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Reviewed by:
  • Melancholy Politics: Loss, Mourning, and Memory in Late Modern France
  • Max Silverman
Melancholy Politics: Loss, Mourning, and Memory in Late Modern France. By Jean-Philippe Mathy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. x + 238 pp.

Jean-Philippe Mathy’s book is essentially an intellectual history of France in the wake of modernity’s broken promises. It concentrates not on the post-humanist thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze), but rather on those post-1968 thinkers — philosophers, historians, and sociologists in the main — who came after (Debray, Gallo, Gauchet, Lipovetsky, Nora, among others). Le Débat is the defining journal for this generation, as Tel Quel was for the previous one. The terrain is familiar: how do intellectuals who still have a certain idea of a republican France adjust to a world in which the values of secularism, citizenship, and culture on which that idea was based have been routed by triumphant ‘Anglo-Saxon’ neo-liberalism, democratic multiculturalism, and globalization? These intellectuals have rejected the Marxist diagnosis of modern society and the anti-humanism of the previous generation but are left disenchanted in a postmodern age of rampant individualism and consumption. Furthermore, they have a sense that the game may be up anyway when information overload has made the intellectual redundant (although Bourdieu thought at times that he could echo Zola’s cries for truth and justice). Mathy’s approach to the French malaise is to view it in terms of a form of melancholia in which the lost object haunts the present at every turn. I am not sure whether it is entirely appropriate to apply a psychoanalytic language of loss and mourning to a whole nation, despite Julia Kristeva’s description of France’s ‘dépression nationale’. Henry Rousso’s attempt to do it with the Vichy syndrome was certainly a fascinating way of describing the haunting of the present by an unassimilated past from the Second World War but was not without its flaws in historical interpretation. However, Mathy treats the current state of melancholia sensitively and always grounds the abstract diagnosis in real situations. In a chapter called ‘Desperately Seeking Marianne: The Uses of the Republic’, he is good on showing how, in the speeches of many politicians and commentators during the campaign for the presidential election of 2002, words such as ‘république’ and ‘républicain’ were ‘empty signifiers’, mobilized to summon up an image of individual, society, and state that has long gone. Sometimes the coherence of the argument is threatened by lengthy descriptions of the minutiae of political/intellectual debates. On the other hand, too many hefty tomes are summed up too quickly and the links between them not always made apparent. However, in general, Mathy does not lose sight of the bigger picture of an age of disenchantment and writes about it in a clear and lucid way. Ultimately, he sees the mourning process not simply as a failure to [End Page 134] work through the past but as a possible opportunity for the future. It could be that memory wars, images of Marianne clothed in a veil, and the like are a necessary step on the path to a different understanding of individual and nation. Let us hope that this positive view of melancholy politics is right.

Max Silverman
University of Leeds
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