BHL: king of the nouveaux philosophes
Photo: Corbis / Richard Melloul
Les nouveaux philosophes are members of a generation rather than a school or group of French thinkers who came to prominence in the 1970s and include Bernard Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, and Pascal Bruckner.
If they decisively rejected Marx on the one hand, they had little time for Nietzsche on the other - or, indeed, for any writers whose work all-too-conveniently lends itself to non-democratic systems of power and authority. Politically, they can thus be described as neo-liberals who unashamedly subscribe to the ideals of the Enlightenment.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Deleuze hated them. Indeed, in a famous text dated 5 June 1977 and given away free in bookstores in an attempt to counter the growing popularity of the New Philosophers, he claimed their thought was entirely devoid of real ideas, even if full of puffed-up concepts and large egos:
"This wholesale return to the author, to an empty and vain subject, as well as to gross conceptual stereotypes, represents a troubling reactionary development." [139-40]
The reason for their success, Deleuze explained, was because the New Philosophers were media-savvy and understood how to market themselves and their works in a brilliant fashion. They effectively turned themselves into a brand and theory into a form of journalism or a series of soundbites perfect for TV. And this, says Deleuze, is conformist to the highest degree and marks a humiliating submission of thought.
For Deleuze, the New Philosophers pissed on the events of May 68 and declared revolution - which is only another word for vital creativity - impossible; where once a little breeze was blowing, now there was a closed window:
"This is the total negation of politics and experiment ... the New Philosophers incarnate the disease that is trying to stifle all that. There is nothing alive in their work, but they will have fulfilled their function if they can occupy centre stage long enough to give whatever is creative the kiss of death." [147]
Deleuze has one more problem with the New Philosophers apart from the fact that they are TV-buffoons and their work is, in his view, shit. And that is that their humanism is overtly moral in tone and feeds off the suffering of others:
"What I find really disgusting is that the New Philosophers are writing a martyrology: the Gulag and the victims of history. They live off corpses. They have discovered the witness-function ... But there would never have been any victims if the victims had thought or spoken like our New Philosophers. The victims had to live and think in a totally different way to provide the material that so moves the New Philosophers, who weep in their name, think in their name, and give us moral lessons in their name. Those who risk their life most often think in terms of life, not death, not bitterness, and not morbid vanity." [144-45]
Now, to be fair, I think Deleuze makes some valid points here and raises important concerns. Whenever one sees BHL, for example, interviewed on TV looking like a playboy intellectual and pleading the case for humanitarian intervention whilst promoting his latest book, one does feel a little creeped out.
Having said that, however, I can't help feeling that the New Philosophers do have import and that André Glucksmann's book Les maitres penseurs (1977) posed a crucial question: How had he, like many others of his generation, been so prone to murderous political fantasies and what role did texts by some of the great thinkers of philosophy play in this? As James Miller points out:
"Whatever its other merits, Glucksmann's book was a trenchant piece of self-criticism. The totalitarian impulse, as he stressed, was not something external, to be smugly denounced as it appeared in others; rather, this impulse affected everyone. Each of us was 'dual', caught in the snares of power, and prey to the temptation to abuse it. And 'if one takes account of this internal division', he concluded, 'it becomes impossible to imagine a single, ultimate revolution ...'"
Obviously such thinking infuriated Deleuze, but Foucault, however, was far more sympathetic and in a review of Glucksmann's book he praised the younger thinker and conceded that the revolutionary ideal itself needed to be questioned - be it in its Marxist or Dionysian form. Without explicitly saying so, Foucault was ratifying Glucksmann's move away from Maoism towards liberalism and, by so doing, furthering a philosophical and political rift between himself and Deleuze.
This took intellectual courage and integrity on Foucault's part I think. And, also, looking back from where we find ourselves today, it was the right thing to have done and not just a brave and honest move. In the final years of his life, Foucault helped inspire a new style of political conduct and commitment (acute, but cautious). André Glucksmann rightly praised him after his death in 1984 for breaking with the terrorist radicalism of the theoretical avant-garde.
This is something we have all had to learn to do ...
Notes
The interview with Gilles Deleuze from which I quote - 'On the New Philosophers (Plus a More General Problem)' - can be found in Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, (Semiotext(e), 2006).
The passage from James Miller is taken from The Passion of Michel Foucault, (Flamingo, 1994), p. 296.
"This is the total negation of politics and experiment ... the New Philosophers incarnate the disease that is trying to stifle all that. There is nothing alive in their work, but they will have fulfilled their function if they can occupy centre stage long enough to give whatever is creative the kiss of death." [147]
Deleuze has one more problem with the New Philosophers apart from the fact that they are TV-buffoons and their work is, in his view, shit. And that is that their humanism is overtly moral in tone and feeds off the suffering of others:
"What I find really disgusting is that the New Philosophers are writing a martyrology: the Gulag and the victims of history. They live off corpses. They have discovered the witness-function ... But there would never have been any victims if the victims had thought or spoken like our New Philosophers. The victims had to live and think in a totally different way to provide the material that so moves the New Philosophers, who weep in their name, think in their name, and give us moral lessons in their name. Those who risk their life most often think in terms of life, not death, not bitterness, and not morbid vanity." [144-45]
Now, to be fair, I think Deleuze makes some valid points here and raises important concerns. Whenever one sees BHL, for example, interviewed on TV looking like a playboy intellectual and pleading the case for humanitarian intervention whilst promoting his latest book, one does feel a little creeped out.
Having said that, however, I can't help feeling that the New Philosophers do have import and that André Glucksmann's book Les maitres penseurs (1977) posed a crucial question: How had he, like many others of his generation, been so prone to murderous political fantasies and what role did texts by some of the great thinkers of philosophy play in this? As James Miller points out:
"Whatever its other merits, Glucksmann's book was a trenchant piece of self-criticism. The totalitarian impulse, as he stressed, was not something external, to be smugly denounced as it appeared in others; rather, this impulse affected everyone. Each of us was 'dual', caught in the snares of power, and prey to the temptation to abuse it. And 'if one takes account of this internal division', he concluded, 'it becomes impossible to imagine a single, ultimate revolution ...'"
Obviously such thinking infuriated Deleuze, but Foucault, however, was far more sympathetic and in a review of Glucksmann's book he praised the younger thinker and conceded that the revolutionary ideal itself needed to be questioned - be it in its Marxist or Dionysian form. Without explicitly saying so, Foucault was ratifying Glucksmann's move away from Maoism towards liberalism and, by so doing, furthering a philosophical and political rift between himself and Deleuze.
This took intellectual courage and integrity on Foucault's part I think. And, also, looking back from where we find ourselves today, it was the right thing to have done and not just a brave and honest move. In the final years of his life, Foucault helped inspire a new style of political conduct and commitment (acute, but cautious). André Glucksmann rightly praised him after his death in 1984 for breaking with the terrorist radicalism of the theoretical avant-garde.
This is something we have all had to learn to do ...
Notes
The interview with Gilles Deleuze from which I quote - 'On the New Philosophers (Plus a More General Problem)' - can be found in Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, (Semiotext(e), 2006).
The passage from James Miller is taken from The Passion of Michel Foucault, (Flamingo, 1994), p. 296.
