Perhaps the most influential anthropologist of his generation, Claude Levi-Strauss left a profound mark on the development of twentieth-century thought, equal to that of phenomenology and existentialism. Through a fertile mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics and from sociology and ethnology, Levi-Strauss elaborated his theory of structural unity in culture and became the preeminent representative of structural anthropology. La Pensee sauvage, published in French in 1962, was his crowning achievement. Ranging over philosophies, historical periods, and human societies, it challenged the prevailing assumption of the superiority of modern Western culture and sought to explain the unity of human intellection. Unfortunately titled The Savage Mind when it first published in English in 1966, the original translation nevertheless sparked a fascination with Levi-Strauss's work among generations of Anglophone readers. Wild Thought: A New Translation of "La Pensee sauvage" rekindles that spark with a fresh and accessible new translation. Including critical annotations for the contemporary reader, it restores the accuracy and integrity of the book that changed the course of twentieth-century thought, making it an indispensable addition to any philosophical and anthropological library.

With several never-before published writings, this volume gathers Althusser's major essays on psychoanalytic thought----documenting his intense and ambivalent relationship with Lacan, and dramatizing his intellectual journey and troubled personal life.

This memoir is less a chronicle of the life of a leading scholar and critic of matters French than a series of differently angled fragments, each with its attendant surprise, in what one commentator has called Jeffrey Mehlman's "amour vache"--his injured and occasionally injurious love--for France and the French. The reader will encounter masters of the art of reading in these pages, the exhilaration elicited by their achievements, and the unexpected (and occasionally unsettling) resonances those achievements have had in the author's life. With all its idiosyncrasies, "Adventures in the French Trade" depicts an intellectual generation in ways that will attract not only people who recall the heady days of the rise and reign of French theory but also those who do not. This provocative book should be of interest to students of intellectual history, literary criticism, Jewish studies, the history of American academia, and the genre of the memoir itself.

In these two essays, two of the most important French thinkers of our time reflect on each other's work. In so doing, novelist/essayist Maurice Blanchot and philosopher Michel Foucault develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth. The two texts present reflections on writing, language, and representation which question the status of the author/subject and explore the notion of a "neutral" voice that arises from the realm of the "outside." This book is crucial not only to an understanding of these two thinkers, but also to any overview of recent French thought. Michel Foucault (1927-1984) was the holder of a chair at the College de France. Among his works are "Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, "and "The History of Sexuality "Maurice Blanchot, born in 1907, is a novelist and critic. His works include "Death Sentence, Thomas the Obscure, "and "The Space of Literature."

In Revolution and Repetition, Jeffrey Mehlman surveys the question of the relation between Karl Marx's writings and the institution of literature. He presents not an application of Marxian categories to literary texts, but a delineation of how the phenomenon of revolution in France is refracted through two divergent series of writings. The first comprises three works by Marx: The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and The Civil War in France. The second consists of two exemplary nineteenth-century novels on revolution: Victor Hugo's Quatrevingt-treize and Honore de Balzac's Les Chouans. Mehlman also explores the limits and opportunities of reading itself. Within a series of precise textual analyses, the reader will encounter Jean Laplanche's lectures on "anxiety" in Freud, Jacques Derrida's Glas, Georg Lukacs's study of Balzac's "realism," and Michel Foucault's genealogy of prisons, Surveiller et punir. This volume is a working introduction to what may be termed French "post-structuralism." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

Most critics have come to terms with the contradictions in Freud's work by attempting to impose a unified system even at the cost of rejecting crucial metapyschological concepts such as the death wish. According to Jean Laplanche, "such variations or variants deserve better than a choice in favor of one of the other: they require an interpretation and such as interpretation implies that, as is the case with the analysis of dreams, all the elements be juxtaposed so that nothing be eliminated, that the either / or be retanslatedinto an and." In a way that Freud plainly does not control, Laplanche argures, there are at work two different concepts corresponding to each of a series of crucial Freudian terms; in each of these conceptual pairs of one of the elements is solidary with a specific conceptual scheme and the other with a second one. The entire body of Freud's work, for Laplanche, is constituted as an elaborately structured polemical field in which two mutually exclusive schemes may be seen to be struggling to dominate a single terminological apparatus. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis is a painstakingly lucid inquiry into the interpretative consequences of the conceptual and terminological difficulties posed by Freud's texts. It is an uncannily precise delineation of the perverse rigor with which Freud's most virulent discoveries perpetually escape him-and are endlessly rediscovered.

