Author: ericbrandom

The challenge of contingency and Leibniz’s cybernetic thinking

Post author By ericbrandom
Post date February 5, 2018

By guest contributor Audrey Borowski

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, painted by Christoph Bernhard Francke

According to the philosopher of science Alexandre Koyré, the early modern period marked the passage ‘from the world of more-or-less to the universe of precision’. Not all thinkers greeted the mathematization of epistemology with the same enthusiasm: for the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, this marked a watershed moment when modern nihilism had taken root in the shape of the reduction of the world to calculation and recently culminated with the emergence of cybernetics. One of the main culprits of this trend was none other than the German mathematician and polymath Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), who in the late seventeenth century invented the calculus and envisaged a binary mathematical system. Crucially, Leibniz had concerned himself with the formalization and the mechanization of the thought process either through the invention of actual calculating machines or the introduction of a universal symbolic language – his so-called ‘Universal characteristic’– which relied purely on logical operations. Ideally, this would form the basis for a general science (mathesis universalis). According to this scheme, all disputes would be ended by the simple imperative ‘Gentlemen, let us calculate!’

A graphic representation of second-order cybernetics by Mark Côté

For having mechanized reasoning, cyberneticist Norbert Wiener touted Leibniz as a ‘patron saint for cybernetics’ (Wiener 1965, p. 12) in the ‘Introduction’ to his 1948 seminal work Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. In it, he settled on the term ‘kybernetes’, the ‘steersman’ to describe a novel type of automatic and self-correcting reasoning which consisted in the deployment of mathematics, notably via a feedback mechanism, towards the domestication of contingency and unpredictability. Cybernetics does not ‘drive toward the ultimate truth or solution, but is geared toward narrowing the field of approximations for better technical results by minimizing on entropy––but never being able to produce a system that would be at an entropy of zero…. In all of this, [it] is dealing with data as part of its feedback mechanism for increasing the probability of a successful event in the future (or in avoiding unwanted events).’

Cybernetic applications are ubiquitous today from anti-aircraft systems to cryptography; an anti-aircraft system, for instance, receives input data on a moving target and delivers the navigation of bullet to the target as output after a computing process. Cybernetics’ aim is first and foremost practical and its method probabilistic: through the constant refining of the precision of a prediction, it helps steer action through the selection between probabilities. Under those conditions, a constant process of becoming is subordinated to a weak form of determinism; real infinite complexity is deferred in favour of logical symbolism and ‘disorganization’, that ‘arch-enemy’ endemic to intense mutability as Nobert Wiener put it, gives way to ontological prediction.

In his works The Taming of Chance and The Emergence of Probability Ian Hacking traced the emergence of probabilistic thinking away from deterministic causation. In fact and against commonly-held positivist narratives of the triumph of objective rationality, historians of mathematics generally acknowledge that the seventeenth century witnessed the birth of both probability theory and modern probabilism perhaps most famously epitomized by Pascal’s Wager. With the emergence of contingency, the question of its conceptualization became all the more pressing.

Perhaps no thinker was more aware of this imperative than Leibniz. Leibniz is often portrayed as an arch-rationalist and yet he did not view pure deduction as sufficient for reasoning; the ‘statics’ inherent to his characteristic (Leibniz, 1677) were simply ill-suited to a constantly evolving practical reality. Finite calculation needed to be complemented by probabilistic reasoning (1975, p. 135) which would better embrace the infinite complexity and evolving nature of reality. Although the author of a conjectural history of the world, The Protogaea, Leibniz did not merely conjecture about the past, but also sought to come to grips with the future and the state of mutability of the world. To this end, he pioneered the collection of statistical data and probabilistic reasoning especially with regards to the advancement of the modern state or the public good (Taming of Chance, 18). Leibniz had pored over degrees of probability as early as his 1665 law degree essay De conditionibus and the ability to transmute uncertainty into (approximate) certainty in conditions of constant mutability remained a lifelong preoccupation. More specifically, he set out to meet the challenge of mutability with what appears as a cybernetic solution.

An example of Leibniz’s diagrammatic reasoning

In a series of lesser-known texts Leibniz explored the limits and potentially dangerous ramifications of finite cognition, and the necessity for flexible and recursive reasoning. In 1693 Leibniz penned The Horizon of the Human Doctrine, a thought experiment which he subtitled: ‘Meditation on the number of all possible truths and falsities, enunciable by humanity such as we know it to be; and on the number of feasible books. Wherein it is demonstrated that these numbers are finite, and that it is possible to write, and easy to conceive, a much greater number. To show the limits of the human spirit [l’esprit humain], and to know the extent to these limits’. Building on his enduring fascination with combinatorial logic that had begun as a teenager in 1666 with his De Arte Combinatoria and had culminated ten years later with his famous ‘Universal Characteristic’, he set out to ‘show the limits of the human spirit, and to know the extent to these limits’. Following in the footsteps of Clavius, Mersenne and Guldin, Leibniz reached the conclusion that, through the combination of all 23 letters of the alphabet, it would be possible to calculate the number of all possible truths. Considering their prodigious, albeit ultimately finite number, there would inevitably come a point in time when all possible variations would have been exhausted and the ‘horizon’ of human doctrine would be reached and when nothing could be said or written that had not been expressed before (nihil dici, quod non dictum sit prius) (p. 52). The exhaustion of all possibilities would give way to repetition.

In his two later treatments on the theme of apokatastasis, or ‘universal restitution’, Leibniz took this reasoning one step further by exploring the possible ramifications of the limits of human utterability for reality. In them, he extended the rule of correspondence between possible words to actual historical events. For instance, since ‘facts supply the matter for discourse’ (p. 57), it would seem, by virtue of this logic, that events themselves must eventually exhaust all possible combinations. Accordingly, all possible public, as well as individual histories, would be exhausted in a number of years, inevitably incurring a recurrence of events, whereby the exact same circumstances would repeat themselves, returning ‘such as it was before.’ (p.65):

‘[S]uppose that one day nothing is said that had not already been said before; then there must also be a time when the same events reoccur and when nothing happens which did not happen before, since events provide the matter for words.’

In a passage he later decided to omit, Leibniz even muses about his own return, writing once again the same letters to the same friends.

