Date: Mon, 4 Mar 1996 02:10:56 -0500
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Date: Thu, 29 Feb 1996 12:44:50 -0500
From: jennis-AT-PEARL.TUFTS.EDU (Jim Ennis)
Subject: French Intellectuals and Political Engagement
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I thought the following might be of interest:


>Date: Sun, 25 Feb 1996 16:22:01 -0600 (CST)
>From: anderson kevin <tk0kxa1-AT-corn.cso.niu.edu>
>Subject: French Intellectuals and Political Engagement
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>
>The following commentary on "French Intellectuals and Political
>Engagement" by Kevin Anderson, Department of Sociology, Northern
>Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115, was broadcast on KPFK-FM
>(Pacifica Radio, Los Angeles) on Febuary 12, 1996:
>
>        At a time when French thought - from deconstruction to post-
>structuralism to difference feminism - continues strongly to
>influence radical thought in the U. S., especially in academic circles,
>there is a curious omission in much of the U. S. reception of these
>French thinkers.   Here in the U. S., the work of these thinkers is
>often presented as if it were cut off from the social and political
>engagement which marked earlier generations of French
>intellectuals.
>        Such a reception is distorted, as can be seen by the intense
>involvement of French intellectuals in a number of current political
>issues, including, most recently, the massive anti-austerity strikes
>of last December, which at their peak brought over 2 million
>disaffected workers and students onto the streets of Paris and other
>cities. The strikers forced the conservative Chirac-Juppe
>government to withdraw most of a series of budget cuts which
>would have drastically lowered the standard of living of public
>employees.  While the December strikes were reported at least
>sporadically by the American mass media, the involvement of
>leading French intellectuals in the strike has been passed over in
>silence.
>        At the beginning of the labor protests, a few progressive
>intellectuals criticized the strikers and tacitly supported the
>austerity plan.  These included the sociologist Alain Touraine, who
>called the government measures "courageous", the philosopher and
>human rights activist Bernard-Henri Levy, who termed the strikers a
>privileged special interest group, and the editorial board of the left
>of center Catholic journal Esprit.
>        These efforts to distance progressive intellectuals from the
>workers met with a furious reaction from hundreds of other well-
>known intellectuals of the left. By December 4, over 500 leading
>intellectuals, including the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a professor
>at the prestigious Coll=E8ge de France, where luminaries such as
>Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault once held professorships,
>had organized an "Appeal to Intellectuals in Support of the Strikers."
>The intellectuals' appeal spoke of "our responsibility to affirm
>publicly our solidarity with ...this movement, which has nothing to
>do with the defense of special interests and still less that of
>privileges.  In fighting for their social rights, [the appeal continued],
>the strikers are fighting for equal rights for all: women and men,
>young and old, unemployed and employed, public employees and those
>working in the private sector, immigrants and French men and
>women." Among the other signers of the appeal were the
>deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida, Regis Debray, the
>companion of Che Guevara in Bolivia during the 1960s, the feminist
>philosopher Christine Delphy, the Trotsky biographer Pierre Broue,
>the Marxist theorist Michael L=F6wy, and the historian Pierre Vidal-
>Naquet.
>        Pierre Bourdieu also addressed a large meeting of workers on
>the evening of December 12, following the demonstrations of over 2
>million.  "This crisis is a historic chance," Bourdieu said, "for France
>and for all those who refuse the new choice given to us: free market
>liberalism or barbarism." He castigated experts who, "using the
>authority of science, especially economics," tell us that "they know
>what is best for people, even when it goes against the popular will."
>Today's economic and social problems, Bourdieu concluded, "are too
>important to be left to technocrats." In France, a country where the
>opinions of intellectuals carry greater weight than in the U. S.,
>Bourdieu's speech was reported on the front page of the country's
>leading newspaper, Le Monde.
>        This "return" by French intellectuals to political engagement
>has been building all through the 1990s.  Over the last few years, a
>number of leading intellectuals have spoken out forcefully against
>the genocide in Bosnia, and against a series of draconian and racist
>anti-immigration laws passed by the French government.
>        The philosopher Jacques Derrida is a good example of this
>engagement in the 1990s. In the last few years, Derrida has
>(1)strongly supported the Bosnian cause, (2)campaigned on behalf of
>the feminist writer Taslima Nasreen, still under a death sentence by
>Islamic clerics in her native Bangladesh, (3)spoken out against
>racism in France and abroad.  With regard to racism, of particular
>note was Derrida's lengthy August 1995 article, carried on page one
>of Le Monde,  on behalf of African-American writer Mumia Abu-
>Jamal, who still faces a death sentence in Philadelphia.   Derrida
>lashed out at the State of Pennsylvania "for wanting to offer more
>'Black blood' in a racist frenzy, and this in a state which dares to
>boast of being the place where the U. S. Constitution was written, a
>Constitution whose letter and spirit it violates daily." In his 1993
>book, Specters of Marx, Derrida also pointed to the importance of
>rereading Marx today in order to understand and act upon the
>cultural, economic, and social crisis.  Something is definitely
>stirring today among French workers and intellectuals, something of
>which we need to be more aware.
>

-------------------------------
James G. Ennis <jennis-AT-pearl.tufts.edu>
Sociology, Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155 USA

617 628 5000 x2473
fax: 617 627 3032
--------------------------------



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