A belated postscript to last week’s Quarterly Conversation publication of a single chapter from Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, which will be out in April (you can find the essay here; and our post about it here). It describes the 1966 Baltimore conference that René Girard organized, with Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, that brought French thought to America – and with it Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida.
A few days ago, a friend from Paris sent us a Tweet we might otherwise have overlooked. Pierre Assouline is one of France’s most visible critics, and he’s on the Goncourt jury, which awards France’s most prestigious literary award. Moreover, he has more than 32,000 Twitter followers, so that tweet was retweeted more in the days after this screenshot. We lost track of the other French posts after that. But our hard little heart fluttered a bit to see France taking note.
We were also pleased to hear that “The French Invasion” is one of the tony Quarterly Conversation‘s top hitters, with 10,000 readers in the first few days. Give it a click if you haven’t. As one reader said a few days ago, “Haven’t read anything on the internet in a while that’s given me so much pleasure.”
Postscript on 12/20: There’s more: The popular economist Tyler Cowen has featured Evolution of Desire as the lead news item on his website here. Wikipedia tells me he is #72 among the “Top Global Thinkers” in 2011, by Foreign Policy Magazine.
Tags: Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Assouline, René Girard