François Wahl has just left us. With him, the humanities lost a brilliant advocate of structuralist thought and a great publishing figure, a philosopher who profoundly renewed the approach of modern phenomenology and the subject.
A young resistance fighter in the maquis and close to Elie Wiesel, of whom he was the teacher, François Wahl devoted his career to structuralism and psychoanalysis. He was the friend and publisher of the greatest names of contemporary thought that he published at Seuil for nearly 35 years: Paul Ricœur, Roland Barthes, Alain Badiou, Italo Calvino or Jacques Lacan whose texts he had gathered together in the essential Written.
François Wahl, a great theoretician of the sensitive, had endeavoured to say: the truth of the visible on the visible. After a Introduction to the discourse of the painting, The Collected, the work of a lifetime, will remain in the minds as a resolutely contemporary exploration of the objective world.
I extend my deepest condolences to his family and loved ones.