Alain Finkielkraut, itinerary of a singular essayist

Le Regard Libre N° 12 - Jonas Follonier

Alain Finkielkraut was born in 1949 to Polish-Jewish parents, both survivors of the Holocaust. Naturalized at the age of one, he believes he owes a debt to France, which, through the republican school system, enabled him to become French by receiving the culture of his host country, and more particularly the French language and literature.

Initially a committed Maoist, then a leftist in the 60s, Finkielkraut has always distinguished himself from socialism in all its subversive and totalitarian aspects. It has to be said that his intellectual life resembles that of one of his role models, Charles Péguy, for, as Yann Moix says of the man we're interested in: «Péguy was a socialist all by himself, perhaps even the only socialist worthy of the name during the Dreyfus affair, and as Péguy was recuperated by the right and never denied a line of his work, you identify with him a little. Because in the end, in his immobility, he was always right.»

In his early years, he published two books with his friend Pascal Bruckner, then established himself as an essayist with a number of writings, including The defeat of thought was the first to be very successful. This essay, and the dozens that followed, demonstrate a profound coherence, and although he didn't really erect a metaphysical system like Plato or Descartes, Finkielkraut nonetheless set out a number of well-constructed, well-argued ideas.

The death of culture

In 1987, Finkielkraut was already analyzing Europe's cultural crisis. In The defeat of thought, Finkielkraut devotes the first part of his book to an extremely detailed description of the ideological conflicts that took place between German Romantics, partisans of national genius, and Jacobinists. He then goes on to show that the anti-German French nationalists were in fact to recover the ideology of the German reactionaries:

«Thus, hatred of Germany is formulated using concepts and even phrases employed on the other side of the Rhine. When anti-German passion takes precedence over all other considerations, it ensures the triumph of German thought. [...] The heralds of revenge are not so much challenging the idea of race, as they are challenging the German race.»

The ideology of the Enlightenment finally triumphed at the end of the Dreyfus Affair. Unfortunately, however, this did not prevent Europe from plunging into horror in 39-45.

The stroke of genius in Finkielkraut's historical-philosophical analysis is this: following the Second World War, of which Finkielkraut provides a complex analysis in Lost humanity (but that's not our subject here), European intellectuals are not going to return to the ideas of the Enlightenment, i.e., the unity of Europe through culture, universalism, the elevation of the spirit through schools, etc. No, traumatized by fascism, they are going to fall into the trap of re-establishing a kind of historical materialism. No, traumatized by fascism, they will fall into the trap of re-establishing a kind of historical materialism, which is common to both Marx and the European nationalists. Anti-colonialists want to cleanse bourgeois Europe of its colonialist past, because it is bourgeois, and at the same time combat racism; but this anti-racism turns out to lock individuals into their culture and take away their freedom.

There's no more culture, just crops. Individuals disappear, returned to their ethnic group. This is significantly reflected in the new vision of literary works:

«No two myths, dreams, delusions or confessions are alike, but, say the structuralists, these differences give no grounds for value judgments, since they are variants of the same combinatorial activity. Conclusion: the definition of art is an “issue of class struggle”.”[1] and if such and such a text is sacralized and offered for study, it's because through it the dominant group prescribes its vision of the world to the social whole. There is violence at the root of all valorization.»

What's more, the disappearance of high culture has led society to believe that everyone can choose the culture of their choice, just as in the past. self-service. This is unfortunate, because the rejection of old structures and hierarchies is only desirable if the individual is given the opportunity to acquire true freedom of mind:

«Limiting authority does not guarantee autonomy of judgment and will; the disappearance of social constraints inherited from the past is not enough to ensure freedom of the mind.^th As long as there are men who do not obey their reason alone, who receive their opinions from a foreign opinion, in vain will all chains have been broken.«[2] [Despotism has been defeated, but not obscurantism. Traditions are powerless, and so is culture.»

The identity crisis

In 2013 The unhappy identity, another major success for the French intellectual. Reduced to a tissue of extremist and even racist positions, the book gave rise to a great deal of misinformation, and brought Finkielkraut out of his depth on several television platforms. The image of a Finkielkraut who «freaks out» becomes widespread. Here is an objective summary of what emerges from this book, and is taken up in his latest essay, published this year.

Europe's cultural crisis is accompanied by an identity crisis, which is particularly acute in France. This crisis has many roots, but we can identify the main processes leading to a situation where many people no longer feel they live in their own country.

