Alain Finkielkraut

Adler et Finkielkraut ont en commun d'être des intellectuels hétéronomes, c'est-à-dire de acteurs multipositionnés naviguant entre une reconnaissance marginale dans le champ universitaire et une légitimité de position dans le champ médiatico-journalistique. Or, ce multipositionnement et cette (omin)présence, qu'il faudra empiriquement démontrer, dans tous les types de médias (journaux, télévisons, radio ou internet) contribue à créer, grâce à leur légitimité de position et à un effet d’accumulation ou de répétition, une nouvelle doxa conservatrice, faite d'indignations successives, de lieux communs, d'exempla ou de pré-notions, qui valide les postulats idéologiques des dominants. Ainsi, se présentant comme des outsiders à la « bien pensance », des intellectuels subversifs, ces « fast thinkers » engagent, sur la base de faits divers ou artefactuels, une lutte symbolique et idéologique, en terme systématique, monocausal, et vide de sens, de « crises » diverses et variées (crise identitaire, des valeurs, de la culture ou de l’École), contre toute forme de progrès social ou contestation des valeurs morales et culturelles traditionnelles et dominantes. Aussi, ils en viennent à produire un discours conservateur moraliste, simpliste et manichéen qui exalte les valeurs de l'ordre (établit), un certain nationalisme et un élitisme antipopulaire empreint de mépris. Or se pencher sur les trajectoires individuelles de ces acteurs, le passage plus ou moins long et assumé de la gauche radicale et révolutionnaire au néoconservatisme, permet d'abord de montrer comment Adler et Finkielkraut peuvent se présenter comme « subversifs » de longue date, des outsiders au conformisme et à la « pensée unique petite bourgeoise » ou « bobo ». Ensuite, ceci contribue à affermir leur tropisme post-soviétique en matière de relations internationales qui les conduit à prendre systématiquement position en faveur des États-Unis ou de leurs alliés, en particulier Israël dont toute critique – radicale – est de manière quasi automatique taxée d’antisémitisme. Enfin, leurs trajectoires servent à éclairer leur relation ambiguë avec les thématiques véhiculées par le Front National, le rejet de l’immigration arabo-musulmane ou une certaine xénophobie. En résumé, de par leurs trajectoires individuelles, leur surface médiatique et leur marginalité universitaire, ces deux acteurs hétéronomes nous apparaissent comme des représentations idéales-typiques de cette nouvelle doxa demi-savante produite par des intellectuels-journalistes et/ou des universitaires-romanciers qui, loin de former une pensée subversive, en vient à formuler un discours convenu.

Since 2009, the French intellectuals Alain Badiou and Alain Finkielkraut have been meeting on various public stages. This article proposes to show that, given the inclusion of this debate in these instances of cultural action, the meeting between Badiou and Finkielkraut was not improbable. By proceeding to a sociological explanation of the (sub)text of The Explanation, the aim was to apprehend, in a comparative perspective, the structural, longitudinal and dispositional dimensions underlying the making of this co-product. The first part of this article aimed at establishing, from a sociography of Badiou's and Finkielkraut's respective itineraries, that they have in common heterodox intellectual profiles associated with these same external careers of cultural celebration. In a second step, we have tried to show that the disputatio staged according to a radical ideological opposition offers them above all the opportunity to consolidate the prevalence within these circuits of intellectual notoriety of this academic-mundane style, an eminently sophisticated way of combining the effects of the school with those of the anti-school. This meeting between Badiou and Finkielkraut thus condenses in itself all the transformations of the intellectual field from the end of the 1970s under the effect of the emergence of these circuits of visibility. On the one hand, it confirms the monopoly exercised by these channels of cultural celebration in the access to the public notoriety of intellectuals and, by the same token, the ascendancy of the resources of the relational network over the autonomous species of cultural capital. On the other hand, editorial devices such as L'explication, by aiming at the overcoming of the ideological cleavages, remain in this respect quite exemplary of the conformation of the intellectual world to the journalistic modalities of the mediation and the consensus.

This book explores the nature of artistic and literary imagination, creativity, aesthetic experience, and genius, while offering a critique of the post-structuralist assault on transcendent values.  This involves distinguishing between the aesthetics of art and the sociology of art, a subject addressed in Part 1.  In Part 2, the principal arguments by major thinkers, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Norman Bryson, Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Stanley Fish, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, Edward Said, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Hayden White, are subjected to an analytical critique.

