Historians From France

"This temperature of space is not the same in different regions of the universe; but it does not vary in the regions... [of] planetary bodies... [T]he planets of our system... equally participate in the common temperature... augmented for each... by the rays of the sun, according to the distance of the planet from... [it]. ...The intensity and distribution of heat on the surface of these bodies results from the distance from the sun, the inclination of the axes of rotation to the orbit, and the state of the surface..."

"It is difficult to know how far the atmosphere influences the mean temperature of the globe... It is to... M. de Saussure that we are indebted for a capital experiment which appears to throw... light on this... The theory of the instrument is... 1st... the acquired heat is concentrated, because it is not dissipated immediately by renewing the air; 2d, that the heat of the sun, has properties different from those of [invisible] heat... The rays... are transmitted in considerable quantity through the glass plates... They heat the air and the partitions which contain it. Their heat thus communicated ceased to be luminous, and preserves only the properties of non-luminous radiating heat. In this state it cannot pass through the plate of glass covering the vessel. ...It is necessary to consider attentively this order of facts, and the results of the calculus when we would ascertain the influence of the atmosphere and waters upon the thermometrical state of our globe."

"[I]f all the strata of air of... the atmosphere... preserved their density with their transparency, and lost only the mobility... peculiar to them, this mass of air, thus become solid, on being exposed to the rays of the sun, would produce an effect the same in kind... [as] just described."

"The mobility of the air, which is rapidly displaced... and... rises when heated... diminish the intensity of the effects... [of] a transparent and solid atmosphere, but do not entirely change their character."

"We shall now consider that peculiar heat which our globe had at the time of the formation of the planets, and which continues to be dissipated at the surface under the influence of the low temperature of the planetary space."

"In a military school directed by monks, the minds of the pupils necessarily waver only between two careers in life—the church and the sword. Like Descartes, Fourier wished to be a soldier; like that philosopher he would doubtless have found the life of a garrison very wearisome. But he was not permitted to make the experiment. His demand to undergo the examination for the artillery, although strongly supported by our illustrious colleague Legendre, was rejected with a severity of expression of which you may judge yourselves: "Fourier," replied the minister, "not being noble, could not enter the artillery, although he were a second Newton.""

"Fourier's analytical theory of heat (final form, 1822), devised in the Galileo-Newton tradition of controlled observation plus mathematics, is the ultimate source of much modern work in the theory of functions of a real variable and in the critical examination of the foundation of mathematics."

"At the age of twenty-one he went to Paris to read before the Academy of Sciences a memoir on the resolution of numerical equations, which was an improvement on Newton's method of approximation. This investigation of his early youth he never lost sight of. He lectured upon it... he developed it... it constituted a part of a work entitled Analyse des equations determines (1831), which was in press when death overtook him. This work contained "Fourier's theorem" on the number of real roots between two chosen limits. Budan had published this result as early as 1807, but there is evidence to show that Fourier had established it before Budan's publication. These brilliant results were eclipsed by the theorem of Sturm, published in 1835."

"Fourier took a prominent part at his home in promoting the Revolution. Under the French Revolution the arts and sciences seemed for a time to flourish. ...The Normal School was created in 1795, of which Fourier became at first pupil, then lecturer. His brilliant success secured him a chair in the Polytechnic School, the duties of which he afterwards quitted, along with Monge and Berthollet, to accompany Napoleon on his campaign to Egypt. Napoleon founded the Institute of Egypt, of which Fourier became secretary. In Egypt he engaged not only in scientific work, but discharged important political functions. ...In 1827 Fourier succeeded Laplace as president of the council of the Polytechnic School."

