September 18, 2004
Julia Kristeva as Meryl Streep
In the last three decades of the 20th Century, the names of many french thinkers acquired in the US an aura that was previously reserved for heroes of American mythology, or for showbiz stars. One could even play at translating the american intellectual world into the universe of the hollywood western: these french thinkers, often marginalised in France, would surely take the leading roles. Jacques Derrida could be Clint Eastwood, for his role as a solitary pioneer, his uncontested authority and his all-conquering bouffant. Jean Baudrillard could almost pass for Gregory Peck, a mixture of bonhomie and sombre detachment, and with their aptitude for never being where they're expected to be. Jacques Lacan is cast as an irascible Robert Mitchum, because of their common penchant for their murderous streak and undecidable irony. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, rather than the spaghetti westerns of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, evoke the hirsute duo, much-abused but sublime, of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy. And why couldn't Michel Foucault become an unexpected Steve McQueen, with his knowledge of prison, his disquieting laughter and his guerrilla independence, figuring at the top of one of those lists of public darlings? Without forgetting Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard as Jack Palance, for his great passion, Louis Althusser as James Stewart, for that melancholy silhouette; and, on the side of the women, Julia Kristeva as Meryl Streep, courageous mother or exiled sister, and Helene Cixous as Faye Dunaway, the model of free femininity. An improbable western, where the scenes become characters, where the plans of the Indians are victorious, and where the exhausted cavalry never arrives.
In fact, from electronic music to the communities of the internet, from conceptual art to blockbuster movies (appropriately); and above all in the academic arena of political debate, these french authors have attained in the US, since the beginning of the 1980s, an official notoriety and an underground influence which they have never managed at home. Without being idols of the big screen, their names have nonetheless become overcoded, gradually americanised, largely de-francified; names becoming legendary in America, without the country they came from ever realising the extent of the phenomenon.
Franç�ois Cusset, French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux É�tats-Unis: �Éditions La D�écouverte, 2004 [my hasty trans.]
Posted by robin at September 18, 2004 07:46 PMSo is all this just a case of jealousy on Cusset's part, or is his point more along the lines of 'Stupid Americans, chewing over the dross of French Academia which we wouldn't touch with a bargepole at home'?
Anyhow, he's wrong about Derrida being Clint Easwood: Our Jacques is clearly Cort, the disillusioned gunfighter turned preacher played by Russell Crowe in The Quick and the Dead.
Posted by: johneffay at September 19, 2004 03:33 PMI got the distinct feeling from the original article that he was accusing the US of distorting the "real" thought of deleuze - but the book is more evenhanded, taking the french to task for supressing le pensee 68 as much as les anglosaxons for shaping it for their own ends. Apparently the french academy was more or less unaware of the continued existence of poststructuralism overseas until the Sokal 'affair' broke.
I think in the end he sees it as an interesting case study in geophilosophy, the strange attraction of the exotic, and how thought inevitably gets mangled if it gets used at all (this is just from a brief read of random bits of the book, so I may be wrong). There's some photos too, including a totally out of focus picture of deleuze and guattari posing by a chevy on a californian highway.
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