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PARTISAN REVIEW
II. Perry Meisel
PM:
At what moment in contemporary French intellectual history
would you say you arrived in Paris?
JK:
It was a very interesting moment. Politically, it was one of the
highest moments of Gaullism, that period when Charles de
Gaulle said that he wanted to create a sphere of influence stretch–
ing from the Atlantic to the Urals . Intellectually, there was the
very interesting coexistence of the discovery of Russian formalism
through Levi-Strauss ; a certain revival of Marxism, also on the
background of structuralism (I mean a rereading of Hegel), and
a third very important current, the renewal of psychoanalysis
through Lacan. All these movements were, for me, the real back–
ground of the 1968 events . Because if you look at the people who
were involved in the 1968 revolution - students - most of them
were involved beforehand in very advanced theoretical writings.
Les Cahiers pour l'analyse,
for instance, at the Ecole Normale were
done by people who became Maoists after 1968. So it was a kind
of intellectual turmoil, a sort of real theoretical fever. Where can
you speak of Marxism, structuralism, Freudianism? Not in the
Eastern countries, it's not possible. American society is too
technocratic and too dominated by positivist ideologies, whereas
that's not the case in French society.
It
was a very, very rare con–
junction.
PM:
At what point did existentialism give way to this new wave and
why?
JK:
On the one hand, existentialism was, in my view, a regression
with regard to the great philosophical and aesthetic formal move–
ments, to take only my own fields. The whole development of
linguistics, of formal logic, was fundamentally ignored by Sar–
trean existentialism.
If
you're interested, on the other hand, in
art, the great revolution of the avant-garde, Mallarme, Lau–
treamont, and after them the surrealists - the entrance of psycho–
sis into the life of the city which modern art represents - these
were also ignored by existentialism. Thus, it was a reaction to all
that . Structuralism, Marxism, Freudianism, joined together, are
a reaction .
PM:
And yet Lacan was, with the surrealists, already at work in the
