What Is Counter-Enlightenment? 3

Home , Antoine de Rivarol, New Philosophers

•INTRODUCTION• 1 2 3 Answer to the Question: What Is 4 5 Counter-Enlightenment? 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 I  of the Enlightenment the eighteenth century was com- 13 monly known as the century of lumière, or light. Its advocates 14 viewed themselves as the “party of humanity”: they sought to rep- 15 resent the “general will” rather than the standpoint of particular 16 interests, estates, or castes. The champions of Enlightenment coun- 17 terposed reason as an analytical solvent to dogma, superstition, and 18 unwarranted social authority. Their compendium of political griev- 19 ances culminated in the cahiers de doléances submitted to Louis XVI 20 in conjunction with the summoning of the Estates General in 1788— 21 a damning indictment of the injustices and corruptions that pre- 22 vailed under the absolute monarchies of Louis and his predecessor, 23 Louis XV. With one or two notable exceptions (e.g., Jean-Jacques 24 Rousseau), the philosophes were political moderates. They conﬁ- 25 dently believed that the monarchy could be progressively restruc- 26 tured, and, consequently, put their faith in piecemeal political reform 27 from above. As such, most were proponents of either “Enlightened 28 Despotism” or, in the case of the so-called Anglomaniacs, English- 29 style constitutional monarchy. Yet, time and again, monarchical 30 intransigence pushed them in the direction of democratic republi- 31 canism. When on June 27, 1789, the deputies representing the Third 32 Estate—whose members had been bred on Enlightenment pre- 33 cepts—took their seats in the National Assembly on the left side of 34 the hall, the modern political left was born.1 35 Of course, the same sequence of events precipitated the birth of S36 the modern political right, whose adherents elected to sit on the R37

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2 INTRODUCTION

1 opposite side of the Versailles assembly hall on that fateful day in 2 1789. But in reality the political battle lines had been drawn decades 3 earlier. By mid-century defenders of the ancien régime knew that the 4 cultural momentum lay with the “party of humanity.” A new breed 5 of anti-philosophe emerged to contest the epistemological and 6 political heresies proposed by the Party of Reason—the apostles of 7 Counter-Enlightenment. Relying mainly on theological arguments, 8 the anti-philosophes cautioned against the spirit of critical inquiry, 9 intellectual hubris, and the misuse of reason. Instead, they empha- 10 sized the need to preserve order at all costs. They viewed altar and 11 throne as the twin pillars of political stability. They believed that any 12 challenge to their unquestioned primacy threatened to undermine 13 the entire social ediﬁce. They considered self-evident the view—one 14 in effect shared by many of the philosophes themselves—that men 15 and women were fundamentally incapable of self-governance. Sin 16 was the alpha and omega of the human condition. One needed 17 both unquestioned authority and the threat of eternal damna- 18 tion to prevent humanity from overreaching its inherently fallible 19 nature. Unfettered employment of reason as recommended by the 20 philosophes was an invitation to catastrophe. As one of the leading 21 spokesmen of the Counter-Enlightenment, Antoine de Rivarol (one 22 of the major sources for Edmund Burke’s Reﬂections on the Revolu- 23 tion in France), remarked in 1789, “From the day when the monarch 24 consults his subjects, sovereignty is as though suspended... When 25 people cease to esteem, they cease to obey. A general rule: peoples 26 whom the king consults begin with vows and end with wills of their 27 own.”2 28 Rivarol and company held “philosophy” responsible for the cor- 29 ruption of morals, carnal licentiousness, depravity, political decay, 30 economic decline, poor harvests, and the precipitous rise in food 31 prices. The social cataclysms of revolutionary France—mob vio- 32 lence, dechristianization, anarchy, civil war, terror, and political 33 dictatorship—convinced the anti-philosophes of their uncanny 34 clairvoyance. 35 In a much-cited essay Isaiah Berlin contended that one could 36S trace the origins of fascism to Counter-Enlightenment ideologues 37R like Joseph de Maistre and Johann Georg Hamann.3 Indeed, a cer-

WHAT IS COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT? 3

tain plausibility marks Berlin’s claim. For one of fascism’s avowed 1 goals was to put an end to the Enlightenment-derived nineteenth- 2 century worldview: the predominance of science, reason, democ- 3 racy, socialism, individualism, and the like. As Goebbels pithily 4 observed a few months after Hitler’s rise to power, “The year 1789 5 is hereby erased from history.”4 Maistre and his contemporaries 6 were horrified by the specter of radical change. As such, they pre- 7 ferred the “contrary of revolution” (reform from above) to the 8 specter of “counter-revolution,” which would merely perpetuate 9 the cycle of violence. 10 The fascists, conversely, crossed the Rubicon and never looked 11 back. They knew that, in an age of total war, a point of no return 12 had been reached: there could be no going back to the tradition- 13 bound cocoon of the ancien régime. They elected to combat the val- 14 ues of the French Revolution with revolutionary means: violence, 15 war, and total mobilization. Thereby, they ushered in an alternative 16 vision of modernity, one that was meant to supersede the stand- 17 point of the philosophes and the political champions of 1789. 18 19 20 Who’s Afraid of Enlightenment? 21 22 Surely, one of the more curious aspects of the contemporary period 23 is that the heritage of Enlightenment finds itself under attack not 24 only from the usual suspects on the political right but also from 25 proponents of the academic left. As one astute commentator has 26 recently noted, today “Enlightenment bashing has developed into 27 something of an intellectual blood-sport, uniting elements of both 28 the left and the right in a common cause.”5 Thus, one of the peculi- 29 arities of our times is that Counter-Enlightenment arguments once 30 the exclusive prerogative of the political right have attained a new 31 lease on life among representatives of the cultural left. Surprisingly, 32 if one scans the relevant literature, one finds champions of post- 33 modernism who proudly invoke the Counter-Enlightenment her- 34 itage as their own. As the argument goes, since democracy has been 35 and continues to be responsible for so many political ills, and since S36 the critique of modern democracy began with the anti-philosophes, R37

