FATOS TARIFA is a former Albanian ambassador to
the United States and a Visiting Professor at Eastern
Michigan University. He is the author, most recently,
of Europe Adrift on the Wine-Dark Sea (2007).
In the midst of intense anti-American sentiments
prevailing in France and throughout
much of Europe early in 2006, a book by
Bernard-Henri Lévy, American Vertigo (Random
House), made it to bookstores all across
the United States. It was apparently directed
against the French and European anti-Americanism
that has become rampant since the
2003 invasion of Iraq. Lévy, who visited
America in 2004, wrote his book to assess
“the state of health of American democracy”
1 one hundred seventy-three years after
Alexis de Tocqueville published his seminal
work Democracy in America. To most Americans,
Lévy is a totally unknown author. His
name, however, is not quite unknown to
those familiar with French intellectual life of
the past three decades.
Lévy is a French quondam philosopher, a
wealthy bon vivant, bohemian intellectual,
who, with his movie-star lifestyle, his picture
frequently featured on the cover of the Paris
Match magazine, and his celebrity friends the
late Yves Saint-Laurent, Alain Delon, and
Salman Rushdie, has long become a fixture
of the continental gossip rags. A man not
particularly encumbered by modesty, Lévy
is anecdotally known for his words “God is
dead, but my hair is perfect.” American Vertigo,
as the author himself admits, is “not a
book of philosophy,” but “it’s journalism, it
is literature, it is funny,” it is also, still in his
words, “un geste philosophique.” It is precisely
this “philosophical gesture” in Lévy’s most
recent book that recaptured my sociological
imagination, to use C. Wright Mills’s language,
which, by grasping history and biography
and the relationship between the two
within French society, evoked a glitzy but
otherwise short-lived episode in France’s
intellectual history of the mid-1970s that
came to be known as the Nouvelle Philosophie
(New Philosophy). The self-announced antianti-
American author of American Vertigo,
Bernard-Henri Lévy, was its founder and the
figurehead of an assemblage of a dozen or so
young intellectuals in Paris, whose “new
philosophy” vanished as swiftly from the
French intellectual stage as it appeared on it.
I.
The May 1968 events in France, as well as a
number of political events from the mid-
1950s to the second half of the 1970s, produced
a profound crise de conscience in French
Marxist thought. The Nouvelle Philosophie
emerged as a byproduct of this crisis. A
coterie of French intellectuals, self-proclaimed
“new philosophers,” frantically denounced
all forms of Marxism as a “philosophy of
domination” and, as Lévy put it, an “opium
for the people.” The “shocking” novelty of
their “new” philosophy was believed to
mark the “end” of Marxism in French social
thought. Thirty years later, however, a number
of questions linger in the intellectual
horizon. What was new in the Nouvelle
Philosophie? What were its tenets? Why did it
fail to emerge as a distinctive school of
thought? If Marx est mort, as the “new
philosophers” and the media announced with
fanfare in the mid-1970s, why couldn’t the
French “new philosophy” escape the fate of
an ephemeral phenomenon? Were the “new
philosophers” misunderstood, incorrectly
interpreted, or badly read in their time? Or
did they simply fail to provide a new conceptual
framework for the understanding and
the interpretation of human society at the fin
de siècle? In what follows I attempt to answer
some of these questions.
II.
France is a country where Marxism in one
form or another, but most importantly in the
form of Marxist existentialism and humanism
as developed in the writings of Jean-Paul
Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well
as of a more orthodox Marxism championed
by Louis Althusser in the early 1960s, has
provided a dominant frame of reference for
work in philosophy, sociology, and the “human
sciences” ever since the end of World
War II.2 During the first two decades after
the war the grip of Marxism on the minds of
French intellectuals was virtually complete. It
became the cerebral orthodoxy in Parisian
intellectual life, or as Jean-Paul Sartre put it,
the “unsurpassable horizon” of the age. As a
matter of fact, it remained so even as it was
reinterpreted in light of existentialism, surrealism,
Saussurean structural linguistics, and
even Freudian psychology.
It was not until the mid-1960s—a period
of affluence, mobility, and individualism
produced by remarkable economic growth,
decline in working-class activism, and the
tedious sclerosis of the Partie Communiste
Français—that the intellectual reign of Marxism
in France became vulnerable to profoundly
ideological and political attacks from
all sides of the intellectual establishment.
