Translated from the French. Read the original.
The indispensable work of Michel Clouscard, whose audience keeps growing on the ruins of postmodernity, is enriched by a precious counterpoint: for the first time, here is the man, recounted in the singular day-to-day of his existence, over the course of a narrative that frees itself from the conventional codes of biography. This narrative cannot be reduced to a pile of anecdotes meant to give flesh and blood to the “dreary empire of the concept.” It gives us access to the voice of a philosopher in situation, who, like Rousseau, the only forerunner in whom Clouscard ever recognized himself, hangs his life upon the true, and rediscovers, in the innermost depths of the psyche, the millennia-old pulsations of collective praxis.
Michel Clouscard, his theses, his persona, were ridiculed and marginalized by the dominant intellectual circles, of which François de Negroni sketches a ferocious portrait. His ways of living or of thinking ran too radically counter to the permissive injunctions of the time and to the celebrated ideologues of desire. No one ever waged a more severe critique of libertarian liberalism. And yet, from many a savory detail throughout the book, one realizes that with Clouscard, the right to happiness, provided it is not imposed as a duty, remains the decisive revolutionary determination.
Dominique Pagani