In spite of the recherché title, there’s something pressing and universal about Sand’s disjointed text. There’s a reason it’s disjointed, that in the end it feels like two texts knitted into one. However, it’s a compelling reason, which only goes to show that scholarship need not always be about conformist lines and arguments.
The book’s first part is an analysis of the role of the intellectual in French society. Working his way through the usual culprits, including Voltaire and Rousseau, as well as a host of others who are lesser known in the Anglo-Saxon world, Sand looks at the dialectic between the intellectual functioning as an apparatchik of the state or, in contrast, as a kind of spiritual guide, someone capable of surveying society from a lofty distance, removed from the petty debates of politics. Sand analyses both positions, questioning their integrity and the degree to which they truly promoted the idea of independent thought. Examining the role via the complexities of French socio-politics leads him, via Gramsci, to state at one point: “the ‘independent’ intellectual appears as bearer of the universal interest, and by this fact alone manages to better conceal both the specific interests of the rulers and their own. This is one of the ways in which cultural hegemony so essential for the maintenance of social order is created.”
Which is not to sat that Sand seeks to reject the importance of the intellectual. The book is spotted with small details from his own life, which help to explain how and why he himself has become an intellectual, and the role that the intellectual plays within a socially conscious world. If anything, there’s sometimes a tone of nostalgia for the days of serious thought, which, it would seem from the final chapters, he feels is being displaced by soundbite-savvy, media-literate figures who have learnt to package a semblance of complex thought into digestible doses. This is most apparent in the final chapter, where he specifically takes on two ‘philosophers’ whose work has risen to prominence as they embrace a critical stance towards Islam. (He also look at Houllebecq’s novels in this context.) Sand is an Israeli by birth, who has a strong residual understanding of the way in which cultural stigmatism functions. The closing chapter of the first part of his book has looked at the way that some French intellectuals embraced fascism. Part of the book’s argument is an investigation into how the idea of the intellectual, constructed in the enlightenment, could have lead to representatives of that term embracing the impoverished ‘philosophy’ of fascism, with its specifically ethnic prejudices. He then sees this being repeated in the twenty first century, as intellectuals turn on Islam, in the same way many from the wartime generation turned on judaism.
All of which makes for a book which is brave and urgent. Sand has the courage to make clear his mixed feelings regarding Charlie Hebdo, calling out the magazine as having been openly racist (whilst never suggesting that this meant it deserved its fate). His closing chapters trace what he sees as a dangerous trend towards Islamaphobism, noting the way in which the arguments in favour of this trend are backed up and given agency by “intellectuals”. Clearly, Sand is identifying a trend that goes beyond the borders of France. At a time when the spectre of fascism appears to have re-emerged to threaten civil society as well as moral absolutes which in another age are envisaged as unimpeachable, Sand’s book is a vital tool to an understanding how we’ve got to where we’ve got to, and possibly signals ways we can start to get out of this mess, before it gets any worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment