French Intellectuals Research Articles

Corrigendum to: The Predatory Economics of Imperialism and Neo-Imperialism: Some Post-War Metropolitan French Intellectual Perspectives

Corrigendum to: The Predatory Economics of Imperialism and Neo-Imperialism: Some Post-War Metropolitan French Intellectual Perspectives

Social networking sites' licensing terms: A cause of worry for users?

AbstractTerms of service (ToS) for social networking sites (SNS) like Instagram, Meta, X, and so on, is a clickwrap agreement that establishes a legal relationship between platform owners and users, yet probably it is the most overlooked legal agreement. The users of these sites often overlook the ToS while registering themselves on these sites and even if users (especially those with no legal background) are attempting to read them, it is difficult for them to understand because of the legal jargon. As a result, they end up signing away legal rights about which they are unaware. According to these sites' ToS, though the ownership of the user‐generated content is bestowed upon the user but the users grant to these sites “a non‐exclusive, royalty‐free, transferrable, sub‐licensable, worldwide license” and this license can be used “to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works of user's content.” These sites even bestow on themselves the right to modify the content which poses challenges to the right‐holders' moral rights. The fact that these platforms can sublicense the user's work creates complexities when a user intends to grant an exclusive license of his work. There is no clarity on the language of the terms like the manner of exploiting the user's content, what happens if the sublicensing is for a wrongful purpose? The problem magnifies as there is neither explicit indication about the duration of the license nor about the territorial extent. This would suggest that these sites can get a perpetual license on the content of the users. These SNS have consumers spread worldwide but in their ToS, they have forum selection clauses that list out the courts and districts in California. This means users will be discouraged to bring a copyright suit due to the lack of an option to file a claim in their home country. The US case Agence France Presse (AFP) v. Morel helps us conclude twofold mainly there is a hope that SNS will not take ToS to shield themselves from further use of the user's work and strengthen the idea that these platforms may choose to license to their partners. Further, in 2018, the Paris Tribunal declared most clauses of Twitter “null and void” due to the nature of the license and also, because it was not in compliance with French Intellectual Property Code. This gives a faint hope for a positive shift in the legal treatment of user‐generated content. Though these sites claim to retain the sublicensing right to run their sites smoothly but the licensing is very broad and carries the possibility of many usages of the content that too without paying compensation to the user. Therefore, this paper aims to highlight and give insight into the unfair licensing terms of the most often used social networking sites and its implications.

How to study the stability of interstitial spaces: an analysis based on the case of the visibility of French intellectuals

This article reports on an investigation into the channels through which intellectuals have gained public recognition since the 1970s (quality press, intellectual journals, think tanks, conference venues, cultural radio and TV programs, publishing houses, etc.). Through the prism of field theory, we explored a space – that of the visibility of ideas – situated at the crossroads of several institutionally established fields (academic, intellectual, media, political, and economic). While the number of studies devoted to this type of interstitial space has multiplied since the 2000s, the focus has mainly been on their heteronomy through comparisons with autonomous fields. This approach tends to lose sight of the fact that they could neither emerge nor endure in the absence of stability. Based on the notion of the space of visibility of ideas, the present paper attempts to show that it is possible to apprehend the stability of these labile spaces by adopting an ethnographic approach, conducive to the articulation of micro/meso/macro levels and the mixing of methods. In so doing, we put forward the idea that interstitial spaces can ultimately be analyzed in terms of perimeters and capital, in other words, as fields.

“What Force Could Trample This Body?”: Transformations of the Concept of Body Politic in the Works of French Intellectuals of XV Century

“What Force Could Trample This Body?”: Transformations of the Concept of Body Politic in the Works of French Intellectuals of XV Century

"The Last Act in the Tragedy of Judaism": Stalinist Antisemitism, the American Jewish Committee, and French Holocaust Memory in the Cold War

Abstract: Beginning in 1952, the New York-based American Jewish Committee (AJC) spearheaded a transatlantic effort to stigmatize Stalinist antisemitism through direct historical comparison with the recent Nazi genocide of European Jewry. In France, home to the AJC's European headquarters, the project of tarring Stalin with Hitler's brush spurred an unprecedented flood of discourse about the Holocaust. However, the narrative that emerged among participating French intellectuals—Jewish and non-Jewish—elided the genocide's Western European dimensions. This article analyzes the AJC's French-language journal Évidences comparatively alongside its American sister journal, Commentary , and contextually against documentation from the AJC archives in order to argue that the politics of the early Cold War did not simply impede Holocaust memory in the West; rather, anti-totalitarian projects produced framings of the genocide that relied on and replicated the Cold War's own temporal and geographic logics.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL FIELDWORK AND “HAVING AN IDEOLOGY”

