Transparency In Postwar France: A Critical History Of The Present

518 Pages·2017·4.171 MB·English

by  Stefanos Geroulanos

transparency in postwar france
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Cultural Memory
in
the
Present
Hent de Vries, Editor
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TRANSPARENCY IN POSTWAR FRANCE
A Critical History of the Present

Stefanos Geroulanos
stanford university press
stanford, california
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of
Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-8047-9974-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-5036-0459-9 (paper)
ISBN 978-1-5036-0341-7 (ebook)
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The Matter with Transparency 1
part i: life in the folds: perception, consciousness,
and knowledge displaced
1 Was Transparency an Optical Problem? A Short History 31
2 France, Year Zero: Perception and Reality after the Liberation 39
3 The World’s Opacity to Consciousness:
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty 48
4 The Image of Science and the Limits of Knowledge 64
5 Machines and the Cogito 79
6 From the Total Man to the Other: UNESCO, Anti-Colonialism,
and the New Humanism of French Anthropology 91
part ii: transparency in politics: state, utopia, grey zones,
1944–1959
7 What Is Social Transparency? A Second Short History 113
8 Between State and Society, I: The Police, the Black Market,
and “the Gangster” after the Liberation 130
9 Between State and Society, II: Psychology, Public Health,
and the Rebellion of the Inadaptés 147
10 Alienation, Utopia, and Marxism after 1956:
A Clarity Worse Than the Penumbra 155
viii Contents
part iii: norms, others, ethnography, the symbolic:
new languages of philosophy, 1950–1963
11 Face, Mask, and Other as Avatars of Selfhood:
A Third Short History 171
12 The Norm and the Same 199
13 The Third Order, or, The Structural “Symbolic”
as Epistemological Interface 226
14 Lévi-Strauss’s World Out of Sync 243
15 The Ethnographer, Cinéma-vérité, and the Disruption
of the Natural Order: Chronicle of a Summer 254
part iv: the road to 1967 and the rethinking of modernity
16 Return to Rousseau: Lévi-Strauss, Starobinski, Derrida 267
17 Return to Descartes: “The Last Tribunal of the Cogito” 282
18 “Speak Not of Darkness, but of a Somewhat
Blurred Light”: Michel Foucault, Modernity, and the
Distortion of Knowledge 300
19 Cybernetic Complexity: Prehistory, Biology, and
Derrida’s Program for Liberation 315
part v: after 1968
20 The Present Time and the Agent of History before
and after May 1968 335
21 The Myth of the Self-Transparency of Society:
Claude Lefort and His Circle 353
22 Nineteen Eighty-Four: Information, the Scrambled Signs
of the Ideal, and The Postmodern Condition 368
Abbreviations 383
Notes 385
Bibliography 449
Index 487
List of Illustrations
0.1 One of Roland Kuhn’s case histories 5
0.2 Hermann Rorschach, Psychodiagnostik (1921), card 1 5
6.1 Opening credit for the film Sous les masques noirs (1939) 93
6.2 The Dakar–Djibouti expedition, 1931 94
11.1 Still from Georges Franju’s Les Yeux sans visage (1959) 180
12.1 The Glass Man, 1937 206
12.2 “La Santé,” frontispiece of L’Être humain 208
15.1 Screening of rushes from the Rouch–Morin film
Chronique d’un été (1961; Chronicle of a Summer) 256
15.2 Scene from Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer) 261
16.1 Page 327 of the typescript of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques 278
16.2 Page 328a of the typescript of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques 279
19.1 Cover of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics 317