Marxism lost its terrain to structuralism and
to what is called post-structuralism in the
Anglo-Saxon world. It was now clear that
capitalism, which Marx had so thoroughly
analyzed a century earlier, was no longer the
same, and the alternative of a revolutionary
transformation of capitalist society was neither
the order of the day nor desirable
anymore. Structuralist movements at this
time not only called into question every
aspect of modern liberal life, they also seemed
to wipe out all hope of escaping the tentacles
of “power” through political action. Instead,
they offered “new possibilities” for resistance,
including what Lévy considered a
“moral and religious resistance against the
evil.”3 The shift was of such magnitude that,
as Mark Lilla points out, “rather than resisting
in action the dehumanization of man on
the basis of a rational analysis of history, one
resisted in theory the idea of a ‘man’, ‘reason’,
and ‘history’ as the oppressive products
of ideology,”4
After the rise of the New Left and the events of
May ’68, all this became clear. An idiosyncratic
historical work like Michel Foucault’s Discipline
and Punish succeeded in casting a far darker
shadow of suspicion over liberal society than
Louis Althusser’s laborious analyses of Marx’s
Capital in the mid sixties….Politically, May ’68
marked the beginning of the end of Marxism, with
Maoism and the “boutique” movements of the
early seventies (feminism, ecologism, “Third
Worldism”) left glowing like embers of a dying
fire.5
This radical transformation in the intellectual
life of France and other parts of
Western Europe was further influenced by a
series of political events, such as the Hungarian
tragedy in 1956, the 1968 Soviet repression
of the “Prague Spring,” and the invasion
of Czechoslovakia, the publication of
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago
in 1973 and its translation in 1974 and, as
significantly, the butcheries in Cambodia in
the second half of the 1970s. By revealing the
repressive nature of state socialism and shaking
liberal sympathies for Third World socialism,
such events set off a profound crise de
conscience among French intellectuals.
There is no doubt that the signs of crisis in
French Marxist thought had appeared much
earlier. One of the events that bred such a
crisis was the Korean conflict in 1950. For
Merleau-Ponty the war in Korea proved the
imperialist nature of the Soviet Union,
whereas for Sartre it marked “the end of
idealism” and the beginning of “realism.” It
was in the mid-1950s that Merleau-Ponty,
in his Les aventures de la dialectique (1955,
Adventures of the Dialectic), announced his
renunciation of Marxism.
There is not much point in trying Bolshevism all
over again at the moment when its revolutionary
failure becomes apparent. But neither is there
much sense in trying Marx all over again if his
philosophy is involved in this failure or in acting
as if this philosophy came out of this affair intact.6
For Sartre, it was a few years later when,
in his La critique de la raison dialectique (1960,
Critique of Dialectical Reason), he “settled
the accounts” both with his own previous
thought and with that of the Communists,
who, he then believed, falsified “true Marxism.”
7 It was the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s
work, however, that had the most shocking
impact among French intellectuals. As Lévy
puts it, Solzhenitsyn’s work was “enough to
immediately shake our mental landscape and
overturn our ideological guideposts.”8 In the
span of a few years, intellectuals who once
subscribed to Sartre’s view on Marxism as
the “unsurpassable horizon” of our time
began to confess that Communist totalitarianism
might fall within that horizon and not
be a historical accident that can be explained
simply as a consequence of the Bolsheviks’
mistakes and the Stalinist deviations. Such a
view was most eloquently expressed by Michel
Foucault in his review of André Glucksmann’s
Les maîtres penseurs (The Master Thinkers),
which was for Foucault himself a final settling
of accounts with Marxism.
The whole of a certain left has attempted to
explain the Gulag…in terms of the theory of
history, or at least the history of theory. Yes, yes,
there were massacres, but that was a terrible error.
Just reread Marx or Lenin, compare them with
Stalin and you will see where the latter went
wrong. It is obvious that all those deaths could
only result from a misreading. It was predictable:
Stalinism-error was one of the principal agents
behind the return to Marxism-truth, to Marxism-
text, which we saw in the 1960s. If you want
to be against Stalin, don’t listen to the victims;
they will only recount their tortures. Reread the
theoreticians: they will tell you the truth.9
Such was, briefly, the context in which
the nouvelle philosophie emerged in the mid-
1970s.
III.
The expression “nouveaux philosophes” (new
philosophers) derived from the title of a
dossier edited by Lévy in the literary weekly
Les Nouvelles Littéraires in June 1976. The
collective noun referred to a number of
young—and for the most part unknown—
intellectuals including Lévy himself, Jean-
Marie Benoist, Michel Guérin, Christian
Jambet, and Guy Lardreau. The dossier
consisted of several articles presenting the
views of such young authors, interspersed
with interviews or exchanges of letters with
well-known figures such as Claude Lévi-
Strauss and Roland Barthes. In this way the
impression was created that the imprimatur of
the philosophico-literary establishment was
granted to the “new movement,” which the
dossier purported to herald. Lévy’s introduction
of the dossier aimed at producing maximum
impact in public, giving the impression
that something truly new, original, unusual,
ground-breaking, and exciting was happening
in French thought, but displaying also a
number of important theoretical points of
reference—from Nietzsche and Heidegger
to structuralism’s “Gang of Four”: Lévi-
Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, and Althusser.
