Exile: An intellectual portrait of André Gorz

472 Pages·018.738 MB·English

by  Brooks, Christopher D.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA CRUZ
Exile: An Intellectual Portrait of Andre Gorz
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction
of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
HISTORY
by
Christopher D. Brooks
June 2010
The Dissertation of Christopher D. Brooks
is approved:
Professor Emeritus Jonathan Beecher, Chair
Professor Edmund Burke, III
Professor Gopal Balakrishnan
Tyrus Miller
Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies
UMI Number: 3421301
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2010
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Exile 1
Chapter 2: From Ecriveur to Ecrivain 54
Chapter 3: The Red Years 103
Chapter 4: May of '68 and its Aftershocks 209
Chapter 5: The Demise of the Revolutionary Subject 289
Chapter 6: The Contemporary Gorz 355
Bibliography: 417
iii
Abstract
Exile: An Intellectual Portrait of Andre Gorz
by
Christopher Brooks
The Austrian-born French philosopher and theorist Andre Gorz (1923 - 2007)
was one of the most important intellectuals to emerge from the circle of thinkers
associated with Jean-Paul Sartre in postwar France. This dissertation argues that
Gorz was a "pragmatic Utopian" whose dual vocation as a journalist and philosopher
allowed him to arrive at insights into the nature of capitalistic society that were both
highly original and historically consequential. It is a comprehensive intellectual
biography of Gorz's life and thought based on readings of Gorz's published material,
interviews with Gorz and his friends and colleagues, and extensive use of the
secondary material on French intellectual history.
Dedication and Acknowledgements
Dedicated to my wife, Rebecca Brooks, for her support, patience, good
humor, and limitless perspicacity.
I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their
years of support and guidance. Jonathan Beecher has been a steadfast ally, freely
sharing with me his enormous wealth of knowledge about French intellectual history
and French culture, not to mention saving me from blunders with French spelling and
translation. Terry Burke has been a critical source of insight into the professional
requirements of the historical vocation and has brought a valuable outside perspective
to my own interest in intellectual history. I owe Gopal Balakrishnan a great deal for
guiding me through the radical historiography of western European thought, as well
as for counseling me on the project of intellectual biography itself.
My thanks to the bodies at UCSC that provided funding for research and
travel: the Department of History, the Institute for Humanities Research, and the
Graduate Division. The University of California's Education Abroad Program
funded transportation and some costs of lodging during my time as a graduate student
instructor at the UC Paris Study Center in 2008; my thanks to the administrators of
that program and to Barbara Prezelin, Shelly Ocafia, and Will Bishop at the Center.
In Paris, the staff and librarians of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France were
exceptionally helpful and courteous, as were the librarians of the McHenry Library at
UCSC. My thanks to Christine Von Koehler and Vincent Burret, who graciously
v
welcomed me into their home during my time in Paris. Thanks as well to Meg
Lilienthal, Stephanie Hinkle, Stephanie Bauman, and Christine Khoo on the history
department staff.
I have benefited enormously from my work with members of the UCSC
faculty. I thank Bruce Thompson, Lynn Westerkamp, Alice Yang-Murray, Buck
Sharp, Cindy Polecritti, Peter Kenez, and Jim Clifford in particular. I also received
invaluable guidance while pursuing both my bachelor's and master's degrees at the
University of Oregon and offer thanks to John McCole, George Sheridan, Joseph
Fracchia, David Luebke, and Louise Bishop.
I received helpful comments on the framing of my arguments about Gorz's
life and thought during presentations I made at the annual conferences of the Western
Society for French History and the Society for French Historical Studies in 2009 and
2010. I would thank Julian Bourg, Jonathan Judaken, and Patrick Hutton in particular
for their critical feedback.
I have had remarkably congenial, supportive, and insightful friends and
colleagues in my cohort of fellow graduate students. I thank them all. In particular,
at UCSC, my heartfelt thanks go out to Kelly Feinstein-Johnson, Elizabeth Mullins,
Ana Candela, Colin Tyner, Jeff Sanceri, Heather Paul, Noel Smyth, Troy Crowder,
Eliza Martin, Urmi Engineer, Michele Henrey, and Amanda Shuman, and at the UO,
to Elizabeth Medford, Camille Walsh, Veta Schlimgen, Lauren Hirshberg, Bob
Reinhardt, Matt Conn, Fernando Calderon, and Matt Ohlen.
