Nouveaux Philosophes to Estates General 1977–1979 299
and Le Nouvel Observateur, the ‘new philosophy’ split the intel-
lectual world. The controversy was all the fi ercer as several of these
young authors had been educated at Normale Sup, as contemporar-
ies of those whom they were now attacking. Like his friend Maurice
Clavel, Michel Foucault had supported André Glucksmann in 1975,
when Le Seuil brought out The Cook and the Man-Eater. Philippe
Sollers, who had broken away from Maoism shortly after his return
from China, formed a real alliance with Bernard-Henri Lévy, and
methodically took up the cudgels on behalf of his books. Roland
Barthes voiced his support for Barbarism with a Human Face, allow-
ing Les Nouvelles littéraires to publish the letter he had written
to its author. By contrast, Gilles Deleuze spat out his venom in a
short pamphlet, On the Nouveaux Philosophes and a More General
Problem. He started right off by saying that ‘their thought is crap’:
I can think of two possible reasons why it is such crap. To begin
with, they proceed with gross concepts, as gross as a hollow
tooth: law, power, master, world, rebellion, faith, etc. This
means they can mix things up grotesquely, creating schematic
dualisms: law versus rebel, power versus angel. At the same
time, the feebler the thought content, the more self-important
the thinker, and the more the subject of utterance gives himself
airs despite the emptiness of the actual utterances. [.. .] With
these two procedures, they destroy work. [.. .] This massive
return to an author or an empty subject infl ated by vanity, and
to stereotypical schematic concepts, represents an obnoxious
reactive force.^2In the rest of his text, Deleuze compared the methods of the nou-
veaux philosophes which the plans set out in the Haby Reform: they
both involved ‘a serious dumbing-down of the “programme” of
philosophy’. But what counted for him, much more than for Lévy
or Glucksmann, was the profound modifi cation that this ‘marketing
enterprise’ had infl icted on intellectual life: ‘Indeed, it is the submis-
sion of all thought to the media; by the same token, it gives these
media the minimum intellectual endorsement and complacency to
stifl e the creative attempts that would enable them to move forward
on their own initiative.’
Derrida had deliberately kept out of the controversy. But at the
end of the summer, Jean Piel asked him to contribute to the special
issue of Critique that he was putting together on the theme ‘What
use is philosophy today?’ He made it perfectly clear that the idea had
come to him when he saw ‘the indecent, sickening, and ridiculous
display of the so-called work by those who pass themselves off under
the name “the nouveaux philosophes” ’. Piel drew up a questionnaire,
‘quite neutral in appearance’, and sent it to a considerable number