Continental Philosophy

A review of French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States

There is a central question that provides a guiding thread through François Cusset’s far ranging and intellectually challenging investigation into the reception of “French Theory” in the United States: how is it that “around the beginning of the 1980s, right when the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Derrida were being put to work on American campuses and in some alternative communities as the theoretical foundation for a new type of politics, those very names were being demonized in France as the epitome of an outdated ‘libidinal’ and leftist type of politics”? (XVIII) His study unfolds, examining the chronological periods before and after this crucial decade, casting back to roughly 1966 and then moving forward up until 2004, in an attempt to answer this question and explain the American phenomenon he terms French Theory.

Link to the review

Lyotard, Political Writings

(via, m-25)

By Ben Dorfman

This paper is an adaptation of a lecture delivered in seminar for the Department of Communication at Aalborg University on postmodernism and knowledge. Its focus is the status of knowledge in postmodern society and culture as framed by J-F Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition and The Postmodern Explained. It emphasizes the ideas of "computerization" and "information society" against the backdrop of postmodern concepts of the cultural quotation. Futhermore – after offering a general introduction to the idea of postmodernism – it attempts to explore the political implications of the interaction of quotation, computerization and information as well as offer a criticism of Lyotard's general approach to these concepts. 

The rest

Files in PDF, some real gems, via Hudsoncress:

Derrida, Jacques – De la grammatologie

Derrida, Jacques – Lyotard and Us

Derrida, Jacques – Points de suspension (The entire book in French)

Derrida, Jacques – Spectres de Marx (The entire book in French)

Freud, Interpretation of Dreams

Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (The entire book in German) 

Sartre, Nausea (The entire book in English)