manifest content with wealth of associations (overdetermination). No pre-given code: each image is interpreted as if for the first time. Sexuality is not a bare animal urge but imbricated in cultural displacements; disguise is internal to how sexuality works as signs. Slips, symptoms, and jokes share the primary-process logic. Psychoanalysis remains interminable because the text of the psyche does.
Freud: from Project to second death drive
Marcel Mauss
Durkheim's Bohemian nephew
Born at Épinal, nephew and pupil of Émile Durkheim, raised in Jewish orthodoxy, Mauss came third in the agrégation (1895), studied Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Ancient Iranian at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and taught the "history of religions of uncivilized peoples" there from 1902. In the First World War he was an interpreter with the British army, decorated twice; he noticed that Australian soldiers could rest on their haunches while he had to stand. A socialist who championed Debussy and Picasso, he founded the Institut d'Ethnologie (1925) and held a Collège de France chair (1930-40). His fame came from articles in L'Année sociologique, not monographs; Dumézil recalled a teacher who rarely prepared but had "a taste for the universal".
The Gift (1923-4): three obligations
Mauss's triangle of the gift and why it is a total social fact
A gift seems to need no return, yet it implies a threefold obligation: to give, to receive, to reciprocate. From the potlatch of North America, the kula of the Pacific and the Maori hau, Mauss shows the gift founding social life, circulating women as well as goods through marriages, feasts, rites, dances and fairs. Objects have a "soul"; persons have mana and can be exchanged. Gift societies value expenditure and prestige, not accumulation: the potlatch giver binds the receiver to match his prodigality, unless it slides into "pure destruction". Everything enters the system, and refusing it risks war.
- From gift to contract. Western law and economy grew from gift-like institutions; monetary equivalence then replaced moral obligation and confined exchange to a public sphere.
- Residues today. Weddings and birthdays still say "we must give back more than we have received"; failing to reciprocate brings inferiority. Charity differs because it carries a utilitarian motive.
- "To give is to show one's superiority." The gift is an end in itself, which makes it a total social fact: one act can be understood only through the whole structure.
Mana and magic
In the essay on magic, mana is "an action, a quality and a state", "a noun, an adjective, a verb", an "infinity of manas" equivalent to collective thought. Magic is private, secret, furtive: the non-social side of the social, a threat and the "limit which gives it meaning", practised by women, children, foreigners. Lévi-Strauss's 1950 introduction claimed Mauss for structuralism by calling mana a floating signifier, like the linguists' zero phoneme: meaningless alone, meaningful by differential position, read synchronically. Exchange, like grammar, is constructed from the facts, not seen in them.
Techniques of the body (1935)
A bodily technique must be efficacious and transmitted by tradition; it is "technique without an instrument", so a technology. Mauss even taught a sick child to spit. Foucault's "techniques of the self" and Bourdieu's habitus follow. Mauss kept symbolic acts apart from physical ones, but later thought, after Pascal ("Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe"), puts technique first, and Mauss himself suspected "biological means of entering into communication with God".
Gift, total social fact, body techniques
Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), Durkheim's nephew: gift and exchange for Lévi-Strauss, Baudrillard, Derrida; body techniques for Bourdieu (habitus) and Foucault (technology of the body). Technique without instrument, transferable and partly objectified. Épinal orthodox Jewish upbringing; agrégation 1895; EPHE religions of "uncivilized peoples"; WWI interpreter, decorated; observes Australian troops sitting on haunches he cannot; Bohemian socialist; Institut d'Ethnologie 1925; Collège de France 1930-40. With Hubert: Sacrifice; The Gift (Essai sur le don): give-receive-return as total social fact; hau; against utilitarianism.
Mauss: gift and techniques
Gift, mana, techniques of the body
Nephew of Durkheim, Mauss (1872-1950) taught history of religions of "uncivilized peoples" at the EPHE; wartime interpreter with British forces (two Military Crosses); army rest habits (Australians on haunches, French upright) fed the essay on techniques of the body. A technique without an instrument is already a technology transferable across activities once partly formalised. Habitus appears in Mauss before Bourdieu's rewrite; Foucault's technologies of the body sit in the same line.
The Gift ties archaic exchange to hau, obligation to give, receive, and return; the gift is never free. Mana is noun, adjective, and verb at once: a quality and a state that absorbs experience, kin to the sacred and to collective thought. Magic is irregular, private, furtive: the non-social edge that gives the social its limit. Levi-Strauss read mana as a floating signifier (zero phoneme): synchronic multiplicity of meaning, not evolutionary residue. Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Foucault all return to Mauss by different doors (gift, body, sacred waste).
Mauss between Durkheim and structure
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
From Les Temps Modernes to the Collège
Like Barthes, he lost his father in the First World War. After the Lycées Janson-de-Sailly and Louis-le-Grand he passed the agrégation in 1930, attended Kojève's Hegel lectures and was briefly linked to the Catholic journal Esprit. He served in the infantry and joined the short-lived Resistance group "Socialism and Freedom" with Sartre. Phenomenology of Perception appeared in 1945; he took the Sorbonne chair of child psychology (1949) and in 1952 became the youngest ever elected to the Collège de France chair of philosophy, until his sudden death in May 1961. A founding editor of Les Temps Modernes (1945-52), he broke with Sartre over the Korean War and communism; Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) attacks Sartre's privileging of the subject-object relation. As Vincent Descombes puts it, without an "interworld" this dichotomy ends in solipsism.
The incarnate perceiving mind
Husserl's epoché (bracketing) disconnects the natural world, without denying it, to reach the immanent essences of lived experience. Merleau-Ponty uses it not to stay with Cartesian doubt but to reach embodied experience.
- Body and world. "To be a body is to be tied to a certain world"; there is no body in itself and no perception in general, only perception lived in a situation.
- Against the cogito. "The perceiving mind is an incarnated mind"; "I perceive" is not "I think", and is not universalisable. The certainty of ideas rests on the certainty of perception, always to be confirmed.
- The perceived thing. Not an ideal unity like a geometrical notion but "a totality open to a horizon of an indefinite number of perspectival views" blending in a style.
Cogito against incarnate perception
Lechte's objection: if perception "forgets itself", philosophy must reflect on it, which reintroduces a universal "I think" just as "I perceive" seemed to defeat it. A rift between consciousness and lived experience "must remain repressed".
Saussure and the turn to language
Greimas left Merleau-Ponty's 1952 inaugural lecture convinced that Saussure, not Marx, held the key to a philosophy of history. Merleau-Ponty highlighted two Saussurian principles: meaning arises diacritically between signs, and diachrony cannot explain current usage. In The Prose of the World: "it cannot be the history of the word or language which determines its present meaning"; synchrony "liberates history from historicism". Language is enacted, understood "from the inside".
Perception, body, interworld
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) gradually separates from Sartrean and even Husserlian phenomenology by bringing Saussure into language teaching (late 1940s-50s) and allying with Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France. Father killed in WWI; ENS agrégation 1930; Kojève's Hegel; brief Esprit; WWII infantry, tortured; "Socialism and Freedom" with Sartre; Phenomenology of Perception (1945); Sorbonne child psychology 1949; youngest Collège philosophy chair 1952; dies suddenly May 1961. Break with Sartre over Korea and communism (Adventures of the Dialectic 1955): without an interworld, subject-object dichotomy yields solipsism. Lived body, perception and language as intertwined; visible/invisible later work.
From consciousness to the interworld
Embodied perception and the flesh
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology relocates meaning in the lived body, not in a constituting consciousness detached from world. Phenomenology of Perception treats sensing as already motile and intentional; the phantom limb and Schneider cases show bodily schema as more than objective anatomy. Against empiricism and intellectualism alike, perception is an open dialectic with things.
Later The Visible and the Invisible (unfinished) names flesh as elemental intertwining of seer and seen; chiasm replaces subject/object dualism. Language and painting (Cezanne) disclose how the world comes to expression. Political writings and the break with Sartre mark a non-communist left attentive to ambiguity. Death 1961 leaves the late ontology fragmentary; structuralists and later embodied cognitive science both raid the corpse differently.
Merleau-Ponty: from perception to flesh
Louis Althusser
The caïman's anti-humanism
Accepted at the ENS in 1939, he was a German prisoner of war and took the agrégation only in 1948. The essays of For Marx (1965) made him a name; by 1966 he and Foucault were the most cited philosophers in the agrégation. He set himself against a Marxism Christianised by Teilhard de Chardin, humanised by the Frankfurt School, and humanised and historicised by Sartre and Gramsci. Society is a structured whole of relatively autonomous levels (legal, cultural, political), determined "in the last instance" by the economy; difference between levels, not expressive unity, matters.
Symptomatic reading and the problematic
Reading Capital separates a surface reading of the words from a symptomatic reading that reconstructs the problematic: "the form in which problems must be posed", the horizon fixing which concepts are thinkable. Inverting Hegel ("standing him on his head"), or opposing workers to economists as Feuerbach opposed Hegel, stays inside the same problematic. Marx's new object is the mode of production, an invisible structure; he speaks fully in his own name only in a few texts (the 1857 Introduction, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marginal Notes on Wagner).
Althusser's break: science against ideology, with the mode of production as object
- Against empiricism. Any epistemology uniting knowledge and real object (Hegel's real = thought, or empiricist sense experience) cannot produce the concept; theory is valid by internal consistency, a priori. Spinoza is Marx's forerunner: science is true because it is successful.
- Ideology. Assumes ideas derive from how things are, accepts false obviousness and avoids constructing the object.
- Overdetermination. Borrowed from Freud's dreams: the economy appears displaced throughout the social formation, not mirrored in consciousness, so contradictions must be made visible by science.
- The break. Against humanist readings of the 1844 Manuscripts (published 1932), he posits an epistemological break: the early Marx "is not Marx".
Ideological state apparatuses (1970)
| Apparatus | Examples | Means |
|---|---|---|
| Repressive | Police, prisons, army | Force |
| Ideological | Churches, schools, law, family, media, parties | Ideology, rituals |
Ideology fills Marxism's gap: how relations of production are reproduced. It represents "the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production". It hails individuals as subjects through material rituals such as shaking hands or praying. "Everyone is in ideology; no one escapes it."
Symptomatic reading and overdetermination
Louis Althusser (1918-1990): Marxism as science of history via epistemological break (Bachelard/Canguilhem). For Marx, Reading Capital with students: symptomatic reading finds answers in problems the text cannot pose. Overdetermination (Freud/Lacan) against simple base-superstructure; ISAs reproduce relations of production. ENS, POW, Party intellectual; murdered wife Hélène 1980, declared unfit; dies 1990. Lechte: anti-humanist structural Marxism that still installs Theory's mastery; later self-criticism.
Althusser: science of history and its break
Anti-humanism, overdetermination, ISAs
Althusser's anti-humanism hit a Marxism already Christianised (Teilhard), humanised by the Frankfurt School, and historicised by Sartre and Gramsci. Individuals are not prior to social conditions. Society is a structured whole of relatively autonomous levels (legal, cultural, political) whose mode of articulation, or effectivity, is determined in the last instance by the economy. Differences between levels matter more than expressive unity; the subject is an agent of the system, not its conscious author.
Overdetermination (from Freud's dream-work) means the economic level is not mirrored in ideology but exists in displaced form across the social formation. Contradictions are not immediately visible; science must render them visible. Reading Capital with Balibar separates a symptomatic reading of Marx from Feuerbachian anthropology and Hegelian expressive totality. Ideology, later via ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses), interpellates individuals as subjects; the school becomes the dominant ISA in mature capitalism, replacing the Church.
Althusser: structure without centre
Émile Benveniste
Influence on Lacan, Kristeva, Barthes
Trained by Saussure's pupil Antoine Meillet, he treated language as a semiotic object, an instrument of communication, a social fact and a vehicle of subjectivity. Lacan credits him with the "mortal blow" to behaviourism: unlike bees, human language is not stimulus-response. Kristeva built a dynamic subject on his pronouns, and Barthes found in the middle voice the model of the writer who now writes intransitively.
Énoncé and énonciation
- Énoncé. The statement independent of context, where the grammatical subject is fixed and static.
- Énonciation. The act of stating, tied to context; with Jakobson's shifters (here, this, I), meaning needs the act. Language must be seen as a "discursive instance": discourse is language enacted.
- I and you. "I signifies the person who is uttering the present instance of discourse containing I"; you is "the individual spoken to" in that instance. The third person is a non-person, the neutral voice of narration, and the condition of the other two.
Benveniste: why human language is not a signal code
Language never repeats itself exactly, and has an undeniable poetic and fictive side. Against Hjelmslev, thought cannot be separated from language: "whoever tries to grasp the proper framework of thought encounters only the categories of language".
Correcting Saussure on semiotics
Saussure predicted linguistics would be absorbed by semiotics. Benveniste doubts it: linguistic codes (Morse, braille, sign language) translate into each other, but semiotic systems are non-redundant. "One cannot say the same thing through speech and through music"; the red of the traffic code and the red of the tricolore share a base yet do not translate. So no system of signs transcends all others; more likely language interprets every semiotic system.
| Dimension | Mode | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| Semiotic | The sign; must be recognised | Independent of reference |
| Semantic | Discourse; must be understood | Wholly referential |
Language and society without origin
Language is constitutive of the social order: an objectifiable super-individual instrument that, as discourse, constitutes individuality, so individual and society cease to be opposites. One can history national languages, but not language as such: "Neither can be changed by human will." In 1956 he faulted Freud for projecting a "chronology of the human psyche" onto history through endless recourse to origins, the Rousseauian error of treating "primitive" peoples as mankind's childhood. There is no primitive language: language changes but does not progress, a mortal blow to ethnographic ethnocentrism.
Discourse, pronouns, énonciation
Émile Benveniste (1902-1976): Cairo-born; Collège de France linguistics 1937-69; Meillet pupil continuing Indo-European forms. Fame with Problèmes de linguistique générale I (1966) and II (1974): language as linguistic/semiotic object, communication instrument, social-cultural phenomenon, vehicle of subjectivity. Lacan: bees vs human language kills behaviourism. Kristeva: I-you polarity for dynamic subjectivity. Barthes: middle voice for the intransitive writer. Énoncé (context-independent statement) vs énonciation (act of stating); shifters (Jakobson) require context. Subject in language is inseparable from realisation: linguistics of discourse, not only formal grammar.
Benveniste: from Indo-European to discourse
Enunciation, person, and Indo-European vocabulary
Emile Benveniste renews Saussure inside a theory of enunciation: language as put into act by a speaker. Pronouns I/you have no fixed lexical referent; they are indicators of the instance of discourse. Tense, mood, and deixis organise subjectivity in language. Problems in General Linguistics collects these analyses; the Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions reads culture through word families (exchange, status, royalty).
Distinction between histoire and discours (third-person aorist narrative vs person-marked discourse) shaped French narratology (Genette and others). Against a pure system without subject, Benveniste restores the speaker without returning to pre-structural psychology.
Benveniste: instance of discourse
Pierre Bourdieu
From Algeria to the Collège de France
Born at Denguin in the south-west, he attended Louis-le-Grand (1950-1) and passed the agrégation from the ENS. Military service in Algeria exposed him to French colonialism and turned the philosopher to anthropology and sociology. He taught in Paris and became director of studies at the École des Hautes Études, heading the Centre for European Sociology, and took the Collège de France chair of sociology in 1982. Homo Academicus values the Hautes Études as a rare marginal yet prestigious place, against a system where academic power rewards patronage and inherited privilege and demands "obsequium, unconditional respect for the fundamental principles of the established order". Common sense rests on misrecognition (méconnaissance) of unequal power.
Three levels of knowledge
Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972): from experience to model to practice
The Outline of a Theory of Practice sets three tiers. Primary experience gives descriptive data. The objectivist model constructs the relations structuring practice, the knowledge of the detached observer; studying language only from the listener's side is defective. It misses style, tact, savoir-faire and improvisation, the misfires and strategies that let individuals act against the model, and so it leaves out time. Lévi-Strauss saw relations over substances but stayed at the model. The third level takes the position of the realisation of practice and finally "objectifies the objectifying subject".
Habitus, field, cultural capital
- Field. A system of positions defined by stakes (power) that occupants desire.
- Habitus. Not a routine or mere socialisation, but a "system of schemas" generating and perceiving practices; a grammar of actions that marks off classes and gives a "sense of one's place", with fluid, contested boundaries. It does not predict individual acts.
- Cultural capital. Taste learned unconsciously at home: the law professor's preference for Bach is exposed when he turns out to be a professor's son raised among art and music.
| Variable | Dominant habitus (law professor) | Dominated (manual worker) |
|---|---|---|
| Schooling | Private school | State school |
| Music | Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier; form over content | The Blue Danube |
| Income | High | Low |
| Food | Simple, elegant: lean meat, fresh produce | Substantial, filling |
The habitus shows when such variables correlate statistically. In Distinction's postscript he faults even Derrida's reading of Kant: opposing philosophy philosophically only reinforces the prestige of the philosophical field; intellectuals are "the dominated fraction of the dominant class".
Habitus, capital, field
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002): inequality at structural level without objectivist illusion; beyond models to practice; beyond doxa's classifications to explicit power in the social field. Algeria fieldwork formative; dominates not by conspiracy but as statistical beneficiary of economic, social and symbolic capital reproduced by institutions. Denguin → Louis-le-Grand → ENS philosophy; Algeria military teaching; Sorbonne 1959-62; EHESS; Collège de France sociology 1982. Distinction, Homo Academicus, Logic of Practice: habitus as durable dispositions; cultural capital; academic obsequium vs scholarly renown.
Bourdieu: domination without conspiracy
Habitus, capital, distinction without conspiracy
Born Denguin 1930, Louis-le-Grand, ENS agregation; Algeria military teaching as formative shock; anthropology before Sorbonne philosophy (1959-62); later director of studies and College de France. The abiding thesis: the dominant class does not dominate by force or conscious conspiracy. It is the statistical beneficiary of economic, social, and symbolic power embodied as capital and reproduced through institutions.
Habitus is a grammar of practices differentiating classes in a field. In Distinction, schemas of production make "good taste" (Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier) correlate with inherited cultural capital, while "middle-brow" taste (Blue Danube) marks another trajectory. Variables (occupation, education, income, food, art) cluster; the professor of law prefers form over content, lean cuisine, private schooling. Science must escape both objectivist structuralism and subjectivist illusion to grasp practice. Doxa is the universally unquestioned; sociology makes power relations inscribed in the field explicit.
Bourdieu: from Algeria to distinction
Noam Chomsky
Linguist and dissident
Born in Philadelphia, son of a Hebrew scholar, he studied mathematics, philosophy and linguistics at Pennsylvania under Zellig Harris, whose politics pleased him more than his structuralism; his master's thesis was on the "Morphophonemics of modern Hebrew" (1951). Logicians (Goodman, Quine, Kripke) and analytic philosophers (Austin, Wittgenstein) shaped a sparse style: like physics, linguistics should seek principles, not phenomena. An outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, he wrote American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), The Fateful Triangle (1983), Necessary Illusions (1989) and Deterring Democracy (1991). In 1980 he wrote a text, used as a preface, for Robert Faurisson's book denying the gas chambers, on the principle that all views have a right to be heard.
Generative grammar
- Competence. A finite set of rules lets an ideal speaker-hearer generate and understand infinitely many new sentences; it is not conscious, but "the mode itself of the speaker's being in language".
- Performance. The finite sentences actually produced: the corpus that is evidence for competence.
- Generative. From the mathematical generator: rules that, in defining a set, "generate" it, each description pairing a deep structure (semantic interpretation) with a surface structure (phonetic interpretation).
Syntactic Structures (1957): three grammars of increasing power
Each grammar in Syntactic Structures is more powerful than the last. Transformational grammar, Chomsky's own, shows that sentences differing on the surface are transformations of one rule, reducing formation to the smallest number of rules. He grounds it in an innate cognitive capacity and a Cartesian linkage of language and mind, rejecting Saussure as an empiricist who privileged parole.
Four limits
| Limit | Lechte's objection |
|---|---|
| Idealisation | Competence belongs to an ideal speaker-hearer, not to language; language becomes transparent, ignoring poetic opacity |
| Static view | Performance covers realised utterances, not the process of realisation (Kristeva; Benveniste's discourse) |
| Native speaker | Ignores multiple native competences and translation |
| Rationalism | An over-reaction to behaviourism; today's debates exceed rationalism against empiricism |
Competence, innateness, politics
Noam Chomsky (born Philadelphia 1928): against Bloomfieldian empiricism and Harris structuralism. Three contributions: (1) from inductive cataloguing to competence / deep structure and creativity; (2) language not stimulus-response but innate cognitive capacity; (3) competence/performance as metaphor for Habermas communicative competence and Bourdieu habitus. Progressive school; Penn math/philosophy/linguistics; Harvard Junior Fellow 1951-55; MIT from 1955, Institute Professor 1976. Hebrew via father; Master's on modern Hebrew morphophonemics. Political books from Vietnam to Deterring Democracy; 1980 Faurisson preface on free-speech grounds (Lechte: "tremendous lapse" / misguided consistency). Alive Since publication (~97; reports of Brazil care after stroke).
