Migration history—like much history—has a known teleological bias: we know the ending and search for the beginnings. But Jennings succeeds in what more migration scholars could do: fully integrate the before with the known after, while providing a rich analysis of the circuitous route itself. Nancy L. Green École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present. By Stefanos Geroulanos. Cultural Memory in the Present. Edited by Hent de Vries. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv1496. $29.95. Most thinkers have their bêtes noires, and postmodernists are no exception: they have, for instance, relentlessly challenged unproblematized notions of meaning, subjectivity, and truth. Stefanos Geroulanos’ s book is a conceptual history of another term that post- modernism has sought to problematize: transparency. His ambitious, wide-ranging, and erudite study provides a comprehensive account of this concept’ s place in French thought since the 1930s, while also rethinking the intellectual history of this period from the stand- point of debates surrounding transparency. Geroulanos situates the origin of the French conversation about transparency in epis- temological debates that began before the Second World War. Transparency, he writes, “denotes . . . a concurrent presence and absence, or presence alternating with absence, which allow something to appear across” (38). Conceptually speaking, transparency thus implies two elements: the act of passing through and the obstacles that refract this passing through. In the 1930s and 1940s, philosophers’ emphasis shifted from the for- mer to the latter. Existentialism and phenomenology were the driving forces behind this new understanding of transparency. Whereas earlier epistemologies had posited a natu- ral fit between consciousness and the world, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau- Ponty concerned themselves with the “opaque resistance of things” (quoted, 51). Rather than a hindrance to knowledge, obscurity became constitutive of the world as it pre- sented itself to situated, finite human beings. As a result, transparency, not opacity, be- came the problem. Geroulanos next turns from epistemology to what he calls “social transparency,” which relates less to the relationship between perception and knowledge than to that be- tween state and society. Transparency, in this context, refers not to a social space purified of obstacles but to the interfaces that make society visible to the state. Geroulanos ex- plores this idea in two ways. First, he examines what he sees as state-led efforts to pen- etrate the obscurity pervading society in the immediate postwar years, such as the police’ s attempts to control forms of criminality like the black market and various projects for re- forming social misfits. Second, Geroulanos shows how postwar Marxists (Merleau-Ponty, Lefebvre, Althusser), while still considering a transparent, egalitarian society as the only alternative to capitalist mystification, rejected a host of concepts premised on the notion of transparency (notably teleology). The point of Marxist critique became, in their hands, to unmask the obfuscation of a hegemonic economic system in the name of a conception of obscurity that was consistent with human nature and needs. Geroulanos considers a range of contiguous issues arising from the problem of trans- parency—the ideas of the face (as it relates to selfhood), norms, and the symbolic—be- fore charting the concept’ s course in the 1960s, when the preoccupation with transparency Book Reviews 457