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This article contrasts two major debates in book form on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, so central to French political discussion today—the ‘quarrel’ between Alain Badiou(with Cécile Winter, inCirconstances 3: Portées du mot ‘juif’)and Éric Marty(Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe), and the debate between Régis Debray and Élie Barnavi(À un ami israélien, by Debray with a response from Barnavi). The Badiou/Marty exchange is hostile and polarised, Badiou arguing strongly against the existence of a separate Israeli state and Marty vehemently in its favour, whileÀ un ami israélienevidences what I describe as Debray's post-Zionism in dialogue with Barnavi's Left Zionism. What emerges from the two exchanges is, it is argued, a taxonomy of attitudes towards Israel substantially more complex than the traditional, and often misleading, polarity between ‘Zionist’ and ‘anti-Zionist’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented to this special issue dealing with topics related to attitudes in France regarding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict with subjects including the Six-Day War, the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and the European pro-Israeli group J Call.

The Deleuzian reading of L'Année dernière à Marienbad proposed here draws less on what has become a virtually canonical concept in film studies – Deleuze's time-image – than on a much earlier work by the same author, Masochism, which treats sadism and masochism as qualitatively different symbolic universes. Resnais's film, with its deployment of mirrors and statuary and its suggestion of a contract between the characters A and X, presents striking resemblances to the world of masochism as described by Deleuze (drawing on the work of Theodor Reik). At the same time, the role of the third protagonist, M, like that of Robbe-Grillet who wrote the screenplay, has Sadean overtones, suggesting that it might be possible to read the film with its diegetic ambiguities as a Möbius strip linking the sadistic and the masochistic world not only with each other, but with the crystalline universe of the time-image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extension du domaine de la lutte (1999) deals with a social class - the world of middle computer management - infrequently seen in recent French cinema. The article interrogates this representation along with problems of masochism and male sexual self-disgust raised by the film and the Michel Houellebecq source-novel. The film's two central characters purportedly, and vainly, seek pleasure in heterosexual fulfillment when it may be masochistic jouissance that is the real object of their desire. The Kristevan notion of the abject - Generally applied to the feminine appears in this context to be applicable to masculinity and the phallus as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Michael Seidman on the authoritarianism experienced by the students on campus from the Gaullian state and another by Daniel Gordon on the relationships of the presidential candidates to the May 1968 event.