Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume Two Vol. 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. In Volume One of this authoritative two-volume study, Thomas R. Flynn conducted a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory. This long-awaited second volume offers a comprehensive and critical reading of the Foucauldian counterpoint. A history, theorized Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comprehensive charting of structural transformations and displacements over time. Contrary to other Foucault scholars, Flynn proposes an "axial" rather than a developmental reading of Foucault's work. This allows aspects of Foucault's famous triad of knowledge, power, and the subject to emerge in each of his major works. Flynn maps existentialist categories across Foucault's "quadrilateral," the model that Foucault proposes as defining modernist conceptions of knowledge. At stake is the degree to which Sartre's thought is fully captured by this mapping, whether he was, as Foucault claimed, "a man of the nineteenth century trying to think in the twentieth." Frontmatter Preface (page ix) Acknowledgments (page xv) Works Frequently Cited (page xvii) PART ONE: Conceptual Coordinates 1. Foucault and the Historians (page 3) 2. Foucault and Historical Nominalism (page 31) 3. The Career of the Historical Event (page 48) PART TWO: Spatialized Reasoning 4. The Eclipse of Vision? (page 83) 5. The Spaces of History (page 99) 6. The Philosopher-Historian as Cartographer (page 126) 7. Pyramids and Prisms: Reading Foucault in 3-D (page 143) PART THREE: Diaries and Maps 8. Mapping Existentialist History (page 177) 9. Experience and the Lived (page 208) 10. Sartre on Violence, Foucault on Power: A Diagnostic (page 230) 11. Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the Collège de France (An Object Lesson in Axial History) (page 260) 12. Ethics and History: Authentic vs. Effective History (page 283) Conclusion: The Map and the Diary (page 307) Glossary (page 311) Notes (page 317) Index (page 379)