Urgency today is a genre in itself.—Bernard-Henri Levy
Waving the banner of human rights in France was the obligatory gesture that accompanied the reconciliation in the late 1970s of some self-proclaimed spokesmen for the French Left with capitalism and the market. Evolving out of the “discovery” of totalitarianism by these Parisian polemicists around 1975, the appeal to human rights became a kind of moral or spiritual supplement to the rearmament of capitalism that transpired in France during that decade. This was not, of course, a uniquely French phenomenon. But the particular vividness of the French case in this regard is informed by two factors: the strength and longevity of France’s revolutionary tradition and the virtual collapse of a capitalist system of values in France in the thirty years following World War II. The weight of both long- and short-term histories meant that the group of repentant ex-militants who began to speak for the Left in the aftermath of 1968 needed to mask their embrace of economic fatalism with a new language. Without a structuring anticapitalist project as the basis for defining the Left, new values had to be promoted and repeatedly invoked. Humanitarianism was the ideal fig leaf.
To understand, then, the abrupt emergence of a discourse of human rights in France, along with the moralizing underpinnings necessary to justify any number of humanitarian interventions in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, we must return to the mid-1970s and to a now-faded page in the history of French intellectual life. The event in question, immortalized by a September 1977 Time magazine cover proclaiming in bold typeface, “Marx is dead,” was the decision made by a group of former 1968 activists, given to philosophizing in the first person, to no longer work within a Marxist paradigm. That this decision could in and of itself constitute an event gives some indication of the dominant role Marxism had played in France since World War II as a frame of reference for work conducted in philosophy and the human sciences more generally. It also attests to the role then occupied by intellectuals in France and the status of philosophy as a practicum for political life. But it also reflects the delight with which the mainstream media greeted and would continue to greet this particular form of grandstanding—both in France and the United States.
The “New Philosophers,” as the loosely knit band of young and mostly unknown writers including Bernard-Henri Levy, André Glucksmann, Maurice Clavel, Christian Jambet, and Guy Lardreau came to be called, derived their denunciation of Marxism as a philosophy of domination from a reading of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Through their reading of Solzhenitsyn’s novel, translated into French in 1974, they pieced together an identification with the figure of the East European dissident. Marshalling a rhetoric of disillusionment that the Time cover story assimilated to that of Arthur Koestler and Daniel Bell, they announced their determination to have done with “mobilizing myths” and “mystifying ideologies.” Liberated from their former infantile dependence on “master narratives,” they were now looking at the world with a fresh lucidity: clear-eyed and cognizant of harsh reality.
But one master narrative had in fact been traded in for another, far older story: with age comes wisdom, one must leave behind the follies of youth, childish errors can be spun into gold.
Negotiating a career out of recantation is neither a new nor a noteworthy phenomenon. And of the hundreds of texts produced by the New Philosophers in the decades that followed—magazine columns, books, philosophical treatises, interviews, and reviews—no single work has endured nor can bear a close textual analysis now. But the authors themselves have endured—even prospered. And their signature tone, which ranges between an indignation bordering on hysteria and a more subtle, quasi-mystical inflection, has remained constant. Loyal servants to the New World Order now for thirty-odd years, they are the French apologists for the United States, neoliberalism, and economic globalization, the loud defenders of human rights (mostly in Bosnia), unconditional supporters of the Israeli government and of a fortified Westemism capable of combating barbarism in any of its forms. In 1986 the gay theorist and activist Guy Hocquenghem invented a grotesque composite portrait of the group to show how their repetitive media appearances and reiterated themes had fused them into a single character: “He has Glucksmann’s nose, July’s cigar, Coluche’s round glasses, Bizot’s long hair, Debray’s moustache, BHL’s open shirt, and Kouchner’s voice.”1 Hocquenghem’s observation regarding the media ubiquity of the Glucksmanns, Lévys, and Kouchners is, if anything, more accurate today. Still, to the extent that we can read their post-1968 conversion narrative as emblematic of a broader swing to the Right beginning in the late 1970s on the part of intellectuals throughout the overdeveloped world, then the tropes, targets, and banners they popularized bear examination. Time’s cover story may have mistitled the event then transpiring. But it was certainly accurate in registering a shift in what we might call “regimes of representation,” a shift whose effects are still with us today. By regime of representation I refer to that which can be seen or heard about particular phenomena or events and beyond that, to what may no longer be said, and what has been, in effect, rendered invisible. The shift that began in the mid-1970s primarily concerned the way in which two related phenomena could be viewed or discussed: the third world and May 1968.
