European Fears of the Gathering Jihad

Front Page News.com ^ | February 21, 2003 | By Bat Ye’or

[Helms]

Great article. Horowitz is the best at combining intellectual and more pragmatic currents to explain whats going on. Also Postmodernist thought has infected France, I hope you will review the following

( Cite:http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/001000.html#001000 :

I would guess that postmodernism is so Franco-centric because the real subject of Postmodern theory is France. Perhaps a better way to put this would be to say that postmodernism is about the experience of being French in the late 20th century...after your country suffered a degrading collapse (and then collaborated with the Nazis) in World War II, after your country suffered the humiliating loss of Vietnam and Algeria (and nearly succumbed to a military coup in disengaging from the latter), after being displaced as the world center of art and culture, and after being economically colonized by American transnational business. Hey, talk about being decentered!

This may be rather glib, but I'm not done. Let’s take Lyotard's "death of meta-narratives." I’d say the biggest meta-narrative that ceased to be credible around, say, 1945, was the notion of France as the center of the world, the Grand Nation, the birthplace of the Revolution, the place where everything important happened and always would happen. (The Marxism of Sartre’s generation was a sort of rear-guard defense of this crumbling meta-narrative, because, bien sur, Marx was an intellectual offshoot of the Revolution and hence, French by association.)

Or how about Baudrillard's theories about the "death of the real" and the growth of "hyperreality"? Doesn’t that sound a lot like a description of the displacement of traditional French culture by American and international media culture? (By the way, if "Postmodernism for Beginners” is accurate, Baudrillard's discussion of the history of simulacra rather humorously skips over the iconclasm of the Reformation, which I suppose makes sense to a French intellectual because, hey, if it didn’t happen in France, it might as well have not happened at all!)

Then there are Foucault's theories about power, knowledge and resistance. I don’t know, but they sound a lot like life under the German occupation to me, as well as a discussion of the life under the continuing Vichy-like authoritarian strain in French politics and society.

But probably the best example is Derrida and his notions of how there is a sort of unstable shifting back and forth between "privileged" and "marginalized" readings of the same text. Hmmm, what could have prompted that notion? Let’s see, over the past 214 years the French have had how many constitutions? How many revolutions? How many governments? How many general strikes? How many flip-flops between "right" and "left"? How much heady rhetoric? And yet, oddly enough, it's still a Catholic country with a tradition of authoritarian central control and a strong affection for its (inefficient) agricultural sector...just like in the days of Louis XIV! Isn't there a saying about "the more things change, the more they stay the same?” (Maybe there’s even a French version of that remark.)

The Postmodernists are right; there is something "ambiguous" and "unstable" about French culture (indeed, something verging on the schizophrenic). Of course, at the same time there is something awfully fixed and unyielding about French life. I can see how, in France, a suspicion of the ambiguities of language would be appropriate, non?

I guess the real question is not why the French see something of themselves and their situation in Postmodern thought, but rather what American academics see in it? Whatever our own issues are, America clearly lacks that peculiarly French culture-schizophrenia. Is it possible that our academics miss it, or do they perhaps actually long for it? Or have they simply not read enough history--either French or American?