Confrontation

A Conversation with Aude Lancelin

Alain Badiou, Alain Finkielkraut

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745685717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Everything in their respective positions divides them: Alain Badiou is the thinker of a revitalized communism and Alain Finkielkraut the mournful observer of the loss of values. The two opponents, gathered here for their first-ever debate, have irreconcilable visions. Yet neither is a stranger to controversy, and in this debate they make explicit the grounds of their personal dispute as well as addressing, in a frank and open exchange, their ideas and theories.

Guided by Aude Lancelin, the two philosophers discuss subjects as diverse as national identity, Israel and Judaism, May 1968, and renewed popularity of the idea of communism. Their passionate debate is more than just the sum total of their disagreements, however, for neither of them is satisfied with the state of our society or the direction in which its political representatives persist in taking it. They agree that there needs to be change and their confrontation in this volume shows the importance of asking difficult questions, not only of each other, but also of our political systems.

1

National Identity and Nations

Aude Lancelin: A debate on “national identity” has been foisted on our country largely for electoral reasons. Predictably, it has quickly become heated. How should it be dealt with?

Alain Finkielkraut: I don’t know whether the debate is timely or not, but the concern is legitimate. In his famous 1882 lecture, Renan began by excluding any racial definition of the nation. “Human history is essentially different from zoology,” he said, and he defined the nation as a spiritual principle, a soul (we shouldn’t be afraid of that word), comprised of two components: a rich legacy of memories, a heritage of glory and regrets to share together, on the one hand, and, on the other, present-day consent, the desire to continue living together. Yet France today is in the grip of a twofold crisis, of heritage and consent. Hatred of France has become the order of the day among a significant fraction of the new French populations. You’d have to be out of touch with reality to think that this militant Francophobia is a response to state racism or the stigmatizing of foreigners. As for our heritage, our schools have been hard at work squandering it for forty years now. More and more French people, including the elites, are alienated from their own language, literature, history, and landscapes. It is because French civilization may be in the process of dying out that this national identity issue concerns so many people even though no one is fooled by the electoral ruse. The government can’t be blamed for wanting to deal with the issue of national identity but rather for offloading responsibility for it onto a debate. I would have preferred a real cultural heritage transmission policy instead.

AL: Yet the Sarkozy government’s actions very often run counter to that discourse on transmission. Take, for example, its effort to eliminate the teaching of history to science-oriented students in the final year of high school …

A. Finkielkraut: That’s a contradiction. A choice has got to be made between Richard Descoings and Marc Bloch.¹ But educational reform along the latter lines (recentering education around culture and restoring requirements) would bring middle- and high-school students, the teachers’ unions, and the parents’ associations out onto the streets to demonstrate. Cultural illiteracy for all is a victory of democracy that it will be very difficult to reverse.

Alain Badiou: A government-organized debate on “French identity” can only be an attempt to come up with administrative criteria to identify “who is a good French person and who isn’t.” The serious jurists of the Pétain government had worked very hard toward that end! They’d shown, with calm expertise, that Jews and other such aliens [métèques] were not good French people … So we can and should be very worried about the Sarkozy–Besson initiative. When the state starts being concerned about the legitimacy of people’s identities, it can only mean we’re in a period of darkest reaction, as historical experience has shown. This initiative is not just stupid and incoherent, then, as we see every day, but is also part and parcel of what I’ve called the Sarkozy government’s “transcendental Pétainism.” As soon as identity considerations are injected into politics or state power, we’re dealing with a mentality that can only be called neo-fascist. This is because an identity-based defi-nition of the population runs up against the fact that, since every population in the world today is composite, heterogeneous, and multi-faceted, the only reality such a definition can have will be a negative one. They won’t succeed in defining “French civilization,” a concept whose meaning completely escapes me; all they’ll do is clearly designate those who aren’t part of it. There are millions of people in our country who have been here, sometimes for decades, who have built our roads, our bridges, and our houses, who live in deplorable conditions, who have done all this for starvation wages, and whom, for the past thirty years, one administration after another has been hitting with persecutory laws, deporting, confining in no-law zones, monitoring, pre-venting from living with their families, and so on and so forth. We know in advance that these are the people who will be designated as not being really French. This political vision is absolutely abhorrent, and I’m weighing my words. Furthermore, I’m really surprised that the categories Alain Finkielkraut uses are the very traditional ones of reaction. The “heritage of the past” and “consent” are totally passive categories whose sole rationale is the imperative “family, homeland.” This is a reactionary and conservative image of French identity. The heritage of France is a heritage that I am prepared to embrace when it’s a matter of the French Revolution, the Commune, the universalism of the eighteenth century, the Resistance, or May ’68. But it’s a heritage I totally reject when it’s a matter of the Restoration, the Versaillais,² colonialist and racist doctrines, Pétain, or Sarkozy. There’s no such thing as “a” French heritage. Rather, there is a constitutive division of that heritage between what’s acceptable in terms of a minimal universalism and what should be rejected precisely because, in France, it has to do with the extreme ferocity of the possessing classes and with the monopolizing of the idea of “national identity” by an oligarchy of careerists, politicians, military men, and media lackeys. People – and Alain Finkielkraut in particular – are always talking about the blood that other people, the “totalitarians,” as he calls them, have on their hands. But “national identity” has actually provided the most egregious examples of this. You’d have to look long and hard to find another wholesale slaughter as senseless and horrific as that of World War I. Yet it was strictly connected to national identity: that’s what people were taken in by. It’s very clear that national identity, when it refers to undivided memory and hereditary and familial consent, is nothing but the return to the tired old categories of tradition and leads only to war, against the “bad French” on the domestic front and against “the others” on the foreign front. The public debate today is between two disastrous positions: on the one side, free-market consensus and universal commercialism and, on the other, the retreat into identities, which is a reactionary and, moreover, totally ineffective defense against that globalization.