A month later, Le Nouvel Observateur,
France’s leading left-wing weekly, published
a lengthy article by Gérard Petitjean,10 in
which a number of other young writers were
launched as “new philosophers” including
Jean-Paul Dollé, André Glucksmann, Jean
Baudrillard, Guy Hocquenhem, and Nikos
Poulantzas. Although that article made no
reference to Maurice Clavel, Gilles Susong,
Alain Finkielkraut, and Philippe Nemo, the
latter were no less affiliated with the nouvelle
philosophie than the others. Most of the thirteen
or fourteen “new philosophers” ranged
in age from twenty-eight to forty. Lévy, the
youngest of all, emerged as the mastermind,
the founder, the figurehead, and de facto
spokesman of this shifting assemblage, not
least because most of the “new philosophers”
were published in the “Figures” and
“Théoriciens” series which he edited for
Grasset.11
Although the label “new philosopher” was
inevitably a somewhat fluid term, not least of
all because it is stretching the word to call any
of them—apart from Glucksmann—a “philosopher,”
the authors who were self-styled
the “nouveaux philosophes” moved rapidly to
the center of attention. They dominated
public perception of the day, creating the
impression that a moment of philosophical
adventure was happening in contemporary
French thought. They were featured on
magazine covers and TV talk shows and,
mirabile dictu, became overnight celebrities.
They made headlines not only in France, but
also in Germany, England, Italy, and to some
extent also in the United States. Time described
the advent of the “new philosophy”
as “probably the liveliest intellectual hubbub
to hit Paris since the early 1950s.”12 For the
rest of 1976 and the next year or so the
nouvelle philosophie truly became media property.
Appearances on television and public
debates were accompanied by a flood of
press interviews, many in magazines not
normally noted for their interest in philosophical
or political issues, such as Lui, Paris-
Match, the French edition of Playboy, etc. It
seemed impossible to read a Parisian newspaper
or to turn on the radio without finding
some mention of the “nouveaux philosophes.”13
Media exposure of the nouvelle philosophie
was so great as to lead to a new coinage: “pub
philosophie“14 (from “publicité philosophie“—
publicity philosophy). In summer 1976, Paris
was once again showing itself to be the city
where fashion in the realm of ideas moves
faster than anywhere else, as was earlier the
case with the art nouveau, the nouveau roman,
the nouveau cinéma, and the nouveau réalisme.
Besides their young age, there were basically
two things that the “new philosophers”
had in common: first, they emerged from
the same socio-political context; second,
they shared certain political beliefs and philosophical
assumptions. More specifically, however,
the “new philosophers” shared a common
past of Maoist gauchisme15 and their
actual anti-Marxism. As Sheehan metaphorically
puts it, they all had set flame to their
recent Maoist past and “had risen like Phoenix
from the ashes to go on to condemn
Marxism and modern liberalism, the Gulag
and Coca-Cola, fascism of the left and the
right…and the rule of the masses.”16 David
Macey, in his biography of Michel Foucault,
points out that to the extent that any unity
could be found in the work of this somewhat
disparate group, it was “a negative unity
centered upon a violent rejection of Marxism
in all its forms.”17 On a cynical view,
such as that of Gilles Deleuze, the “varieties”
of the nouvelle philosophie—Christian, leftist,
liberal, Nietzschean—were simply “different
ways of dressing up the same reactionary
message so as to appeal to as many tastes as
possible.”18
Virtually all the “new philosophers”—
except for Benoist—had a leftist past. They
were veterans of the May ’68 movement and
former leftist militants descending from different
Maoist groups.19 Their biography of
political militancy became an almost indispensable
trademark for the “new philosophers,”
for it provided not only the authenticity
of disillusionment in their denunciations
of Marxism, but also served as “a source
of moral authority for their later pronouncements
and provided their work with a vague
aura of leftism.”20 For the media, the “new
philosophers” belonged to a “lost generation,”
disillusioned by the fading of the
dreams and expectations of May 1968, yet
continuing to bear witness to the “inner
truth” of that movement.
The extreme gauchisme of the “new philosophers,”
which was tempered on the road
from Althusser through a French-style
Maoism, was converted in the mid-1970s,
under the impact of the Soviet and East
European dissidents, into open anti-Marxism.
They subscribed to the idea that Marxism
is an evil and an obsolete ideology that
leads inevitably to totalitarianism and terror.
For them, Marx and his holy scriptures alone
were responsible for the Soviet labor camps
and all the crimes committed by state socialism.
This conviction became the central
thesis of Glucksmann’s La cuisinière et le
mangeur d’hommes (1975, The Cook and the
Man-Eater), and was further expanded in his
Les maîtres penseurs (1977).
The first book is a generalization from the
Soviet example to all of Marx and all socialism.
Inspired by Solzhenitsyn’s disclosures of
the horrors of Stalin’s Gulag, La cuisinière is
a favorable review of the Gulag Archipelago in
terms of Foucault’s reading of the European
prison system and lunatic asylums.
Glucksmann, who had been Foucault’s student,
described the revolt of the “new philosophers”
against Marxism as a refusal to be
swept along the rails of “a system that was
issued 150 years ago by an illustrious longbeard.”