In European anthropological circles there was a burst of interest in the topic of ideology in the 1970s in the wake of the riots of May 1968 in Paris and consequent intense interpretative conflict about theory among French intellectuals. The ideas then discussed in the wider context of the Cold War still have pertinence to the present day when ideology seems to clothe, if not inspire, armed confrontations and authoritarian forms of government. This article reviews the intellectual formation then current among Western anthropologists, points to its deficiencies, and notes that even though the issues then debated about ideology still have some interest they were proper to their time. Since then, not only has anthropology moved on, but the world and the very purchase of “political ideology” has fundamentally changed. In this light I re-visited my fieldnotes from research in Siberia in the 1990s and 2000s and I attempt with hindsight to reflect on my ethnographic experience and its relevance for today. Finally, I introduce some remarks about the relevance of all this to the contemporary situation in Russia.

How Icelandic Is French Law? A Few Remarks about the Discovery and Usage of Icelandic Antiquities in French Legal Historiography during the Nineteenth Century

How Icelandic Is French Law? A Few Remarks about the Discovery and Usage of Icelandic Antiquities in French Legal Historiography during the Nineteenth Century

Pombaline propaganda in France: Translation, visualization, radicalization

The fact that Pombal is today one of the most important actors of enlightened absolutism is due above all to his comprehensive reform program, which included virtually all political fields of action of the 18th century. At least as important, however, is the fact that he accompanied his measures with extremely intensive public relations work: Pombal had understood how important it was to get public opinion in Europe on his side, because especially those reforms that threatened the traditional rights and positions of power of the Catholic Church were the subject of controversial debate in a Europe divided along confessional lines. France played an important role in the European battle of opinion: French intellectuals and publicists dominated international public opinion, and French was the language of the educated and enlightened. This paper will therefore examine how Pombal's propaganda functioned in France and what significance French translations and adaptations had for the European battle of opinion.

Alexander “Sanych” and the Young French Leftists

In 1974 young French intellectuals of leftist views who visited Moscow, had the opportunity to meet A.A. Zinoviev. Those meetings greatly impressed the author of the article, especially the sharp debates about whether socialism in the USSR was real socialism. Zinoviev was not afraid to speak openly and discussed the issue profoundly scientifi cally and reasoned. After many years and the deportation of Zinoviev and his family form the USSR to the West, the author of the article had the opportunity to communicate with Zinoviev and publish his articles and interviews in the French press. Zinoviev’s assessments of the world events were always accurate and ruthless, – his adherence to principles and the ability to speak the truth became example-setting for the author of this article.

Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891–1956 by Piotr H. Kosicki

