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MYSTICISM AND MOURNING IN RECENT FRENCH THOUGHT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 June 2014
Extract
There has been a lot of ink spilled lately regarding the various symptoms generated in French intellectual, cultural, and political life by a malady diagnosed as the triumph of neoliberalism and American consumerism at the end of the Cold War. In recent years, some French scholars afflicted with the disease have revisited and revised well-worn political models, and others returned defensively to the tradition of French secular republicanism as an antidote to “multiculturalism” and “communitarianism” (what Americans would call identity politics), which French authors often envision as American imports. This defensiveness on both the French left and right responds to the apparent exhaustion of nationalism, of revolutionary ideals, and of French identity. Joan Scott's recent book on The Fantasy of Feminist History does a particularly incisive job of revealing the various investments in secular republicanism as themselves forms of sexism and racism or nostalgia, especially on the right. She cites a discussion in which Mona Ozouf, Phillipe Raynaud, and others argue that the particularly “French” form of “seduction” and heterosexual coupling encourages men to exercise dominance through gallantry if they want to win over women. Gallantry civilizes society by using sexual difference as armor against an imagined leveling and sameness represented by those who cannot understand seduction as a means metaphorically of reconciling the differences that inevitably arise in democracies—feminists, “militant homosexuals,” and Muslims who refuse to play by French rules. Here the play of difference relies on a rigid gender difference—and the subordination of women—that sells itself as natural and quintessentially French.
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References
1 Scott, Joan Wallach, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Benjamin, Walter, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2 (1927–1934), ed. Jennings, Michael W., Eiland, Howard, and Smith, Gary; trans. Livingston, Rodney and others (Cambridge, 1999). Mathy also cites this term at 40–41Google Scholar.
3 For a thorough treatment of this aspect of Derridean thought and its impact on intellectual history see LaCapra, Dominick, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” in LaCapra, Dominick and Caplan, Steven L., eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca, 1982), 47–85Google Scholar.
4 For example, Handelman, Susan A., The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany, NY, 1982)Google Scholar.
5 Ethan Kleinberg's book Generation Existential (Ithaca, 2005) on Heidegger's reception in France has had a similar impact on how we read French philosophy, except that his strategy was to reconstruct the reception of Heidegger rather than to focus on one particular thinker.
6 Baring notes at 51 n. 201 that in the English translation by Alan Bass it is simply translated as “difference.”
7 Hoffmann, Stanley, Decline or Renewal? France since the 1930s (New York, 1960), 184Google ScholarPubMed.
8 Bourg, Julian, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal, 2007)Google Scholar.
9 Scott, Joan Wallach, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, 2007)Google Scholar. Though Mathy's treatment is less focused on all the particularities of the debate, which he recognizes have been well rehearsed, his conclusions don't differ substantially from Scott’s, and she too discusses the veil as a form of displacement. His is nonetheless a broader sweep of the French cultural landscape, but a somewhat thinner if wonderfully wrought approach as well.
10 See the excellent book by Fassin, Eric, L’inversion de la question homosexuelle (Paris, 2005)Google Scholar.
11 Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 16, 193.