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place in France . Paris is not what it was: it is, for the first time
within living memory, a city without Marx. One begins to read this
in the States and to hear it from friends with French connections, but
it takes some months of following the French scene up close to realize
just how massive the change in sentiment has been. An American
confronting it for the first time will, understandably, suspect its au–
thenticity, unaccustomed as he is to political consensus among in–
tellectuals. We are all so habituated to the ideological Wars of Reli–
gion that have dragged on since Vietnam that we are incapable of
imagining peace breaking out, as seems to have happened in France.
A transformation of this order is simply beyond our grasp: it would
be as if
Commentary, The New Republic, The New York Review
of
Books ,
and
The Nation
were to issue ajoint declaration of human rights .
It
is
unthinkable.
The shock of the new is even stronger if one is familiar with
academic francophilia in the United States . The common professor,
relying as he does on university press translations of books published
five or ten years ago in France, still believes it to be a land domi–
nated by the giants of the postwar left - by the great social historians
grouped around the
Annales,
or by that undefinable constellation of
radical thinkers the French simply call "the '68ers." One can still en–
counter sad-eyed American graduate students in Parisian libraries
or cafes, clutching their paperback copies of Deleuze, Foucault, Der–
rida, or Lyotard, hoping to absorb some of this radical atmosphere
and work it into their theses . Alas, they were misinformed. No one
seems to have told them that what is now called
la
pensee
'68 lost its
allure some time ago in Paris. Derrida himself is now forced to spend
more of his time in the United States, where, as he defensively ex–
plained in a
Nouvel Observateur
interview last year, "the debates are
richer and more open ."
Yet of course it has been here in Paris - not in New York or
Washington, Cambridge or New Haven-that something resem–
bling rich, open intellectual debate began to reappear after the
shocks of '68. The sources of this reawakening are many, as
Partisan
Review
readers learned in the judicious account recently given by
Dominique Schnapper ("The Politics of French
Intellectuals,"PR 2,
1988). As she has explained, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's
Gulag
books in the mid-1970s, along with the gradual realization of the
Cambodian horrors, had an effect on French intellectuals that was
never reproduced in Germany, Britain, Italy, or America. Marxism
of any variety, whether Sartrean, post-, Freudian, or feminist, be-
