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PARTISAN REVIEW
one can take distance from them, that certain challenges have
begun to appear. These challenges, beyond their simply critical
function, also reflect the state of French philosophy today, as one
begins
to.
see a new intellectual generation seeking to break with
the spirit of the "sixties."
In order to show how this new theoretical work is emerging
from a critique of the "School of '68," three characteristic traits of
French philosophy from that period should be distinguished.
The first is what Paul Ricoeur had named ..the attitude of
suspicion": that is, the deconstructive will which Foucault
(following Nietzsche) called "genealogy" or "archaeology."
This approach, which the philosophers of the previous generation
(Sartre , for example, or Merleau-Ponty) had always rejected,
consists fundamentally in asserting that all conscious discourse
is really just a symptom that hides a deeper social or individual
unconscious. The task of philosophy is therefore, in some sense,
that of the psychoanalysts: to "deconstruct discourse " through an
"archaeology" that unveils the underlying
interest
that has been
covered over. This attitude of systematic suspicions leads one to
believe the subject does not mean what he seems to say, or even
what he means to say. He is dispossessed of his own discourse
and acts, since by definition he can know neither what he says
nor what he does. This also means, as we shall see, that he is not
responsible for his own actions, "responsibility" being an illusion
that has been dispelled by the discovery of the unconscious.
This "genealogy"-a rather banal idea since Marx,
Nietzsche, and Freud-took on a truly remarkable form in the
French intellectual life of the 1960s, one that saw its extreme rad–
icalization in Nietzsche's formula that "there are no facts, just
interpretations." The principle of this radicalization, which was
expressed both by Lacan in his
Ecrits
and by Foucault in
N ietzsche,
Marx, Freud,
seemed to be the following . Considering all dis–
course as a symptom, the psychoanalyst must become an inter–
preter who tries to restore the hidden truth of that discourse by
submitting it to a genealogy. But, since the analyst himself has
his own unconscious, the interpretation and discourse that he
puts forward are themselves merely a disguised expression of
deeper unconscious interests. In short, since there is no neutral
discourse , that of the analyst/ philosopher must also suffer the
same interpretation-and so on , and so on . The result is clear:
