Abstract

Even before the appearance of the most recent specimens, I had already spoken of Parisian fads, the glutting of markets by the collages of a plastic “pop” philosophy and the provincialism of the former capital of universal culture. But the succession of vogues is not a vogue; it is “the vogue” according to which our era, particularly in France, lives its relation to “ideas.” These successive collages compose one harmonious collage whose function is no longer discernible. Surely the significance of a thought or of a corpus of thoughts cannot be reduced to a social and historical function. This reduction, like that of “archaeology,” is one of the devices whereby contemporary ideology attempts to avoid the question of truth and falsehood.