People outside France have always wondered why analytical philosophy has had so little influence in this country, while it has gained currency in many other European countries, such as Germany and Italy, not to speak of Northern Europe, where the analytical tradition is strongly established. This can be explained only by a particular conjunction of historical, cultural, sociological and maybe economical factors, which it would be too long to detail here. If there are natural characters of nations, there is no reason to believe that there are no philosophical characters of nations. As Hume said, the characters of nations can have physical as well as moral causes. As for the physical causes, everybody in Britain knows how insular the Continent can be. So if there is such a thing as French analytical philosophy, nobody will be surprised to learn that it is very insular. Before presenting some of the work done by French philosophers related to the analytical tradition, let me try to give what I take to be some of the moral causes of their insularity.

I come to praise contemporary French philosophy not to bury it. My aim is not to hail the appearance in France of a native brand of analytic philosophy—in itself an important event in the last decade—but to describe the indirect and selective importation of certain Anglo-Saxon concepts by French philosophers whose practice is far from analytic; and also to describe the resultant misunderstanding. In this paper I shall analyse the use of pragmatic concepts—and of the concept ‘pragmatics’—in the recent work by Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, and I shall try to show that these concepts are the object of a creative misunderstanding, of a misprision.

Some months ago, when giving a paper about Sir Francis Bacon's philosophy, I mentioned that, according to him, Nature was a woman; true knowledge treats her like his legitimate wife, while false knowledge deals with her as if she were a barren prostitute. In the same paper, I also mentioned that according again to Bacon, there are three kinds of intellectual attitudes, or three kinds of philosophers, namely the pure rationalists, who are like spiders, the empiricists who are like ants, for they gather materials but do not work on them, and a third category—good philosophers who are like bees, for they gather and work on the material gathered. Now, during the discussion a gentleman strongly objected to Bacon's use of ants as a metaphor. He explained that there are many different species of ants, and some of them do not merely gather, some have gardens for instance, where they grow mushrooms. The gentleman concluded that philosophers do not know what they are talking about when they use metaphors. This is true enough, but I felt sorry indeed that nobody observed that it is not true that a woman is either a wife or a prostitute; nobody asked whether ‘nature as her’ implied that the scientist is, as a matter of course, male; nobody said that the simple fact of using ‘woman’ as a metaphor is questionable in itself. So, when speaking of feminism in contemporary French philosophy, one has to keep in mind that, on the Parisian stage, the honour, dignity, diversity and reality of insects are better defended than the honour, dignity, diversity and reality of women.

Contemporary poetry—true to the changes brought about by the poetics of modernity at the turn of the century—far from glorifying the ‘lyrical illusion’ and from favouring ‘romantic’ identifications with heroes standing ‘alone against all’, that madness of a subject believing himself to be the only exception to the law, had in fact to tone down its song, had to pull down its hopes, had to interiorize its failures in order to turn them into paradoxes … What failures? The failures of the poets who thought they were failing. Contemporary poetry has therefore to meditate the different figures of paradoxical failure (the failure that is in no way a simple failure); namely, to distinguish the failures of Baudelaire from that of Rimbaud, from that of Mallarmé …

A philosophy need not be afraid of being out-of-date. Any true philosophy, untimely as soon as it is published, necessarily remains so, thus necessarily remains relevant. This is the case of Descartes' philosophy. But in the case of Cartesianism, there is more to it: Descartes' philosophy goes in quest of the decisive, the principle, the very first Beginning. And the philosophy in quest of the Beginning is, indeed, a radical and original philosophy: what keeps its interest to Descartes' project and, even nowadays, its relevance is the fact that it may be mistaken with the very project of philosophy. In this way what is new in the Beginning, which we think is the shape of the breaking-up, is the old, the oldest. Although Descartes claims for his novelty (‘je serai obligé d'écrire ici en même façon que si je traitais d'une matière que jamais personne avant moi n'eust touchée’, ‘I shall have to write here as if I were dealing with a subject which nobody before me had ever handled’), he keeps coming back ‘to the very prime moment of the Beginning’, to the initial, original Beginning, that of the being: ‘Mit dem cogito sum beansprucht Descartes, Heidegger says at the beginning of Sein und Zeit, der Philosophie einen neuen und sicheren Boden beizustellen’. Now, nothing is more untimely than the inaugural, nothing is more decisive than the foundation: if the relevance of Cartesianism does exist, it is the true one, the original one. So, even nowadays, we cannot philosophize without Descartes (even though some people would like to philosophize against Descartes).

The French, it is well known, love revolutions, political, scientific or philosophical. There is nothing they like more than a radical upheaval of the past, an upheaval so complete that a new tabula rasa is levelled, on which a new history can be built. None of our Prime Ministers starts his mandate without promising to write on a new blank page or to furnish a complete change in values and even, for some, in life. Each researcher would think of him or herself as a failure, if he or she did not make such a complete change in the discipline that nothing will hereafter be the same. As to the philosophers they feed, from Descartes up to Foucault's days, on radical cuts, on ‘coupure épistémologique’, on complete subversion of everything which has been thought in the past by everybody. No French thinker, indeed no student of philosophy, would seriously contemplate doing anything short of a complete revolution in theories. To hesitate, to respect the past, would be to compromise, to be a funk, or worse, to be eclectic like a vulgar Anglo-Saxon!

