1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910854200803321

Autore

Panagia Davide

Titolo

Sentimental Empiricism : Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France / / Davide Panagia

Pubbl/distr/stampa

LaVergne, : Fordham University Press, 2024

New York, NY : , : Fordham University Press, , [2024]

2024

ISBN

9781531506735

1531506739

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (288 p.) : 8 b/w illustrations

Classificazione

PHI043000POL010000SOC026040

Disciplina

146/.44

Soggetti

Empiricism - History

Philosophy, French - 20th century

PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Post-Structuralism

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from eBook information screen..

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- PART I Missed Understandings -- 1 Reading Political Theory in Postwar America and Postwar France -- 2 Mimesis, the explication de texte, and State Thinking -- PART II Dispositionalities -- Preface -- 3 Jean Wahl, Empirico-Criticism, and the Concrete -- 4 Simone de Beauvoir and the Elementary Structures of Patriarchy -- 5 More than a Unity: Gilbert Simondon's Sentimental Empiricism -- 6 Gilles Deleuze: Displacing Reflection -- 7 Michel Foucault and the Political Ontology of the Dispositif -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Sentimental Empiricism reconsiders the legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism and moral sentimentalism for the intellectual formation of the generation of postwar French thinkers whose work came to dominate Anglophone conversations across the humanities under the guise of "French theory." Panagia's book first shows what was missed in the reception of this literature in the Anglophone academy by attending to how France's pedagogical milieu plays out church and state relations in the form of educational debates



around reading practices, the aesthetics of mimesis, French imperialism, and republican universalism. Panagia then shows how such thinkers as Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault develop a sentimental empiricist critical philosophy that distances itself from dialectical critique and challenges the metaphysical premise of inherent relations, especially as it had been articulated in the tradition of Aristotelian scholasticism.Panagia develops the long disputed political legacy of French theory through an exploration of how these thinkers came to understand an aesthetic of mimesis as a credentialing standard for selection to political participation. Since, in France, the ability to imitate well is a state qualification necessary to access offices of elite power, the political, aesthetic, and philosophical critique of mimesis became one of the defining features of sentimental empiricist thought. By exploring the historical, intellectual, cultural, and philosophical complexities of this political aesthetic, Panagia shows how and why postwar French thinkers turned to a tradition of sentimental empiricism in order to develop a new form of criticism attentive to the dispositional powers of domination. This book is available from the publisher on an open access basis.