French Literature Reviews - 2026

T. Chaplin, Turning On the Mind : French Philosophers on Television
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas

CHAPLIN, Tamara, Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007, 272 p.
ISBN 978-0-226-50991-4

ABSTRACT

In 1951, the eight o'clock nightly news reported on Jean-Paul Sartre for the first time. By the end of the twentieth century, more than 3,500 programs dealing with philosophy and its practitioners—including Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Lévy—had aired on French television. According to Tamara Chaplin, this enduring commitment to bringing the most abstract and least visual of disciplines to the French public challenges our very assumptions about the incompatibility of elite culture and mass media. Indeed, it belies the conviction that television is inevitably anti-intellectual and the quintessential archenemy of the book.

Chaplin argues that the history of the televising of philosophy is crucial to understanding the struggle over French national identity in the postwar period. Linking this history to decolonization, modernization, and globalization, Turning On the Mind claims that we can understand neither the markedly public role that philosophy came to play in French society during the late twentieth century nor the renewed interest in ethics and political philosophy in the early twenty-first unless we acknowledge the work of television. Throughout, Chaplin insists that we jettison presumptions about the anti-intellectual nature of the visual field, engages critical questions about the survival of national cultures in a globalizing world, and encourages us to rethink philosophy itself, ultimately asserting that the content of the discipline is indivisible from the new media forms in which it has found expression.

During the postwar decades, European broadcasting underwent significant transformations as state-run television expanded its cultural remit and sought to engage wider publics. In France, this period coincided with intense debates surrounding modernization, decolonization, and the preservation of national culture against the backdrop of globalization. Media historians and cultural analysts have long studied how television reshaped public discourse and altered the traditional channels through which intellectual authority was maintained and contested. Within this broader landscape, the relationship between printed literature, academic philosophy, and the emerging dominance of the visual screen became a central point of contention for intellectuals navigating a rapidly changing mass society.

Tamara Chaplin's Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television examines the presence of philosophers on French television from 1951 to the end of the twentieth century, analyzing figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Alain Badiou, and Bernard-Henri Lévy. The study addresses the televising of abstract thought, the perceived incompatibility between elite culture and mass media, and the implications of this broadcast history for postwar French national identity. Readers interested in the history of media, French intellectual culture, and the intersection of philosophy with television may find this work relevant.