Intellectuals and the Left in France Since 1968

166 Pages·1987·17.13 MB·English

by  Keith A. Reader (auth.)

INTELLECfUALS AND THE LEFT IN FRANCE
SINCE 1968
By the same author
THE CINEMA: A HISTORY
CULTURES ON CELLULOID
INTELLECTUALS AND
THE LEFT IN FRANCE
SINCE 1968
Keith A. Reader
Senior Lecturer in French
Kingston Polytechnic
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-18583-2 ISBN 978-1-349-18581-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18581-8
© Keith A. Reader 1987
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly & Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1987
ISBN 978-0-312-41894-6
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Reader, Keith.
Intellectuals and the Left in France since 1968.
1. France-Intellectual life-20th century.
2. France-Politics and govemment-1958-
3. Intellectuals-France-Political activity.
4. Politics and culture-France.
5. Right and left (Political science).
I. Title
DC415.R43 1987 944.092 85-22159
ISBN 978-0-312-41894-6
For E. K. with love
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Preface ix
List ofA bbreviations xii
1. THE MAY 'EVENTS' -WHAT WERE THEY? 1
2. DISILLUSIONMENT AND THE ROLE OF THE
INTELLECTUAL IN FRANCE 19
3. INTELLECTUALS AND MARXISM SINCE 1968 -
SARTRE 30
4. INTELLECTUALS AND MARXISM SINCE 1968 -
THE STRUCTURALISTS 37
5. INTELLECTUALS AND MARXISM SINCE 1968 -
MODES OF DISSIDENCE 53
6. THE POLITICS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 61
7. THE POLITICS OF FEMINISM 69
8. LANGUAGE, POWER AND POLITICS -
THE WORK OF FOUCAULT AND DELEUZE 80
9. LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, DECONSTRUCTION
ANDPOLIDCS 92
10. THE 'NEW PHILOSOPHERS' 108
11. THE PLACE OF SOCIOLOGY 115
12. CONCLUSION: THE 'SILENCE OF THE LEFT-WING
INTELLECTUALS' 136
Notes 141
Bibliography 148
Index 151
vii
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank in particular:
Paul Bensimon, Philippe Binet, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Jill Forbes, Michael
Hawkins, Eleonore Kofman, Colin MacCabe, Richard Nice, Catherine
Schmidt, and Herve Touboul, for ideas, suggestions, and discussion; the
members of the Modem Critical Theory Group, for provoking thought
about Chapter 6 in particular; the Nuffield Foundation, for a grant
which enabled me to spend part of the summer of 1983 in Paris
researching this book; the staff of the Bibliotheque de la Maison des
Sciences de l'Homme and of the Bibliotheque du Centre Georges
Pompidou (Beaubourg) in Paris, and Madeleine Evans and Claire
Hutton of Kingston Polytechnic Library, for their help and kindness; my
colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Languages at Kingston Poly
technic, in particular Chris Cobb and all the members of the French
section, for enabling me to take a term's study-leave without which the
book would never have been completed; Chris Cook, for advice on the
world of publishing; and, above all, my parents and Eleonore, for their
warm and loving support.
viii
Preface
A great deal has happened during the past seventeen years to draw
attention within the English-speaking world to the relationship between
intellectuals and the Left in France. The 'events' of 1968, while in many
ways anti-intellectual, were inseparable from the universities, where
they started and where their most lasting effects were felt. Thirteen years
later, the election of a Socialist President-who was also something of an
intellectual - was seen variously as the logical consequence or the diluted
aftermath of the cultural upheaval of May. Intellectual discussion of the
'two Mays', not only in universities or learned journals, but in the
national press and on radio or television, achieved a prominence almost
impossible to imagine in the society of Britain or the United States.
Intellectuals have always occupied a place at once more influential
and more critical of the established social order - hence, loosely, more
'left-wing' - in French than in British or American society. Part of the
raison d'e treof this book is to look at why this should be so and how it has
manifested itself between 1968 and the present day. The tendency has
been for the English-speaking world to encounter major recent
developments in French intellectual life by way of a series of 'names'
(Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan) which recur
inescapably in any discussion of the period. This, while inevitable given
the pervasiveness of the French intellectual 'star-system', is also
profoundly ironic, for all the writers mentioned (and not only they) have
significantly undermined the notions of individuality and personal
autonomy on which Western philosophical and political discourse has
been based since its inception. The paradox that Lacan, who gave the
first full and radical account of the intimate connections between
language and patriarchy, should at the same time have set himself up as
the Great Linguistic Patriarch par excellence, or that Derrida, whose
deconstructive analyses call the very existence of a pre-given text into
question, should regularly figure as a 'set author' on American literary
and philosophical syllabuses - these have been often remarked upon,
and are not irrelevant to this study. Beyond the scope they afford for
ironic amusement, they have important political and institutional
ix
X Preface
implications, reflecting the perception of the French intellectual as a
uniquely prolific and privileged species. The Frankfurt School in
Germany, the Bloomsbury Group in Britain, Gramsci in Italy are all
examples of intellectuals inseparably linked with the social formations
from which they arose, but the sheer number and range of 'Latin
Quarter' intellectuals sets them apart from any other group, and in so
doing may actually divert attention from the importance of the various
contexts-political, social, and institutional-within which they worked.
'Althusser', 'Derrida', 'Lacan', often seem to exist in no context other
than that bounded, in scholarly journals or tables of reference, by their
own names and the litany of which they form part. What will not be
found here, then, is yet another summary of the key ideas of 'pantheon'
thinkers. Ample work of this kind (some of it excellent, some indifferent
or worse) has already been carried out, and it would have been
superfluous to add to it. Emphasis falls rather on the specifically French
contexts of their work, so that while there is no dearth of intellectual
'names' the focus will also be on the different institutions, from the
University of Paris - VIII (Vincennes) to the French Communist Party
or the television programme Apostrophes, which have influenced the
work here discussed. My hope is that even readers already familiar with
many of the ideas and writers dealt with here will find a kind of
contextualisation not otherwise readily available in English.
There are, on the other hand, a great many thinkers whose work still
awaits adequate treatment in English, at least in book form. I cannot
claim, in so limited a compass, to have achieved that here; but I hope that
what I say about the work of figures as important as Lyotard or Bourdieu
may provide a helpful contextualising introduction.
Finally, I should make some attempt to explain my choice of writers
and texts. For the former, the division just mentioned gives the rationale:
certain figures cried out for some form of introduction and treatment,
others - the better-known and more extensively written-about - are
frequently dealt with out of their French context and benefit from an
understanding of that dimension. Those I have omitted have been,
inevitably, on grounds of space (with the craven value-judgement that
implies), or a feeling of inadequacy in their particular field (which, and
not a judgement of value, accounts for, for example, the absence of
economists).
For text-choice, the criteria were more complex. Obvious key works in
an author's output - Bourdieu's La Distinction, Luce Irigaray's Ce sexe
qui n'en est pas un - selected themselves if their authors were still
(relatively) little-known to an anglophone public. With certain notably