Chomsky: linguistic agency
Competence, poverty of stimulus, politics
Chomsky's generative grammar posits an innate Universal Grammar and distinguishes competence from performance. The poverty-of-stimulus argument: children acquire more than the data warrant. Syntactic Structures (1957) and Aspects (1965) reset American linguistics against behaviourism (his review of Skinner). Later minimalist program seeks economy of derivation.
Political writing (Vietnam, media filters with Herman, later wars) runs parallel, not as applied linguistics. Web check Oct 2026: Chomsky alive (born 1928); 2023 stroke reported; still the reference for "alive" vs Lechte's older present tense. Debate continues over innateness evidence and over political factual reliability.
Chomsky: mind and dissent
Georges Dumézil
A scholar formed by etymology
Born in Paris, he met myth through Niebuhr's Greek legends and Perrault's tales. He entered the ENS in 1916, passed the agrégation in letters in December 1919, quit lycée teaching at Beauvais within a year and, after six homesick months as reader in Warsaw, wrote his thesis under Antoine Meillet: Le Festin d'immortalité (1924). He taught the history of religions in Istanbul (1925-31, "the best years" of his life, thanks to Atatürk's secularism), spent two years at Uppsala, joined the École Pratique in 1933, held the Collège de France chair of Indo-European civilisation (1949-68), taught in the United States, entered the Académie française (1978) and died in October 1986. He called his books annual reports, revising Mythe et épopée through several editions.
Michel Bréal's Latin etymological dictionary gave him his "Indo-European passion": Sanskrit "pitar" for father, "matar" for mother. Bréal and Meillet were heirs of Franz Bopp, as were Saussure and Benveniste, Dumézil's early opponent and later strongest supporter.
The three functions
Before 1938 he paired single deities (Ambrosia with Sanskrit amrita, Ouranos-Varuna 1934, Flamen-Brahman 1935) and later judged the comparisons failed. After 1938 the tripartition organised everything: Mitra-Varuna (1940) on sovereignty, The Stakes of the Warrior (1956, 1969) on war, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus on all three. No book treats the third function alone; fertility and "the people" resist systematisation.
| Function | Rome | Vedic India | Scandinavia | Vedic companions of Mitra |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Sovereignty (priests) | Jupiter | Mitra-Varuna | Odin | Mitra |
| 2 War | Mars | Indra | Thor | Aryaman (Iran: Sraosha) |
| 3 Production | Quirinus | Nasatya | Freyr | Bhaga (Iran: Ashi) |
Dumézil's tripartite ideology and its diffusion
By ideology he means a conception of the great forces animating world and society, usually implicit, deciphered from what myths say of the gods' actions; later it approaches an unconscious structure. To the objection that any society needs these functions, he replied that the precise form of the division is what is distinctive.
Facts against a priori schemes
He found Durkheim's Elementary Forms and Rules of Sociological Method a priori: how could one write on method before doing research? Frazer and Mauss mattered more. Yet facts are not meaningful alone: "structure says in Latin what system says in Greek", and each religion is an equilibrium whose meaning lies in its relations. Unlike Lévi-Strauss's universals, he stayed with particular facts ("to leave them is to do poetry"), drew no philosophy from them, and refused every school.
Tripartite Indo-European functions
Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) with Lévi-Strauss pioneers comparative structural method: three invariant functions in Indo-European civilisation: sovereignty, war, production. Sources: Mahābhārata, Avesta, Edda, Virgil's Aeneid; epics, legends, Roman founding. Childhood myths (Niebuhr, Perrault); ENS 1916 (war interruption); agrégation 1919; thesis under Meillet (Le Festin d'immortalité 1924); Istanbul history of religions 1925-31 ("best years," Kemal's secularisation); Uppsala; EPHE 1933; Collège de France Indo-European civilisation 1949-68; Académie 1978. Oeuvre always provisional; classifications mark connectedness without erasing difference.
Dumézil: three functions
Tripartite functions across Indo-European myth
With Levi-Strauss, Dumezil (1898-1986) is an early comparative structuralist. Across Indo-European civilisation he isolates three invariant functions: sovereignty, war, and production (or fertility), without erasing local difference. Sources include the Mahabharata, Avesta, Edda, and Virgil's Aeneid. Childhood Greek legends and Perrault; Louis-le-Grand; ENS 1916 (war interruption); agregation 1919; doctorate Le Festin d'immortalite under Meillet.
Iranian and Indian gods redistribute the three functions (e.g. replacements within Zoroastrian pairs). The precise tripartition is not a universal survival need; other cultures fuse or redraw functions. Objection: you find the structure because society needs it. Reply: the exact Indo-European form is historically specific. Nineteenth-century historical linguistics (Meillet, Breal, after Bopp) still shapes his archive even as 1960s structuralists claim him.
Dumezil: three functions
Gérard Genette
Normalien and founder of Poétique
Born in Paris, agrégé in classical letters (1954), a contemporary of Derrida and Bourdieu, he taught with Derrida in 1959-60 preparing ENS candidates and was among the first to see grammatology's value for a spatial view of literature. Assistant at the Sorbonne from 1963, director of studies in aesthetics and poetics at the École des Hautes Études from 1967, he founded the journal Poétique with Todorov and Cixous in 1970; it first published Derrida's "White mythology". Figures I (1966) rejects psychologism: after Blanchot, the writer's place is anonymous, experience is refracted, not reflected, and the author's "death" is the starting point.
Narrative discourse
| Element | Definition | Linguistic level |
|---|---|---|
| Story (histoire) | The events recounted | What is told |
| Narrative (récit) | The narrative discourse, the text itself | Énoncé |
| Narration | The act of telling | Énonciation |
In Genette's terms, as narrative, the narrative discourse lives through its relation to the story it recounts; as discourse, it lives through the narration which proffers it.
Genette's categories of narrative discourse
- Narrative instance. "For a long time I went to bed early" is transparent until we account for the enunciative moment, as Benveniste taught.
- Narrative time. Space may stay vague, time cannot: there are predictive narratives, simultaneous ones (the epistolary novel, La Nouvelle Héloïse), and the "intemporal" third-person past narration common since the nineteenth century.
- Narrative levels. In Balzac's Sarrasine a narrator recounts how he came to tell the story of Sarrasine and La Zambinella. Genette adds metalepsis, person, the hero as narrator, five functions of the narrator and the narratee.
- Four more aspects. Order (analepsis, prolepsis, anachrony), duration, frequency and mode (point of view, distance).
Mimology and transtextuality
Mimologiques (1976) takes seriously Plato's Cratylus: three centuries of writers presumed names imitate things, through eponymy, which finds hidden meaningful names in a name. Palimpsests (1982), perhaps his finest book, classifies "literature in the second degree".
| Type | Relation |
|---|---|
| Intertextuality | Citation, plagiarism, allusion |
| Metatextuality | Commentary without citation: Hegel evoking Rameau's Nephew |
| Architextuality | Genres and modes that transcend each text |
| Paratext | Title, foreword, afterword (Seuils, 1987) |
| Hypertextuality | Text B grafted on text A, not as commentary: Ulysses on the Odyssey |
Narratology without destroying mystery
Gérard Genette (born Paris 1930, dies 2020) seeks a general theory of the literary object's singularity via supple classificatory schemas: neither procrustean outside categories nor naïve empiricism. Structuralist formal analysis; Proust's Recherche "illustrates nothing but itself." ENS contemporary of Derrida and Bourdieu; lycée teaching with Derrida 1959-60; EHESS aesthetics and poetics 1967; with Todorov and Cixous founds Poétique (1970), which publishes Derrida's "White Mythology."
Figures I-III: against psychologism; with Blanchot, writer's place is anonymity; death of the author. Narration levels (order, duration, frequency, mood, voice); Mimologiques; architext/genres; transtextuality / hypertextuality (Palimpsests 1982); paratext (Seuils 1987); fiction vs diction. Broadens what readers take for granted about how a story "works."
Genette: analytic method
Narrative levels: order, duration, frequency, mode, voice
Genette (b. 1930), ENS classicist, contemporary of Derrida and Bourdieu; Poetique with Todorov and Cixous (1970). Aim: classificatory knowledge of literature's singularity without procrustean imposition or naive empiricism. Proust's Recherche as a whole "illustrates nothing but itself."
Three elements of every narrative act: histoire (story), recit (narrative discourse), narration (telling). Five aspects organise analysis. Order: analepse (prior event), prolepse (advance), anachronie (discordance). Duration: rhythm of happening. Frequency: repetition. Mode: point of view and distance. Voice: metalepsis across levels; person; hero as narrator vs narrated; narrator functions (tell; organise; situate; affect/moralise; ideology); narrataire marked inside the text. Derrida's grammatology licensed a spatial view of literary works; Genette stays a structuralist of narrative architecture.
Genette: five aspects
Roman Jakobson
Moscow, Prague, Copenhagen, New York
Jakobson's itinerary through the linguistic circles
He entered Moscow University in 1914 and founded the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 1915; Husserl helped him think part and whole, and poetry comes closest to a structure where the part equals the whole. In Prague from 1920 he joined the Prague circle (1926) and published his 1929 Remarks on the phonological evolution of Russian. Nikolai Trubetskoy, a follower of Saussure, showed him that sounds function differentially. Fleeing Nazism he worked with Hjelmslev in Copenhagen and wrote Child Language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals in Sweden (1940-1). In New York he taught alongside Lévi-Strauss; despite McCarthyism he held posts at Harvard and MIT.
Metaphor, metonymy, aphasia
- Two poles. Metaphor (similarity: selection and substitution) and metonymy (contiguity: combination and context). Metonymy is external (pen for writer); synecdoche internal (sail for ship).
- Aphasia. Loss of the metaphoric pole is a metalinguistic deficit; loss of the metonymic pole breaks the hierarchy of units.
- Shifters. I, you, this, here: a "duplex structure" invoking code and message at once. They are the last ability a child masters and the first lost in aphasia: "the place where history enters language".
| Relation | Example |
|---|---|
| Message refers to code | "I" is a pronoun |
| Code refers to message | "I" means me, the speaker |
| Code refers to code | "Jerry" is the name of the boy called Jerry |
| Message refers to message | He said, "I am not coming" |
Poeticity and the distinctive feature
Against the charge of art for art's sake, Jakobson said the formalists defended "not the separation of art but the autonomy of the aesthetic function". Because sign and referent do not coincide, "without contradiction there is no mobility of concepts". His phonology grew from the different rhythms of Czech and Russian verse. Phonemes are not sound-atoms but bundles of distinctive features ("sonority, nasality"), defined only by opposition.
Distinctive features: one opposition separates meanings
His controversial claim: the list of features is "supremely restricted", the same across languages, governed by implicational laws. In 1958 he declared that a linguist deaf to the poetic function and a literary scholar ignorant of linguistics "are equally flagrant anachronisms".
Relational invariants and distinctive features
Roman Jakobson (1896-1982): sound-pattern as relational; meaning from relations in context. Nearly 500 articles: poetics, phonology, Slavic, acquisition, epistemology. Marked/unmarked opposition; interplay of invariants and variations at every level; direct influence on Lévi-Strauss (shared New School teaching WWII). Moscow Linguistic Circle 1915; Husserl part/whole; Prague Circle from 1926; with Trubetzkoy differential sounds → distinctive features; Copenhagen with Hjelmslev; US exile. Six functions of language (referential, emotive, conative, phatic, metalingual, poetic): poetic projects equivalence from axis of selection onto axis of combination.
Jakobson: from phonology to poetics
Markedness, phoneme, poetic function
Nearly 500 articles span poetics, phonology, Slavic folklore, acquisition, and the history of linguistics. Every constituent rests on opposition of marked presence to unmarked absence; interplay of invariants and variations is language's innermost property. Teaching with Levi-Strauss at the New School in wartime New York transmitted marked/unmarked analysis into anthropology.
Moscow Linguistic Circle (1915); Husserlian phenomenology; Prague years; escape to Scandinavia then the US. Poetry first taught him that sound patterns (Czech vs Russian rhythm) mediate meaning through distinctive features. Speech is not raw sound but phonemes: concurrent properties that distinguish unlike words. Metaphor and metonymy (similarity/contiguity) organise the two poles of language; the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination. Without contradiction, concepts and signs automatise and awareness of reality dies out.
Jakobson: relational sound and meaning
Jacques Lacan
The baroque seminar
From Clérambault he learned observation; from the surrealists, baroque self-presentation. Élisabeth Roudinesco describes the Sainte-Anne seminar: a faltering, thunderous voice, notes improvised "like an actor", a "sorcerer without magic, guru without hypnosis, prophet without god". The style enacted the principle that language says something other than what it says: language speaks through us. Kojève's Hegel gave him the master-slave dialectic and the Other: desire, founded on the loss of the object (first the mother), divides the subject. His enemy was American ego-psychology (Heinz Hartmann) and post-war humanism's sovereign ego.
Mirror stage and Symbolic order
Between 6 and 18 months the speechless infant recognises its image as both itself and not itself (1936). Ego formation and entry into language depend on this méconnaissance. "Man speaks ... but it is because the symbol has made him man" (Rome Discourse, 1953). From Saussure's bar between signifier and signified: no signifier comes to rest on a signified, and "the subject is the subject of the signifier".
| Freud (dream-work) | Jakobson (rhetoric) | Lacan |
|---|---|---|
| Condensation | Metaphor: one word replacing another | Symptom |
| Displacement | Metonymy: word-to-word connection | Desire |
Slips, forgetting of names and misreadings (Psychopathology of Everyday Life) show the unconscious disrupting communication with structural regularity.
Real, Symbolic, Imaginary
Lacan's three orders and the signifier of lack
- Imaginary. Not mere images but where the subject misrecognises the Symbolic as transparent: a "necessary illusion", as Durkheim said of religion.
- Real. Always "in its place"; only what is missing can be symbolised, so the symbol entails the absence of the object.
- Phallus. The penis is real, but the phallus is a signifier, "the signifier of signification", confronting the subject with lack and mortality. Law is embodied in the Name-of-the-Father, echoing Totem and Taboo and Lévi-Strauss's incest prohibition.
"La femme n'existe pas" means no essence of femininity can be represented; sexuality is masks. Lechte leaves open whether this "story" spells oppression for women. In Encore and later seminars Lacan turned to mathematical formalisation (Frege, Russell, Gödel, Cantor): in Poe's Purloined Letter the letter's unknown content makes it a pure signifier whose meaning depends on who holds it.
Return to Freud via Saussure and Lévi-Strauss
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) rereads Freud through structural linguistics and anthropology. The unconscious is structured like a language; the subject is split by the signifier. Mirror stage (from 1936, rewritten): the infant's jubilant assumption of a unified image is already alienation in the Imaginary. Symbolic order (Name-of-the-Father, Law) mediates; the Real resists symbolisation. Schema L, graphs of desire, objet petit a organise the later teaching. Seminars (especially VII Ethics, XI Four Fundamental Concepts) are the living form of the work; Écrits (1966) the written monument.
Expelled from IPA orbit, founds his own schools; 1964 École Freudienne; dissolution 1980. Influence on Althusser, film theory (Metz), feminism (Irigaray's critique), and literary theory is massive. Lechte stresses the topological turn (borromean knots) and the ethics of not giving way on one's desire.
Lacan: Real, Symbolic, Imaginary
Timeline- 1901-1981. Life; dies 9 September 1981. - 1936/49. Mirror stage. - 1953. "Rome Discourse"; return to Freud. - 1964 / 1966. École Freudienne; Écrits. - 1980. Dissolution of the school.
Mirror, Name-of-the-Father, four discourses
Lacan's return to Freud runs through Saussure and Jakobson: the unconscious structured like a language. The mirror stage (1936/49) forms the ego in anticipatory misrecognition. Foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father models psychosis; the paternal metaphor knots desire to law. Schemas L and R, object a, and the later Borromean knot (RSI: real, symbolic, imaginary) reorganise topology of the subject.
Seminar teaching (1953-80) and Ecrits (1966) eclipse the IPA orthodoxy after the 1963 break. Four discourses (master, university, hysteric, analyst) formalise social bonds as signifying circuits. Critics charge obscurity and clinical overclaim; partisans credit a linguistics-ready Freud. Death 9 September 1981.
Lacan: RSI and the cause of desire
Claude Lévi-Strauss
From São Paulo to New York
The child of artists, he passed the philosophy agrégation in the early 1930s, took a chair of anthropology at São Paulo in 1934, and after military service fled persecution to New York, teaching there in 1941-5, where he met Roman Jakobson. He distanced himself from positivist readings of Durkheim but reworked Mauss. In cheap restaurants of the wine-growing south, diners pour their identical small bottle into a neighbour's glass: the quantity is unchanged, but exchange creates social contact. What matters is the fact of exchange, not what is exchanged.
- Not functionalist or empiricist. Meaning lies in how elements combine, through difference and relation; oppositions and contradictions give society its dynamism.
- Universal scope. He theorises from his own and others' data; the commonest Anglo-American charge is a thin fieldwork base.
- Not Radcliffe-Brown. Structure is never the observable skeleton of a society but a model with at least three elements.
Kinship and the third element
The 1950 introduction to Mauss makes mana a floating signifier, symbolic value zero, like "thing" in English: signifiers abound because language came all at once while knowledge comes progressively. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) reduces marriage to two forms.
Elementary Structures of Kinship: the two forms of marriage exchange
Perfect symmetry would eventually merge the groups and end exchange. Articles of 1945 and 1956 supply the third element: the child, whose counter-prestations in later generations stabilise the initial disequilibrium, and zero-value institutions that "enable the social system to exist as a whole".
Myth and Caduveo faces
Myths represent the mind that creates them; all versions belong to the myth, which arises from a contradiction (autochthony against birth from man and woman). Myth is "language functioning on an especially high level", a third level reconciling langue (reversible time) and parole (history); since reconciliation is impossible, "myth grows spiral-wise". The Caduveo face paintings of Tristes Tropiques are symmetrical compositions on an oblique axis, like court cards holding a fixed place in the pack and a contingent role in play.
Wine, exchange, and the total social fact
Born 1908 (Brussels, French Jewish parents who were artists), agrégation in philosophy, then São Paulo anthropology (1934) to escape Paris orthodoxies. After military service he fled persecution to the New School (1941-45), meeting Jakobson. He reread Mauss against positivist Durkheim. The restaurant wine custom in Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) shows equal glasses poured into the neighbour's glass: quantity unchanged, exchange itself constituting social contact and, in microcosm, the total social fact.
Stakes: with all data in hand there is no basis for a hierarchy of societies. Culture (language foremost), not nature, constitutes the human. Kinship, language and goods exchange are symbolic; the incest prohibition is the passage from nature to culture. Structure is not Radcliffe-Brown's observable skeleton but the outcome of at least three elements; Lechte stresses the ternary, dynamic reading against a static synchronic model of differences. Empiricist critics (especially Anglophone) charge inadequate fieldwork.
Mana, marriage forms, myth
Mana is an empty or floating signifier (compare Lacan's phallus): third element between signifier and signified that keeps language from a perfect fit that would end speech. Restricted exchange (X↔Y) and generalised exchange (A→B→C→D→A) organise the kinship book; apparent dual organisations imply a third element, institutions of "zero value" that enable the social system. Myths gain meaning from combination not intrinsic content; versions are part of the myth's dynamic structure; contradiction (autochthony vs sexual birth) generates myth. Science thinks of the concrete; native thought thinks with it; The Raw and the Cooked is itself a myth about myth.
Lévi-Strauss: culture as symbolic structure
By the numbers- 1908-2009. Lives to 100; dies 30 October 2009. - 1934. São Paulo chair. - 1941. Meets Jakobson in New York. - 1949. Elementary Structures of Kinship. - Mythologiques cycle from The Raw and the Cooked (1964).
Kinship, myth, savage mind
Levi-Strauss applies structural linguistics to kinship (Elementary Structures) and myth (Mythologiques): systems of difference, not origins. The incest prohibition is the cultural cut that founds exchange of women among groups. Mythemes combine like phonemes; music and myth are twin logics in the late volumes. The Savage Mind defends bricolage and classification against the primitive/logical hierarchy.
New York exile with Jakobson; UNESCO and College de France career; nostalgia and Tristes Tropiques complicates scientific self-presentation. Objections: cold formalism, gender blindness in the exchange model, over-strong nature/culture dualism. Death 30 October 2009.
Levi-Strauss: from kinship to myth
Christian Metz
Normalien and cinephile
Born at Béziers, an ENS agrégé in classical letters with degrees in German and ancient history, he took a doctorat d'état in general linguistics and taught it at the École des Hautes Études (1966-9). He ran ciné-clubs, the source of his film examples, and translated books on jazz, though music left no mark on his theory.
Film as impression of reality
Literature has grammar and poetry to measure opacity; film, "the medium par excellence of transparency", has no such support. Film is not more real than theatre: "because the theatre is too real, theatrical fictions yield only a weak impression of reality". Film's realism arises only after a threshold of irreality: "a film is only a film ... but all the same".
- Discourse, not langue. A film is an enunciation by a "narrating agency"; images are statements, not words, indefinite in number and made by the film-maker.
- Connotation and expression. Film is not a language: "a concept signifies, a thing is expressive".
