A continuing preoccupation with the Occupation
In addition to a number of commemorative and traditional events and a steady stream of new publications, references and allusions to the period of the Occupation appear to have increased over the last few years. One basic reason, sometimes supported by evidence, is that after seventy years there is a danger that those years and their traumatic events will gradually be forgotten or remembered incorrectly. It may also be, however, that they are being recalled to help assuage a collective sense of guilt, or in some cases used more consciously for political and socio-political purposes with the result that they feed deep-rooted and sometimes unrealised prejudices with direct consequences for contemporary society. After rapidly rehearsing the ways in which the Occupation has hitherto been assessed, the article focuses precisely on some of this apparent modern development.1
Hitler and the Second World War in French Historiography and Fiction
The introductory chapter argues that fiction is a privileged medium to understand the collective consciousness of a time. It also gives an overview of how and why memories of the Second World War have evolved in France since 1945, highlighting the role that the arts and literature played in this regard. The chapter concludes with a theoretical discussion of the literary and ethical difficulties of including historical characters in fiction, both in general terms and more specifically in the case of Adolf Hitler in French fiction.
The French Communist Party during the Fifth Republic: A Crisis of Leadership and Ideology (review)
date and which will be of interest to those working within a wide variety of disciplines, from political thought and theory, to literary and film studies, aesthetics and, of course, European or ‘continental’ philosophy. As the title suggests, Hutchens’ central claim is that Nancy should be viewed, above all, as a thinker of the future of philosophy and, more specifically, as a philosopher who addresses the concept of the ‘future’ itself. This claim is pursued via a number of expository engagements with various key aspects of Nancy’s thinking: his account of ‘trans-immanent sense’ and the role it plays in the constitution of a shared and meaningful world, his account of freedom, and his important critical-philosophical engagements with what Hutchens terms ‘post-secular theology’, or with key issues of community and contractarian thinking within political thought. In each case, Hutchens succeeds in bringing out the originality of Nancy’s formulations, carefully distinguishing, for instance, his use of terms such as freedom and community from their usual meanings in order to avoid their recuperation into more traditional forms of either libertarian or communitarian thought. At the same time careful attention is drawn to the mode of Nancy’s philosophizing, its fragmentary nature, and the relation of this fragmentary style to the thinking of ‘ungrounded singular plurality’ which emerges across the body of his works. If there are significant limitations to this work, the author himself shows an admirable willingness to acknowledge them openly. In the chapter dedicated to a discussion of Nancy’s influences, he indicates, for instance, that the treatment given will only be a ‘gleaning’ rather than a ‘detailed engagement’. The drawback of such a cursory approach lies in the fact that Nancy’s thinking most often unfolds through a detailed engagement with, or reading of, specific figures (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, amongst others). The decision not to pursue the detail of each engagement risks reducing the account of Nancy given to a systematizing or summary exposition of precisely the kind that the author wishes to avoid. The author also acknowledges that there are important gaps in coverage of Nancy’s thought (for instance, his thinking on art). This is less of a problem since, within the context of such a diverse and heterogeneous philosophical corpus, any one critical work is bound to contain some significant gaps or elisions. More seriously, though, the chapter on ‘ecotechnics’ contains no mention of the important work Corpus in which this term receives its first and perhaps most important elaboration (indeed Corpus like a number of other works does not even appear on the bibliography). Nevertheless this work gives a solid introduction to some of the fundamental aspects of Nancy’s thinking and demonstrates its key importance within contemporary French thought and wider philosophical debate. Insofar as certain aspects of this thinking are omitted or elided, this work demonstrates that, as far as the future of critical commentary on Nancy is concerned, much remains to be said.