Simone?

Last week Le Monde reviewed a reissue of an early novel by de Beauvoir and said that if you had the "malchance' to see Les Amants de Flore you were conned. Actually there are wrong. It was advertised as a kind of romcom with added philosophy, which was what it was. Anna Mouglalis was brillliant as de Beauvoir - she had a steeliness which, mixed with the actresses' natural beauty, a quite atypical, kind of anti-Tautou, sort of beauty, made a real impact. This was great tv.

LES AMANTS DU FLORE

Later this year on F3 and Arte we will see this drama about the lives of Sartre and De Beauvoir. Click on the heading of this entry to go to a slightly ridiculous summary of the programmes. What is interesting is that in the French version de Beauvoir is en route to gaining her agregation but in the English version she is only studying for her bac. Is this a bit of tabloidese spice to attract Channel Five to buy the rights for Brit TV? He was her professor, she was the precocious pupil etc. etc. de Beauvoir had an austere beauty which perhaps justifies casting Anna Mouglalis in the role. It was always going to be difficult to cast Sartre.

Highlights of 2005

Radio - Michel Onfray

Over the summer, for a month Michel Onfray holding forth for an hour each evening on France Culture. This is the kind of programme unimaginable on the BBC. A philosopher talking for an hour - anytime at all, but each weekday night for over a month would cause an influx to R4's Feedback of viagra-spam proportions. Over the same summer period on the same channel, we had the Lévinas week a total of six hours a day on Lévinas for a whole week. I actually do remember hearing Simon Critchley talking about Lévinas for 15 minutes once on R3 about a decade ago.

In the UK we do of course get some philosophy in the media but always in the BBC/PSB tradition filtered through an anchorman as with In Our Time which has philosophy via Melvyn Bragg - Yes it is sometimes good but in spite of the presence of MB rather than because of it. Never philosophy straight.

The things I like about Onfray are his obvious dedication to the questioning nature of philosophy, his defence of hedonism, his areligiosity (I like his references to Paul de Tarse, never using the S. word) and his sheer in depth knowledge of the subject - two or three interesting hours on Pierre Gassendi, hitherto only known obscurely as a questioner of Descartes, now reframed for me as a hedonist materialist.

Television - Clara Sheller (merci Nathalie)

France has never been big on homegrown soap operas or sitcoms preferring the short serial of episodes of an hour to a couple of hours in length. - the feuilleton. (Although F3 has Plus Belle La Vie running at the moment - a half hour daily soap set in Marseilles).
The problem with the feuilleton is that they are more or less strictly for grandmas but this one was different. It had a new star Melanie Doutey who played the eponymous Clara - a figure so easy to identify with, ordinary like us - but also someone who offers a kind of transcendence - a beauty that remains constant despite the travails of everyday life. The secret of a star is not to show too much emotion - by their stillness they offer a glimpse of a kind of stoical future where we can cope, can perhaps glide through life's challenges, just take life's cruel vicissitudes. Therein lies an innate conservatism of the star phenomenon - this (star) other offers a pleasure that means we don't demand the radical otherness of the event - of a radical change.

Clara had a life. This was life as we know it from soaps. And just as we know it - full of emotional over-reachings and blind alleys and straightforwardly abrupt face slaps. A life where men sleep with men and then women sleep with them and women sleep with men and women. People get drunk and say too much which is also never quite enough. The excess and lack of the lover's discourse.

Music - Camille

Without a new album by Brigitte Fontaine or Les Rita Mitsouko then what? Camille's album filled in. She launched her career out of that Nouvelle Vague album where she sang the versions of Too Drunk to Fuck and Guns of Brixton - the latter where she somehow really sounded angry without raising her voice in any standard way. Therefore so much more dangerous than the forced ultra macho and therefore faux leftism of The Clash's original. Veering between Meredith Monk style vocal experiment (Sensa, Jeanine 1,2,3) and standard singer songwriter (Baby Carni Bird) she manages most of the time to produce something quite extraordinary - the heartbroke and heartbreaking opening to Pale Septembre to the surreal hilarity of the various Jeanines.

Film - L'Intrus

I saw it in Paris just round the corner from the Sorbonne and now on DVD. I get an incredible sense of openness from Clair Denis' films - if art is supposed to allow us to reawaken a sense of wonder, then this is art. After the experience of L'Intrus then you, can look differently. The sensual nature of the terre-material is what the films seem to be about - including the human form itself. Look at Michel Subor's face, look at Beatrice Dalle's smile. Perhaps the films are also about the limits of the image itself and the value of the touch of the unknown that is the real world. The moment in L'Intrus where the Michel Subor character goes to touch the breast of (who else) Beatrice Dalle and is ordered off and then the fact that the film ends with the Dalle character laughing uncontrollably as she husky-sleighs over the land where he once lived. There are moments when we have pure experimental cinema - shots held far longer than is usual . . . you look differently. A disquieting yet alluring presence - the Denis image, the world.