It is usually assumed in moral philosophy that a teleological approach, as exemplified by Aristotle's ethics of virtue, and a deontological approach, as heralded by Kant's ethics of duty, are incompatible; either the good or the right, to designate these two major traditions by their emblematic predicates. My purpose in this paper is to show that a theory of action, broadly understood, may provide the appropriate framework of thought within which justice can be done to both the Aristotelian and Kantian, the teleological and deontological moments of morality.

We now inhabit what cultural critics are increasingly calling the ‘postmodern’ age. I propose to explore here some of the implications of the advent of post-modernism for our understanding of the status of images and imaging. Indeed, this question is of added relevance when one considers that post-modern culture is frequently referred to as a ‘civilization of the image’ (a phrase first used by Roland Barthes).

It is over forty years since Merleau-Ponty published his first major work, Le structure de comportement (‘The Structure of Behaviour’) (1942) and a quarter of a century since he died. He belongs, therefore, with Sartre and Marcel, to the first post-War generation of French philosophers. Like his friend Sartre's, his philosophy may be regarded as dated, passé, of no interest or relevance to truly contemporary thought. In philosophical terms forty years are nothing; in terms of trends, fashions and novelties they are an eternity. But perhaps the work of Merleau-Ponty has not dated because it was never in vogue. He did not write plays and novels, or take part in political demonstrations, though he was involved in politics, or win a Nobel prize and refuse to receive it. He was very much a philosopher's philosopher, eminent in his field, well known in academic circles in France but hardly a household name. In this country he is hardly known even in philosophical circles, except by name. More is the pity, since his philosophical approach and manner of philosophizing have much in common with certain modes of British philosophizing, as I hope to show.

Fifteen to twenty years ago one might have been forgiven for thinking that both the philosophy and history of science constituted specialized academic backwaters, far removed from debates in the forefront of either philosophic or public attention. But times have changed; science and technology have in many ways and in many guises become central foci of public debate, whether through concern over nuclear safety, the massive price to be paid for continued research in areas such as high energy physics, the cost of high technology medicine, the spectre of genetic engineering, or the wonders of information processing and the computer revolution. At the same time that there is public questioning of the authority of expert scientific pronouncements and debate about the wisdom of courses of action proposed in the name of technology and progress, there is political pressure to direct eduction in an increasingly scientific and technological direction. But even so, in this country, the history and philosophy of science remain peripheral disciplines, not only in relation to the total academic scene but even in relation to philosophy, which is itself being academically marginalized.

Anyone familiar with contemporary French culture could not fail to notice that, in the field of ideas, history and the philosophy of history occupy in France a more central place than in England or North America. The work and concerns—including the methodological concerns—of historians like Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel and the Annalistes, Georges Lefebvre, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Le Goff and Francois Furet, are known, discussed and taken on board by most French intellectuals and academics.

There are many people who think that deconstruction has run its course, has had its day, and that it is now time to return to the important business of philosophy, or perhaps to serious ethical, social and political questions. Derrida's work, it is said, leads nowhere but a sterile philosophy of difference that in its de-politicized, de-historicized abstractness is a form of conservatism little better than the kinds of identity thinking to which it seems to be so radically opposed. In short, we must go ‘beyond’ deconstruction.

This essay is not about contemporary French philosophy, strictly speaking, but something which concerns it—an important episode in its modern history. Its intention is to deal, in very schematic terms, with the nature and evolution of French Marxism from the mid-1950s to the end of the 70s, focusing on two of its best-known and most influential representatives, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, and relating the internal history of their ambitious reconstructions of Marxism to the wider, non-theoretical history of which they were a part— and for whose comprehension they sought to supply the conceptual instruments. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's balance-sheet of a century of Marxism, Adventures of the Dialectic, published in 1955, provides my starting point and explains my title.

Behind the third ventricle of the human brain a miniscule pedunculate bud, close to the optic thalamus, that is, to the two beds of optic nerves, a gland soft in substance yet containing gritty particles. Function: unknown. Because of its pine-cone shape it is called the conarium or pineal body, even though the recent photographs of it by Nilsson and Lindberg show it to be morphologically reminiscent of nothing so much as the plucked tail of a gamebird, which Simon Dedalus refers to as ‘the pope's nose’. Today it is presumed to be an endocrine gland of some sort, even though there is no doubt that morphogenetically in all vertebrates it is a vestigial unpaired eye. As fossil evidence indicates—and we still find it almost fully developed in some extant amphibians—ancestral vertebrates possessed in addition to the paired bilateral eyes a solitary dorsal eye opening at the top of the skull to the sky. This singular evagination of the brain—something betwixt a visual organ and a gland—seems to hold a special fascination for philosophers. Here we shall consider two of them: René Descartes (1596–1650), the father, as we say, of modern philosophy; and Georges Bataille (1897–1962), the father, as many say, of post-modern philosophy. Three hundred years separate them. Devotion to the pineal body conjoins them.