1.
Paris
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Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It has an area of 105 square kilometres and a population of 2,229,621 in 2013 within its administrative limits, the agglomeration has grown well beyond the citys administrative limits. By the 17th century, Paris was one of Europes major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today. The aire urbaine de Paris, a measure of area, spans most of the Île-de-France region and has a population of 12,405,426. It is therefore the second largest metropolitan area in the European Union after London, the Metropole of Grand Paris was created in 2016, combining the commune and its nearest suburbs into a single area for economic and environmental co-operation. Grand Paris covers 814 square kilometres and has a population of 7 million persons, the Paris Region had a GDP of €624 billion in 2012, accounting for 30.0 percent of the GDP of France and ranking it as one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. The city is also a rail, highway, and air-transport hub served by two international airports, Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. Opened in 1900, the subway system, the Paris Métro. It is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro, notably, Paris Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in the world outside of Japan, with 262 millions passengers in 2015. In 2015, Paris received 22.2 million visitors, making it one of the top tourist destinations. The association football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris, the 80, 000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros, Paris hosted the 1900 and 1924 Summer Olympics and is bidding to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The name Paris is derived from its inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. Thus, though written the same, the name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. In the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps, since the late 19th century, Paris has also been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in English as Parisians and in French as Parisiens and they are also pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the areas major north-south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité, this place of land and water trade routes gradually became a town
2.
20th-century philosophy
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20th-century philosophy saw the development of a number of new philosophical schools— including logical positivism, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, and poststructuralism. In terms of the eras of philosophy, it is labelled as contemporary philosophy. However, there have been disputes regarding both the terminology and the reasons behind the divide, as well as philosophers who see themselves as bridging the divide, in addition, philosophy in the twentieth century became increasingly technical and harder for lay people to read. Analytic philosophy is a term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand, epistemology in the Anglo-American tradition was radically shaken up by the publication of Edmund Gettiers 1963 paper Is Justified True Belief Knowledge. This paper provided counter-examples to the formulation of knowledge going back to Plato. Neopragmatism, sometimes called linguistic pragmatism is a recent philosophical term for philosophy that reintroduces many concepts from pragmatism. V. O and it repudiates the notion of universal truth, epistemological foundationalism, representationalism, and the notion of epistemic objectivity. It is a nominalist approach that denies that natural kinds and linguistic entities have substantive ontological implications and this approach typically involves eschewing philosophical theories in favour of close attention to the details of the use of everyday, ordinary language. The later Ludwig Wittgenstein is ordinary language philosophys most celebrated proponent outside the Oxford circle, second generation figures include Stanley Cavell and John Searle. Continental philosophy, in usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the half of the 20th century. Existentialism is generally considered a philosophical and cultural movement that holds that the point of philosophical thinking must be the individual. Common themes are the primacy of experience, Angst, the absurd, while György Lukácss History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korschs Marxism and Philosophy, first published in 1923, are often seen as the works that inaugurated this current. Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the phrase Western Marxism much later, phenomenology is the study of the phenomena of experience. It is a philosophical movement founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology, in Husserls conception, is concerned with the systematic reflection on, and study of, the structures of consciousness. This phenomenological ontology can be differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis, which sees the world as objects, sets of objects. Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to prominence in the 1960s and 70s
3.
Western philosophy
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Western philosophy is the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. The word philosophy itself originated from the Hellenic, philosophia, literally, the scope of philosophy in the ancient understanding, and the writings of the ancient philosophers, were all intellectual endeavors. Western Philosophy is generally said to begin in the Greek cities of western Asia Minor with Thales of Miletus and his most noted students were respectively Anaximander and Anaximenes of Miletus. Pythagoras, from the island of Samos off the coast of Ionia, pythagoreans hold that all is number, giving formal accounts in contrast to the previous material of the Ionians. They also believe in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, or reincarnation, Socrates The key figure in Greek philosophy is Socrates. Socrates studied under several Sophists but transformed Greek philosophy into a unified, Socrates used a critical approach called the elenchus or Socratic method to examine peoples views. He aimed to study human things, the life, justice, beauty. Although Socrates wrote nothing himself, some of his many disciples wrote down his conversations and he was tried for corrupting the youth and impiety by the Greek democracy. He was found guilty and sentenced to death, although his friends offered to help him escape from prison, he chose to remain in Athens and abide by his principles. His execution consisting in drinking the poison hemlock and he died in 399 B. C, Plato Socrates most important student was Plato. Plato founded the Academy of Athens and wrote a number of dialogues, some central ideas of Platos dialogues are the immortality of the soul, the benefits of being just, that evil is ignorance, and the Theory of Forms. Forms are universal properties that constitute reality and contrast with the changeable material things he called becoming. Aristotle Platos most outstanding student was Aristotle, Aristotle was perhaps the first truly systematic philosopher and scientist. He wrote books on physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, politics, Aristotelian logic was the first type of logic to attempt to categorize every valid syllogism. Aristotelian philosophy exercised considerable influence on almost all western philosophers, including Greek, Roman, Christian, Jewish, the Neoplatonic and Christian philosophers of Late Antiquity. Early medieval philosophy was influenced by the likes of Stoicism, neo-Platonism, but, above all, the prominent figure of this period was St. Augustinianism was the preferred starting point for most philosophers up until the 13th century. The foundations of many northern European universities were built in the Middle Ages by waves of Irish, Scottish & English monks from the Celtic Church begun by Columba, see Celtic Christianity. Erigena is said to have been stabbed to death by his students with their pens and his theology would today be called pantheistic, in keeping with Celtic resolutions of pagan and Christian philosophy
4.
Continental philosophy
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Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the half of the 20th century. It is difficult to identify non-trivial claims that would be common to all the preceding philosophical movements, the term continental philosophy, like analytic philosophy, lacks clear definition and may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views. Simon Glendinning has suggested that the term was originally more pejorative than descriptive, nonetheless, Michael E. Rosen has ventured to identify common themes that typically characterize continental philosophy. First, continental philosophers generally reject the view that the sciences are the only or most accurate way of understanding natural phenomena. This contrasts with many analytic philosophers who consider their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, thus continental philosophy tends toward historicism. This tendency is very clear in the Marxist tradition, but is central in existentialism and post-structuralism. A final characteristic trait of continental philosophy is an emphasis on metaphilosophy, in the wake of the development and success of the natural sciences, continental philosophers have often sought to redefine the method and nature of philosophy. In some cases, this manifests as a renovation of the view that philosophy is the first, foundational. In other cases, it is held that philosophy investigates a domain that is irreducibly cultural or practical, and some continental philosophers doubt whether any conception of philosophy can coherently achieve its stated goals. This tradition, which has come to be known broadly as analytic philosophy, became dominant in Britain, russell and Moore made a dismissal of Hegelianism and its philosophical relatives a distinctive part of their new movement. Self-described analytic philosophy flourishes in France, including such as Jules Vuillemin, Vincent Descombes, Gilles Gaston Granger, François Recanati. Continental philosophy is defined in terms of a family of philosophical traditions. The history of philosophy is usually thought to begin with German idealism. As the institutional roots of continental philosophy in many cases directly descend from those of phenomenology, nonetheless, Husserl is also a respected subject of study in the analytic tradition. J. G. Merquior wrote, the most prestigious philosophizing in France took a very dissimilar path, one might say it all began with Henri Bergson. Carnaps paper argues that Heideggers lecture What Is Metaphysics, violates logical syntax to create nonsensical pseudo-statements. Moreover, Carnap claimed that many German metaphysicians of the era were similar to Heidegger in writing statements that were not merely false, but devoid of any meaning
5.