Este ensayo-reseña fue escrito con el ánimo de seguirle los pasos al debate que ha puesto a la literatura en tela de juicio, a través de tres libros que hablan de la imposibilidad de la lectura, la crisis de la enseñanza de la literatura en las universidades y el desprecio por la tradición de las grandes obras de la literatura (visto como una consecuencia del desprecio por las ideas universales del humanismo). Los libros a los que hago alusión son, en el mismo orden de aparición de los temas que acabo de enumerar, "Pasión intacta" de George Steiner –cuyos dos primeros capítulos tratan abiertamente el problema de la lectura y la interpretación–, "La muerte de
la literatura" de Alvin Kernan y "La derrota del pensamiento" de Alain Finkielkraut.

Between Lévinas and Arendt – Philosophical Origins of Alain Finkielkraut’s Reflection on the Other and the Education, współautor: K.Liszka, „Journal of Education Culture and Society” 2014, no. 2, s. 19-30
A member of the generation of student revolt ’68, Alain Finkielkraut is thought to be one of the most prominent intellectuals in France, taking part in public debates on several issues essential for Europe and the world. His assays, articles and books may be read as a complex commentary with a sound humanistic background to the condition of western culture as well as to current socio-political events. Our article focuses on revealing theoretical grounding of Finkielkraut’s reflection in the philosophies of Emmanuel Lévinas and Hannah Arendt. We attempt to reconstruct the way Finkielkraut employs his critical apparatus built on their thought to the field of educational practices in order to present the specific perspective of educational research and to contribute to the knowledge produced by widely understood critical pedagogic.

Kultura demokracji, red. K.Liszka, R.Włodarczyk, Chiazm, Wrocław 2009 // Przekłady: Cornelius Castoriadis Grecka polis a tworzenie demokracji; Pierre Rosanvallon Transformacja demokracji i przyszłość Europy; Peter Sloterdijk, Alain Finkielkraut Stadion i arena; Claude Lefort Sprawa demokracji

The thesis takes the French revue Lignes (1987-present) as its object of study to provide a new account of French intellectual culture over the last twenty-five years. Whilst there are now many studies covering the role of such revues throughout the twentieth-century, the majority of such monographs extend no further than the mid-1980s: the major novelty of this thesis is extending these accounts up until the present moment. It is largely assumed that a reaction against the Marxist and structuralist theories of the 1960s and 1970s led to embrace of liberalism and an intellectual drift to the right in France from the 1980s onwards: whilst largely supporting this account, the thesis attempts to nuance this narrative of the fate of the intellectual left in the following years by showing the persistence of what can be called a politicised 'French theory' in Lignes, and a returning left-wing militancy in recent years. In doing so, it will both reveal under-studied aspects of well-known thinkers, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, as their thought develops through their participation in a collaborative, periodical publication, and introduce lesser known thinkers who have not received an extended readership in Anglophone spheres. Lignes also argues for the continued persistence and relevance of the thought of a previous generation of thinkers, notably Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Dionys Mascolo, and the thesis concludes by examining the potential role 'French Theory' could still have in France. Furthermore, as revues provide a unique nexus of intellectual, cultural, social and political concerns, the thesis also provides a unique history of France from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the 2007 financial crisis and the Arab Spring. Much of the thesis is concerned with contextualising intellectual debates within a period characterised by the moralisation of discourses, a return of religion, the global installation of neo-liberalism and the eruption of immigration as a controversial European issue. From a relatively theoretical and politically stable position to the left of the Parti socialiste, Lignes therefore provides a privileged vantage point for the mutations in French social and cultural life throughout the period.

Drawing upon the work of Saul Friedländer, Ruth Ellen Gruber, Ulrike Jureit, and Alain Finkielkraut (among others), this essay aims to show that compositions from recent decades by (among others) Ruth Schontal, John Zorn, Isaac Schwarz, Alexander Knapp/Mark Glanville, and David Stock, that deal with the holocaust can be interpreted as part of a new memory culture surrounding the victims of the holocaust, inasmuch as these works do not seek to understand the holocaust, or to highlight the factors that made it possible, but focus instead on reliving it by the creation of fictitious survivors, whose identity is now made more Jewish (or Yiddish) than it very often was for the real victims, while simultaneously redefining symbols of suffering, such as the Yellow star, as 'badges of courage'.