Curated playlist
20th-century French philosophers
- Jean BeaufretJean Beaufret's 1946 challenge to Heidegger produced the Letter on Humanism.
- Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Sartre asked to be dropped as a Nobel nominee, then won anyway. His 1964 letter went unread.
- Albert CamusAlbert Camus thanked his old schoolteacher right after his mother when he won the Nobel Prize.
- Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault's surgeon father expected him to become a surgeon too. He became a leading thinker on power instead.
- Émile DurkheimÉmile Durkheim came from eight generations of rabbis, yet argued religion was social, not divine.
- Gilles DeleuzeGilles Deleuze never trimmed his fingernails. He once explained that he lacked "normal protective fingerprints", and so could not "touch an object, particularly a piece of cloth, with the pads of my fingers without sharp pain". It is a…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died in 2009, and for four days the world did not know.
- Simone de BeauvoirSimone de Beauvoir's partnership with Sartre began on a bench outside the Louvre.
- Frantz FanonAt 17, Frantz Fanon slipped out of Martinique during a family wedding to join the Allies.
- Georges BatailleGeorges Bataille's secret society Acéphale never found an executioner. Every member had agreed to be the victim.
- Jacques LacanIn 1963, psychoanalysts stripped Jacques Lacan of the right to train new analysts.
- Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré won a royal prize for a problem he did not solve. His entry still revealed the first chaotic system.
- Louis AlthusserLouis Althusser used a police officer's shout on the street to explain how ideology shapes every person.
- Alexandre KojèveAlexandre Kojève wrote a 900-page manuscript for Stalin. Whether it ever reached Moscow remains unknown.
- Roland BarthesRoland Barthes was walking home through the streets of Paris on the 25th of February 1980 when the driver of a laundry van knocked him down. A month later, on the 26th of March, he died from the pulmonary complications that followed. He…
- Jean BaudrillardJean Baudrillard wrote on an old typewriter and never at the computer. He insisted that a computer is not "merely a handier and more complex kind of typewriter", and he wanted what he called a "physical relation to writing". The habit…
- Gabriel MarcelGabriel Marcel wrote at least thirty plays, but readers kept turning to his philosophy.
- Jean WahlPhilosopher Jean Wahl escaped the Drancy internment camp and crossed the Atlantic.