Gary Gutting's informative and suggestive book has, both on its cover and on its title page, ‘Thinking the Impossible’ in bold print as – so one might presume – its main title with ‘French Philosophy since 1960’ below, in distinctly lighter print, as its apparently qualifying sub-title. ‘Overall’, he says in his introduction, however, ‘my project is to examine key episodes in the recent history of French philosophy in order to arrive at an account of what it was to “do philosophy” in France during this period, what this sort of philosophizing was able to achieve, and how it differs from the analytic philosophy dominant in Anglophone countries.’ (2) He then explains the link between the two title themes: ‘Finally, Chapter 10 puts to the fore the meta-philosophical theme of the book, developing my thesis that French philosophy since the 1960s has been primarily concerned with thinking the impossible.’ (3) But this comes only as the concluding chapter; and it is fair to say that so far as the balance of the book is concerned, the ‘overall project’ announced in the lighter print of the title does receive a notably greater share of explicit attention.

Part I is largely devoted to what Gutting very reasonably takes to have been ‘the three most important philosophers who came to prominence in the 1960s; Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida.’ This starts with a somewhat condensed ‘discussion of the educational system and cultural milieu that produced them, and then moves to a more detailed treatment of how they formulated and began to carry out their philosophical projects in the 1960s and 1970s.’ Gutting quite rightly explains that for this it is above all essential to have an understanding of their reactions to Hegel (in particular as presented to them according to the interpretations provided by their teacher Jean Hyppolite and by Alexandre Kojève), as well as of the (as he argues) relatively less ‘overwhelming’ influence of Heidegger. His next chapter is devoted to their relationship to Sartre as the ‘father-figure’ of this post-war generation, to whom, despite the subsequent general rejection of his so-called humanism, it remained, in Gutting's view, closer than it was willing to admit. Part I then ends with a chapter on how all three of these philosophers – if indeed Foucault is, properly speaking, to be counted as such – ‘can be seen as developing their fundamental philosophical stances out of distinctive readings of Nietzsche.’ (3)

Part II ‘expands the discussion to topics and philosophers that became prominent in the 1980s and 1990s.’ Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida are still there, of course, but are joined in the principal cast of Part II by Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion and Alain Badiou. The topics in question are those of ethics, religion, ontology (in Badiou's very particular version) and, finally, incomprehensibility – not only what seems to so many analytically trained would-be readers of these philosophers the near incomprehensibility of so much of their writings, but also the far more significant incomprehensibility of that which, arguably, lies beyond the limits of all rationally conceptualisable discourse. It is to this, the Impossible of the main title, to which these French philosophers may be thought of as trying to point. Gutting makes it clear that he is, in the main, very much an admirer of these recent French philosophers. At the same time he is by no means uncritical of what he has ‘called their disdain for the obvious’ and of what he recognises to be the ‘significant weaknesses [of their work], particularly in logical rigour, clarity and relevance [and its] … failure to give proper attention to the mundane concepts and truths of everyday life that are essential as premises of effective arguments… This disdain’, he says, ‘has undermined much of what we might have hoped for from the French effort to think the impossible.’ Nevertheless, he sticks to his concluding claim that ‘the riches of recent French thought… adumbrate achievements of thought that the humdrum analytic mind is not likely to envisage on its own.’ (202, 203)

Gutting's various passing references to the ‘mundane’, the ‘obvious’, and ‘the truths of everyday life’ suggest, however, a surely over-close identification of ‘analytic’ philosophy as a whole with its avowedly ‘ordinary language’ phase. It is true that the great majority of philosophers brought up and working in any of the anglophone family of traditions, will have been formed so as to have a primary concern for the demands of coherent and consistent argument rather than for what may be called literary effect. But there is no reason why these concerns should be seen as mutually exclusive. The writings of some otherwise very good ‘analytic’ philosophers may be more ponderous and convoluted than they need (or should?) be; but there are plenty of examples of others that make for a distinctively pleasurable read. Moreover, while it may well be true – by definition, as it were – that it would never occur to ‘humdrum’ minds to try to think the impossible, it is surely misleading to suggest that all ‘analytic’ minds are to be thought of as humdrum in that sense. Even leaving aside the widely influential instance of Wittgenstein, one might think of Adrian Moore's Points of View (OUP, 1997) as providing one very unhumdrum example of philosophical work accessible to all interested analytic philosophers and clearly recognisable by them as such. Here, as elsewhere, it is a prime concern of Moore's to show that there is an important sense in which we may be said to have ‘ineffable knowledge’, but he clearly aspires, as he puts it, ‘in making sense of the inexpressible, to say only what is meaningful and true.’ (155) It might perhaps be argued that Moore is in many ways a by no means typical analytic philosopher – for one thing, and although they hardly figure in the text itself, his bibliography and end-of chapter suggestions for further reading, do include references not only to Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, but also to Deleuze, Derrida and Levinas (as well as to Ricoeur and Lyotard, who (for perfectly good reasons) receive only relatively walk-on parts in Guttings' story). None of these are names that one might normally expect to find in the bibliographies of mainstream analytic philosophers; but Moore's main philosophical references are in fact to Kant, Wittgenstein and Bernard Williams, all of whom would be naturally familiar to any self-respecting contemporary ‘analytic’ philosopher.

