Tribune. The other day in The world, hundreds of researchers and academics have denounced a “witch hunt” launched by their supervisory minister, Mr.me Vidal. I found their text a bit strong of coffee. To avoid the slightest suspicion of gendered micro-aggression, I will never say that Mr.me Vidal just wants to clean her house. If, from its panoptic positioning, it spots witches, it obviously has to chase them away, even if Donald Trump has deviated the formula, for lack of knowing the Malleus Maleficarum, canonical manual of the witch hunt dating from the XVe century.
I speak from experience: if we, the American university researchers, had been as reactive as the vigilant Macronians of today, we could, from the beginning of the 1980s, have prevented the toxic infestation of our variant of the ‘Islamo-leftism’, by chasing wizards carrying the ‘French theory’ (in French: French Theory), which has quite plagued our intellectual body (and its militant double) for several decades.
Subversive figures
There have been several waves, many inflections: among many philosophers, linguists, semiologists, historians, sociologists, psychoanalysts stand out three particularly subversive figures, all three students of the Ecole normale supérieure and agrégés in philosophy (that’s already all). say, almost the start of a conspiracy), “thinkers” (priesthood not very American, outside the apostolic framework), real sorcerers, capable of attracting 500 people for a “seminar”, of keeping them under the spell of their talk for three to four hours, despite the American inclination to come home to dinner at five o’clock.
First, Michel Foucault – who questioned notions generally considered to be intrinsically clear (“discourse”, “author”) – forced us to confront subjectivity, to rethink the relations between discipline and social order, between power and knowledge, between sexuality and repression. Former communist, then Maoist, gay: fortunately he was neither Jewish nor black, because, with the rest, he would never have obtained an American visa.
Less sulphurous, but no less socially, politically, morally and publicly committed, Pierre Bourdieu weighed heavily on the way of understanding and studying social relations, in particular through his analyzes of the mechanisms of reproduction of social hierarchies and of domination, refusing to privilege economic factors over symbolic and cultural factors.
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