Bibliographie
ADORNO Theodor, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, New York: Columbia U.P, 1991.
ADORNO Theodor, Jargon de l’authenticité, trans. Éliane Escoubas, Paris, Payot, 1989.
APPLEBY Joyce O., HUNT Lynn A. and Margaret JACOB, Telling the Truth About History, New York: W.W. Norton, 1994.
BOURDIEU Pierre, La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1979.
BOUVERESSE Jacques, Prodiges et vertiges de l’analogie, Paris: Raisons d’agir, 1999.
BOUVERESSE Jacques, opening address, Colloque du Collège de France, 28 May 2010, Rationalité, vérité et démocratie : Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Noam Chomsky. <http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/jacques-bouveresse/p1358779596483_content.htm>
CHOMSKY Noam, Hopes and Prospects, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010.
CHOMSKY Noam, “Power Hunger Tempered by Self-deception”, title of the Collège de France address.
CORM Georges, Le Nouveau gouvernement du monde. Idéologies, structures, contre-pouvoirs, Paris: La Découverte, 2010.
EAGLETON Terry, Why Marx Was Right, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
GLISSANT Édouard, Introduction à une politique du divers, Paris: Gallimard, 1996.
GOTTLIEB Erika, The Orwell Conundrum, Canada: Carleton University Press, 1992.
GUERLAIN Pierre, « Affaire Sokal : Swift sociologue; les Cultural Studies entre jargon, mystification et recherche », Annales du Monde Anglophone, n° 9, 1er semestre 1999, 141-160.
GUERLAIN Pierre, “Noam Chomsky et l’université” in Jean Bricmont et Julie Franck (dir.), Cahier de l’Herne, Livre 88, “Chomsky,” Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2007, 244-258.
HITCHENS Christopher, Why Orwell Matters, New York: Basic Books, 2002.
KLEMPERER Viktor, LTI, la langue du troisième Reich, Paris: Albin Michel, 1996.
LEYS Simon, Orwell ou l’Horreur de la politique, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994.
MICHÉA Jean-Claude, Orwell, anarchiste tory, Castelnau-les-Lez: Climats, 1995.
ORWELL George, Inside the Whale and Other Essays, London: Victor Gollancz, 1940.
ORWELL George, Homage to Catalonia, London: Penguin, 2003. [Secker & Warburg, 1938]
ORWELL George, “Politics and the English Language,” in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, London: Secker & Warburg, 1950. Also available at <https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm>
PATAI Daphne, The Orwell Mystique: a Study in Male Ideology, Amherst (MA): University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.
SAID Edward, Reflexions on Exile and other essays, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press 2000.
SOKAL Alan, Beyond the Hoax, Science, Philosophy, Culture, New York, Oxford University Press, 2010.
SOKAL Alan, BRICMONT Jean, Impostures intellectuelles, Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997, trans. as Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, New York: Picador USA, 1999, c1998.
TODOROV Tzvetan, Mémoire du mal, tentation du bien : enquête sur le siècle, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2002.
TODOROV Tzvetan, La Critique de la critique, Un roman d’apprentissage, Paris: Le Seuil, 1984.
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Notes
“Defend the right to be offended,” Open Democracy, 7 February, 2005, <https://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-europe_islam/article_2331.jsp>
The American Ideology, New York: Routledge, 2004, 13 (discussed 19-23).
Mark Falcoff, “The Perversion of Language; or, Orwell Revisited,” National Review, 4 December, 2009. See <http://www.aei.org/publication/the-perversion-of-language-or-orwell-revisited/>
Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters, New York: Basic Books, 2002. See also Adam Hochschild, “Orwell: Homage to the ‘Homage,’” New York Review of Books, 19 December, 2013.
In his Reflexions on Exile and other essays (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, 96), Said writes: “When he was not verbally abusing people he considered opponents or competitors, he was holing up as a reviewer of more or less unchallenging books.” In a book of conversations with David Barsamian (Culture and Resistance) he even accused Orwell of anti-Semitism. Orwell published an essay which cannot be construed as condoning anti-Semitism in any way: “Antisemitism in Britain,” Contemporary Jewish Record, London, April 1945. Available at <http://orwell.ru/library/articles/antisemitism/english/e_antib>
Colloque du Collège de France, 28 May 2010, Rationalité, vérité et démocratie : Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Noam Chomsky, <http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/jacques-bouveresse/p1358779596483_content.htm>
Orwell’s quotation includes the word “nationalism”. “Nationalism is Power Hunger Tempered by Self-deception.”
