Adieu les philosophes: Que reste-t-il des Lumières?

In the very last lines of Adieu les philosophes: Que reste-t-il des Lumières?, Jean M. Goulemot recounts a Damascene moment of illumination that he had on a road near the Rastro in Madrid. Rather than being blinded by divine light, Goulemot was more modestly struck by some graffiti scrawled on a crumbling wall that read “Harto estoy del anhelo de islas” (“Weary am I of the longing for isles”). Goulemot heard in these words an echo of the defiant spirit that guided his pen during the writing of this, his latest book on the Enlightenment. Like the unknown wielder of the spray paint can, he too had grown weary of the desire for isles, weary of modern man’s utopian fantasies of paradises and perfect societies simply waiting to be discovered or built. Evoking utopias in the context of Enlightenment and Enlightenment in the context of utopias is far from a naive gesture on Goulemot’s part; this was, after all, the period marked by what Bronislaw Baczko has termed the “Lumières de l’utopie et l’utopie des Lumières.” Goulemot’s work draws on a similar dialectical tension. In it, he seeks specifically to chart out how the past and present are inextricably intertwined in the constant creation of one another, how we are as much the creators of the eighteenth century as we are its progeny, and finally, how, in our creations and reconstructions, we have often projected our own imaginations and obsessions onto an eighteenth century that would not have necessarily recognized them. Written on the cusp of a new millennium, Adieu les philosophes: Que reste-t-il des Lumières? is thus a timely, polemical, and often personal reflection on the various ways in which the eighteenth century has constructed and, more importantly, has been constructed by, its twentieth-century successors.

After two introductory chapters in which he outlines the book’s general problematic, Goulemot begins his actual investigation of twentieth-century appropriations of eighteenth-century thought in the chapter titled “Enquête sur une absence réelle et une présence illusoire” by revisiting his days as an instructor at the Sorbonne during the turbulent time of May ‘68. Turning his attention once again to the writing on the walls, Goulemot expected to discover numerous graffitied slogans that attempted to demonstrate a connection between the protests and the Enlightenment. Indeed, this was the period conventionally considered to have ushered in the great Revolution of 1789. However, Goulemot’s analysis revealed that, in their revolt, the students of Althusser and other maître penseurs who were at that time writing on the Enlightenment had generally skirted the eighteenth century in their slogans. Why? Goulemot came to understand that while the student revolts embodied a spirit of contestation easily associated with the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment itself--its writers and texts--had become completely integrated into both the doxa of the academy and the political fabric of the Republic--the two principal targets of the revolt. The agents of May ’68, therefore, had to find their sources of inspiration elsewhere. Goulemot’s point is well taken: the remnants of the Enlightenment, to return to the subtitle of his book, are not always where one would expect to find them.

And sometimes, as Goulemot demonstrates in the following chapters, these remnants are where they should not be. The central portion of Adieu les philosophes: Que reste-t-il des Lumières? is devoted to an analysis of two contemporary figures seemingly inherited from the eighteenth century: the libertine and the engaged public intellectual. According to Goulemot, contemporary society’s fascination with libertines and libertinage (hence, their constant recurrence in cinema and literature) owes more to its own narcissistic preoccupation with hedonism than to the intellectually motivated programs of the eighteenth century. As Goulemot claims, the libertine of the eighteenth century was a philosopher; that of today is often simply a debauched, pseudo-aristocratic exhibitionist. Moreover, he continues, the contemporary libertine’s attempts to portray the eighteenth century as an essentially libertine age are simply unfounded. According to him, the eighteenth century was, as the great majority of its literature and art shows, a profoundly bourgeois period, deeply devoted to establishing an ethics based on domestic, familial virtue.

