Or so read a poster (in a rather wishful translation) outside my decrepit French university, where students are no more excited about the end of times than the end of class. The end, to the French, is comfortably close—in a country that prides itself on its wealth but lacks water fountains, toilet seats, and any forward-looking investment, a viable future, outside the long stream of continuous present, seems hard to imagine. Even the radical militants of the student union, who parade around with banners and interrupt classes with harangues, propose no better future than an inclusive amelioration of the neoliberal mediocrity currently paralyzing the country. They have no prime minister (again), no way to shore up their national debt, no solution for the twin surges in migrant arrivals and populism. But yet, their priorities lie elsewhere. In conversation with a middle-aged woman, she expressed an unexpected combination of outrage and disbelief that Americans were not up in arms about a banana taped to a wall being considered art, unlike, to her great pride, the entire country of France. This, to her, was the apocalypse, her everyday life in a floundering state being nothing terribly special. En bref, the French live with a Manichaean bind: apathy or apocalypse.
With yet another forestalled political crisis, the two options seem like one actuality. The reality of life in France is that, unlike America, it can readily admit contradictions. Its discontinuities, by some bizarre balancing act, make the crooked just straight enough and misery just pleasant enough. The philosopher Alain Badiou, who describes himself as “probably one of [Maoism’s] few noteworthy representatives” left in France (after the death of one teacher and murder charges against the other), revels in this contradiction in his latter-day Socratic dialogue, Eloge de la Philosophie. Tocéras, Badiou’s scrambled Socrates, opens with a diatribe on the ubiquitousness of American English, the universal trade language and standard-bearer of capitalist tyranny and brainless modernity. In front of his student interlocutors—among others, “a Chinese, an Englishman, a Senegalese, and a Heideggerian”—Tocéras points his finger at philosophy to save the world from the postmodern intellectual and moral wasteland that it itself is complicit in. He wraps himself in so many contradictory knots (like Socrates!, Badiou interjects) that he ultimately presents, in an apt metaphor for French life, philosophy as a constant (and circular) discipline, finding resolution to restlessness by biting its own tail. Manifesting the end is just shuffling back to the beginning. At least, for Badiou, that is manifesting something.
Cantankerously,
Brady Santoro