De la révolte à l’exercice. Essai sur L’hédonisme contemporain by Jean-Michel Heimonet (review)

L ’E spr it C r éa teu r use. In addition to granting us the ever-titillating glimpse into other people’s classrooms, the essays here provide an excellent stimulation for rethinking and rediscovering Candide. Ju l ie C. H a y es University o f Richmond Jean-Michel Heimonet. D e l a r é v o l t e à l 'e x e r c ic e . E ss a i s u r L’h é d o n is m e c o n t e m ­ p o r a in . Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1990. Pp. ii + 279. $39.95. The focus of Heimonet’s book is the single most important question facing the “ humanities” today. This question confronts all significant work, and—even if only implicitly—we are all constrained to answer it in whatever we write, even when we think our concerns are quite remote from this question. Namely, in what does the transition from modernity to postmodernity consist? The question is fundamental because the manner in which one answers it defines the very meaning and identity of the twentieth century as a whole: that immediate and recent present on the basis of which we think the entire past and posit a future. A preliminary clarification: the terms modernity and postmodernity do not mean quite the same thing to Heimonet as they do to most American writers and readers. Like many other French writers, Heimonet considers Derrida, Foucault et al., or the nouveau roman, to be the last representatives of modernité. Whereas over here, of course, these are the first figures of postmodernity. The latter term, on the other hand, for Heimonet and many of his compatriots, designates those reactionary attempts to return to something resembling the more stable state of affairs which preceded the violent disruptions introduced by the great moderns. Thus, the objects of Heimonet’s disapprobation are the “ absolute anthro­ pology” of René Girard, the attempts to reunify the recently fractured human subject by the neo-liberal philosophers like Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut (who are perhaps the bestknown of those who have recently placed what Americans call “ poststructuralism” on the defensive in Paris), and the sociologist (and, according to Heimonet, apologist) of cool hedonistic 80s culture, Gilles Lipovetsky, author of the widely read L ’Ere du vide. What Heimonet reproaches these figures for is their having turned their backs upon the vehemently affirmed impossibility of any resolution of the enigmas of historical and meta­ physical human tragedy which was the hallmark of the great moderns who people Heimonet’s pantheon: Artaud, Camus and, above all, Bataille, who is Heimonet’s touch­ stone. For Heimonet, the postmoderns have renounced the great modernists’ superb doom­ laden encounters with violence and the sacred—as passionate expressions of revolt—for easy, reassuring, mediocre recuperations which fail to take the measure of their predeces­ sors and which are fatally compromised by complicity with late consumer capitalism. In this narrative of the twentieth century, the nouveau roman and a figure like Derrida con­ stitute something like a halfway house on the road to decadence: while still possessed of a vestigial capacity for resistance and contestation, their failure to interrogate the historical imperatives underlying the disenchantment of the world (Robbe-Grillet), or the failure to connect with experience or life (Derrida), dooms these transitional figures to a triviality which will culminate in the pitiful capitulation of the postmoderns. Both the strengths and the weaknesses of this book derive from its courageous, aggres­ sively unfashionable, stance. Even if one disagrees violently with Heimonet (and many will), we have been in need for a long time now of the kind of powerful, historically and philosophically informed defense of high modernism which Heimonet provides, even if only to refine our sense of what is really at stake in the historic divide between modernity 90 F a l l 1991 B o o k R ev iew s and postmodernity (however these are defined). And this book is one that people interested in the field will want to reckon with. Heimonet’s command of the history of philosophy and literature is always impressive and massively erudite. He writes with elegance...