“... was beautiful). Genet defended her in the media and wrote the foreword to a pamphlet published by Michel Foucault’s Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons called The Assassination of George Jackson. (Jackson had been shot in prison just before his trial started; the others were acquitted.) Foucault, who was working ...”

“... which was mostly a matter of indifference to the postwar generation of French thinkers. Foucault was preoccupied by the ‘human sciences’, but less as a philosopher than as a historian of systems of thought who came at them with a radical libertarian parti pris. The most committed analyst of science was ...”

“... the freedom that underlies the existence of others and letting it come into its own.Back in Paris, Michel Tournier and his fellow students at the Sorbonne had much the same experience: One day in the autumn of 1943, a new book appeared to us like a meteor: Sartre’s L’Etre et le Néant. There was momentary astonishment, followed by prolonged rumination. The ...”

“... literary critic; Lacan started to acquire his reputation as the mage of psychoanalysis; Foucault to invent his archaeology of knowledge; Derrida to become the antinomian philosopher of the age; Bourdieu to develop the concepts that would make him its best-known sociologist. The concentrated explosion of ideas is astonishing. In just two years ...”

“... Whereas psychoanalysis wants us to ask, why do we not want to know what we want? (According to Michel Serres, the only modern question is: what is it you don’t want to know about yourself?) Psychoanalysis wants us to ask – against the grain of traditional philosophy – why do we obscure the good that we seek? Pragmatism takes for granted that the good ...”

“... Desnos, Leiris, Soupault, Picabia, Duchamp, Breton, Aragon, Queneau, Perec, Robbe-Grillet, Foucault, Calvino and Ashbery (who contributes a foreword to Ford’s book). ‘I abandoned myself, out of my depth, in the Gulf Steam of your fantasy,’ André Gide wrote to Roussel in 1918 after receiving one of his books, with a sensuous intimacy that Roussel ...”