- Syntagmatic bias. Montage links images by contiguity; paradigmatic stereotypes (white hat = good) are fragile and easily reversed.
The grande syntagmatique
| No. | Type | Character |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Autonomous shot | A single episode in isolation; includes non-diegetic inserts |
| 2 | Parallel syntagm | Parallel montage; a-chronological |
| 3 | Bracket (accolade) syntagm | Evocations, e.g. "modern love" in Godard's Une femme mariée |
| 4 | Descriptive syntagm | Successive shots of simultaneous things |
| 5 | Alternating syntagm | Alternating series understood as simultaneous |
| 6 | Scene | Continuous flow, no diegetic hiatus |
| 7 | Episodic sequence | Discontinuity as principle |
| 8 | Ordinary sequence | Ellipses skipping uninteresting moments |
The imaginary signifier
The Imaginary Signifier (1977): why the spectator desires cinema
By the mid-1970s Metz turned to reception and the cinema as an institution that needs the spectator's desire. The screen acts as a mirror; the industry works to make each film a Kleinian "good object", so most cinema discourse belongs to the institution. Unlike the mirror, the spectator's body is absent, yet he "identifies with himself ... as a pure act of perception". Scopic passion, voyeurism (the primal scene) and fetishism come to the fore.
Film as medium, not only criticism
Born 1931 Béziers; dies end of 1993. ENS (classical letters), German degree, maîtrise ancient history, doctorat d'état general linguistics. Cinéphile and ciné-club animator; translations on jazz (music oddly leaves little mark on his film theory). Mid-1960s: almost no analysis of film as image or cinema as institution from the spectator's side. Articles 1964-68 in Essais sur la signification au cinéma (1968) help found cinema studies at Vincennes.
Semiology then psychoanalysis
Saussurean langage / langue / parole: film's opacity is harder than literature's because film is the medium of transparency and verisimilitude. Theatre has live presence but weaker illusion; film's celluloid has stronger illusion of reality. Grande syntagmatique maps narrative film segments. Later The Imaginary Signifier turns to psychoanalysis: spectator's voyeurism, disavowal, identification; cinema as institutional apparatus of the desire to see. Two lines (semiological study of film; psychoanalytic study of cinema) organise the oeuvre.
Metz: from opacity of the image to the spectator
Cinema language, imaginary signifier
Christian Metz asks whether cinema is a language without a langue. Grande syntagmatique classifies narrative film segments; later psychoanalytic semiotics (The Imaginary Signifier) treats spectator identification, voyeurism, and disavowal with Lacanian tools. Film is not a natural analogon but a coded spectacle that sutures the viewer.
Difficulty of matching Saussurean categories to moving images drives constant revision. Lechte places Metz at structuralism's media edge: methodical, provisional, and a bridge to screen theory in the Anglophone world.
Metz: film as coded spectacle
Michel Serres
From Carnot to entropy
Serres's founding story: Turner translates Carnot
In 1824 army engineer Sadi Carnot saw that a steam engine's work comes from the temperature difference between boiler and condenser; he died at 36. Clausius coined "entropy" in 1865. Friction turns a projectile's motion into random molecular motion: chance predominates, time becomes irreversible, as in Bourdieu's logic of practice. Unlike his mentor Bachelard, Serres never accepted a hermetic, homogeneous science: knowledge is a Harlequin, always another costume beneath the one removed.
Sailor, normalien, academician
Born at Agen, he entered naval college (1949), the ENS (1952), passed the philosophy agrégation (1955) and served as a marine officer (1956-8). His thesis on Leibniz came in 1968. He taught with Foucault at Clermont-Ferrand and Vincennes, held a Sorbonne chair in the history of science, a Stanford professorship from 1984, and entered the Académie française in 1990.
Noise and the parasite
- Message, channel, noise. Noise is the excluded third: "no message without resistance". Every formalism (mathematics) is founded on excluding it.
- The Parasite. In French "parasite" also means static. In La Fontaine's fable the rats flee a noise at the door: noise or message?
- Systems that fail. "We know no system that functions perfectly ... without losses, flights, wear and tear, errors." Noise is the system: "noise and message exchange roles according to the position of the observer". Dysfunction is essential to function.
- Loganalyse. Structure, learned from the Bourbaki mathematicians more than Saussure, is a mode of transfer: an analysis is structural only when it makes a content appear as a model. He admired Dumézil's comparisons.
| Figure | Role |
|---|---|
| Hermes | Traveller and medium between domains |
| Harlequin | Hybrid, mongrel figure of the chaos of life |
| Lucretius | The clinamen anticipates turbulence and entropy |
| Verne, Zola, Turner | Non-knowledge and stochastics in art |
Poetry is "the noise of science": science lives only by infusions out of the blue. "What exists is the most probable": disorder, chance, the exception.
Thermodynamics, invention, harlequin
Serres voyages between arts and sciences; invention = translation, communication, metaphor. Carnot (1824) on heat flow boiler→condenser; Clausius (1865) coins entropy. First law: energy of the world constant; second: entropy tends to a maximum. Newtonian mechanics: reversible time, no chance; thermodynamics: irreversible time, contingency (link to Bourdieu's irreversible practice). Knowledge is harlequin: another costume always under the one removed; hybrid against homogeneous positivist fields (even beyond mentor Bachelard).
Born 1930 Agen; naval college 1949; ENS 1952; agrégation 1955; marine officer 1956-58; doctorate on Leibniz (1968); taught with Foucault at Clermont-Ferrand and Vincennes; chair history of science Sorbonne; Stanford from 1984; Académie française 1990. Dies 1 June 2019. Hermes series, The Parasite, five senses: noise, interference and the excluded third as productive.
Serres: from mechanics to invention
Parasite, Hermes, loganalyse
Beyond the Carnot story: French parasite also means static. La Fontaine's rats flee a door noise: noise or message? "We know no system that functions perfectly ... without losses, flights, wear and tear, errors." Noise and message exchange roles by the observer's position. Formalism excludes the third; Serres puts the third back as productive.
Loganalyse (after Bourbaki more than Saussure): an analysis is structural only when content appears as a model, the formal analogon of concrete models. Place is here and there at once; subject as discontinuous virtuality, not punctual ego. Hermes travels between domains; Harlequin is hybrid life; Lucretius's clinamen anticipates turbulence. Poetry is the noise of science; Verne's unknown worlds, Zola, and Turner (steam, fog) show non-knowledge constituting knowledge. Later work tracks information technology's everyday effects without abandoning that comparative voyage.
Serres: parasite as productive static
Fernand Braudel
From Lumeville to the Collège de France
Born in a village of 250 people, Lumeville-en-Ornois, he was agrégé in history at 20. Teaching in Algeria (1923-32, with military service in the Rhineland in 1925) he discovered the Mediterranean. After Paris lycées he spent three years at São Paulo from 1935, "the greatest period of his life", the year Lévi-Strauss arrived. Taken prisoner in 1940, he drafted his thesis and its three levels of time in captivity. The Mediterranean appeared in 1949, when he succeeded Lucien Febvre at the Collège de France; with Febvre and Morazé he founded the Sixth Section of the École Pratique (1947). He entered the Académie française in 1983.
Against the history of events
- Histoire événementielle. Political and diplomatic narrative paints history with the observer left out, assumes homogeneous time and one perspective, and drifts into chronicle.
- Organic metaphors. Societies "born, mature and die" make biography the template; isolated cause-and-effect replaces a web of forces.
- A thousand paces. The longue durée draws on the "thousand different paces" of social time, often via statistical series; structure can become a prison if plurality is forgotten.
- Interdisciplinarity. Economics, geography, anthropology and sociology all serve the historian; none holds a monopoly on truth.
The Mediterranean's three times
Braudel's levels of historical time
| Level | Pace | Content |
|---|---|---|
| Geographical time | Almost imperceptible, cyclical | Seas, mountains, deserts, climate |
| Social time | Two or three centuries | Economies, empires, civilisations, aristocracies |
| Individual time | Courte durée | Events, politics and people: "surfaces and deceptive effects" |
| Conjuncture | A specific situation | The English in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean |
There is no single sea but many seas: Catholic and Muslim, plains and mountains, nomads, villagers and transhumance between them. Mountain snow carried to hot Italian cities gave rise to ice-cream. The Ottoman Empire belongs to the Mediterranean; rigid boundaries are a "philosophy of history" instead of history. Lechte calls Braudel "probably the first truly postmodern historian": every sub-system has its rhythm, and history must become "a whole orchestra".
Plural time and the longue durée
Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) temporalises space, climate and technology: history is not only Collingwood's "actions of men" but slow imperceptible effects on those actions. Born Luméville-en-Ornois; agrégé at 20; Algeria 1923-32 discovers the Mediterranean; São Paulo 1935-37 (same years as Lévi-Strauss); POW 1940-45 drafts three levels of time; The Mediterranean (1949); Collège de France after Febvre; with Febvre and Morazé founds Sixième Section (1947); Académie 1983.
Longue durée: global focus, conjuncture and structure, many perspectives at once (Nietzschean perspectivism without a single privileged view). Against courte durée event history. Three speeds: geographical time, social/economic conjuncture, events. Opens history to structural aspect unavailable to actors' consciousness; pairs with Foucault on patterns of practice and discourse, adding patterns of nature.
Braudel: three times of history
Longue duree, capitalism, world-economy
Braudel's historiography layers evenement, conjoncture, and longue duree. The Mediterranean treats geography and structures as slower than kings' battles. Civilization and Capitalism maps material life, markets, and world-economies; capitalism sits at the top of a hierarchy of exchange, not identical with markets as such. Time is plural; the historian's craft is to articulate tempos.
Annales inheritance (with Bloch and Febvre) and imprisonment during WWII shape the oeuvre's scale. Structuralists borrowed the privilege of long structures over event narrative; critics charge geographic determinism and underplayed agency. For Lechte he anchors the historical wing of the structural moment.
Braudel: plural times of history
Georges Bataille
Horror, analysis and journals
Born at Billom in the Auvergne, he grew up with a blind father, partially paralysed from 1900 (by syphilis, Bataille claimed; his brother disputed it). The white of his father's eyes as he urinated became, in Story of the Eye (1928, as "Lord Auch"), egg whites, bull's testicles and the matador Granero gored through the eye. Breton called him a "case"; in 1927 the psychoanalyst Adrien Borel encouraged him to write his obsessions. Eroticism treats the erotic as a violation of the pure self, linked to death; The Tears of Eros ties art to horror from Lascaux on.
He trained as a medievalist at the École des Chartes (second, 1922), read Nietzsche and Freud in 1923 and became a librarian at the Cabinet des Médailles (1924), bringing numismatics to the journal Documents (1929-30). In 1946 he founded Critique, which introduced Blanchot, Barthes, Foucault and Derrida to a wider public.
Vertical and horizontal
Bataille: the lofty system hides its base
Nietzsche is a writer as much as a philosopher: he keeps autobiography and, refusing every cause, condemns himself to solitude, a cry in the wilderness. In "The pineal eye" (1930) plants are vertical, animals horizontal. Learning Hegel from Kojève (1933-9), Bataille saw absolute knowledge as a delirium of reason: total illumination blinds, as in "The rotten sun" on Picasso and Icarus. The obelisk erected at the Place de la Concorde in 1836 marks the site of the guillotine: homogeneous systems hide a heterogeneous baseness.
Sacrifice, loss, chance
- Sacrifice. In The Accursed Share (1949), Aztec magnificence is inseparable from human sacrifice. The victim, unlike the slave, is honoured and dies in the executioner's place; sacrifice "restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded". The anguished witness creates communal continuity.
- Loss. Against Mauss, potlatch is not reciprocity but the general economy of excess, luxury and expenditure without return, opposed to the "restricted" economy of balanced books.
- Chance. Since Laplace, chance meant ignorance; quantum mechanics changed that. Inner Experience, Guilty and On Nietzsche (1941-4) read like journals of "dice throws", their shape fortuitous; chance is linked to anguish.
Anguish and eroticism
"Anguish says: impossible"; "chance is what the anguish in me regards as impossible". The cry, laughter, tears, excrement and poetry give rise to chance, which no system can integrate: it is Nietzsche's amor fati against the Hegelian edifice. In eroticism, sexuality reaches its zenith as a regulated transgression of taboos: discontinuous individuals glimpse the continuity of being in death. The interdiction (vertical) is the condition of the transgression (horizontal), so eroticism is the foundation of the sacred, not its antithesis. Blindness belongs to knowledge: the heights of enlightenment correlate with the depths of non-knowledge.
| Restricted economy | General economy |
|---|---|
| Production, utility | Expenditure without return |
| Equilibrium, balanced books | Excess, luxury, disequilibrium |
| Exchange value, slavery | Sacrifice, the sacred |
Expenditure, eroticism, the sacred
Georges Bataille (1897-1962): numismatist at Bibliothèque nationale; fiction and theory of horror/obscenity (Breton called him a "case"; analysis with Borel). Eroticism: erotic as violation of discontinuous self, linked to death. Tears of Eros: art tied to horror from Lascaux caves. Against utilitarian economy: general economy of expenditure, potlatch, sacrifice (with Mauss). Collège de Sociologie with Caillois; Acephale; influence on Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Nancy. Heterology: science of the wholly other.
Bataille: excess against equilibrium
Expenditure, sacred, Aztec logic
Biographical horror (blind, paralysed father; mother's insanity; disputed syphilis story) feeds Story of the Eye: whites of eyes become eggs, testicles, the matador Granero gored through the eye. Breton called him a "case"; analysis with Borel around 1927. Eroticism ties the erotic to violation of the closed self and thus to death; The Tears of Eros reads art from Lascaux as linked to horror.
Against utilitarian equilibrium, general economy theorises expenditure as excess. Aztec sacrifice (obsidian knife, heart to the sun) introduces disequilibrium into exchange society. The victim, often treated well, dies in the executioner's place; captors taste death as anguish. Sacrifice restores to the sacred what servile use made profane; nothing substitutes for the act. In a world of exchange-value, sacrifice becomes unintelligible, yet echoes in mutilation (Van Gogh). Homogeneous society needs heterogeneous waste; Bataille's Accursed Share follows Mauss toward potlatch and solar waste.
Bataille: expenditure against use
Gilles Deleuze
Career
At the Sorbonne (1944-8) he knew Butor, Tournier and Châtelet and studied under Alquié, Canguilhem and Hyppolite. After the agrégation (1948) he taught in lycées, at the Sorbonne (1957-60), at the CNRS, and at Lyon from 1964, until Foucault brought him to Vincennes in 1969, the year he defended Différence et répétition and his thesis on Spinoza. He retired in 1987.
Horizontal thought
- Outside the canon. A philosopher who creates an event in thought leaves the history of philosophy and enters Nietzsche's desert, though Deleuze still works with its material.
- Not sameness. Horizontality yields not everyone on one level but the instability of differences; it by-passes, not opposes, bureaucratic hierarchy.
- Nietzsche. Origin means a plurality of differences; genealogy is evaluation, a distancing from forebears as a warrior needs a worthy enemy. Objects are hierarchies of forces; there is no objective good, only values; the apparent world is the only world.
- Style. The great philosophers are great stylists; there is no subject above its products, no actor apart from acts.
Deleuze's readings along the horizontal axis
Anti-Oedipus and the rhizome
| Freud and Lacan | Deleuze and Guattari |
|---|---|
| Desire founded on lack | Desire as affirmative flows and lines of flight |
| Oedipus: original trauma, tree-like | Rhizome: connective, not engendered |
| Repression, Name-of-the-Father | Only social desire, no individual/collective divide |
| Theatre of representation | Desiring machines |
| Organic body | Body without organs (from Artaud), always forming and deforming |
Career and radical horizontality
Born 1925, Deleuze studied at the Sorbonne (1944-48) with Butor, Tournier, Châtelet; teachers included Alquié, Canguilhem, Hyppolite. Agrégation 1948, lycées to 1957, Sorbonne history of philosophy 1957-60, CNRS 1960-64, then Lyon, and from 1969 (at Foucault's behest) professor at Vincennes. Lecercle notes an outsider aloof from master-disciple circles, little discussed in France yet among the most cited French thinkers in English, rarely travelling.
"Horizontal" and "vertical" are Lechte's clarifying terms more than Deleuze's own labels; rhizome already evokes horizontality. Horizontal thought creates an event that separates the thinker from the conventional history of philosophy (Nietzsche's desert). It does not flatten everyone into sameness but produces unstable differences and permeable boundaries, bypassing bureaucratic hierarchy without simply opposing it. Deleuze still works with the canon, but reads Nietzsche for eternal return, will to power and the overturning of the vertical axis of objective truth into the horizontal axis of values.
Spinoza, Proust, Leibniz, Carroll; Anti-Oedipus
For Spinoza, expression is not essence appearing; morality is an "ethics of joy" that enhances life. Proust teaches through signs. Leibniz's fold is difference to itself. Carroll's series proliferate. With Guattari, Anti-Oedipus refuses desire-as-lack, Oedipal trauma and the tree; only social desire, desiring machines, and the body without organs (from Artaud) as rhizomatic connective synthesis always forming and deforming. English reception hears a democratic chord; Lechte asks whether yes-without-no harbours its own purity and raises violence's potential.
Deleuze along the horizontal axis
Timeline- 1925-1995. Life; dies 4 November 1995. - 1948. Agrégation; lycée teaching begins. - 1968-69. Différence et répétition, Logique du sens; Vincennes chair. - 1972 / 1980. Anti-Oedipus; Mille plateaux. - Teachers: Alquié, Canguilhem, Hyppolite (OCR "Aliquie").
Difference, rhizome, capitalism and schizophrenia
Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense overturn identity-first metaphysics. With Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus invent schizoanalysis, rhizome versus tree, deterritorialisation, and assemblages. Philosophy creates concepts; cinema books taxonomise movement- and time-images; Leibniz, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson are constant interlocutors.
Against negativity-centred dialectics, affirmation and multiplicity lead. Critics cite political vagueness and romanticised schizophrenia; readers in art and architecture take the vocabulary as toolbox. Death 4 November 1995.
Deleuze: concepts
Jacques Derrida
The logic of identity
Russell's three laws, identity ("whatever is, is"), contradiction and the excluded middle, presuppose an origin that is simple, homogeneous and present to itself. They exclude complexity, mediation and difference, and institute paired concepts: sensible/intelligible, nature/culture, speech/writing.
- Rousseau's supplement. Nature is self-sufficient, yet sometimes lacking (a mother without enough milk); if it needs a supplement it cannot be self-identical.
- Mediation excluded. Consciousness and language make knowledge possible yet are left out of it.
- No exit. Deconstruction must use the very concepts it finds unsustainable; its aim is to generate effects and keep philosophy inventive.
Différance and writing
The double terms that différance gathers
Coined in 1968, différance takes Saussure's "differences without positive terms" further than Saussure or the structuralists: such difference is unconceptualisable, not the enumerable difference between x and y. Its "a" is graphic, inaudible in speech. Saussure and Lévi-Strauss treat writing as secondary and phonetic; but punctuation and spacing are not sounds, and writing mixes pictographic, ideographic and phonetic elements. Writing as trace is virtual, the precondition of phenomenal forms; it evokes cybernetics and information theory.
Signifier, name and signature
- Style as argument. Glas and The Post Card blur philosophy and literature; at the Sorbonne in 1968 he said he sought the point where the signified is "no longer easily separable from the signifier".
- The improper name. Ponge becomes éponge (sponge); the critic becomes a writer.
- Iterability. Repeatability detaches signifier from signified: "context is unbounded" (Culler). Against Searle's reading of Austin, infelicitous performatives cannot be eliminated, because anyone can repeat a signature: iterability entails forgery.
Deconstruction does not exit the tradition
Deconstruction does not promise to remove paradoxes or found a clean new system. It must use the concepts whose claims it finds unsustainable, and provisionally sustain those claims, in order to generate effects and keep philosophy a site of invention. Différance (1968) is not enumerable difference between x and y but the unconceptualisable play of differing and deferring; its silent a is graphic, inaudible in speech.
Saussure and Lévi-Strauss treat writing as secondary and phonetic. Différance itself, punctuation, and the silences of speech show that neither speech nor writing is pure. Writing as trace is virtual, precondition of phenomenal forms ("The end of the book and the beginning of writing"). The enterprise evokes cybernetics and information theory as much as philology.
Proper names, politics, iterability
Genre boundaries rest on fragile trust, not essence; subverting them opens creativity. Laclau takes the fragility of constructed identities as a political opening. Proper names are improper: Ponge becomes éponge; Wordsworth / Joyce yield series by pun and anagram. Against Searle on Austin, infelicitous performatives cannot be eliminated because signatures are iterable and thus forgeable. Style in Glas and The Post Card is itself argument: the signified is "no longer easily separable from the signifier."
Derrida undoes the speech/writing hierarchy
Cast- Rousseau. Nature, lack, supplement. - Saussure / Lévi-Strauss. Speech privileged over writing. - Austin / Searle. Performatives and the unboundedness of context. - Ponge. Name become sponge. - Specters of Marx (1993). The "recent" Marx book Lechte flags. - Genette. Colleague in 1959-60 (arrival was 1949, not 1959).
