This is more of a brainstorm than a post, but when I was talking about Jean Baudrillard's this morning over breakfast, it dawned on me that France had a second enlighment during the 20th Century.

The majority of the most influential French philosophers were born in the 1920s and most of them either studied, worked with or new each other through the French university system throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

They all oohed and aahed at Georges Bataille and Albert Camus. Then there was Jean Paul Sartre and his lifemate, Simone de Beauvoir was a notorious organizer and party animal.

It seems like all of these people at one point of another studied or worked with Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Michele Blanchot, or Claude Levi Strauss.

Michele Foucault was one of the few people who knew Blanchot personally. He was good friends at one point with Jacques Derrida and a had a falling out with Sartre.

Jean Baudrillard studied with Roland Barthes and so did Julia Kristeva.

Then there's Deleuze and Guattari. Everybody knew of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's magical and tempestuous working relationship.

Sarah Kofman studied with both Deleuze and Derrida. Helen Cixous also studied with Derrida (and it seems they had a thing going on). As the mother of French post-structuralism, she worked with women like Luce Irigaray exploding philosophy with terms like phallogocentrism.

All in all, France had a huge philosophy boom in the 20th Century, a true "Age of Englightment", or dare I say given the context of these philosophers' works, an Age of Post-Enlightment.

Amazing what one county can do.