This was not immediately apparent at the time. The explicit New Philosopher target was neither the Third World nor the political upheavals of their own recent past but rather the heartless Stalinist structures of the Soviet Union. A rough approximation of New Philosopher discourse begins with the assertion that mass popular revolt, or struggle by the working class or the oppressed to destroy bourgeois power, leads inexorably to the Gulag. The proof? The Soviet Union. Yet Soviet camps so central to their discourse were not seen as Russian, they were seen as Marxist. Marxism was responsible for the terror in the camps through its proffering of the Grand Illusion of Revolution. Marx invented the Gulag, and the French Revolution inspired Marx. Because the State is the central source of political oppression, politics aimed at seizing state power is dangerous and vain. Science, and even reason itself—the New Philosophers disdained any form of Enlightenment legacy—reinforced state power and were thus both inherently totalitarian. And because any political ideology could be used to justify crimes against humanity, the only “safe” form of political action was the defense of human rights.
That defense—especially in the form of a relentless sequence of urgent humanitarian “emergencies”—could be appealed to in order to justify any number of intellectual contradictions or simple sloppiness in their ideas. And in a discourse that actively valued irrationalism and that resonated with overt forms of evasiveness, bad faith, and opportunism, these were many. (Levy, for example, was given to discounting what he called the dry, statistical method of documenting brutalities, in favor of “that aspect of myth, of fiction, of the symbolic that makes it possible that Evil, which cannot be thought, can be represented.”)2 In retrospect it becomes easier to see how the main terms of the discourse—a frantic antistatism and a glorification of individual sovereignty—could merge rather seamlessly with the rise in France during the 1980s of a neoliberalist championing of private enterprise and the minimalist state. Because any attempt to change society leads straight to the Gulag, best to let the market construct society all by itself. At the time, though, what was in fact a profound mutation in the French left was smoothed over in part by the invocation of human rights.
In that sense the impact of the New Philosophers lay not in their ideas per se but in the extent to which they succeeded in replacing any opposition between Left and Right with an all-or-nothing cosmic struggle between hypostasized categories of Good and Evil. Central to this accomplishment was their mobilization of two figures: the Gulag and the dissident. The Gulag was already a powerful theme in antitotalitarian critique; Soviet camps justified asserting a symmetry between fascism and communism: a blinding symmetry that had the advantage of masking any sign of the capitalist base of Adolf Hitler’s regime. Hannah Arendt had made the camps, Nazi and Soviet, the central and distinctive institution of totalitarian regimes; in Democracy and Totalitarianism, Raymond Aron had elaborated a French version of the themes designed to counteract the enthusiastic audience given the Communist Party after the Liberation, by giving the Right, discredited by the Collaboration, a new boost.3 But in the hands of the New Philosophers, the Gulag, in Peter Dews’s apt description, begins its rapid degenerative slide from terrible historical reality to pseudo-concept to slogan.4 Unhinged from any specific, circumscribed historical manifestation, Auschwitz and the Gulag share a structural similarity, a mere homological relation. By having recourse to a homology—ahistorical from the outset—the camps in their writings become the manifestation of a crime infinite in proportion, an unthinkable and irreparable crime, the work of a pure, unlimited force of Evil exceeding any legal or political measure. Henceforth only ethics—and not politics—can think this unthinkable Evil, whose victims, eternal and silent in nature, tend to be portrayed as vaguely spiritualized in their suffering. Man, as Glucksmann is fond of reminding us, is forever the son of Auschwitz and the Gulag. As forces for dissuading anyone who hesitated or was reluctant to back the imperatives of the new human rights order, what could be more powerful than Auschwitz and the Gulag?
