Özet:

From the Dreyfus affair to the Algerian war, the intellectual is a central theme in public discussion in France. According to Alain Badiou, it is an important scholarly exercise to contrasting Sartre’s “total intellectual” with Foucault’s “specific intellectual” that will ultimately lead to Bourdieu’s vision of the “collective intellectual”. A genealogy of the concept seems to suggest more than a structuralist response to an existentialist individual responsibility. It is not a matter of individual choice but an epistemological point of view. Foucault situates Sartre in the context of French philosophy and the two philosophical traditions prevalent in France at the time. These are “a philosophy of experience, sense, and subject” in contrast with “a philosophy of knowledge, rationality, and concept”. Sartre is on the side of this philosophy of subject, which also critised by antropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.The place of the intellectual in a regime of truth regulating the production of knowledge is crucial for Foucault. In a regime of truth producing discourses that function as true in a given time and a given place, the complex relations between power and knowledge can be understood through the multiple facets of this regime. What makes an intellectual’s specificity is related to his position in this complex mechanism of knowledge production. It is not the role of the guardian of universal values but the one who has a specific point of view due to his specific place on the power/knowledge structure. Bourdieu in his positions during the Algerian War, Foucault in his philosophy of subject criticized Sartre very severely. Sartre speaks of Foucault’s The Order of the Things as “the last rampart that the bourgeoisie can still erect against Marx” while Foucault argues in The Critique of Dialectical Reason that Sartre’s work is “the magnificent and pathetic effort of a man from the nineteenth century to think the twentieth century”. Bourdieu does not only criticize Sartre on the grounds of intellectual irresponsibility but also argues that his “most reliable strategy for engagement is to set himself up as a transcendent consciousness”. Letting others “speak for themselves” is essential for Bourdieu as it is for Foucault. But despite the severe political accusations and theoretical conflicts Foucault and Sartre militated together and Bourdieu assumed the position of the most influential intellectual of his time, becoming “the intellectual” à la Sartre. For Bourdieu the enabling conditions for this total intellectual, “active on every front, as philosopher, critic, novelist and dramatist” are no more out there. Which means that another Sartre is impossible. But it is possible to have collective intellectuals acting within a series of networks that resist the imposition of a global neo-liberal doxa.

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