Marx and his nineteenth-century
philosophical doctrine, which was not only
out of date but, most importantly, dangerous
in the new era, were made responsible for all
crimes committed by Stalin since, according
to Glucksmann, there would have been “no
Russian camps without Marxism.”21 Communism,
in his view, equals Nazism, for “a
camp is a camp, be it Russian or Nazi.”22
Lévy, on his part, simply echoed
Glucksmann’s view when in his La barbarie à
visage humain (1977, Barbarism with a Human
Face)—a patchwork of ideas borrowed
from the writings of his associates (Lardreau,
Jambet, and Glucksmann), which immediately
became a bestseller—he strongly attacked
the promises of Marxism as empty,
blaming Marx for all evils of the Soviet
Union where the state had grown into a
monstrous “reactionary machine.” “The
Soviet camps,” Lévy rephrased, “are Marxist,
as Marxist as Auschwitz was Nazi.”23 All
this, according to Lévy, became evident
with Solzhenitsyn, whom Lévy called “the
Dante of our time,” and “the Shakespeare of
our time, the only one who knows how to
point out the monsters.”
We needed another Divine Comedy to represent
Hell, the modern Hell of the Gulag, whose
horrendous topography he [Solzhenitsyn] has
outlined in book after book. Hence there was a
chain reaction, first of all within reference to
Marxism. It was enough that Solzhenitsyn spoke
for us to wake up from a dogmatic sleep. All he had
to do was to appear, and a very long history finally
came to an end: the history of those Marxists who,
for thirty years, had been retracing the path of
decadence in search of their guilty party, moving
sorrowfully from the “bureaucratic phenomenon”
to the “Stalinist deviation,” from Stalin’s
“crimes” to Lenin’s “faults,” finally from Leninism
to the blunders of the earliest apostles, going
through the layers of the Marxian soil one by one,
sacrificing a scapegoat at each step, but always
preserving above suspicion the one he dares to
denounce for the first time—the founding father
himself, Karl Capital and his holy scriptures.24
Like Glucksmann, Lévy found that
Foucault’s description of the great confinement
in his Histoire de la folie (History of the
Madness) was applicable to the Soviet Union
and, therefore, he called for “a Foucauldian
analysis” of Soviet society. The advocacy of
the “new philosophers” for the Soviet dissidents
and for Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago
was so zealous that Deleuze, in a
virulent pamphlet, expressed his disdain,
saying that he was disgusted by the way the
“new philosophers” were trying to create “a
martyrology…feeding on corpses, blaming
the inhabitants of the Gulag for not having
‘understood’ earlier,” and showing rather
“too much scorn for the inhabitants of the
Gulag.”25 Other authors also criticized the
“new philosophers” on similar grounds, pointing
out that with their writings they only
“contributed to make the reality of Gulag a
myth.”26
IV.
Critics usually agree that the “shocking”
novelty of the “new philosophers” consisted
of the fact that they were a group of young
intellectuals who were no longer prepared to
dialogue with—or work within—the framework
of Marxism but openly denounced it as
a philosophy of domination.27 For them,
Marxism had proved incapable of explaining
the struggles and the sufferings of men in
the present day. Its theoretical tools were no
longer valid; hence, as Lévy wrote in his La
barbarie, it had become “urgent to rethink
the spectrum of our society, according to
new guides, new systems of power, and new
orders of concepts.”28
The question for the “new philosophers”
was not criticizing Marxism as a philosophy
and ideology and its alteration in light of the
new social realities. Their aim was rather an
out-and-out liquidation of Marxism as a
worldview. In 1970, Jean-Marie Benoist
had announced the “end” of Marxism in his
book Marx est mort (Marx is Dead). After
decades in which the vast majority of French
intellectuals had almost unanimously adhered
to Marxism, the attitude of the “new
philosophers” seemed now to mark an important
departure. Whereas the Paris events
of May ’68 had led to the “stagnation” of
French Marxism, the advent first of Deleuze’s
“philosophies of desire” (1970-1975), and
then of the nouvelle philosophie (1976-1978)
“marked the ‘disappearance’ of Marxism—
at least temporarily—from the field of discussion
in France.”29
Be that as it may, the “new philosophers”
cannot be credited with originality in regard
to their vehement denunciation of Marx and
Marxism. Anti-Marxism in French modern
thought did not arise in 1977. As early as
1948—that is, three decades before the “new
philosophers” voiced their anger at and
repugnance of Marx, Marxism, and the
Soviet totalitarian system to which it was
applied—Marxism and Sovietism were
strongly denounced by Claude Lefort, who
was directly influenced by Victor
Kravchenko’s book I Chose Freedom. Other
important examples of earlier denunciation
of Marxism in French modern thought include
Raymond Aron’s L’opium des intellectuels
(1955, The Opium of the Intellectuals), and
Merleau-Ponty’s Les aventures de la dialectique.
Earlier still, André Gide and Arthur Koestler,
among others, had abandoned communism
and Marxism to which they had previously
subscribed, in bitter disillusionment with
Stalin’s purges and the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact of 1939.
