‘68 Forever

In his L’ingratitude: Conversation sur notre temps (French Edition) , Alain Finkielkraut cites Roland Barthes’s inaugural lecture at the College of France: “Language, as performance of the language system, is neither reactionary nor progressive. It is simply fascist: for fascism is not the prohibition of saying things but the obligation to say them.” (Why doesn’t he stop talking? Because he thinks there’s a “Utopia of language” that will break through.)

Finkielkraut responds: “Structure is oppressive, says the structuralist, who despite appearances, shares with the existentialist, his enemy, the dream of a subject capable of subtracting all he has received and deciding sovereignly his own being” (p. 143).

And behind the existentialist is the Cartesian. How far we have come since ‘68!