Years of Theory: French Thought from the Post-War Period to Today

In a series of lectures for graduate students and auditors delivered at Duke University in the spring of 2021, American philosopher and critic Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) discusses the main milestones of French theory: existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, placing this tumultuous period of thought in the context of significant European political events: the liberation of Paris, the Algerian war, the May uprisings of 1968, and the creation of the EU. Jameson enlivens the philosophical debates of this period, referring to the works and episodes in the lives of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Fanon, Barthes, Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze, the Tel Quel group, and Cahiers du Cinéma, as well as thinkers like Rancière and Badiou, presenting his view on one of the most important moments in intellectual history.