The figure of the dissident could be put to work as a vehicle of identification and self-promotion. On the one hand, the case of Eastern dissidents allowed the West to present itself once again as the defender of liberty and human rights. But the New Philosophers were also fond of depicting themselves as persecuted and “silenced” dissidents. And this despite the fact that they commanded seemingly unlimited access to every venue in the mainstream media: radio programs, television broadcasts, book series editions, op-ed columns, and prominent book review placements to review each others’ publications. But the figure of the dissident also served in promoting a notion of revolt dissolved into innumerable individual situations. Dissidence, by definition, is an elite phenomenon: Dissidents can never be dissident masses, for once the masses are involved, we are back in the realm of revolution, not dissidence. Identifying with dissidents reinforced their membership in a knowledge elite, and it is that elite, the elite of Parisian talk shows and café chat—and not the masses—that makes history.
The lack of any political solution to the problems of the dissident became the basis for the New Philosophers’ highly metaphysical conception of liberty. Freed of any historical grounding, the dissident, like the Gulag, becomes a “concrete” figure, in this case a figure of the timeless affirmation of liberty defined metaphysically by its absolute opposition to its other, the state, or to any other malignant spirit that works to “imprison” humanity in closed systems. For a Left no longer defining itself in terms of anticapitalism, values of liberty, and human rights, through their “transcendence” of older social divisions now seen as outdated, were powerful humanist alibis. Dissidence and human rights became little more than slogans that enabled a significant number of French intellectuals to disengage from politics in the name of a spiritualized or ethical “revolt,” a revolt that offered the important guarantee of keeping existing structures in place.
For what was ultimately at stake in the New Philosophers’ invocation of the horrors of the distant Soviet camps was a far more immediate and pressing concern: the political meaning, continuities, and disappointments of their own recent past, and specifically of the May 1968 insurrection that had brought the nation to a six-week standstill a few years earlier. After all, the Soviet atrocities had already been revealed and documented countless times in many well-known testimonies, many of them written by Marxists and other radical leftists. Testimonies including those by Leon Trotsky, Victor Serge, Panait Istrati, and Nikita Khruschev himself were known in France. Why then would it have suddenly become imperative to “discover” the Gulag in 1974? By performing the drama of their own disillusionment on the stage set of world history—with the Gulag as backdrop—they could act as though the real political battle were not being fought at home, over the memory and political afterlives of the 1960s political upheavals.5 Ten years after May 1968, that memory and those afterlives were still very much up for grabs. The central idea and the practices developed during the May movement concerned the union of intellectual contestation with workers’ struggle. By making all of the political discussions and actions of the 1960s the expression of an immense, collective illusion, these could be relegated definitively to a long-ago past. And their own past as militants could become an item on their resume to be highlighted or minimized as future occasions demanded.6
Marxism is one name for the political framework within which French intellectuals—many New Philosophers included—had negotiated the positions they took in the big political struggles of the postwar period. But a more accurate name for the aspirations and political desires that propelled radical politics in the years surrounding 1968 might be “third-worldism”: the political subjectivation that grew out of the War in Algeria and other anticolonial movements, and that became the basis for a new level of engagement on the part of French middle-class intellectuals in struggles against capitalist exploitation and imperialism. A twenty-year period of radical political culture began with a small but significant opposition to the Algerian War and with the embrace by many French of a “third-worldist” north/south analysis of global politics in the wake of the enormous successes of the colonial revolutions. Such a reorientation toward the north/south axis was hardly a uniquely French phenomenon—indeed, in the form of international opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, it is the principal—and perhaps the only—factor allowing us to think of something called “the worldwide 1960s.” But the French critique of U.S. imperialism of the 1960s and 1970s was informed by a third-worldism that was highly specific. Anticolonialism that developed in France did so in a country that clung tenaciously to its colonies through its own seven-year war in Vietnam, followed by another eight years of intense war in Algeria, and in a country that then went on to become a far from disinterested observer of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Such an anticolonialism developed perforce outside of the French Communist Party (which took a kind of wait-and-see position on Algerian independence), in far-Left circles, where it combined with a virulent anticapitalism. French third-worldism in this important sense differed markedly from the Anglo-U.S. version. The latter was born and evolved under the auspices of philanthropy and Christian charity and within an ideology of modernization and developmentalism manifest in the massive aid campaigns launched by the United States at the end of World War II. The aid went to underdeveloped—the term was invented by those same aid campaigns—countries the United States feared were in danger of becoming Communist after having achieved independence. Third-worldism in France, on the other hand, which arose in part as a critical response to the U.S. aid campaigns, was dominated by an analysis based on class relations. “Colonial subject” and worker were fused into a single agent of class struggle, and all of the universalizing power of the proletariat was projected onto the rebellion of the colonized. Radical Left political culture in France, from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, was in this way characterized by an inextricable merging of the discourses of anti-imperialism and those of anticapitalism.
