"Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation" analyses the major themes and developments in a period that brought continental philosophy to the forefront of scholarship in a variety of humanities and social science disciplines and that set the agenda for philosophical thought on the continent and elsewhere from the 1960s to the present. Focusing on the years 1960-1984, the volume examines the major figures associated with poststructuralism and the second generation of critical theory, the two dominant movements that emerged in the 1960s: Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida,...

Jean Wahl (1888-1974), once considered by the likes of Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gabriel Marcel to be among the greatest French philosophers, has today nearly been forgotten outside France. Yet his influence on French philosophical thought can hardly be overestimated. Levinas wrote that "during over a half century of teaching and research, Wahl] was the life force of the academic, extra-academic, and even, to a degree anti-academic philosophy necessary to a great culture. " And Deleuze, for his part, commented that "Apart from Sartre, who remained caught none...