The Accursed Share
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The Accursed Share, An Essay on General Economy is a book about political economy by the French intellectual Georges Bataille. Written between 1946 and 1949 and collected in seven of Batailles complete works, it comprises three volumes, Consumption, The History of Eroticism, and Sovereignty. First published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1949, the book was re-edited in 1967, the Accursed Share is considered one of the most important of Batailles books. Bataille presents a new theory which he calls general economy. In the Theoretical Introduction, Bataille writes that. the extension of economic growth requires the overturning of economic principles—the overturning of the ethics that grounds them. Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation, if a part of wealth is doomed to destruction or at least to unproductive use without any possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return. An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the way that one changes a tire. It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tire. The notion of energy is central to Batailles thinking. Batailles inquiry takes the superabundance of energy, beginning from the outpouring of energy or the surpluses produced by lifes basic chemical reactions. In other words, an organism in Batailles general economy, unlike the rational actors of classical economy who are motivated by scarcity and this extra energy can be used productively for the organisms growth or it can be lavishly expended. Bataille insists that a growth or expansion always runs up against limits. The wasting of this energy is luxury, the form and role luxury assumes in a society are characteristic of that society. The accursed share refers to excess, destined for waste. Crucial to the formulation of the theory was Batailles reflection upon the phenomenon of potlatch and it is influenced by Marcel Mausss The Gift, as well as by Friedrich Nietzsches On the Genealogy of Morality. In Volumes 2 and 3 Bataille extends the argument to eroticism and sovereignty, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre cited The Accursed Share in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, crediting Bataille with interesting insights into the way extravagance can become an economic function. Classicist Norman O. Batailles biographer Michel Surya considered The Accursed Share one of Batailles most important books, biologist Bruce Bagemihl praised The Accursed Share, calling it brilliant. Paul Hegarty argued that Bataille became an apologist for Stalinism in The Accursed Share, doing so despite Batailles awareness of the brutalities of the Soviet Union
6.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and an important figure of German idealism. He achieved wide renown in his day and, while primarily influential within the tradition of philosophy, has become increasingly influential in the analytic tradition as well. Although he remains a figure, his canonical stature within Western philosophy is universally recognized. His philosophy of spirit conceptually integrates psychology, the state, history, art, religion and his account of the master–slave dialectic has been highly influential, especially in 20th-century France. Hegel has been seen in the 20th century as the originator of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad, however, as an explicit phrase, Hegel has influenced many thinkers and writers whose own positions vary widely. Hegel was born on August 27,1770 in Stuttgart, in the Duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany, christened Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, he was known as Wilhelm to his close family. His father, Georg Ludwig, was Rentkammersekretär at the court of Karl Eugen, Hegels mother, Maria Magdalena Louisa, was the daughter of a lawyer at the High Court of Justice at the Württemberg court. She died of a fever when Hegel was thirteen. Hegel and his father caught the disease but narrowly survived. Hegel had a sister, Christiane Luise, and a brother, Georg Ludwig, at the age of three Hegel went to the German School. When he entered the Latin School two years later, he knew the first declension, having been taught it by his mother. In 1776, Hegel entered Stuttgarts gymnasium illustre, during his adolescence Hegel read voraciously, copying lengthy extracts in his diary. Authors he read include the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and writers associated with the Enlightenment, such as Christian Garve, Hegels studies at the Gymnasium were concluded with his Abiturrede entitled The abortive state of art and scholarship in Turkey. At the age of eighteen Hegel entered the Tübinger Stift, where he had as roommates the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, sharing a dislike for what they regarded as the restrictive environment of the Seminary, the three became close friends and mutually influenced each others ideas. All greatly admired Hellenic civilization, and Hegel additionally steeped himself in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and they watched the unfolding of the French Revolution with shared enthusiasm. Schelling and Hölderlin immersed themselves in theoretical debates on Kantian philosophy, Hegel at this time envisaged his future as that of a Popularphilosoph, i. e. Having received his certificate from the Tübingen Seminary, Hegel became Hofmeister to an aristocratic family in Bern. During this period he composed the text which has known as the Life of Jesus
7.
Karl Marx
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Karl Marx was a Prussian-born philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Born in Trier to a family, he later studied political economy. His work has influenced subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history. These economic critiques were set out in works such as the three volumes, published between 1867 and 1894, that comprise Das Kapital. According to Marx, states are run in the interests of the class but are nonetheless represented as being in favor of the common interest of all. He predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system, socialism. Marx actively fought for its implementation, arguing that the class should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history and his work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. Many intellectuals, labour unions, artists and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marxs work, Marx is typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern sociology and social science. Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 to Heinrich Marx and he was born at Brückengasse 664 in Trier, a town then part of the Kingdom of Prussias Province of the Lower Rhine. Marx was ancestrally Jewish, his grandfather was a Dutch rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied Triers rabbis since 1723. Marx was also a cousin once removed of German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, also born to a German Jewish family in the Rhineland. Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant, a classical liberal, he took part in agitation for a constitution and reforms in Prussia, then governed by an absolute monarchy. In 1815 Heinrich Marx began work as an attorney, in 1819 moving his family to a property near the Porta Nigra. Her sister Sophie Pressburg, was Marxs aunt and was married to Lion Philips Marxs uncle through this marriage, Lion Philips was a wealthy Dutch tobacco manufacturer and industrialist, upon whom Karl and Jenny Marx would later often come to rely for loans while they were exiled in London. Little is known of Karl Marxs childhood, the third of nine children, he became the oldest son when his brother Moritz died in 1819. Young Karl was baptised into the Lutheran Church in August 1824 along with his siblings, Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise, Emilie. Young Karl was privately educated, by Heinrich Marx, until 1830, by employing many liberal humanists as teachers, Wyttenbach incurred the anger of the local conservative government
8.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869, Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, and he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and he lived his remaining years in the care of his mother, and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and died in 1900. Nietzsches body of work touched widely on art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from figures such as Schopenhauer, Wagner. His writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism, born on 15 October 1844, Nietzsche grew up in the small town of Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. He was named after King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who turned forty-nine on the day of Nietzsches birth, Nietzsches parents, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler, married in 1843, the year before their sons birth. They had two children, a daughter, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, born in 1846, and a second son, Ludwig Joseph. Nietzsches father died from an ailment in 1849, Ludwig Joseph died six months later. The family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsches maternal grandmother, after the death of Nietzsches grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house, now Nietzsche-Haus, a museum and Nietzsche study centre. Nietzsche attended a school and then, later, a private school, where he became friends with Gustav Krug, Rudolf Wagner. In 1854, he began to attend Domgymnasium in Naumburg, because his father had worked for the state the now-fatherless Nietzsche was offered a scholarship to study at the internationally recognized Schulpforta. He transferred and studied there from 1858 to 1864, becoming friends with Paul Deussen and he also found time to work on poems and musical compositions. Nietzsche led Germania, a music and literature club, during his summers in Naumburg. His end-of-semester exams in March 1864 showed a 1 in Religion and German, a 2a in Greek and Latin, a 2b in French, History, and Physics, while at Pforta, Nietzsche had a penchant for pursuing subjects that were considered unbecoming. The teacher who corrected the essay gave it a mark but commented that Nietzsche should concern himself in the future with healthier, more lucid. After graduation in September 1864, Nietzsche commenced studies in theology, for a short time he and Deussen became members of the Burschenschaft Frankonia. After one semester, he stopped his studies and lost his faith. In June 1865, at the age of 20, Nietzsche wrote to his sister Elisabeth, who was deeply religious, a letter regarding his loss of faith
9.
Sigmund Freud
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Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg and he qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology, Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938 Freud left Austria to escape the Nazis and he died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939. In creating psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, Freuds redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfillments provided him with models for the analysis of symptom formation. On this basis Freud elaborated his theory of the unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, in his later work Freud developed a wide-ranging interpretation and critique of religion and culture. Though in overall decline as a diagnostic and clinical practice, psychoanalysis remains influential within psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, nonetheless, Freuds work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. In the words of W. H. Audens 1940 poetic tribute, by the time of Freuds death, Freud was born to Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the first of eight children. Both of his parents were from Galicia, in modern-day Ukraine and his father, Jakob Freud, a wool merchant, had two sons, Emanuel and Philipp, by his first marriage. Jakobs family were Hasidic Jews, and although Jakob himself had moved away from the tradition and he and Freuds mother, Amalia Nathansohn, who was 20 years younger and his third wife, were married by Rabbi Isaac Noah Mannheimer on 29 July 1855. They were struggling financially and living in a room, in a locksmiths house at Schlossergasse 117 when their son Sigmund was born. He was born with a caul, which his mother saw as an omen for the boys future. In 1859, the Freud family left Freiberg, Freuds half brothers emigrated to Manchester, England, parting him from the inseparable playmate of his early childhood, Emanuels son, John. Jakob Freud took his wife and two children firstly to Leipzig and then in 1860 to Vienna where four sisters and a brother were born, Rosa, Marie, Adolfine, Paula, in 1865, the nine-year-old Freud entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, a prominent high school. He proved an outstanding pupil and graduated from the Matura in 1873 with honors and he loved literature and was proficient in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Freud entered the University of Vienna at age 17, in 1876, Freud spent four weeks at Clauss zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels in an inconclusive search for their male reproductive organs. He graduated with an MD in 1881, in 1882, Freud began his medical career at the Vienna General Hospital
10.