4 INTRODUCTION

1 why not mobilize their powerful arguments in the name of the 2 postmodern political critique? As a prominent advocate of postmod- 3 ern political theory contends, one need only outfit the Counter- 4 Enlightenment standpoint with a new “articulation” (a claim 5 couched in deliberate vagueness) to make it serviceable for the ends 6 of the postmodern left.6 Yet those who advocate this alliance of 7 convenience between extreme right and extreme left provide few 8 guarantees or assurances that the end product of the exercise in 9 political grafting will result in greater freedom rather than a 10 grandiose political miscarriage. 11 One of the crucial elements underlying this problematic right- 12 left synthesis is a strange chapter in the history of ideas whereby 13 latter-day anti-philosophes such as Nietzsche and Heidegger became 14 the intellectual idols of post–World War II France—above all, for 15 poststructuralists like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles 16 Deleuze. Paradoxically, a thoroughgoing cynicism about reason and 17 democracy, once the hallmark of reactionary thought, became the 18 stock-in-trade of the postmodern left.7 As observers of the French 19 intellectual scene have frequently noted, although Germany lost on 20 the battlefield, it triumphed in the seminar rooms, bookstores, and 21 cafés of the Latin Quarter. During the 1960s Spenglerian indict- 22 ments of “Western civilization,” once cultivated by leading repre- 23 sentatives of the German intellectual right, migrated across the 24 Rhine where they gained a new currency. Ironically, Counter- 25 Enlightenment doctrines that had been taboo in Germany because 26 of their unambiguous association with fascism—after all, Nietzsche 27 had been canonized as the Nazi regime’s official philosopher, and for 28 a time Heidegger was its most outspoken philosophical advocate— 29 seemed to best capture the mood of Kulturpessimismus that predom- 30 inated among French intellectuals during the postwar period. Adding 31 insult to injury, the new assault against philosophie came from the 32 homeland of the Enlightenment itself. 33 One of the linchpins of the Counter-Enlightenment program 34 was an attack against the presuppositions of humanism. By chal- 35 lenging the divine basis of absolute monarchy, the unbelieving 36S philosophes had tampered with the Great Chain of Being, thereby 37R undermining morality and inviting social chaos. For the anti-

WHAT IS COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT? 5

philosophes, there existed a line of continuity between Renaissance 1 humanism, Protestant heresy, and Enlightenment atheism. In Con- 2 siderations on France (1797) Maistre sought to defend the particu- 3 larity of historical traditions against the universalizing claims of 4 Enlightenment humanism, which had culminated in the Declara- 5 tion of the Rights of Man and Citizen of August 20, 1789. In a spirit 6 of radical nominalism, the French royalist observed that he had 7 encountered Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and even Persians (if 8 only in the writings of Montesquieu). But “humanity” or “man in 9 general,” he claimed, was a figment of a feverish and overheated 10 philosophe imagination. “Man” as such did not exist.8 11 An assault on humanism was also one of French structuralism’s 12 hallmarks, an orientation that in many respects set the tone for the 13 more radical, poststructuralist doctrines that followed. As one critic 14 has aptly remarked, “Structuralism was . . . a movement that in 15 large measure reversed the eighteenth-century celebration of Rea- 16 son, the credo of the Lumières.”9 In this spirit, one of the movement’s 17 founders, Claude Lévi-Strauss, sought to make anthropology useful 18 for the ends of cultural criticism. Lévi-Strauss famously laid respon- 19 sibility for the twentieth century’s horrors—total war, genocide, 20 colonialism, threat of nuclear annihilation—at the doorstep of 21 Western humanism. As he remarked in a 1979 interview, “All the 22 tragedies we have lived through, first with colonialism, then with 23 fascism, finally the concentration camps, all this has taken shape not 24 in opposition to or in contradiction with so-called humanism . . . 25 but I would say almost as its natural continuation.”10 Anticipating the 26 poststructuralist credo, Lévi-Strauss went on to proclaim that the 27 goal of the human sciences “was not to constitute, but to dissolve 28 man.”11 From here it is but a short step to Foucault’s celebrated, 29 neo-Nietzschean adage concerning the “death of man” in The Order 30 of Things.12 31 For Lévi-Strauss, human rights were integrally related to the ide- 32 ology of Western humanism and therefore ethically untenable. He 33 embraced a full-blown cultural relativism (“every culture has made 34 a ‘choice’ that must be respected”) and argued vociferously against 35 cross-cultural communication. Such a ban was the only way, he felt, S36 to preserve the plurality and diversity of indigenous cultures.13 His R37

6 INTRODUCTION

1 strictures against cultural mixing are eerily reminiscent of the posi- 2 tions espoused by the “father of European racism,” Comte Arthur 3 de Gobineau. In The Origins of Inequality Among Human Races 4 (1853–55) the French aristocrat claimed that miscegenation was the 5 root cause of European decline. The ease with which an antiracism 6 predicated on cultural relativism can devolve into its opposite—an 7 unwitting defense of racial separatism—was one of the lessons that 8 French intellectuals learned during the 1980s in the course of com- 9 bating the ideology of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.14 10 Lévi-Strauss’s polemical critique of Western humanism repre- 11 sents a partial throwback to J. G. Herder’s impassioned defense of 12 cultural particularism at the dawn of the Counter-Enlightenment in 13 Yet Another Philosophy of History (1774). For Herder, a dedicated foe 14 of universal Reason’s leveling gaze, it was self-evident that “Each 15 form of human perfection is . . . national and time-bound and . . . 16 Individual. . . . Each nation has its center of happiness within itself, 17 just as every sphere has its center of gravity.”15 While Herder’s 18 standpoint may be viewed as a useful corrective to certain strands of 19 Enlightenment thought (e.g., the mechanistic materialism of the 20 High Enlightenment; La Mettrie, after all, sought to view “man as a 21 machine”), in retrospect his concerted defense of cultural relativism 22 ceded too much ground vis-à-vis the political status quo. To achieve 23 their ends, the advocates of political emancipation required a more 24 radical and uncompromising idiom. Unsurprisingly, they found it in 25 the maxims of modern natural right as purveyed by philosophes 26 such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Condorcet. 27 During the 1960s among many French intellectuals cultural rela- 28 tivism came to supplant the liberal virtue of “tolerance”—a precept 29 that remained tied to norms mandating a fundamental respect for 30 human integrity. When combined with an antihumanist-inspired 31 Western self-hatred, ethical relativism engendered an uncritical 32 Third Worldism, an orientation that climaxed in Foucault’s enthusi- 33 astic endorsement of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.16 Since the “dictator- 34 ship of the mullahs” was antimodern, anti-Western, and antiliberal, 35 it satisﬁed ex negativo many of the political criteria that Third World- 36S ists had come to view as “progressive.” Similarly, Lévi-Strauss’s 37R unwillingness to differentiate between the progressive and regres-