Now from this it follows: if the human race endured long enough in its current state, there would be a time when the same life of certain individuals would return in detail through the very same circumstances. I myself, for example, would be living in a city called Hanover situated on the river Leine, occupied with the history of Brunswick, and writing letters to the same friends with the same meaning. [Fi 64]

Leibniz contemplated the doctrine of Eternal Return, but it was incompatible with his metaphysical understanding of the world. Ultimately, he reasserted the primacy of the infinite complexity of the world over finite combinatorics. Beneath the superficial similarity of events – and thus of description- lay a trove of infinite differences which superseded any finite number of combinations: paradoxically, ‘even if a previous century returns with respect to sensible things or which can be described by books, it will not return completely in all respects: since there will always be differences although imperceptible and such that could not be sufficiently described in any book however long it is.’. [Fi 72]’ Any repetition of event was thus only apparent; each part of matter contained the ‘world of an infinity of creatures’ which ensured that truths of fact ‘could be diversified to infinity’ (p. 77).

To this epistemological quandary Leibniz opposed a ‘cybernetic’ solution whereby the analysis of the infinite ‘detail’ of contingent reality would open up a field of constant epistemological renewal which lay beyond finite combinatorial language, raising the prospect of an ‘infinite progress in knowledge’ for those spirits ‘in search of truth.’ (p. 59) The finite number of truths expressible by humans at one particular moment in time would be continuously updated to adapt itself to the mutability and progress of the contingent world. ‘Sensible truths’ could ‘always supply new material and new items of knowledge, i.e. in theorems increasing in length’ in this manner permitting knowledge to approach reality asymptotically. In this manner, the theoretical limits which had been placed upon human knowledge could be indefinitely postponed, in the process allowing for incrementally greater understanding of nature through constant refinement.

Leibniz thus set forth an ingenious solution in the shape of a constantly updated finitude which would espouse the perpetually evolving infinity of concrete reality. By adopting what may be termed a ‘cybernetic’ solution avant la lettre, he offered a model, albeit linear and continuous, which could help reconcile determinism and probabilism, finite computation and infinite reality and freedom and predictability. Probabilism here served to induce and sustain a weak form of determinism, one which, in keeping with the nature of contingency itself as defined by Leibniz, ‘inclined’ rather than ‘necessitated’.

Audrey Borowski is a historian of ideas at the University of Oxford.

Tags Cybernetics, Mathematics

Intellectual history Think Piece

Nazi Punching, or, Simone Weil on Resistance and the Organized Left

Post author By ericbrandom
Post date January 8, 2018

by contributing writer Agatha A. Slupek

Simone Weil (1909-1943) occupies a liminal position in the history of ideas. While Weil’s thought is an established concern for scholars of religion and mysticism, she is neglected in the Anglophone study of the history of political thought. Weil’s ambivalent categorization within the history of ideas reflects the trajectory of her life: beginning at the École Normale Supérieure, a common start for French intellectuals, but straying quickly from academics to long bouts of militancy. Her uncommon path and melancholic spirit might suggest that to treat her as simply one among others in the history of ideas would be to do her legacy a disservice. Let us not allow saintliness to prevent us from careful reading.

Simone Weil in Marseilles, circa 1940

In this essay, I argue for the relevance of Weil’s thought to our present political conjuncture: one in which concerns about the ethics of resistance and questions of free speech saturate the public sphere. Weil helps us think through the relationship between individual liberty and collective oppression, as well as how to constitute political groups that don’t reproduce oppressive dynamics. The contradictory space between – not the individual and society, as liberalism would have it – but the individual and the self-constituted collective – was for Weil the site of the political. There is no doing away with this contradiction for Weil. The space of the political remains a contingent and tenuous field that we must always configure anew. Reflecting on Weil in 2017 promises to illuminate key ethical and political problems we face in the context of the rise of neo-fascisms and at the centenary of the Russian Revolution. While at times Weil unjustifiably conflated fascism and communism, her corpus is germane to thinking the contemporary political moment.

Simone Weil and the Organized Left

For those on the left re-visiting the revolutionary legacy of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution on its centenary, a renewed interest in Weil may seem reactionary or irrelevant. Given the changing and storied relationship between French intellectuals and the organized left, committed Marxists can be quick to dismiss her as a member of the so-called ‘anti-totalitarian left’. Weil was never a member of the French Communist Party (PCF), having published perhaps the most scathing critique of the party form. However, she was active on the left, writing pseudonymously in militant journals and gazettes aimed at a workers’ audience. Initially, it was her experience of hard factory labor in 1934-35 that brought her to see the PCF and the CGT as incapable of relieving workers from what she saw as the source of their misery and destitution – a moral degradation caused by the oppressive rhythms of piece-work. Weil’s experiential study of the condition of the French working class led her to assert the primacy of experience in determining both the means and ends of action.

In keeping with what has been called the Machiavellian moment in French philosophy at this time, Weil places emphasis not on the ends of political action, but on the importance of means to attaining desired ends. In contrast to what she saw as the instrumentalist and economistic visions of the PCF and the CGT, the joyous and spontaneous stoppages of work in factories revealed for her the incapacity of either to understand the “eternal demand” of the working class – that one day men be valued more than things (Grèves et Joie Pure [GJP], 74). On this point, Weil praises Marx, noting that the best pages of Capital are in Chapter 10 (E, 73). These pages bring to light the incompatibility of the industrial mode of production with human liberty and satisfaction for the soul (Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’Oppression sociale [LO], 15-22). For Weil, workers’ experience is what ought to inform political ends and means: she has no doubt that people will organize to combat oppressive and intolerable social conditions. This sense of necessity, she argues, comes from a deep-seated sense of obligation humans have toward one another, founded on the needs of the human body and soul (E, 9-18). But the manner in which they come together is of paramount importance to her philosophy: Weil has a different problem than did other philosophers, more concerned with the anti-totalitarian label, of the 1970s and 80s.

Simone Weil in Spain

For Weil, the 1935-36 wave of steelworkers’ strikes in France was more than the vindication of such and such an economic demand, but above all a pure joy (GJP, 37). The means workers employed to their collective self-constitution – occupying the factories, singing and laughing in the presence of inoperative machinery that heretofore had forced them into submission day after day – were conducive to their ends of liberation from oppression. Weil’s acute sense of the contingency of means carries through to her posthumously published L’Enracinement [E](1949). In this later work, Weil reflects further on the needs of the human soul and how these inform the thorny questions occupying contemporary public debates about resistance and free speech. This may have put her out of step with the French left of her time, but increases her interest in our own.

Free Speech and Resistance, or, Should You Punch a Nazi?

