Modern French Philosophy

From Existentialism to Postmodernism

Robert Wicks

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781780744568
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This is a thorough and balanced guide to modern French philosophical thought, providing lucid, authoritative accounts of famous philosophers whilst also highlighting lesser-known figures. Author Robert Wicks introduces the major works of each philosopher, explaining their impact on their peers and on the wider world. Covering such major movements as Existentialism, Surrealism, Structuralism and Postmodernism, this handbook is a useful resource for Francophiles, students of philosophy and all those interested in the intellectual landscape of 20th- and 21st-century France. The book includes detailed coverage of such philosophers as Henri Bergson, Beauvoir, Sarte, Camus, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Levi-Strauss, among others.

PART 1

SURREALISM, EXISTENTIALISM, AND VITALISM

1

The Surrealistic Setting: 1916–38

It is a recurring historical phenomenon that individuals who find themselves initially located in society as outcasts, radicals, subversives, criminals, and other kinds of non-mainstream types, often later become legitimated and honored as culturally vital heroes who once stood among the avant-garde. Once-obscure poets, novelists, and playwrights emerge to assume places at the center of the prevailing literary canon, fringe-party political revolutionaries rise to become world-historical heads of state, once-underappreciated musicians move into fashionable current to begin a previously unimagined cultural sound, and people who were once frowned upon by the social elite become overnight sensations as they are ushered into the limelight. On the negative side, the public recognition of protest-groups sometimes undermines the protesters by rendering their causes legitimate, as they slowly become redefined, digested, assimilated, and disarmed by the terms of acceptable language and acceptable media.

Such was the dual fate of the Dada artistic group which originated in the midst of the First World War, during the end of 1915 and the beginning of 1916. This artistic circle established itself in Zürich, Switzerland, as an attempt to raise a voice against the ongoing war in Europe, not by arguing positively for peace, but by protesting against the general cultural scene – one that they perceived to be responsible for the war. The Dadaists comprehended the established cultural atmosphere, as noted in the introduction above, in reference to an alienation-generating amalgam of rationalistic thinking, science, and technology that adhered to the preservation of order, systematicity, and methodicality. They opposed the standing arrangement of the social (dis)order during their time, and they believed firmly that European cultural values were not worth preserving, given how they were fueling the war that was then devastating Europe.

The most frequently encountered label that has been attached to the Dada movement is ‘nihilistic:’ the Dadaists have been perceived, and indeed they perceived themselves, as being against ‘everything,’ as they joked, recited nonsense poetry, danced around on stage in absurd costumes, and insulted their audiences. They embodied outrage and negation, gathering together regularly at the Cabaret Voltaire on Zürich’s Spiegelstrasse, where it was possible to witness escapades such as the following:

On the stage, keys and boxes were pounded to provide the music, until the infuriated public protested. Serner,¹⁸ instead of reciting poems, set a bunch of flowers at the foot of a dressmaker’s dummy. A voice, under a huge hat in the shape of a sugar-loaf, recited poems by Arp.¹⁹ Huelsenbeck²⁰,²¹ screamed his poems louder and louder, while Tzara²² beat out the same rhythm crescendo on a big drum. Huelsenbeck and Tzara danced around grunting like bear cubs, or in sacks with top hats waddled around in an exercise called noir cacadou. Tzara invented chemical and static poems.²³

The Dada scenes conveyed a feeling of chaos, fragmentation, assault on the senses, absurdity, frustration of ordinary norms, pastiche, spontaneity, and posed robotic mechanism. They were scenes from a madhouse, performed by a group of sane and reflective people who were expressing their decided anger and disgust at the world surrounding them. The Dadaists organized a steely toned carnival in their Swiss café, mimicking the chaotic insanity of the First World War in an effort to criticize it. But in place of bloody violence, they substituted zaniness, absurdity, laughter and jokes, as they tried to defuse the seriousness of the general cultural chaos. They criticized the cultural scene by making light of it, perhaps in an effort to psychologically diffuse for themselves the horror it was generating.

