The conservatism of radicalism?

Radical experiments in 20th century French philosophy

Abstract

Philosophie des expérientes radicales, a recently published book by Stéphane Madelrieux, a pragmatist philosopher and professor at the University of Lyon III, proposes an original and innovative way of reading 20th century French philosophy. Without approaching it through traditional paths, such as the chronological succession of generations (1860, 1900, 1900, etc.), typical concepts (spirit and life; existence and transcendence; dialectics and praxis; structure and discontinuity; difference and deconstruction, etc. ), hegemonic currents (Bergsonian spiritualism, philosophies of life; existentialisms; Hegelianisms, Marxisms; structuralism, historical epistemology; poststructuralism or postmodernism, etc.), Madelrieux chooses six French authors (Henri Bergson, Jean Wahl, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault), all from the twentieth century, to then analyse them through the prism of "metaphysical empiricism". What interests Madelrieux is to point out the presence of an unprecedented program, not worked out in philosophical literature, which ties experience and metaphysics, and which explains an important part of twentieth-century philosophy, notably in France.