Nouvelle philosophy

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With new philosophers (often is also used by the new philosophers spoken) refers to a group of French intellectuals to André Glucksmann , Alain Finkielkraut , Bernard-Henri Levy , Pascal Bruckner , Jean-Marie Benoist , Jean-Paul Dollé , Michel Guérin , Christian Jambet and Gilles Susong . The current is named after the title of an issue of the magazine Les Nouvelles littéraires , which appeared in June 1976 and whose editing was entrusted to the young Bernard-Henri Lévy by Jean-Marie Borzeix.

The representatives of the flow, which partly from the existentialist and Foucault , partly recruited -Schule also from the Maoist camps had, under the influence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn to anti-totalitarianism known. They appeared in the 1970s with a criticism of "left-wing" philosophers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and various post-structuralists . These “left” philosophers put - so the criticism of the new philosophers - communal and ideological ideals over humanistic points of view, in particular over the point of view of the individual. They can be assigned to the same anti-humanist tradition as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger .

The hallmark of the new philosophers , who work primarily as polemical essayists and writers, is a fundamental reservation against arguments “from the left”. Their representatives overestimated the authority of “left” traditions and their responsibility for politics in principle, especially with regard to the intellectual legacy of left Hegelianism and Karl Marx . The fact that the (French) intellectual must be a “leftist” thinker, as Jean-Paul Sartre or Michel Foucault manifest, is not just a widespread stereotype, but an unfounded cliché.

Positions on multiculturalism and Islamism

More recently, the criticism of the new philosophers has been directed on the one hand against the indifference that the “left” shows towards the humanitarian needs of members of other cultures. So Finkielkraut turns against a "cultural racism" that no longer makes use of biological arguments, but assumes an inequality of cultures. This devaluation of foreign cultures is a western invention. In particular, the polemics of Pascal Bruckner and Paul Cliteur in this regard were followed internationally.

On the other hand, representatives of the current criticize the idealization of multiculturalism by European intellectuals. Lévy developed into a critic of what he called "Islamofascism". In The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World , Lévy accuses the Americans of leaving the world to the Russians, Chinese, Turks, Iran and Sunnist Islam. Only the US and Israel could keep these powers in check. Bruckner accuses the left of having strengthened capitalism through reforms and not touching its economic priorities, the core of commodity production.

criticism

The movement was vehemently criticized. François Aubral and Xavier Delcourt speak of a media phenomenon, a pub philosophy that was initiated by Bernard-Henri Lévy with the aim of promoting the series he heads at the Grasset publishing house . Their philosophy is empty ("vacuité").

Gilles Deleuze spoke of a return of “great concepts” in the context of simplified dualistic juxtapositions - something that his own generation fought against with good reason. The utterances of the new philosophers are empty incantations: THE FAITH, THE law, THE world, and they are self-centered: I as a member of the previous generation, of May 68, I as a Christian, I as a contemporary witness tell you ... (as Lévy in The barbarism with a human face that begins with the sentence: “I am the illegitimate child of a diabolical couple, Stalinism and fascism”). The new philosophers would not have founded a new philosophical school, which otherwise had a long tradition in France with decidedly authoritarian and inquisitorial side effects; they are literary self-marketers. Her work has been valued by journalists and television in search of "events". They are conformists and live on the martyrs and "cadavers" of Stalinist and other acts of violence. "Your thinking is zero."

Jürg Altwegg states that the anti-totalitarianism of the new philosophers has only replaced Marxism. The so-called Islam totalitarianism is a new variant of it. It is a matter of "prophylactic warfare against the new tyrants in order to avoid genocide." In the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was [...] equated with Hitler; he had fought the Kurds with gas. The bombs against his next revenant, Milošević, were also dropped in the name of coming to terms with the past: to prevent ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. At the same time, however, the anti-totalitarian intellectuals ignored the real genocide in Rwanda, in which the co-responsibility of their own country is undisputed. "Lévy actively propagated the war against Libya, advertised it to Sarkozy," and he got it ". Altwegg predicts that none of Lévy's works, which were tied to current circumstances, will survive him.

literature

  • François Aubral, Xavier Delcourt: Contre la nouvelle philosophie (= Collection idées. 380, ISSN  0530-8089 ). Gallimard, Paris 1977.
  • Gilles Deleuze : On the subject of the nouveaux philosophes et d'un problem plus general. In: Minuit. No. 24, Supplément, 1977, ( digitized ; also in: Gilles Deleuze: Deux régimes de fous et autres textes. Textes et entretiens 1975–1995. Éditions de Minuit, Paris 2003, ISBN 2-7073-1834-5 , p. 126-134).
  • Peter Dews: The Nouvelle Philosophy and Foucault. In: Economy and Society. Vol. 8, No. 2, 1979, pp. 127-171, doi : 10.1080 / 03085147900000005 .
  • Richard J. Golsan: French Writers and the Politics of Complicity. Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD 2006, ISBN 0-8018-8258-3 .
  • Peter Kampits : From Politics to Ethics. France's 'Nouvelle Philosophy'. In: Science and Worldview. 1978/2.
  • Dominique Lecourt : The Mediocracy. French Philosophy since the mid-1970s. Verso, London et al. 2001, ISBN 1-85984-793-5 .
  • Günther Schiwy : Poststructuralism and "New Philosophers" (= Rowohlt's Encyclopedia. 413). Revised new edition. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-499-55413-5 .
  • Peter Starr: Logics of Failed Revolt. French Theory after May '68. Stanford University Press, Stanford CA 1995, ISBN 0-8047-2445-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Keyword Nouvelle Philosophie on www.histophilo.com.
  2. ↑ Alain Finkielkraut : The defeat of thinking (= rororo. 12413). Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1989, ISBN 3-499-12413-0 .
  3. ↑ I'm at war. Spiegel talk with Bernard-Henri Lévy . In: Der Spiegel , April 3, 2010.
  4. ^ Bernard-Henri Lévy : The Empire and the Five Kings. America's Abdication and the Fate of the World. Henry Holt, New York NY 2019, ISBN 978-1-250-20302-1 .
  5. ^ Pascal Bruckner : Misère de la prospérité. La religion marchande et ses ennemis. Grasset, Paris 2002, ISBN 2-246-53411-9 .
  6. ↑ Aubral, Delcourt: Contre la nouvelle philosophy. Paris 1977.
  7. ↑ Deleuze on the nouveaux philosophes . Online publication of the text from Minuit , Supplément au n ° 24, May 1977 (French).
  8. ↑ Jürg Altwegg: He wanted the war, and he got it. In: faz.net, July 12, 2018.