How does neo-Kantianism become, in Michel Clouscard’s work, a concept that makes it possible to critique contemporary anti-Marxism?
In this preface to Simon Verdun’s thesis, Critique of Neo-Kantianism and Dialectical Reason in Michel Clouscard, Dominique Pagani places the work within Clouscard’s growing readership among young people hit hard by the crisis. He argues that neo-Kantianism becomes a concept only with Clouscard. He distinguishes the post-Kantianism of Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel, which opposed the religious co-opting of the Rousseau–Kant axis, from the anti-materialist neo-Kantianism that runs from Sartre to Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault. Returning to Mallarmé and Hölderlin, quoted in the epigraphs, he concludes with Nietzsche, Lenin, and Marx: imagination is a criterion of humanism.
Translated from the French. Read the original.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, a man accustomed to dreams comes to speak of another who is dead (the speaker sits down…).”
Mallarmé/Lecture on Villiers de L’Isle-Adam
“For they have not, the heavenly ones, all power: Mortals reach the abyss before them. So that with them the echo changes, Long is the time, but there comes to pass the True”
Hölderlin/“Mnemosyne”
I sense, in my young comrade and friend, Simon Verdun, masterly author of the immense work that he does me the honor of having me present here, I sense, or at the very least I imagine, the beginnings of a frown at the sight of the two references I dare to set here as epigraphs: two poets, one of them a “madman,” that one, and this one, seemingly shut away forever in his haughty “ivory tower,” that elitist withdrawal peculiar to “decadent” eras and milieus that have missed the boats of history! Could one choose anything more inappropriate when it comes to introducing the work of a Marxist of Michel Clouscard’s mettle, for whom the epithet “orthodox,” so often attached to him, seems to ring out in the mode of euphemism? All the more so since the very title chosen by Simon Verdun, “Critique du néo-kantisme et raison dialectique chez Michel Clouscard,” warns us clearly enough that what will be at issue here—at last!—is Clouscardian philosophy, that is, apparently the least “fun” and/or “sexy” register among all those that the author of “Le Capitalisme de la séduction” strives to make resound in the multiform profusion of a body of work that booksellers have great trouble assigning to their shelves, too subject as they are to the sole discriminations of “merchandising”: Should it be presented under the headings of Sociology? of Politics? of Economics? History? of the “Human Sciences,” or “Social” ones?
But the very title of the work that follows clearly lifts these nosographic hesitations: thus appears to us the courageous decision taken by its author to plunge us once and for all—this once, which is not the custom—into the most strictly theoretical instance of Clouscard, and for that reason the most difficult, and therefore necessarily the one least often treated as such, over the course of an exegesis that meanwhile never ceases to grow in scope. What we have in view here, over these last few years, is the singular emergence of this corpus: its reception, which, recent as it is, keeps accelerating its rise in power, within a readership that is admittedly still largely underground, dispersed across different sensibilities, often opposed ones, among different generations, but in which there easily predominate, and still, and more so with every passing day, the most dynamic elements of a youth that the ongoing crisis of Capital, the most serious since the “Great Depression” of the thirties, never ceases to put to the test, socially, with more brutality than is the case on average in the other age groups (As it strikes, at the other extreme of the pyramid of generations, that of the retired). It should come as no surprise that the work of M.Clouscard arouses such an echo among the most threatened fringes of the many students and/or young workers who have no use for the traps of the youthism peculiar to ruling classes in their phase of exhaustion.
