French Intellectuals Against the Left

Christofferson, Michael Scott

doi:10.1515/9781782389743

Cited by 7 publications

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“…The trend that tends to present Lefort as a liberal and normative political theorist is vast and nuanced. It spreads from some of Lefort's advocates (Geenens 2008) to some of his critics (Christofferson 2004;Garo 2008). One could argue that this trend often ignores or downplays the social aspects of Lefort's thinking (Pranchère 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Machiavelli and La Boétie with Lefort

Charreau¹

2023

Theoria

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This article will explore the historical account and political actualisation of Machiavelli and La Boétie in the work of Claude Lefort. In the 1970s, Lefort renewed the interpretation of Machiavelli and La Boétie by underlining their common ‘radical humanism’. The long-overlooked insights into desire and social division of the two Renaissance thinkers underline the subversive potential of humanism against its common ideological and oligarchic uses. But the history of radical humanism cannot be separated from its topicality, as it is one of the germs of the democratic revolution. This radicalism echoes and inspires Lefort's agonistic theory of democracy. After Machiavelli and La Boétie, his work grapples with the continued dependency of the subjects on visible and invisible masters. Indeed, according to Lefort, contemporary societies long for certainty and remain haunted by servitude in the form of ideology (be it bourgeois, totalitarian or invisible).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Machiavelli and La Boétie with Lefort

Charreau¹

2023

Theoria

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“…Hill (2018, 68). On the increasing position of the anti-totalitarian critique, see Christofferson (2004). This period also coincided with the gradual decline of the French Communist Party and communist movement, see Judt (1990).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Democracy, community and the supplemental plus un: Derrida’s reading of Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community

Fathaigh

2022

Philosophy & Social Criticism

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This article argues that Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship presents an implicit but significant critique of Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community. In Blanchot’s text, the Other disrupts any sense of fusional or essentialist community. But Derrida criticises Blanchot for neglecting the need to negotiate my responsibility to infinite others. Derrida proposes a logic of the plus un, playing on this double meaning in French, where a need to count singularities (‘plus one’) disrupts the unity of community (‘no longer one’). For Derrida, this offers a greater emphasis on those outside the boundaries of constituted communities, something he finds lacking in Blanchot. I demonstrate that Derrida’s position is a challenge to an emerging xenophobic discourse in 1980s French politics. I propose, therefore, that Derrida’s difference with Blanchot is motivated as much by a political difference as a philosophical one, with Derrida judging Blanchot’s account inadequate for contemporary political concerns.

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“…The most illustrious, historical example of the latter is the Marxist idea that the working class makes up a privileged, historical subject. The demise of the subject, thus understood, was hailed by a generation of French intellectuals and activists as a liberation from the oppressive predominance of the French communist party (PCF) in the preceding decades (Christofferson 2004). Foucault's entrenched polemic against subject philosophy had two targets, existentialism and Marxism, both of which converged in the towering figure of Sartre (Dosse 1997, 3-9).…”

Section: Anti-humanism #2: Radical Behaviorismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Return of the Repressed: Subject, Truth and Critique in Times of Post-Truth

Söderberg

Bjurö

2022

Philosophy of the Social Sciences

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The surge of post-truth calls for a reassessment of psychoanalytic and ideology critique-approaches in the social sciences. Both traditions are dismissed by the principal antagonists in the post-truth debate, the “positivist” defenders of science and the “post-modern” critics of science. The antagonists share a predisposition towards anti-humanism, refusal to distinguish between the latent and the manifest, and adherence to descriptive methods. In order to substantiate these claims, the article investigates commonalities between B.F. Skinner and Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The article concludes that the allegedly “pseudo-scientific” or “metaphysical” concepts of Subject and Truth, pivotal to both psychoanalysis and ideology critique-approaches, need to be rehabilitated in response to the challenge of post-truth.

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French Intellectuals Against the Left

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Reading Machiavelli and La Boétie with Lefort

Reading Machiavelli and La Boétie with Lefort

Democracy, community and the supplemental plus un: Derrida’s reading of Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community

The Return of the Repressed: Subject, Truth and Critique in Times of Post-Truth

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