Turning On the Mind

French Philosophers on Television

Cloth $67.50 ISBN: 9780226509907 Published December 2007

Paper $27.50 ISBN: 9780226509914 Published December 2007

In 1951, the eight o’clock nightly news reported on Jean-Paul Sartre for the first time. By the end of the twentieth century, more than 3,500 programs dealing with philosophy and its practitioners—including Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Lévy—had aired on French television. According to Tamara Chaplin, this enduring commitment to bringing the most abstract and least visual of disciplines to the French public challenges our very assumptions about the incompatibility of elite culture and mass media. Indeed, it belies the conviction that television is inevitably anti-intellectual and the quintessential archenemy of the book.

Chaplin argues that the history of the televising of philosophy is crucial to understanding the struggle over French national identity in the postwar period. Linking this history to decolonization, modernization, and globalization, Turning On the Mind claims that we can understand neither the markedly public role that philosophy came to play in French society during the late twentieth century nor the renewed interest in ethics and political philosophy in the early twenty-first unless we acknowledge the work of television. Throughout, Chaplin insists that we jettison presumptions about the anti-intellectual nature of the visual field, engages critical questions about the survival of national cultures in a globalizing world, and encourages us to rethink philosophy itself, ultimately asserting that the content of the discipline is indivisible from the new media forms in which it has found expression.

Review Quotes
Contents

“Anyone who wants to understand the unique role that philosophy continues to play in contemporary France can now read Tamara Chaplin’s superbly documented study of philosophy on French TV. For American readers, Turning On the Mind raises a host of serious issues for comparison and debate.”—Alice Kaplan, author of French Lessons

“Two top-ten hate objects for old-fashioned academics—television and ‘French theory’—are brought together in Tamara Chaplin’s exhilarating new book. She shows the folly of assuming there is something essential to TV that renders it antithetical to complex ideas. She also shows the folly of assuming there is something essential to ‘French theory’ that renders it antithetical to popular explanation. Move over, reality TV—Foucault meets prime time!”—Toby Miller, University of California, Riverside

“Audaciously conceived, exhaustively researched, and vigorously written, Turning On the Mind challenges many entrenched assumptions about the allergic reaction of esoteric thought to the mass media. By painstakingly reconstructing the complex interaction of philosophy, national identity, state policy, and television over a half century of French history, Tamara Chaplin provides a stunningly original account of a previously unexplored corner of modern culture.”—Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

"Only in France could a history of television programs also be a history of philosophy! And it works. If the French were not so despondent about their own culture, they would learn enormously from this book about their many worthwhile attempts at turning philosophy into a form of public life."—Bruno Latour

"[A] vivid, thorough, and irreverent cultural history."—Sam Stark, Bookforum

"Chaplin's fascinating study lifts the curtain on the secret life of French philosophers. . . . In the process, she raises some fundamental questions of whether complex thought can be communicated in the limited time frame of a television programme, and what happens to philosophy when it is presented in embodied form."—Michael Kelly, H-France

"Chaplin's topic is most welcome and her treatment of it is superb. . . . The book gives very clear depictions of the positions and achievements of the philosophers who appeared on television."—Mark Poster, American Historical Review

Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Prologue: Portrait of a Philosopher
Introduction: Televising Philosophy in Postwar France

Chapter One
The Cultural Politics of Philosophical Celebrity, 1951–1968

Chapter Two
Philosophy and the Early Television Book Show, 1953–1968

Chapter Three
From Educational Television to Cultural Spectacle, 1964–1974

Chapter Four
The “New Philosophers” and Morality for the Masses, 1974–1986

Chapter Five
Bucking the Ratings: Antigone, Abraham, Heidegger, and the Holocaust, 1987–1992

Conclusion: Philosophical TV in the 1990s

Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Culture Studies

History: European History | History of Ideas

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory | Romance Languages

Media Studies

Philosophy: General Philosophy

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