"He carried on his elaborate investigations on the propagation of heat in solid bodies, published in 1822 in his work entitled La Theorie Analytique de la Chaleur. This work marks an epoch in the history of mathematical physics. "Fourier's series" constitutes its gem. By this research a long controversy was brought to a close, and the fact established that any arbitrary function can be represented by a trigonometric series. The first announcement of this great discovery was made by Fourier in 1807 before the French Academy. The trigonometric series \sum_{n=0}^{n=\infty} (a_n\sin nx+b_n\cos nx) represents the function \phi(x) for every value of x if the coefficients a_n = \frac{1}{\pi}\int_{-\pi}^{\pi}\phi(x) \sin nx\,dx, and b_n be equal to a similar integral. The weak point in Fourier's analysis lies in his failure to prove generally that the trigonometric series actually converges to the value of the function."

"It is true that M. Fourier had the opinion that the principal end of mathematics was the public utility and the explanation of natural phenomena; but such a philosopher as he is should have known that the unique end of science is the honor of the human mind, and that from this point of view a question of number is as important as a question of the system of the world."

"He started as a convinced Jacobin... and ended up a cautious liberal."

"He ranks among the most important scientists of the 19the century for his studies in the propagation of heat... and the paternity of the expression ""—effet de serre—is attributed to Fourier."

"The novelty of his method... initially perplexed... mathematicians... from Lagrange to Laplace and Poisson. ...[P]ublication ...was ...delayed as many as fifteen years during which he ...defended, explained and extended [his work]."

"The formula and even the method was... used by Euler in... 1777, published... 1798. (Fourier... having failed to refer to earlier works...) ...[A]s with Bernoulli, Fourier had acquired an intimate understanding of the physical meaning of the problem. Over... two years... Fourier repeated all important experiments... carried out in England, France, and Germany and added experiments of his own. ...[S]triking ...confirmations of his new theory ...together with his overcoming ...difficulties advanced by the old masters. Fourier mentioned the motion of fluids... propagation of sounds and...vibrations of elastic bodies, as other applications ...fully aware of having opened up a new era for the solution or partial differential equations... It was the era of linearization that would dominate mathematics for the first half of the nineteenth century and... has remained important... The diffusion equation is a : Linear combinations of solutions are still solutions. It was not the first such equation... in history... but the method opened up enormous... possibilities."

"Galileo and Hooke demonstrated that every sound is characterized by a precise number of vibrations per second, but the full understanding of even the simplest... vibrators requires... calculus. ...Leonard Euler, Daniel Bernoulli, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and Joseph Louis Lagrange all studied the vibrating string.... In 1747 d'Alembert found... the wave equation and in 1753 Bernoulli stated the... decomposition of every motion of a string as a sum of elementary sinusoidal motions. Then at the beginning of the following century Fourier developed "harmonic analysis.""

"A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found. We should struggle not against the devil himself but what allows the devil to live — Manichaean thinking itself."

"Pride is not a wise counselor. People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world. The absence of any obstacle to the deployment of strength is dangerous for the strong themselves: passion takes precedence over reason. "No power without limit can be legitimate," as Montesquieu wrote long ago. Political wisdom does not consist in seeking only immediate victory, nor does it require systematic preference of "us" over "them.""

"Democracy brought to others through the barrel of a gun is not democracy; to impose it by force is to undermine it."

"Nothing is more commonplace than the reading experience, and yet nothing is more unknown. Reading is such a matter of course that at first glance it seems there is nothing to say about it."

"Fantasy changes the world deliberately, allowing impossible things which science fiction at least pretends not to allow. Yes, I say "what if magic worked, and then...," and "what if there were dragons... yes. Then you just follow out, you just follow the fictional enterprise like any novelist, it seems to me, and the more detailed and accurate you are, the better the book will be. And of course, the tricky thing about imaginative fiction, both science fiction and fantasy, is the coherence of the imagination, because you are making a whole world out of words only. It's all made to hold together. Tolkien is very clear about that in some of his essays. He's the best theorist of fantasy I know, actually, Tolkien himself. The European fantasy theorists, Todorov, and those people, they are terrible, terrible. The works they are talking about always seem so insignificant to me. That's not what I mean by fantasy."

"American society has always exercised a stronger pressure on individual behavior than Western European societies; but in time of war this pressure is notched a few degrees, and starts to become quite alarming."