Weil’s libertarian influence, wariness of collectivities, and “bias against the first person plural” has lead earlier commentators to view her thought as profoundly anti-political (e.g., O’Brien 1977). Weil derives all human obligations from the basic needs of the soul, yet to freedom of speech she devotes more discussion than to any other of the fourteen she enumerates, suggesting a profound concern with the collective aspects of human existence (E, 35-48) Weil writes that intelligence is vanquished when thoughts are preceded, implicitly or explicitly, with that little word nous (E, 41). Important, however, is that in French there is a distinction between nous (first person plural) and on (impersonal plural). While Weil is of the view that thought is hampered if preceded by the ‘we’, as we have seen, she is by no means allergic to the impersonal plural in the sphere of collective action. The political lies exactly in this tension, between the self-asserted nous and the individual human soul, that is always already in contact with the impersonal on. Means are never neutral, however: to use the ‘we’ in this sphere also entails that one’s freedom of speech is not unlimited. Weil in fact denies that collectivities such as journals or political parties have an unreserved freedom of speech, suggesting instead that collectives considered as such do not have rights (E, 10). In Weil as in Hannah Arendt, anti-totalitarian thought reveals to us the complex and tenuous relationship between ethics and politics.

Anti-totalitarian thought has been cast as reactionary, namely, as prompting a retreat into moralism and away from politics conceived of action within relations of force. The work and life of Simone Weil, who remained a committed militant throughout her life, defies such easy denunciation. Though fascinated with Christianity (though not herself a Christian in any formal sense), Weil is by no means a uniformly pacifist thinker. Her militancy in pacifist and anti-fascist organizations in the early 1930s and polemical remarks on the effects of war on the human soul do not describe her full trajectory. In 1943, Weil describes her affiliation with pacifist groups as a mistake (Oeuvres, 77), and her later writings are very ambivalent not as to whether there be a responsibility to resist collective oppression, but how to go about doing so without reproducing oppressive logics. It is this how that guides her life and words, and I suggest, prompts us to consider her legacy beyond the simplistic lens of a beautiful soul. Looking to Weil’s thought today to understand the relationships of political means to ends constitutes a fruitful terrain for scholarly research and public reflection alike.

In France, Valérie Gérard (ENS) has begun to do so, taking interest in Weil’s influence by the Machiavellian currents in inter-war French intellectual circles. Taking this approach to her texts reveals Weil’s critique of abstract universals and emphasis on the concrete in new light. Gérard points to Weil’s favorable remarks on class struggle and her comments on the relationality of political action (L’Iliade ou le poème de la force, Appendice, 159). In the Anglophone world, Antonio Y. Vásquez Arroyo has presented a compelling reading of Weil as advancing a political ethic, that is, “a public ethic that deals with questions of collective life” (104). Her critique of abstractions and collectives lends itself on first glance to a moralistic and ‘merely anti-totalitarian’ reading. However, contemporary evaluations of militant action share her preference for means of resistance – spontaneous, joyful, and conjunctural – that do not reproduce oppressive dynamics, and we have much to learn from her writings on this subject.

So, would she punch a Nazi? That may be the right question to ask our protest buddies, but is a less fruitful approach to Weil. We look to the history of ideas not to find prescriptive rules for action, but to mine it for a richness of insight and feeling that can illuminate our contemporary struggles. We would do well to look to Weil today, not to validate our political agendas, but to find in her work a powerful and nuanced reflection on the nature of oppression, free speech, political association, and resistance.

Agatha A Slupek is a doctoral student in political theory at the University of Chicago. Her research interests are in feminist theory, 20^th century continental thought, and democratic theory.

Intellectual history

Nonsense and the Crisis of Democracy in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae

Post author By ericbrandom
Post date January 3, 2018

by Contributing Writer Lucy Valsamidis

Athens was doing badly in the war against Sparta. The fleet had been devastated in Sicily, and morale and cash were running low. When Peisander appeared in the assembly and explained the only way to win was to suspend the democracy for a while – to “have a more moderate form of government” – so they could ask for help from their old enemies the Persians, the Athenians were dubious. They reluctantly agreed to let Peisander try negotiating, but wouldn’t budge on the democracy point. Peisander sailed away – but secretly urged groups sympathetic to oligarchy to undermine the democracy in any way they could. Some time later, the prominent popular politician Androcles was assassinated.

This, according to Thucydides (8.53-54, 65), was what was happening in the spring of 411BC, when (probably) Aristophanes put on his Women at the Thesmophoria at the Dionysia festival (Sommerstein 1977). The play – unlike his Lysistrata, put on just a few months before – hasn’t traditionally been seen as political. It’s even been suggested that Aristophanes was so alarmed by developments that he chose not to put on an overtly political play. Explicit comment on impending oligarchy is certainly limited in the Thesmo. But the Thesmo. is a play preoccupied with political language and its breakdown. What I’d like to argue here is that in tracking the collapse of political language into nonsense and violence Aristophanes just might have been saying something about contemporary politics too.

It’ll be useful to start off with an overview of the plot. The tragedian Euripides discovers that the women of Athens are going to seize the opportunity of a women-only festival, the Thesmophoria, to stage a political assembly and plot to murder him, because he’s given them a bad name by putting characters like Phaedra on stage. Alarmed, Euripides gets an unnamed relative of his to go along in disguise to talk them out of it. When the women discover him, they bring on a Scythian guard to detain him. The rest of the play is taken up with Euripides’ increasingly absurd attempts to rescue the Relative with skits from his own plays. Eventually Euripides succeeds, the women agree not to murder him if he stops misrepresenting them on stage and all ends happily.

A fourth-century South Italian vase thought to show a scene from the Thesmophoriazusae: the Relative (right) faces off against one of the women. Würzburg, Martin von Wagner Museum.

So far, so meta-theatrical, and plenty of valuable work has been done on the play’s treatment of theatre and gender (see especially Zeitlin 1981). But the men who played the women at the Thesmophoria were like all performers of Athenian drama also members of the democratic assembly, performing before an audience of thousands of (mostly) their fellow citizens. The assembly scene is, in this sense, a parody of Athenian politics. Getting up to speak for the plan to murder Euripides, one of the women claims his lies are outrageous. The rest agree. But when the Relative replies that women really do cheat on their husbands so they can’t complain, the women are equally impressed:

Relative: … Don’t we commit these misdeeds? By Artemis, we do! And then do we get mad at Euripides, though he’s done nothing worse to us than what we’ve done ourselves?