It cannot be said, no doubt, that Points of View is a particularly easy book to read. Moore introduces in the course of it a considerable number of new terms, or terms that he uses in an unfamiliar way, for which he helpfully provides a readily intelligible glossary. But while his arguments certainly demand close and careful attention, and whether one agrees with them or not, there is no particular difficulty of principle in seeing how they are intended to work. This, after all, is what one would expect of the arguments of any first-rate analytic philosopher. And Gutting makes no bones about the fact that in many, if not indeed most, of the more important writings of his chosen French philosophers it remains frustratingly hard to determine exactly where the argument lies or how exactly it is supposed to run, and accordingly hard to assess it with any real assurance as to what the appropriate criteria of assessment might be.

So what is there so much to admire in the work of recent French philosophers? ‘It maintains', Gutting claims, ‘a fruitful contact with the history of philosophy and with wider intellectual and artistic developments. It has produced exciting conceptual innovations… It has kept an admirable connection to the richness of personal, social and political realities. Most importantly, it has faced up to questions about the limitations of conceptual thought. In all these ways’, he adds, ‘it remains superior to the bulk of work in analytic philosophy.’ (p. 202) We may put aside the question as to just whose work may or may not properly be taken as contributing to ‘the bulk’ of the work in analytic philosophy. It is certainly true that any recipient of a good philosophical education in France will have a far better and more extensive grasp of the history of the subject than the great majority of analytically trained students or, indeed, practitioners of philosophy. And true too that the political, social and, I would add, institutional contexts in which philosophers of the latter part of the last war-torn century were formed and working in France were strikingly, even dramatically, different from those of virtually all the major anglophone countries of the world. Philosophy – and not only philosophy, of course – tended to find itself so deeply entangled with political issues and allegiances that the very attempt to work in some non-political or politically neutral way would quite naturally be taken to have its own political significance. So to develop one's philosophy in one way rather than another was not just a matter of finding better ways of reasoning one's way through the perennial problems so much as one of establishing new forms of intellectual action.

Gutting also quite rightly emphasises the highly competitive nature of the route which all aspiring French academics have to travel towards the goal of being properly accredited as such, but one should remember too the relative absence of institutionally structured contexts for closely argued critical discussion. In the analytic world, few books, if any, are published whose contents have not previously been tested out as lectures or papers delivered to audiences capable of detailed critical reaction, and which, in most cases, have been suitably adjusted in the light of the criticism there received. French philosophers have tended to respond to each other through whole books at a time, contrasting if not actually opposing one overall approach, one way of conceiving things, to another. When feeling particularly frustrated – even, perhaps intellectually threatened – by one's inability to see one's way clearly enough through their texts, one may be tempted to say that they consist not so much of recognisably reasoned argument as of a series of conceptually rhetorical affirmations. I sometimes wonder, however, whether one of the main sources of perplexity is not rather that there is here at work a somewhat different view as to what a convincing argument might consist in. Thus, one might think it not altogether ‘unreasonable’ to hold that, while the ‘normal’ canons of reasoning have their undoubted place, they should not be allowed so to impose themselves as to place all creative thought within some sort of conceptual straitjacket; and that in establishing the credentials of a position all sorts of other considerations have their place too – such, for example, as alliances with other respected authorities – political, psychoanalytic, literary, aesthetic, etc. – invoked as much by way of appropriately echoing images or terminological gestures as by explicit appeal to their authority as such. This is not to say that straightforward (humdrum?) argument may not also have its part to play – as in the anti-Cartesian rejection of anything that might seem to make appeal to infallible and unmediated knowledge of the contents of one's own present awareness or might go under the label of a philosophy of presence.

One of the most striking contributions, moreover, to this sense of the elusiveness of would-be rigorous argument is Derrida's showing by way of repeated detailed example that words – and with them the concepts that they vehicle – can never be finally pinned down to one clear and definite meaning, but that, under suitable pressure, they tend so to slide about in their interconnections with each other that the very notion of a rationally compelling argument – including, reflexively, that through which this very point is made – has to be recognised as something of an illusion; that, à la limite, reasons cannot so much compel as, however strongly, suggest, and that anyone hoping to be able to pin a philosophical text down to one clearly determinate meaning, should not be surprised to find his (or her) best efforts frustrated. From which one may conclude, quite reasonably as it were, that other (more literary? more rhetorical?) methods may be more appropriately effective to the putting of a philosophical case.

There is a great deal of helpful and suggestive guidance to be found to these developments in Gary Gutting's book. I suspect, though, that it may prove more readily enlightening and more stimulating to those who have already some experience of trying to orient themselves within French philosophy of the period in question – to those who are already not totally unfamiliar with the countryside through which he guides them – rather than to readers to whom this territory is as yet still wholly unfamiliar.

It seems churlish to end what is intended to be a decidedly welcoming review, with a few minor complaints. But one would hope that in any future edition the terms ‘khâgne’ and ‘hypo-khâgne’ would receive a more consistently correct spelling. (See pages 10, 12 and 18 and the Index itself for the variations to which it is here submitted.) And, although it may have certain charms, the reference to ‘scarce quotes’ (192) should, no doubt, really be changed back to ‘scare quotes’. But one knows only too well, of course, that however often one may go through one's proofs a few typos will always survive to provoke reviewers to churlish complaints of this sort!