WHAT IS COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT? 7

sive strands of political modernity—for instance, between democ- 1 racy and fascism—suggests one of the perils of structuralism. By 2 preferring the “view from afar” or the “longue durée,” the struc- 3 turalists, like the anti-philosophes of yore, denigrated the human 4 capacities of consciousness and will. Instead, in their optic, history 5 appeared as a senseless fate, devoid of rhyme or reason, consigned 6 a priori to the realm of unintelligibility.17 7 The parallels between the core ideas of Counter-Enlightenment 8 and postwar French thought have been shrewdly analyzed in a 9 recent study of Maistre’s intellectual legacy. With tact and discern- 10 ment, Owen Bradley phrases the problem as follows: 11 12 Maistre’s absence from current debates is a yet much greater sur- 13 prise given the uncanny resemblance between his work and the 14 dominant trends in recent French thought. Bataille on the sacred as 15 the defining feature of human existence . . . Blanchot on the . . . vio- 16 lence of all speech and writing; Foucault on the social function of 17 punishment in pre-Revolutionary Europe; Derrida on violence and 18 difference...all of these themes . . . were anticipated and exten- 19 sively elaborated in Maistre’s writing.18 20 In many respects, these suggestive remarks concerning the strangely 21 underresearched affinities between Counter-Enlightenment and the 22 postmodernist credo form the core of the study that follows. 23 24 25 “The Sovereign Enterprise of Unreason” 26 27 In the concluding pages of Madness and Civilization Foucault praised 28 the “sovereign enterprise of Unreason,” forever irreducible to prac- 29 tices that can be “cured.” Foucault’s contrast between the exclu- 30 sionary practices of the modern scientific worldview, whose rise was 31 coincident with Descartes’s Discourse on Method, and the noncon- 32 formist potentials of “madness” qua “other” of reason, would help 33 to redefine the theoretical agenda for an entire generation of French 34 intellectuals. Even in the case of Derrida, who formulated a power- 35 ful critique of Foucault’s arguments, there was little disagreement S36 with the Foucault’s central contention that Reason is essentially a R37

8 INTRODUCTION

1 mechanism of oppression that proceeds by way of exclusions, con- 2 straints, and prohibitions. Derrida’s own indictment of “logocen- 3 trism,” or the tyranny of reason, purveys a kindred sentiment: since 4 the time of Plato, Western thought has displayed a systematic intol- 5 erance vis-à-vis difference, otherness, and heterogeneity. Following 6 the precedents established by Nietzsche and Heidegger, deconstruc- 7 tion arose to overturn and dismantle Reason’s purported life-denying, 8 unitarian prejudices. 9 In a similar vein, Jean-François Lyotard attained notoriety for his 10 controversial equation of “consensus” with “terror.” The idea of an 11 uncoerced, rational accord, argues Lyotard, is a fantasy. Underlying 12 the veneer of mutual agreement lurks force. This endemic cynicism 13 about linguistically adjudicating disputes is another one of post- 14 structuralism’s hallmarks. Yet one cannot help but wonder how 15 Lyotard expects to convince readers of the rectitude of his position 16 if not via recourse to time-honored discursive means: the marshal- 17 ing of supporting evidence and force of the better argument. If, as 18 Lyotard insinuates, “force” is all there is, on what grounds might we 19 prefer one position to another? One cannot help but suspect that, 20 ultimately, there is something deeply unsatisfying about the attempt 21 by Lyotard and his fellow poststructuralists to replace the precepts 22 of argumentation with rhetoric, aesthetics, or agonistics.19 23 The Seduction of Unreason is an exercise in intellectual genealogy. 24 It seeks to shed light on the uncanny afﬁnities between the Counter- 25 Enlightenment and postmodernism. As such, it may also be read as 26 an archaeology of postmodern theory. During the 1970s and 1980s 27 a panoply of texts by Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard were 28 translated into English, provoking a far-reaching shift in American 29 intellectual life. Many of these texts were inspired by Nietzsche’s 30 anticivilizational animus: the conviction that our highest ideals of 31 beauty, morality, and truth were intrinsically nihilistic. Such views 32 found favor among a generation of academics disillusioned by the 33 political failures of the 1960s. Understandably, in despondent times 34 Nietzsche’s iconoclastic recommendation that one should “philoso- 35 phize with a hammer”—that if something is falling, one should give 36S it a ﬁnal push—found a ready echo. Yet, too often, those who rushed 37R to mount the Nietzschean bandwagon downplayed or ignored the

WHAT IS COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT? 9

illiberal implications of his positions. Moreover, in retrospect, it 1 seems clear that this same generation, many of whose representa- 2 tives were comfortably ensconced in university careers, had merely 3 exchanged radical politics for textual politics: unmasking “binary 4 oppositions” replaced an ethos of active political engagement.20 In 5 the last analysis it seems that the seductions of “theory” helped 6 redirect formerly robust political energies along the lines of accept- 7 able academic career tracks. As commentators have often pointed 8 out, during the 1980s, while Republicans were commandeering the 9 nation’s political apparatus, partisans of “theory” were storming 10 the ramparts of the Modern Language Association and the local En- 11 glish Department. 12 Ironically, during the same period, the French paradigms that 13 American academics were so busy assimilating were undergoing an 14 eclipse across the Atlantic. In France they were perceived as expres- 15 sions of an obsolete political temperament: gauchisme (“leftism”) or 16 “French philosophy of the 1960s.”21 By the mid-1980s French intel- 17 lectuals had passed through the acid bath of antitotalitarianism.22 18 Under the influence of Solzhenitsyn’s pathbreaking study of the 19 Gulag as well as the timely, if slick, anticommunist polemics of the 20 “New Philosophers” such as André Glucksmann and Bernard Henri- 21 Lévy, who were appalled by the “killing fields” of Pol Pot’s Cambo- 22 dia (the Khmer Rouge leader had been educated in Paris during the 23 1950s) and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, French intellectuals 24 began returning to the indigenous tradition of democratic republi- 25 canism—thereby leaving the 1960s leftists holding the bag of an 26 outmoded philosophical anarchism. The tyrannical excesses of 27 Third Worldism—China’s Cultural Revolution, Castro’s Cuba, Idi 28 Amin’s Uganda, Mobutu’s Zaire, Duvalier’s Haiti—finally put paid 29 to the delusion that the “wretched of the earth” were the bearers of 30 a future socialist utopia. Suddenly, the nostrums of Western human- 31 ism, which the poststructuralists had emphatically denounced, 32 seemed to merit a second look. 33 During the 1960s the poststructuralists sought to supplement 34 Marx with more radical critiques of “civilization” set forth by Nietz- 35 sche and Heidegger. Their indictments of Western humanism S36 seemed well-suited to the apocalyptical mood of the times, framed R37

