Module description
This module engages with the long-standing and powerful legacy of critical thought in French over the past fifty or so years. Informed by Continental Philosophy, this tradition has articulated a speculative critique of ideologies and cultural hegemonies; it is often counter-intuitive, and inter-disciplinary. The names of figures such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Monique Wittig and a host of others, all of whom have proposed radical transformations of the way we can think about subjectivity, language, power and history, have become common currency in academic disciplines in the arts and humanities and beyond. The work produced in the 'time of theory' (broadly the 1960s and 1970s) by these and other thinkers has had a profound influence on subsequent thinkers, who have developed their ideas and concepts in relation to more recent conjunctures. The module will involve close attention to selected readings by French or francophone thinkers, often linking more recent work to earlier moments. While the material is not literary, neither is it strictly philosophy, at least in the Anglo-American idiom (the module does not require previous study in philosophy); French thought invariably involves an inventive, creative and speculative use of concepts. The ethos of the module will be to consider the ways in which the material proposes a 'new image of thought' (Deleuze) and invites us to rethink our relations to power, to identity, technology, gender, language, and the image. Depending on the year of study the primary reading material will be selected in such a way as to allow a focus on a specific thematic strand in French thought (for example, subjectivity and language, technology, or power) and to afford a narrative development of a kind through the schedule of classes. Reading will normally be in the form of relatively short essays, chapters or extracts. The module will be taught using primary reading material in French and in translation into English and is thus accessible to students without French language competence.
Assessment details
1200-word commentary (40%); 2-hour written examination (60%)
Assessment (for study abroad semester 1 only students if taught in semester 1): 1200-word commentary (40%); 2000-word essay (60%)
Reassessment: 1200-word commentary (40%); 2000-word essay (60%)
Educational aims & objectives
- To introduce students to some of the broad tendencies in very contemporary French thought against the background of the dominant trends in French thought since the 1960s.
- To enable students to analyse texts of a high degree of theoretical and rhetorical complexity.
- To stimulate critical and speculative thinking about the key themes and preoccupations of recent and contemporary French thought.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this module students will:
- Have a broad grasp of the dominant tendencies in recent French thought.
- Have a profound knowledge of specific examples of recent French thought.
- Have gained the broad contextual knowledge and analytical ability in this subject matter that will equip them for further study and research.
- Be able to relate what they have studied to wider existential and ethical issues beyond academic study.
Teaching pattern
Two hours per week
Suggested reading list
- Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). ENGLISH: 'The Order of Discourse' in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. R. Young (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 52-78.
- Michel Foucault, 'Les Corps dociles'; 'Le Panopticisme' in Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 137-71; pp. 197-229. ENGLISH: Michel Foucault, 'Docile Bodies'; 'Panopticism' in Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 136-169; pp. 195-228.
- Michel Foucault, 'Droit de mort et pouvoir sur la vie' in La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). ENGLISH: 'Right of Death and Power over Life' in The History of Sexuality Vol. I: The Will to Know (pp. 135-59).
- Gilles Deleuze, ‘Contrôle et devenir’ & 'Postscriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle’ in Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit, 1990), pp. 229-239; 240-247. ENGLISH: ‘Control and Becoming’ & ‘Postscriptum on Societies of Control’ in Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 169-76; 177-82.
- Judith Butler, 'Revisiting Bodies and Pleasures' Theory, Culture and Society 16: 2 (1999), 11-20.
- Judith Butler, 'Subjection , Resistance, Re-signification: Between Freud and Foucault' in The Psychic Life of Power: Essays in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 83-105.
- Nancy Fraser, 'Foucault's Body Langage: A Post-humanist Political Rhetoric?' in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 55-66.
- Sandra Lee Bartky, 'Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power' in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 63-82.
- Michel Foucault, 'Il faut défendre la société': Cours au Collège de France 1975-1976 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997), pp. 3-74. ENGLISH: Michel Foucault, 'Society must be Defended' Lectures (1-4) at the Collège de France 1975-76, in Society must be Defended, trans. by David Macey (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 1-85.
- Michel Foucault, 'Le Sujet et le Pouvoir' in Dits et écrits IV, 1980-1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 222-43. ENGLISH: 'The Subject and Power' in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault: Power, ed. by James Faubion, trans by Robert Hurley and others (London: Penguin, 2020), pp. 326-48.
- Michel Foucault, 'Les techniques de soi' in Dits et écrits IV, 1980-1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 783-813. ENGLISH: Michel Foucault, 'Technologies of the Self' in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 223-52.
- Michel Foucault, 'Qu'est-ce que les Lumières?' in Dits et écrits IV, 1980-1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 562-78. ENGLISH: Michel Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?' in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 304-19.
- Michel Foucault, 'Le Courage de la vérité', in Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres: Le Courage de la vérité (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), pp. 3-22. ENGLISH: Michel Foucault, '1st February 1984: First Hour' in The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others; Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-84, trans. by Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1-22.