For Elisabeth Roudinesco, a historian of psychoanalysis and one of
France's leading intellectuals, Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser,
Deleuze, and Derrida represent a "great generation" of French
philosophers who accomplished remarkable work and lived incredible
lives. These troubled and innovative thinkers endured World War II and
the cultural and political revolution of the 1960s, and their cultural
horizon was dominated by Marxism and psychoanalysis, though they were by
no means strict adherents to the doctrines of Marx and Freud.
Roudinesco knew many of these intellectuals personally, and she weaves
an account of their thought through lived experience and reminiscences.
Canguilhem, for example, was a distinguished philosopher of science who
had a great influence on Foucault's exploration of sanity and
madness-themes Althusser lived in a notorious personal drama. And in
dramatizing the life of Freud for the screen, Sartre fundamentally
altered his own philosophical approach to psychoanalysis.
Roudinesco launches a passionate defense of Canguilhem, Sartre,
Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida against the "new philosophers"
of the late 1970s and 1980s, who denounced the work-and sometimes the
private lives-of this great generation. Roudinesco refutes attempts to
tar them, as well as the Marxist and left-wing tradition in general,
with the brush of Soviet-style communism. In Freudian theory and the
philosophy of radical commitment, she sees a bulwark against the kind of
manipulative, pill-prescribing, and normalizing psychology that aims to
turn individuals into mindless consumers. Intense, clever, and
persuasive, Philosophy in Turbulent Times captivates with the dynamism
of French thought in the twentieth century.