My translation. For the original version in French, see <http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/jacques-bouveresse/p1358779596483_content.htm>
Thus Erika Gottlieb writes: “In 1984, conservatives, liberals, neo-conservatives and the New Left battled over the possession of Orwell’s political legacy often blithely oblivious to the literary text, let alone aesthetic considerations.” Erika Gottlieb, The Orwell Conundrum, Canada: Carleton University Press, 1992, p. 3.
For example, in a book about mostly other topics, French writer Roland Gori pays Orwell the following backhanded compliment which suggests a strange conception of the relation between fiction and thinking: «C’est un peu comme si avec le système technicien et l’économie capitaliste auquel il appartient, nous risquions de rendre possible ce rêve, ou plutôt ce cauchemar, d’une tyrannie en germe dans toute philosophie politique, ce que l’écriture de fiction d’un Orwell avait anticipé sans l’avoir analysé. ». La Fabrique des imposteurs, Paris : Les Liens qui libèrent, 2013, 156-7.
See, among others, <http://leaksource.info/2013/12/24/a-christmas-message-from-edward-snowden-video/> and Glenn Greenwald: “Orwell, 9/11, Emmanuel Goldstein and Wikileaks,” <http://www.wikileaks-forum.com/-wikileaks-related-news/23/glenn-greenwald-orwell-911-emmanuel-goldstein-and-wikileaks/4826/msg20819#msg20819>
Daphne Patai argues in The Orwell Mystique: a Study in Male Ideology that Orwell was a male supremacist and homophobic writer.
Victor Klemperer, LTI, la langue du troisième Reich, Paris: Albin Michel, 1996. (original German publication, LTI, Notizbuch eines Philologen, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1947). One could also read such celebrations as that by Hans Magnus Enzensberger “Armer Orwell” (Poor Orwell) in Der Spiegel, 26 March 2012 (142-143), which acknowledges Orwell’s visionary comprehension of totalitarianism yet claims that things are now much worse than he foresaw, mostly because people accept tyranny even without a dictatorship. This is a direct reference to La Boétie’s idea of “voluntary servitude”. Available at: <http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-84519417.html>
Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” The New York Review of Books, 23 February 1967.
“The enemy is the gramophone mind whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.” (“The Freedom of the Press,” unpublished preface to Animal Farm.)
« Il n’y a rien hors du texte – un texte ne doit être lu que dans sa texture propre, sans référent, ni signifié transcendantal, ni hors-texte. » Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, Paris : Éditions de Minuit, 1967, 227. One interpretation of this “axiom” (propos axial) can be found at <http://www.idixa.net/Pixa/pagixa-0512152008.html>. It is, of course, beyond the scope of this paper to discuss this proposition.
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch02.htm> See also “Words from Abroad,” Notes to Literature, vol. 1, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 185-199.
« Langues et langages », in Introduction à une politique du divers, Paris: Gallimard, 1996.
See for instance the article published by Friedrich Engels in Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 15 February 1949 under the title “Der Demokratische Panslawismus” (Democratic Pan Slavism) and the quotation which can be found in German at: http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me06/me06_270.htm. Translated into English, it reads: “Will Bakunin accuse the Americans of a ‘war of conquest’, which, although it deals […] a severe blow to his theory based on ‘justice and humanity’, was nevertheless waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilization? [my emphasis]. Or is it perhaps unfortunate that splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it? That the energetic Yankees by rapid exploitation of the California gold mines will increase the means of circulation, in a few years will concentrate a dense population and extensive trade at the most suitable places on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, create large cities, open up communications by steamship, construct a railway from New York to San Francisco, for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to civilization, and for the third time in history give […] world trade a new direction? The ‘independence’ of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, in some places ‘justice’ and other moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter to such facts of world-historic significance?” Found at < http://www.workersliberty.org/node/989>. Terry Eagleton deals with this topic in an astute way showing both the conservative ideas entertained by Marx and Engels and also their changes over time and the complexity of the issue of colonization and progress. Why Marx Was Right, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
Class at the Université populaire de Caen, broadcast by France Culture radio on 16 August, 2011: <http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-conferences-de-michel-onfray-erich-fromm-et-la-psychanalyse-humaniste-2011-08-16.html>.
