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PARTISAN REVIEW
public schools against private schools; and they are still explaining the
world through Marxist language and the Marxist perception of the
world. We still find among them what was the typical reaction in the
fifties and the sixties: that the issue is not whether one is right or
wrong, but whether one is on the left. You don't discuss the issue
itself, you discuss from what part of the scene one is talking. There
was a book by two young philosophers, Ferry and Renaud, called
La
Generation Soixante-huit,
which was against the four leaders of the
former generation, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Bourdieu. Of the
four, two were dead. The two others refused to discuss the issue. But
there was an extremely strong reaction from all the intellectuals
rm
talking about, because most academics, journalists, publishers, and
media people still live on a kind of vague Marxism, partly expressed
by Bourdieu, and a vague Third World ideology. I think it will take
a long time before this disappears. According to the rules of cultural
diffusion, ideas go from the top to the bottom, so perhaps in twenty–
five or fifty years even teachers in
lycees
won't be Marxist any more .
But for the time being they certainly are, and as my friend Casanova
once said,
"C'est leurfonds de commerce"
-
they make their living on this
kind of primary Marxism. For the time being, I don't think the top
intelligentsia has a lot of influence on them.
Peter Shaw:
I wasn't thinking about your distinction between the two
kinds of intellectuals when reading
The Tears of the White Man
by
Pascal Bruckner, but I have the impression from the book that the
kind of Third Worldism you refer to was quite powerful among the
elite, the top intellectuals, and that it amounted to self-flagellation
over being white. Prostrating oneselffor the idea of the Third World
was of tremendous social importance; it undoubtedly had its in–
fluence on many kinds of political opinions.
Dominique Schnapper:
You are right in that what remains of the old
ideology is certainly centered on Third World ideology. But it has
nothing of the violence and the importance of the debate about the
Soviet Union in the fifties. You know we had the communist prob–
lem, then we had the leftist problem, then we had the Maoist prob–
lem, and what remains is the problem of the Third World.
It
is
assumed that the whites are bad, but intellectuals are not sure they
are that bad .
Peter Shaw:
What about anti-American passion?
Dominique Schnapper:
That's finished . The anti-American passion was
extremely strong, as you know, but that was part of the passion