Chorus: This is really astonishing! … I wouldn’t have thought the wicked woman would ever have had the nerve to say these things so brazenly right before our eyes: now I guess anything is possible …

Chorus leader: No, there’s nothing worse in every way than women born shameless – except for the rest of women! (502-32, with omissions)

Thucydides evokes such moments when, in the Mytilenean Debate, he has Cleon criticise the Athenians for being “the easy victims of newfangled arguments [kainotetos logou]” and “slaves to every new paradox” (3.38). It’s significant that we start seeing discussion of clever argumentation of this sort towards the end of the fifth century, around the same time that the philosopher Gorgias floated the idea that it was impossible to convey reality in logos. Suddenly, the implication was, you could argue for anything at all. In fact, Euripides was especially famous for having his characters do this: the Nurse in his Hippolytus, for instance, presents Phaedra with an elaborate justification for adultery (433ff).

Suspicion could attach not only to the content of a political speech but the authenticity of the speaker: Diodotus, Cleon’s opponent in the Mytilenean debate, attacks the Athenians for hesitating to support politicians they agree with for fear they have taken bribes (3.41). Authenticity was apparently felt to be a particularly acute problem in 411. Thucydides tells us that one of the masterminds behind the oligarchical plot was a clever man named Antiphon, who became an object of popular suspicion because he never appeared in the assembly himself but got others to make speeches on his behalf (8.68). So it’s interesting that when the women discover that Euripides’ Relative is not all he seems – not speaking up for himself but Euripides, and not even a woman at all but a man – they quickly abandon their political assembly. Although the women do make political comments later in the play, it’s never as a constituent assembly and never as part of a debate. As the women start seeing through the Relative’s deceptions, then, they also lose their interest in political persuasion.

The women have to make sure that Euripides won’t be able to snatch the Relative from under their noses. So they bring in a guard who is incapable of any sort of persuasion. The Scythian guard is one of the most spectacularly racist caricatures in all fifth century literature. He ties up Euripides’ Relative and threatens him with rape, and is capable of speaking only short sentences of broken Greek (1002ff). The first character Euripides brings on to try to rescue the Relative is Echo, a character from his recent (though now lost) Andromeda. Echo doesn’t bother trying to persuade the Scythian that the Relative is really Andromeda chained to the rocks and in need of rescuing. Instead, while the Scythian is distracted Echo gets the Relative to play along as Andromeda in a duet, parroting the end of each of his lines. The Relative loses his patience, but that just makes her echoes all the more insistent:

Relative: You’re killing me, old hag, with your jabbering!

Echo: Jabbering! (1074)

When the Scythian notices the noise they’re making, Echo flees, parroting each of his yells back at him (1082ff).

Scythians as they saw themselves: this comb was made around the same time the play was first performed. St Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum.

The failure of the Echo ploy, and then of Euripides’ attempt to appear as Andromeda’s saviour Perseus (1098ff), makes Euripides realise he’ll have to try something new again:

Ah me, what action, what clever logic now?

All wit is lost upon this savage lout.

For work a novel ruse (kaina sopha) upon a clod

and you have worked in vain … (1128-31)

So, for his final trick, Euripides doesn’t bring on any characters from his plays at all. Instead, he disguises himself as a pimp and brings a girl, Elaphion, with him on stage (1160ff). It doesn’t prove difficult to persuade the Scythian to pay to spend some time with the – totally wordless – Elaphion, leaving Euripides alone with the Relative and giving them the chance to escape.

Over the course of the play, then, the elaborate political deceptions of the women’s assembly and theatrical deceptions of Euripides’ characters collapse into nonsense and violence. On one level, all this justifies the exclusion of women and non-Athenians from politics. The women’s attempts to plot against Euripides lead to the corporal punishment without trial of an Athenian by a foreign slave. But if we recall that all the characters in the play were played by male Athenian citizens, a different interpretation is possible too. In his analysis of the violent conflict between proponents of oligarchy and democracy on Corcyra (modern Corfu), Thucydides claimed that “words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them” (3.82). Describing the growing mistrust between the citizens of Corcyra, he claims that

the inferior in intellect were most successful. Apprehensive of their own deficiencies and the cleverness of their antagonists, they feared to be worsted in debate … and so boldly had recourse to action. (3.83)

Thucydides was an Athenian, and his analysis of the Corcyraean civil war prefigures his later, more detailed account of the oligarchic coup in Athens. In this light, it’s tempting to think Aristophanes might have used the play between sophistication and stupidity in the Thesmo. to reflect on the breakdown of political debate in the spring of 411. On this view, the assembly of women lose their faith in politics when they realise that the speakers are inauthentic and that there is no relation between their words and reality. Trusting only the unpersuadable Scythian and abandoning political debate themselves, they watch as Echo and the Scythian break the most essential link between words and meaning – basic comprehensibility – as the Relative is tied up and clever Euripides is reduced to tricking the Scythian with the promise of sex.

All this would have been rather more subtle than Aristophanes’ normal mud-slinging at particular politicians and policies. Even in Thesmo., the Chorus – once it forgets about its own claims to political authority – lampoons a few real politicians by name (785ff): one of these, in fact, would be killed by another in the civil conflict later the same year (Thuc. 8.73.3). But perhaps the political problems of 411 demanded a different approach. By using the women’s assembly at the Thesmophoria to comment on Athenian politics, Aristophanes could draw attention to the dangers both of disingenuous political language and of the breakdown of that political language. Importantly, he could also fairly claim that the play wasn’t about politics at all.

If Aristophanes did mean to reflect on the issues of the day, that doesn’t necessarily tell us where he stood on them. In one sense, the Scythian’s acceptance of Euripides’ promise might have reminded the Athenians of their own collective willingness to be duped by promises, of Persian cash or anything else. On this view, the Scythian’s lust for Elaphion is a nasty twist on the comic trope of the Athenian hero getting the girl at the end of the play, or even a reminder of the trope of the voting public’s greed for handouts. On the other hand, the dangerously stupid Scythian might just as well have reminded some of the oligarchic assassins: after all, Thucydides doesn’t specify in his analysis of the Corcyrean crisis whether the oligarchs or the democrats were more likely to be “inferior in intellect”, and by his account the oligarchs were the ones who resorted to violence in 411. Interpretations of this sort along several different lines are possible. Perhaps, then, rather than pushing a partisan line Aristophanes wanted Athenians of democratic and oligarchic persuasions alike to use the Thesmo to think about their approaches to public discourse – and, as a poet who lived off that discourse, to draw attention to its value. Put differently, by projecting the political failings of the men of Athens onto the women at the Thesmophoria and the Scythian, he could invite his audience to turn their derision for each other onto the disenfranchised.