A. Finkielkraut: It’s true that it’s possible to have a racial and deterministic conception of national identity and treat it as a fixed, biologically transmitted trait, but it was precisely against such an idea that the president of the Republic’s speech at La Chapelle-en-Vercors was directed. There is a debate, he said, but race cannot be part of it: “We are French because we don’t see ourselves as a single race, because we don’t allow ourselves to be confined to a single origin or to a single religion.”³ It is legitimate and even necessary to point up the contradiction between the proclaimed desire to safeguard national identity and a policy of abandoning our heritage. But why is there such deafness? Why denounce as racist a speech so obviously anti-racial? Because, in the eyes of the prevailing anti-racism and anti-fascism, national identity itself, whatever its definition, is “repulsive” – or “abhorrent,” to use Alain Badiou’s word. So that means that our task would have to be to eliminate all identity predicates – disaffiliation, in other words. In order to be ourselves – that is, faithful to our universal vocation – all our distinguishing features would have to be wiped out. In order not to exclude anyone, we’d have to empty ourselves out, rid ourselves of all substance, and be nothing, ultimately, but the gesture itself of openness.

AL: There are the words of the president of the Republic, which are those of a party leader during an electoral campaign, and then there’s the reality of the debate in which, clearly, suspects are being named, and you know very well who they are …

A. Finkielkraut: Simply to brush off as unimportant the demonstrations celebrating Algeria’s victory over Egypt eight years after the booing of “La Marseillaise” at the France–Algeria match⁴ is, as Arthur Koestler said about the communists, like having “the eyes to see and a mind conditioned to explain away what they saw.”⁵ Let me also remind you that family reunification legislation was introduced back in 1974. What really bothers me about this hyperbolism is that it no longer makes any distinction between Marc Bloch and Pétain, between Péguy and Drumont,⁶ between Bernanos⁷ and Brasillach,⁸ or between the nation according to De Gaulle and the Volk according to Hitler. Most of the Resistance fighters referred to the indivisible national heritage to justify their resistance, and what did Simone Weil say? That there was no more hideous spectacle than that of a people no longer attached to anything, with no fidelity whatsoever.⁹

A. Badiou: But fidelity to what?

A. Finkielkraut: To the Coronation Rite of Reims and to the Fête de la Fédération,¹⁰ to “the Republic one and indivisible, our kingdom of France” …¹¹

