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Showing posts with the label Intellectuals

French Intellectuals and Revolutionary Sentiments - Why Foucault Works

Sartre: A Biography (1986) Ronald Hayman   Barthes for Beginners (1997) Philip Thody and Piero   1968: Marching in the Streets (1998) Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins   How To Read Foucault (2007) Johanna Oksala I will get Hayman's 1986 biography of Sartre out of the way quickly. It has few real insights into the man or his thoughts (except perhaps giving us some indication of his curious turn towards support for Zionism in later life) but it does have the virtue of laying out the basic facts of his life clearly. One for the library as reference text but not otherwise particularly recommended.  We will lay Sartre aside for the moment.   Barthes for Beginners is equally unsatisfactory. It should have got three stars as a bog standard basic introduction to the semiologist, Roland Barthes, but the graphics really do let it down. Clear graphics are an essential element in this series which sells itself on using imagery to help get across complex ideas. The fact that Barthes was a ph