The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens.

The year 411 wasn’t the end of democracy in Athens. In June – in an atmosphere, Thucydides suggests, of profound mistrust (8.66) – the assembly voted to install an oligarchical government of Four Hundred, but it proved short-lived. The opponents of the Four Hundred stockpiled arms and gathered in the theatre at Piraeus before going to speak with representatives of the oligarchs (8.93). But the distinctions between political violence and the democratic process were never really clear cut. Two years later, an inscription tells us (Wilson 2009), in the Theatre of Dionysus before the opening of the tragedy competition, a crown was awarded to Thrasybulus of Calydon – a non-citizen – for assassinating the oligarch Phrynichus and, in so doing, defending the democracy from harm.

Lucy Valsamidis studied Classics at the University of Oxford (2013-17), where she was a scholar at Merton College. Translations, sometimes adapted, are taken from Strassler’s edition of Crawley’s Thucydides (1996) and Sommerstein’s Aristophanes Loeb (2000).

Think Piece

The Emotional Life of Laissez-Faire: Emulation in Eighteenth-Century Economic Thought

Post author By ericbrandom
Post date October 18, 2017

By guest contributor Blake Smith

Capitalism is often understood by both critics and defenders as an economic system that gives self-interested individuals free reign to acquire, consume, and compete. There are debates about the extent to which self-interest can be ‘enlightened’ and socially beneficial, yet there seems to be a widespread consensus that under capitalism, the individual, egoist self is the basic unit of economic action. For many intellectuals from the right and the left capitalism seems, by letting such economic agents pursue their private interests, to erode traditional social structures and collective identities, in a process that is either a bracing, liberating movement towards freedom or an alienating, disorienting dissolution in which, as Marx famously phrased it, “all that is solid melts into air.”

Economic activity unfettered by government regulation was not always so obviously linked to the self-interest of atomized individuals. In fact, as historians inspired by the work of István Hont show, the first wave of laissez-faire political economists, who transformed eighteenth-century Europe and laid the foundation for modern capitalism, claimed that they were creating the conditions for a new era of mutual admiration and affective connections among economic agents. For these thinkers, members of the ‘Gournay Circle’, emotions, rather than mere self-interest, were the motor of economic activity. They specifically identified the kind of activity they wanted to promote with the feeling of ’emulation’, and touted the abolition of traditional protections on workers and consumers as a means of stoking this noble passion.

Emulation has only been recently been given center stage in the history of economic thought, thanks to scholars like John Shovlin, Carol Harrison and Sophus Reinert, but it has a long history. From Greco-Roman antiquity down through the Renaissance, it was understood as a force of benign mutual rivalry among people working in the same field. Emulation was said to set in motion a virtuous circle in which competitors, bound by mutual admiration and affection, pushed each other to ever-higher levels of achievement. When a sculptor, for example, sees a magnificent statue made by one of his fellow artists, he should experience an uplifting feeling of emulation that will inspire him to learn from his rival in order to make a still more magnificent statue of his own. Emulation thus leads to higher standards of production, generating a net gain for society as a whole; it also, critically, unites potential rivals in a bond of shared esteem rooted in a common identity. This form of friendly competition sustains communities.

Emulation was not for everyone, however. It was understood only to exist in the world of male elites, and only in non-economic domains where they could pursue glory without the taint of financial interest: the arts, politics, and war. The circle of young male artists in the orbit of the great painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), as Thomas Crowe notes, could present their (not always harmonious) competition for attention, resources, and patronage in terms of emulation. In the homosocial space of the studio, anything so petty as jealous or avarice was abolished, and such artists as Antoine-Jean Gros, Anne-Louis Girodet and Jean-Germain Drouais could appear, at least in public, as a set of friends who admired and encouraged each other. Women, meanwhile, were largely excluded from the art world’s apprenticeships, studios, and galleries, on the grounds that their delicate psyches were not suited to the powerful emotions that drove emulation.

Vincent de Gournay

The discourse of emulation shaped access to the arts, but, in a stroke of public relations genius, the members of the Gournay Circle realized that it could also reshape France’s mercantilist economy. Beginning in the 1750s, this group of would-be reformers coalesced around the commercial official and political economist Vincent de Gournay (1712-59). Largely forgotten today (but now increasingly visible thanks to scholars such as Felicia Gottmann), Gournay and his associates inspired the liberal political economists of the next generation, from Physiocrats in France to Adam Smith in Scotland. The Gournay Circle and those who moved in its wake called for the abolition of restrictions on foreign imports, price controls on grain, state monopolies, guilds—the institutions and practices around which economic life in Europe had been organized for centuries.

The Gournay Circle spoke to a France fearful of falling behind Great Britain, its rival for colonial and commercial power. Gournay and his associates argued that France was not making the most of its merchants, entrepreneurs and manufacturers, whose energies were hemmed in by antiquated regulations. To those worried that unleashing economic energies might heighten social tensions, making France weaker and more divided instead of stronger, the Gournay Circle gave reassurance. There was no conflict between fostering social harmony and deregulating the economy, because economic activity was not motivated by self-interested desires for personal gain. Rather, buying and selling, production and distribution were inspired by emulation, the same laudable hunger for the esteem of one’s peers that motivated painters, orators and warriors.

Just as a sculptor admires and strives to outdo the work of his colleagues, laissez-faire advocates argued, a merchant or manufacturer regards those in his own line of work with a spirit of high-minded, warm-hearted camaraderie. Potential competitors identify with each other, forging an emotional bond based on their shared effort to excel. Thus, for example, demolishing traditional guild controls on the number of individuals who could enter into a given field of trade would not only encourage competition, raise the quality of goods and reduce prices—most importantly, it would draw a greater number of people into emulation with each other. Social classes, too, would be drawn to emulate each other, and rather than stoking economic conflict among competing interests, deregulation would encourage economic actors to earn the admiration of their fellows. National wealth and national unity would both be promoted, joined by a common logic of affect.

Under the banner of emulation, reformers challenged the guilds and associations that had long offered some limited protections to workers. Since the Middle Ages, guilds throughout Europe had set standards of production, provided training for artisans, and offered forms of unemployment insurance. Critics observed that they also kept up wages by limiting the number of workers who could enter into specific trades, and further accused guilds of thwarting the introduction of new technologies. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781), a political economist linked to the Gournay Circle, believed that the best way to “incite emulation” among workers was “by the suppression of all the guilds.”

