French Theory In America

Explores how the French theory of philosophy, which became popular during the last three decades of the twentieth century, spread to America and examines the critical practices that French theory inspired.

What does it mean to"do theory" in America? In what ways has "French Theory" changed American intellectual and artistic life? How different is it from what French intellectuals themselves conceived, and what does all this tell us about American intellectual life? Is "French Theory" still a significant force in America, raising conceptual questions not easily answered? In this volume of new work--including the French writers Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilled Delezue, as well as essays by Sylvere Lotringer and Sande Cohen, Mario Biagoli, Elie During, Chris Kraus, Alison Gingeras, and Kriss Ravetto, among others--French theorists assess the impact and reception of their work in America, and American-based critics account for their effects in different areas of cultural criticism and art over the last thirty years.

Working from the premise that May '68 is a shorthand that delimits an intensive decade of global revolt, Jason Demers documents the cross-pollination of French philosophy, international activist movements, and American countercultures. From the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and George Jackson to the revolt at Columbia University, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Woodstock, and the Weather Underground, Demers writes French theory into a constellation of American events and icons uncontained by national borders. More than a compelling new take on the history of theory, The American Politics of French Theory develops concepts gleaned from the work of Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, providing new tools for thinking about translation, theory, and politics. By recontextualizing "French theory" within a complex fabric of mass communication and global revolt, Demers demonstrates why it is politically potent and methodologically necessary to think of translation associatively.

This work focuses on the series of encounters between the most prominent French philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s and the artists of their times, most particularly the protagonists of the Narrative Figuration movement.

This volume studies the impact of French thought on the American world of learning during the 1970s and the 1980s as well as the American response to the various discourses ranging from literary theory and philosophy to psychoanalysis and anthropology. The typical American reception of Derrida, Lacan, and Deleuze is discussed as well as the accommodation of French feminists, including Cixous, Wittig, and Irigaray.

A book by the acclaimed intellectual historian on the queering of the French literary canon by American writers and scholars.

Connecting French thinkers to the American sixties, The American Politics of French Theory demonstrates why, in an era of mass communication and global revolt, it is politically potent and methodologically necessary to think of translation not as an act of substitution, but as a web of associations.

American Paraliterature examines the generative encounters of post-1968 French theory with the postwar American avant-garde. The book begins with an account of the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference that was organized by Semiotext(e) editor Sylvère Lotringer at Columbia University. The conference was an attempt to directly connect the American avant-garde with French theory. At the event, John Cage shared the stage with Deleuze and Foucault introduced William S. Burroughs. This schizo-connection presents a way to read the experimental methods of the American avant-garde (Burroughs, Cage, and Kathy Acker), and how their writing creates a counterprogram to the power that Foucault and Deleuze started to articulate in the 1970s.