Differance, deconstruction, justice
Derrida's early trio (Voice and Phenomenon, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, 1967) displaces presence-centred metaphysics. Differance names differing/deferring without a master concept. Deconstruction is not demolition but reading of a text's constitutive unsettlement (supplement, hymen, pharmakon). Later work on law, hospitality, Marx, and friendship ties deconstruction to justice as undeconstructible.
Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and structuralism are the near field; American reception via Yale shaped literary deconstruction. Charges of nihilism miss his claim that responsibility increases when foundations shake. Death 9 October 2004.
Derrida: from writing to justice
Michel Foucault
Five key terms
He took the agrégation at 25, a diploma in psychology in 1952, worked in a psychiatric hospital and taught at Uppsala (1955). Discursive practices coincide neither with individual works nor with disciplines; their regularity is unconscious and arises at the level of parole, not a prior langue.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| The present | History answers problems of now: structuralism (The Order of Things, 1966), prison revolts (Discipline and Punish, 1975) |
| Genealogy | "Effective history" (Nietzsche) written as an intervention |
| Epistemology | The changing "grammar" of knowledge, after Bachelard, Canguilhem, Cavaillès |
| Discontinuity | Breaks between eras override causal continuity |
| Technology | Unacknowledged regularities of action, after Mauss's techniques of the body |
Madness and reason
Folie et déraison, defended in May 1961 under Canguilhem, shows Descartes excluding madness from hyperbolic doubt: he can doubt everything but his own sanity. The division between reason and madness is historical, not a universal category.
History of Madness: discontinuities, not progress
The mad replaced the leper as the excluded figure. In Brant's Stultifera navis (1497) and Bosch, madness spoke truth; in the Classical Age it fell silent among libertines, debauchees and magicians, a police matter rather than a medical one. Medicine entered the asylum through revolutionary concern for rights and therapeutic practice, not discovery.
Power, knowledge, self
- Discipline and Punish. From the tortured regicide Damiens to the watched prisoner: army, factory and school discipline bodies; Bentham's Panopticon lets few watch many. The prison becomes a tool of knowledge.
- History of Sexuality I. Power is not possessed or merely repressive but dispersed and productive; in political theory "the king's head is still to be cut off". Sex was not repressed: discourse exploded.
- Care of the self. In The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self pleasure comes through regulation: the danger is excess (too much inside marriage), not deviance, breaking any continuity with Christianity.
Five terms: present, genealogy, epistemology, discontinuity, technology
Born Poitiers 1926, agrégation at 25, psychology diploma 1952, psychiatric hospital work, Uppsala 1955. Major thesis Folie et déraison (1961, supervised by Canguilhem); Collège de France chair "history of systems of thought" (1970); dies AIDS-related 1984. First course "The will to truth" already speaks of discursive practices that coincide neither with individual works nor with sciences, but emerge as regularities at the level of parole.
Because nothing in history is intrinsically important, history is always written from the present's interests (structuralism → The Order of Things 1966; prison unrest → Discipline and Punish *1975). Genealogy blocks historicist teleology: cause must not override effect, continuity must not erase discontinuities of practice. The past is continually revalued; simple causality between past and present fails. Epistemology here is not philosophy of science alone but analysis of every manner of speaking and behaving in which someone appears as knowing, ethical, juridical or self-conscious subject. Technology (after Mauss's techniques of the body) names unacknowledged regularities of action, later technologies of the self, transferable across practice sets.
Madness, then power
Descartes excludes madness from hyperbolic doubt; Foucault studies how the division reason/madness is historically made. Renaissance madness differs from Classical unreason (silence) and from nineteenth-century mental illness. Internment from the Hôpital général (1656) is police before medicine; Tuke and Pinel reform asylums under rights discourse and therapeutic redesign, not a medical discovery. In the 1970s discourse yields to power/knowledge and the body: power is not a substance possessed but relational; it exceeds the Enlightenment's philosophico-juridical frame of representation.
Foucault from asylum to technologies of the self
Discursive practice- Not reducible to oeuvre or discipline. - Regularity at parole, unconscious, neither logical nor linguistic type alone. - Regime of practices with its own logic, strategy, evidence, reason. - History of ideas' prior "ideas" and ideology's expression of conditions both refused.
Archaeology, genealogy, biopower
Alongside the five terms already listed: The Archaeology of Knowledge formalises discursive formations, enunciative modalities, and the archive. Genealogy in the 1970s relocates power into micro-practices; Society Must Be Defended and later lectures invent biopower and governmentality. Sexuality volumes shift from repressive hypothesis to productive discourse and then to ancient arts of existence.
Iran writings, prison activism (GIP), and the AIDS death (25 June 1984) polarise reception.
Foucault: archaeology to biopower
Emmanuel Levinas
Kovno, Strasbourg, Freiburg
Born to a Jewish family in Kovno, Lithuania, a centre of Talmudic study, he read Russian and Hebrew; Dostoyevsky's responsibility for the Other prepared him for Plato and Kant. At Strasbourg from 1923 he met Blanchot, who introduced him to Proust and Valéry, and absorbed Bergson's duration. In 1928-9 he heard Husserl at Freiburg and read Being and Time. A naturalised Frenchman, he served as a Russian and German interpreter, was captured in 1940, and lost almost all his Lithuanian family to the Nazis. He began Existence and Existents (1947) in captivity, directed the École Normale Israélite Orientale, and after Totality and Infinity (1961) taught at Poitiers, Nanterre (1967) and the Sorbonne (1973-6).
The horror of the "there is"
- Il y a. The impersonal "there is" (es gibt) is "the sheer fact of being": night, ambiguity, indeterminacy before any concept. "The rustling of the there is ... is horror."
- Not Heidegger. It is not anxiety before nothingness but horror before unavoidable being; Macbeth's haunting spectre is its shadow.
- Consciousness. "To be conscious is to be torn away from the there is": the particular that eludes the universal.
The forms of alterity in Levinas
The face of the Other
Time, existence, the other person, language and God all figure as alterity. Transcendence means rupture, not conceptual mastery. "The face is by itself and not by reference to a system": an epiphany that summons me, the infinite in me that breaks my self-identity. The relation is dissymmetrical, like Bergson's irreversible duration; the future is "time without a concept". Language, never full presence, opens the self to the Other, who gives me identity. Through the face, God is reached, à-Dieu.
From Husserl to the Other prior to any act
Sartre recognized himself in Levinas's Théorie de l'intuition (1930). Later Blanchot, Derrida, Irigaray and Lyotard take up his rethinking of the Other (Autrui): ethics concerned with the Other "prior to any act." Born 1906 Kovno, Lithuania, into a Jewish family oriented to Russian language and literature; Hebrew and Talmudic milieu; Dostoyevsky (responsibility for the Other), Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol as preparation for Plato and Kant. Strasbourg 1923 under Blondel and Pradines; Bergson on duration; friendship with Blanchot (Proust, Valéry). Freiburg 1928-29 with Husserl; reads Being and Time. French citizenship 1930; WWII interpreter then POW 1940; almost all Lithuanian family killed. Existence and Existents (1947); director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale; Totalité et Infini (1961) → Poitiers, Nanterre 1967, Sorbonne 1973, retires 1976. Dies 25 December 1995.
Il y a, face, infinity
The impersonal il y a / es gibt is twisted toward horror: neither exterior nor interior, a nocturnal vigilance without objects. Escape from the il y a is not through a solitary subject but through the ethical relation. Totality (war, politics, ontology) absorbs the other into the Same; infinity in the face of the Other resists representation and commands "Thou shalt not kill." Responsibility is asymmetric and infinite; the saying precedes the said. Talmudic readings accompany the philosophical books without collapsing into confession.
Levinas: ethics against totality
Cast- Husserl / Heidegger. Phenomenology he both transmits and exits. - Blanchot. Lifelong friendship and shared outside. - Dostoyevsky. Responsibility for the Other. - Derrida. "Violence and Metaphysics" as major engagement. - Irigaray. Takes corporeal alterity further.
Face, infinity, otherwise than being
Levinas opposes Heideggerian Being with ethics as first philosophy. The face of the Other commands before knowledge; totality (war, system) yields to infinity. Totality and Infinity stages hospitality and desire; Otherwise than Being intensifies with substitution, hostage, and saying vs said. Jewish sources and phenomenology intertwine; Derrida both inherits and unsettles him ("Violence and Metaphysics").
Born Lithuania 1906, naturalised French, wartime captivity; death 25 December 1995. Critics ask whether the asymmetric Other silences politics; defenders find a brake on ontology's violence.
Levinas: ethics before ontology
Roland Barthes
A life turned into writing
Born at Cherbourg, he lost his father in naval combat in 1916, grew up in Bayonne and Paris, and between 1934 and 1947 suffered bouts of tuberculosis, reading omnivorously. He taught in Romania and Egypt, where he met Greimas, then at the École des Hautes Études, and entered the Collège de France in 1977. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Camera Lucida he fictionalises himself in the third person; finding his dead mother as a little girl in a faded sepia print, he wants not "just an image" (Godard) but a just image. In A Lover's Discourse, "the text speaks, that is all".
Myth today
Mythologies: myth as naturalised second-order speech (Paris-Match cover)
- Message, not concept. Myth is defined "by the way it utters its message": a matter of parole. Ideology hides; myth distorts: "neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion".
- The Paris-Match cover. A Black soldier saluting the tricolour becomes "the very presence of French imperiality". Myth works because it seems natural; if its ideology is obvious, it fails as myth.
- Writing Degree Zero (1953). Bourgeois culture denies the opacity of language. The neutral "zero degree" (Camus, the nouveau roman) soon proves a style of neutrality: naturalism is an ideology.
Fashion and S/Z
The 1966 structural analysis of narrative, using James Bond, exposed codes that make stories seem uncoded. The Fashion System, a reluctant venture into scientificity, studies written women's fashion in two magazines (June 1958-June 1959). Fashion is only connoted; its language lies in signifier-signifier relations (object, support, variant: cardigan, collar, open-necked), and its sign is "tautological": fashion is only the fashionable garment.
| S/Z code | Function in Balzac's Sarrasine |
|---|---|
| Hermeneutic | Poses and delays an enigma |
| Semic | Connotative meanings of character |
| Symbolic | Antitheses and symbolic fields |
| Proairetic | The logic of actions |
| Gnomic (cultural) | References to a body of received knowledge |
The most plausible details are artifice, not imitation. After Sade, Fourier, Loyola, The Pleasure of the Text contrasts the comfortable text of pleasure with the text of jouissance, bliss and loss of self.
Mythologies to the novelistic
Born Cherbourg 1915; father dies 1916 North Sea; Bayonne childhood; TB 1934-47; reads Gide; teaches Romania/Egypt (meets Greimas); Collège de France 1977; dies 26 March 1980 after street accident. Late books (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida) fictionalise life in third person; Winter Garden photo of mother: wants a "just image," hears Godard's "Not a just image, just an image." A Lover's Discourse: "the text speaks"; solitude of a discourse with no specific subject.
Early phase: critique of bourgeois culture. Myth = a type of speech, a message defined by how it utters; second-order semiological system (Saussurean). S/Z, pleasure/jouissance of the text, writerly vs readerly. Diversity: Michelet obsessions, Racine psychobiography (outraged establishment), fashion system, Japan. Semiotician who becomes a writer of the "novelistic without the novel."
Barthes: from myth to mourning
From zero degree to fashion system and Camera Lucida
Born Cherbourg 1915; father died in naval combat; tuberculosis 1934-47; first articles on Gide; taught in Romania and Egypt (met Greimas); College de France 1977; dies 1980. Late books (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida) fictionalise biography in the third person: "novelistic without the novel." The Winter Garden photograph of his mother seeks a just image, not "just an image" (Godard).
Writing Degree Zero, mythology as naturalised history, S/Z's lexias, and the move from work to text mark the semiological arc. The Fashion System studies written women's fashion in two magazines (June 1958-June 1959): semiology reads collective representations, not sociological "reality"; fashion is never directly denoted, only connoted as natural function ("ideal for walking"). Langue of fashion is a system of differences. Early structural demystifier becomes late writer of affect and punctum.
Barthes: from demystification to punctum
Umberto Eco
From Aquinas to Joyce
Born in Piedmont, he published his Turin thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas at 24 (1956) and in 1959 a long chapter on medieval aesthetics (Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, 1986). The Middle Ages are a chapter of sign theory, and Joyce, full of Aquinas, Dante and bestiaries, bridged the medieval and the modern. The same year he wrote on the open work: Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez, Mallarmé, Calder and Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg produce "works in movement" completed by the addressee.
- Model reader. Infinite readings are an "empty gesture"; each text proposes a model reader within real possibilities, whatever the empirical author intended: "that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia" (Finnegans Wake).
- Bologna. He held the chair of semiotics at Bologna from 1975 and wrote A Theory of Semiotics (1976) and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984) in English.
Codes and Model Q
Under Peirce's unlimited semiosis, meaning is fixed by the interpretant within conditions of possibility. A Morse-type code maps one system onto another (as DNA to RNA); an s-code correlates Hjelmslev's expression and content planes. Eco avoids the referential fallacy: /dog/ stands for all dogs, /nevertheless/ has no referent. Signs are cultural units: in Australia "your shout" makes someone buy the drinks. Incompetence (snow is peanut butter), laughter and lies matter; after Quillian, "Model Q is a model of linguistic creativity", nourished by fresh information.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language: the dictionary is a disguised encyclopedia
Modes of sign production
| Mode | Example |
|---|---|
| Physical labour | Effort to produce the sign |
| Recognition | Imprints, symptoms, clues |
| Ostension | An object shown as exemplar of its class |
| Replica | Emblems, musical types, mathematical signs |
| Invention | Ratio difficilis: unforeseen by the code |
Even strongly motivated signs (an image of the Virgin, Dürer's "realism" in Gombrich, a photograph) carry convention.
Medievalist, open work, model reader
Born Piedmont 1932. Turin thesis on Aquinas aesthetics (1956, age 24); medieval aesthetics chapter later Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1986 Eng.). Medieval sign theory (Aristotle → Aquinas) feeds contemporary semiotics (metaphor). Joyce bridges past erudition and modern polyphony. Same year as the medieval chapter: "Poetics of the open work": Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez; Mallarmé, Joyce; Calder; Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg produce works in movement where the addressee co-completes.
Open work ≠ "anything goes." Every literary work proposes a model reader tied to real textual possibilities; infinite readings as empty gesture; empirical author cannot finally adjudicate. Evidence for pertinent, coherent interpretation matters. A Theory of Semiotics, The Role of the Reader, novels The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum stage sign theory (Holmes, Corpus Hermeticum, medieval archives). Dies 19 February 2016.
Eco: openness with constraints
By the numbers- 1932-2016. Life. - 1956. Aquinas thesis published. - 1980 / 1988. Name of the Rose; Foucault's Pendulum. - FW 120 "ideal insomnia" as emblem.
Open work, codes, and limits of interpretation
Umberto Eco joins medieval aesthetics, semiotics, and mass-culture analysis. The Open Work theorises ambiguity as structured invitation to the performer/reader. A Theory of Semiotics and later The Role of the Reader balance open textuality against overinterpretation; The Limits of Interpretation answers deconstructive excess. Novels (Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum) stage interpretative mania as plot.
Labelling, encyclopedia vs dictionary competence, and guarantor codes organise his Peircean-Saussurean hybrid. Death 19 February 2016 dates the book. For Lechte he is the semiotician who kept communication and model readers inside the structural adventure.
Eco: openness with limits
Algirdas Julien Greimas
Lithuania, Grenoble, Paris
Born in Lithuania, he studied law at Grenoble from 1936, acquired a taste for the Middle Ages and studied Franco-Provençal dialect. Back home in 1940, he saw his country invaded by the Soviets and the Germans. In Paris from 1944 he wrote a thesis on the vocabulary of fashion in 1830 (1948), an echo of Barthes. A 1956 article on Saussure drew on Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss; in 1966 he co-founded Langages and published Structural Semantics. He belonged to Lévi-Strauss's semiotic group at the Collège de France with Todorov, Kristeva, Genette and Metz, and compiled a Dictionary of Old French (1969).
- Legal grammar. Every legal discourse is "produced by a legal grammar that is distinct from the grammar of the natural language" it appears in.
- System produced. Unlike Saussure, language is an "assemblage of structures of signification" that must be articulated: discourse is language "taken on by the person who is speaking" (Benveniste).
- Vocabulary. Seme, sememe, classeme, anaphora: discourse, not the sentence, is the unit.
- Strategies, not rules. There is no actor behind the action, only actants produced by discursive configurations: a married couple can be one actant, a city (Paris in Maupassant's "Two Friends") another.
Modality, aspect, isotopy
Greimas's modal levels and the turn to passions
Modalisation is an axiomatic positing that overdetermines action, so it is discontinuous and cannot capture states of passion. Hence aspectuality in the semiotics of passions: Éluard's Capitale de la douleur valorises inchoateness (love only at its beginning, the day as it breaks), giving the body a place.
| Isotopy in "Two Friends" | What it links |
|---|---|
| Actorial | Separate actions referred to one actor, Paris |
| Discursive | Independent sentences sharing a subject |
| Figurative | The text as vehicle of several allegories |
| Thematic | Knowledge beyond narrative: fishing, friendship |
Lechte replies that Freud built a text from heterogeneous elements.
From Propp to structural semantics
A.J. Greimas (1917-1992), Lithuania → Grenoble law/medieval culture → wartime return → Paris doctorate on fashion vocabulary 1830 (1948) (echo of Barthes). 1956 Saussure article via Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss; 1966 founds Langages with Barthes et al.; Structural Semantics. Still follows Propp from known→unknown, simple→complex, oral→written, yet strives not to confuse semiotic being with ontology. Actantial model (subject/object, sender/receiver, helper/opponent); semiotic square of contrary/contradictory; narrative as transformation of content. Relentless scientific push risks positivism; Lechte: still repays the effort as the most developed descriptive discourse semiotics.
Greimas: structural semantics
From Propp to passions and aspectuality
Greimas still follows Propp's move from known to unknown, folktale to literary tale, even while warning against confusing semiotic being with ontology. The semiotic square and actantial model (subject/object, sender/receiver, helper/opponent) aim at a descriptive science of discourse. Modalities organise narrative: wanting-to and being-able-to at the virtual level; knowing and being-able-to at actuality; doing and being at realisation. Modalisation is axiomatic and hypothetico-deductive, overdetermining actants' discontinuous actions.
Passions and continuous states escape pure modalisation. Aspectuality (inchoate, durative, terminative) enters the semiotics of passions; Eluard's Capital de la douleur valorises beginnings (love at its start, eyelids opening, daybreak, infancy). The body becomes central to aspectual analysis. Greimas's drive to scientificity risks positivism; Lechte judges that reading him still repays the effort because he both pushes description furthest and names the difficulties.
Greimas: modalities and passions
Louis Hjelmslev
The sign function
In the Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1943) language is both system and process (text), comparable to langue and parole. No sign exists alone: Hjelmslev speaks of a sign function, "a dependence that fulfils the conditions for an analysis", between two inseparable functives, expression and content. An arrow is not always a sign. Language builds signs from non-signs, figurae such as letters, which evoke Lévi-Strauss's floating signifier and an open-ended totality.
- Purport. "The amorphous thought-mass" common to all languages: "unformed ... simply susceptible to formation", yet inaccessible to knowledge.
- System and process. A text without a language is impossible; a language without a text is imaginable. One system implies innumerable texts.
- Form and substance. Both planes have a form and a substance: the words "I love Ron" (expression-form) in a voice or carved on a wall (expression-substance).
One zone of purport, three languages
| Danish | German | French |
|---|---|---|
| træ | Baum; part of Holz | arbre; part of bois |
| skov | part of Holz; Wald | most of bois; some of forêt |
"This incongruence within one and the same zone of purport turns up everywhere": each language's content-form carves the same meaning area differently. Learners pronouncing "Berlin" vary the expression-purport, not the content; German Gott and Danish godt ("well") share sound, not content.
Denotation, connotation, metasemiotic
Hjelmslev's semiotics of connotation, as Eco diagrams it
Barthes, Todorov and Eco adopted denotative and connotative semiotics but stayed wary of metasemiotics, of which linguistics, language studying language, is the example.
Glossematics: immanent form
Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1966) sought to make Saussure's general theory rigorous. Language is a supra-individual institution to be studied immanently, not as a transcendental means to thought or emotion. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language treats language as both sign system and realisation process (roughly langue/parole). A sign is never isolated: Hjelmslev speaks of a sign function, a dependence fulfilling conditions for analysis, between expression and content functives. A mark is a sign only in context (an arrow is not always a sign).
Purport is the amorphous "thought-mass" common to languages, inseparable from language yet in some sense external, "unformed" and "inaccessible to knowledge" insofar as knowledge is formation. Language is form in relation to substance/purport; there is expression-purport and content-purport. System is always already realised structure; process/text is virtual: text needs language, but language can exist without a text. Tree/wood examples (Danish trae/skov vs German Baum/Holz/Wald vs French arbre/bois/forêt) show incongruent content-form divisions of the same purport zone.
