ABSTRACT
When considering the imprint of Stoicism on contemporary French philosophy, there is a great temptation to focus on two quite recent and very famous cases, namely Deleuze and Foucault, and to enter into a close discussion with the already substantial literature devoted to the few texts where they dealt with Stoicism.1 This chapter adopts a quite different approach: many other philosophers will be studied in the following pages, both in order to broaden the perspective on Stoicism in French thought and to understand better Deleuze’s and Foucault’s respective contributions by putting them into the relevant intellectual contexts. One of these contexts consists in the works about Stoicism written by French historians of
philosophy. When dealing with a doctrine such as Stoicism, which is preserved mainly in Greek and Latin fragments and testimonies, philosophers are likely to be dependent on historians of ancient philosophy. But this is not the main reason to take them into account. It is crucial to remember that the distinction between history of philosophy and philosophy has probably been much more blurry in France since the second half of nineteenth century than in many other countries or periods, as witnessed by the number of influential philosophers (such as Ravaisson, Boutroux, Brunschvicg, Deleuze or Derrida) who wrote a thesis, taught courses and sometimes even published books about past philosophers. Conversely, most historians of ancient philosophy also studied modern authors and were philosophically minded. This is obviously a direct result of the way philosophy was taught in the last year of high school2 and in universities. There is indeed a distinguished tradition of French scholarship on Stoicism from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, which will not be studied in itself here but which needs to be touched on inasmuch it played a crucial role in non-historical appropriations of this doctrine. French philosophy in the twentieth century naturally includes many diverse and even rival
schools, and authors, which can be interested (or not) in various aspects of Stoicism or have diverging interpretations of them. The reception of Stoicism in the last century in France is as diverse as it was in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. While it sometimes echoes the classical debates raised by Stoicism when it first entered the French philosophical scene with Montaigne, Du Vair, Pascal and Descartes, the lines of fracture specific to the twentieth century should be kept in mind to avoid any illusion of a perennis philosophia gallica. As a starting point, one can use a division offered by Foucault of “contemporary philosophy in
France” along “the line that separates a philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept. On the one hand, one network is that of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; and then another is that of Cavaillès, Bachelard and Canguilhem” (Foucault 1978: 1). At first sight, French uses of Stoicism are firmly anchored in the first tradition, as we shall see presently. Foucault himself sided with the second tradition, but might be an apparent exception since he became interested in Stoicism only at the end of his career, when he had moved away from the critical analysis of scientific discourses and was looking for a new approach to truth and subjectivity or the self by delving into Greek and Latin texts.
