{"id":15232,"date":"2017-03-14T11:35:01","date_gmt":"2017-03-14T15:35:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=15232"},"modified":"2017-03-14T12:08:07","modified_gmt":"2017-03-14T16:08:07","slug":"15232","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/15232\/","title":{"rendered":"R\u00e9gis Debray “Chez Lui”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"R\u00e9gis Debray \u2014 as those who know me will be well aware \u2014 has been a writer, thinker & activist I have greatly admired & have kept reading & rereading for 40+ years. Gathering work for a book of essays, I came across my\u00a0review of a book\u00a0of journalistic articles by Debray called L\u2019esp\u00e9rance au Purgatoire<\/i>, or Hope in Purgatory<\/i> \u2014 published back in 1980 by\u00a0The New Statesman<\/i> in London. I thought it worthwhile to post this piece today\u00a0\u2014 in the hope that it might help spark what I perceive as a needed reassessment of how we, poets, writers & intellectuals working in these Disunited States right now need to (re)focus our attempts to resist & (re)act.
\n
\n<\/a>The question of the public intellectual \u2014 or rather of his\/her absence \u2014 in this country has often exercised me. Here we have to rely mainly on journalists & pundits, in print or on TV who deal with the immediate day-by-day events \u2014 in itself an overwhelming task right now, given Trumpian tactics of drowning out\/covering up the actual facts and events with a barrage of irrelevant twitter jabber. I\u2019d love to see a greater involvement of those whose intellectual work in the arts I admire & on whose writings I have drawn to widen & deepen my own sense of the world.<\/p>\n

Maybe we can get some inspiration from an old European habit. As\u00a0Umberto Eco wrote in his Preface to the American Edition of Travels in Hyperreality<\/i>:\u00a0 \u201c\u2026It is true that along with my academic job, I also write regularly for newspapers and magazines, where, in terms less technical than in my books on semitiotics, I discuss various aspects of daily life, ranging from sport to politics and culture\u2026.this habit is common to all European intellectuals, in Germany, France, Spain, and, naturally, Italy: all countries where a scholar or scientist often feels required to speak out in the papers, to comment, if only from the point of view of his own interests and special field, on events that concern all citizens. \u2026. if there was any problem with this it was not my problem as a European intellectual; it was more a problem of American intellectuals, who live in a country where the division of labor between university professors and militant intellectuals is much more strict than in our countries\u2026.There is, then, a difference in \u201cpatterns of culture.\u201d Cultural anthropologists accept cultures in which people eat dogs, monkeys, frogs, and snakes, and even cultures where adults chew gum, so it should be alright for countries to exist where university professors contribute to the newspapers.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

And here, the R\u00e9gis Debray review:<\/p>\n

\n

R\u00e9gis Debray <\/b>Chez Lui<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u2018I detest journalists but revere journalism. I refuse the title of journalist but claim its quality . . . Journalism is not my profession but my curse . . .\u2019 Thus Regis Debray in the introduction to his collection of articles entitled Hope in Purgatory, <\/i>one of two books by him published earlier this year. The book is divided into two main sections: \u2018French Circumstances\u2019 and \u2018South American Circumstances\u2019. The earliest piece, \u2018I saw Cuba learning to read\u2019, dates from 1962, when Debray was in his early twenties; the most recent one, published in 1979, is a report on the Sixth Conference of non-aligned countries held in Havana that year. His perennial concern with South America thus frames\u2014and to some extent overshadows, in sheer quantity as well as importance\u2014his French concerns.<\/p>\n

Those articles demonstrate once again that Debray is one of the most brilliant, if not the most brilliant, commentator on South American political affairs. The September \u201979 article on the aftermath of the victorious Nicaraguan revolution is by far the best analysis of the political situation and of the ideological choices confronting that country I\u2019ve read so far.<\/p>\n

The pieces dealing with France were all written between 1973, the date of Debray\u2019s return from South America, and March 1978, when the left-wing parties were defeated in the parliamentary elections. Although less weighty than the South American articles, they are interesting on two counts. Firstly, for his response to attacks from the far left who interpreted his support of the (unhappily short-lived) \u2018Union de la Gauche\u2019 as treasonable in view of his revolutionary past. How could the man who had left France to stand at the Che\u2019s side in the Bolivian jungle now sidle up to as dubious a political figure as Mitterand? Debray\u2019s answer is, on the one hand, a caustic castigation of those ultra leftist French salon-revolutionaries who, he says, gloat over a poster of a pin-up, romanticize a dead Che, while dismissing the efforts \u2018of a live Castro, in charge of a country, making alliances, and busying himself\u2014oh shame\u2014with matters of productivity, with cement factories and sugar cane\u2019. On the other hand it is a clear and sharp lesson in Realpolitik: France is governed by \u2018a bourgeoisie which by now has lost even its bourgeois morality and values\u2019, a bunch of adipose paunches it is essential to defeat at any costs (he calls it \u2018a question of human dignity\u2019, \u2018an enterprise of public hygiene\u2019). Given that \u2018revolution is within grasp only once or twice a century\u2019, that \u2018there is presently no revolutionary situation in France\u2019 where the only road to power is the electoral road, one\u2019s best bet is to back the left-wing coalition.<\/p>\n