Reviewed by: Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891–1956 by Piotr H. Kosicki Mikołaj Kunicki Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891–1956. By Piotr H. Kosicki. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2018. Pp. xxviii, 424. $40.00. ISBN: 9780300225518). Writing a transnational historical monograph about Polish and French intellectuals, lay activists, and ecclesiastical figures alike, who formed the twentieth-century “Catholic avant-garde,” the personalist current, is not an easy task. First, the collective biography of these figures is likely to appeal to highly specialised audiences; [End Page 213] secondly, the current climate around the Roman Catholic Church, with its internal conflicts, sexual-abuse cases, and the Vatican’s inconsistent approach toward international and social affairs may diminish some readers’ appetite for the story of Catholic revolutionaries who sought a just society, engaged in dialogue with Marxism and its Stalinist branch, and paved the way for the groundbreaking Vatican Council II. Fortunately, Piotr Kosicki’s book is a tour de force, expertly researched, elegantly written, and likely to be compared with and favorably contrasted against such titles as Zeev Sternhell’s Neither Right nor Left (1983/1987) and Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect (1992). Kosicki begins his story in the 1890s with Catholics’ reactions to Marxism, capitalism, and nationalism and concludes it in the mid-1950s, when Polish and French personalists and Catholic socialists faced the end of Stalinism, liberating themselves from the ideological corsets (if not straitjackets) of anti-Germanism, Soviet-sponsored and one-sided, anti-Americanist peace activism. The liberating effect of the thaw coincided with the death of Pius XII and the subsequent convocation of the Second Vatican Council. The book’s French characters illustrate the vicissitudes of Catholic thinkers and activists, including Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, or worker-priest Jean Boulier, and impact they made in France and beyond. Their Polish counterparts constitute an equally diverse company of groups and individuals who adopted the personalist core, tried to implement and modify it in prewar, wartime, and postwar communist-dominated Poland, often paying for their actions with their lives, imprisonment, or moral compromises. The book focuses mostly on the Polish part of the story, giving the fascinating portrayals of fascists and nationalists turned into pro-communist “progressive” Catholics (Bolesław Piasecki and his entourage of Dziś i Jutro millieu). We also meet their young adept, Catholic radical Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first Polish democratic prime minister after the collapse of communism, and a young cleric and priest named Karol Wojtyła, better known as John Paul II. Lastly, Kosicki pays close attention to the Cracow-based disciples of Mounier from the Tygodnik Powszechny weekly that were turned down by their spiritual master, vowed to abstain from the communist-dominated political life preserving their integrity and defending independent culture, and later joined forces with Mazowiecki and gay catehumen Jerzy Zawieyski to form the Znak circle of more independent Catholic activists in the post-Stalinist era. For Kosicki, the link between the Polish personalist groups and the Solidarity movement, which served as an icebreaker of communism in the 1980s is obvious. However, the autor is at his best while discussing less-known and researched phenomena such as the peculiar nature of French intellectuals’ involvement in the Soviet-sponsored Peace Movement; the role of anti-Germanism shared by both the French and the Poles in cementing their collaboration with Moscow; and the opposition of Esprit editors to European integration in the 1950s. Kosicki’s work does not contain any flaws or errors. If anything, I view it a bit apologetic toward John Paul II, one of the protagonists of this book, much revered in the past, and currently under posthumous re-examination. Another issue concerns the real [End Page 214] impact of intellectual Catholicism on Polish religiosity, which under the tutelage of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, also a frequently evoked figure, moved away from open Catholicism. Lastly, I would advise the author to pay more attention to the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign and the effect it had on the collapse of the Znak group. Still, Piotr Kosicki authored an excellent work, which will top the readingg lists of students of Polish and European history...

“I Dreamed of an Alliance between the Authority of Dogma and Political Liberty”: Mormonism and Socialism in France in the Nineteenth Century

“I Dreamed of an Alliance between the Authority of Dogma and Political Liberty”: Mormonism and Socialism in France in the Nineteenth Century

КОНЦЕПТ ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОГО ТЕЛА ВО ФРАНЦУЗСКОМ ПОЛИТИКО-ФИЛОСОФСКОМ ДИСКУРСЕ XIV В.

Throughout the 14th – 15th centuries, French intellectuals actively used the concept of body politic in their works – in mirrors for princes, sermons, ballads and first political treatises. In this vein, both ancient examples of the construction of such models and medieval works were subjected to rethinking. The metaphor of the body politic became a constant leitmotif of the 14th century mirrors for princes, who with the help of that trope tried to explain the complex social structure and reflect on the abstract nature of the state. While in them the political body often served as an ideal, a model of correct state structure, the antipode became the image of a sick or monstrous body. Eustache Deschamps refers to such an image in his ballads, using it to demonstrate the deplorable state of the French kingdom, mired in feuds and the hardships of war with England. The metaphor of the political body was interpreted in a variety of ways: it was a concept designed to consolidate opposing social groups and political factions around the figure of the monarch, but at the same time it could be used to criticize the corruption of the ruler’s close associates. Such different strategies of interpretation of that concept compel to further analyze the genesis and development of metaphorical descriptions of the state.

Dubious Authoritative Opinion: the “Justification” of Jean Petit and his Critics

The article is devoted to the treatise “Justification of the Duke of Burgundy” by Jean Petit (1408) and to the peculiarities of his criticism by French intellectuals of the first third of the 15th century. The author of the article pays special attention to the concept of the «legitimate murder» formulated by Jean Petit, with which he tried to explain and excuse the actions of his master Jean the Fearless, who ordered the assassination of Duke Louis of Orleans in 1407. French humanists, including Jean Gerson, Pierre d’Ailly, Nicolas de Clamange and Alain Chartier, not only rejected this pseudo-legal theory, but also put forward their own concept of the «murder by necessity», with which they tried to justify the murder of Jean the Fearless himself in 1419 as a man who had lost his mind, turned into a beast, and therefore into a tyrant and a devil.