French third-worldism had an exceptional impact, at a mass level, on the political life of the country. It was the leading catalyst of May 1968—an event that was itself the largest mass movement in modern French history, the biggest strike in the history of the French labor movement, and the only “general” insurrection the overdeveloped world has known since World War II. The prehistory of 1968 in France lies in the radical anticolonialism associated with French and Francophone thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Verges, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and with the Asian, African, and Latin American theorists translated into French in the inexpensively priced paperback series, the Petite Collection Maspero—required reading for everyone on the Left throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It lies in the attempt to link the stakes of Algerian independence to a leftist alternative in France. For it was the war in Algeria that provided the background noise of the childhood of the militants of 1968; striking workers and their supporters in the streets had all seen, in the context of the final years of that war, to what use the Gaullist regime put its police.
At the level of political practice, a new kind of mass organizing (against the Algerian War in the early 1960s and later against the Vietnam War) took students outside of the university to workers’ housing and popular neighborhoods in the outskirts of the city; it brought previously segregated social groups into new forms of contact and sociability. Political organizing that involved physical dislocation ended up becoming a dislocation in the idea of politics—moving it out of its place, its proper place, which at that time for the Left meant the Communist Party.
In their subsequent rewriting of the event, New Philosophers and other reformed militants did succeed in, in effect, “Americanizing” its memory into a playful, countercultural, libertarian eruption of free expression. And they did so in large part by forgetting or excising that prehistory. A whole world disappears: the war in Vietnam, the iconography of Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh, and the efforts of editors like Maspero to convey directly how people engaged in political struggle talked about that struggle. Gone was any image of a militant or combative third world—a forgetting made necessary by the need to discover a different third world just a few years later: the Third World as figured in human rights discourse. Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” as the name for an emergent political agency would be essentially reinvented in the late 1970s: The new Third World is still wretched, but its agency and political subjectivity have disappeared, leaving only the misery of a collective victim of famine, flood, or authoritarian state apparatuses. In a series of articles, essays, books and media events that culminated with a 1985 conference held in Paris and organized by Doctors Without Borders, Pascal Bruckner, Bernard Kouchner, and other reformed gauchistes put what Bruckner was fond of calling “the imbecilic masochism of third-worldism” on trial, suggesting that in the wake of decolonization, former third-world colonies have reverted back to their pre-colonical state of barbarism, savagery, and unabated misery. Political solutions to problems were a thing of the past—nothing could be done, it seems, but to aid the victims of human and natural disaster. Previous political rebellions in the Third World are rewritten as minor battles in the war between the titans of East and West and seen as direct maneuvers on the part of the Soviet Union. In this way the map of the Gulag gets extended to include the entire Third World as well: Totalitarianism is equated with communism and the old struggles that pitted the colonized against the colonizers are seen as nothing more than a projection of East-West relations.
