Vincent Descombes: Modern French Philosophy (1979–) [EN, ES, GR, CZ, RU]

“This is a critical introduction to modern French philosophy, commissioned from one of the liveliest contemporary practitioners and intended for an English-speaking readership. The dominant ‘Anglo-Saxon’ reaction to philosophical development in France has for some decades been one of suspicion, occasionally tempered by curiosity but more often hardening into dismissive rejection. But there are signs now of a more sympathetic interest and an increasing readiness to admit and explore shared concerns, even if these are still expressed in a very different idiom and intellectual context.

Vincent Descombes offers here a personal guide to the main movements and figures of the last forty-five years. He traces over this period the evolution of thought from a generation preoccupied with the ‘three H’s’ – Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, to a generation influenced since about 1960 by the ‘three masters of suspicion’ – Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. In this framework he deals in turn with the thought of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the early structuralists, Foucault, Althusser, Serres, Derrida, and finally Deleuze and Lyotard. The ‘internal’ intellectual history of the period is related to its institutional setting and the wider cultural and political context which has given French philosophy so much of its distinctive character.” (from the back cover, 1980)

First published in French as Le Même et L’Autre, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1979

English edition
Translated by L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding
With a Foreword by Alan Montefiore
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1980
ISBN 0521296722
192 pages

Review (Robert Young, MLN, 1982)
Review (Alasdair MacIntyre, London Review of Books, 1981)
Interview with the author (Praxis, 2012/2013)

Publisher (EN)

Modern French Philosophy (English, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding, 1980, no OCR)
Lo mismo y lo otro: cuarenta y cinco años de filosofía francesca (1933-1978) (Spanish, trans. Elena Benarroch, 2nd ed., 1982/1988, pp 12-15 missing, no OCR)
Το Ίδιο και το Άλλο: 45 χρόνια γαλλικής φιλοσοφίας 1933-1978 (Greek, trans. Λένα Κασίμη, 1984)
Stejné a jiné: Čtyřicetpět let francouzské filosofie (1933-1978) (Czech, trans. Miroslav Petříček jr, 1995, no OCR)
Sovremennaya frantsuzskaya filosofiya (Russian, trans. M.M. Fedorov, 2000, DJVU)

Moles, Baudrillard, Boudon, van Lier, Wahl, Morin: Les objets (1969/71) [French, Spanish]

Communications is a biannual social sciences journal founded by Georges Friedmann, Roland Barthes, and Edgar Morin. Soon after its start in 1961 it became a reference publication for media studies and semiotics in France and internationally.

Its first 1969 issue was dedicated to the theory of objects, positioning it “at the confluence of sociology, political economy, social psychology, marketing, philosophy, design and aesthetics” (p 141). At the same time the journal argued for the relevance of the study of objects for governmental institutions such as “the Ministry of Industrial Production, the Ministry of Transport, the customs authorities, the courts, the counterfeits studies, or the National Industrial Property Institute” (p 141).

It can be read as a post-May 1968 attempt to use the concept of object as an agent linking social sciences in order to increase their impact on direct political change, and as well as an early echo of what more than a decade later came to be known as the actor-network theory.

Two years later the magazine appeared in its Spanish translation in book form.

Communications 13
Publisher Centre d’études des communications de masse, École pratique des hautes études, and Seuil, Paris, 1969
139 pages

Les objets (French, 1969), View online
Los objetos (Spanish, trans. Silvia Delpy, 1971/1974)

Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine (1965) [French]

“The proceedings from the Sixth Symposium at Royaumont in 1962 were titled Le concept d’information dans la science contemporaine [The Concept of Information in Contemporary Science] and were published three years later in Paris by Les Éditions de Minuit.

In attendance were Gilbert Simondon, Norbert Wiener, Martial Gueroult, Giorgio de Santillana, Lucien Goldmann, Benoit Mandelbrot, René de Possel, Jean Hyppolite, André Michel Lwoff, Abraham Moles, Ferdinand Alquié, Henryk Greniewski, Helmar Frank, Jiri Zeman, François Bonsack, Louis Couffignal, Albert Perez, Maurice de Gandillac, Ladislav Tondl, Gilles-Gaston Granger, and Stanislas Bellert, among others.

Simondon was a very active organizer and introduced Wiener. The collection is fascinating for a number of reasons; most striking, perhaps, is the fact that a prominent Marxist (Goldmann) and a brilliant mathematician (Mandelbrot) were given equal opportunity to talk philosophically about the concept of information. Mathematicians like Mandelbrot and Wiener were given the same stage as philosophers like Simondon and Hyppolite.

Some of the papers are pretty scientific, but most of them are not. What you get is a collection of papers given and discussed (the Q & As are included and are revealing) by some of the individuals who heavily influenced Deleuze and a number of other French philosophers. This is an incredibly revealing volume and I will eventually work hard to translate some of the papers that are included.

Simondon’s paper, ‘L’Amplification dans les processus d’information’, was not included in the proceedings (only the abstract is provided at the very end of the book, along with the topic of Wiener’s response to Simondon), but was published and is available in the collection of his papers titled Communication and Information: Courses and Conferences (La Transparence, 2010).” (from a blog post by Andrew Iliadis)

Publisher Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1965
425 pages
via Andrew Iliadis, HT babyalanturing

Review: D. Gabor (The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1966, EN).

PDF (36 MB, updated on 2021-3-28)
multiple formats (Internet Archive)