Philippe Corcuff

Philippe Corcuff, born in 1960, is a French academic, full professor in political science at the Institut d'études politiques de Lyon since October 1992 and member of the CERLIS laboratory (Centre de Recherche sur les Liens Sociaux, Université de Paris / Université Sorbonne Nouvelle / CNRS) since October 2003. Politically committed to the left, with a trajectory that took him from social democracy to pragmatic anarchism, via the ecologists and the New Anti-Capitalist Party,[1] he defines himself as an “anti-globalization and libertarian activist”.[2] He was a columnist for the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo from 2001 to 2004.[3]

Sociologically speaking, he had started in study with a socio-ethnographic approach, within the scope of his thesis, the building of social groups, through railroaders’ trade unionism and, wider, the workers' movement. He offers then a reading of the Pierre Bourdieu’s critical sociology, emphasizing on the “post-marxist” aspect of his social criticism, while pointing out several contradictions. He did so especially in the book Bourdieu autrement (2003, non-translated, in English: “Bourdieu, differently”).[4] In this perspective, he linked the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and the philosophy of emancipation of Jacques Rancière to build a new critical theory, particularly in his book Où est passée la critique sociale? (2012, non-translated, in English : "Where is the social criticism?").[5] The re-evaluation of the place of individuality has been one of the axes of this new critical thinking. To explore this new critical theory, he also analyzed products of popular culture (detective novels, films, TV series, songs...), using the notion of language games taken from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and drawing on Stanley Cavell's philosophy of cinema. From the 2010s onwards, he has been interested in a critical political theory of the extreme right-wingisation of public spaces in France and how the confusion of ideas on the left contributes to it, with his book La grande confusion. Comment l'extrême droite gagne la bataille des idées (2021, non-translated, in English: "The great confusion. How the far right is winning the battle of ideas").[6] To do this, he uses the notion of "discursive formation" borrowed from the philosopher Michel Foucault.