Denotation, connotation, metasemiotic
Denotation: expression referring to a content ("The cat sat on the mat"). Connotation: expression+content together become a new expression for another content (childhood primer, "typical example"). A denotative semiotic has no plane that is itself a semiotic; a connotative semiotic has an expression plane that is a semiotic; when the content plane is a semiotic, Hjelmslev names a metasemiotic (linguistics studying language). Barthes, Todorov and Eco use denotation/connotation more readily than metasemiotics. Lechte: the project reveals how easily "sign" is taken for granted, yet Hjelmslev's own elaboration often strains his ideals of coherence and simplicity; "purport" remains the theory's most problematic factor.
Hjelmslev: from sign function to connotation
Glossematics: content and expression, form and substance
Louis Hjelmslev's glossematics radicalises Saussure: language as a system of pure relations. Each sign has content and expression planes; each plane has form and substance. The sign-function joins form of content to form of expression; substances (phonetic, semantic) lie outside the calculation proper. Commutation tests identify invariants.
Copenhagen School rigor influenced Greimas and Barthes's semiological reductions. Difficulty and neologism limited uptake; Lechte presents him as the logician of structural linguistics whose square of form/substance x content/expression remains a teaching diagram for semiotics.
Hjelmslev: two planes, form over substance
Julia Kristeva
From Sofia to Tel Quel
She came to Paris from Bulgaria in 1965, attended Barthes's seminars and joined the circle of Tel Quel, edited by Philippe Sollers, a leading force in the late 1960s critique of representation. She first made her name as interpreter of Bakhtin (the dialogical novel, carnival), then with semanalysis: the study of language's materiality, its sounds, rhythms and graphic disposition, which conventional logic, built to eliminate contradiction, cannot formalise. Poetic language (Joyce, Mallarmé) disrupts meaning; not understanding it at first is the first index of its effects. In 1990 she published Les Samouraïs, a roman à clef on her generation recalling Beauvoir's Mandarins.
Semiotic and symbolic
Revolution in Poetic Language (1974): the two dispositions
In her 1974 thesis, Revolution in Poetic Language, le sémiotique differs from both conventional semiotics and the symbolic. Mallarmé and Lautréamont exploit the semiotic within the Third Republic's historical and economic formation. Drawing on Lacan, the semiotic becomes the feminine chora, the unnameable place of the mother. The child's cries, singing, rhythm and laughter supply the raw material the avant-garde poet uses to shake an ossified symbolic.
After 1980: abjection, love, melancholy
- Powers of Horror (1980). The abject, an ambiguity beyond what can be coped with, appears in vomiting, pollution rituals and art.
- Tales of Love. Love needs idealisation and separation from the mother; agape, "the father of individual prehistory", comes from outside. Without it, eros turns destructive.
- Black Sun. Melancholics live in perpetual mourning for the mother: "foreigners in their maternal tongue".
- Strangers to Ourselves. The history and experience of being a foreigner.
Semanalysis and the subject in process
Born 1941, arrived Paris from Bulgaria 1965; Barthes's seminar; Tel Quel under Sollers. First prominence as interpreter of Bakhtin (dialogical novel, carnival). Semanalysis focuses on language's materiality (sounds, rhythms, graphic disposition) rather than communicative function alone. Poetic language (Joyce, Mallarmé) resists conventional scientific logic that eliminates contradiction; not understanding it at first is already an index of its effects. Against static langue as conscious instrument, she develops the subject in process: never only the punctual subject of consciousness, always also repressed, knowable through effects.
Semiotic and symbolic
In Revolution in Poetic Language (1974 thesis), le sémiotique (not la sémiotique) is the pre-symbolic, drive-linked chora of rhythm and energy; the symbolic is representation and articulated language. At text level they correspond to genotext and phenotext. Later work on abjection (Powers of Horror), love, melancholy and strangerhood keeps analysing the unanalysable without abandoning it to mysticism. Les Samouraïs (1990) is a roman à clef of her generation after Sartre, recalling Beauvoir's Mandarins. Feminine as source of the unnameable is one thread; language analysis remains central.
Kristeva: two modalities of signifying
Cast- Bakhtin. Dialogism and carnival she first transmits in Paris. - Barthes / Sollers / Tel Quel. Institutional and stylistic milieu. - Joyce / Mallarmé. Poetic language as laboratory. - Freud / Lacan. Subject, drives, the unnameable. - Alive Since publication.
Semiotic, symbolic, abjection
Kristeva's linguistics of the speaking subject joins Lacanian and Bakhtinian resources. The semiotic (chora, drive-based rhythm) and the symbolic (syntax, law, judgement) intertwine in poetic language; revolution in poetic language is not exterior decoration but subject-in-process. Abjection (Powers of Horror) names the borderline of subject and waste, food, maternal body; horror polices identity.
Intertextuality, stranger/foreigner ethics, and later detective fiction extend the early Tel Quel work. Born Bulgaria 1941, Paris from the 1960s; still active Oct 2026. Feminist reception splits between celebration of the maternal semiotic and critique of its risks. Lechte stresses the subject-in-process against a closed structural langue.
Kristeva: subject-in-process
Charles Sanders Peirce
A backwoodsman of signs
Son of a Harvard mathematics professor, he took Harvard degrees (1859-63), worked for the United States Coast Survey for over thirty years and lectured in logic at Johns Hopkins (1879-84). He read Kant and Hegel in German and prized Duns Scotus's haecceity, "thisness". He published over ten thousand printed pages but no book on his subjects, so his semiotics is a series of restarts. Logic, broadly, is "general semeiotic", and a paper of 1868 argued that thought which cannot be cognised in signs does not exist.
The triad
Peirce's sign function and the chain of interpretants
Induction, deduction and abduction (hypothesis) are three types of interpretant. As Eco puts it, the interpretant is another interpretation.
- Icon. Shares a quality with its object: a portrait; for Eco a mirror image is an "absolute icon".
- Index. Physically affected by its object, in a dynamical relation: weathercock, barometer, sundial, "this", a cry of "Help!", a knock at the door.
- Symbol. Originally "thrown together" as a contract: a conventional sign with an imputed relation, inseparable from its interpretant, close to Saussure's arbitrariness.
A trichotomy of trichotomies
| Sign in itself | Relation to object | Relation to interpretant |
|---|---|---|
| Qualisign: a quality | Icon | Rheme: a possibility |
| Sinsign: a one-off event | Index | Dicent: actual existence |
| Legisign: a law | Symbol | Argument: a sign of law |
These yield ten classes. A weathercock is a dicent sinsign, necessarily indexical, involving an iconic sinsign; no material sign fits a class exactly, and a photograph is both icon and index.
Logic as general semiotic
Born 1839 (father Benjamin, Harvard mathematics). Harvard BA/MA/BSc (1859/62/63); thirty-plus years with the U.S. Coast Survey; part-time Johns Hopkins logic (1879-84). Scholar of Kant, Hegel (in German) and Duns Scotus (haecceity, thisness/singularity). Founder of pragmatism and of modern semiotics; for Peirce the two are inseparable: logic in its broadest sense is "thought always taking place by means of signs," a general semeiotic treating "not merely of truth, but also of the general conditions of signs being signs" (1.444). 1868 paper: cognizable thought is thought in signs; uncognizable thought does not exist.
Over 10,000 printed pages, no single definitive book on signs: successive reworkings, repetitions and alterations. A sign is never isolated. Sign A denotes object B for interpretant C. Sign = Firstness, object = Secondness, interpretant = Thirdness. The interpretant mediates and opens unlimited semiosis: every interpretant can be read by another (Eco: the interpretant is another interpretation). Induction, deduction and abduction are three types of interpretant.
Icon, index, symbol
Icon: resembles its object in some respect. Index: contiguous or causal link (smoke/fire, weathervane). Symbol: conventional (words, traffic /stop/). STOP on red: sign /stop/, object "coming to a halt," interpretant the idea joining them; it may also mark a main road or dense area, continuing semiosis. Categories of Firstness (quality/possibility), Secondness (brute fact/reaction) and Thirdness (law/mediation) organise the whole philosophy.
Peirce: triad and unlimited semiosis
By the numbers- 1839-1914. Life. - 1868. Thought-in-signs paper (age 29). - CP citations (1.444, 2.228, 5.251) from the Collected Papers. - Scotus's haecceity as affinity.
Triadic sign, abduction, unlimited semiosis
Peirce's sign is triadic: representamen, object, interpretant. Icons, indices, symbols classify relations to objects; abduction joins induction and deduction as hypothesis. Unlimited semiosis: each interpretant becomes a further sign. Pragmatic maxim ties meaning to conceivable practical effects.
Lechte reads Peirce as structuralism's other grandfather beside Saussure: process and thirdness versus dyadic langue. Eco and later semioticians hybridise both. Difficulty of the Collected Papers and shifting terminology reward slow reading.
Peirce: triadic unlimited semiosis
Ferdinand de Saussure
An obscure Sanskritist
Born in Geneva to a famous scientific family, a contemporary of Durkheim and Freud, he left physics for languages at Leipzig, studied Sanskrit in Berlin and at 21 published his Mémoire on the primitive vowel system of Indo-European, which Benveniste saw as already inspired by arbitrariness. After a thesis on the absolute genitive in Sanskrit (1880) he taught Gothic and Old High German at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1881, then Sanskrit and Indo-European at Geneva. Dissatisfied with the discipline's terminology, he never wrote his book: the Course in General Linguistics was compiled from students' notes of lectures in 1907, 1908-9 and 1910-11. Saussure was as much catalyst as innovator.
Against nomenclature
Saussure's break with rationalist and historical views of language
Lancelot and Arnauld's Port-Royal grammar made language a mirror of universal logic; nineteenth-century linguistics made Sanskrit the link explaining all languages. Both assume language names things. Saussure shifts from history to synchrony and finds the nomenclaturist position inadequate.
- Differences. The letter "t" can be written in many ways so long as it stays distinct from other letters; in chess a button can stand for a lost king, because value comes from position, not substance.
- The sign. Signifier plus signified, bound arbitrarily, not word plus thing.
- Langue and parole. Langue is the social system; parole, individual speech. Nothing enters the system except through speech, so the totality of langue stays hypothetical.
- Change. Language changes over time independently of speakers' wills; individuals are formed by language as much as they form it.
Structure in the human sciences
For Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, Lacan and Barthes, Saussure turned research from documenting events to reading systems of meaning: kinship, texts, fashion photographs read for differential value and symptoms, with the researcher inscribed in the system, as the linguist is in language. This reverses the political philosophy that put the biological individual at the origin of society.
Course as catalyst
Before 1960 obscure; after 1968 "father" of linguistics and structuralism. Course in General Linguistics compiled from student notes (1907, 1908-09, 1910-11) at Geneva. Born Geneva 1857; physics/chemistry then Leipzig/Berlin Sanskrit; Mémoire on Indo-European vowels at 21 (Benveniste later: already the arbitrary sign); Paris EPHE Gothic/OHG from age 24; Geneva chair. Dissatisfied with linguistics' lack of reflexiveness; the book he could not write arrives posthumously via Bally and Sechehaye.
Opposes Port-Royal language-as-mirror-of-universal-logic and Neogrammarian historical explanation via Sanskrit. Key pairs: langue/parole, synchrony/diachrony, signifier/signified, arbitrariness, value through difference. Social sciences take the structural model of language as model of culture. Dies 1913.
Saussure: structural turn
Arbitrary sign, synchronic system, post-1968 catalyst
Before 1960 few outside linguistics knew Saussure; after 1968 he was named father of structuralism. The Course was compiled from students' notes (1907, 1908-09, 1910-11) at Geneva. Born 1857 into a scientific Geneva family; left physics/chemistry for Leipzig languages; at 21 published the Memoire on Indo-European vowels that Benveniste later called prophetic of the whole matter of the linguistic system.
Key theses for the human sciences: the sign's arbitrariness; langue as social system versus parole; synchronic relations over diachronic atomism; value as pure difference within the system. Individuals are formed by language as much as they form it. Structuralists (Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu, Lacan, Barthes) turned from documenting events to systems of meaning; the researcher is inscribed in the system under study. Lechte stresses catalyst as much as innovator: the century needed a language model for culture.
Saussure: system before reference
Tzvetan Todorov
Poetics of narrative
Arriving from Sofia in 1963, he read in the Sorbonne library, met Genette through a librarian and joined Barthes's seminar, completing a doctorate with him in 1966 and writing for Communications. In "Les catégories du récit littéraire", shaped by the Russian Formalists, description seeks the meaning of elements, which lies in their relations; the meaning of a whole work lies in its relation to other works: "The meaning of Madame Bovary is to be opposed to romantic literature."
- Les Liaisons dangereuses. In Littérature et signification (1967) actions obey a logic; a narrative can have more than one structure; and action may dissolve into the characters' psychological states.
- Self-creation. "Every work, every novel recounts ... the story of its own creation." Laclos's last letter explains how the letters came to be published, so the fact of fiction becomes fiction's essential trait.
- Later poetics. The Decameron, the fantastic, the theory of the symbol (Romanticism is inescapable), Critique de la critique (1984).
Bakhtin and the Other
From 1981 his reading of Bakhtin turned him from formalism, once a refuge from socialist realism, towards a philosophical anthropology of otherness: after Dostoyevsky the "thou" of the other becomes a subject, and the human sciences become a dialogue of texts.
The Conquest of America (1982): a war of signs
In The Conquest of America, Columbus meets the Indians through religious blinkers, violating them as "dirty dogs" while idealising the noble savage: alterity is "at once revealed and refused". Cortés wins by learning signs and fostering the illusion that he is a god, yet, wanting only gold, destroys Aztec civilisation. True dialogue, Rimbaud's "I is an other", lets both voices sound.
From structural narrative to the other
Born in Bulgaria, Todorov reached Paris 1963. The pre-1968 Sorbonne dean coldly refused "literary theory"; via a librarian he met Genette, then Barthes's EHESS seminar, doctorat de troisième cycle with Barthes (1966), articles in Communications. Early structural work privileges form over semantic substance (then tied to humanist hermeneutics); Greimas later supplies a structural semantics. "Les catégories du récit littéraire" (Russian Formalist influence) places meaning in relations; narrative actions obey a logic, may bear more than one structure, and can fuse with personages' psychology (Les Liaisons dangereuses). Littérature et signification (1967): even the epistolary novel's verisimilitude rests on énunciation/énoncé processes; the story of any novel is the story of its own creation.
Bakhtin turn; Conquest of America
Early 1980s rereading of Bakhtin marks a turn from apolitical formalism toward interpretative "philosophical anthropology" centered on otherness. After Dostoyevsky, art must treat the other as subject not object; "I is an other" as dialogue. The Conquest of America (1982) reads Columbus 1492 documents: fixed European grids miss indigenous meaning. Cortés learns Aztec language and myth (even posing as a god) yet still destroys; Spanish hunger for gold fails to see humans. Estimates cited: South American population from about 80 million to 1 million across 1500-1600 while world population was around 400 million. Nous et les autres (1989) continues the ethics of dialogue. Lechte contests Todorov's naming of Western civilisation as origin of dialogue, writing and improvisation.
Todorov from structure to dialogue with the other
Fantastic, genres, and ethics of the other
Tzvetan Todorov's early structuralist narratology (Grammar of the Decameron, theories of the fantastic as hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations) sits beside later essays on conquest, concentration camps, and democratic ethics. Bulgarian-French path; Poetique with Genette and Cixous. The move from formal genre theory to moral history of otherness marks his distance from pure textualism.
Lechte keeps both Todorovs in view: the classifier of narrative and the writer on the conquest of America and the dangers of dualism. Death 7 February 2017 dates present-tense source lines.
Todorov: form then ethics
Luce Irigaray
Speculum and the phallic symbolic
Her studies of the language of dementia found private idiolects structured by broken rules. Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) re-examined femininity and the mother-daughter relation in Freud and sought an écriture féminine against a male imaginary that condemns women to silence. Starting from Lacan's Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, she reads the symbolic as patriarchal: its other, once symbolised, is the same; otherwise it is incommunicable. Even the neutral subject of science and the third person are gendered male.
- Against egalitarian gestures. Equal status for the vagina still makes the penis the benchmark: "Female sexuality has always been conceptualised on the basis of masculine parameters."
- Speaking like a man. If language is phallic, women must appropriate the masculine instrument or risk psychosis.
- Dereliction. "Women lack mediation for the work of sublimation"; like Marx's proletariat, women are in society but not of it, a "sex which is not one", excluded from the social contract.
Irigaray on the unsymbolised mother-daughter relation
Elements, the divine, ethics
Since the mid-1970s she has sought symbolic means for the mother-daughter relation, revisiting the divine feminine, witchcraft and sorcery. As Margaret Whitford stresses, the aim is not mysticism or an essential woman but overcoming the deficit of woman unsymbolised. Her readings of Nietzsche (water), Heidegger (air) and Elemental Passions attend to the body and the elements. "A feminine god ... is yet to come": a god of becoming, flows and "the splendor of the body". From Levinas she takes alterity met in the material encounter, making the feminine its prototype.
Dereliction and the sex which is not one
Irigaray's Speculum (1974) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1977) treat egalitarian feminism as already compromised: women are cast on the deficit side of the ledger, lacking what men have (status, autonomy, a separate identity). Equalising the vagina with the penis still takes the penis as benchmark and concedes Freud's penis envy. Lacan intensifies the problem: the symbolic is wholly phallic, the subject a signifier, sexual difference staged as masculine fullness versus feminine lack. Irigaray answers that this is a masculine view, and that "Female sexuality has always been conceptualised on the basis of masculine parameters."
Without mediation women cannot sublimate or objectify themselves; men objectify both themselves and women. Attachment to a man becomes the condition of a social persona. Hence dereliction: a "sex which is not one" (not whole, dependent), excluded from the social contract. Psychoanalysis narrates entry into language as the son's separation from the mother via the Name-of-the-Father; the daughter is only a potential mother, poorer in symbolic means, her speech more driven (as Irigaray found in delirium studies). Whitford stresses that the project is not mystical essentialism but symbolising woman as woman so women can represent themselves to themselves and form positive relations.
Style, elements, divine, Levinas
Experimentation of style (Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, Elemental Passions, L'Oubli de l'air chez Martin Heidegger) recovers repressed body and elements (water, earth, fire, air). Theology's masculine God excludes women's experience; a feminine divine would give form to multiplicity, difference, becoming, flows, rhythms and "the splendor of the body". "A feminine god is yet to come": becoming, fluidity, transient boundaries. From Levinas she takes ethical obligation centered on the other as exteriority, met at the material encounter; the feminine is the prototype of that alterity.
Irigaray: from deficit to a feminine symbolic
Cast around Irigaray- Lacan. Real / Symbolic / Imaginary grid she inhabits and reverses. - Freud. Castration and penis envy as masculine parameters. - Margaret Whitford. Reads the project as symbolisation, not mysticism. - Elizabeth Grosz. Names the innovative "styles" of her écriture. - Levinas. Ethics of alterity at the corporeal encounter. - Nietzsche / Heidegger. Figures whose elemental silences she re-voices.
By the numbers- 1973. Le Langage des déments (Approaches to Semiotics). - 1974 / 1977. Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One. - 1980-84. Marine Lover, Elemental Passions, L'Oubli de l'air, Éthique de la différence sexuelle. - Torcello. Female Jesus that moved her as a woman (je, tu, nous). - Alive Oct 2026. Still a reference for difference feminism.
Three critiques Lechte keeps open1. Anti-Oedipus debt. Lacanian RSI still governs the subversion. 2. Homogeneous sexes. "Men"/"women" as blocs (so Derrida cannot be feminist) restore identity logic and risk classificatory closure. 3. Devotees. Does feminism require sharing her joy at Torcello's female Jesus?
Speculum, sexual difference, morphology
Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman reads the Western philosophical canon as mirror for masculine subject; woman appears as lack or envelope. This Sex Which Is Not One proposes a morphology of fluid, plural feminine sexuality against phallic one. Later work turns to ethics of sexual difference, language, and civic rituals (civil code, sexuate rights).
Psychoanalytic training and break with Lacanian orthodoxy; feminist splits over essentialism charges. Web check Oct 2026: Irigaray alive. Lechte places her with Le Doeuff and Pateman as rebuilding the subject after structuralism's anonymity.
Irigaray: difference against the mirror
Michèle Le Doeuff
The philosophical imaginary
In The Philosophical Imaginary (1980) she reads Kant's passage on phenomena and noumena: the understanding is a territory explored, then an island enclosed by nature, "the land of truth", ringed by a stormy ocean, "the native home of illusion", with fog banks and melting icebergs deluding the seafarer.
How images work in philosophy, according to The Philosophical Imaginary
Such images are not mere metaphors. Through them "every philosophy can engage in a straightforward dogmatization" without counter-argument, since good readers skip "illustrations". The image is philosophy being unphilosophical, and closing it off from scrutiny is philosophy's closure.
Women and philosophy
- Reason is not male. Unlike Irigaray (and Cixous), she holds that the plurality of rationalities belies a single masculine reason; women have always been in philosophy.
- Outdated question. "Nothing prevents a young woman from studying philosophy": why rehearse the day before yesterday?
- The practice at fault. Philosophy misrecognised images, privileged abstraction over pertinence, refused the "wandering" of thought, made women its other and hid the place of enunciation.
