It is time to re-examine the French Revolution as a political resource. The historiography has so far ignored the question of popular sovereignty and emancipation; instead the Revolution has been vilified as a matrix of totalitarianisms by the liberals and as an ethnocentric phenomenon by postcolonial studies. This book examines why.

More so than historians, it is philosophers that have played the leading role in the portrayal of this major event in French political history. The philosophical quarrels of the 1960s placed the French Revolution at the heart of their debates. The most well-documented among these is the conflict between Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss and subsequently, Michel Foucault.

Do we need an ethics of the history of the French Revolution? Rancière, Derrida, Balibar, Lefort, Robin, and Loraux can help answer this question, in an epistemological approach to history. These successive explorations allow us to move away from a myth of identity and to rediscover a real Revolution, capable of offering Enlightenment and political utility and interrogating what democracy and emancipation mean for us today.

Les mer
It is time to re-examine the French Revolution as a political resource. The historiography has so far ignored the question of popular sovereignty and emancipation; instead the Revolution has been vilified as a matrix of totalitarianisms by the liberals and as an ethnocentric phenomenon by postcolonial studies. This book examines why.
Les mer

Introduction – The French Revolution is Not a Myth: Sartre, Lévi-
Strauss, Foucault, Lacan and us

Part I
Chapter one – How did the French Revolution become a Sartrean object?

Chapter two – Working with historical details against the fetishizing of reality

Chapter three – Do not dissolve the real men of the French Revolution in a bath of sulfuric acid

Chapter four – Restoring the sacred to its place

Chapter five– Apocalypse and Fraternity-Terror

Chapter six – The question of dialectical time and the futility of the notion of rearguard

Part II
Chapter seven – Three humanities in one, Europeans, colonized, savages

Chapter eight – Conclude a book, conclude a discussion

Chapter nine – Michel Foucault and the French Revolution: a misunderstanding?

Chapter ten – The French Revolution in between archaeologies of knowledge, discourse formations, and social formations

Chapter eleven – Surrounding the Iranian revolution, retrieving the missed object with Foucault, in spite of Fouc

Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781786616180
Publisert
2023-01-26
Utgiver
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; Rowman & Littlefield International
Vekt
345 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Dybde
14 mm
Aldersnivå
U, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
246

Forfatter
Oversetter

Om bidragsyterne

Sophie Wahnich is director of research in history and political science at the National Research Institute (Centre national de recherche scienti?que, CNRS) and director of the IIAC in the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, France. A specialist of the French Revolution trained in discourse analysis and political theory, Sophie Wahnich examines disruptive historical events and their consequences for the political, social, and emotional fabric of society.

Owen Glyn-Williams is a PhD candidate and philosophy instructor at DePaul University. His research focuses on early modern philosophy and contemporary political thought.