Tzvetan Todorov: Thinker and Humanist

282 Pages·2020·3.513 MB·English

by  Henk De Berg, Karine Zbinden

Tzvetan Todorov
Thinker and Humanist
edited by Henk de Berg and Karine Zbinden
Tzvetan Todorov
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Tzvetan Todorov
Thinker and Humanist
Edited by
Henk de Berg
and Karine Zbinden
Rochester, New York
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Copyright © 2020 by the Editors and Contributors
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2020
by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.camden-house.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-996-2
ISBN-10: 1-57113-996-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Berg, Henk de, 1963– editor. | Zbinden, Karine, editor.
Title: Tzvetan Todorov : thinker and humanist / edited by Henk de Berg and
Karine Zbinden.
Description: Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2020. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019051114 | ISBN 9781571139962 (hardback ; acid-
free paper) | ISBN 1571139966 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN
9781787446854 (PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Todorov, Tzvetan, 1939–2017—Criticism and interpretation. |
Philosophy, French—20th century. | Philosophy and civilization. | Politics and
culture.
Classification: LCC B2430.T56 T98 2020 | DDC 194—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051114
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Henk de Berg and Karine Zbinden
1: A Marginal Centrist: Tzvetan Todorov and the French
Intellectual Field 20
Maxime Goergen
2: Todorov and Camus 43
Robert Zaretsky
3: The Enlightenment Redux: Autonomy in Todorov,
Glucksmann, and Onfray 55
David McCallam
4: Todorov’s Reading of Rousseau: A Heritage for Our Times? 74
Christine Baycroft
5: Tzvetan Todorov’s Enlightenment 92
Carl Niekerk
6: Todorov and Bakhtin 109
Karine Zbinden
7: Tzvetan Todorov and the Writing of History 127
Evgenia Ilieva
8: Tzvetan Todorov and the Trials of History:
A Dissenting Voice 147
Richard J. Golsan
9: European Integration and the Cultural Cold War:
Todorov and Denis de Rougemont 159
Adam Piette
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vi  CONTENTS
10: Tzvetan Todorov on Totalitarianism, Scientism, and Utopia 172
Eric B. Litwack
11: Tzvetan Todorov’s Political Philosophy 188
Henk de Berg
12: Interview with Tzvetan Todorov 236
Henk de Berg and Karine Zbinden
Notes on the Contributors 259
Index 263
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Acknowledgments
WE SHOULD LIKE to express our gratitude to the School of Languages
and Cultures of the University of Sheffield for its financial support
of our work on Tzvetan Todorov, which, in addition to this volume, has
included two international colloquiums, one in Sheffield in March 2015
and one in Paris in July 2017. We should also like to thank the contribu-
tors to this volume, as well as our friends and colleagues who helped us
in other ways: Stoyan Atanassov, Ger Groot, Olivier Postel-Vinay, Henry
Rousso, and Léa Todorov. Thanks are also due to editorial director Jim
Walker at Camden House for his patience, precision, and intellectual
acuity. We are grateful that Tzvetan Todorov opened his home to us in
March 2016 and that we had the opportunity to intervie w him at length.
His kindness, modesty, and honesty shone through as always and leave us
with the warmest of memories. We dedicate this book to his memory.
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Introduction
Henk de Berg and Karine Zbinden
“TZVETAN TODOROV IS a skinny guy in glasses with an enormous mass of
curly hair. He is also a linguistic researcher who has lived in France
for twenty years, a disciple of Barthes who worked on literary genres (the
fantastic, in particular), a specialist in rhetoric and semiotics. . . . Having
grown up in a totalitarian country evidently aided the development of a
very strong humanist conscience, which comes out even in his linguistic
theories. . . . [He speaks] immaculate French but with a st ill very notice-
able accent”: this is how Laurent Binet’s novel La septième fonction du
langage (The Seventh Function of Language, 2015) describes the thinker
who is the topic of our volume of essays.1 Binet’s book, part literary fic-
tion and part crime story, is set in 1980/81—the period when François
Mitterra nd succeeded Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to the presidency—and
features a range of famous philosophers and literary theorists, from
Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva to Jacques Derrida
and Bernard-Henri Lévy. Tzvetan Todorov’s presence among these lumi-
naries is not accidental: he was undoubtedly one of France’s most impor-
tant and most respected intellectuals of the past fifty years. Yet Todorov
plays only a minor role in the novel, and this is perhaps no coincidence
either: although a thinker of the highest caliber, he never achieved the
iconic status of a Foucault or—to name another Eastern Europe–born
theorist—a Slavoj Žižek.
There are several reasons for this relative lack of fame. First, Todorov
was always excessively modest about his work, and his self-e ffacing man-
ner was directly at odds with the demands of our media age and its obses-
sion with c elebrity. Though not a recluse and not afraid to express his
opinion, he never sought the limeligh t and he engaged in few controver-
sial debates. More over, w hen he expressed himself publicly, he did so with
the same rhetorical restraint and intellectual fair-mindedness that ar e char-
acteristic of his academic work. This, it seems to us, is the second reason
he never became one of the “stars” of the intelligentsia. European—and
especially French—thought has a tendency toward binarism and extrem-
ism, be it of the left-wing or the right-wing variety. But Todorov was a
firm believ er in the ideals of moderation, tolerance, and self-criticism, and
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