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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
In 1966 Michel Foucault pointed out that the generation of thinkers who had taken as their model Sartre or Merleau-Ponty had suddenly become part of the intellectual museum. A new generation of thinkers had appeared whose passion was not for “meaning”, “man” and “commitment”, but for the “concept and the system”.
One could say that the break with the past generation began the day that Levi-Strauss with regard to societies and Lacan with regard to the unconscious showed us that “meaning” was probably nothing but a sort of surface effect, a scum, and that that which affected us most profoundly, that which preceded us, that which maintains us.in space and time was the system.
“Our task, Foucault went on, is to free ourselves from humanism and in that sense our work is political.” For some time Foucault and those who thought like him were classed as ‘academics”, that is as people whose thinking had little or no implications for the ongoing state of the society. Then came the May movement of 1968 and in February of 1969 a major gathering was held and the main speakers were Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.
