Simone de Beauvoir: the Subject in Question

Abstract

A product oflate nineteenth century journalism, the interview originally appeared in the French daily press around 1884. J Philippe Lejeune, in his short study of the development of the interview genre, suggests that it emerged in part to satisfy a need for biographical infonnation about authors which was deemed not to exist in his or her published works. 2 The gradual emergence of the interview proper was also linked to the author's need for control over his or her temoignage (testimony). Surrounded by potential temoins, Lejeune argues that authors began to favour privileged interlocutors or interviewers who might ideally be relied upon to mediate a desirable public image or at least one that was more susceptible to the author's control. 'Spin' is evidently not a recent phenomenon! Yet the emergence of the interview at the end of the nineteenth century seems also to be imbricated with the materialization and mobilization of the modem French intellectual at the time of the 'Affaire Dreyfus' in the sense that certain writers, at least, assumed a public voice and a testimonial function, and required a broadcasting medium. Although this testimonial voice was produced at that time through the medium of published petitions, letters and manifestos rather than in a dialogue with a privileged interlocutor, the voice of the modem intellectual, committed to disrupting orthodoxy, appears to assume greater social influence as the modes of its communication multiplied and reached ever wider audiences. However, Regis Debray, writing in the late 1970s, has argued in Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France, that the increasing mMiatisation (media exposure) and social supremacy of the intellectual has progressively led in the post-1968 period to 'une considerable degradation de la fonction intellectuelle' (a significant erosion of the intellectual function). 3 In this way, the development ofthe interview genre in press, radio and television broadcasting might seem to have contributed to this' degradation' more visible via new broadcasting media, the commodified intellectual paradoxically appears to function as a less politically committed, less disruptive force.