Mysticism and Mourning in Recent French Thought

Modern Intellectual History, 11, 2 (2014), pp.
479–490
C Cambridge University Press 2014
doi:10.1017/S1479244314000109
mysticism and mourning in

recent french thought
carolyn j. dean
Department of History, Yale University
E-mail: carolyn.dean@yale.edu
Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Jean-Phillipe Mathy, Melancholy Politics: Loss, Mourning, and Memory in Late Modern
France (University Park: Penn State Press, 2011)
There has been a lot of ink spilled lately regarding the various symptoms
generated in French intellectual, cultural, and political life by a malady diagnosed
as the triumph of neoliberalism and American consumerism at the end of
the Cold War. In recent years, some French scholars afflicted with the disease
have revisited and revised well-worn political models, and others returned
defensively to the tradition of French secular republicanism as an antidote
to “multiculturalism” and “communitarianism” (what Americans would call
identity politics), which French authors often envision as American imports.
This defensiveness on both the French left and right responds to the apparent
exhaustion of nationalism, of revolutionary ideals, and of French identity. Joan
Scott’s recent book on The Fantasy of Feminist History does a particularly incisive
job of revealing the various investments in secular republicanism as themselves
forms of sexism and racism or nostalgia, especially on the right. She cites a
discussion in which Mona Ozouf, Phillipe Raynaud, and others argue that the
particularly “French” form of “seduction” and heterosexual coupling encourages
men to exercise dominance through gallantry if they want to win over women.
Gallantry civilizes society by using sexual difference as armor against an imagined
leveling and sameness represented by those who cannot understand seduction
as a means metaphorically of reconciling the differences that inevitably arise
in democracies—feminists, “militant homosexuals,” and Muslims who refuse
to play by French rules. Here the play of difference relies on a rigid gender
479
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480 carolyn j. dean
difference—and the subordination of women—that sells itself as natural and

quintessentially French.1
Another dimension of these exhausted ideals is the “left-wing melancholy”—
a phrase coined by Walter Benjamin in the face of fascism triumphant2 —
generated by the loss of familiar metanarratives about the Western progressive
trajectories from barbarism to Enlightenment, and from oppression to political
emancipation. Here Jacques Derrida’s work played an important role in
dismantling the philosophical and political totalities that had become so familiar.
Thus far, the sense of decline and also of opportunity has not been addressed
fully as a cultural phenomenon but treated in a more fragmented fashion by
scholars who in the aftermath of 1968 wish to rethink politics from lessons
learned, debates about the Muslim headscarf in France, the Scott-like emphasis on
resurgent racism and feminism in particular contexts, and, more indirectly, post-
Marxist efforts to conceive emancipation without resorting to foundationalism,
among others. Mathy’s book is significant for its broad treatment of the affective
investments that inform this mourning for a past in which the French knew where
they were headed or in efforts to reinvent tradition. Baring’s book on the young
Derrida, by exposing Derrida’s deep attraction to mysticism and his own location
in the most mainstream French philosophical currents of his time, illuminates
unacknowledged ways in which the phenomenological variant of philosophical
discourse may have in fact anticipated some of the losses now mourned. In so
doing, Baring also suggests that these real and symbolic losses, as Mathy argues,
are “the condition[s] of the possibility of recovery” (44), an argument Mathy
attributes to Derrida, among others (43).
The two books span the entire history of postwar French thought from very
different perspectives: Baring traces Derrida’s thought painstakingly back not
only through the optic of French phenomenology since 1945, but also to the
political and intellectual impact of the institutions within which it took shape
until 1968. As noted, Mathy’s own account takes on the current “melancholy”
about the dashed hopes of 1968, and more generally the decline of familiar
metanarratives that Derrida’s generation did so much to bring about. And yet
these books could not be more different. Baring’s is a dense contextualist account
of the development of Derrida’s central philosophical concepts and Mathy’s is
an impressionistic and elegantly conceived meditation on the current state of
French intellectual and political life from a wide variety of perspectives. He seeks
1
Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC, 2011).
2
Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2 (1927–
1934), ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith; trans. Rodney Livingston
and others (Cambridge, 1999). Mathy also cites this term at 40–41.
mysticism and mourning 481
to provide a snapshot of a complicated cultural moment rather than an extended

