Richard Wolin: The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (2010)

“Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who’s who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China’s Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life.

Wolin’s riveting narrative reveals that Maoism’s allure among France’s best and brightest actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics. Instead, it paradoxically served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. French student leftists took up the trope of “cultural revolution,” applying it to their criticisms of everyday life. Wolin examines how Maoism captured the imaginations of France’s leading cultural figures, influencing Sartre’s “perfect Maoist moment”; Foucault’s conception of power; Sollers’s chic, leftist intellectual journal Tel Quel; as well as Kristeva’s book on Chinese women–which included a vigorous defense of foot-binding.

Recounting the cultural and political odyssey of French students and intellectuals in the 1960s, The Wind from the East illustrates how the Maoist phenomenon unexpectedly sparked a democratic political sea change in France.”

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2010
ISBN 0691129983, 9780691129983
400 pages

Video interview with the author: Platypus.

Reviews: Scott McLemee (The National), Julian Jackson (The Guardian), David Gress (The Wall Street Journal).

Publisher

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Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow: Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982–) [EN, DE, PT, ES]

This book, which Foucault himself has judged accurate, is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault’s work as a whole.

To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault’s work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault’s work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method—”interpretative analytics”—capable of explaining both the logic of structuralism’s claim to be an objective science and the apparent validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition.

First published in 1982
Second Edition With an Afterword by and an Interview with Michel Foucault
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1983
ISBN 0226163121, 9780226163123
256 pages

German edition
Translated by Claus Rath and Ulrich Raulff
Originally published by Athenäum Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1987
Second edition
Publisher Beltz Athenäum Verlag, Weinheim, 1994
ISBN 3895470503
327 pages

Foucault at Monoskop wiki

review (Peter Kemp, History and Theory)
review (Tracy B. Strong, Political Theory)
review (Dominick Lacapra, The American Historical Review)
review (David Hoy, London Review of Books)
review (Michael Donnelly, American Journal of Sociology)
review (Ian Hacking, The Journal of Philosophy)
review (Mary Maynard, The British Journal of Sociology)
review (Randall McGowen, Comparative Literature)
review (Mark Seltzer, Diacritics)

Publisher (EN)
Google books (EN)

Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (English, 1982/1983)
Michel Foucault: Zwischen Strukturalismus und Hermeneutik (German, trans. Claus Rath and Ulrich Raulff, 1987/1994, no OCR)
Foucault. Uma trajetória filosófica. Para além do estruturalismo e da hermenêutica (Portuguese, trans. Vera Porto Carrero, 1995, low-res, no OCR, added on 2014-3-6)
Foucault: más allá del estructuralismo y la hermenéutica (Spanish, trans. Rogelio C. Paredes, 2001, added on 2014-5-27)

Harold Aram Veeser: Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism (2010)

This insightful critical biography shows us an Edward Said we did not know. H. Aram Veeser brings forth not the Said of tabloid culture, or Said the remote philosopher, but the actual man, embedded in the politics of the Middle East but soaked in the values of the West and struggling to advance the best European ideas. Veeser shows the organic ties connecting his life, politics, and criticism.

Drawing on what he learned over 35 years as Said’s student and skeptical admirer, Veeser uses never-before-published interviews, debate transcripts, and photographs to discover a Said who had few inhibitions and loathed conventional routine. He stood for originality, loved unique ideas, wore marvelous clothes, and fought with molten fury. For twenty years he embraced and rejected, at the same time, not only the West, but also literary theory and the PLO. At last, his disgust with business-as-usual politics and criticism marooned him on the sidelines of both.

The candid tale of Said’s rise from elite academic precincts to the world stage transforms not only our understanding of Said—the man and the myth—but also our perception of how intellectuals can make their way in the world.

Publisher Routledge, 2010
ISBN 0415902649, 9780415902649
260 pages

review (Kim Peterson, Dissident Voice)

author
publisher
google books

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