When some of yesterday’s third-worldists reemerged into the public eye, they did so under the banner of the traditional values of bourgeois imperialist ideology: human rights, liberty, and democracy—all of which were seen to emanate uniquely from the West. And it was a West that was increasingly taking on the appearance of a besieged fortress, as the “yellow peril” imagery of founding New Philosopher Maurice Clavel indicates:
Let’s be quite frank. Is the West bent on suicide? If it is, then the end is not far off. just look at our little promontory and think that, with the elimination of the Cultural Revolution figures and the ongoing Sino-Soviet reconciliation, a billion robots are already resting their weight on the Elbe. Those two billion eyes blinking, or rather not blinking—we talk much less about them than about the municipal elections. But they are what is key. . . .7
Europeans, wrote Bruckner in the textbook of anti-Third Worldism he published in 1982 titled Tears of the White Man, should throw off the shackles of the guilt complex caused by perspectives that viewed western wealth as having accrued at the expense of poor countries. They should return to both a fortified notion of self and a fortified Europe of strong values. “Europe is our destiny, our lot. More than ever, we develop as individuals through the respect of its borders, its traditions, and its territorial integrity.”8 Well before Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” Glucksmann, Bruckner, Levy and other reformed 1968-ers had reconfigured the world beyond Euro-America into a kind of invading force of absolute alterity against which it would now be the vocation of a small elite group, namely western intellectuals, to remain ever vigilant.9 To the western intellectual falls the task of safeguarding the ineffable difference between barbarism and culture, a role not at all incompatible with a construction of “the barbarian,” or anyone who lives outside the West, as at times an object of pity or compassion, in need of humanitarian aid from the West. Victim and barbarian were the flip sides of the same coin, and beginning in the 1980s they became virtually the only guises available through which the non-westerner could become visible to the West.
At work then in the anti-Third Worldist discourse of the early 1980s is a three-part transformation. First, by trading in (and trading on) their former expertise in insurrection, ex-gauchistes are allowed to reemerge in the imperial guise of the “official dissident-intellectual.” Secondly, the colonial or third-world other of the 1960s is refigured and transformed from militant and articulate fighter and thinker to “victim” by a defense of human rights strictly identified as the rights of the victim, the rights of those who do not have the means to argue their rights, or to create a political solution to their own problems. They are those who cannot help themselves. The interest awakened by the Third World in the West is thus now in inverse proportion to its political force, to its capacity to construct its own future, or to have any remote bearing on our own. The pathos of the victim rivets attention onto the effects of the crisis immediately at hand, blocking any analysis of the processes that led to such a crisis; a rhetoric of emergency reinforces thought’s paralysis. Gone is any attempt to document or understand the historical and political context of the oppressed—there is no time for that. The new figuration of the victim occurs in a regime of pure actuality created by the rhetoric of emergency, an eternal present that not only dispossesses the victim of her own history but removes her from history itself. In the new politics of emotion, subject and object are described in different, indeed invidious terms, with the objects of the relationship—the victims—bearing distinctive and distinctively less equal, qualities than the subjects from the West. In fact, to call it a politics of emotion is something of a misnomer. For to what extent can the figure of suffering—the new generic figure of alterity in the 1980s and 1990s appearing nightly on television screens in the West—lead in and of itself to a politics? Are pity and moral indignation political emotions?
At stake then is a third transformation, a change in the relation of French intellectual to third-world other, one that takes the form of the retreat I have been tracing from politics into ethics. The third-worldism of the early 1960s resulted in a political relation to radical anticolonial movements to the extent that that engagement was predicated on dis-identifying or breaking with the systems and patterns of allegiance that had once grounded one’s identity—with the French state, for example, or the Communist Party. The new, ethical relation to alterity is grounded instead in a fortification, even a hypertrophy of identity—of the West, its values, of the intellectual as professional spokesperson for the suffering. And the suffering now, within the contemporary regime of representation governing the humanitarian victim, by definition cannot speak and can only attain visibility within highly overdetermined logics of aesthetics and marketing. The new relation involves quasi-military acts