Marquis de Sade
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Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer, famous for his libertine sexuality. He was a proponent of freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion. The words sadism and sadist are derived from his name, during the French Revolution, he was an elected delegate to the National Convention. Many of his works were written in prison and he was his parents only surviving child. He was educated by an uncle, the Abbé de Sade, in Sades youth, his father abandoned the family, his mother joined a convent. He was raised with servants who indulged his every whim, which led to him becoming known as a rebellious, later in his childhood, Sade was sent to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, a Jesuit college, for four years. While at the school, he was tutored by Abbé Jacques-François Amblet, later in life, the Abbé testified at one of Sades trials, saying that Sade had a passionate temperament which made him eager in the pursuit of pleasure but had a good heart. At the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, he was subjected to corporal punishment, including flagellation. At age 14, Sade began attending a military academy. At age 15, he was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant on 14 December 1755 after 20 months of training, becoming a soldier. After 13 months as a sub-lieutenant, he was commissioned to the rank of cornet in the Brigade de S. André of the Comte de Provences Carbine Regiment and he eventually became Colonel of a Dragoon regiment and fought in the Seven Years War. In 1766, he had a theatre built in his castle. In January 1767, his father died, the men of the Sade family alternated between using the marquis and comte titles. His grandfather, Gaspard François de Sade, was the first to use marquis, occasionally, he was the Marquis de Sade, but is identified in documents as the Marquis de Mazan. The Sade family were noblesse dépée, claiming at the time the oldest, Frank-descended nobility, so, at Court, precedence was by seniority and royal favor, not title. There is father-and-son correspondence, wherein father addresses son as marquis, for many years, Sades descendants regarded his life and work as a scandal to be suppressed. At that time, the marquis of legend was so unmentionable in his own family that Xavier de Sade only learned of him in the late 1940s when approached by a journalist. He subsequently discovered a store of Sades papers in the family château at Condé-en-Brie and his youngest son, the Marquis Thibault de Sade, has continued the collaboration
11.
Lev Shestov
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Lev Isaakovich Shestov, born Yehuda Leyb Schwarzmann, was a Russian existentialist philosopher. Born in Kyiv on February 121866, he emigrated to France in 1921 and he lived in Paris until his death on November 19,1938. Shestov was born Lev Isaakovich Schwarzmann in Kiev into a Jewish family and he obtained an education at various places, due to fractious clashes with authority. He went on to law and mathematics at the Moscow State University but after a clash with the Inspector of Students he was told to return to Kiev. Shestovs dissertation prevented him becoming a doctor of law, as it was dismissed on account of its revolutionary tendencies. In 1898 he entered a circle of prominent Russian intellectuals and artists which included Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Diaghilev, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Shestov contributed articles to a journal the circle had established. During this time he completed his first major work, Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche, Philosophy and Preaching. He developed his thinking in a book on Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Frederich Nietzsche. In All Things Are Possible Shestov adopted the style of Friedrich Nietzsche to investigate the difference between Russian and European Literature. D. H. Lawrence, who wrote the Foreword to S. S. Kotelianskys literary translation of the work, summarized Shestovs philosophy with the words and it is only a shaking free of the human psyche from old bonds. The positive central idea is that the psyche, or soul, really believes in itself. Shestov deals with key issues such as religion, rationalism, and science in this highly approachable work, topics he would also examine in later writings such as In Jobs Balances. Shestovs own key quote from this work is probably the following. we need to think that only one assertion has or can have any objective reality, that nothing on earth is impossible. Every time someone wants to force us to admit there are other, more limited and limiting truths. Shestovs works were not met with approval even by some of his closest Russian friends, many saw in Shestovs work a renunciation of reason and metaphysics, and even an espousal of nihilism. Nevertheless, he would find admirers in such writers as D. H. Lawrence, in 1908 Shestov moved to Freiburg, Germany, and he stayed there until 1910, when he moved to a small Swiss village named Coppet. During this time the author worked prolifically, One of the fruits of these labours was the publication of Great Vigils and Penultimate Words. He returned to Moscow in 1915, and in this year his son Sergei died in combat against the Germans, during the Moscow period, his work became more influenced by matters of religion and theology
12.
Michel Foucault
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Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels and his thought has been highly influential both for academic and for activist groups, especially those working within contemporary sociology, cultural studies, and critical theory. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book and these first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called archaeology. In 1970 he was admitted to the Collège de France, membership of which he retained until his death and he also became active in a number of left-wing groups involved in anti-racist campaigns, anti-human rights abuses movements, and the struggle for penal reform. He went on to publish The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, in these books he developed archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role which power plays in the evolution of discourse in society. Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in the city of Poitiers, west-central France and he had been named after his father, Dr. His father was a local surgeon, having been born in Fontainebleau before moving to Poitiers. She was the daughter of prosperous surgeon Dr. Prosper Malapert, Paul Foucault eventually took over his father-in-laws medical practice, while his wife took charge of their large mid-19th-century house, Le Piroir, in the village of Vendeuvre-du-Poitou. Together the couple had three children, a girl named Francine and two boys, Paul-Michel and Denys, all of whom shared the same hair and bright blue eyes. The children were raised to be nominal Roman Catholics, attending mass at the Church of Saint-Porchair, in later life, Foucault would reveal very little about his childhood. Describing himself as a delinquent, he claimed his father was a bully who would sternly punish him. In 1930, Foucault began his two years early at the local Lycée Henry-IV. Here he undertook two years of education before entering the main lycée, where he stayed until 1936. He then undertook his first four years of education at the same establishment, excelling in French, Greek, Latin and history but doing poorly at arithmetic. In 1939, the Second World War broke out and France was occupied by Nazi Germany until 1945, his parents opposed the occupation and the Vichy regime, in 1940, Foucaults mother enrolled him in the Collège Saint-Stanislas, a strict Roman Catholic institution run by the Jesuits. Lonely, he described his years there as the ordeal, but excelled academically, particularly in philosophy, history, in 1942, he entered his final year, the terminale, where he focused on the study of philosophy, earning his baccalauréat in 1943. Returning to the local Lycée Henry-IV, he studied history and philosophy for a year, aided by a personal tutor and these ideas influenced Foucault, who adopted Hyppolites conviction that philosophy must be developed through a study of history
13.
Jacques Derrida
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Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts and he is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy. During his career Derrida published more than 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and he also influenced architecture, music, art, and art criticism. Particularly in his writings, Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his work. Some critics consider Speech and Phenomena to be his most important work, others cite Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Margins of Philosophy. These writings influenced various activists and political movements and he became a well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious difficulty of his work made him controversial. Derrida was the third of five children and his elder brother Paul Moïse died at less than three months old, the year before Derrida was born, leading him to suspect throughout his life his role as a replacement for his deceased brother. Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar, on the first day of the school year in 1942, French administrators in Algeria — implementing anti-Semitic quotas set by the Vichy government — expelled Derrida from his lycée. He secretly skipped school for a rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students. In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers an instrument of revolt against family and his reading also included Camus and Sartre. In the late 1940s, he attended the Lycée Bugeaud and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, on his first day at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1952, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium, he completed his masters degree in philosophy on Edmund Husserl and he then passed the highly competitive agrégation exam in 1956. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956–57 academic year reading Joyces Ulysses at the Widener Library, in June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence of 1954–1962, Derrida asked to teach children in lieu of military service, teaching French. Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne and his wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, in 1965 Derrida began an association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years. Derridas subsequent distance from the Tel Quel group, after 1971, has attributed to his reservations about their embrace of Maoism. At the same colloquium Derrida would meet Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man, a second son, Jean, was born in 1967
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Jacques Lacan
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Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud. Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced many leading French intellectuals in the 1960s and his ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, linguistics, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis. Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Émilie and Alfred Lacans three children and his father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic – his younger brother went to a monastery in 1929, during the early 1920s, Lacan attended right-wing Action Française political meetings, of which he would later be highly critical, and met the founder, Charles Maurras. By the mid-1920s, Lacan had become dissatisfied with religion and became an atheist and he quarreled with his family over this issue. In 1920, after being rejected for service on the grounds that he was too thin. During that period, he was interested in the philosophies of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. In 1932, after a year at Saint Annes Clinique de Maladies Mentales et de lEncéphale. In 1932 he was awarded the Diplôme dÉtat de docteur en médecine for his thesis On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality. It had a reception in the 1930s because it was not published until four decades later. This thesis is thought to mark Lacans entry into psychoanalysis and it shows Lacan’s dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry and the growing influence of Sigmund Freud on his works. ‘Paranoid Psychosis and its Relation to the Personality’ was based on observations of patients with a primary focus on one female patient whom Lacan called Aimee. It was published in the Revue française de psychanalyse, in Autumn of that same year, Lacan began his training analysis with Rudolph Lowenstein, which was to last until 1938. Two years later Lacan was elected to the Société psychanalytique de Paris, in January 1934 he married Marie-Louise Blondin, and in January 1937 they had their first child, a daughter named Caroline. Their second child, a son named Thibaut, was born in August 1939, in 1936, Lacan presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad on the Mirror Phase. The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, insulted, Lacan left the congress to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. No copy of the original lecture remains, Lacan was an active intellectual of the inter-war period—he was associated with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. He attended the mouvement Psyché that Maryse Choisy founded and he published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure and attended the first public reading of James Joyces Ulysses
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Maurice Blanchot
