Jean Wahl

Jean André Wahl (May 15, 1888 - 1974) was a French philosopher.

Early career

He was professor at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967, broken by World War II. He was in the U.S. from 1942 to 1945, having been interned as a Jew at the Drancy deportation camp (north-east of Paris) and then escaped.

He began his career as a follower of Henri Bergson and the American pluralist philosophers William James and George Santayana. He is known as one of those introducing Hegelian thought in France in the 1930s, ahead of Alexandre Kojève's more celebrated lectures. He was also a champion in French thought of the Danish proto-existentialist Kierkegaard. These enthusiasms, which became the significant books "Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel" (1929) and "Études kierkegaardiennes" (1938) were controversial, in the prevailing climate of thought. However, he influenced a number of key thinkers including Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the second issue of "Acéphale", Georges Bataille's review, Jean Wahl wrote an article titled "Nietzsche and the Death of God", concerning Karl Jaspers' interpretation of it. He became known as an anti-systematic philosopher, in favour of philosophical innovation and the concrete.

In exile

While in the USA, Wahl with Gustave Cohen and backed by the Rockefeller Foundation founded a 'university in exile', the "École Libre des Hautes Études", in New York. Later, at Mount Holyoke where he had a position, he set up the "Décades de Mount Holyoke", also known as "Pontigny-en-Amérique", modelled on meetings run from 1910 to 1939 by Paul Desjardins at the site of the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy. These successfully gathered together French intellectuals in wartime exile, ostensibly studying the English language, with Americans including Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and Roger Sessions. Wahl, already a published poet, made translations of poems of Stevens into French.

Post WWII

In post-war France Wahl was an important figure, as a teacher and editor of learned journals. Starting in 1950, he headed the "Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale".

With Lacan

Jean Wahl was in analysis with Jacques Lacan.

Wahl translated the second hypothesis of the "Parmenides" of Plato as "Il y a de l'Un", and Lacan adopted his translation as a central point in psychoanalysis, as a sort of antecedent in the Parmenides of the analytic discourse. This is the existential sentence of psychoanalytic discourse according to Lacan, and the negative one is "Il n'ya pas de rapport sexuel" — there is no such a thing as a sexual relationship.