Alain Badiou, "Pocket Pantheon"

(Verso, 2009)

Badiou's book collects eulogies to certain recent-contemporary giants of French intellectual life. All are beautifully written, most shed light on Badiou's own philosophy, and some are excellent introductions to their subject matters.

The eulogy to Derrida is probably the best in the collection, precisely for how it combines humour, clarity and sympathy in its reconstruction - I hope you'll pardon me here - of deconstruction. Also particularly notable are the entries on Sartre, Althusser and Lyotard. The impression is reinforced that for Badiou, there are no problems of a strictly or abstractly philosophical importance; for a philosophical "interventionist", in a constrained but important sense the philosophical is the concrete. This accounts for his rooting of interpersonal sympathies and dissonances at a level of abstraction that is often surprising and counter-intuitive. Through humour, sadness, love and ire, the force of Badiou's personality shines through in virtually every eulogy, giving body to the austere rigour of his own philosophical work.

Though highly interesting, the book is more for browsing than reading cover to cover, a supplement to one's studies at best. For example, the discussion on the Kantianism/Spinozism of Francoise Proust means nothing to me at this point; as a North-American student of French theory, there's a fair bit regarding more minor personalities that eludes my grasp. The main attraction for me was the prospect of reading Badiou on his philosophical contemporaries, both allies and rivals. I was rewarded with the usual aesthetic experience of his writings, but also a clearer picture of his self understanding vis a vis French intellectual life. I hesitate however to recommend this text for systematic study. If you're curious about, say, Sartre's influence on Badiou, by all means turn to the essay in this book. We must, however, pick our battles.

Sunil Khilnani, "Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France"

(Yale, 1993)

Those of you in North America who study or dabble in so-called "French Theory" - roughly, French philosophy, sociology, feminism, anthropology, etc dating from approximately the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss to the ongoing interventions of Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and others - may have noticed that the secondary literature on the subject is usually somewhat slanted and/or polemical. From opposite ends of the political spectrum, authors usually have an axe to grind (Cf. Cusset, French Theory from the Left, and Ferry/Renaut, La pensée 68 from the liberal centre/Right). When examining the subject, they also tend by turns to reduce the arguments and concepts in question to the particular French context that produced them, or by contrast, to focus mainly on the internal dynamics of the arguments themselves. The effect is either to lose French Theory in factual description, or to speak as though its arguments and concepts can be airlifted into North American intellectual space without losing anything important in the process.

The virtue of Khilnani's relatively even-handed book is to provide context for understanding the major arguments, concepts and enjeux of the French intellectual Left while also taking apart and examining some of the major arguments themselves. He provides a concise breakdown of the postwar political climate within which the arguments emerged, highlighting the particularly French and historically-rooted meanings of "Left" and "intellectual", before examining in detail the attempts of Sartre and Althusser to give a satisfactory account of the role of the intellectual in the revolutionary movement. He goes on to describe the "exorcism" of revolutionary discourse and practice in the years 1968-1981 during which, paradoxically, the intellectual Left was all but evacuated by the time the Socialist Party rose to power. Finally, he examines the revisionist history of Francois Furet as regards the French Revolution - specifically, the argument that the legacy of the Revolution for France and the world is not one of iron Bolshevik-style discipline and terror, but rather of liberal pluralism and democracy.

One of the main themes of the book is the definition of political community, and with respect to which, the tension between the universal and the particular - specifically, the Revolutionary idea of France's own national heritage, serving as a bastion and beacon of freedom and civilization to the rest of the world. Khilnani doesn't shy away from producing an image of a France awash in paradox, by turns high-mindedly cosmopolitan and narrowly provincial. The overall picture he draws is in some ways bleak for the Left, but he holds out hope that French intellectuals will have a continuing role to play in defining their political community - certainly an urgent task felt across the globe, as witnessed by the popularity of e.g. Hardt and Negri's otherwise disappointing Empire and Multitude.

For those who are interested in post-structuralism and "postmodernism" in particular, Arguing Revolution should be required reading. For those still on the Left, moreover, I suspect it's a doubly good idea to engage in this text. It is highly artificial, if not downright idealistic to treat the arguments and concepts of e.g. a Derrida or a Lyotard as if they have no history; perhaps it is even highly damaging in some ways, since the emptying of ideas and arguments of their historical content and context is to succumb to an ecclecticism that cuts one off from the truly important events and historical currents of the day. Add Khilnani's Arguing Revolution to your reading list.

Claude Lefort, 1924-2010

It's October, which must mean that one or more of my French theory heroes has died. This time the bell tolls for Claude Lefort, true relic of a particular France I've learned about and loved.

Though lesser known among Anglophone readers than the post-structuralist superstars of the 80s and 90s, Lefort's intellectual efforts in political theory deserve wider recognition. A student of Merleau-Ponty, Maussian sociology, and a founder of post-Trotskyite council communist journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, the early Lefort brought phenomenological tools to bear on some of the major political problems and events of his time. As a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, he joined Castoriadis, Lyotard and others in furthering the critique of bureacratic deformation in communist states and workers' movements. Though for a time a contributor to Sartre's Temps Modernes, Lefort bloodied Sartre's nose in a penetrating Leftist critique of "The Communists and Peace". This singled him out early on as an upstart and, possibly, a major contender.

Essentially unmooring himself from Marxism, Lefort went on to make major contributions in the history of political philosophy and the philosophical critique of totalitarianism. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty and Arendt, he theorized democracy as a perpetually shifting, centreless and interminably constituting political field; totalitarianism on this view being an attempt at drawing up final accounts and foreclosing the political as such through total mobilization. Lefort's analysis of actually existing communism and its collapse, however, was nuanced enough to trouble the simplistic notion of totalitarianism bandied about by other political commentators.

Lefort was, in sum, a rigorous Leftist thinker who responded to the general political disillusionment of his generation with sustained critique and searching forays into intellectual history. This made for less sexy fare than Baudrillard's apocalyptic irony and Deleuze's offhanded comments on anal sex, but I think we could all benefit from a close reading of Lefort.