analysis of one philosopher’s thought over two decades.
Baring’s book is an impressive demonstration of how revelatory contextual
and synoptic intellectual history may be even when it examines the thinker held
most responsible for undermining both approaches; Derrida, after all, exposed
how the reduction of ideas to context or paraphrase is compromised by the way
in which the imaginative work of interpretation inevitably supplements texts
and relies on multiple contexts (which are often hypostatized by reference to
“the” context).3 Indeed, Baring both embraces the idea that texts cannot be self-
same and shows how the deconstruction of texts presumes for its own (always
illusory?) coherence a stable reading of the text to be deconstructed. He does not
elaborate this observation more extensively (hence my question mark), though
it could legitimate Derridean play or point to the limitations of deconstruction,
depending upon how one makes the argument.
The Derrida that Baring reconstructs is not the one we thought we knew. His
reconstruction is so persuasive that the book succeeds in revising interpretations
that have become truisms in Derrida scholarship, among them the relationship
between Derrida’s Jewish origins and his thought (Hebraic iconoclasm, or
the privileging of words over images);4 Derrida’s marginality to the Parisian
intelligentsia because of his Algerian background, a view encouraged by Derrida
himself; and the crucial passage through structuralism as well as phenomenology.
Instead, Baring shows us that all three presumptions are extremely problematic
and even erroneous. Derrida’s trajectory, in spite of his Algerian birth and
upbringing, was similar to that of other Parisian intellectuals—the privileged
Parisian preparatory school, the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS), the aggrégation,
the Sorbonne, and back to a career at the ENS in 1964. Of course, Derrida couldn’t
participate in Catholic social circles (his friends went to Mass together) and was
shaped by his Algerian experience sufficiently to have a different perspective
than his peers (initially he supported a more inclusive French Algeria), and
these differences are important. He was not, to be sure, from the Parisian haute-
bourgeoisie, as were others, like Lacan. But interaction with and adaptation to
other French philosophers and the most privileged institutions in which they
worked shaped his ideas in interesting and as yet underexplored ways. As the
ENS sought to accommodate a growing number of students when the numbers
3
For a thorough treatment of this aspect of Derridean thought and its impact on intellectual
history see Dominick LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” in
Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Caplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History:
Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca, 1982), 47–85.
4
For example, Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic
Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany, NY, 1982).
482 carolyn j. dean
of French students in higher education exploded after the war, Louis Althusser
proposed that Derrida join him to train young men (preparation was then gender-
segregated) to take the aggrégation. He was thus not exactly on the outer circles
of French intellectual life.
Derrida’s intellectual development begins in the context of French academic
philosophy in the 1950s, when phenomenology and then structuralism replaced
existentialism after its “golden age.” Baring shows brilliantly how political
developments had rendered humanism an increasingly contentious term. As
he notes, “the central question in 1945 was not whether existentialism was a
humanism, but rather what type of humanism it was and why that mattered” (23,
original emphasis). Sartre begins his famous “Existentialism is a Humanism”
lecture in 1945 by defending himself against Catholic existentialism and
communist efforts to define his path as too subjectivist. In brief, Catholics thought
existentialism’s focus on man’s freedom represented an atheistic humanism and
Communists believed the same focus neglected the real constraints on freedom
generated by the capitalist mode of production. In order to make various claims
about God’s place in the universe and about scientific Marxism, respectively,
the Catholics turned to Heidegger and the communists to Husserl, whose works
French philosophers, influenced by the Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao,
interpreted through the lens of the philosophy of science.
Baring’s mining of Derrida’s papers at Irvine (and for other claims, the ENS
archives) reveals that, in this context, Derrida turned to Christian existentialism,
