French Theory: the recall notice France never issued
When an automaker discovers that a defective component has made its way into millions of vehicles on the road, it issues a recall. It does not argue that the part worked fine when it left the factory. It does not claim the drivers misused it. It acknowledges the defect, absorbs the cost, and makes the repair.
No nation has ever issued a recall notice for an intellectual product. I propose that France pioneer the exercise, and I will start at my own scale, that of one citizen who writes. The product in question was manufactured in Paris between the 1960s and the 1980s. It now circulates through every institution in the West under a name that is not even ours: French Theory. If the name means nothing to you, its effects will. It is what murmurs beneath the debates over who has the right to translate a poem, beneath the Roald Dahl novels rewritten out of caution, beneath the corporate trainings where employees learn to hunt down their own biases, beneath every toppled statue and every word we no longer dare say out loud.
Let us be precise about what we actually produced, because the indictment is usually poorly drafted. Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze were never a school. They rarely cited one another, did not always care for one another, and would likely have rejected the shared label. It was the American university that shelved them side by side, as François Cusset established in the book that bears precisely that title. France, in other words, did not deliver a working machine. It delivered three separate mechanisms, each signed with a prestigious name, each warranted by our most respected institutions.
The first mechanism bears the signature of Michel Foucault. It reduces all knowledge to a maneuver. In its author’s hands the matter was subtler than the summary suggests, a question of regimes of truth rather than a denial of truth, and orthodox Foucauldians will be quick to say so. No matter. A concept also belongs to its posterity, and the posterity of this one comes down to an equation that has become a reflex: knowledge is domination. The hospital, the courtroom, the school, the laboratory, so many masks laid over relations of force. Concretely: when your doctor renders a judgment, it is no longer that he knows something; it is that he is exercising power over you. The second mechanism, signed Jacques Derrida, dissolves meaning. No text says anything stable, no utterance binds its author, every interpretation is as good as any other. Your contract, your Constitution, your Gospel mean only what today’s reader decides to find in them. The third mechanism, stamped Gilles Deleuze, reverses the polarity of inheritance: rootedness becomes a pathology, fidelity a prison, every limit a form of violence. Preferring what you have inherited to whatever happens to be circulating becomes suspect in itself.
Each of these mechanisms, taken alone, feeds a legitimate philosophical debate. It is their assembly in series that produces the toxic effect, and that assembly required a particular environment. The American campus supplied it: a gaping historical guilt, a moralism inherited from the founding sects, an obsessive relationship to group belonging. On that terrain the graft took hold with a vigor Paris would never have allowed. Judith Butler drew from it her theory of gender as performance: no one is born a man or a woman, we play the role, and a role can be rewritten. Edward Said built from it the study of the colonial gaze as an academic discipline: the West never described the Orient, it only justified its domination of it. Other constructions, intersectionality first among them (the idea that oppressions accumulate and that each of us is defined by our group memberships), came out of purely American workshops, those of Black feminism and critical legal studies, but they found in this general climate of suspicion the atmosphere that let them breathe. And the climate bore our trademark.
At this point the objection raises itself: if the mechanisms were not defective when they left the factory, and the assembly was American, why should the recall be French? Because product liability law has anticipated precisely this case. Recalls are issued not only for design defects but for failure to warn, when the manufacturer knew the reasonably foreseeable use of its product and omitted the warning. We delivered precision instruments, designed for hands trained by three centuries of rationalism, to buyers who had neither that training nor any intention of acquiring it. No manual, no safeguards. And our masters watched the assembly line run, at times encouraged it, and at no point stood in its way: Foucault at Berkeley before packed, rapturous lecture halls, Derrida spending three decades between Yale and Irvine watching his concepts become an industry. The manufacturer who tours the plant where his product is being repurposed and walks out flattered can no longer plead ignorance.
It remains to establish the exact nature of the defect, and I want to do so without theatrics. Every durable society rests on a small number of shared convictions: that reality is knowable and reason gives access to it, that some ways of living are better than others and this can be demonstrated, that what the dead have left us deserves to be handed on to the living who follow. Remove these convictions and there is nothing left to teach, nothing to judge, nothing to defend. The assembled product attacks precisely these three load-bearing points. It has trained entire cohorts of graduates who can dismantle any argument and are incapable of making one. Minds drilled to sniff out the ulterior motive and disarmed before the plain evidence of beauty. A clerisy that can detect a structure of oppression in a grammar textbook but could not say why its own civilization deserves to be continued. And the product is now coming back to us by the containerload, reimported in its American version: our television panels have their permanent moral tribunal, our historic advocacy groups tear themselves apart over identity categories that owe everything to Berkeley and nothing to the Republic, and our European institutions fund the ideological rewriting of their own history.
None of this is my discovery, and that is exactly the problem. The indictment of la pensée 68 was drawn up here in the mid-1980s, first by the philosophers Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, then by others, and the debate has been purring along in the ideas pages of our journals for forty years. But an indictment is not a product recall. Diagnosing the defect at the neighbor’s house while continuing to collect royalties on the national prestige is precisely the posture I refuse. A debt is not extinguished because it is well documented.
I can hear the objection about timing: the wave is receding, American universities are backpedaling, why apologize for a fire that is burning itself out. An insurer’s answer: you tally the damage after the disaster, not during it. And the retreat of a fashion does not restore the faculties it atrophied. A generation trained in systematic dismantling does not relearn admiration through a mere change in the intellectual weather. The liability is there, it is counted in minds, and it will sit on our balance sheet for a long time.
Where should we look for the recovery? Not to the commentary industry, which lives off the very disaster it deplores. For a long time I looked for it among the builders, and they do hold a real share of it. Wherever people produce instead of commenting, in machine shops as much as among those who write code that actually runs, among those who would rather own their servers than rent their digital existence from intermediaries, the three convictions survive in practical form. Reality is held to be knowable because they bend it every day; hierarchy goes without saying because artifacts either work or they don’t; transmission endures because every trade is learned from an elder. But let us not kid ourselves: practice preserves these convictions, it does not regenerate them. An engineer can bend reality all week and still recite, come Sunday, on gender or history or the nation, the received categories of the very university he believes he despises. The workshop shields the craftsman; it does not reeducate the clerisy. Whoever outsources his convictions to the spirit of the age has already accepted the cognitive crutch, however strong his hands may be. Corrupted thought cannot be routed around by practice. It has to be repaired by thought.
And this is where the French debt finds its repayment plan. Since what the world lacks is not builders but a body of thought worthy of them, that thought is what we must put back into production, we who stopped producing it in order to regulate our decline rather than build our future. The inventory exists. We invented the methodical examination of reality before anyone else, thought about democracy and its gentle downward slopes with a lucidity no one has matched, and for centuries ran the workshop where Europe came to learn how to reason. The world bought our reasons to doubt everything. It would just as readily buy our reasons to hold onto something, if we started making them again.
The recall notice is hereby issued. Now comes the warranty work: writing what holds, teaching what is worth keeping, replacing piece by piece what we ourselves sabotaged. Consider this essay the first replacement part.