[lit-ideas] Resistance

  • From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:05:57 -0800

From page 53 of Tony Judt's Past Imperfect, French Intellectuals, 1944-1956:

 

". . . resistance, the condition of being anti-something. . . .  The appeal
of the Communists (and of de Gaulle as well) , was that they not only spoke
for the nonintellectual masses but existed for the express purpose of
opposing and overturning the status quo. . . ."

 

"In this way of thinking, all experience, all of society was necessarily
divided into two irreconcilable parts, whose differences could not be
bridged by good intentions, nor by a resort to Kantian universals.  And so
the last, the most embracing of the styles of thought inherited from the
lessons of the Occupation, came to this: life consists of a series of
encounters with an enemy.  Everything was classified in Manichaean terms:
Communists/capitalists, Soviet Union/United States, right/wrong, good/evil,
them/us.  Tertium non datur.  It was once again Sartre who gave this idea
its most rarified expression.  Hell being other people, one found one's own
identity through one's enemy, through the opposition of others; thus, it was
better to choose that identity than have it imposed from the outside.  But
no one needed to resort to existentialist metaphysics in order to share and
understand the basic principle.  The imaginative exercise of empathy, the
wish to understand the reasoning of those with whom one disagreed, was not
widespread among French intellectuals in the aftermath of liberation.  The
point, after all, was not to understand the world but to change it, and for
that one did not need to know what the Other felt or thought but only who it
was."

 

Lawrence

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