MARK LILLA
265
ing Up their noses at the latest products of popular culture, a healthy
instinct American intellectuals have all but lost. But it is nonetheless
disturbing to see the French placing much of the blame for their cur–
rent
angoisse
on a liberal political consensus they have only just
recently achieved . "The empty center" the French keep lamenting is
both the great political achievement and great cultural weakness of
liberal republics; Americans have come to accept that emptiness or,
in the past at least, simply went to Europe to flee it. But the French,
sensing perhaps that they have nowhere else to flee, are already
beginning to consider the frightening possibility that the center
might actually hold . What then? A friend of mine once quipped that
the French are always looking for saviors, who must be either very
short (Napoleon) or very tall (De Gaulle). Is this what the centrist
French intellectual wants today , someone to lead him out of the land
of the Average Build?
Reflecting on these frustrations, however mild and premature
they seem at the moment , cannot but send one into deeper waters .
One thinks of the bitter and still continuing debates here over the
Heidegger case- not of the disagreements over fundamental on–
tology or whether Heidegger paid his Nazi dues, but ofliberal death–
wish and the political seduction of intellectuals unsatisfied with
democratic life. There was an element of that in French defenses of
Heidegger (and not just on the left), a sense that, however despi–
cable Heidegger's behavior, it is still an intellectual duty to guard the
flame of his contempt for bourgeois liberalism. The French, of
course, are not yet contemptuous of their new liberalism, just a little
disappointed with the grayness that seems to accompany it. They
say they are prepared to accept Jean-Franr;:ois Revel's challenge to
live without Marx or Jesus, but one wonders if they really can .
Mark Lilla