of rescue and the emergency landing of doctors—“commandos in white coats” in the words of Claude Liauzu10—into perilous situations. Liauzu’s phrase underlines the way in which parachuting doctors were frequently indistinguishable from their colonial parachutiste predecessors, the way in which humanitarian pretexts sometimes masked the deceptively colonial character of rescue interventions into third-world “hot-spots.” In fact, the pre- and postindependence Third World comes to elicit the same imperialist shibboleths, as human rights rhetoric takes on an uncanny resemblance to the old songs about the moral mission of colonialism and the salutary arrival of the West. It is only a short step from reasserting Eurocentric moralism to justifying such neocolonial adventures as the expansion of capital might require—perhaps no step at all. For only a difference of degree and not one of essence separates a military from a humanitarian intervention. The moral imperative used to plead the right to humanitarian intervention quickly transmutes that right into an obligation and then, even more quickly, into an obligation that must be given all the force of an armed intervention. By rehabilitating values of freedom, human rights, and a frantic antistatism, France once again had the right (and the duty) to intervene in Chad, as it did in 1983 with the full support of Kouchner and Glucksmann. Similarly, Ronald Reagan and the United States must be urged, as did a petition signed by Levy along with converted Maoists, Jacques and Claudie Broyelle, in Le Monde on March 21, 1985, to maintain and increase its aid to the Contras in Nicaragua. Hocquenghem, in his 1985 Lettre ouverte, focused much of his scathing attack on his former 1968 comrades against what he calls the new “warrior moralism” and militaristic fantasies of the ex-gauchistes, to the emergence of doctors like Kouchner prescribing the correct dosage of human rights and bombs. It was the same intelligentsia, Hocquenghem notes, who rallied around the installation of Cruise missiles in western Europe in the early 1980s and France’s sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985.
Anti-Third Worldists of the 1980s take on the figure of the colonial other and modify its features into that of the adoptable child, the people-object, in need of emergency rescue. A whole new imaginary of the Third World comes into play as the painstaking work of reestablishing their moral credentials after 1968 reaches fruition for many reformed gauchistes. But the new Third World imaginary is not, as I have suggested, completely new, but rather an uncanny reprisal: the discovery of humanitarian adventure and “ambulance-politics” remobilizes neo-romantic colonialist tropes, the old themes of departure and leaving gray Europe behind. Rescue operations in extreme situations—floods and famines—offer the only “pure” choice, one untainted by politics, as well as the only pure victim. Yet even at the time some critics noticed that denunciations of third-world totalitarianism on the part of the media intelligentsia were almost invariably directed against left-wing regimes; Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and Reagan’s Contra Wars, for example, elicited no calls for emergency interventions, while efforts to eradicate the democratically elected—but leftist, and thus totalitarian—government in Nicaragua were to be supported.
The generic figure of alterity today, as I mentioned, has two faces: barbarian (terrorist) or victim. The suffering face of the permanent victim appeared regularly on our TV screens throughout the 1990s in urgent need of emergency medical/philanthropic rescue. Humanitarianism, some call it; ambulance politics, say others. History became punctuated by a succession of urgencies—medical, sexual, technical, economic, and military—that alienate the present into extreme moments, into so many imminent menaces. History became a spectacle of such urgencies: Faces from the most distant places on the planet stare out at us from the midst of terrifying situations (famines, genocidal programs, and brutal repressions). The ethico-moral discourse of human rights, which was spawned by the New Philosophers in the 1970s from the need to repudiate not just the ideology of 1968 but its memory, has reinforced a discourse that projects violence definitively outside of the West and renders it all the more visible in that it is perceived to emanate from faraway countries. In this it ultimately serves the interest of the New World Order, whose own discourse, as Jacques Rancière and others have pointed out, manipulates many of the same tropes and figures.11 The defense of human rights is identified solely with the rights of the victim and not with those of the thinker, militant, or historical agent. And the infinite suffering of the victim grants the defender of the victim’s rights infinite power—or “infinite justice” as George W. Bush briefly called the Pentagon’s offensive against that infinite enemy, terrorism. The obligation of assisting the victims of absolute evil becomes indistinguishable from the deployment of an unlimited military power—a police force charged with bringing order to any part of the world where evil may be lurking.