This stance certainly does not imply an uncritical allegiance to the left\u2019s \u2018joint program\u2019 by Debray, who, among other things sharply criticizes the Socialist Party\u2019s and draws on his experience in Chile (where he lived between his release from a Bolivian jail and his eventual return to France) to show how the far left is unable to organize the masses and how a valid strategy for seizing power can only be worked out inside an organized workers\u2019 movement.<\/p>\n

All of Debray\u2019s articles backing the left coalition are from 1973 and 1974. The next one is dated 29 September, 1977\u2014six days after the negotiations on the left\u2019s joint program broke down. Here lies the second point of interest of these pieces, in that the remaining articles foreshadow the direction Debray\u2019s work has followed since then. The first piece is an analysis of what he calls the left\u2019s century-old n\u00e9vrose obsessionnelle <\/i>with elaborating and signing political programs. He discusses this obsession in quasi-psychoanalytical terms, referring to a \u2018religious phantasm\u2019 and to a \u2018juridical phantasm\u2019. Why, he asks, this obsession with the Text? Because the left\u2019s original project wants men to pass from a history inflicted upon them to a history they consciously master, it is in the left\u2019s nature to define that project<\/i> <\/b>in an objective, coherent and verifiable program \u2014something capitalism has no need of. But, he goes on to say, over the last 20 years our society has moved from \u2018It\u2019s true, I\u2019ve read it in the paper\u2019, to \u2018It\u2019s true, I\u2019ve seen it on the telly\u2019. According to Debray, television plays into the hands of the right because the right has understood that TV is \u2018not so much a technique, but an ideology, their own\u2019. But \u2018the left has not yet understood that major phenomenon and still imagines that it can use television without first being used by it\u2019.<\/p>\n

Since the writing of those few pieces concerned with television, Debray has completed a two-volume Treatise on Mediology, <\/i>now awaiting publication. He is one of the finest journalists working\u2014 even if a reluctant one. In his work there is no sign of the lukewarm, ironic distancing often falsely labeled \u2018objectivity\u2019 of so much that passes for reporting. His writing is polemical\u2014 from polemos, <\/i>the fight: \u2018As a journalist I never write about <\/i>but against \u2014 <\/i>someone or myself.\u2019 He acknowledges his deeply ambiguous stance towards journalism: \u2018I don\u2019t like myself as a journalist,\u2019 says on the one hand the bourgeois intellectual \u00e9crivain, <\/i>dreaming of Flaubertian seclusion and finely honed prose and despising the hack whose hurried commentaries find a precarious home on that most perishable of cultural commodities, newsprint. And that assessment is echoed by \u2018the sacrificial militant\u2019, who does not like the \u2018witnesses of their times, those impostors\u2019, who always seem to arrive when the fight is over, lost or won, \u2018who live history by proxy\u2019, phoning in their reports between two whiskies without ever leaving the local Hilton. But he is also aware that journalism, \u2018his curse\u2019, fulfills a \u201ccardinal function . . . in that it implies an instant <\/i>relation, without filter or safety net, with the empirical event\u2019. The writer, theoretician or academic critic, can indulge in black or white distinctions and attempt to play god, but \u2018there is journalism because there are shady, gray areas and because we are not god . . . No knowledge is able to exhaust an actual event in advance. Journalism lives precisely from the tension between the attainments of knowledge and the unforeseen of experience.\u2019 It is the friction of those two poles that provides the spark of successful journalistic writings, a spark that Debray has ignited on many occasions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

R\u00e9gis Debray \u2014 as those who know me will be well aware \u2014 has been a writer, thinker & activist I have greatly admired & have kept reading & rereading for 40+ years. Gathering...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,61,1532],"tags":[1914],"class_list":["post-15232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intellectuals","category-journalism","category-writing","tag-regis-debray"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15232"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15237,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15232\/revisions\/15237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}