A. Badiou: Of course, of course, but careful … There are a huge number of people in this country who are faithful to a lot of other things and first of all to passing down their property through inheritance, as has been the case since the dawn of time. They are faithful to the sequences of history in which the popular forces were thrown into disarray. Even as regards the Resistance itself they deliberately ignore the ultimately key role, like it or not, played by the communist armed forces. Taken in isolation, “heritage” and “fidelity” are meaningless. What we should ask is: Whose heritage? Fidelity to what? In fact, you presume – and that’s why your approach is absolutely tautological – that the problem of national identity has already been resolved. It’s to this undivided but non-existent identity that you say we have to be faithful. I myself am faithful in as exemplary a manner as possible to revolutionary France, to its paradigmatic universality, to the 1793 constitution, which declared that, whenever a man took in and raised an orphan, anywhere in the world, well, just by doing so he acquired French nationality. I’m all for an acrossthe-board, immediately transmissible identity of that sort. But I don’t know of any example where the inclusion of a figure of identity in the conception of the state can be considered as progressive, in any way, shape, or form. The question of involvement in the Resistance went far beyond the question of the liberation of the country, as you are well aware, and had nothing to do with a national “identity.” The most combative armed Resistance groups in France were made up of communists who came from all over Europe and whom Pétain, in the name of French identity, accused of being traitors, which really takes the cake! When Aragon wrote “My Party has restored to me the colors of France,”¹² both aspects should be emphasized: France, of course, but also the Party, which was for him the name of the inter-nationalist and communist vision.

A. Finkielkraut: If an inventory has to be drawn up, we should start by making one of communism, too … All one does by discrediting or aggressively breaking down the desire for French civilization to continue is embrace the current trend toward world music, world cuisine, planetary civilization, and the global village. Characterizing this surrender to the trend we’re being swept away by as “resistance” to Sarkozy is going a bit far.

AL: But isn’t Sarkozyism itself part of that trend?

A. Finkielkraut: That’s exactly what I have against it.

A. Badiou: Your philosophical and political categories lock you into an extremely narrow conception of the question. You’re caught between consenting to universal commodification, to the dilution of everything into the global village, on the one hand, and a theory of identity that is supposedly the one and only defense against it, on the other. It’s exactly as if Marx in 1848 had said that the only alternatives were global capitalism or French nationalism. But in actual fact Marx, a century and a half ago, defined a form of political internationalism that’s not reducible to either one. And that’s what our problem is today. It’s not about clutching onto so-called identities that we draw from tradition and think should be restored in order to mount an illusory resistance to the immense power of universal commodification. Rather, the problem is about finding a way that involves neither the supremacy of capital and its “democratic” mumbo-jumbo nor the frenzied manufacturing of domestic enemies who are supposedly undermining our “identity.” And in this regard I am committed to the only tradition that was founded in just such a way and that refused to be co-opted by diehard nationalism in the nineteenth century, namely, the revolutionary internationalist tradition. It’s the only one. That’s moreover why it was the hard kernel of the resistance to identitarian fascism everywhere, and especially in France.

AL: Do you in fact think, as Alain Badiou claims you do, that identity attribution is the only option we have for resisting this uniform planetary commodification that you, too, denounce, although from a very different perspective?

A. Finkielkraut: I deplore the loss of things, but French civilization isn’t the only thing that might be lost. I’m also concerned about the destruction of the earth, creeping ugliness, the decrease in attention span, the demise of silence, and our move into the technological age in which everything is being degraded. And for just this reason I think that, to confront a disaster like this, we can’t be satisfied with a politics of liberation. We also need a politics of responsibility. What bothers me about Alain Badiou’s conception of politics is that there’s no place in it for gratitude, for fidelity, for what Hannah Arendt called the love for the world. That’s the philosophical and existential perspective from which I see things, and, in an even more general way, I’m struck by the critical poverty of the critique of domination.

AL: What do you have in mind? What current of thought or ideas, exactly?

A. Finkielkraut: All of them. The model in which the world is divided into the dominant and the dominated, a model that’s so deeply ingrained that nobody protests when a decision of the European Court requires crucifixes to be removed from Italian schools, while the Swiss decision not to allow any more minarets to be built is treated as a disgrace by a quasi-unanimous press. Crucifixes today, even deactivated ones (public school in Italy is secular), are perceived as emblems of domination, while people see in the minaret the rallying sign of the oppressed, the banner of the wretched of the earth. We’re constantly being brought back to this big division.

A. Badiou: Those are trivial issues; that’s how I feel about it. I’m a strict Nietzschean when it comes to issues like these. God is dead, and has been for a long time. So we need to begin with the idea that, when we’re dealing with so-called phenomena of civilization or religion, they’re hiding something and are other than what they seem. What’s really behind them? We don’t see any mystical figures, deep religious thinkers, innovative theology, and so on. We see no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Aude Lancelin
• 1 National Identity and Nations
• 2 Judaism, Israel, and Universalism
• 3 May ’68
• 4 Communism (Past and Future)