inspired by thinkers as varied as Gabriel Marcel and Simone Weil. As Baring
demonstrates, Derrida’s main concerns were ethical, but he rejected Kantian
formalism and its absolute principle of morality. He also rejected Sartrean
nihilism, since Sartre’s phenomenological ontology tied freedom (the pour
soi he contrasted with the en soi) to nothingness. Derrida found in Christian
existentialism the recognition of the rational limitations of human beings and
sought a way to reject both formalist absolutism and nihilism. The foundations
for all of Derrida’s later work are here: the emphasis not on “man’s” death but on
his limitations, the interest in mysticism as a means of developing that emphasis,
the rejection of totalizing systems that had not yet taken a particular shape.
The continuity of Derrida’s work from this early period through the end
of his life is surprising. Baring guides us step by step through the maze of
institutional affiliations and philosophical influences that shape how he works
through his early interests and eventually facilitates the development of his
signature concept, différ(a)nce. Because he traces Derrida’s thought not only to
Husserl or Heidegger, but in intricate detail to the French philosophical discourses
and academic politics within which these thinkers were interpreted,5 Baring
5
Ethan Kleinberg’s book Generation Existential (Ithaca, 2005) on Heidegger’s reception
in France has had a similar impact on how we read French philosophy, except that
revises not only the emphasis on Derrida’s Jewish identity and his scholarly
marginality, but also his indebtedness to structuralism. The major figure for
Derrida, as has often been remarked, is Husserl, whose Origin of Geometry
Derrida translated and commented on, his efforts winning the prestigious Prix
Cavaillès in 1964. Yet Baring succeeds in showing not just that Husserl was crucial
in the development of Derrida’s thought, but that Derrida’s engagement with
Husserl (with whose thought he had already struggled in his Mémoire) was as
strategic as it was philosophical. By then, mathematical phenomenology was
a mainstream current of French philosophy and allowed him to adapt to the
Marxist environment at the ENS, where others used Husserl’s transcendental
logic and the phenomenological reduction as a means to ground formal systems
to legitimate Marxism’s scientificity. Derrida’s work on Husserl both defended
the master against some of his French phenomenological critics and allowed him
to revisit his own interest in “man’s” limitations, including via Husserl’s own
invocation of God in Ideas. Derrida addressed the ever-unresolved questions
regarding the relationship between formal systems (rules and syntax as elaborated
not only by Husserl but also by philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Carnap)
and the empirical objects they constitute as well as how formal systems that
constitute the world are themselves constituted. He concluded, as had others
like Gaston Bachelard, that the phenomenological emphasis on intuition as the
ground of formal systems was ultimately unpersuasive. In so doing, he turned to
Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology, his insistence that theology and philosophy
were distinct, as elaborated by the Christian Heideggerian Henri Birault (173–81).
Birault had argued that Heidegger asserted that no being was supreme because
it was impossible to grasp being in its infinity (for Heidegger, Being was always
dissimulated by beings) and thus always “veiled” in its “unveiling”: “Thought,”
Birault argued, “had to recall this veiling,” for “without it, Being would always
threaten to collapse into one privileged form of being and the thought of Being
would remain a latent [larvée] theology” (175). Baring argues that Birault was no
secularist but simply used Heidegger to reject the idea of a theological absolute
rather than to reject the concept of divinity. As he puts it, “it limited knowledge
to make room for faith” (176). Derrida used Heidegger in this fashion not to
assert the existence of a God or faith, but to insist that Being cannot exist
outside its historicity, outside its limited self-unveiling in time, and thus to
insist that if we conceive Being as such we must acknowledge the limitations of
human knowledge. Moreover, the difference between Being and beings meant
that “God was both what was read through history and yet was transcendent to
all the constituted moments of that history, it was an infinite that could not be
his strategy was to reconstruct the reception of Heidegger rather than to focus on one
particular thinker.
484 carolyn j. dean
immediately opposed to finite beings: transcendence in immanence” (179). When