Despite the zealous ambition of the “new
philosophers” to search for tools for understanding
the new social world more adequate
than those Marxism provided, they were
utterly unable to create any coherent system
of concepts and propositions. The “New
Philosophy” indeed produced nothing that
could be compared with other philosophical
schools (i.e. the Frankfurt School or existentialism),
nor were the “new philosophers”
allied to one another through some kind of a
common doctrine. One could argue, as
Hirschhorn does, that the “new philosophy”
was, in 1976–1977, still “a school in the
making.”30 But even if we agree with such a
claim for a moment, there is no doubt that
the “new philosophy” failed to emerge as a
distinctive school of thought, regardless of
some praise it received initially. On the one
hand, besides their rejection of Marxism,
which became a central theme in all fourteen
books that the “new philosophers” churned
out and in numerous magazine and newspaper
articles and interviews—their whole theoretical
repertoire—there was not much else
that they had in common. Even though
almost every one of them declared himself a
moralist in philosophy, a nominalist in
worldview, and an anti-totalitarian in politics,
it is impossible to discuss the “new
philosophers” as if they represented a unified
viewpoint on anything.31 At the crest of their
jubilation, in 1978, Michael Ryan pointed
out that
The “new philosophers” could be said to exist in
name only. The homogeneity of the movement
rests on a mutual espousal of heterogeneity.
Hence, their “program”: a rejection of authority
of any kind whatsoever (be it right or left), a
pessimistic belief that the Master (any form of
authoritarian power, from parents to state) is
ineliminable, that the only moral alternative is
neutrality or a Christian detachment from the
arena of power, that the only political alternative
is a perpetual revolt which dances constantly out
of the grasp of the Master in the hope of a future
free from mastery; a condemnation of reason as a
weapon which reinforces mastery in the form of
state power; and finally (and it is this which has
earned them notoriety) an arraignment of
Eurocommunism, as well as of Marx and of
socialism in general, as a modern Master, whose
inevitable expression is Gulag.32
Despite the public perception that the
“new philosophers” formed a coherent group,
they themselves insisted that there were important
differences in their views and some
bridled at being lumped together. The group’s
oldest member, as well as its best-regarded
thinker, Glucksmann, refused even to be
grouped with them.
On the other hand, the content of their
works also is eclectic. Emmanuel Garrigues
refers to Glucksmann’s works as an example
of philosophical eclectism where Nietzsche,
Wagner, Clausewitz, and Mao Tse-tung are
all mixed up together.33 Peter Dews, for his
part, points out that the work of the “new
philosophers” is in fact an “ill-considered
mélange of theories, attitudes, and responses,
in which positions inherited from the post-
’68 far-left mingle with themes which, under
their veneer of novelty, can be seen to belong
to the traditional repertoire of the Right.”34
Old reminiscences of Althusserian Marxism
and Maoism—although Marx, Althusser, and
Mao were now rejected en bloc—were mixed
up with a set of notions borrowed from
Lacan, Kojève, Foucault, and Solzhenitsyn,
who became their new gurus. This resulted in
an amalgam of beliefs, ranging from Lévy’s
nihilist spiritualism—at first of a moralistic
form in his La barbarie and then with plain
religious tones and references to the biblical
heritage in his Le testament de Dieu (1979,
The Testament of God), which Elle magazine
referred to as a signal of “un nouveau
mysticisme“35—to a sort of Lacanian Christianity
in the work of Philippe Nemo, and,
furthermore, to Gnosticism to be found in
L’ange (1976, The Angel), a book written by
Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet. Gilles
Deleuze, who criticized the “new philosophers”
probably more harshly than any other
French scholar, disdained them as “sophists”
and “TV buffoons,” who should be credited
for nothing.36
As was previously suggested, besides their
admiration for Solzhenitsyn, the thought
and idiom of the “new philosophy” was
marked by Lacan and Foucault. Lacan’s
work had been important for several generations
of French intellectuals, including
Merleau-Ponty, Jean Hyppolite, and Louis
Althusser. Especially after the publication of
his Ecrits in the late 1960s, Lacan became a
truly central figure. The “new philosophers”
made extensive use of Lacan’s perception of
science as an “ideology of the suppression of
the subject,” expanding it into an attack on
the “authoritarianism” implicit in the rigor
of scientific method. This, as Michael Ryan
asserts, might explain their rage against
theory, science, reason, and Marx, all of
which they lumped whole-sale with Gulag
and the concentration camps.37 For Lévy,
the totalitarian state means “scientists in
power.”38 “Total power,” he wrote, is synonymous
with “total knowledge.” The threat
of totalitarianism is even greater when a
society imposes the duty of “telling all.” This
is, in Lévy’s view, the case with state socialism
and its Marxist ideology, for by sanctifying
“the Hegelian dream of the truth
becoming the world and the world becoming
the truth, [it] ends up with an ideal which
is…one of the definitions of modern tyranny.”
