Turning on the Mind

by Chaplin, Tamara

• ISBN13: 9780226509914
• ISBN10: 0226509915
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

In 1951, the eight o'clock nightly news reported on Jean-Paul Sartre for the first time. By the end of the twentieth century, more than 3,500 programs dealing with philosophy and its practitionersincluding Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Levyhad aired on French television. According to Tamara Chaplin, this enduring commitment to bringing the most abstract and least visual of disciplines to the French public challenges our very assumptions about the incompatibility of elite culture and mass media. Indeed, it belies the conviction that television is inevitably anti-intellectual and the quintessential archenemy of the book. Chaplin argues that the history of the televising of philosophy is crucial to understanding the struggle over French national identity in the postwar period. Linking this history to decolonization, modernization, and globalization,Turning On the Mindclaims that we can understand neither the markedly public role that philosophy came to play in French society during the late twentieth century nor the renewed interest in ethics and political philosophy in the early twenty-first unless we acknowledge the work of television. Throughout, Chaplin insists that we jettison presumptions about the anti-intellectual nature of the visual field, engages critical questions about the survival of national cultures in a globalizing world, and encourages us to rethink philosophy itself, ultimately asserting that the content of the discipline is indivisible from the new media forms in which it has found expression.

Author Biography

Tamara Chaplin is assistant professor of modern European history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Abbreviations	p. xiii
Prologue: Portrait of a Philosopher	p. xv
Introduction: Televising Philosophy in Postwar France	p. 1
The Cultural Politics of Philosophical Celebrity, 1951-1968	p. 17
Philosophy and the Early Television Book Show, 1953-1968	p. 52
From Educational Television to Cultural Spectacle, 1964-1974	p. 87
The "New Philosophers" and Morality for the Masses, 1974-1986	p. 130
Bucking the Ratings: Antigone, Abraham, Heidegger, and the Holocaust, 1987-1992	p. 179
Conclusion: Philosophical TV in the 1990s	p. 226
Notes	p. 241
Bibliography	p. 285
Index	p. 315
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