Melancholy Politics
Author | : Jean-Philippe Mathy |
Publisher | : Penn State Press |
Total Pages | : 250 |
Release | : 2011-01-01 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 0271037849 |
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The current cultural climate in France is often described as one of &“d&éclinisme&” or &“sinistrose,&” a mixture of pessimism about the national future, nostalgia for the past, and a sinister sense of irreversible decline concerning the present. The notion of &“democratic melancholia&” has become widely popular, cropping up time and again in academic papers and newspaper articles. In Melancholy Politics, Jean-Philippe Mathy examines the development of this disenchanted mood in the works of prominent French philosophers, historians, and sociologists since the beginning of the 1980s. This period represents a significant turning point in French intellectual life, as the legacy of major postwar and sixties theorists such as L&évi-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault was increasingly challenged by a younger generation of authors who repudiated both Marxism and structuralism. The book is not a classic intellectual or cultural history of post-1968 France, but rather a contribution to the understanding of the present&—a collection of soundings into what remains largely a complex, ongoing process.