39
The theme of “power/knowledge” became
central also in Glucksmann’s Les maîtres
penseurs. Inspired by Foucault, who insisted
that power is irreducible, that no system can
do away with the structures of power and
that a system can at best merely shift them,
Glucksmann extended his criticism to what
he calls “the Revolution-State,” arguing that
all philosophers, without exception, display a
will to domination, which explains their
complicity with tyrants. Rephrasing Hegel,
Glucksmann maintains that “to dominate is
to know; to know is to dominate.”40 This,
according to Glucksmann, is a vicious circle.
And the circle of circles: “The master fabricates
all the truth.”41 Glucksmann accused
modern philosophy since Hegel of intellectual
complicity in the violence of a history
dominated by principles of the revolutionary
state. Demonstrating such an understanding
of the relation pouvoir/savoir, the “new philosophers”
tried to find the seeds of “totalitarianism”
in the 1844 Manuscripts of the
young Marx and in Hegel’s Logic. In their
view, all Marxism becomes Stalinism or
Gulag, whereas the dictatorship of the proletariat
is Hegel’s monarchical state, or Fichte’s
police state. As Foucault, who welcomed the
publication of Les maîtres penseurs puts it,
Glucksmann’s basic question is: “By what
trick was German Philosophy able to turn
Revolution into the promise of a true, a good
state, and the State into the serene and
complete form of Revolution?” Foucault
himself, in his review of this book, endorsed
Glucksmann’s blanket condemnation of the
hyphenated monster “State-Revolution,”
portrayed as inevitably devouring its own
children.42
Glucksmann’s and Lévy’s views on the
complicity of knowledge and power or philosopher
and tyrant show how much the
“New Philosophy” was influenced by
Alexandre Kojève’s teachings, for it was
Kojève who, over two decades earlier, had
announced that there is “no essential difference
between the philosopher and the tyrant.”
The tyrant, according to Kojève, is
never anything but a statesman attempting to
realize a philosophical idea in the world.
Since the truth of a philosophical notion is
judged by its realization in history, the
philosopher, Kojève argues, cannot reproach
the tyrant for tyrannizing in the name of an
idea, as is always the case with modern
tyrannies, where those in power consistently
claim to represent an ideology.43
More directly still, the subject of the
knowledge/power relationship, as it was
thematized in the works of the “new philosophers,”
and their belief in the inherent oppressiveness
of reason seem to have been
inspired by Foucault’s early work Folie et
déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique
(1961, Madness and Civilization: A History of
Insanity in the Age of Reason) and, even more
importantly, by his Surveiller et punir (1975,
Discipline and Punish). For Foucault,
Power and knowledge directly imply one another….
There is no power relation without the
correlative constitution of a field of knowledge,
nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and
constitute at the same time power relations.44
Just as Foucault demonstrated that, in
general, power produces knowledge and
knowledge in turn reinforces power, so the
“new philosophers” located the origin of
authority in reason. Reason, as a powerful,
ordering, and system-making device, lies
behind the desire to create hierarchy in the
order: Theory, Party, State, Gulag; hence
the movement from rational thought, as a
form of theoretical mastery, to the concentration
camps, as a form of practical mastery.
Glucksmann considers Marxism a “rational
theology,” hence Gulag and the camps are
already inscribed in Marx’s text, which as a
rational theory has decided how things are
and which therefore constitutes a law that
demands overall obedience and precludes challenge.
In his view, Marx’s theory, because it
is a rational system, is in itself authoritarian
and, as such, it leads inevitably to Gulag.
“C’est comme ça,” that’s how it is—as Jambet
and Lardreau, citing Lacan, put it.
Similar arguments were used by other
“new philosophers” to explain the complicity
of language and power domination. Lévy,
for example, maintains that language is
power. Moreover, language is the essence of
power, and “grammar is the science of
power.” He writes:
There is an obvious relationship between the form
of power and the shape of language, between the
orders of a Prince and the images of a sentence….
There is an idiomatic science of power, an algebra
of domination, and there is no politics that is not
first of all linguistics…. Speech is not as Aristotle
proposed, a pacified space in which conflict can be
expressed; neither is it, as the Marxists say, a
political instrument which oppressors and oppressed
in turn make use of; nor is it even, as
Foucault’s followers assert, a critical stake in the
struggle for power. Language is simply power, the
very form of power, entirely shaped by power even in
its most modest rhetorical expression.45
Although we do not intend to go into
further detail as regards Lévy’s ideas on the
language/power relationship, a number of
questions instantly come to mind: Does the
oppression of man by man and political
domination coincide in time with the birth
of human language? Has language, over the
course of history, contributed to the progress
of society? How is it that some societies have
a more repressive state apparatus than others
even though they may use the same language?
