1 - Georges Bataille - chief architect of ideas developed by Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan.
2 - Albert Camus – author of The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, The First Man, A Happy Death and The Plague.
3 - Jean Baudrillard – unclassifiable principal analyst of contemporary capitalist-consumerist culture.
4 - Michel Foucault – major historical-critical studies of social institutions like prisons; History of Sexuality.
5 - Jacques Derrida - the importance of writing for humanity; All of Western society is stuck in a system of BINARY OPPOSITIONS. Thinking, acting, and creating beyond them is the key to the de-reconstruction of the world. Even the idea that we can change capitalist society by OPPOSING it (like Mr. Zizek believes) is the wrong road of a binary opposition.
6 - Alain Badiou – thinker of the Event, the return of the subject, the return of philosophy, mathematics, gambling, poetry, love.
7 - Jean-Paul Sartre - thinker of existential Marxism.
8 - Jacques Lacan – linguistics and psychoanalysis; the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real.
9 - Jean-François Lyotard - thinker of the sublime; The Postmodern Condition, The Differend.
10 - Maurice Merleau-Ponty - we are embodied and engaged in-the-world, not detached Cartesian subjects.
11 - Claude Lefort - thinker of real democracy, and of the fusion of radicalism and liberalism.
12 - Simone de Beauvoir - thinker of existential feminism.
13 - Gilles Deleuze – - thinker of desire and the machine; What Is Philosophy?; teamed with Félix Guattari.
14 - George Steiner – European-American transnational thinker; arguably the most important thinker alive.
15 - Paul Virilio – great thinker of the downside of technology and the question of speed.1
16 - Julia Kristeva – feminism, semiotics, poetic language, psychoanalysis, rebellion.
17 - Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth; wrote about torture during the Algerian War.
18 - Claude Lévi-Strauss – Tristes Tropiques, The Savage Mind; the “father of modern anthropology.”
19 - Roland Barthes – I vote for a new reading of him, with emphasis on queer, fashion, bliss, and the voice.
20 - André Breton – Mr. Surrealism; much more important for Utopian Studies than, say, Ernst Bloch.
21 - Emmanuel Levinas – great Jewish philosopher; Mark Patrick Hederman studied with him.
22 - Albert Schweitzer – medicine, theology, music; philosophy of “reverence for life.”
23 - Alexandre Kojève – famous for his Hegel lectures; Kandinsky’s uncle, Strauss’ friend, Bloom’s mentor.
24 - Maurice Blanchot – novelist and philosopher; The Gaze of Orpheus, The Writing of the Disaster.
25 - Michel Leiris - great surrealist writer; used Simulacre as a book title long before Dick and Baudrillard did.
26 - Daniel Odier - Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love.
27 - Jean-Luc Nancy - The Sense of the World, The Inoperative Community, The Experience of Freedom.
28 - René Girard - great literary critic and thinker of sacrifice; Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World.
29 - Bernard Henri-Lévy – wrote important books on Sartre and Tocqueville; admirable for his chutzpah.
30 - André Gorz – thinker of existential Marxism, radical ecology, liberation from work, and guaranteed income.
31 - Félix Guattari – teamed with Deleuze on Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaux.
32 - Pierre Bourdieu – Homo Academicus, A Theory of Practice, On Television, Masculine Domination.
33 - Alexandre Koyré - history and philosophy of science.
34 - Paul Ricoeur - phenomenology and hermeneutics.
35 - Michel Serres - ”beautiful and enigmatic prose so reliant on the sonorities of French that it is considered practically untranslatable” - Wikipedia.
36 - Luce Irigaray – feminist and cultural theorist; Speculum of the Other Woman, This Sex Which Is Not One.
37 - Guy Debord - Society of the Spectacle; Situationist filmmaker.
38 - Pierre Klossowski – translated Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Benjamin into French.
39 - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – unorthodox Catholic thinker; thought deeply about the future of humanity.
40 - Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space, The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
41 - Tristan Tzara – leading figure of the Dadaist movement.
42 - Pierre Clastres – anarchist anthropologist; Society Against the State.
43 - Gabriel Marcel – Christian existentialist; The Mystery of Being.
44 - Cornelius Castoriadis – libertarian socialist thinker; The Imaginary Institution of Society.
45 - Henri Lefebvre – unorthodox Marxist sociologist and urbanist; Critique of Everyday Life.
46 - Michel de Certeau – Jesuit and multidisciplinary thinker; The Practice of Everyday Life.
47 - Bruno Latour – key figure in Science Studies and Technology Studies.
48 - Fernand Braudel - historian and a leader of the Annales School.
49 - Alain Finkielkraut - important Jewish thinker, public intellectual, historian of ideas.
