power of negative thinking, The

Spectator, The, Jun 25, 2005 by Scruton, Roger

I emerge alone and in dread in the face of the unique and first project that constitutes my being: all the barriers, all the railings, collapse, annihilated by the consciousness of my liberty; I have not, nor can I have, recourse to any value against the fact that it is I who maintain values in being; nothing can assure me against myself; cut off from the world and my essence by the nothing that I am, I have to realise the meaning of the world and my essence: I decide it, alone, unjustifiable, and without excuse.

The entire trajectory of Sartre's post-war decline, from the explosive brilliance of Being and Nothingness to the dreary totalitarianism of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, is foretold in that passage. To build a 'commitment' on the premise of negation alone is to launch oneself on the path of enmity - enmity towards every normality, every loyalty, every natural dependency of man on man. This, and this alone, provides the thread that binds the anti-hero of the novels and plays to the melancholy biographer of Flaubert, and to the tub-thumping defender of the Soviet, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban and Cambodian revolutionaries namely the visceral need to place a sign of negation in front of 'bourgeois' France.

And it worked. Thanks to Sartre it became little short of obligatory for the post-war French intellectual to define himself in opposition to the 'bourgeoisie', and to espouse the causes, whatever they might be, of the loathsome French Communist party. Dissenters like Albert Camus and Raymond Aron were not merely ostracised by Sartre and his followers, but subjected to massive show trials and witch hunts in the pages of Les Temps modernes, and hounded out of the cafés where everything happened - everything, in this case, meaning Nothing with a capital N.

When, in 1958, de Gaulle stepped in to rescue France from its self-inflicted chaos, the agenda took on a new urgency, with the General as its target. The Sixties brought to prominence the new generation of intellectuals - Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze - who had found ways of refreshing the tired old anti-bourgeois message, and who owed everything to the Sartrean orthodoxy, from which they departed only in the meaningless details that distinguish theologian from theologian in the ongoing commentary on Nothing. They swept away what remained of the Catholic culture of France, gave heart to the soixantehuitards, and handed on the task of negation to their 'deconstructionist' successors at the journal Tel Quel, whose rising star, Jacques Derrida, was later to travel the world with the new gift of nothing, this time without the capital N.

The French have not recovered from Sartre and perhaps never will. For they have had to live with an intellectual establishment that has consistently repudiated the two things that hold the country together: Christianity and the idea of France. The anti-bourgeois posture of the left-bank intellectual has entered the political process, and given rise to an elite for whom nothing is certain save the repudiation of the national idea. It is thanks to this elite that the mad project of European Union has become indelibly inscribed in the French political process, even though the people of France reject it. It is thanks to this elite that the mass immigration into France of unassimilable Muslim communities has been both encouraged and subsidised. It is thanks to this elite that socialism has been so firmly embedded in the French state that no one now can reform it. And it is thanks to this elite that, even today, when the ordinary French citizen has had the antibourgeois message up to the eyeballs - rasle-bol - the intellectual agenda remains unchanged, with transgression as its dominating purpose.