Abstract

This analytic survey should soon appear in English translation with Cambridge University Press in its new series, "Modern European Philosophy," edited by Alan Montefiore. As the title suggests, its leitmotif is the dialectic of same and other, first stated by Kojève in its explicit Hegelian mode of identity and contradiction and transposed during the sixties into that of difference and repetition. Descombes’s book is an account of how the generation of the three H’s was supplanted by that of the "masters of suspicion," Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. His point of departure is Kojève’s Hegel lectures which, he argues, had a determining influence on subsequent French philosophic thought. Central to the process was Kojève’s humanizing of the negative, le néant. Sartre naturally enters the scene at this point but exits without a hint of his own major study of dialectical reason. Merleau-Ponty receives more extended treatment, probably because he is portrayed as a bridge figure, though not only that, to the semiologists and philosophers of history of the sixties and seventies. When it comes time to define structure, Descombes takes Michel Serres’s quasi-mathematical definition as canonical. In fact, he insists that anything less yields pseudostructuralism, a statement which Foucault would doubtless second, if only to dissociate himself from that party once and for all. Serres and Lévi-Strauss are treated under the rubric of semiology with the aid of some very clear descriptions of the relation between semiology and structuralism in the strict sense. Next Descombes considers the Foucault of The Order Of Things and the complete Althusser as critics of History. The problem of difference enables him to treat Derrida and one aspect of Deleuze together. Deleuze reappears in the final chapter, "The End of Time," accompanied by the later Foucault, Klossowski, and Lyotard.