During my graduate study and career, I disliked the cult status of French critical theory in American English departments. This began after the 1960s and lasted until around the turn of the century. I had come of age at a time when Marx, Hegel, Sartre, and Lukács still set the tone. I was convinced that much remained to be done by following (and correcting) their course. Recently, I was relieved to meet excellent French scholars who despise the French celebrity theoreticians as much as I do. It was only upon discovering the atypical Alain Badiou that I became more curious about his precursors Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida. I was curious why Badiou was both in their tradition and distinct from it.
French philosophy is institutional. It is showcased in the public media and taught in every lycée by teachers who have undergone a rigorous training, dominated by the elite École Normale Supérieure (ENS). The ENS entrance exam is so demanding that among three stellar theoreticians, Deleuze failed, Foucault succeeded on his second try, and Derrida only on his third. Those who would go on to teach philosophy submit to the agrégation. It consists of two (formerly three) written exams and an equally demanding oral. A year in advance, a program is published with the philosophers to be covered. They are invariably drawn from among the greatest thinkers of the past, with whom the candidate must engage knowledgeably and critically. This highly competitive and no less institutionalized nature of French philosophy accounts, I believe, for its mix of tradition and critical aggressiveness, as well as its quality of appearing to the outsider as a colloquy among cognoscenti. French academic philosophy is fiercely secularist, and it extends its critical approach to society. There is an inbred Oedipal relationship with its forebears and a Zolaesque relationship with social institutions, especially the Church. It’s as if the ivory tower could be an assault engine against the powers that be. The American Right likes to take aim at “tenured radicals.” That charge would apply to post-Sartrean French philosophy.
Gary Gutting’s survey in The Oxford History of Philosophy series, Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960, set me straight on many points. By 1960, Sartre was passé. His focalization of the subject yielded to the impersonal contexts of postmodern structuralism. It was Heidegger who, despite his Nazi association, maintained his status as the last great master thinker. (However, the secularist and oppositional bent of Sartre continued to rule.) The post-Sartrean structuralist tendency lent French theory its anti-humanistic and relativistic profile, appearing to dissolve all meaning and truth in an esoterically technical discourse. Despite Gutting’s obvious absorption in recent French philosophy, he is refreshingly frank about the wretched and jargon-ridden writing that it has produced. This is refreshing to me because in my time, not a few American academic publications claimed little relevance beyond subjecting their topics to a derivative jargonization, exemplified most notoriously by “the Sokal hoax.” This was a nonsensical discussion of science in French theoretical terms (“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”), submitted by the old-school leftist Sokal and accepted by the cultural studies journal Social Text. “Theory” was like pouring old wine into fancy new bottles or maybe just smashing the bottles.
In several other blog entries, I tried to convey my response to Badiou’s key terms of Being and Event. As a title, they echo Heidegger’s Being and Time and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. In many regards, Badiou is the quintessential product of the French system: elite, tradition-bound, militantly atheistic, and unflinchingly radical and oppositional. But if one can generalize that the entire postmodern run of French critical theory tends to be relativistic regarding meaning and truth, then Badiou for his part intends the sharpest possible deviation from that lineage: he is determined to restore the subject—without “subjectivity”—by upholding the meaning of truth in a maximal sense. As Gutting puts it: “there is an essential tie between being a subject and having a commitment to an objective truth” (pp. 174-75). It makes sense to me. We are only a subject by virtue of our allegiance to truths. Without any allegiance to truth, we would be insane. Even the conscious liar honors truth in the breach.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” expresses a shared allegiance to the Event which was the American Revolution. “It is self-evident that human well-being outweighs national citizenship,” is a truth derived from the former, one that sets me apart from some and unites me with others. I am only a subject to the extent that I am subjected to certain shared or unique truths. In losing my grip on the truths that I share or uniquely hold, I cease to be a subject in the Badiouvian sense. Losing our grip on all truth would reduce us to driven, unmoored reflexes of consciousness, tossed and spun forth like leaves in the currents of time—Heidegger’s das Man. Badiou’s notion of the subject appeals to me since it characterizes the condition of being-a-subject more as a matter of taking a stand and resisting falsehood than as the irresponsible passivity which we call “subjectivity,” which is now found everywhere in our passively driven online creatures.
Truth demands resistance. Shared truths are the basis of comradeship and society. This resonates with what I admire most in the history and culture of France, where philosophy is a required school subject and the memory of the Resistance has been a touchstone of integrity.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 