68 EFFECT IN FRENCH PHILOSOPHY

Behind this project is a conviction that, for each of the important figures of what is now generally called “French Theory” (a label imported from U.S. Universities), the “May 68 events” in Paris (and elsewhere) represented a surprise and created an interruption in the course of their speculations and researches. This can be identified in some cases in the form of a “self-criticism”, in others as new collaborations and a shift in intellectual “alliances”, but above all in the form of a discovery of new objects and an invention of new terminologies. At stake would be, no doubt, a more direct way of interweaving the “conceptual” and the “political” in philosophy, but more profoundly the very notion of the political (whose traditional definitions, institutional or revolutionary, found themselves devalued in the course of the events), the representation of the “intellectual”, and what Deleuze later would call the “image of thought”. It is this change that we want to address in the seminar, by focusing on a selection of essays that can be read as a “reaction” to the event in the field of theory. They will be presented in the frame of dialogic confrontations around three themes: 1) “Discourse” (Foucault and Lacan); 2) “Desire” (Deleuze-Guattari, Irigaray and “Mouvement de Libération des Femmes”); 3) “Reproduction” (Althusser and Bourdieu-Passeron). This is a limited choice indeed, which nevertheless we hope may help elucidate how philosophers at the time wrote in the conjuncture.