Various commitments on papers commissioned in French have kept me away from this blog. Reward is another factor: with an average of around 30 daily hits on the English blog and 2500 on the French one, vanity has been a powerful drive for concentrating on the French one. Dialogue is another one. If you’ve had the opportunity of looking at the French blog you will have noticed that commentators often engage in lively conversations, with me resting comfortably in the meantime in the bleachers.

Why is that so? I believe that my reputation as a writer in English is not up to that as a writer in French, despite the 11 years I’ve spent in the UK and the 11 years I’ve now spent in the US. The reason is no doubt cultural affiliation: even in those days I was teaching at Cambridge University I was very much regarded as a representative of French anthropology. This applies as well to my writings in the philosophy of science: they belong distinctively to a tradition initiated by Poincaré, Meyerson and Duhem. As for my properly philosophical musings, they draw heavily on Kojève’s reading of Hegel and on Hegel himself – definitely not a central philosopher within the Anglo-Saxon world. Lacan, one of my major influences is surely known of English speakers but the truth here is that the Lacan I’m familiar with and have been a student of is an entirely different beast than the one resulting from the amazing transformation Lacan underwent when crossing the Atlantic.

So should my English blog fold? Not quite yet and this for the following reason: I detect (thanks to Google Analytics!) a renewed interest in the papers I wrote last year on the subprime crisis. The reason I imagine is that although they must have looked utterly weird at the time I posted them with such considerations as calls to renationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they’ve now turned mainstream even though not due to anything of my own making.

This renewed interest may entice me in turn to come up with more, restarting hence the currently stalled dynamics. In addition, further contributions to a Human Complex Systems’ approach to the unfolding financial crisis are still in the making. Watch this space as only time will tell…