Lafayette's Children

In 1994, Princeton University Press launched with considerable fanfare an auspicious series of translations called “New French Thought,” edited by Thomas Pavel, Professor of French at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Mark Villa of the Political Science and French Studies Departments at New York University (both recently transplanted to the University of Chicago). Pavel, the author of an earlier critique of structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and Lilla, best known until then for his book on Vico as an antimodernist, were not coy about their agenda. ¹ Their aim was to introduce “the younger generation of philosophers, historians, and social commentators who represent the new liberal, humanistic bent of French intellectual life.” ² In so doing, they hoped to break the stranglehold in the English-speaking world of what had come to be called “French Theory” in the quarter century after the events of 1968. Tacitly allied with the historian Tony Judt and the political philosophers Charles Larmore and Stephen Holmes, Pavel and Lilla boldly set out to compel the Zeit to find a new Geist (or rather the temps a new esprit), permitting us to recover from what they see as the dire effects of too much ill-digested Barthes, Blanchot, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Lyotard, Debord, Foucault, Althusser, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Levinas, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe. For there has been, they hasten to inform us, an alternative and healthier tradition of “continental philosophy” and post-1968 politics emanating from France that should now command our serious attention.