Transparency in postwar France : a critical history of the present / Stefanos Geroulanos.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Geroulanos, Stefanos, 1979- author.

Series:

Cultural memory in the present.

Cultural Memory in the Present

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Philosophy, French--20th century.

Philosophy, French.

Transparency (Philosophy).

Knowledge, Theory of.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (503 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2014.

Summary:

This book returns to a time and place when the concept of transparency was met with deep suspicion. It offers a panorama of postwar French thought where attempts to show the perils of transparency in politics, ethics, and knowledge led to major conceptual inventions, many of which we now take for granted. Between 1945 and 1985, academics, artists, revolutionaries, and state functionaries spoke of transparency in pejorative terms. Associating it with the prying eyes of totalitarian governments, they undertook a critical project against it—in education, policing, social psychology, economic policy, and the management of information. Focusing on Sartre, Lacan, Canguilhem, Lévi-Strauss, Leroi-Gourhan, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Transparency in Postwar France explores the work of ethicists, who proposed that individuals are transparent neither to each other nor to themselves, and philosophers, who clamored for new epistemological foundations. These decades saw the emergence of the colonial and phenomenological "other," the transformation of ideas of normality, and the effort to overcome Enlightenment-era humanisms and violence in the name of freedom. These thinkers' innovations remain centerpieces for any resistance to contemporary illusions that tolerate or enable power and social coercion.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction. The Matter with Transparency

1. Was Transparency an Optical Problem?

2. France, Year Zero

3. The World’s Opacity to Consciousness

4. The Image of Science and the Limits of Knowledge

5. Machines and the Cogito

6. From the Total Man to the Other

7. What Is Social Transparency?

8. Between State and Society, I

9. Between State and Society, II

10. Alienation, Utopia, and Marxism after 1956

11. Face, Mask, and Other as Avatars of Selfhood

12. The Norm and the Same

13. The Third Order, or, The Structural “Symbolic” as Epistemological Interface

14. Lévi-Strauss’s World Out of Sync

15. The Ethnographer, Cinéma-vérité, and the Disruption of the Natural Order

16. Return to Rousseau

17. Return to Descartes

18. “Speak Not of Darkness, but of a Somewhat Blurred Light”

19. Cybernetic Complexity

20. The Present Time and the Agent of History before and after May 1968

21. The Myth of the Self-Transparency of Society

22. Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781503603417

1503603415

OCLC:

1198931546