Was the Defeat Undone? The Two English Translations of Alain Finkielkraut’s <i>La Défaite de la pensée</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the curious English-language life of Alain Finkielkraut’s 1987 book La Défaite de la pensée. Uniquely in his corpus and very unusually for contemporary philosophy, this work exists in two different English translations: Dennis O’Keeffe’s The Undoing of Thought (1988) and Judith Friedlander’s The Defeat of the Mind (1995). O’Keeffe’s work was an effort to secure a place for Finkielkraut in discourse of Anglo-American conservatism, whereas Friedlander was far more invested in recovering Finkielkraut as a student of Levinas and as an heir to a certain kind of French Jewish intellectual community. What these different translations show us today is the folly of ascribing an Anglo-American “left-right” dichotomy to French intellectual debate, something that holds just as true for Finkielkraut’s most recent writing, including his recent collections of actualités such as L’Identité malheureuse (2013) and La Seule Exactitude (2015).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".