Concept and Form: The Cahiers pour l'analyse and contemporary French thought

Project start date: 2006-09

Project end date: 2010-09

This website provides an electronic annotated edition of the French philosophical journal Les Cahiers pour l'Analyse. Edited by a small group of Louis Althusser's students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the Cahiers pour l’Analyse appeared in ten volumes between 1966 to 1969 – arguably the most fertile and productive years in French philosophy during the whole of the twentieth century. Guided by the examples of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser and Georges Canguilhem, the Cahiers were conceived as a contribution to a philosophy based on the primacy of concepts and the rigour of logic and formalisation, in opposition to philosophies based on lived experience or the interpretation of meaning. The website is the main product of a three-year research project funded by the AHRC (2006-2009), undertaken by members of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University (the Centre subsequently moved to Kingston University in the summer of 2010). It includes a full electronic edition of the original French texts in both html and facsimile pdf versions, together with detailed commentaries on each article, recent interviews with members of the original editorial board, and substantial entries on the main concepts and authors at issue in the journal. Other components of the research project included an international conference on the Cahiers and its legacy, held at Middlesex University on 21-22 May 2009, and two edited volumes on the Cahiers, entitled Concept and Form. These volumes are forthcoming from Verso in 2011. Generation of HTML files from XML data for web-delivery