Anatole France was a French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie française, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament".
Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French psychotherapist, philosopher, semiologist, activist and screenwriter. He founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy, and is best known for his intellectual collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus. An important part of Deleuze's oeuvre is devoted to the reading of other philosophers: the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Bergson, with particular influence derived from Spinoza. A. W. Moore, citing Bernard Williams's criteria for a great thinker, ranks Deleuze among the "greatest philosophers". Although he once characterized himself as a "pure metaphysician", his work has influenced a variety of disciplines across the humanities, including philosophy, art, and literary theory, as well as movements such as post-structuralism and postmodernism.
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu, published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.
In sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history and linguistics, structuralism is a general theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.
In Search of Lost Time, also translated as Remembrance of Things Past, is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust (1871–1922). It is his most prominent work, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory; the most famous example of this is the "episode of the madeleine," which occurs early in the first volume. It gained fame in English in translations by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin as Remembrance of Things Past, but the title In Search of Lost Time, a literal rendering of the French, became ascendant after D. J. Enright adopted it for his revised translation published in 1992.
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1980 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the second and final volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While the first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1972), sought to "short-circuit" a developing "bureaucracy of analytic reason" in France, A Thousand Plateaus was created as a "positive exercise" in nomadology and rhizomatic philosophy.
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1972 book by French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, respectively a philosopher and a psychoanalyst. It is the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the second being A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
Marcel Arland was a French novelist, literary critic, and journalist.
Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1983) is the first of two books on cinema by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the second being Cinema 2: The Time Image (1985). Together Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 have become known as the Cinema books, the two volumes both complementary and interdependent. In these books the author combines philosophy and cinema, explaining in the preface to the French edition of Cinema 1 that "[t]his study is not a history of cinema. It is a taxonomy, an attempt at the classifications of images and signs"; and that the "first volume has to content itself with […] only one part of the classification". To make this division between the movement-image and the time-image Deleuze draws upon the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theory of matter (movement) and mind (time).
Roger Whitney Shattuck was an American writer best known for his books on French literature, art, and music of the twentieth century.
The Proust Questionnaire is a set of questions answered by the French writer Marcel Proust, and often used by modern interviewers.
Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher, and Félix Guattari, a French psychoanalyst and political activist, wrote a number of works together.
Nietzsche and Philosophy is a 1962 book about Friedrich Nietzsche by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in which the author treats Nietzsche as a systematically coherent philosopher, discussing concepts such as the will to power and the eternal return. Nietzsche and Philosophy is a celebrated and influential work. Its publication has been seen as a significant turning-point in French philosophy, which had previously given little consideration to Nietzsche as a serious philosopher.
Venice for Lovers is a collection of essays and travel impressions about the city of Venice in Italy, written by Louis Begley and wife Anka Muhlstein.
Stéphane Heuet (Brest) is a French comics artist. He is notable in the Franco-Belgian comics genre for having tackled one of the most literary of modern novels, À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust (1988).
Mauro Carbone is an Italian philosopher. Since 2009, he has been a full professor at the Faculté de Philosophie of the Jean Moulin University Lyon 3 in Lyon, France. Since 2012, he has been a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty is a 1967 book by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, originally published in French as Le Froid et le Cruel, in which the author philosophically examines the work of the late 19th-century Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In the Foreword Deleuze states that Masoch has a particular way of "desexualising love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity". Deleuze attempts to "cut through" the various forms of expression and content that are the artistic creation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. He also attempts to develop a problematic of masochism in contradistinction to sadism, concluding that the two forms of 'pornology' are non-communicating, and cannot be integrated into Sadomasochistic entity. Deleuze argues that Masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain and that Masochism has nothing to do with Sadism.
Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985) is the second volume of Gilles Deleuze's work on cinema, the second being Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983). Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 have become to be known as the Cinema books, and are complementary and interdependent texts.
Jacques Guérin was a French industrialist. For many years he successfully headed up the D'Orsay Parfumerie business after inheriting it in 1936 from his remarkable mother, Jeanne Louise Guérin. Beyond the world of commerce Jacques Guérin is better known by many as a passionate collector of books and manuscripts. One reviewer, paraphrasing the sentiments of several commentators, has described him as "not just a collector but a rescuer of all things Proustian".