The “trial of Marxism,” the discourse on the Gulag, and the emergence of human rights as the only acceptable basis for political action thus served many purposes. First and foremost, it allowed certain converted gauchistes to secure a prime enunciatory position in the post-1968 political landscape. But it also made it easier to avoid confronting the frustrations, contradictions, and disappointments of their own militant past. This chapter has only discussed the French case and the reaction to May 1968, but throughout the overdeveloped world the reaction to the failure of similar 1968s, specifically, and, more broadly, the inability of the New Left to achieve domestic transformation produced similar effects. Michael Ignatieff, in an earlier, more reflective tone than the one that has subsequently overtaken him, describes the rush of first-world intellectuals to champion intervention in Bosnia in the name of human rights was “driven by narcissism.” “We intervened not only to save others,” admits Ignatieff, “but to save ourselves, or rather an image of ourselves as defenders of universal decencies. We wanted to show that the West ‘meant’ something . . . . Bosnia became the latest bel espoir of a generation that had tried ecology, socialism, and civil rights only to watch all these lose their romantic momentum.”12 Returning specifically to France, in exiling their own political history, the New Philosophers took a crucial first step in the liquidation of historical analysis per se. The contents of popular movements, their origins and aspirations, the grassroots history of emancipatory struggles—all this could now be cast aside as well.
Guy Hocquenghem, Lettre ouverte a ceux qui sont passés du col Mao au Rotary (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986), 17. Hocquenghem’s acerbic assessments of his former comrades were surprisingly accurate: “Today when people talk about ethics, they mean returning to their parents’ morality. When people like Finkelkraut or Bernard-Henri Lévy talk about the return to ethics, it’s just a way to disguise how they’re serving an older moralism.” Cited in Elisabeth Salvaresi, Mai en heritage (Paris: Editions Syros, 1988), 21.
Bernard-Henri Levy, cited in J. Paugham, ed., Génération perdue (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1977), 176.
See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1966) and Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism: A Theory of Political Systems (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
See Peter Dews, “The Nouvelle Philosophie and Foucault,” Economy and Society 8, no. 2 (May 1979): 128. For my description of the ideological changes wrought by the New Philosophers, I have relied on this essay, along with another by Dews, “The New Philosophers and the End of Leftism,” in The Radical Philosophy Reader, ed. Roy Edgley and Richard Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 361-84; Hocquenghem, Lettre ouverte; Dominique Lecourt, Dissidence ou Rivolution? (Paris: Maspero, 1978); Jean-Pierre Garnier and Roland Lews, “From the Wretched of the Earth to the Defense of the West: An Essay on Left Disenchantment in France,” The Socialist Register (1984): 299-323; Robert Linhart, “Western ‘Dissidence’ Ideology and the Protection of the Bourgeois Order,” Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies (London: Ink Links, 1979); as well as the account offered in my Many ‘68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 138-208.
For a fuller treatment of the battles surrounding the memory of 1968 and third-worldism in France, see Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 158-169.
In certain cases, notably that of Levy, political errors of the past had to first be invented to be later confessed.
Maurice Clavel, cited in Le Nouvel Observateur (November 22, 1976).
Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man (New York: Free Press, 1986), 156.
And vigilant they have remained. From the early 1980s, when Levy signed a petition published in Le Monde urging Ronald Reagan to increase support to the Contras in Nicaragua, and when Glucksmann supported the French invasion of Chad, to the present, the politics of these extremely vocal editorialists has remained consistent. During the U.S. invasion of Iraq, they were characteristically loud in proclaiming their fraternal alliance with the United States. Their stance was that of solitary, isolated, dissident men of justice, bone-weary from being forced to lead the battle for liberty and modernity against what Bruckner and Glucksmann, referring to widespread French opposition to the war, called “the quasi-Soviet ambiance that has welded together 90% of the population into the triumph of a monolithic way of thinking,” and, in the same text, “the nationalism of imbeciles.” From “La Faute,” Le Monde, April 15, 2003. While Levy claimed afterward to have opposed the war, any opposition he expressed was drowned out by his adamant self-characterization as an “anti-anti-American.”
See Claude Liauzu, L‘enjeu tiersmondiste: Débats et combats (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988) and Claude Liazu, “Le tiersmondisme des intellectuels en accusation,” Vingtième siècle 12 (Oct.-Dec. 1986), 73-80.
See for example Jacques Rancière, “Le 11 septembre et après: une rupture de l‘ordre symbolique?” Lignes (May 2002): 35-46. See also Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2002).
The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997), 95.