The guetthoïsation of French society is leading to the failure of living together. National cohesion is being replaced by the praise of mixing and blending at all costs. This is the result of the mismanagement of a certain type of immigration, bringing in people with cultural codes that differ from republican values. Integration is failing. At the same time, anti-white racism has emerged, giving rise to a growing hatred of France. Finkielkraut writes in The only accuracy in 2015:

«The monotonous fury of rap ignores individuals; it knows only the “chalk faces”, i.e. the representatives of a harmful species. Here are a few samples of this incandescent poetry from Christian Godin's book Demoralization and in the issue of L'Obs with Jacques Rancière. Salif: “Poitiers is burning and this time there's no Charles Martel. France is farting, I hope you get the concept.” Lunatic: “Vote to take the pigs to the morgue.” (pigs, as everyone knows or should know, are non-Muslims). Booba: “The colonists put it deep inside us. We'll do it to them backwards. When I see France with her legs spread, I fuck her without oil”, etc.»

The republican school is no longer fulfilling its role of ensuring equality of opportunity. With the pursuit of a spurious equality and the collapse of the authority of culture and its representatives, the school is no longer republican, and the less gifted are disadvantaged. Indeed, the concept of equality has changed: the equality aimed for has become a kind of social equality, so that it would be unacceptable, for example, for one child to have more general knowledge than another. Cultural elitism is being fought, and with it access to culture itself is dying. It's a race to the bottom par excellence. This problem is consubstantial with the one we're going to look at now.

Republican secularism

One of the distinctive features of French secularism is the ban on religious symbols in schools. No exception should be justified at school on the grounds of religion. No crosses, no headscarves, no yarmulkes should be tolerated, for if a Muslim woman can wear a head covering because her religion prescribes it, but a cap cannot be worn in class, how can it be justified that a Muslim woman should be forced to attend a biology class discussing the theory of evolution if her religion rejects it? Similarly, it is imperative that Madame Bovary can be taught to all pupils; culture must not allow itself to be subjugated by ridiculous communal fantasies.

More generally, schools are being transformed into circuses of self-expression. This distresses Alain Finkielkraut, who as a child entered an emancipatory sanctuary where the self had no place, because culture was at the center. This passage from The unhappy identity:

«We no longer say, as Alain did, “School is an admirable place where outside noise doesn't penetrate. I love these bare walls. [...] like François Dubet, we are delighted [...] to see that ”the walls of sanctuary are crumbling before the force of social demands and individualistic claims. The walls are crumbling: current events are forcing open the doors of the temple, the freedom of the Moderns is inviting itself into playgrounds and classrooms, the present can no longer be kept at a distance, everyday life can never be forgotten, the desires of life invading the institution, society, with its codes, its fashions, its brands, its emblems, its fetish objects, its signs of belonging and recognition, is flooding into the school.“

Alain Finkielkraut contrasts republican secularism with liberal secularism. While the former establishes a framework within which all students must refrain from self-expression upon entering a school so that they can live in harmony and learn, the latter's sole aim is to recognize all religions, and by extension all individual identities, by letting the present in a place where the transmission. The debate is therefore all the more complex in that it is a «war of homonyms», of «secularists against secularists», as the philosopher writes in The Book and the Books. Talks on secularism. It is in this same book, in dialogue with the Jewish philosopher Benny Lévy, that Alain Finkielkraut sums up his plea:

«Against jihadism and against progressivism, I see no answer or salvation except in preserving a space secular. Secular, in the sense that nothing is written.»

Whether or not we agree with his thinking, we can admit that Alain Finkielkraut is, more than a descriptor, a decryptor of the present: not content to paint a portrait of society as one might in a novel, the French thinker strives for a demanding analysis of the world in which he lives, taking into account its complexity. By resisting the invective and anathemas that are the hallmark of contemporary debate, the French thinker makes his own the famous words of Camus, who rejected Sartre's totalitarian progressivism: «The truth of a thought is not decided by whether it is to the right or to the left, and even less by what the right or the left decide to do with it. If truth finally seemed to me to be right-wing, I'd be there.»

Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com

Photo credit: Jérémy Barande / Ecole polytechnique Université Paris-Saclay / CC BY-SA 2.0

[1] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Social Criticism of Judgment), Editions de Minuit, 1979, p. 50

[2] Condorcet, Report and draft decree for the general organization of public education, April 1792, quoted in Bronislaw Baczko, An education for democracy (Texts from the revolutionary era), Garnier, 1982