Ο φόβος της αμερικανοποίησης της γαλλικής κουλτούρας μέσα από "επικίνδυνες" ιδέες που ανθούν στα αμερικάνικα πανεπιστήμια. Η διένεξη συνεχίζεται.
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Απόσπασμα
This irony is redoubled if we take into account that, as the French intellectual historian François Cusset influentially argued, French Theory is an American invention. Many French intellectuals derided the American academy’s embrace of Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Hélène Cixous, among others.
Building on their work, thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said laid the foundations of postcolonial, queer, and gender studies. (Those scholars working in the United States were themselves not immune to the accusation that they had wrongly derived a politics that was not native to French theory.)
The biggest irony of all, in the end, might be that, in feigning to defend France against American influence, Macron has borrowed a page from the American conservative’s playbook. And treating criticism of France’s colonial history, discriminatory practices, and police brutality as byproducts of a new form of American imperialism only reproduces the disavowal of an intellectual tradition based on a different history, which is very much France’s.
Recognizing this is all the more urgent in light of the rise of neofascism in Europe and globally. It will take more than symbolic gestures like Macron’s recent proposal to rename French streets after notable figures from the former colonies (among them, Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, whom he called “cultural heroes”). It will take engaging these thinkers seriously — not as cultural heroes but as anticolonial thinkers.
Césaire uses the phrase “boomerang effect” in his 1955 essay “Discourse on Colonialism” to describe how colonialism returned to haunt Europe under the guise of fascism. If we want to understand how something like Nazism came out of the so-called enlightened West, Césaire contends, “we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer.” When the French refuse to recognize this history as theirs, Césaire warns, “a universal regression takes place.”
What threatens France is not the pseudo-notion of Islamo-leftism or the influence of foreign thought, but the persistent regression of its own historical feedback loop, a narrative of exceptionalism that must be disrupted by a new generation of scholars and activists.
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