To comprehend the Dada mentality, we can note its close and usually unrecognized coincidence with what Hegel described a century earlier as the ‘skeptical’ attitude. In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), he wrote the following:

[The skeptical attitude] declares the nothingness of seeing, hearing, etc., but it sees and hears, etc.; it declares the nothingness of moral principles, and yet it behaves in accord with these very principles. Its actions and its words continually contradict one other … If likeness is pointed out to it, then it points out unlikeness; and then if one indicates that it had just pointed out unlikeness, then it turns around and points out likeness. Its talk is in fact like the quarrelling of obstinate children, one of whom says A when the other says B, and then says again B, when the other says A, and through the contradiction with themselves buy for themselves the fun [Freude] of remaining in contradiction with each other.²⁴

In tune with this skeptical and contrary attitude, the Dadaists claimed that in times of war, the slogan of Dada is peace, and in times of peace, the slogan of Dada is war.²⁵ Whenever they encountered a positive thesis, they immediately defined themselves against it. And predictably in tune with this form of skepticism, self-contradictory phrases sprinkle themselves across the Dada manifestos – phrases which proclaim that everything is false, that Dada is nothing, that there is no ultimate truth, that everything is absurd, that everything is incoherent and that there is no logic. They are phrases that present themselves in the manifestos as being true, meaningful, coherent, and logical, while they deny all truth, meaning, coherence, and logic.

When conceiving the Dada movement as a form of active-and-antagonistic skepticism, as a form of playful contrariness, and also as a form of intellectual violence, rather than as a kind of hopeless and indifferent nihilism, this artistic movement’s influence upon subsequent French thought is more readily perceivable. We shall see, for example, that Hegel’s discussion of skepticism also resonates well with the definitively poststructuralist conception of deconstruction advanced by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. A Dada influence colors the 1970s writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well. And more generally, a skeptical attitude characterizes the wider sphere of twentieth-century French thought, insofar as there was a continued effort to secure a sense of freedom by taking a stance against the establishment by saying ‘no’ to the oppressive status quo, as it was conceived in various guises.

As will also become evident, such ‘anti-establishment’ sentiments appear not only in Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari, but in Roland Barthes’s view that language itself is oppressively ‘fascist’ in how it determines our styles of thinking, in Michel Foucault’s ‘negative’ conception of power as an external social force of mental and bodily manipulation, in Luce Irigaray’s conception of European languages as being inherently sexist and oppressive towards women, and in Jean-François Lyotard’s conception of the scientific establishment as a one-dimensional and exclusionary enterprise that violently silences its opposition by denying people the very vocabulary in which to express themselves. The Dadaists’ earlier attempt to free themselves from the cultural array that was perpetuating war throughout most of the European mainland, stylistically parallels later attempts to combat the oppressive cultural arrays that were perceived to be damaging the health of the Western cultural spirit, namely, the forces of capitalism, fascism, sexism, science and technology.

Given that the Dadaists set themselves against whatever happened to come their way – they even set themselves against the art establishment itself –²⁶ it is no surprise that the earlier Dadaist manifestos (c. 1918) are antagonistic to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, which had been growing in popularity. At the time, psychoanalysis remained a kindred spirit nonetheless, for Freud intended psychoanalysis to be subversive: although its critics pointed out that psychoanalytic theory conservatively located its understanding of the human psyche within the contours of the traditional family unit, psychoanalysis still carried an intellectual and revolutionary bite. For perhaps more influentially, Freud maintained that to understand the human psyche, it is essential to understand human instinct, which he believed has a murderous aspect. This Freudian concern with human instinct led to a theory that, for the late Victorian era, involved a radical, upsetting and offensively microscopic and (allegedly shameless) attention to sexual energies and social taboos. Psychoanalysis drew attention to what it believed to be the source of these energies, namely, wild and unconscious states of mind, and this aspect of the psyche soon captured the interests of the surrealists, owing to the connections Freud discerned between unconscious energies, and creativity, spontaneity, dreams, non-rationality, and liberation from civilized norms.

