Abstract
This chapter evokes the atmosphere that attended the birth of French theory in Paris in the 1960s. The intensities of political action and the ambitions of political theory fed upon each other and both thought and action resorted to extremes. Thanks to the legacy of structuralism, theory was focused on “culture,” on the symbolic and the ideological—and the effect was to dramatize the undoing of the modern bourgeois subject. A collaboration between Lacan and Althusser offered a newly linguified Freud and Marx to the creators of French theory and the object of their thought became an “unconscious” that was at once psychological and social. A story of Tel Quel is told and we are introduced to the names we have been waiting for—Barthes, Foucault, Derrida—and also get a sense of the furiously competitive race for recogntion as a radical innovator that Philippe Sollers presided over as editor of that decisively influential publication. The early career of Julia Kristeva at Tel Quel sheds light on why textuality (“writing”) became the leading “power idea” of that movement. If cultural politics was to be a politics, thinkers still committed to some form of Marxism realized that language had somehow to be materialized.
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Notes
- 1.
For young Americans in revolt in the 1960s, and for decades thereafter, the 1950s played an analogous role—captured in images of ticky-tacky suburban uniformity, housewives in high heels cooing over gleaming washing machines, commuter husbands in gray flannel suits. The poolside party Dustin Hoffman’s parents held for their son (The Graduate (1967)), featured this iconic scene: an overbearing business man, intending to do his good deed for the day, drapes a possessive arm over young Dustin’s shoulder and confides: “One word for you, young man, just one—plastics.”
- 2.
Francois Dosse stresses the importance of a convergence between Althusser and an ascendant Foucault: “After 1968 Althusserians left their ivory towers, where they had limited themselves to simple exegeses of Marx’s ideas, in order to meet the real world. It was from this perspective in 1970 that Althusser defined a vast research program with his famous article on the SIAs: State Ideology and Ideological Apparatuses … his positions were closer to those of Michel Foucault in 1969, when he argued that the discursive order needed to be complemented by the study of non-discursive practices. … For both Althusser and Foucault, ideology had a material existence incarnated by institutional practices. … Althusser’s undertaking was the most ambitious and totalizing in the gamut of speculative structuralism. … [It] prepared the way for a historicized structuralism, incarnated by Michel Foucault, among others” (1977, 167–168, 188).
- 3.
Gary Gutting thinks Heidegger’s main legacy for French philosophy in the 1960s was the conviction that, whatever the way forward, Classical metaphysics was exhausted (2013, 60). But Heidegger’s focus on the “average everydayness” of Dasein, thrown into a social and linguistic setting, seems to me ancestral also—not only to Lacan’s “symbolic” and Althusser’s “ideological apparatus,” but to Barthes’ “doxa,” Derrida’s “general text,” Foucault’s “discursive practices,” and Bourdieu’s “habitus.”
- 4.
But his language, and the categorical tone—“necessity,” “the real”—no matter how obscure the referents, suggest that he retained the aspiration of an older generation: he wanted truth.
- 5.
See Peter Starr, The Logics of Failed Revolt (1995).
- 6.
Every boundary, every category, was suspected of owing its existence to some prohibition, some violent exclusion.
- 7.
Les Temps Moderneswas in turn conceived in reaction to the fate of the premiere intellectual journal of the first half of the twentieth century, La Nouvelle Revue Française. Its apolitical commitment to literature and art made the NRF an easy mark for sophisticated Nazi occupiers and it succumbed with barely a murmur. “Engagement” became a byword at Les Temps Modernes for good reason (Marx-Scouras 1996, 11–17).
- 8.
For French intellectuals, the “postmodern” begins with the radical artistic and literary innovators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Modern,” unless qualified in some way, suggests the Third Republic,bourgeoisconvention, and so on. In his interview with Clare Parnet (see “C is for Culture”), Gilles Deleuze waxes nostalgic in very revealing ways about the Liberation, and the rich years after, discovering and especially rediscovering things from before the war in philosophy and the arts.
- 9.
By the end of the 1960s, however, when Tel Quel was insisting on the materiality of the text and consequently on writing as political action, Sollers turned against the original surrealists—especially Breton. They were indicted for an “idealist,” even “spiritualist,” effort to preserve the autonomy of art and artists and for the popularity of their works with bourgeois audiences. Tel Quel affiliated itself instead with Bataille and Artaud, “dissident surrealists” who insisted on the materiality of a subject identified with the body and whose works held no appeal for bourgeois sensibilities (Marx-Scouras 1996, 159–164).
- 10.
