Journal of the History of Ideas Virtual Issue: Recent Work in French Intellectual History

This virtual issue highlights recent publications in the JHI of relevance to French intellectual history since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The reason for compiling it is relatively simple—we hope that readers might enjoy it. This string of recent publications (roughly since 2016) indicates some significant turns in the field. “French” intellectual history is certainly no longer limited to the hexagon, nor to the existentialist, Marxist, structuralist and “liberal 1980s” storylines. It belongs squarely in transnational and postcolonial discussions; it is invested in close philological and theoretical work as much as in detailed contexts and sociological frames, some of which have long been underexamined; and it is far more genuinely transnational than it has been before. The research expected nowadays of articles on classic authors is both denser and broader in scope than it was even a decade ago. 

The essays in this set include work on the French Extreme Right, on classic figures like Deleuze and Foucault, on Black internationalism and anticolonialism, on Catholic theology, on the history of theory, and on a series of other topics. We also include texts which cut diagonally across the traditional field (like Asbrink’s “When Race was Removed from Racism,” whose second half considers Maurice Bardèche, ethnopluralism, and the New Right), Sarah C. Dunstan’s “The Capital of Race Capitals” (which considers Paris in the context of other sites of Black internationalism), and Nicolas Guilhot’s essay on the paranoid style (which brings Jacques Lacan’s early writings in conversation with the broader international discourse on the “paranoid style”). We as editors think that these are essential to seeing how to work transnationally on different registers. 

 —Stefanos Geroulanos, on behalf of the Executive Editors