Modern French Thought Research Articles

Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought: Massignon, Corbin, Jambet, written by Ziad Elmarsafy

Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought: Massignon, Corbin, Jambet, written by Ziad Elmarsafy

ESOTERIC ISLAM IN MODERN FRENCH THOUGHT: MASSIGNON, CORBIN, JAMBET. By ZiadElmarsafy. New Directions in Religion and Literature. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Pp. xii + 177. Hardback, £75.

ESOTERIC ISLAM IN MODERN FRENCH THOUGHT: MASSIGNON, CORBIN, JAMBET. By ZiadElmarsafy. New Directions in Religion and Literature. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Pp. xii + 177. Hardback, £75.

Hemmens Alastair, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought. From Charles Fourier to Guy Debord

Hemmens Alastair, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought. From Charles Fourier to Guy Debord

Method and Variation: Narrative in Early Modern French Thought

Method and Variation: Narrative in Early Modern French Thought

The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought

The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought. By Jesse Goldhammer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 218p. $45.00. The problem of how to found a political regime is one of the oldest and most vexed in the history of Western thought. The founding act has often been drenched in blood because certain forms of violence actually help to foster political foundation. This is the illiberal starting point of Jesse Goldhammer's study of the French discourse on sacrificial violence, a theme that he rightly describes as “anathema to mainstream political theory” (p. x), which tends to divert its glance from what it sees as unseemly anachronisms like this. Undaunted, Goldhammer bravely plunges in, turning to 1790s France and the theorizing about sacrifice that it spawned for insight into the violence that he claims is “necessary for political beginnings” (p. 1). While the French revolutionaries engaged in “sacrificial practices and interpretations” such as the beheading of Louis XVI, they never actually developed a theory of sacrifice. That was the contribution of notorious postrevolutionary writers, such as Joseph de Maistre, Georges Sorel, and Georges Bataille, who well understood that violent sacrifice “facilitates the process of conferring moral legitimacy to political power and setting boundaries for political identity” (p. 192).

Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion

Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion

Review of Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought, ed. Christopher John Murray

Review of Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought, ed. Christopher John Murray

Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion

<i>Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion</i>

Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought

Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought

Reverberations of the Kabbalah in Modern French Thought

Charles Mopsik is a charge de recherche (research fellow) at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scholarly Research). His publications include Les grands textes de la cabale: les rites qui font. Dieu (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1993), Le secret du mariage de David et de Bethsabee (paris: L'Eclat, 1994), and an annotated translation, Le side du sanctuaire de Moise de Leon (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1996).

Revolution and Morale in Modern French Thought: Sorel and the Sorelians

The role of revolution and morale in the careers of Sorel and the Sorelians is a problem in apocalyptic political conceptions: They desired a drastic and total renovation of society. This article aims to establish that Sorel's search was always for such a politico-spiritual conquest; that though the basic pattern of his apocalyptic views was repeated for each of his affiliations, his views nevertheless underwent important evolution; and that his thought and action initiated in France an identifiable and significant Sorelian movement.' How and why did Sorel become a revolutionary? Long before he began to write, there appeared in his background a number of paradoxes which possibly prepared the way for his later intellectual development.2 There were mystical tendencies in his Catholic family environment, yet he turned to a career as an engineer in the civil service; His was an intensely bourgeois appearance and demeanor, yet he lived for over twenty-two years with an illiterate working-class woman whom he considered the inspiration of his work. His sympathies were royalist after the fall of the Second Empire, yet his reading and re-education in social thought drew him to the anarchist Proudhon.

The Revival of Pascal. A Study of his Relation to Modern French Thought.

The Revival of Pascal. A Study of his Relation to Modern French Thought.

The Revival of Pascal. A Study of his Relation to Modern French Thought

The Revival of Pascal. A Study of his Relation to Modern French Thought

Some Currents of Modern French Thought as Reflected in the Novel

Some Currents of Modern French Thought as Reflected in the Novel