T.W. Adorno, Jargon de l’authenticité , translated by Éliane Escoubas, Paris: Payot, 1989.
Here is a typical tribute paid by Chomsky to Orwell: “Easy contradiction is an important talent to acquire, the talent for Orwell’s ‘doublethink’: the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, while accepting both of them.” N. Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010, 45. Thus Chomsky the linguist accepts an intellectual debt to Orwell the non-linguist for what matters here is the psychological and sociological insight which have now become common knowledge.
“Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves.” The Prince, ch 18.
See Tzvetan Todorov, Mémoire du mal, tentation du bien : enquête sur le siècle, Paris: Robert Laffont, 2002.
See: “Lickety splits: two nations divided by a common language. Are there too many ‘Americanisms’ in The Guardian?”, The Guardian, November 26, 2010.
Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994.
Here is a typical comment by Chomsky: “ Left intellectuals took an active part in the lively working class culture. Some sought to compensate for the class character of the cultural institutions through programs of workers’ education, or by writing best-selling books on mathematics, science, and other topics for the general public. Remarkably, their left counterparts today often seek to deprive working people of these tools of emancipation, informing us that the “project of the Enlightenment” is dead, that we must abandon the “illusions” of science and rationality – a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use.” Year 501: The Conquest Continues, Boston: South End Press, 1993. Quoted by Alan Sokal in Beyond the Hoax, Science, Philosophy, Culture, Oxford University Press, 2010, XVII. Jacques Bouveresse explicitly established a link between Orwell and Chomsky: « Tout comme George Orwell, Chomsky trouve difficilement compréhensible et inquiétant le peu d’empressement que les intellectuels de gauche mettent à défendre des notions comme celles de ‘vérité’ et d’ ‘objectivité’, quand ils ne proposent pas ouvertement de les considérer désormais comme réactionnaires et dépassées. » J. Bouveresse, “Noam Chomsky et ses calomniateurs,” Le Monde diplomatique, mai 2010.
Orwell argued against verbiage in British society; Chomsky does so for France: “French intellectual life has, in my opinion been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the ‘star’ system. It is something like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another – Stalinism, existentialism, structuralism, Lacan, Derrida – some of them obscene (Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous (Lacan and Derrida). What is striking, however is the pomposity and self-importance at each stage.” Chomsky Notebook, ed Jean Bricmont and Julie Frank, Columbia University Press, New York, 2010, p. 72. Jacques Bouveresse chose the following quote from Paul Valéry as an epigraph for his book Prodiges et vertiges de l’analogie (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 1999): « Le mal de prendre une hypallage pour une découverte, une métaphore pour une démonstration, un vomissement de mots pour un torrent de connaissances capitales, et soi-même pour un oracle, ce mal naît avec nous. ». See also “Chomsky on Postmodernism” a text written in 1995 in which his charges are more detailed. Available at <http://www.mrbauld.com/chomsky1.html> and Language and Politics, C.P. Otero (ed.), 2d ed., Oakland (CA): AK Press, 2004.
Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, Paris : Éditions de minuit, 1979.
For a philosophical discussion of the impact of “literary” criteria in sciences, see J. Bouveresse, Prodiges et vertiges de l’analogie, Paris : Raisons d’agir, 1999.
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text , N. 46/47, Spring/Summer 1996, 217-252. See also his “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca , May/June 1996, 62-64. See my own analysis of the whole affair: Pierre Guerlain, « Affaire Sokal : Swift sociologue; les Cultural Studies entre jargon, mystification et recherche », Annales du Monde Anglophone, n° 9, 1er semestre 1999, 141-160. See also Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont , Impostures intellectuelles , Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997, trans. as Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, New York: Picador USA, 1999.
T. Todorov, La Critique de la critique, Un roman d’apprentissage, Paris : Le Seuil, 1984, 123.
The paper he presented at the Collège de France. On 28 May 2010 can be read at <http://revueagone.revues.org/958>. Here is the relevant passage translated into English: “The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. [sic]. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
This is a direct reference to Bertrand Russell who wrote in History of Western Philosophy: “The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on towards a certain kind of madness – the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone.” Quoted in A. Sokal, Beyond the Hoax, op cit., 339.