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Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida. Little was known until recently much of Blanchots life. Blanchot was born in the village of Quain on 22 September 1907, Blanchot studied philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, where he became a close friend of the Lithuanian-born French Jewish phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas. He then embarked on a career as a political journalist in Paris, from 1932 to 1940 he was editor of the mainstream, conservative daily the Journal des débats. In December 1940, he met Georges Bataille, who had written strong anti-fascist articles in the thirties, Blanchot worked in Paris during the Nazi occupation. He refused the editorship of the collaborationist Nouvelle Revue Française, for which, as part of an elaborate ploy, in June 1944, Blanchot was almost executed by a Nazi firing squad. After the war Blanchot began working only as a novelist and literary critic, in 1947, Blanchot left Paris for the secluded village of Èze in the south of France, where he spent the next decade of his life. Like Sartre and other French intellectuals of the era, Blanchot avoided the academy as a means of livelihood, importantly, from 1953 to 1968, he published regularly in Nouvelle Revue Française. At the same time, he began a lifestyle of relative isolation, often not seeing close friends for years, part of the reason for his self-imposed isolation was the fact that, for most of his life, Blanchot suffered from poor health. Blanchots political activities after the war shifted to the left, the manifesto was crucial to the intellectual response to the war. In May 1968, Blanchot once again emerged from personal obscurity and it was his sole public appearance after the war. Yet for fifty years he remained a consistent champion of modern literature, during the later years of his life, he repeatedly wrote against the intellectual attraction to fascism, and notably against Heideggers post-war silence over the Holocaust. Blanchot wrote more than thirty works of fiction, literary criticism, in 1983, Blanchot published La Communauté inavouable. This work inspired The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancys attempt to approach community in a non-religious, non-utilitarian and he died on 20 February 2003 in Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis, Yvelines, France. Blanchots work is not a coherent, all-encompassing theory, since it is a founded on paradox. The thread running through all his writing is the constant engagement with the question of literature, for Blanchot, literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question. In the everyday use of language, words are the vehicles of ideas, the word flower means flower that refers to flowers in the world
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Jean Baudrillard
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Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture and he wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, gender relations, economics, social history, art, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his best known works are Simulacra and Simulation, America and his work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on 27 July 1929 and his grandparents were peasant farm workers and his father a policeman. During high school, he became aware of pataphysics, which is said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillards later thought and he became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne. There he studied German language and literature, which led him to teaching the subject at several different lycées. Subsequently, he began teaching sociology at the Paris X Nanterre, during this time, Baudrillard worked closely with Philosopher Humphrey De Battenburge, who described Baudrillard as a visionary. At Nanterre he took up a position as Maître Assistant, then Maître de Conférences, eventually becoming a professor after completing his accreditation, LAutre par lui-même. In 1970, Baudrillard made the first of his trips to the United States, and in 1973. He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to his becoming a photographer, in 1986 he moved to IRIS at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teaching career. He nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur lInnovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de Pataphysique. Baudrillard taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and collaborated at the Canadian theory, culture, and technology review Ctheory and he also participated in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies from its inception in 2004 until his death. In 1999–2000, his photographs were exhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris, in 2004, Baudrillard attended the major conference on his work, Baudrillard and the Arts, at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany. Baudrillard thought, as do many post-structuralists, that meaning is brought about through systems of working together. Following on from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning is created through difference—through what something is not, from this starting point Baudrillard theorized broadly about human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His writing portrays societies always searching for a sense of meaning—or a total understanding of the world—that remains consistently elusive. In Baudrillards view, the subject may try to understand the object, the subject is, rather, seduced by the object. Reality, in sense, dies out
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Michel Onfray
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Michel Onfray is a contemporary French writer and philosopher who promotes hedonism, atheism, and anarchism. He is a prolific author on philosophy, having written more than 100 books. His philosophy is influenced by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Epicurus, the cynic and cyrenaic schools, French materialism. Born to a family of Norman farmers, Onfray was abandoned by his parents to a Catholic boarding from age 10 to 14, overcoming these early hardships, Onfray graduated with a PhD in philosophy. Onfrays Traité dAthéologie became the number one best-selling nonfiction book in France for months when it was published in the Spring of 2005 and this book repeated its popular French success in Italy, where it was published in September 2005 and quickly soared to number one on Italys bestseller lists. In the 2002 election, Onfray endorsed the French Revolutionary Communist League and its candidate for the French presidency, Onfray himself attributes the birth of philosophic communities such as the université populaire to the results of the French presidential election,2002. His book Le crépuscule dune idole, Laffabulation freudienne, published in 2010, has been the subject of controversy in France because of its criticism of Freud. He recognizes Freud as a philosopher, but he brings attention to the considerable cost of Freuds treatments and casts doubts on the effectiveness of his methods and he is an atheist and author of Atheist Manifesto. In 2015, he published Cosmos, the first book of a trilogy, Onfray considers ironically that it constitutes his very first book. Onfray writes that there is no philosophy without self-psychoanalysis and he describes himself as an atheist and considers theist religion to be indefensible. Onfray has published 9 books under a project of history of philosophy called Counter-history of Philosophy, in each of these books Onfray deals with a particular historical period in western philosophy. The series of books are composed by the titles I. Les Sagesses Antiques, Les Ultras des Lumières, V. LEudémonisme social, VI. Les Radicalités existentielles and VII. La construction du surhomme, Jean-Marie Guyau, Friedrich Nietzsche. In an interview he establishes his view on the history of philosophy, from that point on, anything that crosses this partial – in both senses of the word – view of things finds itself dismissed. Philosophy that comes down from the heavens is the kind that – from Plato to Levinas by way of Kant and Christianity – needs a world behind the scenes to understand, explain and justify this world. The other line of force rises from the earth because it is satisfied with the given world and his mission is to rehabilitate materialist and sensualist thinking and use it to re-examine our relationship to the world. He defines hedonism as an attitude to life based on taking pleasure yourself and pleasuring others. Onfrays works have explored the philosophical resonances and components of science, painting, gastronomy, sex and sensuality, bioethics, wine and his most ambitious project is his projected six-volume Counter-history of Philosophy, of which three have been published. His philosophy aims for micro-revolutions, or revolutions of the individual and small groups of like-minded people who live by his hedonistic, recently Michel Onfray has embraced the term postanarchism to describe his approach to politics and ethics
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Guy Debord
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Guy Louis Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International. He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931. Debords father, Martial, was a pharmacist who died due to illness when Debord was young, Debords mother, Paulette Rossi, sent Guy to live with his grandmother in her family villa in Italy. During World War II, the Rossis left the villa and began to travel from town to town, as a result, Debord attended high school in Cannes, where he began his interest in film and vandalism. As a young man, Debord actively opposed the French war in Algeria, Debord studied Law at the University of Paris, but left early and did not complete his college education. After ending his stint at the University of Paris, he began his career as a writer, Debord joined the Letterist International when he was 19. The Letterists were led dictatorially by Isidore Isou until an agreed upon schism ended Isous authority. This schism gave rise to several factions of Letterists, one of which was led by Debord upon Gil Wolmans unequivocal recommendation. In the 1960s, Debord led the Situationist International group, which influenced the Paris Uprising of 1968, some consider his book The Society of the Spectacle to be a catalyst for the uprising. In 1972, Debord disbanded the Situationist International after its members, including Asger Jorn and Raoul Vaneigem. Debord then focused on filmmaking with financial backing from the movie mogul and publisher, Gérard Lebovici, Debord was suspected of Lebovicis murder. Distraught by the accusations and his friends death, Debord took his films and he had agreed to have his films released posthumously at the request of the American researcher, Thomas Y. Debords two most recognized films are Society of the Spectacle and In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, after dissolving the Situationist International, Debord spent his time reading, and occasionally writing, in relative isolation in a cottage at Champot with Alice Becker-Ho, his second wife. He continued to correspond on political and other issues, notably with Lebovici and he focused on reading material relating to war strategies, e. g. Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, and he designed a war game with Alice Becker-Ho. Debord married twice, first to Michèle Bernstein and then Alice Becker-Ho, Debord had affairs with other women, including Michèle Mochot, the daughter of a surrealist. Bernstein wrote a fictional but detailed account of the open relationships Mochot. Just before Debords death, he filmed a documentary, Son art et son temps and it has been suggested that his dark depiction of this period was a suicide note of sorts. Both Debords depression and alcohol consumption had become problematic, resulting in a form of polyneuritis, perhaps in order to end the suffering caused by these conditions, Debord committed suicide by shooting himself in the head on November 30,1994
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Giorgio Agamben
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Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics informs many of his writings, Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where in 1965 he wrote an unpublished laurea thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. Agamben participated in Martin Heideggers Le Thor seminars in 1966 and 1968, in the 1970s, he worked primarily on linguistics, philology, poetics, and topics in medieval culture. During this period, Agamben began to elaborate his primary concerns, in 1974–1975 he was a fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, due to the courtesy of Frances Yates, whom he met through Italo Calvino. During this fellowship, Agamben began to develop his second book, Agamben was close to the poets Giorgio Caproni and José Bergamín, and to the Italian novelist Elsa Morante, to whom he devoted the essays The Celebration of the Hidden Treasure and Parody. His strongest influences include Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Agamben edited Benjamins collected works in Italian translation until 1996, and called Benjamins thought the antidote that allowed me to survive Heidegger. In 1981, Agamben discovered several important lost manuscripts by Benjamin in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Benjamin had left these manuscripts to Georges Bataille when he fled Paris shortly before his death. The most relevant of these to Agambens own later work were Benjamins manuscripts for his theses On the Concept of History, Agamben has engaged since the nineties in a debate with the political writings of the German jurist Carl Schmitt, most extensively in the study State of Exception. His recent writings also elaborate on the concepts of Michel Foucault, in his later work, Agamben intervenes in the theoretical debates following the publication of Nancys essay La communauté désoeuvrée, and Maurice Blanchots response, La communauté inavouable. These texts analyzed the notion of community at a time when the European Community was under debate, Agamben proposed his own model of a community which would not presuppose categories of identity in The Coming Community. At this time, Agamben also analyzed the condition and political attitude of Bartleby — a scrivener who does not react. He also has held visiting appointments at several American universities, from the University of California, Berkeley, to Northwestern University, Agamben received the Prix Européen de lEssai Charles Veillon in 2006. In 2013 he was awarded the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize by the University of Tübingen for his work titled Leviathans Rätsel. Much of Giorgio Agambens work since the 1980s can be viewed to leading up to the so-called Homo Sacer-project, in this series of works, Agamben responds to Hannah Arendts and Foucaults studies of totalitarianism and biopolitics. Since 1995 he has been best known for this project, the volumes of which have been published out of order. Homo Sacer II,1 Stasis, Civil War as a Political Paradigm, Homo Sacer II,2 The Sacrament of Language, An Archaeology of the Oath. Homo Sacer II,3 The Kingdom and the Glory, For a Theological Genealogy of Economy, Homo Sacer II,4 Opus Dei, An Archeology of Duty. Homo Sacer II,5 Remnants of Auschwitz, The Witness, the Highest Poverty, Monastic Rules and Forms-of-Life
20.
