Politics and cultural history in postwar France and America: Toward a pragmatic analytic of practice

This research project focuses on the evolution of political theory and aesthetics in postwar French and American thought. Each of the two parts is divided into four chapters that follow parallel historical trajectories leading from French philosophy in the immediate postwar era to the turn of the 21 st century, and finally to significant echoes and reformulations in American philosophy. The primary authors studied include Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Ranciere, Richard Rorty and Arthur Danto. The central argument is that a particular pragmatic approach, referred to as relational pragmatism, yields more satisfactory results than the various forms of transcendental philosophy encountered through the course of the study. This is true both at a philosophical and at a historical level. Philosophically, relational pragmatism shifts the conceptual ground upon which all essentializing questions are based, i.e. questions that aim at isolating the transcendental property uniting all uses of a particular term or concept such as politics, aesthetics, history or culture. Historically, relational pragmatism jettisons the search for the transcendental conditions of possibility behind the discursive production of a particular era. Instead of trying to distill out the transcendental properties of a particular concept or historical era, a pragmatic approach begins by what is called an analytic of practice, which is in many ways a generalization of Foucault's analytic of power (as opposed to a metaphysics of Power). Concepts such as politics and aesthetics are analyzed as concepts in struggle that are torn between competing definitions in relational networks of exchange. A pragmatic analytic of practice proposes both to map out these fields of struggle and participate in them at various levels, which sometimes means attempting to displace their underlying framework. This leads to a historical portrayal of postwar French thought that is significantly different from the standard approaches in terms of isolated individuals or monolithic movements (Existentialism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism). Furthermore, the historical account that is provided simultaneously acts as a performative manifestation of the basic philosophical argument in favor of relational pragmatism.