For a brief moment, Turgot (still hailed as a hero in libertarian circles) was able to put his pro-emulation agenda into action. Appointed Comptroller-General of Finances (the equivalent to a modern Minister of Finance) in 1774, Turgot launched a laissez-faire campaign that included the abolition of guilds and the suspension of state controls on the price and circulation of grain. The royal decree announcing his most infamous batch of policies, the Six Edits, declared: “we wish thus to nullify these arbitrary institutions… which cast away emulation.” Turgot’s policies provoked outrage across French society, from peasants who feared bread prices would spiral out of control, to guild members who faced the competition of unregulated production. He was forced to resign in 1776; his most hated policies were reversed. But the damage had been done. The guild system, permanently enfeebled, straggled on for another generation. Peasants and workers, to whom the fragility of the institutions that protected their access to food and labor had been made brutally obvious, remembered the lesson. Their outrage in the mid-1770s was a rehearsal for 1789.

“Carte d’Entrée” for the first annual meeting of the Société d’Emulation

Emulation gradually faded away as a justification for liberal economic policies, although throughout much of the nineteenth century ’emulation clubs’ (sociétés d’émulation) remained a fixture of French municipal life, promoting business ventures while excluding groups whose capacity for emulation was considered questionable: women, Jews, and Protestants. As a key, albeit forgotten, concept in the development of modern economic thought, emulation reveals the extent to which the notion of the self-interested individual as the essential subject of economic activity is not in fact essential to capitalist ideology. In eighteenth-century France, laissez-faire policies aimed at increasing economic growth were justified in terms of their contribution to social harmony and emotional fulfillment. In the rhetoric that promoted these policies, the imagined economic subject was not an isolated, calculating egoist but a passionate striver who wanted, more than mere utility, welfare or profit, the admiration of other members of his community (that this community should exclude certain groups of people went without saying). Such arguments may well have been deployed by cynical activists agitating on behalf of powerful financial interests, yet they nevertheless speak to an affective dimension of economic life that is too often occluded. In its short-lived role as an economic concept, emulation showed that the history of capitalism is necessarily entangled with the history of emotions.

Blake Smith holds a PhD from Northwestern University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is currently a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, where he is preparing a study of the eighteenth-century French Orientalist Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron.

Tags Economic History, Political Economy

Think Piece

Violence, Intimate and Public, in Bel-Ami’s Republic

Post author By ericbrandom
Post date October 2, 2017

By Contributing Editor Eric Brandom

Mme Forestier, who was playing with a knife, added:

–Yes…yes…it is good to be loved…

And she seemed to press her dream further, to think of things she dared not say.

“L’argent” (“Money”), from Félix Vallotton’s series “Intimités” (image credit: Van Gogh Museum)

These are lines from a dinner scene early in Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 Bel-Ami (I have consulted, but in places substantially modified or replaced, the Sutton translation). The novel follows the talentless and superficial George Duroy—eventually Du Roy, since the sparkle of aristocracy is all the more fascinating en République—as he makes his social ascent through seduction, daring, and a little judiciously applied journalism. Duroy is driven by desire, especially for wealth, status, to be adored by people in general, and to possess women. His lack of moral feeling for anyone but himself means that he is able to make good use of his one real advantage, which is that women find him uncommonly attractive. Robert Pattinson played him, perhaps without the requisite physicality, in the 2012 film. In this post, I want to think about violence in Maupassant’s novel. Indeed I would like to use the experience of reading to give historical depth and complexity to the notoriously ambiguous and freighted concept of violence.

Bel-Ami is a rich text, taking as major themes not only great passion betrayed, but also journalism, gender, and colonial politics in the early Third Republic. It does not appear particularly violent compared to, for instance, Zola’s Germinal (1885), which breaths misery and social politics from every page, or the same author’s Nana (1880), also about an implausibly sexually attractive individual. For just this reason it seems to me that we may learn something from Maupassant about what counts as violent, what registered as dangerous violence in the Third Republic. As the lines quoted above suggest, violence is by no means absent here. Violence is both presented to the reader in the action of the plot, often at an ironic distance, and also is an effect produced in the reader. These two sorts of violence do not line up. So here I consider several “violent” incidents, including those that are physically—manifestly or naively—violent and those that are not. Indeed it seems to me that it in this novel, and perhaps in the larger society out of which it came, we might look for the most dangerous violence at the juncture of what is spoken and what one does not dare say, of the public and the intimate.

Bel-Ami opens with Duroy as flâneur, going down the boulevard with barely enough money in his pocket to last out the month. He has a powerful thirst for a bock (beer), and covets the wealth of those he can see enjoying the pleasures of life in the cafés. He has just finished two years in “Africa” and the memories are not far away: “A cruel and happy smile passed over his lips at the memory of an escapade which had cost the lives of three men of the Ouled-Alane tribe, and secured for himself and his comrades twenty chickens, two sheep, some money, and something to laugh about for six months.” The novel’s plot is launched when Duroy by chance meets Charles Forestier, an old friend from the military. He is introduced to the borderline honorable professional of newspaper work at the fictional La vie française, owned by “le juif Walter.” We are introduced to Madeline Forestier, whose talent for political journalism and willingness to ghostwrite propelled her husband Charles into prominence, and will now do the same for Duroy.

French expansion in African is woven into the plot. Indeed the way in which the novel takes journalism in general, and the actualités of Third Republic colonial ventures in particular, as a theme is one source of scholarly interest. Duroy’s first publication in the newspaper, which meets with a success he is never able to emulate again without the assistance of Madeline, draws on his experiences in Africa. But there is a larger colonial venture in the background of the novel. Put briefly, the minister Laroche-Mathieu connives with Walter to convince the public that the French will never go into Tunisia. This has the effect of driving down to practically nothing the price of Tunisian government bonds. Then Laroche-Mathieu’s government does decide to invade, determining among other things to guarantee the solvency of the bonds. Walter turns out to own a great quantity of them. From merely wealthy he becomes among the richest men in Paris—from “le juif” he becomes “le riche Israélite.” This subplot ties the novel both to the current events of the 1880s and to Maupassant’s own newspaper career.