Husserl alluded to God, Derrida argued, he interpreted the Kantian idea, which
defined pure reason as a form always inadequate to (but regulating) objects given
to the senses, as immanent and transcendent; always concealed in phenomena;
always, in Heideggerian terms, “veiled.” Formal systems can ground thought and
guide it dialectically and do not necessarily have to distinguish between absolute
and transcendental logic. The difference between Being and being meant that no
infinite lay outside history’s movement and that Being could never be identical
to beings but was always delayed or deferred in the movement it took philosophy
to trace it, deferred in the unveiling that was also a veiling.
Indeed, as Baring argues, it was mathematical phenomenology and its dynamic
approach to structures that proved the conduit to structuralism in the 1950s (“and
not the famous debates conducted by Lévi-Strauss or Althusser with Sartre”
(159)), because it sought to ground subjectivity in formal logic. Though no
reviewer can do justice to the complexity of the history of ideas that this book
covers, Derrida’s consistent emphasis on the inability of formal systems to account
for themselves over time led him to develop the concept of différ(a)nce, which was
already implied in his commentary on Husserl. Mathematical phenomenologists
like Gilles Granger and Suzanne Bachelard had already focused on writing as
a means of detaching science from perception, since the scientific object took
the form of language. Language thus reduced subjectivism and allowed for a
formalization of rules. Derrida picks this up a decade later. By the time he
published the essays in Writing and Difference, Derrida’s construction of writing
had shifted from tracing and marking an impossible presence (the difference
between Being and beings). The word différ(a)nce was first used in Derrida’s essay
on Artaud in 1965, later published in Writing and Difference.6 Now, in the context
of his criticism of structuralist literary analysis, his participation in debates over
Lacanian psychoanalysis in the early 1950s, and other essays before 1967, Derrida
radicalized his understanding of the primacy of writing over speech, which was to
find its full articulation and argument in Of Grammatology. Baring summarizes
two movements: first, Derrida identified the movement of thought no longer
in the difference between Being and beings, but as one internal to signification
itself caused “by the excess of the Sign, its process of supplementing and not its
inadequacy” (200); second, and similarly, writing was no longer the formalized
inscription of a voice. In order to provide the most appropriate metaphor for
structuralism and its rejection of the “self-present,” writing had to be the absence
rather than the inscription, again, of a transcendental signifier that could never
be fully unveiled. Thus writing was “the trace of the trace, and not the trace of a
6
Baring notes at 51 n. 201 that in the English translation by Alan Bass it is simply translated
as “difference.”
pure if impossible (spoken) presence” (200). In this way Derrida finally conceived
Heidegger’s work as itself still containing traces of metaphysics (because there
was still a transcendental, if always veiled, signifier present).
In essence, Derrida never adopted structuralism and was never part of the
new philosophy: he adapted phenomenology as it had developed throughout
the 1950s to address the limits of structuralism. The powerful critique of
structuralism that he offered preceded structuralism and was made more forceful
through its engagement with Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, and other prominent
structuralists. Indeed, as Baring demonstrates, until 1968 the preeminence of
communism and of Althusser at the ENS forced Derrida to make his own work
relevant to structuralism so that he would be relevant to the students and thus
the examinations for which he was supposed to prepare them. His institutional
location meant that he was exposed to structuralism and forced to contend with
it intimately, yet he did not do so by jumping on the bandwagon but by extending
a particular critique of metaphysics already well under way in his own prior and
unfolding phenomenological work.
This book impresses at every level. The extremely compressed version of his
argument in this review cannot begin to convey the rigorous engagement with
extremely difficult ideas. Baring is diligent at getting things right—dating the
first appearance of a particular word, comparing translations, reconstructing the
chronology of Derrida’s intellectual development by reading all the philosophy
to which Derrida might have been exposed or cited, no matter how secondary or
forgotten. Given all that he has accomplished it is hard to ask him to engage more
fully the extant literature. By contextualizing Derrida, his work implicitly rebuts
a great deal of conventional wisdom. But it would be interesting to know, for
example, if Baring thinks the literature on Derrida’s presumed Jewish perspective
is of any interest. Similarly, where does he stand on Derrida’s contribution itself
other than to celebrate its playfulness and to prove again the power of his revision
of phenomenology in the face of structuralism? To return to his allusions to the
presumptions that Derrida had to make about his own reading of texts in order to