And now Cahiers du Cinéma have put out two of Denis' earlier films Nenette and Boni and S'en Fout la Mort - incidentally the latter will never be shown in full in Britain because of the cockfighting scenes.

Novel - Houellebecq

More or less simultaneously released in French and in English. What strikes me is how French it is. The whole novel is based on a parodic take on the Raelians who were all over French media a couple of years ago with their cloning claims - but hardly reported in Britain. Then there are the constant references to French public figures such as Michel Onfray (see above) and Jamel Debbouze.

The sex is explicit, but if pornography is lies (Dworkin) then this is pretty truthful, most of it is about the decline of virility of the main character. If the sex is explicit it is tellingly explicit when MH describes the impotence and droop of the main charcacter Daniel. How he is just too old, others are going to live a more exciting life than he. So . . .

Then there are the moments of existential poetry. Nothing more exposes the cultural differences between France and Ukania more then the way Houellebecq is responded too. In France the poetic-philosophic genius, in Ukania the pretentious porn merchant.

Rancière on democracy, populism and the banlieues

Rancière was interviewed in Libération last Friday. He set out (very clearly) a few of his ideas on politics and democracy. Here are a few snippets:

1. Democracy

La démocratie n'est ni la forme du gouvernement représentatif ni le type de société fondé sur le libre marché capitaliste. Il faut rendre à ce mot sa puissance de scandale. Il a d'abord été une insulte : la démocratie, pour ceux qui ne la supportent pas, est le gouvernement de la canaille, de la multitude, de ceux qui n'ont pas de titres à gouverner.

Democracy isn't the form of representative government nor is it the type of society founded on the capitalist free market. You have to restore the capacity to scandalise to the word. It was an insult at first: democracy, for those who couldn't stand it, is government by the rabble, the multitude, of those who do not have the title to govern.

2. Populism

On voit se séparer deux types de légitimité : l'une, savante, des gouvernants et des experts, l'autre, populaire, de plus en plus contestée et stigmatisée comme «populiste» quand elle va à l'encontre de la logique dominante, comme lors du référendum sur la Constitution européenne.

We see the separation of two types of legitimacy: one, learned, of the governers and the experts, the other, popular, more and more contested and stigmatised as 'populist' when it is contrary to the dominant logic as at the time of the referendum on the European Constitution.

3. Equality

L'égalité n'est pas un but à atteindre, au sens d'un statut économique ou d'un mode de vie semblable pour tous. Elle est une présupposition de la politique. La démocratie est le pouvoir de n'importe qui, la contingence de toute domination.

Equality is not a goal to be attained, in the sense of economic status or a way of life similar for everybody. It is a presupposition of politics. Democracy is the power of no matter who, the contingency of all domination.

4. The banlieues

Le problème n'est pas de savoir si des gens sont mal traités ou mal dans leur peau. Il est de savoir s'ils sont comptés comme sujets politiques, doués d'une parole commune.

The problem isn't knowing if people are badly treated or feeling bad about themselves. It is to know if they are counted as political subjects, equipped with a common language.

END OF THE REPUBLIC?

On Friday 9 Dec 2005 Balibar and Bensaid will debate on the basis of the following;


La République a été un idéal émancipateur. Elle a délivré les individus de leur sujétion à un monarque pour en faire des citoyens membres d'une collectivité régie par le droit. Joue-t-elle encore ce rôle? Le démenti social que lui opposent ceux à qui elle n'a pas fait place la relègue dans l'idéologie. Ne serait-elle à présent qu'un ensemble de valeurs abstraites destinées à masquer les exclusions de fait : à l'école, dans les banlieues, dans la représentation politique et médiatique? Le dévoiement patrimonial de la République a transformé l'idéal en un rappel à l'ordre des autorités et des hiérarchies instituées.
Face au désir de reconnaissance, exprimé dans la violence brute ou par la revendication politique, les défenseurs du "modèle" républicain ne cessent de dénoncer son antithèse qu'ils nomment communautarisme, le repli des individus sur leur identité ethnique. Mais ces réactions ne sont-elles pas le produit d'une République volontairement aveugle à la reproduction des inégalités sociales et à son passé colonial. Il est temps de sortir de cette alternative idéologique pour penser autrement la participation à la chose publique, à la lumière des multi appartenances et d'une citoyenneté aussi bien sociale que politique.