This memoir is less a chronicle of the life of a leading scholar and critic of matters French than a series of differently angled fragments, each with its attendant surprise, in what one commentator has called Jeffrey Mehlman's "amour vache"--his injured and occasionally injurious love--for France and the French. The reader will encounter masters of the art of reading in these pages, the exhilaration elicited by their achievements, and the unexpected (and occasionally unsettling) resonances those achievements have had in the author's life. With all its idiosyncrasies, "Adventures in the French Trade" depicts an intellectual generation in ways that will attract not only people who recall the heady days of the rise and reign of French theory but also those who do not. This provocative book should be of interest to students of intellectual history, literary criticism, Jewish studies, the history of American academia, and the genre of the memoir itself.

Perhaps the most influential anthropologist of his generation, Claude Levi-Strauss left a profound mark on the development of twentieth-century thought, equal to that of phenomenology and existentialism. Through a fertile mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics and from sociology and ethnology, Levi-Strauss elaborated his theory of structural unity in culture and became the preeminent representative of structural anthropology. La Pensee sauvage, published in French in 1962, was his crowning achievement. Ranging over philosophies, historical periods, and human societies, it challenged the prevailing assumption of the superiority of modern Western culture and sought to explain the unity of human intellection. Unfortunately titled The Savage Mind when it first published in English in 1966, the original translation nevertheless sparked a fascination with Levi-Strauss's work among generations of Anglophone readers. Wild Thought: A New Translation of "La Pensee sauvage" rekindles that spark with a fresh and accessible new translation. Including critical annotations for the contemporary reader, it restores the accuracy and integrity of the book that changed the course of twentieth-century thought, making it an indispensable addition to any philosophical and anthropological library.

In this 1995 book, which includes a substantial introduction, Jeffrey Mehlman confronts the politically devastating resonances in the work of several leading French writers. The essays focus on the series of enigmas surrounding the 'Blanchot affair' - a scandal provoked by Mehlman's revelation in 1977 that Maurice Blanchot, one of the tutelary figures of contemporary French thought, had in the 1930s been a prominent fascist journalist. Mehlman takes the issue of Blanchot's forgotten political essays deep into the most revered - and misunderstood - of his novels, L'Arret de mort. Using this affair as a point of departure, Mehlman sheds light on the question of the usability of psychoanalysis for literary readings (examining, for example, Baudelaire, Mallarme and Valery); he also investigates the ideological and political connotations of similar literary and theoretical material. The volume as a whole provides a consistently provocative meditation on literature, ethics, and the experience of the French in World War II.

In this book, Jeffrey Mehlman dwells on the series of enigmas surrounding the "Blanchot affair", in which one of the leading figures of contemporary French thought was shown to have been a prominent fascist journalist during the 1930s. Using this as a point of departure, Mehlman investigates the ideological and political connotations of similar literary material, shedding new light on the question of the usability of psychoanalysis for literary readings. The volume provides a provocative meditation on literature, ethics, and the experience of the French in World War II.

Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. These four essays-on Blanchot, Lacan, Giraudoux, and Gide-have as their focus the barely imaginable coherence which the writings of four major contemporaries take on when read in the light of France's pre-World War II heritage of anti-Jewish thought. As the essays delve into such crucial topics as the inaugural silence in Blanchot's sense of literature, the "style" of Lacan, Giraudoux's relation to Racine, and the sexual politics of Gide, they engage a realm that at times seems-or seemed-anti-Semitic in its essence. Negotiating the complex ramifications of a lost tradition and the structure of its obliteration, Jeffrey Mehlman, in his conclusion, speculates on the emblematic value of Walter Benjamin's perpetually deferred "journey to Palestine via France" and its import for textual interpretation. A French version of Mehlman's essay on Blanchot, published in Tel quel,spurred an impassioned journalistic debate in Paris and London. Broadening still further the context of that inquiry, Legacies will prove a source of provocation and insight to all who are interested in the intellectual history of contemporary France.

Limited Inc is a major work in the philosophy of language by the celebrated French thinker Jacques Derrida. The book's two essays, "Limited Inc" and "Signature Event Context," constitute key statements of the Derridean theory of deconstruction. They are the clearest exposition to be found of Derrida's most controversial idea, that linguistic meaning is fundamentally indeterminate because the contexts that fix meaning are never stable. Limited Inc includes an important new afterword by the author.

Consider the oddly juxtaposed eminence of those in attendance: Wartime New York was the city where French Symbolism, in the person of Maurice Maeterlinck, came to live out its last productive years; where French surrealism, in the person of AndrA(c) Breton, came to survive; and where French structuralism, in the person of Claude LA(c)vi-Strauss, came to be born. From the largely forgotten prewar visit to the city of PA(c)tain and Laval to the seizing, burning, and capsizing of the Normandie, France's floating museum, in the Hudson River, Jeffrey Mehlman evokes the writerly world of French Manhattan, its achievements and feuds, during one of the most vexed periods of French history.

In EmigrA(c) New York, a series of surprising and expertly etched portraits emerge against the backdrop of an overriding irony: the United States, the world's principal hope in the battle against Hitler's barbarism, was for the most part more eager to deal with PA(c)tain's collaborationist regime than with what Secretary of State Cordell Hull called de Gaulle's "so-called Free French" movement.

In light of the legendary difficulty of Walter Benjamin's works, it is a strange and intriguing fact that from 1929 to 1933 the great critic and cultural theorist wrote - and broadcast - numerous scripts, on the order of fireside chats, for children. Invited to speak on whatever subject he considered appropriate, Benjamin talked to the children of Frankfurt and Berlin about the destruction of Pompeii, an earthquake in Lisbon, and a railroad disaster at the Firth of Tay. He spoke about bootlegging and swindling, cataclysm and suicide, Faust and Cagliostro. In this first sustained analysis of the thirty surviving scripts. Jeffrey Mehlman demonstrates how Benjamin used the unlikely forum of children's radio to pursue some of his central philosophical and theological concerns. In Walter Benjamin for Children, readers will encounter a host of intertextual surprises: an evocation of the flooding of the Mississippi informed by the argument of "The Task of the Translator"; a discussion of scams in stamp-collecting that turns into "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; a tale of bootlegging in the American South that converges with the best of Benjamin's forays into fiction. Mehlman superimposes a dual series of texts dealing with catastrophe, on the one hand, and fraud, on the other, and allows it to resonate with the false-messianic theology of Sabbatianism as it came to focus the attention and enthusiasm of Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem during the same years. The radio scripts for children offer an unexpected byway, on the eve of apocalypse, into Benjamin's messianic preoccupations. A child's garden of deconstruction, these twenty-minute talks - from the perspective ofchildhood, before an invisible audience, on whatever happened to cross the critic's mind - are also by their very nature the closest we may ever come to a transcript of a psychoanalysis of Walter Benjamin. Particularly alive to that circumstance, Mehlman explores the themes of the radio broadcasts and brilliantly illuminates their hidden connections to Benjamin's life and work. This lucid analysis brings to light some of the least researched and understood aspects of Walter Benjamin's thought. It will interest and provoke literary theorists and philosophers of culture, as well as anyone who hopes to understand one of this century's most suggestive and perplexing critics.