Roland Barthes
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Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Roland Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy and his father, naval officer Louis Barthes, was killed in a battle during World War I in the North Sea before Barthes first birthday. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him in the village of Urt, when Barthes was eleven, his family moved to Paris, though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout his life. Barthes showed great promise as a student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at the Sorbonne and he was plagued by ill health throughout this period, suffering from tuberculosis, which often had to be treated in the isolation of sanatoria. His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his career, affecting his studies. They also exempted him from service during World War II. His life from 1939 to 1948 was largely spent obtaining a license in grammar and philology, publishing his first papers, taking part in a medical study and he received a diplôme détudes supérieures from the University of Paris in 1941 for his work in Greek tragedy. In 1948, he returned to academic work, gaining numerous short-term positions at institutes in France, Romania. During this time, he contributed to the leftist Parisian paper Combat, out of which grew his first full-length work, in 1952, Barthes settled at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he studied lexicology and sociology. During his seven-year period there, he began to write a series of bi-monthly essays for the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles. Knowing little English, Barthes taught at Middlebury College in 1957 and befriended the future English translator of much of his work, Richard Howard, that summer in New York City. Barthes spent the early 1960s exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing various faculty positions around France, many of his works challenged traditional academic views of literary criticism and of renowned figures of literature. By the late 1960s, Barthes had established a reputation for himself and he traveled to the US and Japan, delivering a presentation at Johns Hopkins University. Barthes continued to contribute with Philippe Sollers to the literary magazine Tel Quel. In 1970, Barthes produced what many consider to be his most prodigious work, throughout the 1970s, Barthes continued to develop his literary criticism, he developed new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality. In 1971, he served as visiting professor at the University of Geneva, in 1975 he wrote an autobiography titled Roland Barthes and in 1977 he was elected to the chair of Sémiologie Littéraire at the Collège de France. In the same year, his mother, Henriette Barthes, to whom he had been devoted, died, aged 85 and they had lived together for 60 years. The loss of the woman who had raised and cared for him was a blow to Barthes
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Julia Kristeva
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Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a professor at the University Paris Diderot, Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural studies and feminism after publishing her first book, Semeiotikè, in 1969. She is prominent in structuralist and poststructuralist thought, Kristeva is also the founder and head of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee. Born in Sliven, Bulgaria to Christian parents, Kristeva is the daughter of a church accountant, Kristeva and her sister attended a Francophone school run by Dominican nuns. Kristeva became acquainted with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin at this time in Bulgaria, Kristeva went on to study at the University of Sofia, and while a postgraduate there obtained a research fellowship that enabled her to move to France in December 1965, when she was 24. She continued her education at several French universities, studying under Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes, on August 2,1967, Kristeva married the novelist Philippe Sollers, né Philippe Joyaux. Kristeva taught at Columbia University in the early 1970s, and remains a Visiting Professor and she has also published under the married name Julia Joyaux. After joining the Tel Quel group founded by Sollers, Kristeva focused on the politics of language and she trained in psychoanalysis, and earned her degree in 1979. In some ways, her work can be seen as trying to adapt a psychoanalytic approach to the poststructuralist criticism, for example, her view of the subject, and its construction, shares similarities with Sigmund Freud and Lacan. However, Kristeva rejects any understanding of the subject in a structuralist sense, instead, in this way, she contributes to the poststructuralist critique of essentialized structures, whilst preserving the teachings of psychoanalysis. She travelled to China in the 1970s and later wrote About Chinese Women and it is an emotional field, tied to the instincts, which dwells in the fissures and prosody of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words. It is closely tied to the feminine, and represents the state of the pre-Mirror Stage infant. Upon entering the Mirror Stage, the child learns to distinguish between self and other, and enters the realm of shared meaning, known as the symbolic. This process of separation is known as abjection, whereby the child must reject and move away from the mother in order to enter into the world of language, culture, meaning, and the social. This realm of language is called the symbolic and is contrasted with the semiotic in that it is associated with the masculine, the law, Kristeva departs from Lacan in the idea that even after entering the symbolic, the subject continues to oscillate between the semiotic and the symbolic. Therefore, rather than arriving at an identity, the subject is permanently in process. Because female children continue to identify to some degree with the mother figure and this continued identification with the mother may result in what Kristeva refers to in Black Sun as melancholia, given that female children simultaneously reject and identify with the mother figure. After abjecting the mother, subjects retain an unconscious fascination with the semiotic, desiring to reunite with the mother, slasher films thus provide a way for audience members to safely reenact the process of abjection by vicariously expelling and destroying the mother figure
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Literature
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Literature, in its broadest sense, is any single body of written works. Its Latin root literatura/litteratura was used to refer to all written accounts, developments in print technology have allowed an evergrowing distribution and proliferation of written works, culminating in electronic literature. There have been attempts to define literature. Simon and Delyse Ryan begin their attempt to answer the question What is Literature, with the observation, The quest to discover a definition for literature is a road that is much travelled, though the point of arrival, if ever reached, is seldom satisfactory. Most attempted definitions are broad and vague, and they change over time. In fact, the thing that is certain about defining literature is that the definition will change. Concepts of what is literature change over time as well, definitions of literature have varied over time, it is a culturally relative definition. In Western Europe prior to the century, literature as a term indicated all books. A more restricted sense of the term emerged during the Romantic period, contemporary debates over what constitutes literature can be seen as returning to the older, more inclusive notion of what constitutes literature. Cultural studies, for instance, takes as its subject of both popular and minority genres, in addition to canonical works. The value judgment definition of literature considers it to cover exclusively those writings that possess high quality or distinction and this sort of definition is that used in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition when it classifies literature as the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing. The formalist definition is that literature foregrounds poetic effects, it is the literariness or poetic of literature that distinguishes it from ordinary speech or other kinds of writing. Etymologically, the term derives from Latin literatura/litteratura learning, a writing, grammar, originally writing formed with letters, in spite of this, the term has also been applied to spoken or sung texts. Poetry is a form of art which uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of. Possibly as a result of Aristotles influence, poetry before the century was usually less a technical designation for verse than a normative category of fictive or rhetorical art. As a form it may pre-date literacy, with the earliest works being composed within and sustained by an oral tradition, novel, a long fictional prose narrative. It was the close relation to real life that differentiated it from the chivalric romance, in most European languages the equivalent term is roman. In English, the term emerged from the Romance languages in the fifteenth century, with the meaning of news, it came to indicate something new
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Philosophy
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Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. The term was coined by Pythagoras. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument and systematic presentation, classic philosophical questions include, Is it possible to know anything and to prove it. However, philosophers might also pose more practical and concrete questions such as, is it better to be just or unjust. Historically, philosophy encompassed any body of knowledge, from the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century, natural philosophy encompassed astronomy, medicine and physics. For example, Newtons 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy later became classified as a book of physics, in the 19th century, the growth of modern research universities led academic philosophy and other disciplines to professionalize and specialize. In the modern era, some investigations that were part of philosophy became separate academic disciplines, including psychology, sociology. Other investigations closely related to art, science, politics, or other pursuits remained part of philosophy, for example, is beauty objective or subjective. Are there many scientific methods or just one, is political utopia a hopeful dream or hopeless fantasy. Major sub-fields of academic philosophy include metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, logic, philosophy of science, since the 20th century, professional philosophers contribute to society primarily as professors, researchers and writers. Traditionally, the term referred to any body of knowledge. In this sense, philosophy is related to religion, mathematics, natural science, education. This division is not obsolete but has changed, Natural philosophy has split into the various natural sciences, especially astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and cosmology. Moral philosophy has birthed the social sciences, but still includes value theory, metaphysical philosophy has birthed formal sciences such as logic, mathematics and philosophy of science, but still includes epistemology, cosmology and others. Many philosophical debates that began in ancient times are still debated today, colin McGinn and others claim that no philosophical progress has occurred during that interval. Chalmers and others, by contrast, see progress in philosophy similar to that in science, in one general sense, philosophy is associated with wisdom, intellectual culture and a search for knowledge. In that sense, all cultures and literate societies ask philosophical questions such as how are we to live, a broad and impartial conception of philosophy then, finds a reasoned inquiry into such matters as reality, morality and life in all world civilizations. Socrates was an influential philosopher, who insisted that he possessed no wisdom but was a pursuer of wisdom