“In September 1968, Tel Quel was still publishing articles on contemporary semiology in the USSR (issue 35), introduced by Julia Kristeva, but by the beginning of 1969, it turned to the Red East to the ‘Great Helmsman,’ to a Stalinist Marxism-Leninism purified by President Mao. … When the ‘Movement of June ’71’ was created at Tel Quel, no compromise was possible. Bridges had been definitively burned with ‘revisionists’ and ‘new czars.’ Tel Quel became the expression of intellectuals’ fascination with China and their interest was reciprocated when a team from the editorial board including Marcelin Pleynet, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes was invited to China” (Dosse 1997, 157–158).
- 11.
The phrase “useful idiot,” widely attributed to Lenin, was used by Bolsheviks to refer to naïve fellow travelers from Western democracies who lent their support to the Russian Revolution and the Communist Party.
- 12.
Sollers once went so far as to call Tel Quel a theoretical organ of Derridean deconstruction. He singled out Of Grammatology and admonished his readers that no “thinking can henceforth avoid situating itself with respect to this event.” (“Le reflexe de reduction,” in Tel Quel: Theorie d’ensemble, 1968 p. 303). Jacques Derrida’s disingenuously articulated materialism served him as well at Tel Quel as it did at ENS, under Althusser.
- 13.
Francois Mauriac was a renowned Nobel Prize-winning author, one of a cohort of Catholic intellectuals actively opposed to Fascism. Louis Aragon was a surrealist poet and journalist, actively affiliated with the PCF, who became something of a gatekeeper for aspiring writers on the Left. Francis Ponge was a poet and an essayist, influenced by surrealism, active in the resistance, and a PCF member until the end of WWII. It would be hard to imagine a core of supporters more suited to help Sollers in his ascent to the summit.
- 14.
As we shall see in Chap. 12, the rise of academic postmodernism is only one, relatively insignificant, effect of the manifold of conditions that brought it about. But the possibility of a new humanism is lodged in the same configuration and might, if properly understood and pursued, turn out to be very significant indeed. And that is a task for serious intellectuals—a new opportunity for thought.
- 15.
This view of Cartesian dualism as inherently “masculine” and, therefore, imperial was more or less taken for granted by many feminist theorists. Compare, for example, Sandra Harding (1986) “From Feminist Empiricism to Feminist Standpoint Epistemologies” and Susan Bordo (1987) “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought.”
- 16.
The proximate source of this notion of fulfillment is Husserl’s distinction between an intentional relation with some entity that is “fulfilled” because it is actually perceived as opposed to one that is merely indicated or supposed in thought or speech. Once again we can’t help but notice the remarkable influence of phenomenology on the thinking of its fiercest critics.
- 17.
Again, I am not saying “why did they indulge in obscurity, why didn’t they just come out and say it thusly if that’s what it comes down to?” In fact, they believed they were transgressing conventional conceivability and were committed to that project.
- 18.
See Plato’s Timaeusfor this term and for his description of the cosmos as “receptacle,” as seething matter without form, without stable characteristics.
- 19.
Kristeva herself recalls her arrival on the scene this way: “Having come to France under the auspice of the Gaullist dream of a ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,’ I felt I had found in this territory that stretched from the publishing house of Le Seoul to the … EPHE … a cosmopolitanism that transcended the socialist and European domains and that constituted a continent of thought, speculation, and writing corresponding to the high points of the universalistic legend of Paris” (2002, 6).
- 20.
The term carry the connotation of “gimmick,” to be sure—but it is important to remember that Deleuze and Foucault especially were responding to deconstruction’s assault on concepts (including the concept of “concept”) by insisting that they were best dealt with as “tools,” that meaning lay in their use. And this, apparently, without any input from Wittgenstein.
- 21.
Compare, again, Derrida coining the term “field of the mark” so that the possibility of misunderstanding a bit of “writing” enjoyed the same status as understanding it and the state of mind of the subject would be rendered moot.
- 22.
See Joy, O’Grady, and Poxon eds. French Feminists on Religion: A Reader (2002, 86–88) for a succinct account of how Kristeva’s experience in Communist Bulgaria, compounded by the embarrassments of 1968 and 1974, explain why she “spurns the group identification necessary in both social and radical feminisms.”
- 23.
“I myself was alarmed by the profound unflagging presence of the Soviet model, the only sign of the 20th century in this land of peasants, and all the more evident because it was violently resisted.... I saw nothing that might possibly prevent the cultural revolution from becoming a national and socialist variation. … It marked my farewell to politics, including feminism” (From “My Memory’s Hyperbole” in The Portable Kristeva ([1984b] 2002, 19)).
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de Zengotita, T. (2019). The Mood of the Moment. In: Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_8
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