But colonial experience is manifest in the novel on quite other levels. Through no fault of his own Duroy becomes involved in an affair of honor, a duel with a reporter from another paper. In a darkly comic scene Duroy, who is capable of self-reflection only in the mode of self-justification, considers the ridiculous possibility that he will die. His military past returns, above all in its irrelevance: “He had been a soldier, he had shot at Arabs without much danger to himself, it is true, a little as one shoots at a boar on a hunt.” Unfortunately for him, “in Paris, it was something else.” The duel takes place, as it must; both parties fire and miss; honor is maintained. Such duels were relatively common among bourgeois men and especially among journalists on the right like Duroy. So well institutionalized was the practice of risking one’s life—even if relatively few people died—for one’s honor that it could be seized by women to criticize the gender divisions of the Third Republic. In an elaborate set piece that farcically repeats his own experience, Duroy attends a charity banquet involving a series of epée and saber duels as entertainment. One section of the spectacle is women sparring to the erotic delight or forbearance of all.

The violence of Algeria has no existential weight for Duroy, as little as do the semi-nude fencers. This has not to do with the victims (Duroy has no feelings for anyone beyond himself, Ouled-Alane or French, man or woman) or more surprisingly even with the objective risk of death.In Paris, there are other men looking at him. It is fame, unequal recognition—to seduce Paris—that Duroy really wants. The duel is violence that does not take place, mere potential violence, as meaningless as the long late-night monologue in which the poet-columnist Norbert de Varenne spills out to Duroy all that he has learned about life and death.

The duel, staged and public, is a comic event for the reader and, at least as he tells it in retrospect, for Duroy. But there are also many moments of intimate violence that are less comical. Charles Forestier succumbs to a long-term illness, and Duroy proposes himself to Madeline as a replacement at the deathbed. Eventually, she agrees. Later, however, Madeline stands in the way of Duroy’s plans to marry Suzanne, the prettier of the now fabulously wealthy Walter’s two daughters. But how to rid one’s self of a wife? Duroy brings in the police to make a public discovery of Madeline in a compromising situation with Laroche-Mathieu, and force a divorce (this, too, was topical–debates around its legalization in 1884 were intense). Duroy breaks down the door to the furnished apartment and the police commissioner follows him in. The policeman demands an account of what has obviously been going on from Madeline. When she is silent: “From the moment that you no longer wish to explain it, Madame, I will be obliged to verify it” (“Du moment que vous ne voulez pas l’avouer, madame, je vais être contraint de le constater”). Duroy is able to turn the revelation—which of course is nothing of the sort—to his own advantage not only by divorcing Madeline but also, in a series of newspaper articles, by destroying the career of Laroche-Mathieu.

“La santé de l’autre” (“The Health of the Other”), from Félix Vallotton’s series “Intimités” (image credit: Van Gogh Museum)

This elaborately public scene with Madeline is to be contrasted with the scene between Duroy and his longtime mistress and benefactor, Clotilde de Marelle. They are together in the apartment that she rented for that purpose long ago; she has just learned, elsewhere, about his impending marriage to Suzanne Walter. Marelle, processing what he has done, how he has kept her in the dark about the plan, abuses him: “Oh! How crooked and dangerous you are!” He gets self righteous when she describes him as “crapule” and threatens to throw her out of the apartment—a miss step because she has been paying for the apartment all along, from back when he had no money at all. She accuses him of sleeping with Suzanne in order to force the marriage. As it happens, Duroy has not and this, it seems, is a bridge too far—at least so he can tell himself. He hits her; she continues to accuse him, “He pitched onto her and, holding her underneath him, struck her as though he were hitting a man.” After he recovers his “sang-froid” he washes his hands and tells her to return the key to the concierge when she goes. As he himself exits he tells the doorman, “You will tell the owner that I am giving notice for the 1^st of October. It is now the16th of August, I am therefore within the limits.” It is almost as though Duroy was compelled to assert to a man, of whatever class, that he was “dans les limites.” As Eliza Ferguson succinctly remarks in her rich study of Parisian judicial records related to cases of intimate violence, “the proper use of violence was an integral component of masculine honorability.” In certain situations juries and even the law itself recognized that an honorable man might inflict even fatal violence on a woman. Duroy is of course not an example of honorable masculinity, but he is intensely concerned with that appearance. Familiar with his style, Marelle simply will not accept the appearance he wants to impose in the space of their intimate life. He resorts to physical violence of an extreme sort.

The only scene in the novel that does not follow Duroy in close third takes place between the Walters, when Madame Walter discovers that her daughter Suzanne has disappeared, doubtless with Duroy. Duroy, of course, had earlier seduced, used, and then grown bored of Madame Walter, a devout Catholic who had never previously done anything so immoral. Her relationship with Duroy is, again of course, unspeakable. As she explains to her husband that Duroy has made off with their daughter, Walter responds in a practical way. Rather than rage at betrayal, he is impressed by Duroy’s audacity: “Ah! How that rascal has played us…Anyway he is impressive. We might have found someone with a much better position, but not such intelligence and future. He is a man of the future. He will be deputy and minister.” His wife cannot explain the depths of betrayal she feels, at least without admitting her own culpability, so that she is rendered hypocritical even in her righteous anger. The public face of things, carefully arranged by Duroy, brings appalling suffering to the private.

“L’absoute” (“Absolution”), Félix Vallotton (image credit: Gallica)

The novel’s violent moments are at this juncture, when the not always unspoken code of illicit intimacy is broken. Violence is generally inflicted on women by Duroy, using publicity, using his capacity to apply the logic of public to that of private life, honor to desire. In Duroy’s Third Republic the deepest moral corruption, the most serious violence, is not corruption in the usual sense of the word, the turning of the public to private ends, which is how one might normally think of the Tunisian affair, but rather the brutal and repeated enforcement of the public in the intimate. Here, then, is a way of thinking about differentiation within the broader category of violence. Some violence mattered more than other violence in the Third Republic. Men beating women, French soldiers killing Arabs out of boredom, or a duel in defense of masculine honor—this was violent, but not serious. The interruption of logics of intimacy and desire by logics of publicity, the betrayal of a tacit agreement by spoken law, these are the sorts of transgressions that are not so easily sanitized by ironic distance.

Intellectual history

On Tzvetan Todorov: A Personal Recollection

Post author By ericbrandom
Post date August 18, 2017

By guest contributor Richard J. Golsan

Early one morning last February, I received a text from a friend in Paris telling me that Tzvetan Todorov had died. The text concluded with the word “Désolée,” which captures so well feelings of regret and sorrow, and also empathy. My friend knew that I had known Tzvetan for twenty-five years, that I admired him tremendously, and that from an intellectual mentor Tzvetan had become a close friend, whom I looked forward to seeing every time I went to Paris. Although I had known that Tzvetan suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and I had been shocked by his condition when I last visited him last September, I never really imagined that he would die, and so soon.

