The Concepts of Life in Twentieth Century French Thought: Genealogies and Transformations

The aim of this project is to analyze the renewed primacy of the concept of life in contemporary French philosophy, especially in Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, and to retrace its different genealogies: the history of biology according to Canguilhem (for Foucault), the vitalism of Bergson (for Deleuze), the phenomenology and ontology of Husserl and Heidegger (for Derrida) . The reconstruction of these geneologies and the analysis of their conceptual displacements enable us to read the history of French philosophy from the end of the nineteenth century through the twentieth century in a way that corrects the classical opposition between so-called philosophies of the subject and of meaning (bergsonism, phenomenology), on the one hand, and the philosphies of rationality and of science (Canguilhem), on the other.