Although Freud eventually refined his theory of mind from a two-aspect ‘conscious vs. unconscious’ model (c. 1900) to a three-aspect ‘ego, superego, and id’ model (c. 1923), each component of which could have unconscious aspects, he characterized the core of unconscious life – an aspect of the psyche which he termed the ‘id’²⁷ – in a manner that underscored its socially threatening nature:

[The id] is the dark, unapproachable part of our personality … we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of bubbling excitations … it has no organization, summons up no collective will, only the endeavor to produce the satisfaction of instinctual needs in accord with the pleasure principle. Concerning the goings-on in the id, the logical laws of thought have no application, above all the law of contradiction. Opposing movements exist next to each other, without reconciling each other or drawing energies away from each other … In the id, one finds nothing that corresponds to the representation of time …

One can take for granted that the id recognizes no values, no good and evil, no morality.²⁸

Even to the Dadaists, the subversive nature of Freud’s theory of the unconscious soon became clear, as is evident from later Dadaist statements that praise unconscious energies as being inexhaustible and uncontrollable, and that regard creative energies as being among the chaotic and illogical manifestations of life, as they stand in the same spirit as wild tribal dances.²⁹ In the waning phases of the Dada movement, their representatives admitted the importance of unconscious energies, and their own adherence to contrariness and irrationality gradually intermingled with the sentiments of the surrealists, who, as central to their artistic vision, expressly advocated the need for artists to tap into their instinctive, non-rational energies.

Complementing the Romanian Dada-manifesto writer, Tristan Tzara, André Breton (1896–1966) – French poet, essayist, critic, and editor – emerged as the main author of the surrealist³⁰ manifestos during the 1920s. For Breton, Freud’s emphasis upon dreams, along with the psychoanalytic therapeutic technique of ‘free association,’ was of the most striking artistic importance. Seeking to explore the contents of his patients’ unconscious thought-processes more effectively, Freud often asked his patients to relax upon a couch and to associate freely whatever ideas came to mind. This free association was done in relation to some given stimulus idea that was perceived to be central to the person’s troubled mental condition. Freud’s therapeutic hope was to generate a cluster of associations that would emerge without the interference of the filtering and censorship mechanisms that a person ordinarily has comfortably and controllingly in place. His aim was to stimulate the person to ‘dream’ out loud, to speak from his or her unconscious, in order for obscured and repressed meanings to emerge, thus revealing more explicitly the inner tensions that were troubling the person.

Breton was interested specifically in the nature of artistic creation, and he found the method of free association, or ‘automatic writing,’ to be a method of pure expression. Using it to stimulate his own literary creativity, Breton used this method to generate texts, with results that surprised him in the degree to which they embodied high emotion, a wide-assortment of images, a vivid graphic quality and periodic levity.³¹ By tapping into his unconscious energies, Breton discovered a more authentic mode of artistic expression – one that conveyed a revolutionary quality as well, for given Freud’s theory, the unconscious was also regarded as being notoriously free from social constraints, censorship, reason, and moral norms, and therefore, as an energy well-suited to dynamite the values of the established society within which he found himself.

By locating the source of authentic and liberating thought in the unconscious, and by understanding dreams to be expressions of the same, the surrealists aspired to integrate these unconscious energies into the social scene at large to illuminate, and also change, the standing social condition. Hence originated the term ‘surrealist’ as signifying a resolution and blend between dream and reality into what was hoped to be a truer, more liberated, daily condition. In a manner to be developed in later years by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray, one of the surrealists’ aims was to show that prevailing social norms are mostly artificial and fragile, and are thereby eminently changeable and reformable. By dissolving the myth that the standing social order is somehow natural, inevitable, and unchangeable, one opens the door for alternative social arrangements.

During the later 1930s, the French surrealist movement transformed to adopt communistic ideals in its desire for social reform, and it framed its revolutionary aspirations in the Marxist terms of an attack upon both capitalism and fascism, identifying the proletarian workers as among the foremost powers of social liberation. In general, by blending dream with reality, surrealistic thinking aimed to stimulate a more passionate and instinctively energized consciousness of the ordinarily experienced world, and it intended to use its thought-provoking imagery to demythologize the illusions upon which rested the capitalist and fascistic social orders. Such socially reforming aspirations were shared by the remnant Dada artists who returned to Germany and who contributed a voice against Nazism during the 1930s; later, they were embodi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Surrealism, Existentialism, and Vitalism
• Part 2: Structuralism
• Part 3: Poststructuralism and Postmodernism
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index