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Beyond Commitment: Intellectual Engagement in Politics in Postwar France, 1944-1962 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Eric William Richtmyer IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OFPHILOSOPHY Advised By: Thomas Wolfe May 2010 © Eric William Richtmyer 2010 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation was conceived and realized at two very different stages of my graduate student career. I had the idea for this project in 2005, when, after a brief hiatus in my studies, it became clear to me that if I were actually to complete a dissertation, it would have to be about Maurice Blanchot. It was his subtlety, perspicacity, intellectual dexterity, and above all, his fundamental dignity which made the value of the life of the mind clear to me, and which remain models to which I will forever aspire. The actual writing of this dissertation took place in the wake of the 2007-2008 race for the democratic presidential nomination, which was a period of increased political activity among the graduate students at the University of Minnesota. This dissertation’s efforts to understand the ethics of intellectual engagement in postwar French politics are largely motivated by my own struggles with political engagement in the contemporary United States. I am thankful to the many faculty from whom I have received my education at the University of Minnesota. Thomas Wolfe and JB Shank have seen me through my entire graduate student career, and of the many things they have been kind enough to share with me, it is for their generosity – which I am now able to recognize as the gift of a truly great teacher – that I am most grateful. I have learned much more from them than just history. I am thankful to Bruno Chaouat, Stuart McLean, and Ajay Skaria for their kind service and advice. I would also like to thank Thomas Pepper and James Tracy, who, in very different ways, taught me how to read. i I am grateful to have been able to share my years in graduate school with many friends. I wish to thank, first of all, Michael Sizer. His friendship is the real footnote to every page of this dissertation. I thank Christopher Freeman, Meredith Gill, Isaac Kamola, Garnet Kindervater, Serena Laws, Arnold Lelis, Michael Ryan, Timothy Smit, Andrew Urban, and Aaron Windel for providing the community that I was looking for when I first applied to graduate school. I thank Zen Dochterman and Devin McIntyre for their friendship, and for generously boarding me when I needed to escape to Los Angeles, or to New York. My graduate studies have benefited from David and Mary Good, who provided a fellowship at the University of Minnesota in 2007. Thanks to Karine Cantin for teaching me how to speak French, and, without realizing it, serving as my therapist. Additionally, I would like to thank the students of the Institute for Global Studies and the Department of History at the University of Minnesota, who should know how much I have learned from the privilege of being their teacher. I would never have been able to complete this project without the support of those closest to me. I thank Caley Horan for her love and companionship, for her kindness and her intelligence. She taught me the most important lesson of my entire graduate career: that the real name for what we call reality is make-believe. I thank my grandmother, Cecilia Ellis, whose assistance with Saint Thomas Aquinas I will always appreciate. While it will never be enough to express my gratitude for everything that they have done for me, I wish to thank my parents, David and Pamela Richtmyer, ultimately, for being proud of me. ii ABSTRACT This dissertation is a study of the way that French intellectuals engaged in major political debates in the years immediately after World War II. It examines three moments in particular: the purge of writers and intellectuals who collaborated during World War II, the Algerian war of independence, and the emergence of structuralism in the early 1960s. Initially, the mode of engagement developed by the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, called commitment, dominated the political debate over the postwar purge between 1945 and 1948. At the same time, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Jean Paulhan critiqued Sartrean commitment for its philosophical inadequacy, its political inefficacy, and its moral ambiguity. As a result, they developed their own mode of engagement, based on the articulation of political arguments through unlikely means, such as literature and philosophy, which achieved prominence by the end of the war in Algeria in 1962. This dissertation concludes with an examination of the mode of discursive, or textual analysis developed in an exchange between Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault at the beginning of the 1960s. This exchange reveals that their version of textual analysis itself served as a mode of engagement in politics, and was rooted in the critique of Sartrean commitment articulated during the postwar purge, and the war in Algeria. This dissertation has the