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Anthropology
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Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies, linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the development of humans. The abstract noun anthropology is first attested in reference to history and its present use first appeared in Renaissance Germany in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann. Their New Latin anthropologia derived from the forms of the Greek words ánthrōpos and lógos. It began to be used in English, possibly via French anthropologie, various short-lived organizations of anthropologists had already been formed. The Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first to use Ethnology, was formed in 1839 and its members were primarily anti-slavery activists. When slavery was abolished in France in 1848 the Société was abandoned and these anthropologists of the times were liberal, anti-slavery, and pro-human-rights activists. Anthropology and many other current fields are the results of the comparative methods developed in the earlier 19th century. For them, the publication of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect, Darwin himself arrived at his conclusions through comparison of species he had seen in agronomy and in the wild. Darwin and Wallace unveiled evolution in the late 1850s, there was an immediate rush to bring it into the social sciences. When he read Darwin he became a convert to Transformisme. His definition now became the study of the group, considered as a whole, in its details. Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had taken an interest in the pathology of speech and he wanted to localize the difference between man and the other animals, which appeared to reside in speech. He discovered the speech center of the brain, today called Brocas area after him. The title was translated as The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples. The last two volumes were published posthumously, Waitz defined anthropology as the science of the nature of man. By nature he meant matter animated by the Divine breath, i. e. he was an animist and he stresses that the data of comparison must be empirical, gathered by experimentation
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Economics
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Economics is a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work, consistent with this focus, textbooks often distinguish between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomics examines the behaviour of elements in the economy, including individual agents and markets, their interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, macroeconomics analyzes the entire economy and issues affecting it, including unemployment of resources, inflation, economic growth, and the public policies that address these issues. Economic analysis can be applied throughout society, as in business, finance, health care, Economic analyses may also be applied to such diverse subjects as crime, education, the family, law, politics, religion, social institutions, war, science, and the environment. At the turn of the 21st century, the domain of economics in the social sciences has been described as economic imperialism. The ultimate goal of economics is to improve the conditions of people in their everyday life. There are a variety of definitions of economics. Some of the differences may reflect evolving views of the subject or different views among economists, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue for the publick services. Say, distinguishing the subject from its uses, defines it as the science of production, distribution. On the satirical side, Thomas Carlyle coined the dismal science as an epithet for classical economics, in this context and it enquires how he gets his income and how he uses it. Thus, it is on the one side, the study of wealth and on the other and more important side, a part of the study of man. He affirmed that previous economists have usually centred their studies on the analysis of wealth, how wealth is created, distributed, and consumed, but he said that economics can be used to study other things, such as war, that are outside its usual focus. This is because war has as the goal winning it, generates both cost and benefits, and, resources are used to attain the goal. If the war is not winnable or if the costs outweigh the benefits. Some subsequent comments criticized the definition as overly broad in failing to limit its subject matter to analysis of markets, there are other criticisms as well, such as in scarcity not accounting for the macroeconomics of high unemployment. The same source reviews a range of included in principles of economics textbooks. Among economists more generally, it argues that a particular definition presented may reflect the direction toward which the author believes economics is evolving, microeconomics examines how entities, forming a market structure, interact within a market to create a market system
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Sociology
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Sociology is the study of social behaviour or society, including its origins, development, organisation, networks, and institutions. It is a science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order, disorder. Many sociologists aim to research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare. Subject matter ranges from the level of individual agency and interaction to the macro level of systems. The traditional focuses of sociology include social stratification, social class, social mobility, religion, secularization, law, sexuality, the range of social scientific methods has also expanded. Social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques, the linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-twentieth century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophic approaches towards the analysis of society. There is often a great deal of crossover between social research, market research, and other statistical fields, Sociology is distinguished from various general social studies courses, which bear little relation to sociological theory or to social-science research-methodology. The US National Science Foundation classifies sociology as a STEM field, Sociological reasoning pre-dates the foundation of the discipline. Social analysis has origins in the stock of Western knowledge and philosophy. The origin of the survey, i. e, there is evidence of early sociology in medieval Arab writings. The word sociology is derived from both Latin and Greek origins, the Latin word, socius, companion, the suffix -logy, the study of from Greek -λογία from λόγος, lógos, word, knowledge. It was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in an unpublished manuscript, Sociology was later defined independently by the French philosopher of science, Auguste Comte, in 1838. Comte used this term to describe a new way of looking at society, Comte had earlier used the term social physics, but that had subsequently been appropriated by others, most notably the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet. Comte endeavoured to unify history, psychology and economics through the understanding of the social realm. Comte believed a positivist stage would mark the final era, after conjectural theological and metaphysical phases, Comte gave a powerful impetus to the development of sociology, an impetus which bore fruit in the later decades of the nineteenth century. To say this is not to claim that French sociologists such as Durkheim were devoted disciples of the high priest of positivism. To be sure, beginnings can be traced back well beyond Montesquieu, for example, Marx rejected Comtean positivism but in attempting to develop a science of society nevertheless came to be recognized as a founder of sociology as the word gained wider meaning. For Isaiah Berlin, Marx may be regarded as the father of modern sociology
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History of art
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The history of art is the history of any activity or product made by humans in a visual form for aesthetical or communicative purposes, expressing ideas, emotions or, in general, a worldview. The subsequent expansion of the list of arts in the 20th century reached to nine, architecture, dance, sculpture, music, painting, poetry, film, photography. The study of the history of art was developed during the Renaissance. Today, art enjoys a network of study, dissemination and preservation of all the artistic legacy of mankind throughout history. The rise of media has been crucial in improving the study, international events and exhibitions like the Whitney Biennial and biennales of Venice and São Paulo or the Documenta of Kassel have helped the development of new styles and trends. Institutions like UNESCO, with the establishment of the World Heritage Site lists, the field of art history was developed in the West, and originally dealt exclusively with European art history, with the High Renaissance as the defining standard. Gradually, over the course of the 20th century, a vision of art history has developed. This expanded version includes societies from across the globe, and it attempts to analyze artifacts in terms of the cultural values in which they were created. Thus, art history is now seen to all visual art. The history of art is often told as a chronology of masterpieces created in each civilization and it can thus be framed as a story of high culture, epitomized by the Wonders of the World. On the other hand, vernacular art expressions can also be integrated into art historical narratives, in the latter cases art objects may be referred to as archeological artifacts. One way to examine how art history is organized is by examining the major survey textbooks, information on canonical art history is also found in the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, which is sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The first tangible artifacts of human art that have found are from the Stone Age. During the Paleolithic, humans practiced hunting and gathering and lived in caves, in the Bronze Age, the first protohistoric civilizations arose. The Paleolithic had its first artistic manifestation in 25,000 BCE, the first traces of human-made objects appeared in southern Africa, the Western Mediterranean, Central and Eastern Europe, Siberia, India and Australia. These first traces are generally worked stone, wood or bone tools, to paint in red, iron oxide was used, in black, manganese oxide and in ochre, clay. Surviving art from this period includes small carvings in stone or bone, cave paintings have been found in the Franco-Cantabrian region. There are pictures with magical-religious character and also pictures with a naturalistic sense, sculpture is represented by the so-called Venus figurines, feminine figures which were probably used in fertility cults, such as the Venus of Willendorf
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Mysticism
