Winter 2009

All of those clichés about the fashionable French and the lumpen Americans cannot be entirely discounted. These differences surface even in French and American intellectual life. Compare for instance Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, who were born and died in almost the same years. They were both exceptional thinkers, but Derrida dressed in classy tweeds and fine shirts. He played the role of the star. Rorty looked like a schlumpy American professor; he vanished in a crowd. He probably drove an old Volvo, which would bolster Stanley Fish’s thesis that American academics choose to be dreary.
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The notion that the realization that Stalin's methodsof political persuasion were somewhat heavy handed only occurred to French thinkers in the seventies is incorrect. There was plenty of testimony in France in the twenties from exiled Mensheviks and thirties from Trotskyites (Trotsky himself passed through France in exile). After the war, the Communists did not have the field to themselves, and were opposed by Christians and the secular independent left, as well as suffering a steady stream of departures from their own ranks. Publications like Arguments and Socialisme ou Barbarie, the early efforts of David Rousset, and Sartre's essay after the Hungarian Revolution in Les Temps Modernes (Le Phantome de Staline) ---as well as the work of historians of Russia and thinkers as varied as Antelme, Aron, Axelos, Fetjo, Gorz, Lefort, Lefebvre, Morin. Castoriadis were quite emancipated from illusions about the USSR --they did not require late tutoring from Levy.

Posted by Norman Birnbaum | April 8, 2009 7:27:18 PM EDT