Fran?ois Cusset, author of the acclaimed book "French Theory," investigates the queering of the French literary canon by American writers and scholars in this thought-provoking and free-minded journey across six centuries of literary classics and sexual polemics.

Cusset presents the foundations and rationale for American queer theory, the field of study established in the 1990s and promulgated by writers and scholars such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner, which challenges a supposed "heteronormative" ideology in our culture. He then provides an overview of their reinterpretation of the French literary canon from a queer perspective, then deliberately goes further, confronting that same canon with a lively form of general suspicion― seeking gender trouble and sexual ambiguities in the most unexpected corners of French literary classics, in which macho heroes turn out to be homosocial melancholics, and the most seemingly submissive housewives, great vanguards of lesbian liberation.

Cusset's survey includes medieval and Renaissance literature, works from the Age of Enlightenment, nineteenth-century avant-gardists such as Charles Baudelaire and Honore de Balzac, and twentieth-century modernists such as Marcel Proust and Jean Genet.

Bold in its themes and propositions, "The Inverted Gaze" (a translation of the book "Queer Critics") is an extraordinary work about French literature and American queer politics by one of France's most prominent intellectuals.

An examination of the reactionary, individualist, cynical, and belligerent shift in global politics to the right, implemented both by the right and the establishment left. Systemic, euphemized, insidious and structural violence has increased. It is now objectively measurable by the gulf in revenues, by subjective malaise, or by the menace of ecological apocalypse, and also by their constant exacerbation. -from How the World Swung to the Right Despite a few zones of active resistance-the alter-globalization movement, the Chiapas uprisings, the Arab springs, and the recent resistance to racialized police brutality and environmental and genocidal warfare in the United States-the last half-century has been witness to an undeniable global shift to the right. How the World Swung to the Right provides a comprehensive overview of this reactionary, individualist, cynical, and belligerent shift, which often has been cloaked in the guise of entertainment and good intentions. The counterrevolutions began with a first phase of deregulation and ideological counter-attacks, and the fall of the so-called "real" communisms. The 1990s inaugurated a global biopolitical turn and the financialization of the economy; the 2000s hammered in neoliberal gains through the alliance of ultraliberalism with neoconservatism. These policies were implemented, surprisingly, not only by the right but often by the establishment left. Cusset argues that in the face of this betrayal, conflict is the one thing we can still salvage from the notion of the "left." What we need today, he contends, are new sites of conflict that multiply the causes of struggle and the sites of mobilization, linking socioeconomic struggle with questions of identity and the urgency of ecology.

"A great story, full of twists and turns. . . . Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie." --Stanley Fish, "Think Again, New York Times" "In such a difficult genre, full of traps and obstacles, French Theory" is a success and a remarkable book in every respect: it is fair, balanced, and informed. I am sure this book will become the" reference on both sides of the Atlantic." --Jacques Derrida "The Atlantic Ocean has two sides, and so does French Theory. Reinvented in America and betrayed in its own country, it has become the most radical intellectual movement in the West with global reach, rewriting Marx in light of late capitalism. Breathtakingly moving back and forth between the two cultures, Francois Cusset takes us through a dazzling intellectual adventure that illuminates the past thirty years, and many more decades to come." --Sylvere Lotringer During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock 'n' roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation. Outside the academy, "French theory" had a profound impact on the era's emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At thesame time in academic departments across the country, their poststructuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America's cultural and intellectual fabric. French Theory "is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. Francois Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today-showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life. Francois Cusset, a writer and intellectual historian, teaches contemporary French thought in Paris at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques and at Columbia University's Reid Hall. His books include Queer Critics" and La Decennie." Jeff Fort is assistant professor of French at the University of California, Davis. He has translated works by Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, and Jean-Luc Nancy.