The Winter 1980 issue of Social Research (Philosophy: An Assessment) brought together a number of texts by professional philosophers practicing in the United States, texts designed to expound but also to exemplify current trends in philosophical work. The use of the expression "philosophical work" is meant to signify a certain conception of what philosophy is, namely, an enterprise carried on by workers in a more or less well defined intellectual domain, whose character is determined at any given time less by some eternal or abstract or doctrinaire conception of what it ought to be than by the actual interests and preoccupations of its practitioners. Looking at what philosophers are actually doing, rather than at what philosophy ought (according to conviction or prejudice) ideally to be, is the only way of getting a grasp of the subject as contemporary rather than timeless.

But philosophy is not only contemporary; it is also, given at any rate the present political and linguistic state of the world, inescapably regional.  The opportunities that present themselves for colleagues to learn about one another's work arise as a function of geographical or sometimes conceptual proximity, and depend for their fruitfulness on the availability of a common language, in two senses--natural and technical. Technical distinctions of vocabulary and usage mean that even English-speakers in philosophy do not always communicate successfully with each other, although (as I suggested in the Introduction to the earlier issue) we are beginning to surmount some of the thornier obstacles to common discourse tha have been notorious in recent decades. Differences in natural languages ought also to be surmountable, in that translation is in principle possible (and if inadequate can be made the object of further discourse, itself in principle translatable, and so on for as many levels as necessary--a pragmatic overcoming of radical intranslatability), but in practice of course such differences are often accompanied by technical differences which still have to be confronted even if the translation is completely successful. Further, however, differences in natural languages always reflect historical or cultural divergences that need to be understood from both sides if communication is to be achieved, and it is precisely here, rather than on the purely linguistic plane, that mutual incomprehension usually arises.

Unless there is a great deal of work in common--unless, that is, philosophers from the two linguistic domains in question are more or less constantly speaking one another's languages in the pursuit of shared philosophical interests--it is quite possible for workers on one side not to recognize what goes on on the other as belonging to their discipline at all. Something like this happens in the present case, where the two languages involved are French and English. When philosophers from France visit universities in the United States they most often do so as guests of departments of French or comparative literature rather than of philosophy departments proper (and this is only partly due to the fact that they do not find many people in the latter with whom they can speak French). One reason for this is that French philosophers are nurtured in a literary tradition more dominant in their culture than any such tradition is in ours; but one result of it is that French philosophy, seen from the perspective of the American academy, looks even more purely literary than it really is. The leaders of intellectual fashion whose works get translated and reviewed in the literary quarterlies are not necessarily seen by their own colleagues in philosophy as typical of the discipline, which there as here is practiced by professionals dispersed throughout the intellectual (and especially the academic) world. There is, it is true, a stronger center in the French case; in philosophy at any rate we have no equivalent of Paris. But even in Paris all philosophers are not structuralists or Marxists or nouveaux: along with methodological or ideological modes goes a continuing tradition of scholarship and inquiry, rooted in the teaching of philosophy, that reflects more accurately, perhaps, than the discourses of distinguished transatlantic lecturers the state of the subject in France.

It is this working aspect of philosophy that I have sought to represent in the texts that follow. They were solicited in much the same spirit as those for the earlier issue, with this difference; that while in the case of philosophers in this country it was possible to specify subdivisions of the discipline, in the French context it was more a matter of choosing individual philosophers and leaving the choice of subject up to them. There is less in the way of topical organization of the field and on the whole more cultivation of personal style in France than in the English-speaking world. Still the resulting distribution of topics is if anything more inclusive and more typical than was the case in the American issue, and the texts that were sought for this one but did not materialize left less obvious gaps in the coverage of the contemporary scene. In fact, the range of styles in this collection, from the philosophical writing of Clement Rosset and Jean Baudrillard to the philosophical computerizing of Andre Robinet, is remarkably wide; this reflects perhaps a greater degree of idiosyncrasy and a Iooser professional coherence in France than in America, but while that implies a greater risk in generalizing from any sampling to the whole it also conveys a genuine sense of the liveliness and diversity of current work.

Not that there is no professional coherence; as in any scholarly domain nuclei of common interest form and are sustained for longer or shorter periods, and four of the essays--those of Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy--represent in their different ways the fruits of a close and long-standing association among colleagues. The preoccupation of this group with German philosophy--Kant, Hegel, but especially Heidegger--reminds us that the contiguity of philosophical regions has consequences of a kind not readily appreciated by Anglo-American philosophers in their insular or continental isolation. Lacoue- Labarthes' contribution strikes me as particularly significant, taking up as it does the vexed question of Heidegger's brief involvement with the Nazi regime and putting it in the setting of the general relationship between philosophy and politics, while Kofman's brings a similar sensibility to bear on the question of feminism. 

The history of philosophy is represented here at the first-order level by Michele Le Doeuff's analysis of the idea of Utopia in More, Campanella, and Bacon, and at the second-order level by Yves Michaud's reflections on the relations between historical and philosophical work (which may be read profitably in connection with H. S. Thayer's essay in the earlier issue). That questions of technical interest to English-speaking philosophers are also alive in France is clear from the contributions in logic and the philosophy of language from Gilles-Gaston Granger and Vincent Descombes. And finally Francois George shows that the politics of the left, that old preoccupation of French intellectual life (and an old reproach on the part of many Anglo-American critics of that life), while it has not lost its appeal, has not been allowed to swamp either scholarship or critical independence. 

If one concluding remark is appropriate it is in fact that politics in general is far more in evidence in these essays than in their American counterparts. In the Assessment some of the articles, notably that of Virginia Held, showed an awareness of the political relevance of philosophy, but here a lively sense of that relevance is the rule rather than the exception. If Francois George can refer to some of the Utopians, from the point of view of contemporary political philosophy, as primitive socialists, Michele Le Doeuff, in treating them historically, is certainly not unaware of their current political relevance. And if Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe raises explicitly the issue of the relation between political and philosophical texts in Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy is certainly not unaware of the contemporary significance of the inverse relation in Hegel. Paris may have something to do with this also: the decentralized character of American philosophy has not accustomed its practitioners to view their subject--not just political philosophy, not just philosophy with obvious ideological overtones, but philosophy as such--as a politically significant discipline. We need not prejudge its outcome in order to recognize that we may have something to learn from a meditation on this difference.

The publication of this collection represents for me the completion of a long-standing project, in the early development of which I was helped by a grant from the Faculty Research Award Program of the Research Foundation of the City University of New York. Among friends in France, not represented among the contributors, who assisted with contacts and encouragement I wish to mention especially Michel Deguy. And for practical help in finding translators, as well as being one of the best in the trade, I thank Mary Ann Caws.