Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut
THE PHILOSOPHIES OF
'68
Two aspects of French philosophy during the 1960s are
noteworthy today. Beneath their evident diversity, the philosoph–
ical and intellectual currents of that period revolved around cer–
tain grand themes and common approaches that allow us to
characterize what might be called the "School of ' 68" - and not
just for historical reasons. Despite the divisions and polemics be–
tween the neo-Marxism of the Althusserians, the sociology of
Pierre Bourdieu, the Nietzschean-Heideggerianism shared by
Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and
J.
F.
Lyotard, or the neo-Freudianism of Jacques Lacan's school, these
approaches shared a common intellectual framework that was
fused with the cultural leftism of the late 1960s. And if these au–
thors' works have exercised a real influence on recent intellec–
tual life despite their being misunderstood (indeed, in certain
cases, unread) , this is all the more reason to examine their
shared assumptions rather than remarking what distinguishes
them.
Second , we must note the difficulties in which these
philosophies find themselves today. In a certain sense, at least in
France, they had already begun to fall out of fashion during the
1970s, as two quite different developments came together. The
first was the dramatic change in the intellectual climate follow–
ing the crisis of Marxism (which explains, for example, the al–
most total disappearance of the Althusserians); the other was the
increasing speed with which intellectual fashion began to
change. In this regard the work of Foucault has proved the most
durable, in part because he claimed that his thought had under–
gone a profound transformation. Still, it remains the fact that, if
these intellectual approaches are today less celebrated than they
once were, their retreat took place without their ever being truly,
and directly, criticized . Oddly enough , it is only today, when