10 INTRODUCTION

1 by the war in Vietnam and the reigning superpower nuclear strat- 2 egy of “mutually assured destruction.” The experience of totalitar- 3 ianism, however, which remained a reality in Eastern Europe until 4 1989, suggested that the idea of human rights had become the sine 5 qua non of progressive politics. In another one of history’s pro- 6 found ironies, during the 1970s and 1980s marxisant French intellec- 7 tuals were reinstructed in the virtues of civic humanism by their 8 Eastern European counterparts: courageous dissidents such as 9 Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik, George Konrad, and Andrei Sakharov. 10 At this point “French philosophy of the 1960s” ceded to the neohu- 11 manism of “French philosophy of the 1980s.”23 12 Another reason for poststructuralism’s demise related to a series 13 of embarrassing political scandals that dated from the 1930s but 14 only came to light in the course of the 1980s. The ﬁrst concerned 15 revelations that during the 1930s French literary critic Maurice Blan- 16 chot, one of deconstruction’s seminal forebears, had published a 17 number of compromising articles in the profascist, anti-Semitic jour- 18 nal Combat. In 1936 Blanchot, referring to the Popular Front govern- 19 ment, bemoaned “the detestable character of what is called with 20 solemnity the Blum experiment . . . a splendid union, a holy alliance, 21 this conglomerate of Soviet, Jewish, and capitalist interests.”24 At the 22 time, the opprobrious litany associating communists, Jews, and cap- 23 italists (in deﬁance of rudimentary considerations of political logic) 24 was the standard fare of French rightists, whose watchwords were 25 “France for the French” and “better Hitler than Blum.” 26 Although efforts to limit the fallout associated with Blanchot’s 27 youthful political transgressions were largely successful, the same 28 cannot be said for two subsequent scandals, bearing on the com- 29 promised pasts of Heidegger and deconstruction’s American ambas- 30 sador, Paul de Man. Since both of these “affairs” have now been 31 rehearsed ad nauseum in countless books and articles, I will refrain 32 from discussing them at length.25 Nevertheless, the damaging reve- 33 lations about the compromised intellectual pedigree of French 34 “theory” raised a number of troubling questions that poststruc- 35 turalism’s defenders never seem to answer satisfactorily. The delib- 36S erative ineptitude of poststructuralism’s champions when it came 37R

WHAT IS COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT? 11

to proffering a credible defense has been as injurious as the facts 1 themselves. Thus, at a pivotal moment in the debate over de Man’s 2 fascist past, Derrida “deconstructed” one of the young Belgian’s 3 articles from the early 1940s that enthusiastically endorsed the 4 deportation of European Jews—at the very moment the Nazi Final 5 Solution was being implemented—by claiming, counterintuitively, 6 that it demonstrated de Man’s status as a closet résistant.26 Similarly, 7 in the debate over Heidegger’s Nazism, several poststructuralists 8 argued implausibly that the German philosopher had succumbed to 9 Nazism’s allure owing to a surfeit of humanism. It was the later 10 Heidegger, they claimed—the avowed “antihumanist”—who was 11 the genuine antifascist. 12 The poststructuralists may be distinguished from their predeces- 13 sors, the structuralists, by virtue of having rejected the concepts of 14 “totality” and “totalization.” According to Derrida, poststructural- 15 ism’s basic lesson teaches that the idea of a textual coherence is a 16 chimera. Poststructuralism demonstrates that the “center does not 17 hold”; attempts to achieve epistemological “finality” or “closure” 18 are unsustainable. Language is inherently polysemic and plurivocal. 19 As such, its fissures and slippages militate against the Hegelian ideal 20 of Absolute Knowledge. By glorifying the ideal of “scientific 21 closure,” by trying to limit the free play of signification, the struc- 22 turalists merely repeated the errors of Western metaphysics. By 23 succumbing to the foundationalist urges of traditional metaphysics, 24 structuralism reveals itself to be “logocentric”—merely another 25 species of “first philosophy.” 26 According to the conventional wisdom, both poststructuralism 27 and postmodernism are movements of the political left. One of the 28 goals of the present study is to challenge this commonplace. After 29 all, historically, the left has been staunchly rationalist and universal- 30 ist, defending democracy, egalitarianism, and human rights. One of 31 the hallmarks of the political left has been a willingness to address 32 questions of “social justice,” systematically calling into question 33 parochial definitions of liberty that sanction vast inequalities of 34 wealth, demanding instead that proponents of formal equality meet 35 the needs of socially disadvantaged groups. Time and again, the left S36 R37

