French Thought 1940–1990, the Millenium, and the New World Order

French Thought 1940-1990, the Millenium, and the New World Order Philip R. Wood T HE GREAT FRENCH HISTORIAN of the Middle Ages, Marc Bloch, tells us that “ . . . on the eve of the year one thousand a preacher in the churches of Paris announced this date for the End of Time.” 1In the final years of the tenth century, Bloch writes, portents were regularly detected and interpreted as signalling the coming of the Anti-Christ whose empire would precede the coming of the Kingdom of God. Today, as the second millenium draws to a close, there is once again a widespread sense of an impending Day of Wrath. Unfortunately for us, the resemblance between the two periods ends there; all the more unfortunately to the extent that Marx’s dictum, according to which his­ torical high tragedy repeats itself as farce, would appear to require rever­ sal in this instance. For medieval millenarianism was based on an inter­ pretation of the Book of Revelations: “And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.” It is hard for us moderns to take this kind of thing seriously. Unless, perhaps, one were to choose to take the Satanic epiphany in question to be the onset of Western modernity itself, the first glimmerings of which do indeed begin to appear within the interstices of feudalism in the eleventh century with a striking upsurge in trade; and which, from the point of view of the preservation of the diversity of human cultures and animal and plant species, has undoubtedly been the worst catastrophe to have hit the planet since the asteroid which, we are told, destroyed the dinosaurs sixty million years ago. Indeed, contrary to the case of medieval millenarian­ ism, to detect a dread design in the pattern of today’s global events is not risible; it is a mark of realism. The ever-accelerating collapse of the bio­ sphere appears to have acquired such momentum as perhaps already to be irreversible—either as a biological process now beyond human rectifi­ cation, or simply as prolonged by the entrenched political and economic interests which unleashed it in the first place. The most superficial famil­ iarity with the complex feedback mechanisms whereby all natural and socio-economic processes function as vicious circles which feed upon their own momentum would seem to make it legitimate to wonder whether the warnings we have already received—Chernobyl, global Vol. XXXII, No. 4 63 L ’E sprit C réateur warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, pandemics among marine species—are not relatively anodine phenomena which presage worse to come. As climate changes induce drought, famine, 500-mph hurricanes and catastrophic migrations of immense human populations, and as human and animal auto-immune deficiencies brought on by the dilapida­ tion of the ozone layer lead to unfamiliar plagues of unprecedented virulence, we may well witness scenes in the imminent future more apocalyptic than anything since the Black Death (including the worst atrocities of the Second World War). In short, one can be excused for believing that we may be witnessing the convulsive agony of the planet, and that, as Heidegger put it, “Only a god can save us.” It is in this context that recent French thought acquires an acute actualité or topicality. For if one limits oneself to the thought of the modern industrialized West, then it is in French thought of the last fifty-odd years in particular that we can detect with unusual ease the incipient signs of a new world order which just might come in time to prevent our onrush into the abyss. Naturally, by “new world order,” I do not mean the military, eco­ nomic and political hegemony of the West dear to some. Nor am I mak­ ing the fatuous suggestion that it could conceivably be from something as miniscule as “French thought” that salvation might come. French thought is merely symptomatic of something more vast in which it participates. A good place to begin would be to emphasize at once that we are not talking here solely about “the environment,” which, as usual, we instinc­ tively—and this is the problem—think of...