This book returns to a time and place when the concept of transparency was met with deep suspicion. It offers a panorama of postwar French thought where attempts to show the perils of transparency in politics, ethics, and knowledge led to major conceptual inventions, many of which we now take for granted.
Between 1945 and 1985, academics, artists, revolutionaries, and state functionaries spoke of transparency in pejorative terms. Associating it with the prying eyes of totalitarian governments, they undertook a critical project against it—in education, policing, social psychology, economic policy, and the management of information. Focusing on Sartre, Lacan, Canguilhem, Lévi-Strauss, Leroi-Gourhan, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Transparency in Postwar France explores the work of ethicists, who proposed that individuals are transparent neither to each other nor to themselves, and philosophers, who clamored for new epistemological foundations. These decades saw the emergence of the colonial and phenomenological ‘other, ‘ the transformation of ideas of normality, and the effort to overcome Enlightenment-era humanisms and violence in the name of freedom. These thinkers’ innovations remain centerpieces for any resistance to contemporary illusions that tolerate or enable power and social coercion.
Tabla de materias
Introduction: The Matter with Transparency
1. Was Transparency an Optical Problem? A Short History
2. France, Year Zero: Perception and Reality after the Liberation
3. The World’s Opacity to Consciousness: Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
4. The Image of Science and the Limits of Knowledge
5. Machines and the Cogito
6. From the Total Man to the Other: UNESCO, Anti-Colonialism, and the New Humanism of French Anthropology
7. What Is Social Transparency? A Second Short History
8. Between State and Society, I: The Police, the Black Market, and ‘the Gangster’ after the Liberation
9. Between State and Society, II: Psychology, Public Health, and the Rebellion of the Inadaptés
10. Alienation, Utopia, and Marxism after 1956: A Clarity Worse Than the Penumbra
11. Face, Mask, and Other as Avatars of Selfhood: A Third Short History
12. The Norm and the Same
13. The Third Order, or the Structural ‘Symbolic’ as Epistemological Interface
14. Lévi-Strauss’s World Out of Sync
15. The Ethnographer, Cinéma-vérité, and the Disruption of the Natural Order: Chronicle of a Summer
16. Return to Rousseau: Lévi-Strauss, Starobinski, Derrida
17. Return to Descartes: ‘The Last Tribunal of the Cogito’
18. ‘Speak Not of Darkness, but of a Somewhat Blurred Light’: Michel Foucault, Modernity, and the Distortion of Knowledge
19. Cybernetic Complexity: Prehistory, Biology, and Derrida’s Program for Liberation
20. The Present Time and the Agent of History before and after May 1968
21. The Myth of the Self-Transparency of Society: Claude Lefort and His Circle
22. Nineteen Eighty-Four: Information, the Scrambled Signs of the Ideal, and The Postmodern Condition
Sobre el autor
Stefanos Geroulanos is Associate Professor of European History and Director of the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at New York University. He is the author of
An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, 2010).
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