Biography 

French philosopher. Professor emeritus of the Universities at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE). Associate researcher at the CEVIPOF (Sciences Po research center). She has taught political theory at the Doctoral School of Sciences Po Paris.  She was awarded the 2019 Special Jury Prize for Political Books for her body of work.

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Research topics

A specialist in ethical and political philosophy, her research first focused on the Terror of the French Revolution, on the "evil of politics" and the "intractability" of the passions that form the original basis of the social bond. She questioned the notion of the "banality of evil" and the question of the "meaning of the human" understood as the capacity to exchange experiences, a capacity of which the concentration camp experience in particular has shown us the most radical defection. 

For some time now, she has been thinking about the various registers of contemporary experience. She has published works on the notions of "authority", "crisis" and "representation" as well as on the attacks on the common world and democratic existence by the irruption and diffusion of the notion of "post-truth". His reflection on democracy gives a decisive place to political affects and to the subjective dispositions that individuals have towards the democratic mode of existence.

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 Some of her works

• What man does to man. An essay on political evil, Seuil, 1995 (Champs-Flammarion, 1999 and 2010)

• The compassionate man, Seuil, 2008 (Montyon Prize of the French Academy)

• Why we don't like democracy, Seuil, 2010

• The endless crisis. An Essay on the modern experience of time, Seuil, 2012 ("Points Essais", 2016e

• The mirror and the stage. What political representation can do, Seuil, 2016

• Politics explained to our children, Seuil, 2017

• The weakness of truth. What the post-truth does to our common world, Seuil, 2018 ("Points-Essais" October 2021 with an unpublished afterword)

• The spirit of Macronism. The art of deviating concepts, Seuil, 2021,Points-Essais, 2022)

• The twilight of criticism, Seuil, collection "Libelle", 2022