Richard Wolin: The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (2010)

“Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who’s who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China’s Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life.

Wolin’s riveting narrative reveals that Maoism’s allure among France’s best and brightest actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics. Instead, it paradoxically served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. French student leftists took up the trope of “cultural revolution,” applying it to their criticisms of everyday life. Wolin examines how Maoism captured the imaginations of France’s leading cultural figures, influencing Sartre’s “perfect Maoist moment”; Foucault’s conception of power; Sollers’s chic, leftist intellectual journal Tel Quel; as well as Kristeva’s book on Chinese women–which included a vigorous defense of foot-binding.

Recounting the cultural and political odyssey of French students and intellectuals in the 1960s, The Wind from the East illustrates how the Maoist phenomenon unexpectedly sparked a democratic political sea change in France.”

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2010
ISBN 0691129983, 9780691129983
400 pages

Video interview with the author: Platypus.

Reviews: Scott McLemee (The National), Julian Jackson (The Guardian), David Gress (The Wall Street Journal).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2023-4-25)

Benjamin Noys: The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (2010)

The Persistence of the Negative offers an original and compelling critique of contemporary Continental theory through a rehabilitation of the negative. Against the usual image of rival thinkers and schools, Benjamin Noys identifies and attacks a shared consensus on the primacy of affirmation and the expelling of the negative that runs through the leading figures of contemporary theory: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou.

While positioning the emergence of affirmative theory as a political response to the corrosive effects of contemporary capitalism, Noys argues that, all too often, affirmation is left re-affirming the conditions of the present rather than providing the means to disrupt and resist them.

Refusing to endorse an anti-theory position that would read theory as the symptom of political defeat, The Persistence of the Negative traverses these leading thinkers in a series of lucid readings to reveal the disavowed effects of negativity operating within their work.

Overturning the limits of recent debates on the politics of theory, The Persistence of the Negative vigorously defends the return of theory to its political calling.

Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2010
ISBN 0748638636, 9780748638635
196 pages

review (Baylee Brits, Parrhesia)
review (Raphael Schlembach, Shift Magazine)

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Philippe Pignarre, Isabelle Stengers: Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (2005–) [FR, EN]

“If denunciation were effective, capitalism would have disappeared a long time ago. But denunciation is never enough. Capitalism is a system that reinvents itself permanently, through the creation of infernal alternatives, alternatives which take us all hostage: ‘if we don’t cut the deficit, we’ll never regain our competitiveness’.

In other traditions than that of the moderns, this sort of paralysis would be described as sorcery. Capitalist Sorcery takes this idea seriously – literally – and explores the consequences of our vulnerability to a system which daily recruits the minions that it needs to cast its spells.

Proposing a pragmatic reading of Marx, a reading which seeks to ward off the thoughtlessness encouraged by the theme of progress and the resignation that arises from accepting that capitalism is the ‘only game in town’, the authors look at how we can protect ourselves from the logic which – from financial collapse through GM foods to oil spills and climate catastrophe – runs scared of the cry ‘another world is possible’.”

La sorcellerie capitaliste: Pratiques de désenvoûtement
Afterword by Anne Vièle
Publisher La Découverte, Paris, 2005
ISBN 2707143979
228 pages

English edition
Translated and edited by Andrew Goffey
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
ISBN 0230237622, 9780230237629
224 pages

Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)

La sorcellerie capitaliste (French, 2005)
Capitalist Sorcery (English, 2011)