- Devotees. Women were cast as disciples; male philosophers short of greatness leaned on a woman to fill an "ontological lack", as Sartre leaned on Beauvoir.
Beauvoir, Roussel, Utopia
In Hipparchia's Choice, Beauvoir remodels Sartre's categories "in the heat of the moment", taking from existentialism values, not theses: her choice is "first and foremost one of morality", and she comes to speak in her own voice. Pierre Roussel's 1777 treatise, echoing Book V of Emile, reduced women to their sex: practical, imaginative, unfit for theory. Le Doeuff argues that Utopia (More, Bacon, Campanella) is essentially scholarly, a society for the school; the New Philosophers' attack on the intellectual master presupposes that dream realised.
The philosophical imaginary
Michèle Le Doeuff, ENS Fontenay professor, entered philosophy via Shakespeare's Fool: subversive speech in real life. The Philosophical Imaginary: philosophy has an imaginary level specific to it that sets what can count as rationality. Kant's island of understanding (land of truth) surrounded by foggy ocean of illusion is not mere metaphor: images close the text from scrutiny, enabling dogmatization ("that's the way it is") because "good readers" bypass illustrations. Explaining images as childish residue or as intuitive clarity both hide that effect. Closing the image = closing philosophy.
Unlike Irigaray's suspicion of philosophy's masculine language, Le Doeuff argues women should inhabit and contest reason rather than exit it. Hipparchia's Choice stages the woman philosopher's dilemma. The Sex of Knowing tracks how women are cast as knowing wrongly. Alive Since publication (IdRef / FR sources; a floating "2022 death" claim is false).
Le Doeuff: the philosophical imaginary
Philosophical imaginary and Hipparchia's choice
Le Doeuff, professor at ENS Fontenay, entered philosophy by identifying with Shakespeare's Fool: subversive speech in real life. The Philosophical Imaginary shows images are not imported decoration but set conditions of what can count as rationality. Kant's island of truth, stormy ocean of illusion, fog banks and icebergs in the first Critique close the text off from scrutiny; they are not "mere metaphor."
Philosophy has explained its images two ways (as dispensable rhetoric, or as deep truth); Le Doeuff tracks how they police who may speak. Hipparchia's Choice stages women's relation to philosophy without devotee status; Beauvoir becomes exemplary when she speaks in her own voice. Grosz and Morris worry about a salvage operation that softens feminist charges; Le Doeuff answers that autonomy of thought, even if historically monopolised by men, remains a practice feminists can use. Historical limits of philosophy are not limits of philosophy as such.
Le Doeuff: imaginary inside reason
Carole Pateman
From clerk to theorist
Born in Sussex, she left grammar school at 16 to be a clerical worker, entered Ruskin College in 1963, read PPE at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and published Participation and Democratic Theory (1970) as a graduate student. She taught at Sydney from 1972 and in 1990 took a chair at the University of California. Her aim is a genuinely general theory of the political and a more participatory democracy.
Obligation and consent
Classical theory starts, as Marx said, from the isolated individual in a state of nature, who rationally consents to a social contract. Whether, with Rousseau, men stay free under it, or, with Hobbes, trade freedom for security, liberal theory offers no deep account of consent: it can only say the individual voluntarily accepts representative government.
The Sexual Contract: liberal theory's hidden division
- Rousseau. Women cannot sublimate their passions, have no sense of justice and would favour kin over equality before the law.
- Rawls. Contemporary theories of justice keep the abstract individual without explaining how women escape association with nature.
- Canon selection. Political theory reads the canon minus its passages on sexual difference; feminism "challenges the patriarchal construction of modern political theory".
- Freud and Rousseau. Anatomy is destiny: the primal horde of brothers and the woman in the home both found a fraternal bond. The "civil body politic is fashioned after the image of the male 'individual'".
- Marriage contract. Women never consented to unequal power; husband and wife shared one legal identity, so right flowed from might.
Consent, contract, and the sexual contract
Born Sussex 1940; left school at 16 for clerical work; Ruskin College then Lady Margaret Hall (PPE) and a doctorate. Participation and Democratic Theory (1970) while still a graduate student. Sydney lecturer 1972, reader, then (1990) chair at University of California. Project: a truly general political theory that does not disqualify categories of person (women foremost) from full political subjectivity, and a more participatory democracy.
Classical liberal theory starts from the isolated individual in a state of nature (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill). Why obey? Mythical Social Contract: rational men consent. Pateman: when asked why any free and equal individual should be governed by anyone else, liberal theory has no real answer beyond voluntary acceptance of representation. Hierarchy already strains "free and equal." Worse: the political is defined as the public sphere of reason and universal freedom, while the private/domestic (reproduction, emotion, kin, body) is cast as nature's residue and women's province. For Rousseau, women in public threaten justice because they cannot sublimate particular passions.
The Sexual Contract
The Sexual Contract (1988) argues that the social contract presupposes a prior sexual contract: men's sex-right over women, fraternal right after the defeat of classic patriarchy. Marriage, employment and prostitution contracts encode subordination as "consent." Political obligation and participatory democracy cannot be repaired without confronting that buried contract. Lechte places her with Irigaray and Le Doeuff as reconstructing the political from the excluded feminine without abandoning democratic universalism's promise.
Pateman: from obligation to the sexual contract
Timeline- 1940. Born Sussex. - 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. - 1972 / 1990. Sydney; UC chair. - 1988. The Sexual Contract. - Alive Since publication.
Sexual contract and political obligation
Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract argues that modern social contract theory presupposes a prior sexual contract subordinating women; fraternity among men is not universal freedom. Critiques of Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau expose the patriarchal residue of consent stories. The Problem of Political Obligation and democracy essays extend the theme to employment and citizenship.
Anglophone political theory rather than Parisian structuralism; Lechte includes her to show feminist reconstruction of the political subject. Web check Oct 2026: Pateman alive. Reception: foundational for feminist contract critique; debates continue over historical reading of contract texts.
Pateman: contract before consent
Theodor Adorno
Frankfurt, Vienna, New York
Born Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, he studied with Kracauer at 15, took a Frankfurt doctorate in 1924 and in 1925 studied composition with Alban Berg in Vienna, writing on Schönberg. His Habilitation on Kant and Freud was rejected; the second, on Kierkegaard, appeared in 1933 as Hitler took power. He went to England, rejoined the Institute for Social Research in New York in 1938 (possibly dropping "Wiesengrund" as too Jewish-sounding, says Martin Jay), worked on Lazarsfeld's Princeton Radio project, advised Thomas Mann on Doktor Faustus and wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) with Horkheimer. Back in Frankfurt from 1953 and director from 1959, he clashed with students who occupied the Institute and died in Switzerland in 1969, writing Aesthetic Theory.
Three differences from French thought
- Science. Kristeva cites quantum physics and Derrida cites Gödel; Adorno sees science as positivist, wholly bound to identity. "Philosophy is neither a science nor the 'cogitative poetry'" positivists would make it.
- Essence and appearance. Like Plato, he condemns appearance: commodities take on a life of their own, feeding "the reified consciousness"; people live in "the open-air prison which the world is becoming".
- Consciousness. The unconscious gets little elaboration; Adorno remains more beholden to identity than recent readers suggest.
Negative dialectics
Negative Dialectics: nonidentity against Hegel's affirmative synthesis
Philosophy "lives on" after Marx's attempt to discredit it, and needs a sense of its impotence before the material world: "Disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of philosophy." It may not borrow from art; "Thoughts intended to think the inexpressible by abandoning thought falsify the inexpressible." Language keeps it from resembling science.
Against the culture industry
The aphorisms of Minima Moralia defy Hegel's system, which "cannot admit aphorisms as such". Adorno champions Schönberg, Webern and Berg because difficult avant-garde works resist reduction to exchange-value; even the simplest work becomes a tour de force. Parataxis in Aesthetic Theory serves the same resistance; aesthetic experience is the experience of the non-identical (Peter Osborne).
Negative dialectics against identity
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969): Kracauer at 15; Frankfurt doctorate 1924; Vienna composition under Berg; Schönberg essays; Kierkegaard Habilitation published day Hitler takes power (1933); Institute with Horkheimer; New York 1938 (Radio Research with Lazarsfeld); Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) with Horkheimer; returns Frankfurt 1953, director 1959; dies Switzerland 1969 writing Aesthetic Theory; student occupation conflict.
Identity-thinking is the target of Negative Dialectics: concept's violence in equating non-identical. Science treated as positivist (unlike French bonds to physics/Gödel). Culture industry: enlightenment reverts to myth. Lechte: anticipates some postmodern moves yet remains dialectical and anti-positivist, not French post-structural.
Adorno: critique without positivising
Negative dialectics and aesthetic theory
Born Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969); may have dropped Wiesengrund when joining the New York Institute (1938) because it sounded Jewish (Jay). Studies with Kracauer; Frankfurt doctorate 1924; Vienna composition with Berg; rejected Kant/Freud Habilitation; Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic accepted 1931, published the day Hitler took power. Princeton Radio Research with Lazarsfeld; Dialectic of Enlightenment with Horkheimer (1947); return to Frankfurt 1953, director 1959; conflict with occupying students; dies in Switzerland writing Aesthetic Theory.
Negative dialectics refuses identity thinking that digests the nonidentical as another identity. Philosophy must not become poetry, nor borrow "intuitions" barbarians take for art's prerogative; affinity to art does not license aestheticism. To abandon thought to "express" the inexpressible falsifies the inexpressible. Nonidentity is impure, not a pure contradiction; Marx erred in declaring philosophy's end in that key. The culture industry thesis and Schoenberg vs Stravinsky polemics sit beside this unfinished aesthetic.
Adorno: exile, dialectic, aesthetic
Hannah Arendt
Königsberg to New York
Born in Hanover and raised in Königsberg, she lost her father in 1913 and learned politics from her mother, who followed Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacists. In 1924 she studied with Heidegger at Marburg, with whom she had an affair; his mark shows in her love of the Greeks and her etymological method. Under Jaspers she wrote on love in Augustine (1929), married Günther Stern and began a life of Rahel Varnhagen. She fled Nazism in 1933 to Paris, where she knew Walter Benjamin, escaped to America after France fell in 1940 and taught mainly at the New School.
Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
- Precedents. Antisemitism and the Jews as a pariah people; imperialism's administration valuing efficiency over the lives of the colonised.
- The rightless. Stateless people lose legal identity and face arbitrary police action; a criminal is better off, having a status. "Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever." With Burke, abstract human rights are no rights at all.
- Victims, not enemies. Unlike despotism, totalitarianism targets the innocent, murders the moral person and makes death anonymous: "a secret society in broad daylight", founded on propaganda.
The banality of evil
Reporting the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker in February and March 1963, Arendt saw not a monster but an innocuous cog, content with his unexceptional status. Genocide flowed from banal, systematic, bureaucratic motives: improving rail services or exterminating millions made no difference, so long as the means were efficient and orders were followed.
The Human Condition (1958)
The Human Condition: labour, work and action
Labour and work are means; only action, possible with others, is an end, the beautiful deed. The social, the old household (oikia) of necessity, has swallowed the political. Marx is paradoxical: labour is man's essence, yet communism frees us to hunt in the morning and criticise at night. Technology makes the "social question" redundant, so freedom can return. In On Revolution (1963) the French Revolution's 1793 terror subordinated rights to necessity, while the Americans' constitution-making put freedom first.
Freedom, necessity, the modern world
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975): modern age (Columbus/Copernicus discoveries) vs modern world born with atomic explosions (The Human Condition). Obsessive themes: freedom/necessity; exception/norm; not simple Hegelian idealism. Born Hanover, raised Königsberg; father and grandfather die 1913; mother and Spartacist politics (Luxemburg); Marburg under Heidegger (affair); Husserl; Jaspers; detention; US exile; friendship with Benjamin; Origins of Totalitarianism, Human Condition, On Revolution, Eichmann "banality of evil." Vita activa: labor, work, action; public space of appearance; natality as political miracle.
Arendt: vita activa
Vita activa, banality, revolution
Lechte places Arendt among political thinkers of modernity's crises. The Human Condition divides labour, work, and action; the private household and the public space of appearance organise freedom.
Jewish exile, friendship with Jaspers, break with Heidegger after 1933, New York intellectual life, and the Eichmann report's reception (Gershom Scholem's "love of the Jewish people" charge) are part of the entry's stakes. Action is plural and unpredictable; forgiveness and promise stabilise its irreversibility and unpredictability. Critical readers dispute the social/political split and the Eichmann portrait's adequacy to evidence.
Arendt: action under crises
Jürgen Habermas
Assistant to Adorno
Born in Düsseldorf, he wrote his dissertation on the Absolute and history in Schelling (1954), assisted Adorno in Frankfurt (1956-9), and later directed the Max Planck Institute at Starnberg. He keeps Hegel and Marx but rejects Marx's theory of value. With Weber he holds that the first generation confused system rationality and action rationality, so the system (the economy) seemed to dominate society at the expense of the lifeworld. "Hegel was the first philosopher to develop a clear concept of modernity."
Against positivism
- Instrumental reason. In the 1960s science had become the slave of purposive rationality (Weber's Zweckrationalität): it serves commodities and weapons but cannot justify capitalism, and its positivism is ideological.
- Legitimation. In the 1970s, the state's limited revenue to cushion crises limits its legitimacy.
- Labour as critique. Through the hermeneutic tradition, including Freud, symbolic interaction gains a weight Marx never gave it, culminating in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981).
System and lifeworld
Habermas: the system must not override the lifeworld
Communicative action "relies on a cooperative process of interpretation" in which participants relate at once to the objective, social and subjective worlds. Drawing on Mead, Durkheim, Parsons, Piaget and Kohlberg (moral competence) and Chomsky (linguistic competence), he argues that norms are open to critical reflection, since even the technical/normative distinction is normative. Moral theory should "clarify the universal core of our moral intuitions and thereby refute value skepticism".
Emancipation without revolution
Habermas refuses both revolutionary and positivistic roads to emancipation. Capitalism is a class society and purposive rationality tightens its hold, yet the self-regulating system whose imperatives override consciousness must not be equated with the lifeworld of consciousness and communicative action. Early 1970s work on language, communication and social evolution builds a normative frame for an emancipatory interest, culminating in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981).
After Schutz, the lifeworld is the everyday horizon, public and private, of identity formation. Communicative action is a cooperative interpretation relating at once to objective, social and subjective worlds. Recognition of validity claims here can modify lifeworld structures and push back on the system. With Parsons he theorizes society as system; with Kohlberg and Piaget, moral competence; with Chomsky, linguistic competence. Norms must be open to critical reflection because the technical/normative distinction is itself normative. Moral theory should "clarify the universal core of our moral intuitions and thereby refute value skepticism."
Pathologies and the discourse of modernity
A pathology is a disequilibrium: cultural impoverishment when technical rationality dominates the system is the prime case. Modernity risks total pathology unless Enlightenment correctives inside the modern tradition itself are activated. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity he charges Adorno, Bataille, Foucault and Derrida with exacting "a high price for taking leave of modernity": a radical critique of reason that still depends on reason and blunts the line between alienation and emancipation. Validity claims (truth, rightness, sincerity) replace the older subject-centered philosophy of consciousness.
Habermas from Schelling to communicative reason
Timeline- 1929. Born Düsseldorf. - 1954. Dissertation on Absolute and history in Schelling. - 1956-59. Assistant to Adorno, Frankfurt. - 1970s. Legitimation and welfare-state fiscal limits. - 1981. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. - 14 Mar 2026. Dies in Starnberg, aged 96 (Suhrkamp / AP).
Validity claims in speech- Truth. Propositional claims about the objective world. - Rightness. Normative claims about the social world. - Sincerity. Expressive claims about the subjective world. - Ideal speech. Distorted communication is diagnosed against an interest in mutual understanding built into language use.
Communicative action and discourse ethics
Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action distinguishes communicative from strategic action; validity claims (truth, rightness, sincerity) are redeemable in discourse. The public sphere's structural transformation (Strukturwandel) and later discourse ethics answer postmodern scepticism with procedural reason. Debates with Gadamer, Luhmann, Rawls, and Derrida define late-century positions.
Frankfurt second generation after Adorno; linguistic turn inside critical theory. Web-verified Oct 2026: died 14 March 2026 in Starnberg. Lechte's living present tense is obsolete; flag in lens, do not rewrite his narrative voice as if he foresaw it.
Habermas: communication as reason
Ernesto Laclau
From Buenos Aires to Essex
Educated at Buenos Aires and Oxford, he taught in the Department of Government at Essex from 1973. His 1971 article "Feudalism and capitalism in Latin America" demolished Gunder Frank's reduction of capitalism to a nineteenth-century notion of the market, blind to the weight of culture and ideology in Latin America.
Beyond Marxist essentialism
- Second International. Kautsky read Marxism as a science of socialism's inevitability, fixed by the economic base.
- Critics. Reformists (the British Labour Party), Bernstein's revisionism, Sorel's syndicalism and, in the 1920s, Gramsci gave weight to superstructure and intellectuals.
- Still essentialist. Whether economistic or culturalist, Marxism read in the working class "its objective destiny", giving it ontological status.
- New premises. No necessary link between socialism and any agent, no privileged point such as marginality; "unfixity" has "become the condition of every social identity". Althusser's "last instance" goes, his Freudian overdetermination stays.
Laclau's logic of the political, from structure to hegemony
Identity as power
An identity is neither fixed nor wholly fluid: it is relational, after Saussure, yet not reducible to its relations, the product of tension between necessity and contingency. A totally self-determined identity would make autonomy redundant; a fully determined one would merge with the structure. Antagonisms have no underlying reason, yet are unavoidable because identities never close. Hegemony, like "democracy", is a floating signifier. Politics needs relatively unchanging sedimented practices, and representation needs some opacity. Turning Derrida's "impurity" into a politics, Laclau treats feminism, ecology, multiculturalism and the anti-war movement as contingently constituted: "identity as such is power". American pluralism and elitism are two sides of one determinist coin.
Contingency, antagonism, hegemony
With Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), Laclau argues that no social structure is entirely closed: dislocation is essential and opens transformative action. Identities are partially determined by social relations yet never fully so; autonomy is constituted through dislocation. Hegemony is the politically potent articulation that links antagonisms into a provisional social identity. Against postmodern impotence, the tone is optimistic.
Born in Argentina, educated at Buenos Aires and Oxford; from 1973 at Essex. In 1971 his critique of Gunder Frank ("Feudalism and capitalism in Latin America") rejected reducing capitalism to a nineteenth-century market notion inadequate for Latin-American societies where culture and ideology matter as much as markets.
Against Marxist essentialism
Classical Marxism (Second International, Kautsky) reads socialism as historically inevitable via economic laws; reformists (Bernstein), syndicalists (Sorel) and Gramsci gave more weight to ideology and intellectuals, yet still placed the working class as origin of change. Whether economistic or culturalist, Marxism remains essentialist: intellectuals "read in the working class its objective destiny." A new frame is needed for contingency. Empty or floating signifiers (after Lévi-Strauss / Lacan) organise political frontiers; antagonism prevents any final suturing of the social. Radical democracy multiplies sites of struggle rather than waiting for a single proletarian subject.
Laclau/Mouffe: contingency against destiny
Timeline- 1935-2014. Born Argentina; dies 13 April 2014. - 1971. Critique of Gunder Frank. - 1973. Essex Department of Government. - 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with Mouffe. - Later: New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time; populism as political logic.
Hegemony, empty signifiers, populism
With Mouffe, Laclau reworks Gramsci: hegemony articulates contingent elements into political frontiers; society has no sutured foundation. Empty or floating signifiers (the "people," "justice") organise chains of equivalence against a constitutive outside. Populism is a logic of articulation, not a mere demagogic style.
Argentine roots, Essex school, and debate with Marxist class essentialism define the project. Death 13 April 2014 (web-verified) dates Lechte's present tense. Critics charge political formalism; supporters find a vocabulary for movements after the working class's demographic decline.
Laclau: hegemony without guarantee
Alain Touraine
From the coal-mine to the Renault factory
Born into a long line of doctors, he entered the École Normale Supérieure and passed his agrégation, then broke with family tradition to work in a coal-mine in northern France. In 1950 he joined Georges Friedmann at the CNRS; his study of work at Renault appeared in 1955, Sociologie de l'action in 1965. Study with Parsons and Lazarsfeld in America (1952) made him one of the few French sociologists who knew American sociology from inside; his theory of action is largely a critique of Parsons's social system.
Social movements
Touraine's three forms of conflict, illustrated from the factory floor
On the factory floor, demanding equal pay for equal qualifications is defensive collective behaviour; demanding a say in decisions is social struggle; seeking to transform power relations in the factory and society is a social movement. Movements are active, not reactive, and fight for historicity, the general cultural forms of social life. Such conflict is neither crisis nor Parsonian dysfunction.
- Class. Against Marx, there is no class in itself: "Social class is the category in whose name a movement acts."
- Women's movement. It changes norms and values as well as inequalities, and cannot be reduced to a party.
- Method. "Cold objectivity" misses the movement's heat; the researcher works from inside towards a "conversion", first applied to himself, then shared with actors.
