Transparency And Dissimulation: Configurations ...
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Moving away from a treatment of concepts as belonging to disciplinarily defined conversations, or even to particular spheres of social life, Geroulanos has written a history of transparency as a passage point of signification, through which a multitude of cultural productions are made legible. The payoff of this methodological innovation is enormous, and Geroulanos offers novel readings of intellectual figures like Jacques Derrida, Max Jacob, and Jean Starobinski alongside analyses of discourses on the black market, cinema, and political integration. The result is an exemplary and surprising intellectual history that the reviewers celebrate for its creativity and ambition. Transparency in Postwar France is not only a major achievement in its own right, but a provocation and an incitement to expand the scope of intellectual history.
As all four reviews attest, Geroulanos has not only made a major contribution to French intellectual history, but has also expanded the disciplinary boundaries of the field. In doing so he has brought to life an endlessly rich imaginary of transparency as it emerged in postwar France, and remains with us today.
The book traverses a staggeringly broad set of ideas linked by the emergence of this concept of transparency in postwar French phenomenology (Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre), history of science (Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré), Marxism (Sartre and others), structuralism (Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault), deconstruction (Jacques Derrida). But he does not limit himself to great thinkers and, in an original move, carries his analysis of the transparency metaphor into discourses about the black market, gangsters, juvenile delinquents, and young rebels in New Wave cinema. As Geroulanos demonstrates with great elegance, transparency defies and cuts across philosophical classifications, capturing the emergence of new anxieties, new objects of analysis, and new modes of seeing the world as well as new self-perceptions. Each part of the book traces the fashioning of transparency as a symbol of a totalizing impetus in culture, science, social life, and politics. Particularly creative is its interpretation of specific cultural figures as impediments to social transparency, including gangsters.
One of the advantages of this approach is that it exposes under-acknowledged continuities between phenomena whose inter-relation is more usually conceived in terms of successive rupture, such as existentialism, structuralism and the recovery of political philosophy in the 1970s. By centring on the issue of transparency the book also reveals previously unexplored synchronic connections between work in diverse fields such as phenomenology, anthropology, and the philosophy of science. The erudition required to flesh out the complex conceptual argument from such a diverse range of published and archival source material is extremely impressive. And although it is the larger conceptual argument that will probably earn this book the wide attention it deserves, it is worth noting that Transparency in Postwar France can be profitably consulted by scholars interested in many of the individual thinkers covered in the text, irrespective of whether they are persuaded by its macro-historical claims. 59ce067264