"One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche’s work is that Kant had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of critique in terms of values."

"Nous sommes fatigués de l'arbre. Nous ne devons plus croire aux arbres, aux racines ni aux radicelles. Nous en avons trop souffert. Toute la culture arborescente est fondée sur eux, de la biologie à la linguistique. Au contraire, rien n'est beau, rien n'est amoureux, rien n'est politique, sauf les tiges souterraines et les racines aériennes, l'adventice et le rhizome."

"It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections."

"A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and counter-current, of back-wash with other flows — the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other — two flows in what relationship?"

"Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistence which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States?"

"In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side — there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return."

"There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons."

"A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments."

"Deleuze is a key figure in postmodern French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, post-structuralism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence."

"Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature""

"Second, we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man."

"It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in firs and starts . It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines- real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it."

"When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness (Z III “Of the three evil things”). But in fact egoism is a bad interpretation of the will, just as atomism is a bad interpretation of force. In order for there to be egoism it is necessary for there to be an ego."

"Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple."

"This is Nietzsche’s twofold struggle: against those who remove values from criticism, contenting themselves with producing inventories of existing values or with criticizing things in the name of established values (the “philosophical labourers”, Kant and Schopenhauer, BGE 211); but also against those who criticise or respect values by deriving them from simple facts, from so-called “objective facts” (the utilitarians, the “scholars”, BGE Part 6). In both cases philosophy moves in the indifferent element of the valuable in itself or the valuable for all. Nietzsche attacks both the “high” idea of foundation which leaves values indifferent to their origin and the idea of simple causal derivation or smooth beginning which suggests an indifferent origin for values. Nietzsche substitutes the pathos of difference or distance (the differential element) for both the Kantian principle of universality and the principle of resemblance dear to the utilitarians. “It was from the height of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for them; what did utility matter?” (GM I 2 p. 26)"

"Evaluations, in essence, are… ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate."

"The shortage of public intellectuals (in the English-speaking world) goes back to the decline of the written media: the first TV intellectual was Foucault, who was at home in both media, but his successors and imitators know only the camera."

"Two widespread assumptions lay behind such thinking, shared very broadly across the intellectual community of the time. The first was that power rested not—as most social thinkers since the Enlightenment had supposed—upon control of natural and human resources, but upon the monopoly of knowledge, knowledge about the natural world; knowledge about the public sphere; knowledge about oneself; and above all, knowledge about the way in which knowledge itself is produced and legitimized. The maintenance of power in this account rested upon the capacity of those in control of knowledge to maintain that control at the expense of others, by repressing subversive 'knowledges'. At the time, this account of the human condition was widely and correctly associated with the writings of Michel Foucault. But for all his occasional obscurantism Foucault was a rationalist at heart. His early writings tracked quite closely the venerable Marxist claim that in order to liberate workers from the shackles of capitalism one had first to substitute a different account of history and economics for the self-serving narrative of bourgeois society. In short, one had to substitute revolutionary knowledge, so to speak, for that of the masters: or, in the language of Antonio Gramsci so fashionable a few years earlier, one had to combat the 'hegemony' of the ruling class."

"In the course of the 1960s there emerged a plethora of applied structuralisms: in anthropology, history, sociology, psychology, political science and of course literature. The best-known practitioners—usually those who combined in the right doses scholarly audacity with a natural talent for self-promotion—became international celebrities, having had the good fortune to enter the intellectual limelight just as television was becoming a mass medium. In an earlier age Michel Foucault might have been a drawing-room favourite, a star of the Parisian lecture circuit, like Henri Bergson fifty years earlier. But when Les Mots et les Choses sold 20,000 copies in just four months after it appeared in 1966 he acquired celebrity status almost overnight. Foucault himself foreswore the label 'structuralist', much as Albert Camus always insisted he had never been an 'existentialist' and didn't really know what that was. But as Foucault at least would have been constrained to concede, it didn't really matter what he thought. 'Structuralism' was now shorthand for any ostensibly subversive account of past or present, in which conventional linear explanations and categories were shaken up and their assumptions questioned. More importantly, 'structuralists' were people who minimized or even denied the role of individuals and individual initiative in human affairs."

