Somewhere around 1965, when I was between twenty and thirty years old, I met an excellent number of teachers in the field of philosophy. The old ones, like Sartre, Lacan, or Kangilem, were still active - some others who were a little younger, like Althusser, were developing their work, while a whole generation, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, was entering the arena.

All these teachers, today, are dead. The philosophical scene, widely occupied by charlatans, is constituted differently, drawing its coherence only from those, young and less young, who can remain faithful to the questions that inspired us forty years ago, through the reformulation in their own language of these questions.
I believe it is right to gather here the analyses and tributes I have devoted - for a long period of time, each time they disappeared - to those to whom I owe the significance, always human but equally noble and combative, of the word "philosophy". The relationships I had with these capital contemporaries of ours were not always simple and peaceful: philosophy, as Kant says, is a battlefield. However, looking at the countless media "philosophers" today, I can say that I love all those I speak of in this book.