French Intellectual Nobility

Niilo Kauppi is Research Fellow at the Academy of Finland and recently was Visiting Scholar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

"There is not, to my knowledge, any work in English or in French that does such a good job of integrating the historical and the structural. Kauppi's sociological perspective allows him to see better than most what ties together Foucault, Bourdieu, and Derrida; to see the commonalities of the discursive style of Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, and Kristeva."The work should be useful to those interested in contemporary French culture, in the history of the social sciences—sociology in particular, and in French intellectual life." — Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Columbia University"The book is of particular interest to American audiences because it illuminates the specific aspects of French intellectual culture that helps to explain the emergence and popularity of structuralism and why French intellectual culture has retained its trademark as a high-status cultural good."Kauppi shows the symbolic boundaries of the post-Sartrian French intellectual nobility and indicates how its definitions of what constitutes intellectual excellence differs from its opposition." — Edward Schaffer, State University of New York, Plattsburgh

• List of Figures and IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction Part I. The French Intellectual Habitus and Literary Culture 1. The Ancien Régime: French Literary Culture 2. The Nouveau Ré: The Weight of Past Deeds Part II. The Rise of Structural Constructivsm and Semiology: The Academic Avante-Garde 3. Scientific Practice and Epistemological A priori: Durkheim, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu 4. The Uses of the "Economy" in Structural Constructivism 5. Semiology and the Dynamics of the Intermediate Space 6. On Scientific Style: The Effects of Two Cultures Part III. Iconoclasm and Parody: The Litarary Avant-Garde Against Sartre 7. System of Succession and System of Coronation 8. The Conditions of Possibility of the New Avant-Garde: The Case of Tel Quel Epilogue: The Emergence of a Tripolar StructureNotesReferences Index