"This sort of infinitely relativistic 'Foucaultism' actually says nothing about anything; but it does bear a close family resemblance to the more commonly held view that 'all' women, 'all' peasants were unpolitical. (Foucault is a prominent French scholar and scholastic.) This is extremely patronising, of course, and based on no shred of evidence. Indeed, in the case of French strikers it requires a poker-faced denial of that evidence. It also allows the authors of such views to dispense with the political dimensional together, on the circular ground that they have shown politics to be of no concern to the people under investigation. The premise is the conclusion and vice-versa."

"We talked about Michel Foucault as an example of someone who in theory seemed to challenge those simplistic binary oppositions and mind/body splits. But in his life practice as a teacher, he clearly made a separation between that space where he saw himself as a practicing intellectual-where he not only saw himself as a critical thinker but was seen as a critical thinker-and that space where he was body. It really is clear that the space of high culture was where he was in mind, and the space of the street and street culture (and popular culture, marginalized culture) was where he felt he could be most expressive of himself within the body."

"In 1982, Foucault invited me to the Collège de France for six weeks. On the first evening we spoke about German films: Werner Herzog and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg were his favourite directors, whilst I spoke out in favour of Alexander Kluge und Volker Schlöndorff. Later we told each other about the curriculum of our respective years of philosophical study, which took something of a different course. He recalled how Lévi-Strauss and structuralism had helped him to liberate himself from Husserl and “the prison of the transcendental subject”. With regard to his discourse theory of power, I asked him at the time about the implicit standards on which his criticism was based. He merely said: “Wait for the third volume of my History of Sexuality“. We had already arranged a date for our next discussion about “Kant and the Enlightenment”. I was very shocked when he died in the interim."

"What, then, are the grounds that determine Foucault to shift the meaning of this specific will to knowledge and to truth that is constitutive for the modern form of knowledge in general, and for the human sciences in particular, by generalizing this will to knowing self-mastery into a will to power per se and to postulate that all discourses (by no means only the modern ones) can be shown to have the character of hidden power and derive from practices of power? It is this assumption that first marks the turning from an archeology of knowledge to a genealogical explanation of the provenance, rise, and fall of those discourse formations that fill the space of history, without gaps and without meaning."

"Foucault, always focused on the exercise of power and repression, tells his students to read Hayek and crew “with special care.” He found much to commend in their work. First and foremost, true liberalism is “imbued with the principle: ‘One always governs too much.’” As important, it asks (and answers) the question, “Why, after all, is it necessary to govern?”"

"I have been thinking a lot about this question. Foucault always subscribed to a number of social projects. And in his texts he was talking to readers in an ongoing transformative process. Over the past year I edited his 1971–1972 lectures at the Collège de France, together with Bernard Harcourt, and it became clear to me that his thinking revolved around the idea of change, of transformation, of individuals and collectives. In the stale climate of the 1960s we thought the transformation could occur only through literature and art. And in the early 1970s, when things were opening up, Foucault thought that social change was possible merely by changing a small number of very important relations of power — for example, the prison system. But already in 1976 he realized that this project of social change was a failure, and that people are much more easily mobilized by religious motives or nationalistic ones. The great movements weren't social. He didn't give up on his project of social change. But it had gotten more complicated."

"From a conservative perspective, the great thing about Foucault's writing is that it is more plastic than Marx, and far less economically subversive. Academics rooted in Foucauldian thought are far more compatible with neoliberalism than the old Marxist academics."

"I openly avow myself the pupil of that mighty thinker Michel Foucault, and even here and there coquette with the modes of expression peculiar to him. But at least for my purposes his useful ideas suffer a certain mystification in his hands: he presents them upside-down, as it were. They must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."

"The history of the very institution of the prison is a history of reform. Foucault points this out."