Culture January 1, 1

If form hadn’t been a conspicuous problem for philosophers just then and there, the idea of a history of postwar French philosophy as seen on television would seem like a joke. But in the thirty years after the radio broadcast of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 essay “Republic of Silence,” philosophers in France were peculiarly concerned with their changing media. Declaring the book inert—“written by a dead man about dead things,” Sartre wrote in 1947, “it no longer has any place on this earth”—he advised contemporary writers to “learn to speak in images” and to work for newspapers, radio, and film.