deconstruct them, we might ask whether in the end Derrideanism has exhausted
itself (a common refrain) or, since Baring refutes clearly and refreshingly the
charges of nihilism, how is Derrida’s thought “ethical” in contemporary terms?
Does this revision of Derrida offer a new perspective on the “mourning” now
taking place about the end of metanarratives—a Derridean joyful rather than
melancholy take that might also refute, as Derrida sought to do in Specters of
Marx, the discourse of loss and decline while acknowledging it? It is already an
extraordinary achievement to have revised our understanding of Derrida, and it
is also clear that Baring believes that Derrida’s thought did not break with the
past, but used it to renew the vigor of its potential for future thought. But what
does that mean substantively at a time when Derrida has been mostly relegated
486 carolyn j. dean
to the past, his followers often conceived as acolytes, his troubling defense of Paul
de Man’s ostensible anti-Semitism often overwhelming his legacy and the sheer
brilliance of his intervention? It is true that Baring stops at 1968, and it is true that
placing Derrida very carefully in context enables his argument. As Baring notes,
“Derrida’s thought provides the intellectual historian with valuable resources for
thinking through the complex relationships between philosophy, which aspires
to transhistorical validity, and the particular historical moment in which it arose”
(11). In so arguing, he defends Derrida against baseless charges of nihilism and
relativism. But since Baring demonstrates that Derrida’s thought is inspired by a
certain messianic streak, some more meditation (perhaps a thicker epilogue) on
these questions would have been welcome. Surely, however, Baring has now given
other scholars an entirely new opportunity to revisit some of these arguments.
∗∗∗
In an important essay he wrote on the “Confrontation in May 1968,”
Stanley Hoffmann quoted graffiti from the struggle that seemed, in his
view, “a prophetic description of France’s last greatest upheaval: ‘We want a
music that would be savage and ephemeral.’”7 Hoffmann thus argues from a
sociopolitical and historical perspective that the events of May proved mostly
inconsequential. Mathy demonstrates how all the detractors and defenders of
French Republicanism can at least agree that the ideals of 1968 had a short
shelf-life (with the exception of Pierre Bourdieu’s engagement), and mourn a
particular political, social, and cultural formation that has outlived its relevance,
one they seek to reinvent for future use. He does not engage debates about the
aftermath of 1968 other than to adhere to the consensus that the post-1968 years
were characterized by a decline of revolutionary zeal and diagnosed on the left
and right as having inadvertently contributed to a nihilistic, atomized culture.8
The strength of the book is rather its stealthy dismantling of any coherence or
clarity given to French Republicanism today—after the Revolution, and through
the Third Republic, its meaning was always contested and had its dark sides,
including colonialism and the often brutal repression of uprisings. Thus the
revival of “republicanism” after 1968 on both the left and right alike appears as a
melancholic attachment to an object that has long been an idealized “stand-
in for the French psyche as a whole” (225). The generation of 1968, as has
often been argued, rejected both Stalinism and “totalitarianisms,” in a then-
radical rejection not only of the French Communist Party (which had initially
7
Stanley Hoffmann, Decline or Renewal? France since the 1930s (New York, 1960), 184.
8
Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought
(Montreal, 2007).
supported the French position in Algeria before reversing itself, as well as the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) but also of the totalizing metanarratives that
informed Marxist and republican thought. The events of May accelerated the
criticism of already powerful intellectual trends implicit in French structuralism,
particularly its rejection of historicism and all transcendent meaning by reference
to the instability of our semantic space (meaning that within a differential system
each element of language derives its meaning from its relation to other elements).
Structuralists thus rejected the unfolding of progressive historical trajectories
from capitalism to workers’ liberation or from barbarism to light and redefined
them in new terms. During the 1960s, structuralism gradually gave way to post-
structuralism and postmodernism, associated closely with Derrida and François
Lyotard, and thus with efforts to dismantle all the received wisdom of any kind
of systemic, totalizing thought, including the universalism implicit in French
republicanism. Mathy is extremely effective at demonstrating the sense of loss in
multiple contexts and is at his best in refusing nostalgia for the Republic and in
asserting the complexity of responses to its presumed demise.
He introduces the term “melancholy” as a metaphor, citing the precedent
of Henri Rousso’s Vichy France. Rousso used Freudian schemata—repression,
return of the repressed, and so on—to explain the appearance of Vichy in
French memory eventually as the criminal and collaborationist regime it had
been (Charles de Gaulle had played up the French resistance and republic and