additional significance of redefining how the body of thought known in the United States as French theory is conceived. Ultimately, the move away from existentialism and its mode of political commitment was one of the main factors that contributed to French theory’s growth in the 1960s. By historicizing French theory within the culture and politics of postwar France, this dissertation shows that iii French theory must be understood as a large and synthetic intellectual community, rather than as a description of a particular kind of philosophical or literary thought. The relations which obtained within this community affected, and sometimes even determined the generation of theoretical ideas and texts. This dissertation shows that French theory has continued utility for contemporary scholarship when it is taken to indicate the relations of this intellectual community. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Intellectual Engagement in Postwar France 1 The History of Intellectual Engagement in France 28 Chapter 1: Death Is Loose in the World: Revolution and Repetition in the Épuration 42 The Print Culture of French Intellectuals 59 The Politics of the Purge 71 Why This Woman? 103 Chapter 2: Beyond Commitment: The Ethics of Engagement during the War in Algeria 138 Blanchot and Camus during the 1950s 145 The Ethics of Commitment 161 The Refusal of the War in Algeria 209 Chapter 3: Words Rent by Lightning: Origins after Structuralism 224 Two Generations of French Intellectuals 238 The Unlikely Origin 247 The Need to Forget 285 Conclusion 301 Bibliography 310 v INTRODUCTION Intellectual Engagement in Postwar France On March 28, 1962, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno gave a radio address titled “Commitment,” in which he stated that “Since Sartre’s essay Qu’est-ce que la littérature? [published in 1948] there has been less theoretical debate about committed and autonomous literature. Nevertheless, the controversy over commitment remains urgent.” 1 To Adorno, who had just witnessed the closing of the border between East and West Germany and the erection of the Berlin Wall seven months earlier, this was a travesty of epic proportions. The intensification of the Cold War – “the freezing of historical relations which nowhere seem ready to melt,” as Adorno put it, heightened the urgency of finding new means of intellectual engagement in politics. 2 Looking across the border to France, Adorno bemoaned what seemed like the comfortable distance into which the proponents of committed literature – littérature engagé – and the proponents of autonomous literature had settled from each other. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist version of commitment seemed, lamentably to Adorno’s way of thinking, to have become the orthodoxy purely by default. Yet, the debate over committed literature had in fact continued without abating. In 1962, Sartrean commitment – the idea that each individual was responsible for changing the world because of the simple fact that he or she existed in the reality of the 1 Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Adorno et al. Aesthetics and Politics , trans. Francis McDonagh (London: Verso, 1980), 177. See Adorno, “Zur Dialektik des Engagements.” Die Neue Rundschau 73, no. 1 (1962): 93-110. 2 Ibid. 194. 1 world, and that this change could be achieved through literature – was by no means the only accepted way for intellectuals to engage in politics in France. 3 Since the Dreyfus Affair, the exigency of political engagement had been so deeply embedded in the identity of French intellectuals that a vigorous debate over the best way to pursue that engagement raged throughout the postwar years. After the fall of the Vichy regime, the ousting of the German occupation forces, and the thorough discrediting of the right, French intellectuals saw the reconstruction as an opportunity to remake the political and social organization of France according to radical leftist ideals. In the years following World War II, the question of committed versus autonomous literature was of paramount importance to French intellectuals, for the precise reason that what was at stake was not simply literature, but the very possibility of ideas affecting politics, and the possibility of theory being put into practice. French intellectuals were not simply concerned with literature, or even the literary. Rather, they were concerned with the possibility of affecting leftist, egalitarian political change through intellectual activity. For this reason, many French intellectuals were unwilling to concede hegemony to Sartre’s concept of commitment without putting up a fight. Adorno can hardly be blamed for having missed the many different arguments made about commitment in France. The debate had shifted context in the decade and a half since Qu’est-ce que la littérature? was published in 1948. It had moved from the highly visible mediasphere in which Sartre operated, to the small, literary and 3 On the concept of commitment and its genesis before and during World War II, see David Schalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).