Why French Intellectual History Should Repeat Itself as Farce

Eric Fassin

  • Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the 20th Century by Bernard-Henri Lévy, translated by Richard Veasey
    Harvill, 434 pp, £20.00, December 1995, ISBN 1 86046 035 6
  • The Imaginary Jew by Alain Finkielkraut, translated by Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff
    Nebraska, 230 pp, £23.95, August 1994, ISBN 0 8032 1987 3
  • The Defeat of the Mind by Alain Finkielkraut, translated by Judith Friedlander
    Columbia, 165 pp, $15.00, May 1996, ISBN 0 231 08023 9

In lieu of Sartre and Raymond Aron, future historians of French intellectuals in the Eighties and Nineties may well be condemned to structuring their narratives around the post-Marx brothers of French intellectual life, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. This is not a case simply of contemporary thinkers being dwarfed by the giants of the past – the familiar lament about the decline of French intellectuals is rather unfair. The problem is that Lévy and Finkielkraut play the venerable role of intellectual to perfection – that they imitate their noble ancestors to a fault.

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