T svetan T odorov
THE MODERN GADFLY
If it has become somewhat difficult to consider "the role of the
intellectual" in our time, this may be because several common responses to
the question seem to foreclose the debate before it even begins. One is first
obliged to overcome the purely deterministic notion of intellectuals that treats
them as a social group like any other, defending their own interests or those
of their class. If, for example, one asserts that intellectuals are necessarily
"bourgeois," incapable of expressing anything but bourgeois ideology, the
question is quickly settled, but hardly clarified. Such a conception of humanity
is intrinsically unacceptable in any case, since it fails to recognize that, despite
the external pressures they suffer, human beings are distinguished by their
ability to exercise free will and to make choices for which they assume re–
sponsibility. Man is a moral being. And if this is true of all human beings, how
much truer is it of intellectuals, whose distinctive aspiration is to separate
themselves from their particular conditions in order to judge the world by
disinterested criteria.
As
Paul Benichou wrote in his unsurpassed study
Le
.mcre de l'icrivain,
"Man is so constructed that he can place himself outside
himself in order to consider his conduct in the light of absolute values: there
would be no intellectuals otherwise. Their autonomy in society plays the
same role as the autonomy of thought in life." An incomplete autonomy, to
be
sure, but irrepressible nonetheless.
Beside this reduction to "causes" (whose Marxist variant is the most
common), there is another that reduces the intellectual's role to that of his or
her immediate utility. In this case, various "ends" are said to dictate the
intellectual's behavior as strictly as "causes" do in the other. Although such
utilitarianism no doubt exists, it is a marginal phenomenon not especially per–
tinent to the question at hand. In fact, two types of utilitarianism exist among
intellectuals and should
be
distinguished. In the first, it is the intellectual himself
who profits from his mental abilities in order to acquire advantages, to in–
crease his wealth or power. We have been familiar with this figure since
Plato caricatured the sophists for using their eloquence to win meritless trials
and for seizing the benefits of political power by garnering the crowd's sup–
port at public gatherings. We are hardly lacking in contemporary illustrations