Devoirs et délices (photo credit: Seuil)

I first met Tzvetan when he came to Texas and stayed in my house for three days while he lectured and gave a seminar for the Interdisciplinary Group for Literary Historical Study at Texas A&M University. Unlike so many other visiting scholars of his stature who fly in, give their lecture, dine with faculty, stay at a nice hotel, and fly out the next morning, Tzvetan wanted to get to know the people he visited, and not just the academics. At my house, where he wished to stay even though we only knew each other through correspondence, he spent as much time talking to my wife and two sons as he did to me. Later, in his autobiography, Devoir et délices he would speak about how the birth of his first child changed his life as well as the trajectory of his intellectual interests, and it became clear to me then why he wished to spend time with my entire little family. For many years Tzvetan was married to the novelist Nancy Huston, with whom he had two children. In conversations he would refer to “my Nancy” and “your Nancy” when talk to turned to family and daily life at home. As so many of his works confirm, for Tzvetan, “life in common” with family and friends was the cornerstone of a rich and happy life as a public intellectual who was respected and admired around the world. In the first years I knew him I visited Tzvetan in his study in his apartment near the Bastille. His daughter Léa and especially his son Sacha were very frequently around, and his tenderness for them and attentiveness to their needs was always evident. Later when he had moved over to the Left Bank and we would take long walks in the Jardin des Plantes or chat in a café near his apartment, he would speak fondly and proudly of his children, now grown. His daughter Léa had become a documentary film maker, and at our memorial conference for him at Reid Hall in Paris this past July, she showed parts of a documentary she was making on Tzvetan during his last visit to his native Bulgaria. Unfortunately he died before the film could be completed.

In our many conversations we ran the gamut of family, politics, books we had read and admired, travels, and many other subjects. He was generous with me in every way—he offered advice on my life and career, told me of important events or debates in Paris, often before they happened. For example, involved early on as an advisor in the Livre noir du Communisme project—which was very close to his heart, given his youth in Communist Bulgaria—Tzvetan told me months before it appeared about the controversy it would generate, and what his own views were.

Tzvetan frequently expressed admiration for friends and intellectuals he admired, and was always circumspect about those whose ideas or views he disliked or found dangerous (in Devoirs et delices, he is open about his dislike of Jacques Lacan and André Glucksmann). Always seeking to live the role of the “responsible intellectual” rather than the “engaged intellectual” of which he was suspicious, he was cautious about the positions he took in the public arena. He wanted to make sure that they measured up to his high standards of being truly thoughtful and reasonable. He was, he told me, discouraged by the often shrill intellectual polemics in the French media. After he published Le nouveau désordre mondial, which obliged him to become involved in these polemics, he said he was done with plunging directly into heated controversies of the moment. He would later, of course, change his mind in the face of new situations and what he perceived as new dangers.

One of Tzvetan’s many qualities was his ability to sum things up with just the right phrase or observation, which he pronounced with a kind of sympathetic detachment. Once when I was overly dramatic in my estimation of the meaning and impact of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s first-round victory in the presidential elections in 2002, Tzvetan stated simply: “Joe, the world is not getting to be a better place.” The phrase, bracing in its simplicity, punctured my apocalyptic pronouncements on the spot. Near the end of his life, he told me that he did not despair of disturbing or even devastating global events and developments, because he did not believe in grand or overarching historical narratives that supposedly gave meaning to these developments while placing them in an imaginary and fictitious “grand scheme” of things. He believed that these crises or disasters had to be dealt with one at a time and on their own merits.

Tzvetan’s ability to capture things in their essence and their profundity was also apparent in more personal things he said to me. In summer 2012, he invited to me to lunch, a break with our habit of walks in the park or café stops. After a long and pleasant lunch in an Indian restaurant near Jussieu, he confided in me that he was worried that he had Alzeimer’s disease. As we left, for the first time he hugged me and said: “You have to promise to come see me next time you are in Paris, even if I don’t remember who you are.”

Javier Cercas (photo credit: Albin Olsson)

Looking back on our encounters in the last years of Tzvetan’s life, it was clear to me that his life was becoming increasingly difficult, and painful. His marriage of many years ended abruptly, and what he feared was Alzheimer’s disease turned out to Parkinson’s disease. From the wiry, fit man I had known he became thinner and moved with increasing difficulty. But there were things that he very much enjoyed. He had received an award in Spain, and as a result spent a few days with the tennis champion Rafael Nadal, who had also received an award and whom he found delightful. He began watching Nadal’s matches on TV when he could. He also told me of his meeting with the Spanish novelist Javier Cercas, author of Soldiers of Salamis, many of whose ideas he shared and whose company he enjoyed. His admiration for figures like his friend the ethnologist, Resistance fighter, and Nazi camp survivor Germaine Tillion, never waned, and he wrote a lovely essay about her in May 2015, when her remains were placed in the Panthéon, alongside other luminaries of France’s Republican past. Tzvetan also still found pleasure and comfort in his work, writing and completing his final book, Le triomphe de l’artiste, shortly before he lost the ability to type.

I last saw Tzvetan in September 2016, when we spent two evenings together recording an interview that covered his entire life and work. There were so many things I did not know about him, despite years of friendship, and this made the visit all the more moving. When he had come back to Paris the month before, after spending the summer with friends in the country while completing his last book, his condition had worsened dramatically. He could no longer leave his apartment, and had difficulty walking about. While the interview went on, friends called repeatedly to ask after him. His daughter Léa hovered discreetly about, and this appeared to please him a great deal.

At the end of the interview we said goodbye at the door. As I left the building I was frightened for Tzvetan, and yet it did not occur to me that I would not see him again. Now that Tzvetan is gone, however, in looking at his books on my shelves, and thinking back to Léa Todorov’s brief film of him in Bulgaria, I remember the man and his ideas. Despite the sadness of his demise, he lived the life that he wished for, and lived it better than most. His legacy, and the memory of his friendship remain, and that is some comfort.

Richard J. Golsan is Distinguished Professor of French and University Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University. His most recent monograph is The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory (Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). He also recently edited a collection of essays with Sarah M. Misemer, The Trial that Never Ends: Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in Retrospect (University of Toronto, 2017). Last summer, he went under the FHN spotlight. The interviews with Tzvetan Todorov mentioned above are forthcoming in South Central Review.

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