downplayed collaboration and the Vichy regime’s brutality, especially toward
Jews). Mathy uses the melancholic metaphor well: “The semantic vagueness of
the republican signifier illustrates the symbolic dislocation that is often associated
with depressive psychological states. The melancholic subject is deprived of
meanings and values, her speech repetitive and monotonous, her voice flat and
affectless” (137). Mathy attributes the decline of French exceptionalism and thus
of the republican model to the shattering of illusions about Stalinist Russia.
But as he demonstrates, ex-communists and fellow travelers hardly followed the
same path: post-Enlightenment intellectuals mourned the loss of the secular state
and universalism; libérataires like Jean Baudrillard celebrated freedom from the
state as “teacher”; and neoliberals like François Furet and Marcel Gauchet felt
finally liberated from the yoke of the state as “ruler.” Thus French intellectuals
believed that the end of the Cold War and the shattering of the illusions of 1968
left what Furet termed a “nothingness” (44–5) in their wake. The question, of
course, was with what to fill it. This book is thus not about Foucault, Derrida,
Ricoeur, and others; it is about those who came in their wake and sought to
develop a defense of French universalism on the left and right. On the left, this
defense meant a return to secularism, a universal concept of reason, and new
uses of the Enlightenment heritage embodied by Alain Finkielkraut and others.
Since Bourdieu remained an optimist who sought to reinvigorate the antistatist
488 carolyn j. dean
language of the revolutionary left in new terms and participated in 1995 public-
sector strikes, he receives a separate and admirable treatment as a latter-day Zola
who sought to find promise in lost illusions.
At the center and right Mathy locates those thinkers normally associated with
neoliberalism, like Pierre Nora, François Furet, and Marcel Gauchet, and devotes
a chapter to the group around Le débat, founded in 1980 as a centrist journal
that aimed to create dialogue among various camps and to provide an alternative
to the image of the revolutionary intellectual. Mathy demonstrates that they
participated actively in new efforts to rethink the political domain in relation
to the social, and can hardly be reduced to uncritical advocates of technocracy
and globalization. Most of the intellectuals Mathy discusses share a knee-jerk
anti-Americanism in spite of their willingness to throw off the parochialism of
past French insularity and translate scholarship from foreign languages. Though
he doesn’t mention it, anti-Marxist Anglo-American revisionist histories of the
French Revolution were only translated into French in the 1970s and 1980s, and
Hannah Arendt’s 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism was first translated in an
abridged edition only in 1972, when Toqueville rather than Marx had become a
source of inspiration.
Mathy does not discuss all the nuances in various lines of thought, and
most of his discussion is an extremely lucid exposition rather than the kind of
dense analysis and unraveling that Baring brings to the work of Derrida. Hence
quarreling with his expositions of ideas unless they convey a thinker in deeply
inaccurate terms would be to miss the point (and this reader found nothing
to quarrel with). For example, he does not address how Finkielkraut’s defense
of the secular republic dovetails with his Zionism or his anxieties about anti-
Semitism. But that is because the book dwells less on the concepts developed
by individual thinkers and their inevitable internal contradictions than on their
varied responses to the perceived decline of republicanism, and it groups or
individuates them based on the response with which they are most closely
associated. As Mathy puts it bluntly, “This book is not an intellectual or cultural
history of France since 1968” (18).
Instead, Mathy evokes a variety of figures or symbols central to French identity
and history, themselves used by commentators, to organize the book and the
arguments of its actors. Figures include the ghosts or specters that haunt the
present, including the collapse of metanarratives and the rise of melancholic
attachments to the past in their wake. He also uses the figure of “orphans” –the
generation of ’68 abandoned to their fate and future. He resurrects symbols
of French identity such as the Dreyfus affair; the symbol of the Republic,
Marianne; and the special place accorded the intellectual elite in France since
the Dreyfus affair, in order to concretize what is emotionally at stake. In all
instances he uses these symbols to expose not the unity but the deep divides
that any analysis of “unified” France masks. And today on the left and the right,
whatever their differences, it is this “idea of France” that is prevalent, manifest
in a struggle against “communitarianism”—group identity—as opposed to the
abstract individualism of the secular republic. In the end, the legacy of loss is
about varied efforts to bring back an idea of France that once was: though he uses
Pierre Bourdieu and François Furet as stand-ins for divergence in views of what
has been lost, the book is more about the contemporary refusal to acknowledge
“difference”—meaning racial, gender, ethnic, and sexual difference in France
today, and the various ways in which this refusal manifests itself on the left and
