The Ambivalences of Vulgarity

Abstract

Pascal Bruckner is one of France's leading "public intellectuals" and novelists, whose work has elicited praise and stirred controversy for almost three decades. This issue of South Central Review includes two essays by Pascal Bruckner, as well as appreciations of is work and contributions by the French "New Philospher" Andre Glucksmann, Luc Ferry, a philosopher and former Minister of Eduction under Jacques Chirac, the French novelist Serge Koster, and Paul Berman, Writer in Residence at New York University and regular contributor to the New Republic, the Village Voice, and other publications. It also includes scholarly contributions dealing with Bruckner's essays and fiction by two American scholars, Ralph Schoolcraft, Nathan Bracher, and one by the South American scholar and poet Eduardo Espina. Bruckner's contributions to the issue examine two controversial topics, European Anti-Americanism and the concept of vulgarity. From Bruckner's perspective, European anti-Americanism constitutes first and foremost a kind of Girardian scapegoating, where all the ills of modernity as well as other flaws—both of which Europe shares—are blamed on the "other". The reasons are several in Bruckner's diagnosis. The most obvious is a resentment and envy of American power and influence. More central is a deep seated European self-loathing that manifests itself in a misguided idealization of formerly colonized people and an overwhelming sense of guilt over the horrors and abuses of Europe's recent past. Bruckner's second contribution, again following a Girardian logic, examines "vulgarity" as a consequence of a "loss of degree" a failure of a legitimate and legitimizing cultural hierarchy that defines social and cultural virtues and makes them broadly acceptable. When cultural hierarchy is absent or in a state of dissolution "vulgarity" extends its reach, and traditional notions of "good" and "bad" become inoperable, and are even subject to inversion.