Just one example among many: Loïc Wacquant, Les Prisons de la misère, Paris: Raisons d’agir, 1999, trans. as Prisons of Poverty, Minneapolis (MN): University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Here is what I wrote in Cahiers de l’Herne : « […] dans un article du Monde diplomatique, tiré d’un ouvrage (“Voyous”, Galilée, 2003) Derrida écrit en parlant de Chomsky et W. Blum et de leurs travaux sur les États voyous : “Ce n’est pas faire injure à ces ouvrages courageux que d’y regretter l’absence d’une pensée politique conséquente, notamment au sujet de l’histoire et de la structure, de la “logique” du concept de souveraineté. “Évidemment nous avons affaire à une dénégation aussi claire que celle du patient de Freud qui déclare ‘ce n’est pas ma mère’, car il s’agit de l’injure suprême que l’on peut adresser à des penseurs politiques” (le ton doucereux et le mot “courageux” ne changent rien à l’injure). Derrida poursuit : “Cette ‘logique’ ferait apparaître que, a priori, les États qui sont en état de faire la guerre aux rogue States sont eux-mêmes, dans leur souveraineté la plus légitime, des rogue States.” Le livre de William Blum (Rogue State; A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, Londres: Zed Books, 2001) tente de déconstruire l’image flatteuse des États-Unis que ses dirigeants érigent en doctrine. Il peut être critiqué lorsque toutes les sources ne sont pas citées mais il ne se présente pas comme un livre théorique. En ce qui concerne Chomsky, on peut se demander si Derrida l’a vraiment lu, aussi bien sur les États voyous que sur la souveraineté. Derrida procède alors à la déconstruction du mot “voyou” et de l’expression “État voyou” en s’affirmant lui-même voyou et en affirmant : “Il n’y a donc que des États voyous”. Il détruit donc le concept par sa généralisation mais le maintient aussi en vie. Sur le fond il ne dit rien de politique que Chomsky n’ait déjà dit mais offre des jeux de mots et un style qui tentent de masquer la totale absence d’originalité de sa pensée “politique”. » P. Guerlain, “Noam Chomsky et l’université”, in J. Bricmont et Julie Franck (dir.), Cahier de l’Herne, Livre 88, “Chomsky,” Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2007, 244-258.
Joyce O. Appleby, Lynn A. Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, New York: W.W. Norton, 1994.
Article entitled “Historical Truth,” series As I Please, Tribune, 4 February, 1944, available at <http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/go-history.html>
Historian Jennifer Pitts documents this shift as far as views on imperialism are concerned in A Turn to Empire: the Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France, Princeton University Press, 2005.
Eric Hobsbawm, “The New Threat to History,” New York Review of Books, 16 December, 1993. Earlier in the same piece he had written: “The other [development] is the rise of ‘postmodernist’ intellectual fashions in Western universities, particularly in departments of literature and anthropology, which imply that all ‘facts’ claiming objective existence are simply intellectual constructions. In short, that there is no clear difference between fact and fiction. But there is, and for historians, even for the most militantly antipositivist ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely fundamental. We cannot invent our facts. Either Elvis Presley is dead or he isn’t.” Hobsbawm was one of the Communists that Orwell targeted.
In his book Le Nouveau gouvernement du monde. Idéologies, structures, contre-pouvoirs (Paris: La Découverte, 2010), Georges Corm considers that neoliberalism is a religious creed which he likens to Marxism-Leninism (not to Marx’s ideas) and proceeds to deconstruct in a way not unlike Orwell’s (see 30-32). On page 91-92 he quotes Orwell explictly: « Les pires prédictions du roman d’Orwell 1984 sont réalisées aujourd’hui grâce à la société consumériste. » And later: «Ce nouveau langage néolibéral a adopté les mêmes techniques linguistiques que celles mises en œuvre par les régimes totalitaires, qui prétendaient régler toutes les conduites humaines afin d’atteindre le stade suprême du bonheur de l’humanité. Il y a d’ailleurs quelque ironie à constater que ce sont les techniques mêmes des langages totalitaires qui ont été utilisées pour détruire ces régimes. » (204).
The text can be found at <http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/Orwell.html>.
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