The Closing of the French Mind
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France has always been of the opinion that it leads the world in matters intellectual. Over the years, this rampant brain-busting has given us such leading lights as the Marquis de Sade, an upper-class deviant who lived by the motto, 'If it titillates, continue', and Jean Paul Sartre, whose wondrous experiences of nothingness, nausea and the abyss were brought on by imbibing prodigious quantities of alcohol. Old-timers aside, the most recently exaulted exponents of French intellectualism have been the Deconstructionists. Made up of a motley bunch of professors that included Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, they contended that there is no text, only interpretation. In one foul swoop, Foucault and his minions served notice that a genuine, guaranteed intellectual movement was roaming loose, gathering speed and power, and preparing to sink its well-muscled fist into the solar plexus of national rectitude. Almost anything was advocated - the death of the author, the death of man, the death of Sunday sports. Never mind that these lethal and highly subversive ideas were obscured by language designed to make the basically simple seem fantastically complex. Having taken France to the top of a high mountain and shown it the victorious 'truth' in the plain below, Foucault - who spent most of his time splashing about in bathhouses - died in 1984. With his passing, Deconstructionism also became passé, and as yet nothing has come along to replace it. Even in the arena of ideas and innovations, 15 minutes of fame is sometimes still too long.
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