That youth can be recognized by the fact that it tends irresistibly not to let itself be confined to the underground of the margins, and to break through the leaden cloak of society, or the gags of the single thought, if only it can spot their flaws. In the case of Simon Verdun, this manifests itself ex officio right down to his academic approach itself, inasmuch as this publication crowns, with an audacity and a force of the most uncommon kind, a doctoral thesis presented behind closed doors in the holy of holies of the E.N.S. (1), carrying off on that occasion the highest distinctions provided for the exercise, and thus getting the work of Clouscard validated and recognized at the highest level, a work that the university institution in general had until then ignored, forbidden, all but censored, even as its popularity in bookstores as well as on social networks never ceased to grow. If further proof were needed that this first attempt, far from missing the masterstroke, did not hesitate, daring the highest risks, to overcome the supreme taboos of ideological censorship, one need only pay attention to the syntagm in which the research effort here undertaken is concentrated: the concept of “neo-Kantianism in Michel Clouscard.” For it is only in the latter that “neo-Kantianism at last attains the dignity of the concept, that of “the concrete universal,” which is the very opposite of hazardous generalization, for it is indeed true that “The concept that is only the concept is not the concept”<Hegel/Philosophy of Right.> Before Clouscard, the syntagm had certainly appeared, but empirically, when it was simply a matter of designating either Kant’s immediate posterity (which one more readily classes within the movement of German idealism) or, more than two generations later, the great retreat of German socio-philosophical reflection, falling from the crests on which the fundamental breakthroughs of historical materialism had perched it, down to paddling endlessly in the meanders of the “critique of critical criticism,” from Marburg to Frankfurt by way of Baden. We are evoking these currents “with an ax,” to speak like Clouscard (2),< see below p.16>
Without dwelling on them any further, so much does the neo-Kantianism modeled by the latter imply an entirely different comprehension, in the logical sense of the term, and, consequently, an entirely different extension. All the more so since, in contrast to the ghetto in which the dominant ideology tries to lock away Clouscard’s theoretical advances—no doubt the most fundamental for postwar Marxist thought—this “social-democratic-libertarian” neo-Kantianism (3)< this is how Clouscard designates the dominant ideology from the “sixties” to the present day, before stabilizing his lexicon by creating the syntagm “Libertarian liberalism,” which has since come quite some way!>is more than abundantly documented. We must nevertheless note right away, without giving away the details of the matter, which Simon Verdun painstakingly tracks throughout his work, that these two neo-Kantianisms, far from appearing as two species belonging to the same genus, stand rather in an inverse relation, particularly in their respective references to the properly Kantian matrix, to the point that, to avoid any conflation, it is better to designate the immediate Kantian posterity precisely as a Post-Kantianism. It is indeed remarkable that Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel, the three accomplices of the Tübingen Stift, never cease in their correspondence, by turns, to denounce the co-optation of the Rousseau-Kant axis by “the priestly rabble,” applying themselves—already!—to skewering this nascent neo-Kantianism. Simon Verdun, at the opposite pole from these troubled waters, shows forcefully that this “Rousseau-Kant axis” is the one on which Clouscard erects the concept most antonymous to that of “neo-Kantianism,” and which he designates as clearly as could be as that of a “Philosophy of the French Revolution.” Whereas, conversely, from the 1860s to our “sixties,” this neo-Kantianism properly so called, far from attacking religious or metaphysical axiology, in the pre-Kantian sense, rather takes as its anti-model positivist materialism, but also and above all the “dogmatic,” even ossified, dialectical materialism that a Marxism cannot fail to become, under the effect of some “virtus dogmaticans” or other, when it has the audacity—the very audacity whose torch Clouscard takes up—not only to dismiss formalism and empiricism alike, but also and above all to denounce analytically their “dark and profound unity.”(4)<Baudelaire/“Correspondences”>
It is in view of the great complexity of these problems, of this tangle in which logical necessity And chronological genesis are constantly braided together, that Simon Verdun proves remarkably attentive both to the conceptual rigor inherent in the former and to the documentary profusion deployed in the latter: the anti-materialist tropism of this “historical” neo-Kantianism, as he admirably pinpoints it in the Clouscardian notion of “The bestowal of meaning by the ante-predicative” (5)<cf. below, at the end of chapter 2: “Les quatre axes du modèle néo-kantien”> remains that dowsing rod which leads him unfailingly to the deductive declension of the avatars peculiar to contemporary anti-Marxism, our own, that of the postwar period or of the “Cold War,” from Sartre to Derrida, from existentialism to structuralism, then, in the direction of a resistible entropy, to track down, against the grain of the admirable Paths of praxis traced by Clouscard, the entropic slope that descends from Deleuze and Foucault to the media operation of the “new philosophers,” down to the present philosophical poverty, forcing thought into this binary choice, leaving no alternative but the naturalist—hence anhumanist—lights of logical positivism, or else, more disquieting still, the “poematic” darkness of the most Nazi of philosophers, whence issued, through his closest female disciple as intermediary, the abject “anti-totalitarian” posture struck from the very outbreak of the “Cold War.” “I am weary of all poets: They muddy their waters so that they may seem deep,” declares Zarathustra, in total opposition to the Nietzsche of the likes of Deleuze, Derrida, and other members of that fellowship in which Foucault ranked them, lodging himself there as well, when he confesses, “We are all neo-Kantians!” I am keen to conclude this preface on this disavowal—Nietzschean!—of aestheticism—so as to loop back to the two poets who had opened it as epigraphs, inasmuch as Simon Verdun, who was not “born yesterday,” knows the most topical classics of dialectical materialism well enough never to forget Lenin’s “Dreaming is necessary,” and just as little to overlook “the clumsiest architect...” whom Marx sets opposite “The most expert of bees,” so as to recognize there, as the unfailing criterion of that humanism which contemporary neo-Kantianism strives to annihilate, the fact “that he represents his house to himself before producing it in reality,” and that this projection into the imaginary, far from departing from materialism, is itself made possible only on the basis of a world forged by that praxis within which, a principio, men carry out “The social production of their existence” (6)<“A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”/Preface >