THE LITERARY IMPACT
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OF THE AMERICAN AND FRENCH REVOLUTIONS
I want to make one other remark. One of the issues at this confer–
ence has been the status of intellectuals, but there has been an unavoid–
able and inevitable blurring of the difference between intellectuals and
writers. Obviously they're not the same; obviously they're not completely
different either. It seems to me that one point that has come out of our
discussions is that, whatever may be the beleaguered status of intellectuals
since they have lost the guaranteed virtue they enjoyed as leading critics
of the old regimes, they arc not obsolete - though maybe that's one
definition of an intellectual: a status, a condition, a kind of consciousness
that is always being declared obsolete. And it is intellectuals themselves,
with their tendency toward self-deprecation, who lead in making this
kind of diagnosis. Today, in Eastern Europe, they have no choice but to
continue in their proper role, which is to be in critical opposition. The
fact that they will not inherit the leadership of these societies, with their
complex burdens of feeling and appalling political and econom.ic deficits,
is hardly surprising. It means the role of those who represent values which
are neither ethnic nor nationalist is now more essential than ever.
In a sense, the adversaries of intellectuals in these countries are cor–
rect. Intellectuals, with their role as critics to fill, cannot be also sponsors
or endorsers of tribalist values. There are plenty of people who are going
to do that. As it was in the name of universalist values such as truth that
the wickedness of the old system was exposed, so it will be as champions
of universalist or transnationalist values that intellectuals will continue to
playa necessary role. They will also continue to be attacked as "rootless
cosmopolitans" - we know what that code-phrase often signifies -
though, as I suggested here yesterday, I think that the transnationalist
values actually have history on their side.
Adam Michnik:
I would like to make a few remarks about what Susan
called "the tribal values." The situation in post-Communist Europe is
such that its' nationalist values have surfaced as an ineradicable element of
what Communism left as a legacy to these societies. Today the problem
does not consist in the fact that some want to defend those values and
others want to reject them. It consists in the political articulation of
those needs. The utopia of the ethnically clean state is the clue to
understanding the conflict in the Balkans. What was victorious in Serbia
or victorious in Croatia was the idea of the ethnically clean state. The
Croatian state, for instance, is not just the state of the Croats; it is the
state for all Croats where others can be guests.
Susan Sontag: I
must reply. When I talk about tribal values I am not
disparaging the human need for community . But about your idea of the
