THE SCHOOL OF THE SOUTH

Robert Misik in conversation with Onur Erdur and Monika Mokre

THE SCHOOL OF THE SOUTH
The colonial roots of French theory

»Anyone who reads Onur Erdur's book will experience the liberating feeling that the world of thought is more contradictory, richer and also more comforting than the exhausting moralisations of the present.«
- Elisabeth von Thaden, The TIME

»Brilliant and elegant.« - Robert Misik in the FALTER

In his history of ideas in eight portraits, Onur Erdur opens up a new geography of French thought that characterised the second half of the 20th century: the theories of intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Pierre Bourdieu, Hélène Cixous and many others were decisively shaped in North Africa or in the confrontation with the French colonies.

What Erdur has achieved is quite simply a gripping story of the (post-)colonial background to French philosophy.

Erdur's search for clues leads him to Algiers, where the young soldier Pierre Bourdieu did his military service in the middle of the Algerian war; to the coastal village of Sidi Bou Saïd north of Tunis, where Michel Foucault arrived at an attitude of philosophical hedonism; or to Casablanca, where Roland Barthes fantasised about becoming a novelist in a kind of enlightenment - and to Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous or Jacques Rancière, who philosophically reflected on their Algerian origins.

The Viennese cultural scientist Monika Mokre comments on and discusses Erdur's study between French post-structuralism and the current positions of postcolonial thought.

Onur Erdur, born in Diyarbakir in 1984, is a historian and cultural scientist. He researches and teaches at the Humboldt University in Berlin on issues relating to the global history of ideas.
Monika Mokre, born in 1963, is a political scientist and works at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Moderation
Robert Misik, Author and journalist

Onur Erdur:
The school of the south. Daring more emotions.
Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2024, 28,- €