the right.
In his effort to address the differences that French republicanism militates
against, he focuses primarily on the peculiarity of laı̈cité and the debate about
the headscarf, the voile that Muslim girls were forbidden from wearing to
public school in 2004. He notes helpfully that laı̈cité and secularism are not
identical concepts. Secularism in France is defined less by freedom of conscience
than by a negative view of religion as superstition and its purported absence
in public space and educational institutions in particular. Mathy focuses on
debates about laı̈cité presumably because they address gender, sexuality, race and
ethnicity in relation to republican universalism. And he is correct. He claims
that “multiculturalism and its attendant set of claims for diversity is taken to
represent the dismemberment of the once unified loved object, a process of
violent disintegration that activates feelings of exalted omnipotence (‘We will
save the Republic!’) and abject failure (‘All is lost!’)” (183). He analyzes the
discrepancy between the level of anxiety over the “integral veil”—the burqua—
and the actual threat posed, which is minimal given the number of girls who
actually wear one (a few hundred to a thousand in a population of several million
Muslim women). And he offers a reading of the Stasi Commission’s report (after
the chair, Bernard Stasi), appointed by Jacques Chirac to evaluate the matter.
Mathy identifies the report’s ambivalence and anxiety, and its struggles to forge a
path between past and present in reference to the headscarf as displacements of
other fears about the decline or loss of national identity and republican values.
Thus the report demonstrates how the debates about the veil were really about
resurrecting the concept of laı̈cité and the école laı̈que in terms consistent with the
new realities of multiculturalism and technology (the impossibility of demanding
full assimilation and of neatly separating private and public). Ultimately, Mathy
shares Joan Scott’s view that the debates over the veil transformed the French
people and culture into victims of the “foreign” Muslims who live among them,9
though his reading is somewhat less historically freighted and more focused on the
9
Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, 2007). Though Mathy’s treatment
is less focused on all the particularities of the debate, which he recognizes have been well
490 carolyn j. dean
veil as the “displaced effect of all the related crises of the modernist project, from
education and representative democracy to nation-state, immigration policies,
and urban planning” (192, original emphasis). In particular, he focuses on all
the ways in which the insistence on French republicanism on the left and right
are defenses against the recognition of ethnic and racial difference, as well as
a defense against the rise of transnational institutions, globalization, and the
apparent triumph of capitalism.
Mathy’s book is a good read and it is at times breathtakingly elegant in the
ease with which it moves through and with difficult concepts and interweaves
ideas, movements, and cultural politics. At the same time, however, one can’t
help but wonder about the role played by French feminism—Luce Irigaray is
never mentioned, and parité only briefly. The debate about the PaCs (pacte civil
de solidarité or civil unions for all couples) garners a footnote. The antifeminism
of those in the group around Le débat, recently criticized by Joan Scott, as well
as the homophobia of those on the left who also invoked republicanism against
“communitarianism,” have been commented on and he does not need to go
over this territory again.10 At the same time, the absence of feminism or feminist
thinkers risks leaving us with the question why some, if not all, feminists who had
little to mourn (after all, they fought the “illusions” of 1968 with a movement as
well as with theory) have embraced republicanism and laı̈cité with similar vigor.
As Julian Bourg has argued, feminists embraced republicanism ambivalently
already in the late 1970s as a vehicle for women’s liberation when left-wing men
proved recalcitrant in struggles to penalize rape and sexual violence.11 Feminists
are on both sides in the affair of the voile, but surely their own investments
are somewhat different than those of others since women’s rights are directly
implicated (even if in fantasy).
rehearsed, his conclusions don’t differ substantially from Scott’s, and she too discusses the
veil as a form of displacement. His is nonetheless a broader sweep of the French cultural
landscape, but a somewhat thinner if wonderfully wrought approach as well.
10
See the excellent book by Eric Fassin, L’inversion de la question homosexuelle (Paris, 2005).
11
Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 16, 193.

Mysticism and Mourning in Recent French Thought

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Mysticism and Mourning in Recent French Thought

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Modern Intellectual History, 11, 2 (2014), pp.

mysticism and mourning in

difference—and the subordination of women—that sells itself as natural and

to provide a snapshot of a complicated cultural moment rather than an extended

immediately opposed to finite beings: transcendence in immanence” (179). When

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