Theme
Since Tocqueville and Jefferson, numerous are the
political, literary and artistic examples of the vitality and the
animosity of the cultural exchanges between the two countries.
Since WWII the influence of French thought academic elite
has been dominating. Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Cixous, Deleuze,
Baudrillard … most of the theoretical texts from the sixties to the
nineties are interspersed with those references. Thirty years of French
Theory and Continental Philosophy in the United States have undeniably
developed and broadened the scope the French theories beyond their
premise. We also know that French intellectuals have been skeptical about
the relevance of the provocative applications of French Theory that
American scholars have undertaken.
Does this mean that the “model” has eventually lost the
control of its influence and has reversed into a resistant attitude to any
progressive development of those theories? Moreover, is the diverted
legacy of the French thought still relevant today in the American
Academic? Or does the cultural influence come now from the other side?
Thinking of the recent French enthusiasm for American crime novels and
thrillers or the new French acknowledgement (under the influence of
American Post Colonial Studies) of the multicultural stakes in its own
cultural history.
The intellectual and cultural imbroglio between the two
countries underlines the ambivalence and the mobility of cross-cultural
relationship, which can never be limited to a unilateral or a
dominating-dominated link.