50 - André Malraux – Minister of Culture under de Gaulle; “Museum of the Future” theorist.
51 - Raymond Aron – The Opium of the Intellectuals; important liberal thinker, and critic of Marxism and Sartre.
52 - Jacques Ellul – “Christian anarchist”; sociologist and theologian; The Technological Society.
53 - Hélène Cixous – deconstruction, feminism, polysexuality.
54 - Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe – deconstructionist philosopher, literary critic, and German-to-French translator.
55 - Louis Althusser – Reading Capital.
56 - Monique Wittig - radical lesbian feminist thinker.
57 - Philippe Sollers – prolific novelist and essayist; founder of the journal Tel Quel.
58 - Algirdas Julien Greimas – leading figure in semiotics and literary theory.
59 - André Glucksmann - Dostoyevsky in Manhattan; The Discourse of Hate; Stupidity.
60 - Alain Touraine – Sociologist of social movements and ”post-industrial society.”
61 - Gilbert Durand - The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary.
62 - Michel Maffesoli – important sociologist; so far I haven’t read anything by him.
63 - Philippe Ariès - Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life.
64 - Jacques Attali - left-liberal economist; A Brief History of the Future.
65 - Lucien Goldmann - Marxist literary theorist.
66 - Jean Grenier - teacher of Albert Camus.
67 - Pierre Lévy - Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace
68 – Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) – exposed in 1971 the reality of tens of millions of political prisoners in Mao’s China while others like Badiou called themselves Maoists.
69 - Edgar Morin – Transdiscipinary thinker. His 1957 book The Stars (on celebrities) was way ahead of time.
70 - Roger Caillois – Man, Play and Games, Man and the Sacred.
71 - Michel Crozier - The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, La societe bloquée.
72 - Émile Benveniste - linguistics and semiotics.
73 - Guy Hocquenghem – queer theorist; critic of the assumption of a homosexual identity.
74 - Raoul Vaneigem - major Situationist thinker; only one of his many books has been translated into English.
75 - Alain Robbe-Grillet – Pour un Nouveau Roman; filmmaker and novelist.
76 - Luc Ferry – I (Alan) believe in Secular Humanism and in many of the things that it opposes.
77 - André Comte-Sponville – I (Alan) believe in atheism and in many of the things that it opposes.
78 - Tzvetan Todorov - Conquest of America: The Question of the Other; literary and cultural theorist.
79 - Jean-Joseph Goux - After Marx and Freud; no English or French Wikipedia article on him yet.
80 - Nicos Poulantzas - structuralist Marxist thinker.
81 - Serge Mallet - new working class theorist ; no English Wikipedia article on him yet.
82 - Catherine Clément – philosopher, novelist, feminist, literary critic.
83 - Jean Wahl – Hegelian and existentialist philosopher.
84 - Jean Laplanche – psychoanalytic theorist; founding member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
85 - Vincent Descombes – philosopher and Socialisme ou Barbarie member.
86 - Jacques-Alain Miller – psychoanalyst and son-in-law of Lacan.
87 - Daniel Cohn-Bendit – before he became a mainstream German Green Party politician in the early 1980s, DCB was a left-wing anarchist. He wrote two books that belong to anarchist intellectual history: Communism is Obsolete (1968) and Le grand bazar (1975). The latter has never been translated into English, and the former was published in a very poor translation.
88 - Robert Castel – From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question.
89 - Jean Duvignaud – novelist and sociologist.
90 - Jacques Rancière – co-author of Reading Capital.
91 - Daniel Guérin - anarchist-Marxist and historian of anarchism.
92 - Albert Memmi - The Colonizer and the Colonized.
93 - Kostas Axelos - important philosopher of technology, in dialogue with Marx, Heidegger, Marcuse.
94 - Jean Hyppolite - Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
95 - Clément Rosset - Le réél et son double : essai sur l’illusion.
96 - Christine Buci-Glucksmann - philosopher of computer art; important book on Antonio Gramsci.
97 - Emmanuel Todd - historian, demographer, sociologist, and political scientist; grandson of the legendary Paul Nizan (author of the incredibly great book Watchdogs: Philosophers of the Established Order).
98 - Marc Augé - Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.
99 - Gilbert Simondon - Du mode d’existence des objets techniques.
100T - Simon Nora, 100T - Alain Minc – co-authors of the important 1978 government-commissioned report L’Informatisation de la société.
The criteria are to leave out natural scientists, and also writers who wrote almost exclusively novels, plays, and memoirs.
Everyone knows that Baudrillard is my darling, but when I really thought about, I could only rank him sixth.
“You are Number Six.”
“I am not a number, I am a free man!”
“HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.”
