Philosophy is dead | Review: Changing the Subject by Raymond Geuss

Philosophy is dead

JONATHAN RÉE

Back in the 1970s, Raymond Geuss was a young colleague of Richard Rorty in the mighty philosophy department at Princeton. In some ways they were very different: Rorty was a middle-class New Yorker with a talent for reckless generalization, whereas Geuss was a fastidious scholar-poet from working-class Pennsylvania. But they shared a commitment to left-wing politics, and both of them dissented from the mainstream view of philosophy as a unified discipline advancing majestically towards absolute knowledge. For a while, Rorty and Geuss could bond as the bad boys of Princeton.

The philosophical establishment denounced people like Rorty and Geuss as relativists, bent on destroying the sacred distinction between truth and falsehood. But they defended themselves by pointing out that even if there is such a thing as an almighty final truth, it looks different from diverse points of view, and gets expressed in different words in diverse times and places. They regarded themselves as "perspectivists" or "historicists" rather than relativists, and believed that – to borrow a phrase from Thomas Kuhn – philosophy needed to find a "role for history".

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In a beautiful eulogy delivered on the occasion of Rorty's death in 2007, Geuss recalled a conspiratorial moment when his colleague revealed a plan for an undergraduate course called "An alternative history of modern philosophy". Rorty proposed to fill his lectures with supposedly minor characters such as Petrus Ramus, Paracelsus and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to the exclusion of canonical drones such as Locke, Leibniz and Hume, and out-and-out deplorables such as Descartes (Rorty's pet hate) or Kant (Geuss's). The projected "alternative history" came to nothing. (According to Geuss, Rorty blamed the Princeton "thought police", otherwise known as the Committee on Instruction.) But Geuss's latest book could be seen as a fulfil­ment of Rorty's plan, forty years on.

Changing the Subject is a history of philosophy in twelve thinkers. There are lucid self-contained essays on Socrates, Plato, Lucretius, Augustine, Montaigne, Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Lukács, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Adorno; but Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume and Kant don't even make it to the index. The whole performance combines polyglot philological rigour with supple intellectual sympathy, and it is all presented – as Geuss puts it – hilaritatis causa, or in a spirit of fun.

Out of his twelve philosophers, Geuss seems closest to Lucretius, who despised religion (though the word religio meant something rather different at the time), and maintained that the world has no moral purpose and is utterly indifferent to our existence. Hobbes comes almost as high in Geuss's estimation: he invented the concept of the "state" as the locus of political sovereignty, and treated it as an "artificial construct" which pays no regard to such so-called principles as "natural rights" or "the common good". Hegel, as Geuss reads him, was a good disciple of Hobbes because he avoided trying to "justify" the ways of the world, and he opened the way for Nietzsche's furious attacks on self-serving ideas of "truth-telling", "profundity" and "authenticity". In the wake of Lucretius, Hobbes, Hegel and Niet­zsche, philosophy seems to be essentially a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by moralistic sentimentality.

There are two different ways of responding to this predicament. Geuss sketches one of them in a scintillating chapter on Theodor Adorno, the twentieth-century aesthete who sought to combine classical Marxism with disdain for the stupidity of the masses. Adorno, you might say, showed signs of intellectual mysophobia, or Platonistic revulsion from impurity, and Geuss – who regards Plato as an "intellectual bully" – is uneasy about Adorno's "relentless negativism". He finds an amiable alternative in Michel de Montaigne who, having no desire to correct the follies of humanity, was "free of all these pathologies".

Geuss pays tribute to Montaigne for never "wagging his finger", but in the end he sides with Adorno. He is a bit of a mysophobe himself, and that seems to be why he never formed a lasting alliance with his old comrade in Princeton. He recalls an occasion when Rorty told him that he found inspiration in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who saw the whole of human existence as a vast "conversation", in which we should try to include everyone, even those with whom we disagree. Geuss tried to convince Rorty that Gadamer was "a reactionary, distended windbag", but Rorty continued on his way: he started to call himself, half-jokingly, a "bourgeois liberal", and began discussing politics in terms of old pieties like "human rights", "democracy", "private life" and even "patriotism". He did not suppose that such phrases had any theoretical justification, but he found them useful for expanding the conversational circle. Geuss, on the other hand, deplored them as "irremediable tosh" and "unwarranted fantasies presenting themselves as irrefutable facts". He was not amused by Rorty's jokes, and found his casualness hard to forgive.

Geuss concludes by suggesting that philosophy is dead: vital signs gave out some forty years ago, he says, and the excitement, creativity and inventiveness of the past have been replaced by dutiful recitations and historical re-enactments. But in this bracing and approachable book he gives himself the lie, demonstrating that there is life in philosophy yet.

