Despite their differences in origin, the three influential schools of twentieth-century continental cultural criticism----the Frankfurt School, existentialism, and poststructuralism----have long been treated as an ensemble and with critical hesitancy. Examining these schools as responses to the appa[...]

Fifteen years ago, revelations about the political misdeeds of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man sent shock waves throughout European and North American intellectual circles. Ever since, postmodernism has been haunted by the specter of a compromised past. In this intellectual genealogy of the postmod[...]

Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who's who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China's Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless expos of left-wing political foll[...]