Jean Khalfa – författare

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined?Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud.The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined?Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud.The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.

The Routledge Guidebook to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth offers an accessible, step-by step guide to Fanon’s original text, providing a clear and engaging account account of the theoretical and historical background that lead to its writing. It unites all elements of the work to produce a precise explanation of this important book, which presents the historicak impact of its publication, traces its ongoing influence and explains the interest it continues to elicit today.

This is a fascinating exploration of the nature and power of human intelligence, and the way it has singled us out from the rest of the animal kingdom. Human success in the face of the rigours of the physical world and human dominance within the animal kingdom are due to intelligence: those tools of the mind that give us access to the stored experience of humankind and allow us to reason, to test our ideas, and to plan for the future. How we define intelligence, what it consists of, how it evolved, and how we can enhance it in the future are the questions addressed by the eight expert contributors to this remarkable book. The volume originates in the seventh annual series of Darwin College Lectures, delivered in Cambridge in 1992, and includes contributions from Simha Arom, George Butterworth, Daniel Bennett, Richard Gregory, Nicholas Mackintosh, Roger Penrose, Roger Schank and Lawrence Birnbaum.

Gilles Deleuze has been labelled as the post-x thinker: post-structuralist, post-modern, post-Spinozist, post-Nietzschean, and even post-utopian. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze explores such categorizations and places Deleuze and Deleuzian method at the heart of contemporary thought.Contributors include: Giorgio Agamben, Mary Bryden, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Khalfa, Claude Imbert, Alain MTnil, Bento Prado, Juliette Simont, Ronald Bogue, Jonathan Philippe.

Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric career was crucial to his thinking as an anti-colonialist writer and activist. Much of his iconic work was shaped by his experiences working in hospitals in France, Algeria and Tunisia. The writing collected here was written from 1951 to 1960 in tandem with his political work and reveals much about how Fanon’s thought developed, showing that, for him, psychiatry was part of a much wider socio-political struggle. His political, revolutionary and literary lives should not then be separated from the psychiatric practice and writings that shaped his thinking about oppression, alienation and the search for freedom.

Frantz Fanon’s political impact is difficult to overestimate. His anti-colonialist, philosophical and revolutionary writings were among the most influential of the 20th century. The essays, articles and notes published in this volume cover the most politically active period of his life and encapsulate the breadth, depth and urgency of his writings. In particular, they clarify and amplify his much-debated views on violent resistance. These works provide new complexity to our understanding of Fanon and reveal just how relevant his thinking is to the contemporary world and how important his ideas are to changing it.

Prior to becoming a psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon wanted to be a playwright and his interest in dialogue, dramatisation and metaphor continued throughout his writing and career. His passion for theatre developed during the years that he was studying medicine, and in 1949 he wrote the plays The Drowning Eye (L’Œil se noie), and Parallel Hands (Les Mains parallèles). This first English translation of the works gives us a Fanon at his most lyrical, experimental and provocative.

Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanon’s work has been deeply significant for generations of intellectuals and activists from the 60s to the present day.Alienation and Freedom collects together unpublished works comprising around half of his entire output – which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage. These writings provide new depth and complexity to our understanding of Fanon’s entire oeuvre revealing more of his powerful thinking about identity, race and activism which remain remarkably prescient. Shedding new light on the work of a major 20th-century philosopher, this disruptive and moving work will shape how we look at the world.

Comment allier inspiration, tradition, culture et invention, d’un côté, et grain de jouissance, Réel, rature et manuscrit, de l’autre. La roue de l’écriture, machine inventée par l’auteur, aide à comprendre les rapports entre ces concepts à partir de l’étude des manuscrits. L’homme, écrivain ou artiste, reste le centre, mais plus assujetti que sujet, plus ouvert aux découvertes qu’organisateur. L’écrivain se sentant, comme l’OEdipe de Bauchau, artiste et suppliant par rapport à la langue choisie et non plus régent d’une écriture instrumentale, scripteur enfin pour devenir auteur. C’est ce que l’auteur met en pratique, utilisant les théories littéraire et psychanalytique pour étudier manuscrits de Marcel Proust et d’Henry Bauchau.

This book is the first full-length study of Marguerite Yourcenar's Le Labyrinthe du monde along environmental lines. Written by the first académicienne more than twenty years after Mémoires d’Hadrien, the three-volume work was her most ambitious undertaking. Drawing extensively on the rich reserves of Yourcenar scholarship as well as on environmental humanities, this study entails a broad review of time, place and interconnectedness.While Yourcenar’s work often engages in detail with her parents and their forebears, the analysis here includes a focus on notions such as fragility and vulnerability, qualities common to human beings and to the rest of the natural world. Through a quasi-plot structure and a range of concerns carefully orchestrated and examined, Yourcenar proffers her extensive genealogical heritage as a reading of the global and the modern, opening the way to possible grounds for optimism. Yourcenar emerges as an insightful and deeply reflective writer with an important contemporary message, responsive to the urgent environmental concerns of the present day.

The essays collected in this volume study the poetry and thought of four major Francophone Caribbean writers: Saint-John Perse, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant. In a context where identity was a question, an original conception of subjectivity appeared, as the end point rather than the origin of a process which was inseparably poetic and political. It entailed an aesthetics of dispersion or errance, rather than belonging. This volume thus questions the traditional teleological narrative of negritude as ‘renaissance’ or ‘awakening’. A careful look at the birth of different negritude movements shows the complexity of this history and explains Fanon’s philosophical and political critique of the notion. These writers’ astonishingly rich production rests on original aesthetic ideas and philosophical reflections which the vagaries of history and displacement, and their comparison with major metropolitan literary movements, had masked. Fanon’s thought is at the heart of the book, but this volume also traces the important debates these authors had with the major French thinkers of their time, notably Bergson, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.

This anthology captures the excitement of one of the most challenging developments in contemporary French writing, the new metaphysical poetry which has become an influential strand in recent French literature. It is a rigorously ontological poetry concerned with the very being of things, and with the nature of poetic language itself. This is not the only kind of poetry being written in France today, but it is an extremely significant development, not only in French poetry, but also in French writing as a whole. Indeed, some of the writers included in this book, notably Édmond Jabès and Gérard Macé, have been influential in the subversion of conventional genres, by the play between poetry, narrative and essay, which has been an important aspect of recent French literature. This anthology brings together writers of different generations, from Gisèle Prassinos and Joyce Mansour, through Jacques Dupin and Bernard Noël, to Frank-André Jamme and André Velter. It represents those who are major figures in France and already have some reputation in Britain and America, alongside writers who are still relatively unknown to English readers. Much of the poetry shows an af?nity with the work of Henri Michaux. The book also reflects the range of poetry published by the innovative French imprint Éditions Fata Morgana, as well as the lists of leading French publishers such as Gallimard, Éditions du Seuil and Mercure de France.