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there is no ultimate, absolutely certain truth that may be consid–
ered objective fact, only interpretations sustained by surreptitious
psychological or social interests (an interest in social distinction,
for example, according to Bourdieu).
This reduction of philosophy to genealogical interpretation
implies the rejection of the classical idea of truth , which is
charged with (at best) naivete or (at worst) intellectual violence .
The traditional concept of truth which is repeatedly challenged
by the different currents within the "School of '68" (precisely be–
cause of their shared recourse to genealogy) is the notion of cor–
respondence to reality. This notion of correspondence clearly
has no place in philosophy if one asserts that there are no facts,
only interpretations-interpretations which themselves are
neither true nor false, but only the beginning of an infinite
regression of interpretations. This dissolution of the traditional
ideal of truth helps to explain the extreme importance of the
critique of science and of philosophical rationalism during this
period, since both treat that original idea of truth as self-evident.
In France this double critique of science and philosophical
rationalism was supported either in Nietzschean or Heideggerian
terms-which are clearly similar, as can be seen if we compare
Heidegger's proclamations that "science does not think" or that
"reason is the most relentless enemy of thought," with Foucault's
acknowledgment that "reason is torture and the subject is its
agent."
It
is not difficult to see how this critique of the idea of truth
will produce a radical relativism or historicism, with predictably
perverse effects.
A third characteristic of the "School of '68"-its critique of
modern humanism-follows directly from its "attitude of suspi–
cion" and its denial of the notion of truth. However, this critique
of humanism, while present in all the authors considered here,
takes on two different forms that must be distinguished. In its
neo-Marxist strand, modern humanism is considered purely and
simply as bourgeois (indeed, petit-bourgeois) ideology, in which
"the human" is a mask for class differences. Althusser attributed
this view explicitly to Marx, calling it "theoretical antihuman–
ism." The Nietzschean-Heideggerian strand, by contrast, sees the
birth of modern humanism in the arrival of the Cartesian idea of
"the subject," defined by his will to make himself "master and
possessor of nature " and by his pretention to render himself and