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Mysticism is popularly known as becoming one with God or the Absolute, but may refer to any kind of ecstasy or altered state of consciousness which is given a religious or spiritual meaning. It may also refer to the attainment of insight in ultimate or hidden truths, the term mysticism has Ancient Greek origins with various historically determined meanings. Derived from the Greek word μυω, meaning to conceal, mysticism referred to the liturgical, spiritual. During the early period, the definition of mysticism grew to include a broad range of beliefs. In modern times, mysticism has acquired a limited definition, with applications, as meaning the aim at the union with the Absolute. This limited definition has been applied to a range of religious traditions and practices. Since the 1960s scholars have debated the merits of perennial and constructionist approaches in the research of mystical experiences. The perennial position is now largely dismissed by scholars, most scholars using a contextual approach, Mysticism is derived from the Greek μυω, meaning I conceal, and its derivative μυστικός, mystikos, meaning an initiate. The verb μυώ has received a different meaning in the Greek language. The primary meanings it has are induct and initiate, secondary meanings include introduce, make someone aware of something, train, familiarize, give first experience of something. The related form of the verb appears in the New Testament. As explained in Strongs Concordance, it properly means shutting the eyes and its figurative meaning is to be initiated into the mystery revelation. The meaning derives from the rites of the pagan mysteries. Also appearing in the New Testament is the related noun μυστήριον, the term means anything hidden, a mystery or secret, of which initiation is necessary. According to Thayers Greek Lexicon, the term μυστήριον in classical Greek meant a hidden thing, a particular meaning it took in Classical antiquity was a religious secret or religious secrets, confided only to the initiated and not to be communicated by them to ordinary mortals. In the Septuagint and the New Testament the meaning it took was that of a purpose or counsel. It is sometimes used for the hidden wills of humans, but is often used for the hidden will of God. Elsewhere in the Bible it takes the meaning of the mystic or hidden sense of things and it is used for the secrets behind sayings, names, or behind images seen in visions and dreams
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Surrealism
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Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream, leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I, the word surrealist was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works, after the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the son of writer. He admired the young writers anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition, later Breton wrote, In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most. Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and they began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote The Magnetic Fields, continuing to write, they came to believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada form of attack on prevailing values. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin, freuds work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness, as Salvador Dalí later proclaimed, There is only one difference between a madman and me. Beside the use of analysis, they emphasized that one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be−the greater its emotional power, the group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. They wanted to people from false rationality, and restrictive customs. Breton proclaimed that the aim of Surrealism was long live the social revolution. To this goal, at various times Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism, in 1924 two Surrealist factions declared their philosophy in two separate Surrealist Manifestos. That same year the Bureau of Surrealist Research was established, leading up to 1924, two rival surrealist groups had formed. Each group claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Guillaume Apollinaire, the other group, led by Breton, included Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Jacques Baron, Jacques-André Boiffard, Jean Carrive, René Crevel and Georges Malkine, among others. Goll and Breton clashed openly, at one point literally fighting, at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, in the end, Breton won the battle through tactical and numerical superiority
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Poststructuralism
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Existential phenomenology is a significant influence, Colin Davis has argued that post-structuralists might just as accurately be called post-phenomenologists. Post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida and Foucault did not form a self-conscious group, Structuralism rejected the phenomenological idea that knowledge could be centred on the human knower, and sought what they considered a more secure foundation for knowledge. In phenomenology, this foundation is experience itself, in structuralism, knowledge is founded on the structures that make possible, concepts. By contrast, post-structuralism argues that founding knowledge either on experience or systematic structures is impossible. This impossibility was not meant as a failure or loss, a major theory associated with Structuralism was binary opposition. This theory proposed that there are theoretical and conceptual opposites, often arranged in a hierarchy. Such binary pairs could include Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signifier/signified, the only way to properly understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems that produce multiplicity, the illusion of singular meaning. It emphasized the logical and scientific nature of its results, post-structuralism offers a way of studying how knowledge is produced and critiques structuralist premises. It argues that history and culture condition the study of underlying structures. A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object, it is necessary to both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object. Post-structuralists generally assert that post-structuralism is historical, and they classify structuralism as descriptive and this terminology relates to Ferdinand de Saussures distinction between the views of historical and descriptive reading. From this basic distinction, post-structuralist studies often emphasize history to analyze descriptive concepts, by studying how cultural concepts have changed over time, post-structuralists seek to understand how those same concepts are understood by readers in the present. For example, Michel Foucaults Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural attitudes about madness, the uncertain distance between structuralism and post-structuralism is further blurred by the fact that scholars rarely label themselves as post-structuralists. Some scholars associated with structuralism, such as Roland Barthes and Foucault, some observers from outside the post-structuralist camp have questioned the rigor and legitimacy of the field. American philosopher John Searle argued in 1990 that The spread of poststructuralist literary theory is perhaps the best known example of a silly, similarly, physicist Alan Sokal in 1997 criticized the postmodernist/poststructuralist gibberish that is now hegemonic in some sectors of the American academy. Has elicited wrong film and literary theory on a grand scale, one can find dozens of books of literary theory bogged down in signifiers and signifieds, but only a handful that refer to Chomsky. Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing structuralism, merquior a love–hate relationship with structuralism developed among many leading French thinkers in the 1960s. In a 1966 lecture Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Jacques Derrida presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life, Derrida interpreted this event as a decentering of the former intellectual cosmos
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French literature
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This article is a general introduction to French literature. For detailed information on French literature in specific periods, see the separate historical articles in the template to the right. Literature written in French language, by citizens of nations such as Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Senegal, Algeria, Morocco. As of 2006, French writers have been awarded more Nobel Prizes in Literature than novelists, poets and essayists of any other country, France itself ranks first in the list of Nobel Prizes in literature by country. French literature has been for French people an object of pride for centuries. The French language is a dialect derived from Latin and heavily influenced principally by Celtic. Today, French schools emphasize the study of novels, theater, the literary arts are heavily sponsored by the state and literary prizes are major news. The Académie française and the Institut de France are important linguistic and artistic institutions in France, Literature matters deeply to the people of France and plays an important role in their sense of identity. As of 2006, French literary people have been awarded more Nobel Prizes in Literature than novelists, poets and essayists of any other country, a writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form. For most of the 20th century, French authors had more Literature Nobel Prizes than those of any other nation. M. G, le Clézio 2014 – Patrick Modiano Grand Prix de Littérature Policière – created in 1948, for crime and detective fiction. Grand Prix du roman de lAcadémie française – created 1918, Prix Décembre – created in 1989. Prix Femina – created 1904, decided each year by an exclusively female jury, Prix Goncourt – created 1903, given to the author of the best and most imaginative prose work of the year. Prix Goncourt des Lycéens – created in 1987, Prix Littéraire Valery Larbaud – created in 1957. Prix Médicis – created 1958, awarded to an author whose fame does not yet match their talent, Prix Renaudot – created in 1926. Prix Tour-Apollo Award – 1972–1990, given to the best science fiction published in French during the preceding year. Prix des Deux Magots – created in 1933, a short history of French literature Burgwinkle, William, Nicholas Hammond, and Emma Wilson, eds. The Cambridge history of French literature Cobb, Richard, Promenades, an appreciation of modern French literature Harvey, Paul. The Oxford companion to French literature Denis Hollier, ed, a New History of French Literature, Harvard University Press,1989,1150 pp. France, Peter
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Medieval French literature
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Medieval French literature is, for the purpose of this article, literature written in Oïl languages during the period from the eleventh century to the end of the fifteenth century. For historical background, see History of France, France in the Middle Ages or Middle Ages, for other national literary traditions, see Medieval literature. The language in southern France is known as langue doc or the Occitan language family, also known under the name of one of iys dialects, the Western peninsula of Brittany spoke Breton, a Celtic language. Catalan was spoken in the South, and Germanic languages and Franco-Provençal were spoken in the East, the various dialects of Old French developed into what are recognised as regional languages today. Languages which developed from dialects of Old French include Bourguignon, Champenois, Franc-Comtois, Francien, Gallo, Lorrain, Norman, Anglo-Norman, Picard, Poitevin, Saintongeais and Walloon. From 1340 to the beginning of the century, a generalized French language became clearly distinguished from the other competing Oïl languages. This is referred to as Middle French, the vast majority of literary production in Old French is in verse, the development of prose as a literary form was a late phenomenon. The French language does not have a significant stress accent or long and this means that the French metric line is not determined by the number of beats, but by the number of syllables. The most common lengths are the ten-syllable line, the eight-syllable line. Verses could be combined in a variety of ways, blocks of assonanced lines are called laisses, the choice of verse form was generally dictated by the genre. The Old French epics are written in ten-syllable assonanced laisses. The earliest extant French literary texts date from the ninth century, the first literary works written in Old French were saints lives. The Canticle of Saint Eulalie, written in the half of the ninth century, is generally accepted as the first such text. It is a poem that recounts the martyrdom of a young girl. The best known of the early Old French saints lives is the Vie de Saint Alexis, the life of Saint Alexis, a translation/rewriting of a Latin legend. Saint Alexis fled from his familys home in Rome on his wedding night and dwelled as a hermit in Syria until a mystical voice began telling people of his holiness. In order to avoid the earthly honor that came with such fame, he left Syria and was back to Rome. He was only identified later when the pope read his name in a letter held in the saints hand
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17th-century French literature
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In reality, 17th-century French literature encompasses far more than just the classicist masterpieces of Jean Racine and Madame de La Fayette. In Renaissance France, literature was largely the product of encyclopaedic humanism, a new conception of nobility, modelled on the Italian Renaissance courts and their concept of the perfect courtier, was beginning to evolve through French literature. In the mid-17th century, there were an estimated 2,200 authors in France, under Cardinal Richelieu, patronage of the arts and literary academies increasingly came under the control of the monarchy. Henry IVs court was considered by contemporaries a rude one, lacking the Italianate sophistication of the court of the Valois kings, the court also lacked a queen, who traditionally served as a focus of a nations authors and poets. Henrys literary tastes were largely limited to the chivalric novel Amadis of Gaul, in the 1620s, the most famous salon was held at the Hôtel de Rambouillet by Madame de Rambouillet, a rival gathering was organized by Madeleine de Scudéry. The word salon first appeared in French in 1664 from the Italian word sala, before 1664, literary gatherings were often called by the name of the room in which they occurred -- cabinet, réduit, alcôve, and ruelle. For instance, the term derives from literary gatherings held in the bedroom. Nobles, lying on their beds, would receive close friends, ruelle refers to the space between a bed and the wall in a bedroom, it became a name for these gatherings, often under the wing of educated women in the first half of the 17th century. In the context of French scholastica, academies were scholarly societies which monitored, fostered, academies first appeared in France during the Renaissance, when Jean-Antoine de Baïf created one devoted to poetry and music, inspired by the academy of Italian Marsilio Ficino. The first half of the 17th century was marked by a growth in private academies. Academies were generally more formal and more focused on criticism and analysis than salons, however, certain salons were closer to the academic spirit. In the mid-17th century, academies gradually came under government control and sponsorship, the first private academy to fall under governmental control was LAcadémie française, which remains the most prestigious governmental academy in France. Founded in 1634 by Cardinal Richelieu, LAcadémie française focuses on the French language, in certain instances, the values of 17th-century nobility played a major part in the literature of the era. Most notable of these values are the aristocratic obsession with glory, the spectacle of power, prestige and luxury found in 17th-century literature may be distasteful or even offensive. The château of Versailles, court ballets, noble portraits, triumphal arches – all of these were representations of glory, the notion of glory was not vanity or boastfulness or hubris, but rather a moral imperative for the aristocracy. Nobles were required to be generous, magnanimous and to great deeds disinterestedly. Ones status in the world demanded appropriate externalisation, nobles indebted themselves to build prestigious urban mansions and to buy clothes, paintings, silverware, dishes and other furnishings befitting their rank. They were also required to show generosity by hosting sumptuous parties, conversely, social parvenus who took on the external trappings of the noble classes were severely criticised, sometimes by legal action
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18th-century French literature
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In common with a similar movement in England at the same time, the writers of 18th century France were critical, skeptical and innovative. Their lasting contributions were the ideas of liberty, toleration, humanitarianism, equality, and progress, the 18th century saw the gradual weakening of the absolute monarchy constructed by Louis XIV. France was forced to recognize the power of England and Prussia. The Monarchy finally ended with King Louis XVI, who was unable to understand or control the forces of the French Revolution. The new class began to challenge the cultural and social monopoly of the aristocracy, French cities began to have their own theaters, coffee houses and salons, the Rise of the Third Estate culminated in their political victory in the French Revolution. Faith in science and progress was the force behind the first French Encyclopedia of Denis Diderot. The Protestants achieved legal status in France in 1787, the exchange of ideas with other countries also increased. British ideas were important, particularly such ideas as constitutional monarchy and romanticism. Toward the end of the century, a sober style appeared, aimed at illustrating scenery, work. These writers, and others such as the Abbé Sieyès, one of the authors of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. They came from the upper class or Third Estate, sought a society founded upon talent and merit. Their ideas were influenced by those of John Locke in England. They introduced the values of liberty and equality which became the ideals of the French Republic founded at the end of the century and they defended the freedom of conscience and challenged the role of religious institutions in society. For them, tolerance was a value of society. When the Convention placed the ashes of Voltaire in the Pantheon in Paris, while the philosophes had widely different approaches, they all had as a common objective, both for mankind and for individuals, the ideal of happiness. Some, like Rousseau, dreamed of the happiness of the savage, rapidly disappearing, others, like Voltaire. The philosophes were optimists, and they saw their mission clearly, they did not simply observe, the comedies of Marivaux and of Beaumarchais also played a part in this debate about and diffusion of great ideas. The relaxing of morals under the French Regency brought the return in 1716 of the Comédie-Italienne and his major works include Les Fausses Confidences, le Jeu de lamour et du hasard, and lÎle des esclaves
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19th-century French literature
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19th-century French literature concerns the developments in French literature during a dynamic period in French history that saw the rise of Democracy and the fitful end of Monarchy and Empire. French literature enjoyed enormous prestige and success in the 19th century. The first part of the century was dominated by Romanticism, until around the mid-century Realism emerged, in the last half of the century, naturalism, parnassian poetry, and symbolism, among other styles, were often competing tendencies at the same time. Some writers did form into literary groups defined by a name, in other cases, these expressions were merely pejorative terms given by critics to certain writers or have been used by modern literary historians to group writers of divergent projects or methods. Nevertheless, these labels can be useful in describing broad historical developments in the arts and their influence was felt in theatre, poetry, prose fiction. Foreign influences played a big part in this, especially those of Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Goethe, Le mal du siècle, a sense of loss, disillusion, and aporia, typified by melancholy and lassitude. Romanticism in England and Germany largely predate French romanticism, although there was a kind of pre-romanticism in the works of Senancour and Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the end of the 18th century. French Romanticism took definite form in the works of François-René de Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant and it found early expression also in the sentimental poetry of Alphonse de Lamartine. The major battles of romanticism in France was in the theater, the dramatic unities of time and place were abolished, tragic and comic elements appeared together and metrical freedom was won. Marked by the plays of Friedrich Schiller, the romantics often chose subjects from historic periods, victor Hugo was the outstanding genius of the Romantic School and its recognized leader. He was prolific alike in poetry, drama, and fiction, all three also wrote novels and short stories, and Musset won a belated success with his plays. Alexandre Dumas, père wrote The Three Musketeers and other novels in an historical setting. Prosper Mérimée and Charles Nodier were masters of shorter fiction, Romanticism is associated with a number of literary salons and groups, the Arsenal, the Cénacle, the salon of Louis Charles Delescluze, the salon of Antoine Deschamps, the salon of Madame de Staël. Romanticism in France defied political affiliation, one finds both liberal, conservative and socialist strains, the expression Realism, when applied to literature of the 19th century, implies the attempt to depict contemporary life and society. The growth of realism is linked to the development of science, history, honoré de Balzac is the most prominent representative of 19th century realism in fiction. His La Comédie humaine, a vast collection of nearly 100 novels, was the most ambitious scheme ever devised by a writer of fiction—nothing less than a contemporary history of his countrymen. Realism also appears in the works of Alexandre Dumas, fils, similar tendencies appeared in the theatrical melodramas of the period and, in an even more lurid and gruesome light, in the Grand Guignol at the end of the century. In addition to melodramas, popular and bourgeois theater in the mid-century turned to realism in the well-made bourgeois farces of Eugène Marin Labiche, from the 1860s on, critics increasingly speak of literary Naturalism
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Tax collector
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A tax collector or a taxman is a person who collects unpaid taxes from other people or corporations. Tax collectors are often portrayed in fiction as being evil, Tax collectors, also known as publicans, are mentioned many times in the Bible. They were reviled by the Jews of Jesus day because of their perceived greed, Tax collectors amassed personal wealth by demanding tax payments in excess of what Rome levied and keeping the difference. Saint Matthew in the New Testament was a tax collector, district collector Tax farming Tax noncompliance Taxman Withholding tax
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Neurosyphilis
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Neurosyphilis is an infection of the brain or spinal cord caused by the spirochete Treponema pallidum. It usually occurs in people who have had chronic, untreated syphilis, usually about 10 to 20 years after first infection, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that neurosyphilis can occur at any stage of a syphilis infection. Neurosyphilis has four different forms, asymptomatic, meningovascular, tabes dorsalis, in rare instances, active neurosyphilis can mimic Alzheimers disease. There may be the sign of Argyll Robertson pupils, which are bilateral small pupils that constrict when the patient focuses on a near object, two examples of penicillin therapies include, Aqueous penicillin G 3–4 million units every four hours for 10 to 14 days. One daily intramuscular injection and oral probenecid four times daily, both for 10 to 14 days, follow-up blood tests are generally performed at 3,6,12,24, and 36 months to make sure the infection is gone. Lumbar punctures for CSF fluid analysis are performed every 6 months. Neurosyphilis was almost at the point being unheard of in the United States after penicillin therapy was introduced, however, concurrent infection of T. pallidum with human immunodeficiency virus has been found to affect the course of syphilis. Syphilis can lie dormant for 10 to 20 years before progressing to neurosyphilis, also, infection with HIV has been found to cause penicillin therapy to fail more often. Therefore, neurosyphilis has once again been prevalent in societies with high HIV rates and limited access to penicillin
