Sartre, Foucault, And Historical Reason

by Flynn, Thomas R.

• ISBN13: 9780226254708
• ISBN10: 0226254704
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-02-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. In Volume One of this authoritative two-volume study, Thomas R. Flynn conducted a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory. This long-awaited second volume offers a comprehensive and critical reading of the Foucauldian counterpoint.A history, theorized Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comprehensive charting of structural transformations and displacements over time. Contrary to other Foucault scholars, Flynn proposes an "axial" rather than a developmental reading of Foucault's work. This allows aspects of Foucault's famous triad of knowledge, power, and the subject to emerge in each of his major works. Flynn maps existentialist categories across Foucault's "quadrilateral," the model that Foucault proposes as defining modernist conceptions of knowledge. At stake is the degree to which Sartre's thought is fully captured by this mapping, whether he was, as Foucault claimed, "a man of the nineteenth century trying to think in the twentieth."

Author Biography

Thomas R. Flynn is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. Among his many publications are Sartre and Marxist Existentialism and Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume One, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xv
Works Frequently Cited	xvii
Part One: Conceptual Coordinates
Foucault and the Historians	3	(28)
Foucault and Historical Nominalism	31	(17)
The Career of the Historical Event	48	(35)
Part Two: Spatialized Reasoning
The Eclipse of Vision?	83	(16)
The Spaces of History	99	(27)
The Philosopher-Historian as Cartographer	126	(17)
Pyramids and Prisms: Reading Foucault in 3-D	143	(34)
Part Three: Diaries and Maps
Mapping Existentialist History	177	(31)
Experience and the Lived	208	(22)
Sartre on Violence, Foucault on Power: A Diagnostic	230	(30)
Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the College de France (An Object Lesson in Axial History)	260	(23)
Ethics and History: Authentic vs. Effective History	283	(24)
Conclusion: The Map and the Diary	307	(4)
Glossary	311	(6)
Notes	317	(62)
Index	379