The French Revolution in Theory

247 Pages·2022·0.73 MB·English

by  Sophie Wahnich, Owen Glyn-Williams

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
IN THEORY
Reinventing Critical Theory
Series Editors:
Gabriel Rockhill, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University
Jennifer Ponce de León, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
The Reinventing Critical Theory series publishes cutting edge work that seeks to rein-
vent critical social theory for the 21st century. It serves as a platform for new research
in critical philosophy that examines the political, social, historical, anthropological,
psychological, technological, religious, aesthetic and/or economic dynamics shaping
the contemporary situation. Books in the series provide alternative accounts and
points of view regarding the development of critical social theory, put critical theory
in dialogue with other intellectual traditions around the world and/or advance new,
radical forms of pluralist critical theory that contest the current hegemonic order.
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Brian Milstein
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Amílcar Cabral—Translated by Dan Wood
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Edited by Poul F. Kjaer and Niklas Olsen
Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency
Joshua Ramey
Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology
Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon and Peter Skafish
The Invention of the Visible: The Image in Light of the Arts
Patrick Vauday—Translated by Jared Bly
Metaphors of Invention and Dissension
Rajeshwari S. Vallury
Technology, Modernity and Democracy
Edited by Eduardo Beira and Andrew Feenberg
A Critique of Sovereignty
Daniel Loick—Translated by Amanda DeMarco
Democracy and Relativism: A Debate
Cornelius Castoriadis—Translated by John V. Garner
Democracy in Spite of the Demos: From Arendt to the Frankfurt School
Larry Alan Busk
The Politics of Bodies: Philosophical Emancipation With and Beyond Rancière
Laura Quintana
Domination and Emancipation: For a Revival of Social Critique
Luc Boltanski and Nancy Fraser—Edited by Daniel Benson
Zero- Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment
Santiago Castro- Gómez—Translated by George Ciccariello-M aher
and Don T. Deere
The French Revolution in Theory
Sophie Wahnich—Translated by Owen Glyn-W illiams
THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION IN
THEORY
SOPHIE WAHNICH
Translated by Owen Glyn-W illiams
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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English translation copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Group, Inc.
Originally published in French as La Révolution française n’est pas un mythe
Copyright © Klincksieck, Paris 2017
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021944957
ISBN 978-1-78661-617-3 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-78661-619-7 (epub)
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For Régine

CONTENTS
Introduction: The French Revolution Is Not a Myth: Satre,
Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, and Us 1
Part I: The French Revolution as an Object for Sartre 11
1 How Did the French Revolution Become an Object for Sartre? 13
2 W orking with Historical Details against the Fetishization
of the Real 25
3 N o Longer Dissolving the Real Actors of the French
Revolution 41
4 Restoring the Role of the Sacred 53
5 Apocalypse and Fraternity-T error 63
6 T he Question of Dialectical Time, or the Inanity of the
Notion of the Rearguard 75
Part II: Rebuking Sartre and His Final Humanist Object:
The French Revolution under Scrutiny 97
7 Three Humanities in One: European, Colonized, Savage 103
8 Finishing a Book, Concluding a Discussion 119
9 M ichel Foucault and the French Revolution:
A Misunderstanding? 133
10 The French Revolution: Between the Archaeology of
Knowledge, Discursive Formations, and Social Formations 147
vii
viii Contents
11 On the “Iranian Revolution”: Retrieving the Missed
Object, with Foucault and Despite Foucault 163
12 “The French Revolution as Matrix of Totalitarianism”:
The Enigma of a Bizarre Statement 177
13 Sade and the Ethical Fold of the French Revolution 193
Conclusion: Clearing Some Foggy Patches 211
INTRODUCTION
The French Revolution Is Not a Myth:
Sartre, Lévi- Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, and Us
“For contemporary man to fully play the role of his-
torical agent, he must believe in the myth of the French
Revolution.”1
We have to admit that this belief of the “historical agent” has been inactive
for a long time. The French Revolution, as revolutionary and as French,
is a repressed historical moment, reduced to amusing signage display-
ing the edge of a guillotine, Phrygian caps, and three national colors that
are either an object of suspicion or overinvestment. It is thus folklorized,
instrumentalized, and deactivated as a fulcrum for exigent political and
theoretical reflection. Nevertheless, when Claude Lévi- Strauss writes this
phrase, which appears in his 1962 The Savage Mind in polemical response
to Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason,2 they are both responsive to political
and theoretical exigency, and each knows his French Revolution with an
impressive degree of precision.
VALUE OF MYTH, VALUE OF TRUTH
This investigation aims first to understand, over fifty years later, the past
and present stakes of the debate between Lévi-S trauss and Sartre over
the French Revolution. The French revolutionary sequence does indeed
occupy a large place in the Critique of Dialectical Reason and its preparatory
1 Claude Lévi-S trauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).
2 Jean- Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (London: Verso, 2004).
1