School of the South: The Colonial Roots of FrenchTheory

Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Jean-François Lyotard, Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière: these were among the luminaries of France's golden age of theory from the 1960s to the 1990s.What is less well-known is that all of these thinkers spent time in North Africa and their ideas were shaped by their encounters with French colonialism.In his remarkable history of ideas in eight portraits, Onur Erdur uncovers the colonial roots of French theory. Erdur's search for these colonial roots leads him to Algiers, where the young Pierre Bourdieu did his military service in the middle of the Algerian war; to the coastal village of Sidi Bou Saïd north of Tunis, where Michel Foucault developed an attitude of philosophical hedonism between sunbathing, walks on the beach and ritualised body culture; and to Casablanca, where Roland Barthes fantasised about becoming a novelist.How did these intellectuals end up in these colonial situations?How did they