Throughout the book and where possible, I use and modify standard translations for the major texts I discuss. In doing so, I hope that a broader group of scholars will be able to engage substantively with my argument. All other translations are my own. I would also like to thank the editors of Modern Intellectual History for permission to reproduce “Humanist Pretensions: Catholics, Communists, and Sartre's Struggle for Existentialism in Postwar France,” which appears here in revised form.

The intellectual history of postwar France often resembles village life. Most of the important academic institutions – the Sorbonne, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Collège de France, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, even the cafés where Sartre debated with Camus – sit within the same square mile on the left bank of the Seine. This “village” was not only geographically limited. Names recur with surprising regularity: Bachelard, father and daughter, two Merleau-Pontys, as well as numerous Jolys, Lautmans, Pons and Michauds filling up the promotions at the elite centers for higher learning. The founder of Tel Quel, Philippe Sollers, married the philosopher Julia Kristeva; Jacques Lacan married Georges Bataille's widow; his daughter married the Lacanian Jacques-Alain Miller. Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Serres, and Jacques Derrida were schoolfriends before they were philosophical interlocutors and then rivals. Everyone knew everyone else. Throughout their careers French intellectuals socialized with each other, went on holiday together, attended parties at each other's homes, corresponded, read the same books, and published in the same journals. Before being a republic of letters, the French intellectual community was a social set.