Are the values of the republic just a set of abstract set of ideas masking real exclusions? What other politics?

Balibar and Bensaid on the events in Paris

Etienne Balibar and Daniel Bensaid are on Les Vendredis de la Philosophie on Friday 9 December under the title of of Ni Commmunauté ni Repuplique (Neither Community nor Republic). Although neither Telerama nor the France Culture site explain anything more, this it seems to me, is likely to be a discussion focussing on the recent events in the banlieues.

Sartre, the subjective and subjectivity

Sartre, Subjectivity and the Subjective

A recent secondary text hoping to help A Level Philosophy students understand Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism is quite useful but gets something fundamental about his work quite wrong. Part of the problem lies with the translation they rely upon but a broader problem concerns anglo philosophical misunderstandings of what has become known as continental philosophy, of which Sartre is a key figure.

Let's start with the Philippe Mairet translation of one of Sartre's key foundational sentences:

il faut partir de la subjectivité

which is translated by Mairet as;

we must begin from the subjective.

So the French la subjectivité is translated as the subjective. This is misleading because there is a big difference between the notion of the subjective and the notion of subjectivity (subjectivité).

So let's take a look at (the very good, incidentally) Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy. There is no definition of subjectivity but there is a definition of subjective which includes four senses of the term, the fourth of which is -

what is subjective is a mere matter of personal taste or preference; lacking in truth or validity; arbitrary.

A French dictionary of philosophy (Dictionnaire de Philosophie - Jacqueline Russ, Larousse Bordas, 1996) also emphasises this weak version of the notion of the subjective:

individuel et dependant des preferences personelles (individual and dependent on personal preferences).

But in the French dictionary there is a separate entry for subjectivité - a much stronger conception of subjectivity as vie consciente (conscious life).

Elsewhere in L'Être et Le Néant (Being and Nothingness) Sartre defines subjectivité as: la conscience de conscience - consciousness of consciousness.

A French commentary on Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism by Sophie Bilemdjian (Puf, 2000, 24) links the Sartrian notion of existentialism to a very strong conception of subjectivity.

L'existentialisme s'inscrit dans la tradition initiée par Descartes des philosophes de la subjectivité . . . . La subjectivité est la specificité d'un être conscient de soi, présent au monde et à soi, qui a rapport à soi et pour lequel son être est en question permanente. Ce mode d'être spécifique de l'homme, Sartre l'appelle dans L'Être et Le Néant le pour soi . . .


Existentialism inscribes itself within the Cartesian tradition of the philosophy of subjectivity . . . Subjectivity is the specificity of a being conscious of itself, present to the world and to itself, which has a relationship to itself and for which its being is in constant question. This mode of being, specific to man, Sartre calls, in Being and Nothiingness, the for-itself . . .


Later she defines subjectivity in opposition to the weaker notion of the subjective:

La subjectivité . . . n'est pas, . . . une hypothése idéaliste enfermant l'individu dans son interiorité et donc occultant le poids du monde materiél . . . . mais c'est le socle théorique minimal de quiconque prétend tenir un discours vrai. (Belemdjian, 38)

Subjectivity . . . isn't . . . an idealist hypothesis locking the individual up in his interiority and thereby obscuring the real weight of the material world . . . but it is the minimal theoretical foundation for anyone who claims to maintain truthful discourse.

So there is a big problem with Mairet's translation of the term subjectivity as subjective. Subjectivity is (epistemologically) something very strong and a starting point for any truth claims, not a starting point for personal preferences and weak claims about the world.

So Mairet gets it very badly wrong. This has consequences for a new book aimed at A level teachers and students, which is a secondary commentary in English, on Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism. (Jones, Cardinal Hayward, Philosophy in Focus, John Murray, 2003).

They say that Sartre's notion of the 'subjective' (or subjectivity) entails the following:

"While the rest of philosophy blunders on with its foolish project to reach objective knowledge about the world, existentialism turns to focus on all that we can know, our own individual subjective experiences." (28)

This is wrong. Sartre the atheist, believes that we should start from human subjectivity rather than the subjective biases of the individual or a purported omniscience.

The authors go on to develop lines of argument based on this misreading, indeed they treat the 'subjective' as a foundational element of Sartre's existentialism. He may reject objectivity in the sense of a non-human godlike view on the world, but his notion of subjectivity holds onto the idea of truth claims very strongly. In fact the subject for Sartre is much more like the notion of the person in the anglo-analytic tradition.

One unfortunate consequence of this text may be that prejudices and ignorance about French philosophy may be reinforced in a whole new generation of philosophy students.