vi
Chapter 1: Exile
Introduction
Andre Gorz committed suicide with his wife, Dorine Kiel, on September 22,
2007. Their bodies were found lying next to each other in their modest house in
Vosnon, the small village southeast of Paris in which they had lived since the early
1980s. A brief note indicated that the police should be contacted, and the sleeping
pills they had taken together were found nearby. Notices followed shortly, as Gorz's
collaborators and friends from his many decades as a journalist and philosopher
saluted his life and work. Most were written by fellow leftist thinkers like Jean
Daniel, with whom Gorz had founded Le Nouvel Observateur in 1964, who noted that
Gorz "Had been the most secretive, the most enigmatic, the most stubborn, and the
most erudite of our group."1 An unlikely tribute came from French president Nicolas
Sarkozy, who despite his well-established contempt for radicalism noted that "It is
with sadness that I acknowledge his passing as well as that of his wife, who
accompanied him on his final voyage."2
Gorz and Dorine's suicide was tragic in that it ended Gorz's ongoing work on
the philosophy of labor, the critique of capitalism, and the theory of ecology, all of
which he had continued to pursue until his death.3 It also deprived the many friends
and correspondents of both Gorz and Dorine of their letters, which were warm,
1 Jean Daniel, "Partir avec elle," Le Nouvel Observateur, 27 September 2007, 29. Translations from
the French are my own unless noted otherwise.
2 Nicolas Sarkozy, Communique, 24 September 2007.
His last book, Ecologica, was published posthumously in 2008.
1
thoughtful, and supportive. Gorz was, however, also perhaps the most important
philosopher of French existentialism after his friend and mentor Jean-Paul Sartre, and
in that, his and Dorine's suicide can be seen as the ultimate extension of the
existential principle that each person has an irreducible ability to choose his or her
fate.5
To understand the importance of Gorz, we must begin with Sartre.6 Sartre, in
his seminal existential writings of the late 1930s and early 1940s such as L 'Etre et la
neant {Being and Nothingness) and the novel La Nausee (Nausea), had claimed that
man was a "useless passion," a consciousness condemned to be free in a world
constituted by obstacles and restrictions. Confronted by their freedom, most
individuals tried to fool themselves into believing that they were obliged to act in
4 Interview with Francoise Gollain, October 22, 2008.
5 A point also made by Gorz's friend Christophe Fourel, who wrote "Yet this tragic gesture appeared in
(also) in its philosophical dimension: the author of Adieux cm proletariat and of Chemins duparadis
had definitively made the choice of freedom." Christophe Fourel, "En guise de presentation:
l'actualite d'Andre Gorz," in Christophe Fourel, ed., Andre Gorz: unpenseurpour le XXIe Siecle
(Paris: La Decouverte, 2009), 7.
6 The scholarly literature on Sartre is enormous. I base my arguments regarding Sartre primarily on the
following: my own readings of Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausee (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), Jean-Paul
Sartre, Being and Nothingness: an Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New
York: Philsoophical Library, 1956), Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (New
York: Knopf, 1963), Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith
(London: Verso, 2002), as well as Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard
Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), two of the major biographies of Sartre, Annie
Cohen-Solal, Sartre, trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987) and Bernard-Henri
Levy, Sartre: Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2003), a classic older work on Sartre's philosophy, Wilfrid Desan, The Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1965), and some of the major secondary works on Sartre written by
intellectual historians: Ian Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004),
Arthur Hirsh, The French New Left: An Intellectual History from Sartre to Gorz (Boston: South End
Press, 1981), Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventure of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 331 - 360, Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and
the Jewish Question: Anti-Antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2006), and Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to
Althusser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
2
certain ways, rather than acknowledging that they were the true authors of their fate.
Sartre called this phenomenon "bad faith." While there was no transcendental escape
from the condition of a freedom doomed to struggle against implacable odds, the
individual could still pursue "authenticity" by designating projects of action and
creation in the world and engaging in them without recourse to obfuscating excuses
like religion or ideological dogmatism.
Sartre conceived of his philosophy in the 1930s, first as one of the most
brilliant students at the legendary French institution of higher learning the Ecole
Normale Superieur and then during his brief stint as a philosophy teacher. At the
time, he was basically apolitical and his version of existentialism was starkly
individualistic, focusing on the fate of the lone consciousness in a world in which
other human beings were perceived as potential threats to one's freedom. As a
soldier in World War II, however, during which he served in the French army on the
Maginot Line and was subsequently captured and held as a prisoner of war, Sartre
underwent a kind of moral conversion that led him to consider the necessity of forms
of solidarity with other people. By the end of the war, having befriended many
members of the clandestine Parti Communiste Frangais (French Communist Party or
PCF), Sartre was convinced that Marxism was the key to the understanding of
history, and he devoted himself to creating a new version of existentialism compatible
with revolutionary politics.
These attempts were sometimes inspiring and brilliant, but were also haunted
by both errors of judgment and the weight of historical circumstances. Sartre and his
3