Jean-Philippe Mathy. Melancholy Politics: Loss, Mourning, and Memory in Late Modern France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. 237 pp. $64.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-271-03783-7.
Reviewed by Drew Flanagan (Brandeis University)
Published on H-Memory (January, 2012)
Commissioned by Catherine Baker (University of Hull)
In recent years, French writers have identified a disillusioned political and cultural mood as prevailing in France. Take for example Pascal Bruckner's work on "democratic melancholia," a depression he attributes to the end of the Cold War and France's subsequent lack of a conflict to unite it, galvanize it, and "open up a future" (p. 3).[1] In Melancholy Politics: Loss, Mourning and Memory in Late Modern France, Jean-Philippe Mathy examines the writings of prominent French intellectuals since the early 1980s who have discussed this subject. In Mathy’s view, a specter is haunting France, in the shape of a national mood of "pessimism about the future and a sinister sense of an irreversible decline unfolding in the present" (p. 3). He undertakes to explain the development of this mood in the writings of leading French historians, philosophers, and social theorists.
Mathy links this "disenchantment and loss" (p. 3) to a broader cultural failure to reconcile France's present with her past during a period when the old ideologies and cultural and political priorities of "the modernist project, from republican secularism and the steadfast cultivation of a public sphere to aesthetic distinction and the once enduring faith in a socialist revolution" appear to be fading into memory (p. 7). In investigating the process by which French thinkers have tried and failed to mourn these "lost objects," (p. 7) Mathy produces a timely contribution to the current debate over the politics of national identity in France. In addition, he contributes usefully to the study of the role of historical memory in contemporary French thought, politics, and culture.
Mathy's book is more like a collection of essays or variations on a theme than a monograph, with each chapter dealing with an aspect of the melancholic mood that he describes. This structure suits his subject matter, which is an ongoing process of which the full implications are still unclear. The first chapter deals with the significance of the "numerous posthumous readings" (p. 27) that have been attributed to the social and political upheaval of May 1968 since the 1970s. Mathy traces the interpretations of those events through the work of Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, and others, showing how intellectuals of the Left, Right, and center have interpreted May '68 as a ghostly presence that "returns" (p. 20) to haunt public consciousness at more or less regular intervals. Of particular interest is his discussion of Specters of Marx, in which Derrida identified the political Right's nostalgic fixation on the demise of communism as the result of the continuing, haunting presence and power of Marx's thought in contemporary discourse.[2] Mathy describes this work as exhibiting what Walter Benjamin has called "left-wing melancholy," a converse pattern of left-wing nostalgia over the "unavowably crushed ideal" of Marxism (p. 41). Both Benjamin and Derrida help to explain how both the Left and the Right have come to be caught in an interminable process of mourning over the apparent death of Marxism.
Mathy's second chapter deals the ways in which the debate over postmodernism in the France relates to France's unmourned cultural and political losses. In spite of the breakdown of old political ideologies and their attendant grand narratives brought on by the rise of free markets, individualism, and identity politics, Mathy argues that French thought is still haunted by specters of the revolutionary politics and critical theory of '68 (p. 37). He explains the debates over postmodernism in light of ongoing efforts by French intellectuals to determine once and for all "whether the revolution was already dead or whether it was still a threat needing to be put to rest" (p. 49).
Chapter 3 deals with the rise of the academic journal Le Débat, which was founded in 1980 and was instrumental in critiquing "the Sartrean legacy of commitment to revolutionary politics" (p. 71). In contradiction to the Sartrean model, Le Débat opted for a centrist and reformist tone and advocated for new modes of intellectual engagement. Writing in the journal’s pages, the historian Pierre Nora argued that "the problem with the intelligentsia was that they didn't know, or didn't want to know, that they no longer existed. Like ghostly spirits outliving their own death, they persisted in playing a role that the new conditions of democratic life in late modernity had deprived of meaning and justification" (p. 77). Unwilling to give up their now meaningless public function, French left-wing intellectuals are, as Francois Ewald put it, "orphans of a worldview, of an ideology" (p. 85).
In spite of Le Débat's spirited disavowal of Marx's specter, the journal's moderate and reformist tone has failed to become the norm. The case of Pierre Bourdieu, outlined in Mathy's fourth chapter, presents an interesting counterexample. During the major public sector strikes of 1995, Bourdieu became a spokesperson for the striking workers, in the process adopting a language and mode of intellectual engagement more similar to that of the Dreyfusard firebrand Emile Zola than of Sartre. In his public advocacy, Bourdieu defended the "republican ideal of truth and justice" (p. 110) in the process of seeking a way of engaging in anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal politics that did not rely on the "undead" ideas of the old Left. In tandem with this effort, Bourdieu reformulated the loss of the illusions of '68 as a positive development. In his words, "Our era is one of lost illusions. In this sense, these are good times" (p. 126).