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伯林何以"不死"？

伯林何以"不死"？

原创： 王前  

一

四月初的东京，樱花盛放，正是赏花好时节。以赛亚·伯林的编辑兼著作权受托人亨利·哈代偕夫人如期而至，这是他们初次访日。

暌违四年，哈代和太太还是老样子，举止言谈，英伦风范。他们到达当晚，我在银座附近的一家日式餐厅为客洗尘。东京湾繁灯如星，畅叙间，哈代忽问我，日本文化是否属耻感文化，看得出，他们对这次旅行准备得细致又充分。计划中，除了冲绳不去，北至北海道，西至大阪京都，还想去访日本海一侧的胜地，似乎要将东瀛看尽。饭后散步，坐了十几个小时飞机二位没有露出丝毫倦色，或许因为，伯林曾经来过。

之所以跟哈代有交集，是因为伯林书信集。

那是2004年的事了。一天，我在亚马逊预订的伯林书信集第一卷到手，翻开后，看到有篇启事，哈代写的。大意是，他正在编辑伯林的书信，已知尚有大量散佚在世界各地，希望知情者提供线索和详细信息，后面附有邮箱地址。我一下想起丸山真男。

除了伯林，我也研究日本战后最著名的政治哲学家丸山真男，所以知道丸山跟伯林是上世纪六十年代相识的好友；伯林1970年代末访问日本，丸山是主要策划者，还亲自陪同参观游览；丸山晚年为一家著名学术出版社推荐新书时提到伯林著作，说不管什么问题到了伯林手上都被他处理得很有趣，赞赏之情溢于言表。

伯林书信集面市的时候，丸山的书信集恰好也陆续出版了，我在里面发现他数次提及伯林，有一处还引用了很长一段伯林写给他的信，是谈访日的情形。看到哈代的启示，我给他发了封邮件，没过几分钟就收到回信，说他不知道伯林还有书信在日本，于是我就想试试帮点小忙。

第二天，我跟东京女子大学图书馆内的丸山文库联系，说明了情况。文库工作人员告诉我，信件整理刚开始不久，无法马上找到伯林的，借出更是不现实，只能耐心等待。于是，我成了哈代在日本的眼睛，专门留意那些中国和日本关于伯林研究的资讯。平日里读书看到跟伯林有关的内容，我会扫描发给他，中日学者写的论文摘要，我也会译成英文发给他。他略作修改会发表在伯林网站上，这无意中让我学到更高阶英文写作的技巧。

哈代本人的英文写作清晰漂亮，他为伯林著作撰写的编者序，每一篇前言都是极佳的essay，如青橄榄般耐嚼，读后齿颊生香。有一次，他还帮忙润色了我为参加伯林国际研讨会提交的论文，一夕完成。

书信集每隔几年出版一本，眼看着第四本也将付梓，我有点着急了。2014年的一天，我去东京女子大学听一位很喜欢的德国文学专家的讲座，顺道去了丸山文库。年轻的研究员们听明来意，热情地说，资料已经大致分类完毕，可以帮忙调——距离我第一次跟哈代联系，十年过去了。

几天后，收到丸山文库的邮件：文库保存的所有伯林书信都已找全，可以凭哈代的委托书来取。又过几天，我捧着哈代的委托书去了丸山文库，第一次看到伯林的亲笔信，长短一共七封。望着他签名的手迹，我一阵恍惚。

这些信件复印后，经EMS到了哈代手里，经他挑选，伯林访日回去后写给丸山的那封长信被收入书信集第四卷，也就是丸山在写给别人的书信里摘译过的那封。信写得颇为动人，有访日观感，也有对友朋谢忱，情真意切。有兴趣的朋友可以读一下原文，那真是英文书信写作的典范。

二

伯林的终生挚友莫里斯·鲍拉（Maurice Bowra，1898-1971）出生于中国九江，是二十世纪最卓越的西方古典学家之一，做过牛津大学副校长。他曾这样描述伯林："他像我们的上帝和苏格拉底一样，没有出版很多东西，但他思考和讲了很多，对我们的时代有巨大影响。（Though like Our Lord and Socrates he does not publish much, he thinks and says a great deal and has had an enormous influence on our times.）"。鲍拉去世的时候，伯林的确没有出版多少东西，除了最早的《马克思传》以外，就是《自由四论》和一些写俄国文人思想家的零碎文字。他的《马克思传》虽然颇为著名，至今还在重印，但他的好友、哲学家布莱恩·麦基说，那是轻量级著作。当然，真正了解伯林的如鲍拉那样的大师，自然明白好友的分量；远在大西洋彼岸的著名评论家埃德蒙·威尔逊也深知这位朋友的才华，初次见面后就在给友人的信里对伯林赞不绝口。可是，在"publish or perish （发表还是发臭）"被奉为圭臬的年代，著作少是硬伤，缺乏代表作也会让人看轻，哪怕当过英国学士院院长封过爵。据传记作者叶礼庭说，伯林生前很长时间里为自己没有masterpiece耿耿于怀。