12 INTRODUCTION

1 has forced bourgeois society to live up to democratic norms, chal- 2 lenging narrowly individualistic conceptions of rights as well as the 3 plutocratic ambitions of political and economic elites.27 Thus, if one 4 examines the developmental trajectory of modern societies, one dis- 5 cerns a ﬁtful progression from civic to political to social equality. 6 On almost all of these questions, postmodernists remain out of 7 step with left-wing concerns. Since their approach has been res- 8 olutely “culturalist,” questions of social justice, which have tradi- 9 tionally preoccupied the left, have remained imperceptible. Since 10 postmodernists are self-avowed “post-Marxists,” political economy 11 plays a negligible role in their work. Yet in an age of globalization, 12 when markets threaten to become destiny, this omission proves 13 fatal to any theory that stakes a claim to political relevance.28 14 From latter-day anti-philosophes like Nietzsche and Heidegger, 15 poststructuralists have inherited a distrust of reason and democracy. 16 The ideas they have recommended in their stead—“différance” (Der- 17 rida), “transgression” (Foucault), “schizophrenia” (Deleuze and 18 Guattari)—fail to inspire conﬁdence. Their denunciations of rea- 19 son’s inadequacies have an all-too-familiar ring: since the dawn of 20 the Counter-Enlightenment, they have been the standard fare of 21 European Reaction. By engaging in a neo-Nietzschean assault on 22 “reason” and “truth,” poststructuralists’ criticisms remain pitched 23 at a level of theoretical abstraction that lets capitalism off the hook. 24 Ultimately, their overarching pessimism about prospects for pro- 25 gressive political change—for example, Foucault contended that the 26 idea of emancipation is a trap laid by the forces of “governmentality” 27 to inscribe the “subject” in the clutches of “power-knowledge”— 28 seems conducive to resignation and inaction. After all, if, as Fou- 29 cault claims, “power” is everywhere, to contest it seems pointless. 30 Instead of challenging domination practically, postmodernists pre- 31 fer to remain on the relatively safe terrain of “metapolitics”—the 32 insular plane of “theory,” where the major risks are “conceptual” 33 and concrete politics are rendered ethereal. 34 But “culturalist” approaches to power leave the structural com- 35 ponents of domination untouched—and, ultimately, unchallenged. 36S The complacency of this approach surfaces in Foucault’s recom- 37R mendation in The History of Sexuality that, in the place of traditional

WHAT IS COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT? 13 left-wing paradigms of social change, which he considers discred- 1 ited, we seek out a “different economy of bodies and pleasures.”29 2 One thereby runs the risk of substituting a narcissistic “lifestyle pol- 3 itics” for “movement politics.” “Identity politics” usurps the tradi- 4 tional left-wing concern with social justice. To be sure, differences 5 need to be respected—but not fetishized. An uncritical celebration 6 of “difference” can readily result in a new “essentialism” in which 7 questions of group identity are elevated to the rank of a ﬁrst princi- 8 ple. Since efforts to achieve consensus are a priori viewed with deri- 9 sion and mistrust, it seems virtually impossible to restore a 10 meaningful sense of political community. Historically, the end result 11 has been the cultural left’s political marginalization and fragmenta- 12 tion. Instead of spurring an attitude of active contestation, a narrow- 13 minded focus on group identity has encouraged political withdrawal. 14 As one astute commentator has pointed out, today the apostles of 15 “cultural politics” 16 17 do not even bother to pretend to be egalitarian, impartial, tolerant, 18 or solidary with others, or even fair. In its worst guise, this politics 19 has turned into the very opposite of egalitarian and democratic 20 politics—as the emergence of virulent forms of nationalism, ethno- 21 centrism, and intolerant group particularism all over the world 22 witness. One begins to wonder whether the [new culturalist 23 approaches] have played into the hands of the antidemocrats by 24 depriving us of the language and conceptual resources indispensable 25 for confronting the authoritarian assertions of difference so preva- 26 lent today.30 27 Identity is not an argument. It represents an appeal to “life” or brute 28 existence as opposed to principles that presuppose argumentative 29 give-and-take. As a European friend once put it: “identity politics— 30 that’s what they had in Germany from 1933–45.” The failures of 31 cultural politics mirrors the decline of the New Left as chronicled 32 by Christopher Lasch and Richard Sennett: the renunciation of an 33 oppositional, public sphere politics in favor of an inner-directed and 34 self-absorbed “culture of narcissism.”31 35 That postmodernists rely unwittingly on arguments and posi- S36 tions developed by proponents of Counter-Enlightenment does not R37

14 INTRODUCTION

1 mean they are conservative, let alone reactionary. The study that 2 follows is not an exercise in guilt-by-association. Nevertheless, such 3 reliance suggests that their standpoint is confused, that the disjunc- 4 tion between their epistemological radicalism and their political 5 preferences (supposedly “progressive,” though often difficult to 6 pinpoint) results in a fundamental incoherence. Nor are postmod- 7 ernists, as their right-wing detractors maintain, particularly “dan- 8 gerous.” Despite their antipathy to democracy and their radical 9 political longings, they, too, are the beneficiaries of a modern polit- 10 ical culture in which tolerance has been enshrined as a fundamental 11 value. 12 In his History of Structuralism, François Dosse remarks that the 13 poststructuralist aversion to democracy represents an expression of 14 intellectual self-hatred.32 He points out how, ironically, this hostility 15 has become pronounced in the homeland of Rousseau, modern 16 republicanism, and the “ideas of 1789.” Although it was the French 17 Revolution that put democracy on the map of European political 18 culture, of late it seems more a source of embarrassment than an 19 index of national pride.33 Paradoxically, whereas a visceral rejection 20 of political modernity (rights of man, rule of law, constitutional- 21 ism) was once standard fare among counterrevolutionary thinkers, 22 it has now become fashionable among advocates of the cultural left. 23 Postmodernists equate democracy with “soft totalitarianism.” They 24 argue that by privileging public reason and the common good, lib- 25 eral democracy effectively suppresses otherness and difference. Of 26 course, one could very easily make the converse argument: histori- 27 cally speaking, democracy and rule of law have proved the best 28 guarantors of cultural diversity and political pluralism. During the 29 1980s the debate on “difference” would take an insidious turn as the 30 European New Right, led by France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, embraced 31 the “right to difference” as a justification for racial separatism.34 The 32 shock of recognition resulting from Le Pen’s electoral successes 33 pushed the European left firmly back into the democratic republi- 34 can camp. 35 Although Derrida has recently professed a sly interest in a nebu- 36S lous “democracy to come” (“democratie à venir/avenir”), what he 37R

