Alain Finkielkraut once spent an afternoon with my grandmother. Or so she claims. It’s supposed to have been during one of his speaking appointments in Stockholm in the 90s, but who knows if it really happened…
He is a leading voice of the kind of high culture that still exists in Paris. He holds seat 21 in the Académie française and also has his own radio programme, “Répliques”, where he discusses ideas every Saturday. He isn’t afraid to speak out against what he thinks are the lunacies of contemporary culture. This, his most recent book of essays, consists very much of diatribes against current culture. It’s an interesting ride.
He visits covid, the MeToo movement, Black Lives Matters, environmental activism and various aspects of free speech. He laments the loss of high culture. He talks about the primacy of Christian values to Western civilization at one point, and then goes on to wave the flag of laicité the next. That doesn’t necessarily imply a contradiction.
One of his threads is the idea that we are living in the end times when it comes to literary culture. The age of spectacle has firmly taken hold, they story goes, and we are now (why only now and not before?) in the era of “after literature”, as the title indicates. This is something that has been said on and off since the turn of the second-to-last century, and maybe most notably by situationist Guy Débord in his “Society of the Spectacle” from 1967. Finkielkraut seems to mean that this time, it’s for real.
I’m all for cultural pessimism if it’s well articulated. It gives food for thought, not least since it forces you to work through the arguments and find holes. Finkielkraut is dedicated to the tenor of pessimism, and maybe he has good reason for it: he is not safe in France today. He was accosted in the street not long ago, treated with ethnic slurs by passersby. He has also been dropped from a few of his speaking engagements as a result of his outspoken ways.
Throughout the essays are lots of references to the writings of Philip Roth (his name is mentioned 57 times throughout the book’s 120 pages), and Finkielkraut also has a soft spot for Kundera quotes. He’s that kind of person. He was born in 1949 as the child of Holocaust survivors. Kind of like my father was, only in another part of the world.
The seven chapters can be summarized capsually like this:
1) céline won over proust, 2) #metoo attracts terrible simplificatrixes, 3) contemporary culture is for sleepwalkers, 4) there has been an overthrow of the old world 5) beauty is no longer revered in our culture, 6) the loss of the tragic is indeed tragic and 7) various pieces of kunderiana.
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Kinship of all Species 