The end of the French intellectual
Subtitle: from Zola to Houellebecq
By: Shlomo Sand ; translated by David Fernbach
Contributors: Fernbach, David, translator
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 278
ISBN-13: 9781786635082
Subjects: Intellectuals; Intellectual life; History
Work titles: Fin de l'intellectuel français?
Description: "Internationally acclaimed Israeli historian Shlomo Sand made his mark with books such as The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel. Returning here to an early fascination, he turns his attention to the figure of the French intellectual. From his student years in Paris, Sand has throughout his life come up against the 'great French thinkers'. He has an intimate knowledge of the Parisian intellectual world and its little secrets, on which he draws to overturn certain myths attaching to the figure of the 'intellectual' that France prides itself on having invented. Mixing reminiscence and analysis, he revisits a history that, from the Dreyfus Affair through to Charlie Hebdo, seems to him that of a long decline. As a long-time admirer of Zola, Sartre and Camus, Sand is staggered to see what the French intellectual has become today, in such characters as Michel Houellebecq, Éric Zemmour and Alain Finkielkraut. In a work that gives no quarter, and focuses particularly on the Judeophobia and Islamophobia of the 'elites', he casts on the French intellectual scene a gaze that is both disabused and sarcastic."--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Preface : the intellectual as object; title: a 'Selfie'?; title: Introduction : the city and the pen; title: part 1. Intellectuals in the torment of the century; title: The Dreyfus affairs : human rights or author's rights?; title: From Voltaire to Bourdieu : who are the 'true intellectuals'?; title: Marx and his descendants : symbolic capital or political capital?; title: The discreet charm of fascism : flirtation or love story?; title: Twilight of the idols : the critical intellectual domesticated?; title: part 2. Islamophobia and the intellectuals' 'rhinoceritis'; title: From Houellebecq to Charlie Hebdo : submission or humour?; title: From Finkielkraut to Zemmour : decadence or xenophobia?.