WHAT IS COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT? 15

might have in mind by this metapolitical decree—long on rhetoric 1 and short on empirical substance—is anybody’s guess. By denying 2 the basic emancipatory potentials of democracy, by downplaying the 3 significant differences between it and its totalitarian antithesis, the 4 postmodern left has openly consigned itself to the political margins. 5 For, whatever their empirical failings, states predicated on rule of 6 law contain a basic capacity for internal political change fundamen- 7 tally absent from illiberal political regimes. Over the last forty years, 8 the qualified successes of the women’s, antiwar, ecological, civil, 9 and gay rights movements have testified to this political rule of 10 thumb. 11 Poststructuralism arose at a peculiar juncture in French political 12 history, one marked by the depredations of civil war (the Algerian 13 conflict and its aftermath), a delirious Third Worldism, a Gaullist 14 regime that had gained power via extraconstitutional means (and 15 which many observers viewed as a dictatorship), and the eclipse of 16 a viable political left. At the time, all inherited theoretical and polit- 17 ical options seemed bankrupt, and the need for a total break with 18 tradition desirable. But attempts to translate the élan of this unique 19 intellectual moment beyond the circumstances of its origination 20 seem dubious. One of the major problems with the North Ameri- 21 can encounter with French “theory” is that its reception has been 22 radically decontextualized. Little attention has been paid to the 23 peculiarly French conditions of its genesis. Consequently, especially 24 among acolytes, its reception has been distinctly uncritical. By fill- 25 ing in these historical and intellectual gaps, the present study hopes 26 to expand significantly the parameters of debate. 27 28 Part I, “The German Ideology Revisited,” reexamines the legacy of 29 three German thinkers who have exerted a major influence on con- 30 temporary intellectual life. One of my main concerns is the endur- 31 ing influence German Existenzphilosophie (existentialism) has had on 32 postwar French thought. In this respect Nietzsche’s work represents 33 an indispensable point of reference. The landscape of contempo- 34 rary French thought would be unrecognizable without his momen- 35 tous and controversial impact. Moreover, the “French Nietzsche”— S36 R37

16 INTRODUCTION

1 the antifoundationalist, literary stylist, and proponent of aesthetic 2 self-fashioning—has in turn become canonical for North American 3 postmodernism. 4 But the appropriation of Nietzsche for the ends of postmod- 5 ernism raises a number of troubling interpretive dilemmas. To 6 begin with, there is the important question of periodization. After 7 all, Nietzsche was a contemporary of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Dos- 8 toevsky, all of whom were classical “modernists.” In what sense, 9 then, can he justifiably be appropriated for the ends of postmod- 10 ernism, which, at the very earliest, dates from the post–World 11 War II period? 12 Moreover, upon closer inspection, the attempt to pass Nietzsche 13 off as an aesthete appears selective and arbitrary. This interpretive 14 gambit was clearly adopted to put as much distance as possible 15 between Nietzsche and the Nazis, among whom he enjoyed the sta- 16 tus of “court philosopher.” One of the major questions that sur- 17 faces in the postmodernist reception of Nietzsche is, When so 18 much of the original doctrine is intentionally left to one side, to 19 what extent can one claim one is still dealing with Nietzsche? 20 With the advent of postmodernist feminism, Jung’s theories 21 began to make significant inroads in the academy.35 Jung’s doctrines 22 proved attractive insofar as they supplanted Freud’s scientism with 23 elements of fable and myth. Among the broader public, Jung’s 24 influence on popular psychology and New Age thought has long 25 been prodigious. Whereas among both of these constituencies 26 Freud has been perceived as a conservative advocate of Victorian 27 morality, Jung stood out as someone who was willing to take risks. 28 In vintage Enlightenment fashion, Freud sought to subject the 29 unruly forces of the unconscious to the pacifying balm of analytical 30 Reason. Jung, conversely, displayed a willingness to confront the 31 irrational on its own terms—hence, his manifest affinities with the 32 postmodernist devaluation of Reason. Unlike his Viennese mentor, 33 Jung felt the need to reestablish psychoanalysis as a vehicle of per- 34 sonal salvation—as a new religion. Thus, in keeping with the irra- 35 tionalist vogue of his day (the rise of Theosophy, Anthrosophy, and 36S so forth), Jung experimented freely with the mysteries of Aryan reli- 37R

WHAT IS COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT? 17 gion, from which his core doctrines—the theory of archetypes and 1 the collective unconscious—derive. 2 Yet, like a modern-day Faust, Jung would pay the price for this fas- 3 cination with forbidden wisdom. When the Nazis came to power in 4 1933, brandishing swastikas and advocating neopaganism, it seemed 5 like an instance of preestablished harmony: Jung thought he was 6 witnessing his own theories come to life. Since the break with Freud, 7 Jung had been convinced of the phylogenetic superiority of Aryan 8 archetypes. Having rejected reason as an inferior mode of cognition, 9 he found the National Socialists’ recourse to Aryan symbols and 10 myths highly congenial. Hitler, he was convinced, was Wotan rein- 11 carnate, a modern-day shaman. From his safe haven in Switzerland, 12 Jung jumped aboard the Nazi bandwagon with alacrity. 13 For a long time the career of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) 14 seemed to be one of the Federal Republic of Germany’s unequivo- 15 cal success stories. Unlike his mentor, Heidegger, Gadamer never 16 joined the Nazi Party. In an era marked by totalitarian extremism, 17 he seemed to possess an uncanny knack for remaining above the 18 political fray. During the Nazi years, Gadamer allegedly sought 19 refuge in “inner emigration.” But a closer look at his orientation 20 during this period demonstrates how difficult it was both to achieve 21 professional success and to steer clear of compromises with the 22 reigning dictatorship. 23 During the early 1940s Gadamer proved a willing propagandist on 24 behalf of the regime, traveling to Paris to present a lecture on “Volk 25 and History in Herder’s Thought,” which explicitly justified the idea 26 of a Nazi-dominated Europe. Enlightenment ideals were bankrupt, 27 argued Gadamer. Germany’s battlefield triumphs reflected the supe- 28 riority of German Kultur. In the New Europe, the Volk-Idea, as 29 set forth by Herder and his successors, would predominate. This 30 dubious chapter of Gadamer’s political biography represents a para- 31 digmatic instance of the ideological affinities between Counter- 32 Enlightenment and the forces of political reaction. 33 Philosophically, Gadamer remains one of the leading representa- 34 tives of hermeneutics, a view that stresses the situated and partial 35 nature of all truth claims as well as the irremediably contextual basis S36 R37

