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4 French Marxism 1945-1975 Notre epoque exigeait de tous les hommes de lettres qu'ils firent une dissertation de politique fran"aise. Jean-Paul Sartre La lutte des classes dans la theorie n'est pas un mot. C'est une realite, une terrible realite. Louis Althusser 'C'est quoi, la dialectique?' 'C'est I'art et la maniere de toujours retomber sur ses pattes, mon vieux' Jorge Semprun, Quel Beau Dimanche, pp. 99-100 FOR a generation following the Second World War, the fashions in left-wing thought in general and high marxist theory in particular were set by the writings of a succession of French intellectuals, whose names became synonymous with styles of marxist discourse. From Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Louis Althusser, what was being argued in Paris became the context for more isolated enterprises upon similar lines from Yale to Canberra. The passage to Britain, the USA, and beyond usually entailed some dessication of the original; what was political in Paris became theoretical in London, before being reduced to the merely academic in its final resting place further afield. This only served to intensifY the interest of foreigners, however: unable to grasp the rather particular circumstances of intellectual production in France, scholars and acolytes abroad could only attribute the intensity of feeling aroused by the works of Parisian maitres it penser to an originality and power of pure thought, to the identifYing of which they have since devoted many thousands of pages.l There is nothing very wrong with this. If Perry Anderson feels the need to publish a book defending the credibility of Louis Althusser against crude empiricist criticism, if literary critics make of Jacques 1 Notorious examples are New Left Review (passim) and the Yale English department. Even Susan James in her very thoughtful work on holism treats the work ofAlthusser as something timeless-he just has 'positions'. See SusanJames, 'Holism in Social Theory: the Case of Marxism' (Univ. of Cambridge Ph. D. thesis 1979). French Marxism 1945-1975 Derrida more than he has ever, even at his most playful, felt constrained to make of himself, little harm ensues. But it is all a trifle peculiar, because at its heart there lies a fascination with an ideological production line once thought incapable ofdelivering the goods. That it should be French marxism and its offshoots which have aroused such latter-day interest is distinctly at odds with an earlier insistence by many upon the inadequacy of theoretical work in France when it purported to be 'marxist'. And yet, since 1945, there is no doubt that it is in France that theoretical discussion around problems in and of marxism has been liveliest.2 Until recently, however, it has not been possible to discuss this unusual moment in French intellectual history from any critical distance. The phenomenon was still unfolding. Studies of French marxism published in the years 1956-75 risked appearing just as the latest 'twist in the dialectic' curled obliquely off the presses.3 Moreover, some kinds of critical distance were their own nemesis: accounts of disembodied entities called 'French Marxism' or 'Existential Marxism' packaged their subject-matter so as to remove it entirely from the political realm. Political chronology served at best as a distant backdrop for a detached account of the Life ofthe French Mind. This approach (for obvious reasons infrequently encountered in France itself) suggested a sort oftimeless unarmed conflict between brachycephalic dyspeptics, with the elderly or conceptually crippled retiring on occasion, to be replaced by New (or newer) Left combattants. Since the mid-I 97os, however, circumstances have altered. At some point between 1973 and 1978 marxism, and the study of its theoretical implications and resonances, lost its stranglehold upon the intellectual imagination in France, a grip it had exercised unbroken for a generation. In the space of less than a decade it became fashionable to be not just non-marxist, but anti-marxist. The French discovered Popper, Hayek, and, with embarrassment at the oversight, their own Raymond Aron. Men and women who had once hawked La Cause·du Peuple began writing tracts on the evils of totalitarianism and the crimes of Mao. Nor were they replaced in their tum by a rising generation-modem Parisian students are not so much opposed to marxism as simply indifferent. 2 See for Perry Anderson's views, Arguments within English MarxIsm (London, 1980), p.2. 3 The phrase is borrowed from George Lichtheim. See Lichtheim, From Marx to Hegel (London, 1971). [13.59.236.219...

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