Egged on by a number of items in my RSS reader, I spent a small part of my Thanks­giv­ing break with “On Com­plain­ing,” Elif Batuman’s long review of Eliz­a­beth Roudinesco’s new book Phi­los­o­phy in Tur­bu­lent Times: Can­guil­hem, Sartre, Fou­cault, Althusser, Deleuze, Der­rida. Though not with­out its prob­lems, It’s a good essay, well worth read­ing in full.*

The first and most obvi­ous ques­tion raised by Roudinesco’s book (and Batuman’s response to it) con­cerns the con­tin­u­ing sig­nif­i­cance of “continental philosophy,” and more specif­i­cally the gen­er­a­tion of French intel­lec­tu­als that came to promi­nence in the years just after World War II. As she tells it, the real point of Roudinesco’s book becomes obvi­ous only in the final chap­ter (on Jacques Derrida):

It’s about the end of some­thing: the end of a big adven­ture, and the dis­so­lu­tion of a group of com­pan­ions who wit­nessed the Holo­caust and the gulag, who lived and died believ­ing that the pen was as mighty as the sword, and of whom Der­rida was ‘the last survivor’.”

For Roudi­nesco, the intel­lec­tual age that spanned Sartre and Fou­cault and Der­rida was her own Great­est Gen­er­a­tion, the mea­sure by which all that follow it are judged lacking.

Batuman’s not so sure. She “dis­agrees with most of what [Roudi­nesco] says” and clearly wants noth­ing to do with the latter’s hero­iza­tion of her friends and fel­lows. (“Per­haps the great­est intel­lec­tual leap Roudi­nesco requires of her anglo­phone read­ers is to enter­tain, at least tem­porar­ily, the notion of ‘con­ti­nen­tal’ phi­los­o­phy as a means to combat social ills.”) And every once in a while, in response to some par­tic­u­lar, she per­mits her­self the luxury of an unqual­i­fied smack­down. (“It’s both wrong and dan­ger­ous to believe that a hos­pi­tal is just like a con­cen­tra­tion camp.”) But my sense is that Batu­man is not as hos­tile to con­ti­nen­tal phi­los­o­phy as some of the other n+1 writ­ers, who tend to treat it much as Thomas Frank and the Baf­flerites did before them: as an aca­d­e­mic fad that served mostly as a prose-​clotting dis­trac­tion from the main thrust of crit­i­cal (i.e., Marx­ian) philosophy.

The con­tin­u­ing rel­e­vance of this tra­di­tion is an impor­tant ques­tion. Though it has cer­tainly not dis­ap­peared, its moment of max­i­mum influ­ence on the Amer­i­can acad­emy is now nearly twenty years in the past. With the approach­ing retire­ment of that seg­ment of the Amer­i­can pro­fes­so­ri­ate that gained tenure on the backs of Tel Quel and Crit­i­cal Inquiry, it seems like enough bath­wa­ter has drained from the tub of Theory that we should be able to start fig­ur­ing how many babies have sur­vived the drought.

But the ques­tion about con­ti­nen­tal philosophy’s con­tin­u­ing rel­e­vance bears on a more gen­eral and more inter­est­ing sub­ject than which French names will find their way into dis­ser­ta­tion sub­ti­tles of the mid-21st cen­tury. It’s a ques­tion not about the ideas them­selves but about the people behind (or, more often for this attention-​loving group, out in front of) the ideas, a ques­tion that Batu­man arrives at by con­sid­er­ing Roudinesco’s rela­tion­ship to the men she is writ­ing about. In her words:

What’s ‘at stake’ here, to use a term beloved of the phi­los­o­phy of com­mit­ment, is the con­tin­ued exis­tence of such a phi­los­o­phy. As Roudi­nesco puts it, how is one to ‘move on from the phi­los­o­phy of com­mit­ment with­out revert­ing to the monot­ony of phan­tas­mal life or of just man­ag­ing the busi­ness of living’? The phi­los­o­phy of com­mit­ment, one assumes, was never sup­posed to be some­thing you did to make your life feel more excit­ing – and yet there it is, the prob­lem of ‘the busi­ness of living’, para­phrased by Deleuze as the choice between two extreme alter­na­tives: ‘To fancy one­self an aca­d­e­mi­cian, or dream of being a Venezue­lan guer­rilla fighter’.

It’s a real prob­lem – and so is the feel­ing that there aren’t any cow­boys anymore.

That’s a prob­lem I’ll be look­ing at more in the next day or so. (Click here for part 2.)

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*Oblig­a­tory qual­i­fi­ca­tion: Much as I appre­ci­ate Batuman’s essay, it’s far from per­fect. Her pre­sen­ta­tion of Fou­cault, for exam­ple, is ten­den­tious and reduc­tive even by the Pro­crustean stan­dards of the review-​essay. But while I wouldn’t con­cede that my qualms about her read­ings are mere quib­bles, Batu­man raises too many inter­est­ing ques­tions to spend time has­sling the problems.