“David Lapoujade's book, at last translated, was an event in France, and so it will be for his American readers, who will rediscover what they thought they knew. Lapoujade does not write about William James but rather embraces the movement of James's thought, performing it as a musician performs a score, making it alive and audible for its own sake and enabling his readers to go back and read James as if for the first time.”
- Isabelle Stengers, author of (In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism) “In this crisp, well-argued book, David Lapoujade rescues the whole idea of pragmatism from the dismissive and misguided views that it is an ‘American’ philosophy by recasting its fundamental questions along new lines. He advances a vision of pragmatism that is based in trust in the world of things in the making, in effect reopening pragmatist thought from a fresh angle.”
- John Rajchman, author of (The Deleuze Connections) “Originally published in French in 1997 and finally translated into English, David Lapoujade's William James is varnished by the specter of Deleuzean transcendental empiricism.... William James is as much an archeological disinterring of Deleuze by way of James as it is a recovery of James’s pragmatism from Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism....”
“[William James] is well written, with a verve that will repay the attentive reader. Recommended.”
- J. A. Fischel (Choice) “For those attentive to connection, who seek to multiply relations, [William James] will prove instructive through its experimentation with the prospective possibilities of a philosopher’s thought. As Lapoujade performatively reminds us, every act of interpretation is also an act of creation.”
- Bonnie Sheehey (American Literary History)
