Reflections on France's "Nouveaux Philosophes" and the Crisis of Marxism

Abstract

In the second volume of his Gulag epic, Solzhenitsyn wrote, When our people heard the news on the BBC that, according to Mikhailo Mikhailov, there had already been concentration camps in our country as early as 1921, many of us (as well as many in the West) were quite shocked. Could it be true? 1921 ... so early? But, of course, they had existed even before this. Mikhailov had been mistaken in 1921 the camps were already long since underway. It would be more correct to say that the shots which were fired from the Aurora heralded the birth of the Gulag Archipelago. But, according to the young generation of French philosophers the nouveaux philosophes even this statement does not go far enough. For them, the problem goes back further, to Marx and Rabelais as well as to other master thinkers who used their powers of reason to lay the groundwork for systems of oppression. For them, the entire wretched history of thought and, above all, the work of these master thinkers, must be decoded in order to discover a clue to the actual origins of prison systems. The major themes of this extreme form of radical social criticism are domination and power and the ways in which their finely tuned mechanisms are concealed by intellectual production; texts which can be interpreted, the results of intellectual production, are seen as the bone marrow of all bureaucracies. The motivation behind their social criticism is their uncom-