Deleuze said that to understand Anglo-Saxon philosophy needed a book that was not yet written, a book about the relationships between the famous James brothers: William, the empiricist and pragmatist philosopher, founder of American psychology, and Henry, the great novelist.
Without reductionism or easy applications, the contemporary philosopher David Lapoujade takes up the challenge and mounts a true dialogue between philosophy and literature, in which both questions and problems are thrown and thoughts are offered without suppressing what is proper to each. The perspectivist structure of the novel converses with the rupture of subject/object dualism and with the conception of the mind as a sounding board of the body; purely "mental" characters with the notion of experience and their relationship to truth; Ghosts, singles, and debt as a system of control draw in fiction a true social theory and illuminate the problem of freedom. Ontology, epistemology and ethics read and are read by literature.
In the scenography of this dialogue converge the echoes of readings by Leibniz, Peirce and Spinoza, as well as the landscape of the American ethos: the conquest of space and the border, the cosmopolitan city, permanent war and a secular morality of salvation.