Juliusz Słowacki in the Holy Land in 1837

ABSTRACT The Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) travelled through Palestine between 2 January and 27 January 1837, from El-Arish on the southern border with Egypt, at that time quarantined owing to plague, to the area around Lake Tiberias in the north, which had just been devastated by a strong earthquake. A detailed analysis of the itinerary of this pilgrimage has made it possible to establish new circumstances and topographical facts. The poet’s recently discovered personal diary (Raptularz Wschodni) contains hitherto unknown observations and drawings by the author himself. Together with his other travel notes and recollections in his letters, they constitute an invaluable basis for a new account of how and where he wandered, and where he stayed and spent the night. The published accounts of other 19th-century travellers in Palestine have helped establish further details: three Polish Roman Catholic priests, two French intellectuals, and the English aristocrat and globetrotter G. Robinson, as well as site views by D. Roberts. The traditional and often erroneous identification and dating of the sites visited by Słowacki have been verified on the basis of scientific historical and archaeological research as well as the author's own observations in situ in Israel and her interviews with Franciscan archivists. As far as the extensive modern Polish literature on this journey concerns, the novelty here lies in identifying features in three of Slowacki’s drawings and determining the places where the poet stayed in the Franciscan hospices in Ramla, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth.

Politics and Theory – “Three Forms of Politicization of Method”, Neoliberalism and The Turn Towards Studying Subjectivity in The Work of Michel Foucault

This paper explores the place neoliberalism has in Foucault’s opus and the reasons he turned to studying subjectivity in the latter part of his career. We will follow the thematic, theoretical, and methodological changes in Foucault’s work and show how they relate to the social context. We will claim that Foucault, due to his political engagement, gives a political dimension to his work by putting it in the service of political goals. The article starts by researching how the social context influenced the beginnings of Foucault’s work in order to show how even then the changes in the French political scene influenced his thought. Afterwards we move on to the period after the rebellion of 1968 when Foucault was working with radical Maoist organizations. It is here that we find the first form of politicization of his intellectual work. We argue that due to the conflict between progressive French intellectuals and the “Communist party of France” in the second half of the 1970s Foucault turned to studying the history of liberalism in order to find a conceptual framework for a new non-communist left politics. This can be seen as a second form of politicization of his intellectual work and Foucault’s study of neoliberal ideas can be located here. We claim that since this research is placed at the very end of his history of governmentality it is here that Foucault found a conceptual framework suitable for a new left politics. For him this politics would be based on the pursuit of an ever greater autonomy of the individual and his subjectivity. Therefore, after studying neoliberalism Foucault turns to studying subjectivity which we understand as a third form of politicization of his intellectual work. We argue that he conceptualized the “care for the self” as a form of subjectivity which is supposed to play the role of an ethical ideal for a new left politics. The paper concludes with a segment in which we contrast our claims with the claims of other authors that studied Foucault’s relation to neoliberalism and his turn towards studying subjectivity. 

Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France by David A. Guba, Jr

Reviewed by: Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France by David A. Guba, Jr Richard C. Keller David A. Guba, Jr. Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France. Intoxicating Histories. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020. x + 302 pp. $37.95 (978-0-2280-0120-1). Cannabis occupies a curious cultural and legal space in France. The nation has the highest rate of cannabis consumption in the European Union, with a whop-ping 42 percent of French adults using the drug at least once per year. Yet it also has among the EU’s strictest penalties for possession and use, including heavy fines and prison time, with landmark legislation that resulted from fears of out-of-control youth in the aftermath of the 1968 uprisings. Even as most Western countries are liberalizing their policies toward the drug, France remains resolute [End Page 274] in its harsh approach. Moreover, Muslims in France bear a disproportionate brunt of zealous policing and prosecution for cannabis offenses: although Muslims number less than 10 percent of the population, they constitute roughly half of those imprisoned for drug violations. As David Guba tells us in his well-researched and carefully argued book, there is little that is new here. A look to the history of French fears and fascinations about cannabis in the nineteenth century—and in particular, about cannabis in its nineteenth-century empire—sheds significant light on discourse about the drug in the French metropolitan present. The book details the evolution of French cannabis policy’s fits and starts from Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign through the implementation of the code de l’indigénat, a brutally discriminatory legal policy, in Algeria in 1881, demonstrating clear connections between medical and political attitudes toward cannabis and the broader historical context of French empire. Perhaps most important, Guba offers compelling links between the history he explores in the book and contemporary French legal approaches to the drug. Guba is particularly adept at showing the agency of cannabis. For example, although Napoleon is erroneously considered to have enacted France’s first interdiction of cannabis in Egypt, Guba reveals a far more complex story, in which Jacques François “Abdallah” Menou, the general in chief of Egypt after Napoleon’s departure, who had converted to Islam and married into a prominent Sunni family, enacted the ban as a means to develop an alliance with Sunni elites who lamented cannabis use. But the most prominent use of cannabis was as a rhetorical tool that French physicians and policymakers used to construct a particular form of North African Islam that required aggressive rule. The “taming cannabis” of the book’s title refers not only to horticultural efforts to distinguish intoxicating strains of the plant from hemp (on which there is a fascinating chapter that exposes Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s engagement in the debate), nor merely to the seesawing criminalization and medicalization of the drug, but also to the effort to control the violent criminal disposition the French believed to govern North African Muslim consciousness. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, French intellectuals, physicians, and colonial agents worked tirelessly to “orientalize” cannabis (chap. 3). In 1809, the orientalist translator Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy gave a speech in which he asserted a linguistic link between hashish and the Islamic Assassins, drawing on Marco Polo’s highly fictionalized account of the group to argue that their violent methods were the result of their constant indulgence in cannabis. This rapidly became a trope in colonial and postcolonial discourse about North African Muslims, providing fodder for generations of psychiatric treatises about the so-called Muslim psyche. At the same time as many sought to use the Muslim’s propensity for hashish consumption as a justification for excessive policing, others saw in cannabis, and hashish in particular, a miracle drug. In a period of largely unregulated consumption in metropolitan France, doctors claimed the drug could cure cholera, plague, and—somewhat paradoxically—mental illness. Later in the nineteenth century, however, as contagionist theories of infection grew in influence, these ideas fell out of favor, with prominent psychiatrists such as [End Page 275] Alexandre Brière de Boismont seizing on the evils of...

Against Autofiction: The French Resistance to Autofiction from Gérard Genette to Julia Kristeva

Against AutofictionThe French Resistance to Autofiction from Gérard Genette to Julia Kristeva Anneleen Masschelein (bio) In her 2016 autobiography, Je me voyage, Julia Kristeva confesses: I do not like autofiction, because it does not liberate from sadomasochism by exhibiting it, it endures it and perpetuates its pleasure by inoculating it to a hypocritical reader, “its double, its brother,” whose desire is, by definition, to power and submission. . . . By replacing [de Sade’s] philosophy in the boudoir with pornography, or with miserabilism, the Spectacle distributes the designer drugs of autofiction, the tailor-made and legal drugs, to a hyperconnected people. This dislike is surprising for several reasons. One of the most prominent post-structuralist French intellectuals, Kristeva belongs to the generation of writers who “invented” autofiction as a hybrid genre, born from experimental prose (the new novel), narratology, and psychoanalysis. Cultivating her outsider position—as a Bulgarian deeply entrenched in the core of Parisian avant-garde life in the 1970s and 1980s, and as one of the main exponents of French theory in New York—Kristeva has always practiced what is now labeled autotheory. Probably the most famous example is her virtuoso 1977 essay on motherhood, “Stabat Mater,” in which she juxtaposes a raw, poetic account of her pregnancy against a cultural history and analysis of the cult of the Virgin mother in Catholicism. Since the 1980s, her studies on the abject, love, melancholia, and the experience of foreignness all contain memorable autotheoretical fragments that link her own experiences and those of her patients, psychoanalytic theory, and readings of the Western canon. When she turned to fiction around the turn of the century, her novels—in various genres—baffled critics and were predominantly read autobiographically, including by herself in Je me voyage, where she readily links many characters to people in her life. Kristeva’s objections against autofiction are double and familiar. On the one hand, autofiction relies on questionable psychological mechanisms in both writer and reader, like sadomasochism, exhibitionism, and narcissism. On the other hand, it is a commercial phenomenon, linked to the digital [End Page 37] sphere and its penchant for reality, self-display, and confession, that, like the opium of religion, lulls the masses to sleep and prevents genuine reflection. Considering the fact that today autofiction and autotheory are most often associated with women’s writing and feminism, Kristeva’s harsh judgment brings to mind an equally scathing passage from her 1981 essay “Women’s Time” about the different waves of feminism and women’s writing. Here, while advocating a revolutionary new language, she explicitly condemns not just attempts to find a “women’s language” but also most literary production by women as “a reiteration of a more or less depressed romanticism and always an explosion of an ego lacking narcissistic gratification,” or, quite simply “naïve whining” or anachronistic “market-place romanticism.” In a note, translator Alice Jardin explains this passionate attack as directed against the “mass marketing” of écriture feminine in France at the time. Still, it is quite remarkable, considering that in the Anglo-Saxon world—including the special issue of Signs where “Women’s Time” appeared in 1981—Kristeva is presented as one of the main exponents of “French feminism,” together with Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. In order to understand the aversion to the related phenomena of autofiction and écriture féminine, it is important to look once again at autofiction as “the forgotten face of French theory,” as Hywel Dix calls it in a 2017 article in Word and Text and in his 2018 edited volume Autofiction in English, and at what Mounir Laouyen termed, in a 2021 article, the “problematic reception” of the genre in France. Dix makes a distinction between Anglo-American autofiction, which is more concerned with an exploration of the status of the author, and French autofiction, which focuses on the distinction between truth and fiction. The association of autofiction with the blurring of boundaries has received a negative value judgment primarily because of Gérard Genette’s oft-cited distinction in 1991 between “true” autofictions, that is, genuinely fictional stories in which author, narrator, and character bear the same name (like Borges in...

