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Dispatches from the Balkan War and Other Writings
Dispatches from the Balkan War and Other Writings is a collection of essays on the Balkan crisis and on European reaction to it. In opposition to many powerful figures in France, Alain Finkielkraut has largely supported the Croatian struggles for sovereignty. He argues against an array of outmoded views of the Balkan region and its political and cultural conditions?conceptions that date back to earlier in the century and that have long bedeviled the region and the European powers? relation to it. The book takes up larger issues about European political and intellectual history?issues that are in urgent need of reexamination and revision in the post-Cold War world. ø A timely and passionate book, this volume will be of great interest to Finkielkraut?s many admirers as well as to anyone interested in the ongoing Balkan crisis and modern European history.
The Future of a Negation
The Future of a Negation is a crucial statement on the Holocaust?and on Holocaust denial?from Alain Finkielkraut, one of the most acclaimed and influential intellectuals in contemporary Europe. The book examines the Holocaust, its origins in modern European thought and politics, and recent ?revisionist? attempts to deny its full dimensions and, in some cases, its very existence as historical fact. Finkielkraut?s central topic is the impulse toward ?negation? of the Nazi horrors: the arguments made by many people, of varying political orientations, that ?the gas chambers are a hoax or, in any case, an unverifiable rumor.? In addition, Finkielkraut looks at other instances of twentieth-century mass murder and at arguments made by contemporary politicians and intellectuals that similarly deny the full extent of these other atrocities. An original, fearless book, The Future of a Negation is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and of genocidal politics and thought in our century.
The Defeat of the Mind
The Defeat of the Mind examines the opposition to Enlightenment thought from the eighteenth century to the present. Finkielkraut asserts that the ostensibly progressive cast of third world anticolonial and anti-Western sentiment, paradoxically, has its antecedent in Eurocentric sources - chiefly the German romantic concept of the Volksgeist, or spirit of the people. Straightforward and succinct, Finkielkraut draws a line between the idea of culture as an expression of the life of the mind and culture as an expression of national spirit. He deplores the appropriation of the concept of the Volksgeist by ethnic nationalists, who employ the notion in justification of such horrors as the Final So...
Remembering in Vain
Remembering in Vain
The Imaginary Jew
The Holocaust changed what it means to be a Jew, for Jew and non-Jew alike. Much of the discussion about this new meaning is a storm of contradictions. In The Imaginary Jew, Alain Finkielkraut describes with passion and acuity his own passage through that storm. Finkielkraut decodes the shifts in anti-Semitism at the end of the Cold War, chronicles the impact of Israel’s policies on European Jews, opposes arguments both for and against cultural assimilation, reopens questions about Marx and Judaism, and marks the loss of European Jewish culture through catastrophe, ignorance, and cliché. He notes that those who identified with Israel continued the erasure of European Judaism, forgetting the pangs and glories of Yiddish culture and the legacy of the Diaspora.
Confrontation
Everything in their respective positions divides them: Alain Badiou is the thinker of a revitalized communism and Alain Finkielkraut the mournful observer of the loss of values. The two opponents, gathered here for their first-ever debate, have irreconcilable visions. Yet neither is a stranger to controversy, and in this debate they make explicit the grounds of their personal dispute as well as addressing, in a frank and open exchange, their ideas and theories. Guided by Aude Lancelin, the two philosophers discuss subjects as diverse as national identity, Israel and Judaism, May 1968, and renewed popularity of the idea of communism. Their passionate debate is more than just the sum total of their disagreements, however, for neither of them is satisfied with the state of our society or the direction in which its political representatives persist in taking it. They agree that there needs to be change and their confrontation in this volume shows the importance of asking difficult questions, not only of each other, but also of our political systems.
The Wisdom of Love
The Wisdom of Love examines the seemingly contradictory claims of universalism and partisanship for the ethnic or racial Other. In discussions of topics ranging from the work of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lävinas to the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s to the contending positions of Right and Left in the recent culture wars in Europe and the Americas, Finkielkraut cautions against both an unreflective universalism and an equally inflexible advocacy of the Other. He argues instead that genuine respect for the Other is inseparable from calls for universal justice and equality. Rather than being opposites, otherness and universalism are, for Finkielkraut, inextricably bound to one another.
The End of the French Intellectual
Charting the decline of the French intellectual, from the Dreyfus Affair to Islamophobia The best-selling author of The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the troublesome figure of the French intellectual. Revered throughout the Francophile world, France’s tradition of public intellectual engagement stems from Voltaire and Zola and runs through Sartre and Foucault to the present day. The intellectual enjoys a status as the ethical lodestar of his nation’s life, but, as Sand shows, the recent history of these esteemed figures shows how often, and how profoundly, they have fallen short of the ideal. Sand examines Sartre and de Beauvoir’s unsettling accommodations during...
Culture and Rights
Part I: Setting universal rights