Critique of modernity (1992)
Modernity, from Descartes and the Enlightenment, is secular and dominated by instrumental rationality. Against the Frankfurt School, which he finds elitist and at risk of a totalitarian outcome, Touraine holds that modernity is divided against itself, "self-critical" and "self-destructive". Our weakness comes from the decomposition of the rationalist model into separate logics of pleasure, status, profit and power. Reading Nietzsche, Freud and the late Foucault, he separates the active subject from the socially consecrated self; the subject "reconstructs the fragmented cultural field", linking life, consumption, nation and enterprise.
Action, subject, and new social movements
Alain Touraine (born 1925) is Lechte's sociologist of action against structural closure. Against both functionalist system theory and classical Marxist class destiny he studies how actors produce society through conflict. Early work on industrial society and workers' consciousness; later the shift to post-industrial society and "new social movements" (students, women, regionalisms, ecology) whose stakes are cultural identity and historicity, not only redistribution.
Method of sociological intervention: researchers enter movements to help actors clarify the meaning of their struggles. The Subject (capital S) is the actor's effort to become an actor, resisting both market and community totalities. Paired with Laclau as the book's hopeful political sociology: contingency and conflict as openings, not pathologies. Dies 9 June 2023 (verified).
Touraine: historicity as struggle
Timeline- 1925-2023. Life; dies 9 June 2023. - Industrial society studies; May 1968 as laboratory. - The Self-Production of Society; later Subject and modernity books. - Lechte present tense is pre-2023.
Social movements, sociological intervention, modernity renewed
Marked by May 1968 at Nanterre: student action ceased to be reactive and became transformative social movement. Action against the system need not mean voluntarism; Touraine seeks a subject of action beyond individualism. Born 1925 (Lechte: 1929), medical family, ENS then coal mine, CNRS with Friedmann, Renault study (1955), Sociologie de l'action (1965), study with Parsons and Lazarsfeld in the US.
Method of sociological intervention: researcher does not adopt actors' ideology but seeks a conversion that elicits the highest meaning of conflict with them. Later modernity work (1992) returns to Descartes/Enlightenment secularisation and progress, then tracks instrumental rationality valorising means; Frankfurt, early Foucault, and the postmodern put subject and universal reason in doubt. Touraine dies 9 June 2023 (web-verified); Lechte's present-tense career notes are dated.
Touraine: movements
Walter Benjamin
The last private scholar
Born in Berlin to a Jewish art dealer, he studied in Freiburg and Berlin, led radical Jewish students and, with Gershom Scholem, absorbed messianic and Kabbalistic thought. He met Ernst Bloch and considered following Scholem to Palestine in 1924, but the communist actress Asja Lacis intervened. Frankfurt rejected his Habilitation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925), for its lyrical style. He translated Proust and Baudelaire, went to Paris in 1933 on an Institute for Social Research stipend, knew the surrealists and Bataille's College of Sociology, and worked on the Arcades Project. Refused passage at Port-Bou in 1940, he took his own life; next morning his group was let into Spain. "Suicide ... is the achievement of modernity in the field of passions."
The work of art and technik
- Aura. Reproducibility withers the work's aura of authenticity, and perception changes with it; art is then designed for reproduction.
- Simulacrum. The negative multiplies "originals", bypassing original and copy, a lead Baudrillard follows.
- Technik. Technique is essential to photography, not a mere negation of aura.
- Remotivation. Gregory Ulmer sees reproduced signifiers remotivated in new contexts, the basis of collage and montage.
- Film. The audience shares the camera's position; the close-up, like Freud on slips of the tongue, reveals the unnoticed.
Reproduction as tradition
The guises of reproduction in Benjamin, from translation to the Arcades
"No poem is intended for the reader": a translation should "touch the original lightly", as fragments of a broken vessel reproduce the whole. A story survives in memory, unlike information; it presupposes a community and turns listener into storyteller. The subject may forget the memory, but the memory does not forget the subject. In the Arcades, glass brings the street inside and blurs private and public; Benjamin joins Marxist analysis of capitalism to Jewish theology. A wax woman adjusting her garter in the Musée Grévin is, says Buck-Morss, "frozen in time".
Private scholar at a threshold
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940): unity of the oeuvre is thwarted by diversity (German tragic drama, Romanticism, history, language, translation, film, Paris, Baudelaire, Marxism, storytelling) and by styles (prose, fragment, aphorism, citation). Judaism, Marxism and progressive modernity meet in a disappearing private-scholar form of life. Berlin Jewish art-dealer family; Freiburg/Berlin philosophy; Jewish radical students with Scholem (messianism, Kabbalah); meets Bloch; contemplates Palestine 1924 but marriage to Asja Lacis intervenes. Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925/28) rejected as Habilitation at Frankfurt for unconventional style; his only completed book. Translations of Proust and Baudelaire; Paris exile 1933; modest Institute stipend; associates with surrealists and Bataille's Collège de Sociologie; unfinished Arcades Project. Suicide at Port-Bou 25 September 1940 after border refusal; next morning the group is allowed through. He had written: suicide is "the achievement of modernity in the field of passions."
Aura and mechanical reproduction
"The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction": aura of authenticity withers; sense perception and mode of existence change; reproduction brings art closer to masses and opens political uses (fascist aestheticisation of politics vs communist politicisation of art). Angel of history (Klee's Angelus Novus): progress as storm piling wreckage. Storyteller essay: experience (Erfahrung) declining. Lechte: postmodern debates keep returning to aura's loss.
Benjamin: fragments against unity
Aura, allegory, weak messianic power
Walter Benjamin's essays braid Marxist and Jewish messianic motifs. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility tracks the decline of aura and the politics of mass image. The Trauerspiel book privileges allegory over symbol; the Arcades Project montages commodity dreamworlds. "On the Concept of History" opposes historicist progress with weak messianic power and the state of exception as the rule.
Friendship with Scholem, Adorno's editing, flight and suicide at Portbou (1940) frame reception. Disputes continue over Marxist vs theological priority. For Lechte he is a precursor of cultural studies and media theory avant la lettre.
Benjamin: aura, allegory, history
Maurice Blanchot
Limpid prose, deepening obscurity
Blanchot is less a Romantic, as Todorov argued, than a lucid modernist who refuses Hegel's end of history and its homogeneous Absolute Knowledge. Unlike Joyce he writes no "unreadable" prose, and unlike Mallarmé no musical text. Death Sentence opens: "These things happened to me in 1938." Then names are erased, as in Kafka; J, terminally ill, seems to die of her own accord, is helped to die with morphine, and returns to life. The time of writing itself becomes ambiguous: a first draft was destroyed, and after J's death the narrator says the events have not yet happened.
Reading as crisis
- Critics. Most set new works in existing categories; once the critic is an author, he can no longer be a reader. True reading is a crisis in reading.
- Anonymity. The work's creative force effaces the author; merit shows only across the oeuvre, which no author fully sees.
- No institution. Nothing exists prior to the work; each work reinvents writing and is, to the institution, non-literary.
- Solitude. The work is cut off from all others; it is the shape the writer's silence takes.
Blanchot's two series of concepts, both yielding indeterminacy
The image grasps the object by distancing it: "what is seen does not belong to the world of reality, but to the indeterminate milieu of fascination". Death cannot be experienced, so Blanchot writes the impossibility of that experience. In When the Time Comes, Claudia looks at the narrator "by chance", and doubt hangs over whether anything happened; chance spreads "like the ink of an octopus". Later works break the récit into fragments, giving the reader the widest range of meaning. A true community, as for Bataille, has no end beyond its existence: the unknown readers into whose void every writer ventures.
Literature, neutrality, the disaster
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) is for Lechte the writer for whom literature is an experience of the outside: work that undoes the mastery of the "I" and the work's own completion. Early right-wing journalism is a biographical scar; postwar friendship with Levinas and the ethics of the other reshape the project. Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence, The Space of Literature, The Infinite Conversation, The Writing of the Disaster stage writing as désœuvrement (unworking): the work's essence is its impossibility of being a finished work.
Death is not a heroic possibility (against Heideggerian authenticity) but the interminable "dying" that writing approaches without owning. The neuter and the il y a (after Levinas) name an impersonal vigilance. Friendship, community and the May 1968 tracts show a politics of refusal rather than programme. Influence on Foucault, Derrida and Nancy is decisive for French thought's turn to literature as philosophical site.
Blanchot: from work to unworking
Writing's outside- Literature ≠ communication or expression of a prior self. - Désœuvrement: the work unworks itself. - Neutrality / neuter against the personal voice. - Dying (not death-as-possibility) as writing's horizon. - Community without communion (later Nancy).
Neutral, disaster, friendship
Maurice Blanchot's fiction and essays theorise the space of literature as where the work unworks itself. The neutral, the outside, and the disaster (The Writing of the Disaster) name relations to death and community without fusion. Political itinerary from 1930s right-wing journalism to later left friendship with Levinas and Derrida complicates hagiography.
Lechte reads him as limit-writing beside Bataille and Levinas: literature as demand that suspends mastery. Death 20 February 2003.
Blanchot: literature unworks
James Joyce
Exile from Dublin
Born in Dublin, he studied modern languages at University College, graduating in 1902 fluent in Italian, French, German, literary Norwegian and Latin, though never Greek. After a spell in Paris he lived in the Martello tower in 1904, began Stephen Hero and eloped with Nora Barnacle. Dubliners (1914), stories of Dublin's "paralysis", came after trouble with the censor; A Portrait of the Artist was serialised in the Egoist from 1914. After Zurich in the war, he settled in Paris, where Sylvia Beach published Ulysses (1922) in 1,000 copies. Finnegans Wake, written 1923-38, appeared from Faber in 1939. He returned to Zurich in December 1940 and died there of a perforated ulcer in January 1941.
Thoth and mnemonics
"Plato's pharmacy" turns on Thoth, the god of writing whom Plato blames for false memory. Joyce's mnemonic procedure links the most unlikely elements; and mnemonics, Derrida notes, would be unnecessary if memory were not already defective, confirming the arbitrary sign.
Ulysses: contingency given form
Day and night: the two Joyces Lechte sets side by side
Homer is only a provisional anchor: like Odysseus, Bloom leaves 7 Eccles Street and returns unpredictably, and Joyce erased the Homeric chapter titles. Baudelaire's modern experience, "to be away from home and yet to feel at home", meets the "coincidence of meeting, discussion, dance, row". Bloom's walk along Sir John Rogerson's quay is a chain of chance encounters that must still be turned into signs. Two strategies stop it becoming an inventory: minimal narrative, and a style that makes words count for themselves. Realists made contingent details look necessary; Joyce makes them autonomous, favouring speech over langue. Kristeva calls this a "revelation".
Finnegans Wake: the night
Stephen holds that "Paternity may be a legal fiction"; the father principle is that of determinacy, meaning and causality. The Wake challenges it through agglutination ("meanderthalltale", "chaosmos", "continuarration"), rhythm and intonation, exposing Kristeva's semiotic level. Criticism struggles to objectify it. Joyce's quip about keeping critics busy for three hundred years misleads: the text has no final meaning, only a system of differences.
Equivocity against Husserl
Derrida finds Joyce already in the Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry (1962) and in "Plato's Pharmacy" (1968): against Husserl's univocity, Joyce's "generalised equivocity." Thoth in Finnegans Wake is Plato's god of writing and false memory (mnemonics); mnemonics confirms the sign's arbitrariness because lived memory is already defective. Glas as a kind of wake (mourning); The Postcard "haunted by Joyce," Babelian multiplicity of voices. Joyce re-evaluates art and reality for late-twentieth-century thought.
Born Dublin 1882; Clongowes, Belvedere, UCD modern languages (Italian, French, German, literary Norwegian, Latin; never Ancient Greek despite myth fascination). Paris medicine 1902; Martello Tower 1904; elopes with Nora Barnacle; Trieste years; Dubliners, Portrait (Egoist 1914), Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939). Dies Zurich 1941. Lechte focuses on Ulysses and the Wake as forces on writing itself: stream, parody, schemata, night language, river of words.
Joyce as philosophical event
Ulysses, Wake, and structuralist reading
Joyce functions in Lechte as the literary laboratory of modern language: Ulysses day's encyclopedia, Finnegans Wake's night language. Structuralists and Tel Quel writers treat Joycean polyglossia as proof that literary language exceeds communication. Homeric parallels, stream of consciousness, and Wakean portmanteaus become semiotic exhibits.
Biographical Dublin-Trieste-Paris path matters less here than the texts' use by theory. Lechte's Joyce is an operator in the structuralism-to-postmodernity machine, not a full life.
Joyce: language as laboratory
Friedrich Nietzsche
A life cut short
Born in Saxony, son of a Lutheran minister who died insane at 36, he grew up in a wholly female household, excelled at Pforta (but not in maths), and studied theology and philology at Bonn, then Leipzig, where he discovered Schopenhauer. Basel made him professor of classical philology at 24, before his doctorate; illness forced his retirement in 1879. In January 1889 he collapsed in Turin, embracing a whipped horse, and never regained his sanity. He published nine books between 1872 and 1888.
Against the order of the Same
- Herd morality. The ideal equality of democracy and Christianity homogenises.
- Self-preservation. The "physiologists'" drive is an unwarranted teleology; life is a venting, a will to power, and violence and sacrifice contradict it.
- Idealism denies life. Every essentialism must deny some part of life; life is a totality of differences, opening an "idiolectal" end of communication.
Tragedy and art
The Birth of Tragedy (1872) sets the Dionysian (chaos, dream, intoxication) against the Apollonian (order, form). "Art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life." The Chorus, contra Schlegel, sees the action as real and responds through rhythmic intoxication. Platonism destroyed tragedy from within; its heirs deny the spirit of music: "Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion."
Nietzsche: reactive and active responses to life
Guilt, Zarathustra and recurrence
Christianity invented bad conscience to sustain the illusion of equality: those who are superior must turn their difference against themselves. Guilt is the weapon of reactive ressentiment. In the market-place of utility, Zarathustra is taken for a madman: "Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same." There is no willing subject behind power; values must be affirmed, not found "in themselves" as Kant thought. The eternal recurrence is a game of dice played infinitely, sometimes tied to thermodynamics, sometimes to refusing to deny even horror: amor fati.
Life, Birth of Tragedy, horizontality
Born 1844 in Saxony to Lutheran pastor Ludwig (died insane 1849); raised from age six in an all-female household after his brother's death. Pforta, then Bonn theology and philology, Leipzig and Schopenhauer. Basel chair of classical philology at 24 without doctorate (hastily arranged). Taught 1869-79, then independent work until collapse in Turin January 1889 (arms around a whipped horse); never regained sanity; died 1900. Biography and the Nazi reception complicate reading; for Lechte he nonetheless seeds anti-humanist thought (especially via Foucault) that refuses a stable subject-object relation.
The Birth of Tragedy (1872) sets Dionysian (chaos, dream, intoxication) against Apollonian (order, form), both aesthetic: life as a work of art. Horizontal thought is thought of difference not identity. Democratic or Christian equality is "herd-animal morality"; the physiologists' drive to self-preservation is a homogenising teleology contradicted by violence, sacrifice, unhealthy living. Life is a venting, a will to power, a totality of differences no common scale can measure.
Guilt, Zarathustra, eternal recurrence
Christian equality invents guilt / bad conscience so those who feel superior must turn difference against themselves as responsibility for others' suffering. Guilt marks reactive thought and ressentiment. In Zarathustra, the higher man speaks in the marketplace of utility and is taken for a madman; the herd wants the Ultimate Man who invented happiness. Revaluation of values is making values within the play of forces of the will to power; values do not exist in themselves. Eternal recurrence is the enigmatic doctrine of difference and uncertainty: no origin or purpose, continual flux, not infinite novelty but repetition like dice cast infinitely; sometimes tied to thermodynamics, sometimes to amor fati, affirming even the horrific without splitting life into acknowledged good and denied evil.
Birth of Tragedy: twin aesthetic principles
Against idealism- Equality as Same → herd morality. - Self-preservation teleology → contradicted by life's facts. - Guilt as reactive weapon of the weak. - Will to power / eternal return / amor fati as affirmative counter-moves. - Style and excess as philosophical practice (link to Deleuze).
Genealogy, will to power, eternal return
Nietzsche is the nineteenth-century detonator inside Lechte's late-century cast. Genealogy of morals, death of God, will to power, and eternal return feed Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and others. Master/slave morality, perspectivism, and the critique of truth as metaphor (On Truth and Lies) underwrite suspicion of foundations.
Philology training, Basel chair, break with Wagner, Turin collapse 1889, death 1900: the life is already myth. Lechte needs Nietzsche less as closed system than as permanent challenge to totality and resentment.
Nietzsche: genealogy against foundations
Georg Simmel
An outsider in Berlin
Youngest of seven children, supported by the music publisher Julius Friedländer, Simmel studied psychology, history, philosophy and Italian in Berlin, taking his doctorate (1881) with an essay on Kant's views of matter. For fifteen years he was a Privatdozent living on student fees; despite Max Weber's backing at Heidelberg, anti-Semitism and conservatism kept him from a chair until Strasbourg in 1914, aged 56. He anticipates Irigaray on male objectivity, Mauss and Bataille on exchange, and the early Barthes on the event.
The metropolis and mental life
In the city, as Tönnies saw, formal ties replace affective ones, and life is ruled by abstract forms, chief among them money, "a great leveller". Freed from the reversible time of tradition into the city's irreversible time, consciousness becomes hypersensitive to Baudelaire's "transitory, the fugitive, the contingent". Overloaded, the psyche filters stimulation until it reaches indifference to distinctions: the blasé attitude.
The Philosophy of Money (1900)
Simmel's account of money and its effects on modern life
- Art. Separated from craft technique, the art object gains exchange value; a Mona Lisa's price must be almost unimaginable to respect its uniqueness.
- Means, not end. Money's meaning lies in what it buys; the miser and the ascetic pervert it into an end.
- Cynicism. Whoever sees that the same sum of money "can procure all the possibilities that life has to offer must also become blasé"
- Union without the personal. Money unites people "while excluding everything personal", yet widens the circle of possible ties.
- Prostitution. Degrades by making people a means, against Kant; Lechte counters that professionalisation is an equally plausible model.
Women and objective culture
Technology and the division of labour make domestic work redundant and drive the women's movement. Objective culture appears gender neutral but is male; women oppose the law because it embodies men's interests. Simmel wants women to enter public life on their own terms, but risks naturalising a female psychology.
Money, metropolis, forms
Georg Simmel (1858-1918), contemporary of Saussure, Freud, Durkheim. Sexuality as male objectivity (Irigaray echo); money/exchange (Mauss/Bataille); event and anti-realism (early Barthes). Undocumented essay style and "prosaic" topics affronted academe; hindsight: living the phenomena he analyses. Berlin 1858; Friedländer patronage; Privatdozent fifteen years; anti-Semitism and conservatism delay chair until Strasbourg 1914 (age 56); dies 1918.
Philosophy of Money; "Metropolis and mental life": formal ties replace affective; bureaucracy and science differentiate life into abstract forms (money the great leveller); greater individual freedom with blasé attitude and reserve as psychic protection.
Simmel: consciousness of modernity
Money, metropolis, and modern individuality
Contemporary of Saussure, Freud, and Durkheim, Simmel (1858-1918) wrote undocumented essays on "prosaic" topics that later look pioneering: sexuality (objectivity as male, near Irigaray), money/exchange (near Mauss and Bataille), the event and critique of realism (near early Barthes). Anti-Semitism and academic conservatism delayed a chair until Strasbourg 1914 at age 56; for fifteen years he lived on Privatdozent fees at Berlin.
The Philosophy of Money treats money as equivalence and mediation with no value in itself; meaning is what it buys. Miser and ascetic pervert money into an end. A developed money economy stays in motion. As pure form, money holds an infinity of contents and frees exchange from barter's particularism; as levelling, it feeds the blase metropolitan attitude. "The metropolis and mental life" portraits autonomous individuality under sensory overload and intellectualisation. To analyse sexuality, money, and sociability was, for Simmel, also a way of living them.
Simmel: money and metropolitan consciousness
Philippe Sollers
Tel Quel and after
Born Philippe Joyaux in Bordeaux to Anglophile factory owners, he loved jazz and then Joyce, was expelled by the Jesuits at Versailles, and taught himself literature and philosophy. He feigned schizophrenia to escape call-up during the Algerian War. Le Défi (1957) won Mauriac's praise, Une curieuse solitude (1958) Aragon's, and Le Parc (1961) a prize. In 1960 he co-founded Tel Quel, which published Foucault, Barthes, Derrida and Kristeva and became, for many, the French avant-garde; L'Infini (1983) marked a "return of meaning".
Writing the void
- Influences. Baudelaire, Poe, Proust, Lautréamont, Surrealism, then Francis Ponge, who treated language as a milieu giving body and soul, not a vehicle for ideology.
- Joyce and Artaud. By 1972, "the greatest revolution in language in the twentieth century", censored by Surrealism.
- Beyond Robbe-Grillet. In 1964 he left the now academic Nouveau Roman: Robbe-Grillet implies the void; Sollers writes it, writing as an analogue of the void.
- Rhythm. Lois has an unconscious decasyllabic rhythm, consciously developed in the unpunctuated Paradis (1981); Purcell, Monteverdi, Webern, Parker and Konitz set the pace. "The ear" comes first.
