French Thought: from the Renaissance to Postmodernity (level 6)

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: Damian Catani
• Lecturers: Damian Catani and Nathalie Wourm
• Assessment: a 1500-word commentary (25%), in-class test (25%) and 3500-word essay (50%)

This module introduces you to key philosophical texts written in French between the Renaissance and the present day. Its objective is to guide you through some of the often intimidating terrain of French thought, indicating how theory and philosophy have consistently impacted on French culture, literature and society.

We will consider how the authors in question present ideas relating to the formation, development and care of the self, as well as the subject's responsibilities and constraints before the Other.

A key preoccupation in the thought of the period under discussion is the question of selfhood, which has alternated in French intellectual history between the conflicting notions of the ‘centred’ and ‘de-centred’ subject: examples of the former are Descartes’ self as the source of philosophical truths, the existential self of Sartre, Beauvoir and Fanon that confronts ethical and political problems (responsibility and commitment, sexual equality, white supremacy), and the committed self of Badiou in the era of liberal global capitalism; while examples of the latter are the mutation of the self into ‘multiplicity’, ‘invention of pleasure’ and ‘alterity’ that is characteristic of a poststructuralist thought that stages a dramatic withdrawal of the self from the concrete and specific task of struggle (Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva and Foucault).

The course is taught and assessed in English. Titles which appear in French in the following outline will be studied in French.

Primary texts

The following is an indicative list:

• Badiou - L’Ethique (2001).
• Barrès - extracts from Les Déracinés (1897).
• Beauvoir - extracts from Le Deuxième sexe (1949).
• Bergson - Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889).
• Comte - extracts from Système de politique positive (1851-1856).
• Deleuze and Guattari - extracts from Mille Plateaux (1980).
• Derrida - L’Ecriture et la Différence (1967).
• Descartes and methodical doubt - Discours de la méthode (1637).
• Fanon - extracts from Peau noire, masques blancs (1952).
• Foucault - extracts from La Volonté de savoir (1976).
• Kristeva - extracts from Etrangers à nous-memes (1988).
• La Rochefoucauld and salon society - Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (1665).
• Montaigne and self-study - three editions of Essais (1580, 1588, 1595).
• Pascal, libertins and religious belief - Pensées (1670).
• Rousseau, places and emotions - Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1776-1778).
• Sartre - extracts from L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946).
• Voltaire - extracts from Dictionnaire philosophique (1764).

Secondary reading

• Jerrold Siegel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (2005).

A full list of suggested secondary reading will be distributed at the start of the course.