18 INTRODUCTION

1 of human knowledge. The traditionalist orientation of Gadamer’s 2 thought—his stress on the “happening of tradition”—would seem 3 unambiguously unpostmodern. Yet in American pragmatist circles, 4 his “anti-foundationalism” (his rejection of “first principles” and 5 universal morality à la Kant) has been widely viewed as an impor- 6 tant harbinger of the postmodernist rejection of objective truth.36 7 Thus, the postmodernist embrace of hermeneutics may not be as 8 strange as it might seem on first view. 9 In “Fascism and Hermeneutics: Gadamer and the Ambiguities 10 of ‘Inner Emigration,’” I suggest that Gadamer’s acquiescence vis- 11 à-vis the Nazi dictatorship possesses a philosophical as well as a 12 biographical basis. Hermeneutics’ skepticism about Enlightenment 13 reason made the Nazi celebration of German particularism—the 14 ideology of the German “way”—seem unobjectionable, and, in cer- 15 tain respects, politically attractive. The German mandarin tradition 16 had long held that the sphere of politics was corrupt. From this van- 17 tage point, to make a devil’s bargain with Hitler and company 18 seemed no worse than the compromises required by other political 19 regimes. At this juncture, relativist conceptions of ethics and poli- 20 tics begin to unravel and cry out for an unmediated dose of cogni- 21 tive and moral “truth.” 22 In L’Idéologie française, Bernard-Henri Lévy took note of a phe- 23 nomenon that the majority of his countrymen had been unwilling 24 to explore until quite recently: modern French history, far from 25 demonstrating the progressive triumph of Republican ideals, betrays 26 a well-nigh constant preoccupation with the regressive temptations 27 of “integral nationalism”—the redefinition of citizenship in accor- 28 dance with the illiberal values of “blood” and “soil.” From the 29 Boulanger and Dreyfus Affairs of the 1880s and 1890s, to the proto- 30 fascistic “leagues” of the 1930s, to the authoritarian paternalism of 31 Pétain’s Vichy and de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, the lure of a “revolu- 32 tion from the Right” has proved a constant seduction among French 33 intellectuals. 34 Part II, “French Lessons,” explores this lure in the case of Georges 35 Bataille, one of poststructuralism’s key intellectual forebears. Until 36S recently, Bataille was perhaps best known as the founding editor of 37R Critique, one of France’s most prestigious literary reviews. Con-

WHAT IS COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT? 19

versely, during the 1930s he belonged to a series of avant-garde cul- 1 tural groupings, several of which were avowedly anti-Republican. For 2 this was an age of political “non-conformism”: an era of boundary- 3 crossers and taboo-breakers, of intellectuals and politicians in search 4 of a “Third Way” between communism and liberalism. Acting under 5 the assumption that democracy had been discredited by the Crash 6 of ’29 and the political uncertainty that followed, large strata of the 7 French intelligentsia succumbed to the proverbial “fascination with 8 fascism.” The fascist regimes of Mussolini and Hitler seemed to 9 restore a measure of social cohesion that, in liberal democracies, 10 remained in distinctly short supply. Perhaps, reasoned many, the 11 idea of a fascism à la française was worth a closer look. 12 It was in this context that Bataille and his associates at the College 13 of Sociology assumed the role of “sorcerer’s apprentices”: a self- 14 appointed elite capable of restoring the elements of myth, charisma, and 15 community, the absence of which seemed to be one of the most 16 debilitating features of modern society. The members of the col- 17 lege thought of themselves as a secret society, akin to the medieval 18 Knights of the Templar or a monastic order, ready to lead should 19 political conditions prove ripe. They viewed the Ordensburgen of 20 Nazi Germany—the elite training centers for the SS—as a contem- 21 porary equivalent. In 1939, the College’s final year, Bataille pre- 22 sented a lecture on “Hitler and the Teutonic Order,” whose title 23 betrays the intellectual risks that he and his fellow nonconformists 24 were willing to take in the name of a “Third Way” between com- 25 munism and liberalism. 26 One of the recurrent themes of postwar French thought con- 27 cerns the deficiencies of “representation”: the ontological gap sepa- 28 rating our linguistic capacities from reality. In his Course on General 29 Linguistics, Saussure famously proclaimed the arbitrariness of the 30 signifier, implying that no necessary correlation existed between the 31 phonemes we employ and the concepts or “signifieds” they desig- 32 nate. For a subsequent generation of French intellectuals influenced 33 by structuralism, Saussure’s insight seemed akin to a revelation. 34 When one thinks of the intellectual traditions that dominated French 35 intellectual life during the previous two hundred years—Cartesian S36 rationalism, Enlightenment materialism, Comtean positivism, and R37

20 INTRODUCTION

1 neo-Kantianism—one can begin to appreciate the distance that post- 2 modern French intellectuals have traveled. 3 In “Maurice Blanchot: The Use and Abuse of Silence,” I suggest, 4 via an examination of Blanchot’s strange career and “double life” 5 (right-wing political journalist during the 1930s, and one of postwar 6 France’s premier literary critics thereafter), that the critique of rep- 7 resentation is itself historically conditioned. The loss of faith in tra- 8 ditional intellectual paradigms is attributable, at least in part, to a 9 series of real historical and political traumas: the setbacks of war, 10 defeat, occupation, and decolonization robbed the French intelli- 11 gentsia of their traditional confidence in the supremacy of Reason. 12 As a result, a strange process of inversion occurred whereby the 13 intellectual values traditionally held in high esteem by the French 14 intellectual mandarinate—lucidity, certainty, and objectivity—sud- 15 denly became objects of opprobrium. This new generation of thinkers 16 valorized indeterminacy, relativism, and flux. 17 Jacques Derrida is one of Bataille’s—and Blanchot’s—spiritual 18 progeny. Several of his early essays appeared in Critique (founded by 19 Bataille), and his first book, Writing and Difference, contained an 20 extended meditation on Bataille’s theory of “general economics”— 21 an approach to exchange that transcends the utilitarian orientation 22 of political economy. Bataille’s concern with “otherness”—phenom- 23 ena that escape the economic and logical imperatives of bourgeois 24 society—would also become one of the signatures of Derridean 25 “écriture” or “writing.” Lastly, both Bataille and Derrida are known 26 for generating “texts” that flaunt the traditional genre distinction 27 between literature and philosophy. 28 One of Derrida’s most cited maxims has been: “there is nothing 29 outside the text” (“il n’y a pas de hors texte”). Few would disagree 30 that deconstruction’s forte has been its “close readings” of demand- 31 ing literary and philosophical works. Conversely, its undeniable 32 weakness has been its lack of effectiveness in dealing with the “non- 33 textual” spheres of history, politics, and society. Hence, by the early 34 1990s deconstruction had been surpassed by a number of more 35 politically engaged paradigms: “cultural studies” and the Foucault- 36S inspired model of “new historicism.”37 37R