The figure of the engaged intellectual poses a similar problem of influence and cultural legitimization. Here, Goulemot evokes a popularly accepted schema that traces the lineage of France’s most famous intellectuel engagé, Jean-Paul Sartre, back to Voltaire. This filiation, which, according to Goulemot, was promoted by Sartre himself, sought to justify the twentieth-century philosopher’s political activity by linking it to a long French tradition of the social engagement of intellectuals beginning with Voltaire’s interventions in the Calas and La Barre affairs. Goulemot, however, questions the historical accuracy of such a genealogy, highlighting the radical differences in context and intention between Sartre and Voltaire’s engagements.

In fact, as Goulemot will argue in two subsequent chapters titled “Les philosophes et le pouvoir (recto)” and “Le pouvoir politique et les philosophes (verso),” if there is one lesson that contemporary intellectuals should have learned from their eighteenth-century predecessors, it is that relationships between savants and institutional forms of political power are often problematic, if not even dangerous. To illustrate this, Goulemot turns to the examples of Voltaire and Diderot. These philosophes were courted by two of eighteenth-century Europe’s most infamous despots--Frederick II of Prussia and Catherine II of Russia. Fraternizing with intellectuals served a blatantly propagandistic role for the absolutist leader by legitimizing his or her image as a benefactor of art and culture in the eyes of Europe. For the intellectual, the presumably enlightened despot gave financial support, cultural recognition, and often the seductive impression of directly helping to shape social policy. However, as history has shown, this was, more often than not, only an impression. Frederick and Catherine, while fond of their reputations as generous benefactors, were disinclined to take political advice from scholars. Diderot came to understand the role he served; Voltaire did not. According to Goulemot, this should have been the lesson handed down from eighteenth- to twentieth-century intellectuals. By rubbing shoulders with totalitarian political entities, the engaged intellectual often runs the risk of being reduced to the salon lapdog or imprisoned victim of the power he serves. Sadly, as Goulemot suggests, this was a lesson not taken to heart by many modern French intellectuals.

In the final chapters of Adieu les philosophes: Que reste-t-il des Lumières?, Goulemot focuses on interpretations of the French Revolution’s heritage and on several critiques of the Enlightenment. As the prototype for all subsequent revolutions in France, whether realized or envisioned, that of 1789 has long been a site for competing interpretations. From its initial moments, thinkers have analyzed what it was, who was responsible for it, and how it applied to their own times. At the heart of Goulemot’s critique is the ambiguity surrounding twentieth-century Marxist interpretations that insisted on applying the stereotypical causes of the Revolution of 1789 (an exploited peuple, an exploiting aristocracy, etc.) to contemporary social settings. By simply returning to these images rather than reflecting upon their historical verity, these interpretations sought effectively to dehistoricize the Revolution, propping it up as a model to be followed but not questioned. In the following chapter, titled “Les Lumières en procès,” Goulemot briefly confronts the principal critiques of the Enlightenment in the twentieth century: Freud against Enlightenment preoccupations with reason and the rational, Adorno and Horkheimer’s steadfast determination to ground the atrocities of the Nazi regime on this same preoccupation with reason, and the many attempts to depict Rousseau’s political theory as “petit-bourgeois” (Marxists), “pre-Marxist” (G. Della Volpe), or “pre-totalitarian” (L. Crocker). For Goulemot, all of these visions of the Enlightenment are, in fact, more telling of our own times than of anything that can be associated with the eighteenth century.

For Goulemot, histories are always constructions, and in this respect, as he clearly states, his own work, Adieu les philosophes: Que reste-t-il des Lumières?, is no different. However, it is a construction whose primary function is to deconstruct with stinging rhetoric and erudite precision many of the readings, interpretations, and appropriations of the eighteenth century that have been made in recent times. In their place, the eighteenth century that Goulemot paints is one marked by its ambiguities and contradictions, ambiguities and contradictions that undermine conventional representations of the Enlightenment as an orderly, coherent body of thought. Goulemot’s lesson is finally one of prudence and vigilance. Scholars should possess the prudence to avoid casting their own fantasies and preoccupations onto periods that do not share them, and they should be vigilant in unmasking those who do. The eighteenth century may have created and passed on a number of key concepts to posterity, but it should not serve as a utopian site upon which men can project their own longing for isles.