Pierre-André Taguieff and the Dilemmas of Antiracism

Pierre-André Taguieff and the Dilemmas of Antiracism Christopher Flood PIERRE-ANDRÉ TAGUIEFF is one of France's leading writers on the subject of racism and on the ideology of the contemporary extreme right. He has also written extensively on the theoretical and practical dimensions of the struggle against racism in France. Born in 1946 to Russian and Franco-Polish parents, he was educated in Paris. Having trained in philosophy, with an early interest in philosophy of language, he is currently a senior researcher at the CNRS. He also teaches at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques. His own political development has passed via various forms of ultra-leftism in the radical 1960s to remain broadly on the left since that time. Though highly critical of the Socialist Party's ideological vacuity, he gave Lionel Jospin his support in the 1995 presidential election. From the late 1970s onwards he began to publish scholarly essays on the discourse and ideology of the New Right think tanks, GRECE and the Club de l'Horloge. In due course, as different elements of the New Right evolved and diverged from each other, Taguieff maintained a particular interest in the work of Alain de Benoist, the most fertile and original of the theorists. The summation of his research in this area is contained in Sur la Nouvelle Droite.λ Meanwhile, he pursued an overlapping investigation into past and present expressions of antisemitism, including work on the mythology of Jewish world conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.2 He also examined the deterministic theories of cultural difference, collective identity and separate development which have been developed by intellectuals of the extreme right as substitutes for the old doctrines of biological racism, Aryanism and white supremacy. The most important of his works on the subject was La Force du préjugé.3 In addition, Taguieff has devoted attention to the Front national (FN), to which many former luminaries of the New Right have in any case migrated. Here too his work has maintained a particular emphasis on the ideological and discursive aspects of the phenomenon.4 Over the course of time Taguieff has made the transition from academic specialist to Parisian intellectual. He has become one of the prominent group of political and cultural communicators who regularly con68 Summer 1997 Flood tribute to national debates about important issues in public life. This transition has not only been due to the impressive quality and quantity of expert work which he has produced on highly topical subjects. It is also cause and effect of the controversies which have surrounded him in recent years. There have been two major areas in which he has offended sections of the left-wing intelligentsia. One of these arises in connection with his work on the New Right, and more particularly on Alain de Benoist. Having tracked de Benoist's theoretical trajectory from whitesupremacist biological racism to ethno-differentialism, Taguieff came to the view that de Benoist's positions in this and other areas had evolved to such a degree that he could no longer be classed straightforwardly as a thinker of the extreme right or even be conveniently pigeonholed in conventional left-right terms at all. Given de Benoist's demonic reputation in bien pensant left-wing circles, Taguieff has been guilty of approaching de Benoist's writings in an excessively open-minded, insufficiently condemnatory way. Rather than hunting obsessively for telltale signs of a sinister pattern of fascistic thought concealed, yet revealed, by the written words, he has at least provisionally accepted the evidence of de Benoist's trajectory, including de Benoist's professed distaste for the xenophobic nationalism of the FN. Taguieff himself became a target for attack. The most notorious case was the Appel à ¡a vigilance launched by a group of left-wing intellectuals —among them, luminaries such as Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Georges Duby, Umberto Eco, Léon Poliakov and Paul Virilio—in Le Monde on 13 July 1993, with an interpretative article by Roger-Pol Droit accompanying it under the title "La confusion des idées. Quarante intellectuels appellent à une 'Europe de la vigilance' face à la banalisation de la pensée d'extrême droite." The appeal...