WHAT IS COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT? 21

Over the last ten years Derrida has made a concerted effort to 1 redress this perceived weakness, writing widely on questions of jus- 2 tice, ethics, and politics. But have these forays into the realm of “the 3 political” in fact made a “difference”? When all is said and done, one 4 suspects that discussions of “the political” are merely a metapoliti- 5 cal pretext for circumventing the realm of “real” politics. 6 Endemic to Derrida’s perspective is the problem that, early on, 7 he attained renown by reiterating a “total critique” of the West that 8 derived from Heidegger’s antihumanism. According to this view, 9 humanism culminates in the Cartesian “will to will.” The twentieth 10 century’s political horrors—genocide, totalitarianism, nuclear war, 11 and environmental devastation—are merely the logical conse- 12 quences thereof. The dilemma besetting Derrida’s approach to pol- 13 itics is that once one accepts the frameworks of “antihumanism” 14 and “total critique,” it becomes extremely difficult—if not impos- 15 ible—to reconcile one’s standpoint with a partisanship for rea- 16 sonable democracy. In “Down By Law: Deconstruction and the 17 Problem of Justice,” I reassess Derrida’s theoretical legacy, conclud- 18 ing that the shortcomings of “really existing democracy” cannot be 19 remedied by recourse to the antidemocratic methods recommended 20 by Heidegger and Nietzsche. 21 Derrida is by no means a Counter-Enlightenment thinker. Nev- 22 ertheless, in the lexicon of deconstruction, “reason” is identified as 23 a fundamental source of tyranny and oppression. An analogous 24 prejudice afflicts Foucault’s concept of “discursive regime.” Here, 25 too, “discourse” is primarily perceived as a source of domination. 26 Whatever deconstruction’s methodological intentions may be, its 27 pragmatic effect accords with the anti-intellectual orientation of the 28 anti-philosophes. By the time deconstruction gets through with the 29 history of philosophy, very little remains. One is tempted to seek 30 refuge in myth, magic, madness, illusion, or intoxication—all seem 31 preferable to what “civilization” has to offer. The end result is that 32 deconstruction leaves its practitioners in a theoretical no-man’s 33 land, a forlorn and barren landscape, analogous to one described by 34 Heidegger: an “age of affliction” characterized by the flight of the 35 old gods and the “not yet” of the gods to come. S36 R37

22 INTRODUCTION

1 Following Part I and Part II, I have included two political excurses. 2 Both chapters may be understood as cautionary tales concerning 3 the dangers of Counter-Enlightenment orientations in modern pol- 4 itics. They illustrate that the Counter-Enlightenment program is 5 not merely a thing of the past. The European New Right has inher- 6 ited the counterrevolutionary critique of modern natural law; it 7 privileges the values of ethnicity (ethnos) over democracy (demos). 8 According to this optic, the prerogatives of cultural belonging trump 9 considerations of “right.” Thereby, New Right politicians seek to 10 advance a type of parliamentary ethnic cleansing. As with the proponents 11 of interwar fascism, today’s antidemocrats seek to exploit the open- 12 ness of the constitutional state to undermine democratic norms. 13 Postmodern political philosophy plays into their hands by suggesting 14 that human rights are a logocentric atavism: a discourse of pseudo- 15 emancipation that serves to conceal our entanglement in “power.” 16 The first excursus treats the rise of the German New Right, 17 whose advocates viewed reunification as an occasion to purvey revi- 18 sionist canards about the German past. That these attempts failed is 19 a tribute to the strength of German democracy. For the first time, 20 democracy in Germany has become a matter of heartfelt convic- 21 tion rather than mere lip service. 22 The second excursus discusses a parallel phenomenon in con- 23 temporary French politics: the rise of the French New Right (Nou- 24 velle Droite) in conjunction with the political success of the National 25 Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen. Over the last two decades authoritarian 26 national populist parties, such as Jörg Haider’s Austrian Freedom 27 Party, have registered disconcerting electoral gains across the Euro- 28 pean political landscape. More seriously, in an era of intense glo- 29 bal competition and economic retrenchment, they have been able 30 to steal the political thunder from the mainstream parties and re- 31 frame public discourse in keeping with their own xenophobic, anti- 32 immigrant agenda. 33 The conclusion, “‘Site of Catastrophe’: The Image of America 34 in Modern Thought,” examines “anti-Americanism” as an enduring 35 component of Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernist discourse. 36S Legitimate criticism of America, directed toward the excesses and 37R miscalculations of its foreign and domestic policy, is welcome and

WHAT IS COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT? 23 indispensable. One might even argue that, in the context of the 1 post-1989 New World Order, in which American power reigns vir- 2 tually unchecked, such criticism has become an imperative. Yet, in 3 the discourses in question, rarely is the “real” America at issue. 4 Instead, these discourses address an imaginary or metaphorical 5 America—the New World as a projection of European fears con- 6 cerning progress, modernity, democracy, and an escalating rate of 7 social change. 8 Traditionally, dystopian views of America have been the stock-in- 9 trade of counterrevolutionary writers such as Maistre, Arthur de 10 Gobineau, and Oswald Spengler. More recently, they have made 11 inroads among champions of the postmodern left, such as Jean Bau- 12 drillard and Slavoj Zizek. In their theories, America represents the 13 epitome of a postmodern, technological Moloch: a land devoid of 14 history and tradition in which the seductions and illusions of a 15 media-dominated mass culture have attained unchallenged hege- 16 mony. The postmodernists allege that the traditional orientations of 17 family, community, and politics have ceded to the febrile delusions 18 of “hyperreality.” Today, we experience the reign of “simulacra”: 19 media-generated copies, shorn of originals, that circulate auto- 20 nomously. This attitude helps explain the enthusiasm with which 21 Baudrillard greeted the September 11 attacks: a “dream come true.” 22 According to Baudrillard, although terrorists committed the actual 23 deed, it was something that, given the conceit of American power, 24 the whole world had wished for.38 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 S36 R37

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