Leo Bersani
FROM BACHELARD TO BARTHES
France, as everyone knows,
is
the country of fashion. Intel–
lectual jargons and artistic personalities are picked up as passionately
and dropped as ruthlessly as the perpetually daring inventions of
Givenchy and Saint Laurent. There
is
a hallowed myth about "the
French mind" which it would be useful to get rid of once and for
all: the French, we have always been told, are critical and sys–
tematic. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If
indeed there
is
such a thing as a French style of thought, it could, I think, be much
more accurately defined as impressionistic, theoretical, polemical and
conformist. This combination of rather unattractive qualities makes
some of us understandably suspicious of the intellectual revolutions
which the French perennially announce. But there has, surprisingly
enough, been something of a revolution in contemporary French
criticism, or at least a considerable number of important works largely
free of that arrogant frivolity which we recognize as the style of
French cultural life.
But that style has naturally fed upon these works, and it there–
fore seems wise to prepare you for the discouragement you will surely
feel if you decide to investigate what has recently been going on in
French literary life.
If,
for example, you were to read the fashion–
able magazine
T el Quel,
you might feel that most of the writers I
will be discussing are hopelessly
demodh.
The "structuralists" quickly
took over from the "thematic" critics. Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre
Richard and Jean Starobinski are, to be sure, still published and
"respected" in Paris, but who would be naive enough to think that
they (or even Roland Barthes, raised in 1965 to martyrdom by
Sorbonne Professor Raymond Picard's attack on his Racine book)
are still "in," now that Michel Foucault has given us, with
Les Mots
et les chases,
what has been called the most important work since
Being and Nothingness
or, better still, since
The Critique of Pure
Reason?
But Foucault may already be last year's fare: a marvelously
