The intellectual history of postwar France often resembles village life. Most of the important academic institutions – the Sorbonne, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Collège de France, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, even the cafés where Sartre debated with Camus – sit within the same square mile on the left bank of the Seine. This “village” was not only geographically limited. Names recur with surprising regularity: Bachelard, father and daughter, two Merleau-Pontys, as well as numerous Jolys, Lautmans, Pons and Michauds filling up the promotions at the elite centers for higher learning. The founder of Tel Quel, Philippe Sollers, married the philosopher Julia Kristeva; Jacques Lacan married Georges Bataille's widow; his daughter married the Lacanian Jacques-Alain Miller. Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Serres, and Jacques Derrida were schoolfriends before they were philosophical interlocutors and then rivals. Everyone knew everyone else. Throughout their careers French intellectuals socialized with each other, went on holiday together, attended parties at each other's homes, corresponded, read the same books, and published in the same journals. Before being a republic of letters, the French intellectual community was a social set.

It has been common to castigate the proponents of a unified field called “French Theory” for being philosophically naïve. “French Theory,” it is argued, is a peculiarly American construct that can only be understood as the product of the blinkered enthusiasm of Anglo-Saxon academics for a range of thought they have not properly understood. The manifold theoretical differences between, say, Foucault, Bourdieu, Deleuze, and Derrida are sufficient to scotch any idea that they shared a common program or had similar ideas. But what seems philosophically unsophisticated can be historically plausible. The search for philosophical ties is warranted by the thick and dense historical connections that recast the manifold debates not as fundamental differences but as the passionate confrontations of the philosophically and socially proximate.