During my stay here I have honed my French listening comprehension skills by tuning in YouTube recordings by politicians and public intellectuals on subjects of politics and philosophy (for which I possess the relevant vocabulary). I got to know Jean-Luc Mélenchon, first as a debater and then as an orator. In the former capacity inspiring, in the latter disappointing, he aroused my curiosity enough so that I bought and read his party program L’avenir en commun. It gave me the sense that the French Left is only capable of beating the dead horses of its past initiatives: laïcité (but how will this relate to the widespread resentment of public religious manifestations on the part of the Muslim community?) and ever more social welfare (a good idea but in the long run a rock of Sisyphus, which needs to be replaced with some new path forward—perhaps the green jobs for the unemployed which Mélenchon shares, though not very prominently, with Biden.
But there is also what I consider a positive adherence to the past represented by two intellectuals, Bruno Latour, a voice for radical ecological reform, and Alain Badiou, an heir to the Sartrean, Maoist, and Marxist traditions in France. Both charmed me as French orators of great clarity and eloquence. Both impressed me with the lucidity of their thought and the beauty and suppleness of their French. Both encourage political action but neither indulges in the guilt and doom-mongering of so much of our Left. Latour is my age; Badiou is ten years older but like me a product of the 1960s. Both speak gravely of our dismal global prospects under the all-consuming machine of advanced capitalism with its destructive and corrosive powers. But both avoid the modern rhetorical tendency, equivalent to the self-and society-flagellating manner of medieval prophets of doom. Both are deeply concerned globally but it seems happy personally. Both are sharp-witted and avuncular in a pleasant French way.
I am interested in visiting L’Ecole des Actes of the Commune (Aubervilliers). This cooperative and socially engaged Institution seems to function in the mode of the volunteer services I’ve worked with at home: no money transactions, no prestige, no threat of failure. No bullshit in a word. Badiou also developed the concept of the “event” (l’évènement). This signifies an experience which breaks with our familiar reality thereby transforming reality and us with it. I need to read more by Badiou but my hunch is that what he calls the “event” is another approach to what I referred to in a previous blog as the conversion experience that made those of my generation become oppositional.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 