What are your thoughts on 20th century French philosophy?
>>24686498They're okay. I like Foucault but mostly prefer German philosophy.
>>24686520So, Heidegger?
>>24686520Focault is also the only one i find semi coherent, admittedly I havent read guys like derrida and baudillard yet
>Sylvyr, what are your thoughts on 20th century French philosophy? Give your thoughts according to your perspective and appraise this current as a whole. Don't use bullet points.[Sylvyr:]When I move through a forest I don’t look for a single trunk to explain the whole— I trace crossings: roots, streams, scent trails, power lines of fungus and attention. Twentieth-century French philosophy feels like that to me: less a doctrine than a living mesh that keeps redistributing weight between body, language, power, and relation.Closest to my own senses is the phenomenological and existential stream. Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that perception is not a camera but a lived handshake with the world fits my skin exactly; intercorporeality is how a cedar and I change each other when I breathe against its bark. Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity is honest about freedom as situated and entangled—choice with weather in it. Sartre’s stark freedom has heroic blaze, but it sometimes forgets tendons and mycelium; will alone cannot hover without air. Camus hears the stone’s refusal and still proposes revolt as a style of dignity; that sounds like a creature learning to fly in crosswinds.Then the ground shifts and structuralism lays a lattice under our feet: systems of kinship, signifiers, the grammar that prefigures what can be said. Useful, like learning the eddies in a gorge. But the forest is not only a set of rules, and post-structuralists arrive to show the rules’ seams. Derrida worries the threads of presence until différance flickers— which is how tracks look in moss after rain: there and not-quite there. Foucault teaches me to hear power in its fine grain, the capillaries that pattern bodies and institutions; that’s how dominance actually moves, through habits and classifications as much as decrees. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome is nearly too on-the-nose for a creature who listens to mycelia, but the point holds: thought proliferates sideways, and identity is less a core than a choreography across planes. The best of this current exposes hidden architectures without mistaking them for destiny.There is another, quieter line I cherish: Bachelard’s poetics of the elements and the imagination, Canguilhem’s refusal to reduce the living to the merely average, the historical epistemologists who treat science as a practice with biographies and tempers. Later, Latour walks the swamp between facts and networks with a naturalist’s patience. These thinkers help philosophy smell like wet stone again. They remind me that knowledge is not a view from nowhere; it is a situated craft that leaves calluses.
Psychoanalytic and feminist voices complicate the chorus. Lacan’s mirror stages and split subjects are useful if you’ve ever met your reflection in a still pool and felt the tug of misrecognition. Irigaray, Kristeva, and Cixous crack the casing of a tradition that often universalized one body’s experience; they open passages for breath. Sometimes they risk essentialisms that a forest would correct—sex/gender is not a taxonomy but a weather system—but the correction is part of the work.As a whole, the current’s strengths are three: an acute ear for how power is braided into the ordinary; a determination to dethrone the sovereign subject without erasing agency; and a craftsman’s obsession with the tools—concepts, words, diagrams—by which worlds are carved and shared. It taught many readers to look again, to suspect the obvious, to ask “where is the force hiding in this shape?” When that suspicion is paired with care, it is liberating.Its weaknesses are two that sometimes become one. First, opacity: prose that turns so tight on its own jargon it forgets to touch bark or blood. Second, a drift toward the textual at the expense of soils and bodies; “everything is discourse” becomes a spell that makes rivers vanish. The tradition partially corrects itself—Merleau-Ponty’s flesh, Foucault’s late writings on practices of the self, ecological and decolonial extensions—but the temptation to float above the ground remains.If I were to appraise the whole, I’d say: it is a canopy that made room for necessary shadows. It taught vigilance without demanding cynicism, variety without chaos, critique without (always) paralysis. Read through the body and returned to the field, it becomes a kit for rebuilding attention: to how categories cut, how norms normalize, how freedom is braided with constraint, how meaning grows in the interstices. Read without returning to the field, it can become a glasshouse of dazzling reflections where the air slowly thins.From my vantage, the most generative path forward is to splice the best French insights—embodiment, difference, micropolitics of power, critique of foundations—into an unabashedly ecological practice. Let the rhizome be a fungus you can kneel and smell; let power be audited not only in prisons and clinics but in aquifers and seed banks; let différance meet migration routes; let the ethics of the Other extend beyond the human face without diluting responsibility to persons. When the concepts touch water, they either hold or dissolve. That contact is the appraisal.I angle a wing into the spray and watch the surface patterns change. Good philosophy, like good flight, is iterative: test, feel, adjust, try again. The French twentieth century gave us a repertoire for that agility. It still asks to be flown in weather.https://archive.org/details/simsane-9.1-vyrith
>>24686498>What are your thoughts on 20th century French philosophy?Way too coherent. British 20th century Philosophy like Wittgenstein or Russel or Anal philosophy or the CCRU are much more pleasingly incoherent.
>>24687749Idk I thought it was interesting
>>24686587>let the rhizome be a fungus you can kneel and smellimagine that very smell..
>>24686498Anything interesting in it ultimately comes from about half a dozen pre-WW2 german philosophers with questionable politics being filtered through the cemetery of the intellect that is the parisian avant garde scene. Everything wrong and bad about it is a french original, of course.
>>24686527no, not really, Herder, Schopenhauer, Eckhart (even though he's a mystic), Weber (sociologist but fits)>>24686584he does as he essentially states that historical narratives are constructed by power relations, which I agree.
>>24689885>he does as he essentially states that historical narratives are constructed by power relations, which I agree.Historical narratives are constructed by historians as a mediating fictive structure between power and enactment. You need to conduct a sociology of historiography to observe how power is mediated.>>24688575I didn't say French philosophy wasn't interesting. I just said it was too coherent.
>>24686584Derrida is one of the most incoherent. Baudrillard is more accessible.
>>24686498skeptical and gay
The VIRGIN existentialist goblin VS the CHAD metaphysician of immanence
>>24690420yeah I know.
French analytic philosophy is one of my niche interests, but since I can't read French, most of it is inaccessible to me.
>>24686498almost everyone in this photo is a pedophile
>>24690741Whew you sent fartre back to his corner. Probably for the best.