Can there ever be a society free of
exploitation and class domination while
people will still speak the same language that
they use today? In this context it is appropriate
to recall the sarcastic words with which
Marx and Engels once disparaged the Young
Hegelians:
They forget, however, that to these phrases they
themselves are only opposing other phrases, and
that they are in no way combating the real existing
world when they are merely combating the
phrases of this world.46
The rejection of the “white terror of
theory” led the “new philosophers” to paradoxical
attacks on science, not because of the
falsity of its discourse, but precisely because
of its “truth.” “We have lost all the respect for
science,”47 declared Lardreau. In Lévy’s attack
on Marxism, for instance—and this
applies to the nouvelle philosophie as a whole—
his ultimate argument is not that Marxism is
a false theory of society, but rather that it is
an all-too-accurate account of the coming
fate of the West. In other words, Marxism is
authoritarian from the very outset by virtue
of its very rationality. As Lardreau and
Jambet put it, Marxism is oppressive because
it is “true,” or at least represents the
“untransvensable philosophy of our time.”48
In Lévy’s terms, “we are today enclosed
within Marxism as Ptolemaic cosmologists
were enclosed within their cosmology,”49 so
much so that to reply to Marxist theory with
a counter-theory would only result in a
lapsing back into the “discourse of the Master.”
According to Lévy, the protest against
Marxism can only take a moral form, since in
the end “nothing remains but ethics and
moral duty”—and in this, Solzhenitsyn has
shown the way:
The idea of an anti-Marxist politics is absurd,
untenable, and a contradiction in terms. Anti-
Marxism is and can be nothing but the contemporary
form of the fight against politics….For a
long time to come, we are condemned to the
language of Capital as long as we resign ourselves
to play the game of politics….We no longer have
a politics, a language, or a recourse. There remain
only ethics and moral duty. There remains only
the duty to protest against Marxism, since we
cannot forget it.50
V.
Despite a good deal of favorable response and
the unusual attention they initially received
in the French media, the “new philosophers”
never had a wide popular following, nor did
they have much impact on French intellectual
or academic life. As Deleuze pointed
out, the impact of the “new philosophers”
was due much more to self-advertisement—
media hype—than to a conscientious readership.
51 In point of fact, the critical response
in relation to the “new philosophers” in the
French academy was one of derision. Very
soon they became an object for both polemic
and mockery. One year after Lévy had
announced the aurora of the “New Philosophy”
Le Nouvel Observateur published a
“jeu-test,”52 which proposed a series of
multiple-choice questions to allow readers to
conclude if they were “new philosophers.”
Anyone who could honestly claim to have
rejected Althusser in the last year scored a
maximum of three points; rejection of Foucault
scored no points. The ideal “new philosopher”
was someone who had at various
times been an orthodox communist, a Maoist,
and a militant Roman Catholic.
The nouvelle philosophie was a fashion in
Paris. As such, it vanished quickly with the
end of the season, which lasted for about two
years. Before the 1970s ended there was no
longer any publicity for it; no important
works written by any of its adherents; no
serious reference made to them. Indeed,
since 1977 when Lévy published his La
barbarie the French public had been fed up
with the “novelties” of the “New Philosophy”
and the media fanfares. Commenting
on this, Lévy would write with sadness and
narcissism at the same time:
There is a strange discrepancy between the public
that has been reached and the one that has been
addressed, and some have to pay a heavy price for
this. I know that these books are read, but I also
know that they carry no weight; they are foreign
bodies for the official left, transplants that cannot
be assimilated by its established institutions….I
don’t think Glucksmann has persuaded anyone
on the left, and not a single Marxist has been
shaken by Marx est mort. This is not uncommon
in the history of ideas: Many significant ideas were
rejected or ignored in their age and always as a
direct result of their critical and subversive force.
The “nouveaux philosophes“…have been misunderstood,
incorrectly interpreted, and badly read.
How could it be otherwise with a somnambulistic
and somehow confused left which is still
rehearsing obscure debates about reform and
revolution, and whose theoretical spectrum has
not got beyond the sour polemics of Lenin and
Hilferding?53
Marx est mort. Yet, he remains a central
figure in much of contemporary debate in
the social sciences. This is not true for the
“new philosophers” who, apart from their
zealous ambition and self-aggrandizement
proved unable to provide a coherent frame of
reference for the understanding of the complexity
of contemporary society, which might
have defined their “movement” as a new
philosophical moment. Hence, in the history
of modern French philosophy, which Alain
Badiou defines as the history of ideas that
took shape between 1940 and the end of the
twentieth century, that is from the publication
of Sartre’s fundamental work L’être et le
néant (Being and Nothingness) in 1943 to the
last writings of Deleuze Qu’est-ce que la
philosophie? (What is Philosophy?) in 1992,54
the nouvelle philosophie occupies no place of
distinction. It failed to pass the test of time,
even though the social and intellectual milieu
and the time in which the “new philosophy”
appeared were particularly conducive to
novel ideas.
This episode in French intellectual history
provides an object lesson in how not to set
about a philosophical reconstruction of French
intellectual life, which could not be delivered
from the dominance of Marxism by a faction
of young men with no resourceful or consistent
idea of their own. The “new philosophers”
deployed a mélange of postmodern
slogans, including the denial of reason itself,
against Marxism, but offered nothing substantially
new, coherent, or noteworthy in its
place. Although historical events in the mid-
1970s had rendered Marxism intellectually
vulnerable and politically obsolete, the failure
of the “new philosophers” demonstrates
that mere opposition to discredited ideas is
not enough to introduce a new philosophical
movement without sound, coherent ideas of
its own.