Nadia Boulanger and Her World, edited by Jeanice Brooks

<i>Nadia Boulanger and Her World</i>, edited by Jeanice Brooks

The aporetic humanism of early Derrida

This article focuses on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s thought in the 1960s. Though the discourse of the ‘death of man’ was regnant among French avant-garde intellectuals, this article argues that Derrida himself has to be described as a humanist at this stage in his career, even if a reluctant one. The case is made through close textual analysis of three of Derrida’s early and seminal works: ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ (1963), ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’ (1964) and ‘The Ends of Man’ (1968). In these texts, Derrida grapples with issues of the subject and the other. They collectively reveal that the Derrida of the 1960s held fast to the view that philosophical thought could neither dispense with the subject nor escape the horizon of humanism. However, Derrida reconceived the human subject with reference to his core concepts of différance and arche-writing, making for an aporetic humanism that deconstructs the binary of humanism–antihumanism.

НА ВЫХОДЕ ИЗ КАРАНТИНА: НОЧЬ ИНТЕЛЛЕКТУАЛОВ

The article deals with the pandemic as an episode of intellectual history and a situation of reflection against the background of the “death of an intellectual”. The author proposes to question the very conditions of the possibility for philosophy’s response to the challenge of this or that current crisis in principle and the coronavirus pandemic in particular. The question is closely related to the phenomenon of the Intellectual, the crisis of which was announced by French researchers about forty years ago. Today one can talk about the simulation of its role and place in modern “reactions”, about the objective historical impossibility of reviving this figure and its inherent form of expression. The issue is considered based on the material of French intellectual history and criticism of the “media intellectual”. The starting point of the analysis is the political crisis in France in 2019, which falsely revived the forgotten structure of “intellectuals and power”. The author of the article draws attention to the similarity of the intellectual “calm” (reflexive inertia) of 1941 and 2021, suggesting to recall those forms of reflection that were involved by A. Malraux, J.-P. Sartre, J. Paulhan, M. Merleau-Ponty. The “reactions” of certain French intellectuals caused by the coronavirus crisis – E. Moren, R. Debray, J.-L. Nancy, B. Latour – reproduced in the article in the light of the interpretation of the pandemic as a “reductive situation” (M. Mamardashvily) with its inherent moralizing and neo-mania (R. Barthes). The author finds it problematic to appeal to criticism in the face of the “terror of the event” (M. Merleau-Ponty). Intellectuals themselves are a rare extinct phenomenon, which is important to consider in anticipation of their “response” in the face of the threat of a pandemic