The City and the Pen: An Excerpt from Shlomo Sand’s “The End of the French Intellectual” – Los Angeles Review of Books, April 17, 2018
The following is an excerpt from Shlomo Sand’s The End of the French Intellectual: From Zola to Houellebecq, translated by David Fernbach and out April 2018 with Verso.
[…]
It is a constant surprise that such major French intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, or Jean-Luc Godard, who had supported the protests of the rebel generation of the late 1960s, were precisely able to fix their choice on the current with the most totalitarian tendency (Foucault was still able to rally to the final totalitarian squall of the century, the Islamic revolution in Iran). [17] Why did these thinkers, and others with them, not prefer the less authoritarian and more rational currents of political revolt? Why did they bring themselves to sympathize with movements that organized a cult, and whose affinities with a distant dictatorship and its oppressive practices were visible to the naked eye?