Stages of Sollers's writing, each a writing about writing
The exception
Like Nietzsche, Sollers holds that "exception is the rule in art and literature": the true writer remodels the protocols of writing and, since they are social, shakes society. Journalism embodies the writing doxa; it fails only when equated with great writing. The narcissist never takes on universal norms; the exception takes the universal as a personal problem. This is horizontal, not elitist, since elites need the existing scale. With Jean-Louis Houdebine he drew on Duns Scotus's haecceitas, "thisness". Femmes is the narrative of its own writing: the critics' charge of disloyalty was folded into the fiction. Paradis is an unpunctuated Femmes, Femmes a punctuated Paradis.
Tel Quel, analogical writing
Philippe Sollers (born Philippe Joyaux, Bordeaux 1936) uses biography for a writing of the act of writing (Forest: analogical writing). Media fixates on persona shifts (Nouveau Roman → Maoism → Catholicism → eighteenth-century classicism) more than on texts; he plays the mirror game. With others founds Tel Quel (1960) publishing Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva; later L'Infini (1983) marks "return of meaning." Jesuit education, expelled; self-taught; feigned schizophrenia to avoid Algerian War call-up 1962. Early prizes: Le Défi (1957), Le Parc (1961); Aragon and Mauriac praise. Distances from Robbe-Grillet 1964: Nouveau Roman too academic; Sollers would write the void as analogue, not only imply it. Joyce and Artaud as greatest twentieth-century language revolutions. Alive Since publication.
Sollers: writing as practice
Tel Quel, text, and the novel after the novel
Philippe Sollers, novelist and animator of Tel Quel, stands at the junction of avant-garde writing and theory (Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida in the journal's orbit). The program treats the text as productive practice, not representation of a prior real; Maoist and then other political turns mark the group's itinerary. Sollers's own fiction experiments with voice, citation, and the erotic as writing's motor.
Lechte reads him among postmodern literary figures beside Duras and Joyce. Biographical present-tense claims in the book need dating; Sollers remains alive as of Oct 2026 (web-verified). Pairing him with Touraine's 2023 death in synthesis was an earlier edition error and must not recur.
Sollers: journal and novel
Jean Baudrillard
A life of "virtual rupture"
Born in Reims to a family moving from peasant roots into the civil service, he failed the agrégation and preferred to describe his life as "a virtual state of rupture". He completed a sociology thesis at Nanterre under the anti-structuralist Henri Lefebvre (1966), worked with Barthes, and published Le Système des objets (1968), which echoes The Fashion System. Unlike Lefebvre, he worked through structuralism to the other side. Mauss's gift and Bataille's expenditure taught him that no economy rests on a utilitarian base: the Kula and potlatch show waste for prestige as the origin of consumption.
Four logics of the object
Baudrillard's four logics: utility, market, gift and status
- Relational objects. Following Saussure, no object exists alone; even restraint in an uncluttered room signals taste.
- Needs are a myth. After Veblen, Mauss and Bataille, irreducible primary needs rest on an ideological anthropology; consumption does not homogenise, it differentiates.
- No true and false needs. Against Galbraith and the Frankfurt School, critique must avoid renewed moralism.
- Anti-discourse. "The society of consumption is also the society of the denunciation of consumption"; even advertising parodies advertising, and everything "anti-" is recuperated.
Code, simulation, hyperreality
From Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), the code (binary, DNA, digital) supersedes the sign. Reproduction is itself "original", so the difference between copy and original becomes redundant, and reversibility abolishes finality. Three orders of simulation run from the Renaissance counterfeit, through industrial production, to today's code. If power has no content, as Foucault showed, central institutions simulate power. Beauty and ugliness, left and right, true and false become interchangeable, and the system risks implosion.
Seduction and fatal strategies
To resist recuperation, Baudrillard gives primacy to the object over the subject: "fatal" theory over banal, critical theory. The conforming masses, once the despair of revolutionaries, become the model: "There is a kind of fatal strategy of conformity."
Sign-value, code, hyperreality
Three phases: (1) critique of Marx's use-value → sign-value of objects (The System of Objects 1968, Barthes echo); (2) even the sign as meaning-vehicle is too reductive; Saussure's anagrams (words emerging magically through letters) closer to language; (3) from Symbolic Exchange and Death mid-1970s: the code (digital, DNA, perfect reproduction) bypasses the real → hyperreality. Gift (Mauss) and expenditure (Bataille) block utilitarian equilibrium; potlatch and Kula show waste/prestige as original consumption.
Born Reims 1929; peasant grandparents, civil-service parents; first intellectual in family; failed agrégation; no permanent university post (retired); "virtual state of rupture." Thesis with Lefebvre at Nanterre 1966; associated with Barthes; early Calvino pieces in Les Temps modernes; translates Brecht and Weiss. Dies 6 March 2007.
Baudrillard: from sign-value to the code
Sign-value, code, hyperreality
Three phases organise Lechte's Baudrillard. First, critique of Marxian use-value yields a semiotic theory of the object and sign-value under production. Second, even the meaning-bearing sign is too reductive; Saussure's anagrams (words emerging through letters) better fit language's magic. Third, from Symbolic Exchange and Death onward, the code (digital, DNA, information) enables reproduction for which copy/original is redundant, opening hyperreality.
Born 1929 Reims; peasant grandparents, civil-service parents; first family intellectual; Nanterre sociology; dies 6 March 2007. Simulation and models exemplify pure reproduction once the "natural object" loses credibility. Extreme theoretical positions are Baudrillard's stated method against systemic implosion; critics reply that the code's hegemony is overstated. Virtual reality, global communications, holograms, and art remain his exemplars of the era after the sign.
Baudrillard: from commodity to code
Marguerite Duras
From Gia-Dinh to the Goncourt
Born Marguerite Donnadieu near Saigon, she lost her father to dysentery and was raised by her mother in Cambodia and Vietnam, speaking more Vietnamese than French until 11. In France from 1932-3 she studied law and political science, worked at the Colonial Office and married the writer Robert Antelme. Les Impudents (1943) was the first book signed "Duras". Friend of Bataille, Merleau-Ponty and Morin, she joined the Resistance with Mitterrand and the Communist Party (1944, expelled 1950). Antelme was deported to Buchenwald and Dachau; waiting for him became La Douleur (1985). Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Moderato Cantabile, India Song and The Lover (Goncourt 1984) made her name.
A style of barely suppressed silence
- Emotion, not ideas. A look, a sigh, a touch matter in themselves; L'Amour evokes love rather than defining it.
- Minimalism. Short sentences slow the intrigue; novels of about 40,000 words contain a barely suppressed silence.
- India Song. Off-screen dialogue, static shots, no shot/reverse shot, a dissonance of sound and image, read by feminists as a "feminine" style.
- Kristeva. After Hiroshima, the Holocaust, Stalinism and colonialism, a deficit of representation locks grief in private; Duras's texts fuse with madness rather than transcend it.
Repeating the mother
From The Sea Wall (1950) to The Lover and The North China Lover (1991), Duras reworks her family. Leslie Hill: The Lover "does no more than repeat episodes rather than account for them". "The story of my life doesn't exist ... There's never any centre to it." Yet her worldwide success suggests that, unable to remember for herself, she remembers for others.
The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein: an event told only in the second degree
Lacan read The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (1964) as his own teaching, though Duras knew none of it. Lol's fiancé Michael Richardson leaves with Anne-Marie Stretter; ten years later Lol returns to S. Tahla. The story reaches us through Hold and Tatiana, and Lol seeks the third position of witness rather than remain the object of another's discourse, as Duras did by giving up the family name.
Indochina, love, political edges
Marguerite Duras (Donnadieu, 1914 Gia-Dinh near Saigon to 1996) writer, filmmaker, dramatist, postwar France-Observateur journalist; anti-Algerian War, May 1968, feminism; also supported Rainbow Warrior sinking (1985) as anti-Soviet realpolitik (Lechte records the surprise). Explores love, desire, suffering, death and women's push toward madness; space between fusion and separation; private/public and symbolic/imaginary boundaries blur; narrative distances from the real until writing is the reality (Lol V. Stein). Biography is source but never a fixed true set (Leslie Hill). Mother raises three after father's death; Vietnamese before French to age 11; France 1932-33; Colonial Office; marries Robert Antelme; Resistance with Mitterrand; PCF 1944, expelled 1950; Antelme's camps → La Douleur (1985); Goncourt for The Lover (1984); Hiroshima mon amour script (1959).
Duras: life into stark prose
Writing, desire, and the India Cycle
Marguerite Duras writes at the edge of autobiography and fiction: The Lover, Hiroshima mon amour, the India Cycle (Vice-Consul, India Song). Silence, repetition, and the unspeakable of desire and colonial Indochina organise the prose. Cinema and plays extend the same economy of voice and gap.
Lechte groups her with literary postmodernity: the work undoes stable character and plot psychology. Alcohol, public political interventions, and the late celebrity of The Lover belong to the myth; the texts insist on blank and echo. Death 3 March 1996.
Duras: desire and blank
Franz Kafka
Prague, insurance, the night
Born to a self-made Jewish businessman in Prague, whose parents spoke Czech but who wanted a German education for his son, Kafka clashed with his father over Jewishness (the Letter to His Father, 1919). He took a law doctorate (1906), met Max Brod in 1902 and worked from 1908 to 1922 for the semi-governmental Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, writing at night. He was twice engaged to Felice Bauer, wrote to his Czech translator Milena Jesenská, contracted tuberculosis in 1917, asked Brod to destroy his work, lived in Berlin with Dora Diamant and died in 1924.
The Kafkaesque
- Means without ends. A godless society, hyper-rationalist bureaucracy strangling the innocent, the end of causality: Joseph K never learns his crime, K never enters the castle.
- Suggestion. Kafka evokes rather than describes, so each reader finds something; the enigma seems intrinsic to its object.
- The law's blind spot. It cannot say who is inside or outside it and pretends to be all-powerful, yet enjoyment, horror and death lie beyond it.
Writing as sacrifice
Kafka's two lines of influence, after Lechte
Literature canonises a truly singular writing; the writer stakes his being and may never be recognised. Kafka exhausted himself, writing The Judgement in one night (22-3 September 1912): "how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water". Brod refused to burn the work and published it, so Kafka gained recognition on his own terms but never saw it. For Deleuze and Guattari he wrote a minor literature: a Czech Jew deterritorialising German, refusing metaphor, attending to small things and a flood of letters. For Marthe Robert, the anonymous K is an exile who crosses every boundary. With no origin, no "why", Kafka is Nietzschean; for Bataille, there is no promised land. Blanchot: "we only understand [it] in betraying it".
Writing, insurance, enigma
Born Prague 1883, Jewish family; German education preferred by upwardly mobile parents; conflict with father over Jewishness (Letter to His Father, Nov 1919). Law doctorate 1906; meets Max Brod (1902); Workers Accident Insurance Bureau until ill-health retirement 1922. Diaries from 1910; Yiddish theatre; engagements to Felice Bauer; letters to Milena Jesenská; TB from 1917; wish that Brod destroy his work; dies 1924 with Dora Diamant. Brod disobeys.
Influence: enigmatic skeletal world of modernity without God; bureaucratic domination; end of idealism and easy causality. Joseph K. never learns his crime; K. never enters the Castle. Suggests and evokes rather than states: kaleidoscopic "Kafkaesque." Second influence line: writing as lived intersection, not message delivery. Minimalist suggestion lets each reader find something; that is the strategy, not a defect.
Kafka: from Bureau to the Kafkaesque
Law, animal, unfinished sentences
Kafka enters Lechte's cast as a writer whose unfinished novels and parabolic short forms organised later theory (Benjamin, Blanchot, Derrida, Deleuze/Guattari). The law that never presents itself (Trial), the castle's inaccessible authority, and metamorphosis as bodily sentence feed readings of bureaucracy, guilt without crime, and minor literature.
Max Brod's refusal to burn the manuscripts shaped the corpus; Hebrew/Yiddish and Czech-German Prague contexts complicate "German writer" labels. Lechte's use is conceptual rather than exhaustive biography: Kafka as limit-case of modernity's opaque institutions.
Kafka: opaque institution
Jean-François Lyotard
From Socialisme ou barbarie to postmodernity
Born at Versailles, he taught in secondary schools for ten years to 1959, then at Paris VIII until 1989. From 1956 to 1966 he sat on the committees of Socialisme ou barbarie and Pouvoir ouvrier, opposed the Algerian War and joined May 1968. Discours, figure and Libidinal Economy (1974) swapped Marxism's "coldness" for Freud's libidinal energy. His most innovative thought is in two books: The Postmodern Condition (1979) and The Differend (1983).
The Postmodern Condition
Written as a report on knowledge for the Quebec government, it finds society as "unicity" (Durkheim's organism, Parsons's system, Marx's two classes) no longer credible. Two metanarratives once legitimated knowledge: knowledge for its own sake (German idealism) and knowledge for a people seeking emancipation. Now science is a language game (Wittgenstein) with immanent rules: only denotative statements count, competence is needed only by the sender, and statements live within series validated by proof.
The Postmodern Condition: from lost metanarratives to paralogy
- Performativity. Maximum output for minimum input: "an equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established"; the best-funded research becomes most convincing.
- Against Luhmann. Systems theory is modernist; knowledge raises uncertainty, as Heisenberg and René Thom's catastrophes show.
- Paralogy. Dissensus challenges the rules; silencing a player is a terrorist act.
The differend
The differend arises when no agreed procedure lets a difference, idea or grievance be presented. Revisionists such as Faurisson demand a gas-chamber victim as witness, yet a victim must have died there. The trouble, Lyotard argues, is an empiricist historiography that treats the referent's existence as sufficient proof within a representable totality. Instead there are regimes of phrases (prescriptive, ostensive, interrogative and more), each presenting a universe, and genres of discourse that unify them.
Speculation against judgement in The Differend
For Kant the sublime signals the mind's lack of an adequate object, and enthusiasm for the French Revolution was a sign of a historical event no genre could express. In Just Gaming, obligation comes from the other's law and cannot be derived from description: "ought" from "is". Levinas is pertinent here.
Differend, postmodern, sublime
Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998): The Postmodern Condition (1979) as report on knowledge: incredulity toward metanarratives; legitimation via performativity and small narratives. Earlier Discours, figure; libidinal economy; later The Differend: phrases in dispute without common tribunal (Auschwitz as name that silences). Sublime (Kant) for avant-garde presentation of the unpresentable. Algeria years; Vincennes; death 21 April 1998. Lechte: justice of the differend against Habermas consensus.
Lyotard: postmodern knowledge
Language games, genres, and judgement
Science as language game: (1) only denotative statements count; (2) scientific statements differ from those binding the social; (3) competence required of the sender, not the receiver; (4) statements live in series validated by argument and proof; (5) players must know the state of the field. Progress means winning peers' approval; complex proof needs costly technology, hence performativity (max output / min input) and the equation of wealth, efficiency, and truth. Wildcat cheap discoveries remain possible; funded research pulls truth under performativity's game. Performativity cannot legitimate itself without a metanarrative once the question is posed.
In The Differend, regimes of phrases (prescriptive, ostensive, interrogative, etc.) each present a universe; genres of discourse unify phrase collections. A cognitive phrase in fiction is not a historian's. Empiricist historiography's claim to the whole real lets Faurisson demand an impossible witness. Hegelian speculation conflates genres; Kantian judgement passes among them like an archipelago. Just Gaming: obligation from the other's law cannot be derived from description (is/ought). Silence itself can be a phrase; critics ask whether "there is always another phrase" becomes its own totality.
Lyotard: from performativity to differend
What Fifty Contemporary Thinkers Teach
Takeaways
- Meaning is relational. From Saussure and Jakobson to Lévi-Strauss, a sign means through its differences, not its substance.
- Knowledge advances by breaks. Bachelard, Canguilhem and Cavaillès show science reorganising its concepts, not piling up facts.
- Every system has an outside. Bataille's excess, Derrida's supplement and Lyotard's differend mark what a structure cannot absorb.
- The subject is made, not given. Freud, Lacan, Althusser and Foucault decentre the self-present subject.
- The other comes first. Levinas, Irigaray and Lyotard ground ethics in an alterity that cannot be reduced to the same.
- Power is everywhere and contingent. Foucault's micro-powers and Laclau's hegemony replace a single centre with shifting relations.
- Exchange is more than economics. Mauss's gift, Bataille's expenditure and Baudrillard's sign-value break with utility.
- Money is a form. Simmel's pure medium of equivalence levels, frees and depersonalises.
- Reproduction changes the original. Benjamin's aura and Baudrillard's code anticipate copies with no original.
- Myth naturalises. Barthes shows signs turning history into "nature".
- Contracts can hide domination. Pateman's sexual contract lies beneath the social contract.
- Reason can turn on itself. Adorno's identity-thinking against Habermas's communicative reason.
- Evil can be banal. Arendt's Eichmann followed procedure regardless of ends.
- Action makes society. Touraine's social movements and Arendt's action answer determinism.
- Writing is an event. Joyce, Kafka, Blanchot, Sollers and Duras write chance, solitude and the witness.
- Metanarratives lose credit. Lyotard's postmodern condition puts performativity in their place.
- Time has layers. Braudel's longue durée sets events against slow structures.
- Interpretation never ends. Peirce's unlimited semiosis and Eco's encyclopedia keep meaning open.
How the book moves from structure to the singular
Frameworks
| Framework | Thinker | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Epistemological break | Bachelard | Shows science advancing by rupture |
| The gift | Mauss | Explains exchange as obligation, not utility |
| Sign: signifier and signified | Saussure | Defines meaning by difference |
| Index, icon, symbol | Peirce | Classifies signs by their link to objects |
| Semiotic square, actants | Greimas | Maps narrative meaning |
| Myth as second-order sign | Barthes | Exposes how culture passes for nature |
| Panopticon, power/knowledge | Foucault | Shows discipline through visibility |
| System and lifeworld | Habermas | Guards communication from steering media |
| Hegemony and dislocation | Laclau | Explains identity as contingent power |
| Labour, work, action | Arendt | Separates necessity from freedom |
| Four logics of the object | Baudrillard | Splits use, exchange, gift and sign value |
| Differend | Lyotard | Names an injustice with no idiom |
Who's who
| Role | Thinkers |
|---|---|
| Philosophers of science | Bachelard, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, Serres |
| Linguists and semioticians | Saussure, Peirce, Hjelmslev, Jakobson, Benveniste, Chomsky, Greimas, Eco |
| Anthropologists and historians | Mauss, Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss, Braudel |
| Psychoanalysts | Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray |
| Literary theorists | Bakhtin, Barthes, Genette, Todorov, Blanchot |
| Social and political theorists | Althusser, Bourdieu, Arendt, Adorno, Habermas, Laclau, Touraine, Pateman, Simmel |
| Philosophers of difference | Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Le Doeuff, Lyotard, Baudrillard |
| Writers and film-makers | Joyce, Kafka, Duras, Sollers, Metz (film theory), Benjamin |
Nineteen and twenty: two more takeaways
- Style is argument. Derrida's Glas, Deleuze's series, Sollers's analogical void, Barthes's novelistic without the novel: form carries the claim.
- Biography is not destiny, but it is material. Duras's Indochina, Levinas's captivity, Cavaillès's Resistance, Benjamin's Port-Bou: Lechte uses life to locate the work without reducing the work to life.
- Feminism is not one. Irigaray symbolises sexual difference; Le Doeuff inhabits philosophy's imaginary; Pateman excavates the sexual contract under liberal consent.
- Hope is a method. Laclau's hegemony and Touraine's Subject answer postmodern impotence without restoring class destiny.
- Science is not the enemy of critique for everyone. French epistemology (Bachelard to Serres) bonds with concepts and thermodynamics; Adorno treats science as identity-thinking's ally. Keep the split visible.
- The archive has gaps. Two source pages exist only as images (Bataille p.100; Saussure p.150); OCR routinely mangles names (Starnberg, Kohlberg, Barnacle, Weil).
Synthesis: the singular outside
Master frameworks (extended)
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Longue durée | Slow geographic/social time frames events | Policy or tech change looks "sudden" |
| Habitus / field / capital | Dispositions meet positions and resources | Inequality without conspiracy stories |
| Communicative action | Validity claims in speech push back on systems | Designing deliberation vs steering media |
| Sexual contract | Fraternal sex-right underlies social contract | Consent and "private" sphere look neutral |
| Rhizome | Horizontal links without tree hierarchy | Networks beat org charts as description |
| Technologies of the self | Practices produce subjects | Training, wellness, compliance regimes |
Master tensions to keep
Five tensions organise recall. (1) System vs event: Saussure/Braudel/Greimas versus Foucaultian event and Serresian noise. (2) Subject: dissolved (Althusser, early Foucault) then rebuilt in ethics and feminism (Levinas, Irigaray, Pateman, Le Doeuff). (3) Power: from state/economy last instance to micro-powers and hegemony (Foucault, Laclau). (4) Meaning: dyadic langue, triadic semiosis, differend without tribunal. (5) Modernity: unfinished project (Habermas) versus incredulity and paralogy (Lyotard) versus hyperreal code (Baudrillard).
Synthesis: modernity disputed