In his L’ingratitude: Conversation sur notre temps (French Edition) , Alain Finkielkraut cites Roland Barthes’s inaugural lecture at the College of France: “Language, as performance of the language system, is neither reactionary nor progressive. It is simply fascist: for fascism is not the prohibition of saying things but the obligation to say them.” (Why doesn’t he stop talking? Because he thinks there’s a “Utopia of language” that will break through.)
Finkielkraut responds: “Structure is oppressive, says the structuralist, who despite appearances, shares with the existentialist, his enemy, the dream of a subject capable of subtracting all he has received and deciding sovereignly his own being” (p. 143).
And behind the existentialist is the Cartesian. How far we have come since ‘68!
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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