French thought no longer enjoys the kind of prominence in the Anglophone world that it did in most of the last half of the twentieth century, a time when Sartre and Camus, then Levi-Strauss, Foucault, and Derrida (to mention only the names most familiar to North American ears) exercised a decisive influence on innovative work in literary and cultural theory, the human and social sciences, and on social thought more generally. It would be a mistake, however, to exaggerate the degree to which this represents either a decline in the actual influence of twentieth century French thinkers or an enervation of contemporary theorizing in France. Derridean deconstruction and Foucauldian power/knowledge analyses have, for example, not been transcended so much as incorporated as part of the standard armamentarium of many thinkers in the English-speaking world.
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