Yet some illusions and chimeras continue to color public discourse. The debate over the meaning of the republic and republicanism takes a front seat in chapter 5, which focuses on the elections of 2002 and the surprising electoral success of the far-right National Front. Like Bourdieu, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his party made use of the language of republicanism, in this case as part of a platform that is fundamentally at odds with Bourdieu's leftist politics. This case illustrates how efforts by the anti-immigrant Right to appropriate republicanism have contributed to rendering republicanism itself an empty signifier. This loss of meaning, in Mathy’s view, has allowed the language of republicanism to be deployed in opposition to identity politics, "political correctness," and ethnic and religious difference.
Chapter 6 concerns itself directly with various political battles over historical memory. Mathy pays particular attention to recent debates over the history of Vichy and collaboration, the role of ethnic minorities in French history, and the legacy of the Algerian war and colonialism more generally. In each case, historians have often found themselves in conflict with one another as well as with political lobby groups and veterans' organizations over how history ought to be written and remembered. The French government itself has stepped in at times, enacting laws (such as those against Holocaust denial) that have raised questions about the state's proper role in the making of both history and memory.
Chapter 7 revisits a theme first substantially introduced in chapter 5, that is, the ways in which republican values have come to be redefined in the new political context of late modernity. Mathy examines the use of the republican concept of laïcité (secularism) to defend French exceptionalism and to attack immigrant communities and others who do not fit an idealized vision of France’s historic character as culturally unified and homogeneous. In particular, he deals with the hot-button issue of the ban on the wearing of Islamic veils, which in his eyes is an effort to avoid a true reckoning with issues of race. He places this politics of denial in the context of France's melancholy politics, a continuing and unhealthy fixation on ideas and attitudes that have outlived their applicability to a rapidly developing social and cultural reality.
Mathy's book is a complex one, and its ideas weave together in various (and sometimes unexpected) ways. While the chapters do not tell one linear story, each one helps to set the stage for the issues dealt with in the following chapters and helps to tie up loose ends left over from the preceding ones. This impressionistic arrangement of ideas may seem at first to be disorienting, but it rewards close reading and, particularly, rereading. I have come back to Melancholy Politics several times since first receiving a copy for review, and each time I have discovered new insights and connections within the text. The concept of "melancholy politics," a psycho-historical metaphor not unlike Henri Rousso's concept of a "Vichy syndrome," has value both as an explanatory scheme and as a literary device that gives the work a measure of tonal coherence.[3] Mathy identifies in each of his cases the tendency of French authors to revert to the language of ghostly hauntings, the undead, and the return of the repressed in order to describe the mood and thought of their times, and this running theme functions to unify an otherwise disparate set of topics more convincingly than might be expected.
Mathy's emphasis on the responses of French thinkers to the past necessarily places questions of memory at the center of his analysis. The efforts he documents at imagining a hopeful political future require a thorough evaluation of France's past and the exorcism of the errors and tragedies of modernity. It is these haunting memories, in Mathy's view, that define French intellectual life today. He quotes Pierre Nora's assertion that when the French "have settled on another way of living together ... the era of commemoration will be over for good. The tyranny of memory will have endured for only a moment--but it was our moment" (p. 226). With this work, Mathy presents a much-needed investigation of the roots of the debates over memory that so dominate the current moment.
Students of modern French history might be inclined to ask whether the melancholy politics of the present (and the recent past) are without precedent in French history and whether placing them in a longer historical context might not provide useful insights. Mathy admits early on that France is one of several western European democracies that is having difficulty reconciling its present reality with its imagined past. It might be added that France has faced such crises of confidence before, perhaps most notably in the fixation on cultural decadence and national decline that marked public discourse under the late Third Republic. Placed within a larger temporal frame, it seems that the development of Mathy's melancholy politics could be traced back before 1968 and even before 1940, potentially illuminating deeper trends and flows within French political culture.
Mathy's book rests on a skillful integration of two approaches to his subject matter, combining the priorities and vocabulary of intellectual history and of the study of historical memory. On one hand, it is an informative and engrossing intellectual history of the present. On the other hand, it rests comfortably within an expanding bibliography on historical memory in France that includes the work of Henri Rousso, Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Nora, and others.[4] The resulting study provides highly readable and informative insight into contemporary waves in French thought and political culture. It is likely to appeal to students of French cultural and intellectual history as well as those interested in contemporary western European politics surrounding race and religion and the methods and theory of the study of historical memory. For all of those with an interest in memory studies, Mathy provides a useful discussion of contemporary thought regarding memory and culture. At the same time, he shows how a number of these theories might be applied to throw light on cultural and intellectual patterns that might otherwise be too shadowy and formless to be clearly explained.
Notes
[1]. Pascal Bruckner, La Melancolie Democratique (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
[2]. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
[3]. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Rousso identifies France's efforts to wrestle with Vichy's collaboration as a process of mourning in the Freudian sense.
[4]. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
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Citation:
Drew Flanagan. Review of Mathy, Jean-Philippe, Melancholy Politics: Loss, Mourning, and Memory in Late Modern France.
H-Memory, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2012.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34519
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