The French Revolution in Theory PDF
Preview The French Revolution in Theory
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN THEORY Reinventing Critical Theory Series Editors: Gabriel Rockhill, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University Jennifer Ponce de León, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania The Reinventing Critical Theory series publishes cutting edge work that seeks to rein- vent critical social theory for the 21st century. It serves as a platform for new research in critical philosophy that examines the political, social, historical, anthropological, psychological, technological, religious, aesthetic and/or economic dynamics shaping the contemporary situation. Books in the series provide alternative accounts and points of view regarding the development of critical social theory, put critical theory in dialogue with other intellectual traditions around the world and/or advance new, radical forms of pluralist critical theory that contest the current hegemonic order. 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Originally published in French as La Révolution française n’est pas un mythe Copyright © Klincksieck, Paris 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021944957 ISBN 978-1-78661-617-3 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-78661-619-7 (epub) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. For Régine CONTENTS Introduction: The French Revolution Is Not a Myth: Satre, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, and Us 1 Part I: The French Revolution as an Object for Sartre 11 1 How Did the French Revolution Become an Object for Sartre? 13 2 W orking with Historical Details against the Fetishization of the Real 25 3 N o Longer Dissolving the Real Actors of the French Revolution 41 4 Restoring the Role of the Sacred 53 5 Apocalypse and Fraternity-T error 63 6 T he Question of Dialectical Time, or the Inanity of the Notion of the Rearguard 75 Part II: Rebuking Sartre and His Final Humanist Object: The French Revolution under Scrutiny 97 7 Three Humanities in One: European, Colonized, Savage 103 8 Finishing a Book, Concluding a Discussion 119 9 M ichel Foucault and the French Revolution: A Misunderstanding? 133 10 The French Revolution: Between the Archaeology of Knowledge, Discursive Formations, and Social Formations 147 vii viii Contents 11 On the “Iranian Revolution”: Retrieving the Missed Object, with Foucault and Despite Foucault 163 12 “The French Revolution as Matrix of Totalitarianism”: The Enigma of a Bizarre Statement 177 13 Sade and the Ethical Fold of the French Revolution 193 Conclusion: Clearing Some Foggy Patches 211 INTRODUCTION The French Revolution Is Not a Myth: Sartre, Lévi- Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, and Us “For contemporary man to fully play the role of his- torical agent, he must believe in the myth of the French Revolution.”1 We have to admit that this belief of the “historical agent” has been inactive for a long time. The French Revolution, as revolutionary and as French, is a repressed historical moment, reduced to amusing signage display- ing the edge of a guillotine, Phrygian caps, and three national colors that are either an object of suspicion or overinvestment. It is thus folklorized, instrumentalized, and deactivated as a fulcrum for exigent political and theoretical reflection. Nevertheless, when Claude Lévi- Strauss writes this phrase, which appears in his 1962 The Savage Mind in polemical response to Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason,2 they are both responsive to political and theoretical exigency, and each knows his French Revolution with an impressive degree of precision. VALUE OF MYTH, VALUE OF TRUTH This investigation aims first to understand, over fifty years later, the past and present stakes of the debate between Lévi-S trauss and Sartre over the French Revolution. The French revolutionary sequence does indeed occupy a large place in the Critique of Dialectical Reason and its preparatory 1 Claude Lévi-S trauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). 2 Jean- Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (London: Verso, 2004). 1
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