Rancie`re). La diversite de focalisations renforce la mise a` la question serree de lapensee de Badiou, lequel clot dignement ce recueil dune rare exigence par unereponse a` lessai dHallward, sous forme de nouvelles propositions forcement polemiques.

PIERRE JOHAN LAFFITTEdoi:10.1093/fs/kni360 IUFM DAMIENS

French Women Philosophers: A Contemporary Reader. Edited by CHRISTINAHOWELLS. London New York, Routledge, 1994. 453 pp. Pb 19.99.

With twenty-eight contributors covering the areas of ethics, alterity, psychoana-lysis, epistemology, legal and political theory, Christina Howells has put togetheran anthology of remarkable range and size. It eclipses the competing anthologies(Mois French Feminist Thought and Oliver and Walshs Contemporary FrenchFeminism) by including major undertranslated (for instance, Kriegel, Schneider,Cassin) and underdiscussed (for instance, Loraux) gures. Its strongest contri-bution is made by its most awkward inclusions: clusters of women philosopherswho have no particular relevance to or interest in feminist theory. Explaining thather aim is to capture their diversity, Howells barely comments on the importantquestion provoked by her project: why do we need an anthology of Frenchwomen philosophers? Many of the well-known among the twenty-eight contri-butors contribute to feminist philosophy (Irigaray, Le Duff, and lessknown to anglophone audiences Fraisse, dEaubonne, Agacinski, Collin).They represent the spectrum of feminist philosophers sympathetic and hostileto philosophies of sexual difference. Cixous and Kofman respectively representecriture feminine and deconstructive readings of women and femininity in thehistory of philosophy; while Kristeva, Schneider and David-Menard representpsychoanalytic theorists concerned with problems of sexual difference who,like Kofman and Cixous, would not self-describe as feminist. These debateshave already been included in the existing anthologies in French feminism. Butthe anthology includes other French philosophers whose work has touchedimportantly on gender: Cassin, the Heideggerian classicist and translationtheorist, noted for her epic studies of sophism in LEffet sophistique and of contra-dictory female gures in ancient Greece; the physicist Balibar who has written, asdoes Charraud, on whether there is sexual difference in science. Along withimportant gures only recently available in English translation (the philosopherand anthropologist Heritier, the materialist feminist and genealogist of racismGuillaumin; Chalier, author of an important study of femininity and women inLevinas; Loraux, renowned for her remarkable work on contradictory represen-tations of femininity and masculinity in Ancient Greece) these gures break theissue tiredly dominating previous commentary on French women philosophers:equality versus difference. Instead, we are offered a banquet of new philosophicalmethodologies for studying gender in the history of philosophy. The remainingcontributors play the least straightforward role in the anthology: they includemajor women philosophers (Proust, Canto-Sperber, Dastur, Revault dAllonnes,Kriegel) a grouping which could also have included Catherine Malabouand Claude Imbert (phenomenology); Marie-Jose Mondzain (aesthetics);Sandra Laugier and Francoise Armengaud (history of analytic philosophy).

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In highlighting such prominent and little known gures, Howells anthologyastutely identies the sore point. All those included in French Women Philosophershave experienced this phenomenon of reception: the healthy translation ofthose engaged in feminist debates, but failure to translate or attend to some ofthe most innovative projects available in France today when produced bywomen philosophers whose projects do not engage with the philosophyof gender. Why are Jullien and Bouveresse widely available in English trans-lation but not the remarkable projects of gures such as Cassin, Kriegel andClaude Imbert?

PENELOPE DEUTSCHERdoi:10.1093/fs/kni361 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Robert Bresson. By KEITH READER. Manchester University Press, 2000.x 166 pp. Pb 9.99.

This study of Robert Bresson is one of the twenty or so titles that now consti-tute the French Film Directors series, edited by Diana Holmes and RobertIngram since 1998. The seriess self-evidently auteurist approach, whose meth-odological basis some may wish to question, could hardly be easier to justifythan in the case of Bresson, as Keith Reader himself remarks in his intro-duction. For Bressons work is one of the classic sites for exponents of thetheory that cinema is an art-form created essentially by exceptional individuals,whose personal lms display a formal and thematic rigour evolving towards anaesthetic absolute. Thus Reader can unashamedly adopt such an auteuristmethod in his examination of Bressons fourteen lms, starting with thelittle-known Affaires publiques (1934) and following the lmmakers longcareer to his nal masterpiece, LArgent (1983), considered as the distillationof everything that the artist had achieved in the intervening fty years. Themain characteristics of Bressons unique manner, according to Reader, are hisminimalist paring down of cinema to its basic material components; hisrejection of French classic cinemas psychologically motivated dramatic narra-tives; and, most famously, his almost exclusive employment of non-professionalmodels rather than trained actors, whose theatricality the lmmaker openlydespised. To these three prime formal traits Reader adds two major thematicconcerns that he believes can be traced throughout Bressons entire corpus.One is the lmmakers ambivalent and increasingly pessimistic relationship tocertain strands of Catholic theology, especially Jansenism and the works ofPascal. The other is what Reader posits as an indirect dialogue betweenBressons lms and the writings of Jacques Lacan. Without anywheresuggesting that Bresson is a Lacanian, or indeed that the lmmaker had anydetectable interest in psychoanalysis, Reader attempts to demonstrate in his dis-cussion that some Lacanian models and concepts can provide original interpre-tive insights into Bressons lms. This is the ve-point agenda, then, thatReader sets out for his chronological survey of Bressons career. In eachchapter he presents very briey the production background and publicreception of the lm or lms in question. Then he gives a linear account ofeach lms narrative, interlaced with his personal readings of the works mainpoints of interest, as well as with references to some of Bressons best-known

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