(Con)versions of Commitment: The Case of Régis Debray's Loués soient nos seigneurs

(Con)versions of Commitment: The Case of Régis Debray's Loués soient nos seigneurs Keith A. Reader ON THE MORNING I BEGAN TO WRITE THIS ARTICLE, the Guardian (Britain's leading daily newspaper of the left) ran a piece relating how Régis Debray and Castro's former head of presidential security, Daniel Alarcon Ramirez, had both published texts highly critical of the Cuban regime. (Debray's book, Loués soient nos seigneurs, will be a principal object of this article). There is nothing particularly unusual about that, but the terms in which the article couches its account of Debray's views are worthy of attention. He is described as having "made a spectacular political conversion in midlife," but this is evidently only primus inter pares, for elsewhere we are told that "his political conversions have included belated admiration for Charles de Gaulle and disillusionment with the late Socialist President, François Mitterrand." It would be easy for the reader to conclude that Debray had joined the procession from left to right supposedly characteristic of middle age in general and the last decade or two in particular. Yet his criticisms of Castro's increasingly megalomaniac Stalinism and Mitterrand's second-term capitulation to the forces of mercantilism and the video-clip quite clearly stem from, as they are impregnated by, values of the left (a Trotskyist would endorse them, albeit whilst drawing very different conclusions). To speak of "conversion" in such a context seems doubly inappropriate—in imputing an ideological volte-face that has not in fact taken place and in implicitly placing Debray's public and political commitments under the sign of the religious. (The paradigmatic "spectacular conversion in midlife" of course occurred on the road to Damascus.) I want here to examine what it is about Loués soient nos seigneurs that appears to invite such a vocabulary, and thus to situate him as a "committed intellectual" rather more clearly than is usually done. Committed intellectuals nowadays can fairly be described as an endangered species. The decline of Marxism worldwide, and before that the disappearance of its hegemony in French intellectual life, have been often enough commented on,1 but well before those events the notion of commitment had undergone substantial revision since its Sartrean hey34 Summer 1997 Reader day. That notion had emerged initially perhaps from the Spanish Civil War, and then from the period of Occupation and Resistance—a period when, as the examples of Walter Benjamin and Paul Nizan prove, loyalty to one's principles and ideals could put one's very life in danger. (There are those who see in Sartre's subsequent intense "commitment to commitment " an unacknowledged atonement for his passivity during much of the Occupation.2) The Algerian War, less dramatically, prolonged this sense of life-or-death material urgency, as the bombings, the refusals to serve in the army, the murderous repression of the Charonne demonstration in 1962 all go to demonstrate. It is in this context that Debray's statement that in his youth "j'enviais plutôt ceux qui avaient mêlé en temps réel encre, sang et cambouis"3 clearly needs to be read. May 1968, in this respect as in so many others, had a contradictory, perhaps even a deceptive, effect. The acting-out of revolutionary violence went hand in hand with a fundamental unwillingness, on either side of the barricades, to shed blood.4 This, along with a host of other factors , meant that the events' revolutionary dimension was largely confined to the domain of culture, in which their repercussions continue to be most durably felt. Althusser's influential 1969 essay Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'État5 was an unacknowledged PCF response to May, foregrounding the hitherto neglected instance of the ideological and (like its author's earlier work) stressing the importance of class struggle in the superstructure. Althusser was Debray's philosophy tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, and one of the father-figures around whom the narrative of Loués soient nos seigneurs is based. "Marxiste, Althusser ignorait résolument l'économie; scientiste, les sciences en travail; révolutionnaire, les révolutions en cours (se gardant bien...