SubStance

SubStance 29.3 (2000) 43-52

The State They're In:
Bourdieu, Debray, and the Revival of Engagement ¹

Keith Reader

If there was one feature of the French cultural and political landscape over the past thirty or so years that had seemed until recently beyond dispute, it was the disappearance of the intellectuel engagé/committed intellectual. The revolutionary hopes of 1968 were to come nowhere near realization in the political domain, something that perhaps became clear as early as the Gaullist electoral landslide in June of that year. The immense energies unleashed by the May movement were to invest themselves above all in the spheres of textuality and culture--a development favored by the movement's origins in the universities and the enthusiasm with which it was taken up by (most of) the intelligentsia. From the reconfiguring of education and broadcasting to the influence, often more widespread outside France than within, of Althusserian and Lacanian cultural theory, it was in the superstructure that radical change was most evident. Political change, meanwhile, took the more tranquil form of Mitterrand's election in 1981 and the subsequent tailoring of socialist aspirations to the demands of a market economy, whose global hegemony since the break-up of the Eastern bloc has remained largely unchallenged.

This is not, of course, to say that intellectuals have cut themselves off entirely from the public sphere, in which there have been a number of interventions from the manifeste des 343 salopes (Manifesto of the 343 Sluts) calling for the legalization of abortion in 1971 through to the 1997 film-makers' movement in support of the sans-papiers, or undocumented immigrants. ² But these, as my examples suggest, have tended to be around single issues and to involve figures from outside the traditionally-defined intellectual realm--both indications that the intellectuel engagé in the classic Sartrean sense, committed in life and work to a project of radical change, might be a thing of the past.

Recent developments, however, have called that demise into question. The twentieth anniversary of Sartre's death has catalyzed a reassessment of the importance of his work, for long triply upstaged by the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism, the discrediting and eventual collapse [End Page 43] of historic Marxism and the attention focused on Beauvoir by gender studies. The institutional structures of the Fifth Republic may seem more unshakeable than ever, but that does not mean that they are universally acknowledged to be delivering the political, or even economic, goods. The république seule et indivisible (one Republic indivisible) has been perceived as insufficiently sensitive to questions of ethnicity and gender, as debates around the sans-papiers and the PACS (recent legislation according rights afforded married couples to all unmarried couples, regardless of sexual orientation) respectively have illustrated. Cohabitation between a Gaullist President and a Socialist Prime Minister no longer raises eyebrows, but while Jospin is generally regarded as being to the left of Blair, Clinton or Schröder, he has been scarcely less willing than they to endorse the onward mercantile march of globalization. This arouses particular disquiet in France because it is widely perceived as a threat to the quantity and quality of services provided by the State--that State which since 1789 has been at the heart of French Republican ideology, and thus, arguably, of French identity. It is most unlikely that 1968's rallying-cry "Tout État est policier" ("All states are police states") would be heard anywhere on the French Left nowadays.

The two intellectual names that most clearly evoke on the one hand the defense of State provision, and on the other, hostility to globalization, are those of Pierre Bourdieu and Régis Debray--the two figures most readily identifiable in contemporary France with the intellectuel engagé. Laurent Lemire, indeed, opined in Le Nouvel Observateur (3 September 1998) that "Bourdieu took himself for a new Sartre" ["Bourdieu s'est pris pour un nouveau Sartre."]. The two writers' political positions have similarities that are not merely apparent. Both--along with another emblematic figure, Jacques Derrida--signed...