Yes, yes a presumptuous title, since "the" implicates that the list is exhaustive, but Ian James' The New French Philosophers does look like a first rate book. He covers Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and François Laruelle. The cover blurb spiels all of these thinkers as the beginning of a post-linguistic turn, of the sort often thought to have begun with Kripke in analytic philosophy.
The book looks like it will pair well with Mullarkey's Post-Continental Philosophy, which covers Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and Francois Laruelle.
Some commentators in France are taking Speculative Realism to be a Badiouian movement. This is not completely unfair, as Meillassoux is Badiou's student, and Meillassoux's neo-Cartesian view of primary properties and thinking about set theoretic paradoxes is strongly influenced by his teacher (see Harman's discussion with links to two French Language reviews HERE). But to be fair, Brassier, Grant, and Harman don't share these positions and developed their views independently of Badiou.
Nonetheless, Robert Brandom is correct to stress the importance of Whig histories in philosophy. My Whig history of Speculative Realism includes Graham Priest as a founding member. This has zero biographical accuracy, but it illuminates the central philosophical debates (at least the outstanding disagreements between Meillassoux, Garcia, and Harman) really clearly.
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