Post-Rationalism Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in Post-War France

Post-Rationalism takes as its main source the experimental journal of psychoanalysis and philosophy, the Cahiers pour l'Analyse, established by students of Louis Althusser in 1966. The journal, little-discussed in the secondary literature, served as a testing ground for the combination of diverse intellectual sources indicative of the period, including Lacan's reinvention of Freud, Althusser's return to Marx, and the earlier post-rationalist philosophy of science pioneered by Bachelard, Canguilhem and Koyré. In treating these two periods of French intellectual history together, Eyers provides an important corrective to standard histories of the period. Each chapter engages the early work of figures now famous in contemporary critical thought, including Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller and André Green. Throughout, emphasis is laid on the ways that French epistemological writing of the 1930s and 1940s, especially that by Bachelard and Canguilhem, laid the ground for the emergence of structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s, thus questioning the standard historical narrative that posits structuralism as emerging chiefly in reaction to phenomenology and existentialism.