NOTES
- See the conversation of Francis Fukuyama with
Bernard-Henry Lévy “It Doesn’t Stay in Vegas,” The
American Interest 1, 3 (2006): 105. - A relevant literature
on this issue includes David Caute, Communism and the
French Intellectuals (New York: Macmillan, 1964); George
Lichtheim, Marxism in Modern France (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1966); Mark Poster, Existential
Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1975); Michael Kelly, Modern French Marxism
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982); and
Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labor and
Politics in France, 1830–1881 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986); Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-
1956 (University of California Press, 1992). - Quoted
in Georges Suffert, “Bernard-Henri Lévy un philosophe
sur la montagne,” Le Point, 16 April 1979, 118–19. - Mark
Lilla, “The Legitimacy of the Liberal Age,” in M. Lilla
(ed.), New French Thought: Political Philosophy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 13. - Ibid., 13-14.
-
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 91. -
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Autoportrait à Soixante-Ans,” in Situations
X (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 149-50. - Bernard-
Henri Lévy, La barbarie à visage humain (Paris: Bernard
Grasset, 1977), 178. - Michel Foucault, “La grande
colère des faits,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 May 1977, 84-
6. - Gérard Petitjean, “Les nouveaux gourous,” Le
Nouvel Observateur, 12 July 1976, 62-68. - Lévy himself
admits that he became “a kind of sponsor, at least through
publicity and editorial judgment” (Lévy, La barbarie, 209).
Sheehan comments that without Lévy’s skillful use of the
press and television, “the so-called ‘New Philosophers’
would never have been launched” (Thomas Sheehan,
“Paris: Moses and Polytheism,” The New York Review of
Books, 24 January 1980). - See “The New Philosophers,”
Time Magazine, 12 September 1977. - David
Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography (New
York: Vintage Books, 1995), 382. - Expression used by
François Aubral and Xavier Delcourt in their book
Contre la nouvelle philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), chap.
VII. - Lévy admits that Mao Tse-tung was “the last word
in fashionable thought” in France in the late-1960s
(Henry-Bernard Lévy, American Vertigo: Traveling America
in the Footsteps of Tocqueville (New York: Random House,
2006), 4. - Sheehan, op. cit.
- Macey, op. cit., 382.
-
Gilles Deleuze, “à propos des nouveaux philosophes et
d’une problème plus general,” Minuit, 24 May 1977, No.
24. - Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 134. - Peter Dews, “The Nouvelle Philosophie and Foucault,”
Economy and Society 8, 2 (1979), 130. - André Glucksmann,
La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes: Essai sur les rapports entre
l’Etat, le marxisme et les camps de concentration (Paris: éditions
du Seuil, 1975), 40. - Ibid., 37.
- Lévy, La barbarie, 181-
182. - Ibid., 181, 180.
- Deleuze, op. cit.
- Regis
Debray, “Les pleureuses du printemps,” Le Nouvel
Observateur, 13 June 1977, 61. - Peter Dews, “The ‘New
Philosophers’ and the End of Leftism,” Radical Philosophy
24 (1980): 2. - Lévy, La barbarie, 111.
- Descombes,
op. cit., 129. - Monique Hirschhorn, “Les noveaux
philosophes: l’ecume et la vague,” Stanford French Review
2, 2 (1978): 302. - Sheehan, op. cit.
- Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak and Michael Ryan, “Anarchism Revisited: A
New Philosophy,” Diacritics (June 1978), 67-68. -
Emmanuel Garrigues, “Pour la releve des intellectuels
français le Marxisme n’est plus la valeur refuge,” Realites
381 (November 1977): 27. - Dews, “The ‘New Philosophers’
and the End of Leftism,” 2. - See “Rendez
vous avec Bernard-Henry Lévy,” Elle, 23 April 1979. - Deleuze, op. cit.
- See Spivak and Ryan, op. cit., 69.
- Lévy, La barbarie, 177.
- Ibid., 141-142.
- André
Glucksmann, Les maîtres penseurs (Paris: Bernard Grasset,
1977), 149. - Ibid., 271.
- See Foucault, op. cit.
-
Alexandre Kojève, Tyrannie et sagesse (Paris: Gallimard,
1954), 252. - Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979),
27. - Lévy, La barbarie, 48-50.
- Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Part One (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1989), 41. - Guy Lardreau,
Le singe d’or (Paris: Mercure de France, 1974), 82. - Guy
Lardreau and Christian Jambet, L’ange (Paris: Bernard
Grasset, 1976). - Lévy, La barbarie, 218.
- Ibid., 217-
218. - Deleuze, op. cit.
- “Etes-vous un ‘nouveau
philosophe’?” Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 August 1977, 46. - Lévy, La barbarie, 209-210.
- Alain Badiou, “The
Advent of French Philosophy,” New Left Review 35
(September 2005), 67.
