We may summarize the main points of the programme that inspired postwar French philosophy as follows.
1. To have done with the separation of concept and existence—no longer to oppose the two;to demonstrate that the concept is a living thing, a creation, a process, an event, and, as such, not divorced from existence;
2. To inscribe philosophy within modernity, which also means taking it out of the academy and putting it into circulation in daily life. Sexual modernity, artistic modernity, social modernity: philosophy has to engage with all of this;
3. To abandon the opposition between philosophy of knowledge and philosophy of action, the Kantian division between theoretical and practical reason, and to demonstrate that knowledge itself, even scientific knowledge, is actually a practice;
4. To situate philosophy directly within the political arena, without making the detour via political philosophy; to invent what I would call the ‘philosophical militant’, to make philosophy into a militant practice in its presence, in its way of being: not simply a reflection upon politics, but a real political intervention;
5. To reprise the question of the subject, abandoning the reflexive model, and thus to engage with psychoanalysis—to rival and, if possible, to better it;
6. To create a new style of philosophical exposition, and so to compete with literature; essentially, to reinvent in contemporary terms the 18th-century figure of the philosopher-writer
via