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  • Radicalism in French Culture: A Sociology of French Theory in the 1960s
  • Edward Ousselin
Radicalism in French Culture: A Sociology of French Theory in the 1960s. By Niilo Kauppi. (Public Intellectuals and the Sociology of Knowledge). Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. x + 154 pp.

In 1990 Niilo Kauppi published Tel Quel: la constitution sociale d'une avant-garde (Helsinki: Societa scientiarum Fennica), which was heavily influenced by the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu. Two decades later, Kauppi once again explores the glory days of what eventually came to be labelled as 'French Theory' across the Atlantic. And once again his study is centred on Tel Quel — the term 'avant-garde', now quaintly dated, has been dropped from the title — and on the various authors who were to one degree or another associated with the journal (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, et al.). This time, the focus is clearly on Julia Kristeva and on her husband Philippe Sollers (a founding member and long-time Editor-in-Chief of Tel Quel and, later, L'Infini), whose works and career paths are detailed — and whose intellectual reputations are not enhanced in the process. During the heyday of Tel Quel (1960-82), their farcical lurching from an ostensibly belletrist, apolitical stance to an incongruous ideological affiliation with the French Communist Party, from a contemptible infatuation with Maoism to the sudden 'discovery' of America and liberal values, each conversion being carried out with the same pompous aplomb and utter lack of self-criticism, would be more than enough to discredit them (as a ludicrous extension, Sollers has since transitioned to Catholicism and a pose of aristocratic detachment). Kauppi also examines through close readings the shallowness of their successive intellectual permutations, characterized by 'a modish cocktail of theoretical sophistication' (p. 32). In the process, he provides numerous reminders of how quickly most of their 'radical' texts have aged and how irrelevant they have become. In the Bourdieu tradition, the author depicts most of the practitioners of 'French Theory' as constrained by and responding to the dynamics of the dominant or dominated poles of the field of cultural production: 'Producing obscure and convoluted ideas through pretentious erudition [. . .] was perfectly logical given the social and existential situations of both producers and consumers' (p. 134). Accordingly, Kauppi explains in Chapter 10 how this exclusively textual 'radicalism' was progressively 'tamed', as a result of structural changes in the field. Unfortunately, Kauppi, no doubt influenced by his topic, writes in an often stilted style, littered with Gallicisms and solecisms: 'without submit thinking' (p. 18); 'took distance from' (p. 20); 'estrangement trip' (p. 23); 'scientist empirism' (p. 66); 'let the imagination take power' (p. 79); 'wanting Lacan to come with' (p. 102). Instead of a sociological study, Radicalism in French Culture turns out to be more of a mixture of textual criticism and history of ideas. Mainly devoted to the minutiae of the Tel Quel phenomenon and to the arcane controversies it generated, Kauppi's book does not offer a comprehensive picture of 'French Theory' and its subsequent impact in the United States, even if it does include (short) chapters on Derrida, Bourdieu, and the 'power-idea of structure'. Readers of Kauppi's earlier book (an English translation, The Making of an Avant-Garde: 'Tel Quel', was published in 1994) will probably find little new content in his latest offering. [End Page 424]

Edward Ousselin
Western Washington University
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