1970年代初，一位年轻人走进了伯林的圈子，此后，伯林寡作的情形慢慢开始改变，他就是当时在牛津大学读博士的亨利·哈代。哈代七八岁开始学习古希腊文和拉丁文，大学期间专攻古典文学和心理学，具有纯正的人文学术修养；重回牛津读研究生，在伯林的另一位终生挚友汉普夏尔（Stuart Hampshire）指导下完成博士论文。十年前，哈代回忆初识伯林（当时是沃尔福森学院院长）的情形：

我是1972年到沃尔福森学院读哲学研究生的。我刚到不久就跟伯林聊过天，通常是在师生公用的公共休息室。他常坐在那里，主要是午饭后，跟所有去那儿的人聊，一聊就是几个小时。因为我是哲学专业，很自然对他写的东西感兴趣，尽管那时我刚入学，对他本人和作品一无所知。于是我求教于那些比我早进学院，比我了解他的人。他们推荐我读《自由四论》，是1969年出版的，也就是我重返大学三年前。我在一个假日读了那本书，发现它极其吸引我，在很多方面感动了我，从那时起我便成了"伯林粉"（Berlinophile）——当然不是毫无批判的。而在此之前就喜欢他这个人，跟他聊天非常有意思。我很难夸张跟他聊天给我带来的巨大影响。他对我说，他接触过的那些天才们点燃了他的心灵，如果这是一个标准，那么他就是天才。他让知性世界变得富有生气，重要，令人兴奋，而且充满乐趣。对我来说这是很新颖的，让我觉得好高兴，是我回牛津读研之前无法预见的。他定义了一个知识人要尽可能让思想变得有趣，这也部分回答了一些人的问题：为何他受到那样的尊崇。我觉得没有人比斯泰尔夫人（Madame de Stael）评价卢梭更精准了："他没有说什么新的东西，但他把每一样东西都点燃了。"我要套用一下斯泰尔夫人的话来描述伯林，不同之处在于：跟卢梭相比，伯林还说了一些新的东西。

哈代毕业后担任牛津大学出版社的编辑，一边从事正业———比如负责著名的The Past Masters丛书（现改名Very Short Introdutions丛书，译林出版社已引进），剑桥学派三剑客之一昆廷·斯金纳的《马基雅维利》就是他组的稿—— 一边为伯林编书，如七十年代末开始出版的四本选集《概念与范畴》《个人印象》《反潮流》和《俄国思想家》（与俄国思想史专家艾琳·凯莉合编）。到了八十年代末，哈代在牛津大学出版社的工作有调整，令他萌生另寻出路的想法，此时伯林正好重新写遗嘱，问哈代是否愿意做他的著作权受托人。于是，哈代做出了他一生中最重要的决定：成为伯林著作的专职编辑。他向伯林建议，对所有手稿文件做个统计，看看他究竟可以做些什么。一看之下，他吃了一惊：发现了一座富矿。在位于牛津大学附近的伯林家中，他找到了大量的伯林手稿和以前发表过的文章，从阁楼到地下室，到处都有伯林的文字。而作者本人已经忘记它们的存在，好像写完就完事了。于是哈代建议，马上开始工作，趁还能向伯林请教。从此，他的后半生就完全跟编辑伯林的著作结合在一起了。

效率极高的哈代没多久就整理出版了《扭曲的人性质材》《北方的博士》和《现实感》。伯林去世后，哈代依旧不停工作，接连出版了《浪漫主义的根源》《自由及其背叛》和《浪漫主义时代的政治观念》等，不断给"伯林粉"们以惊喜，让人们知道，曾经被揶揄凭借"会说"而被封爵的伯林其实写过很多东西，绝非只有几篇人物素描的轻量级学者，或空头哲学家。有论者看到已经安息在牛津大学附近墓园里的伯林不断有新著问世，写了篇有趣的长文《大师不死》（Old Polymaths never die），说伯林跟他的老朋友、史学大家Hugh Trevor-Roper一样，拥有"势不可挡的思想遗产"（unstoppable legacies）。而这种幸运，很大程度是因为他们都遇到了有学识有能力的知音，甘作嫁衣裳。

哈代还重新编辑了一些伯林的旧作，如把《北方的博士》跟《维科与赫尔德》合并成一册《启蒙的三个批评者》，增加了注释，使文本更加完整可信。

若论编辑工程哪一宗最为浩大，我想应该是三年前出版完毕的书信集。这四大本书信集堪称二十世纪思想史文化史和政治史的一个小小缩影。因为伯林交际甚广，上至总统女王，下至无名青年，三教九流无所不包，他跟很多人都有通信。有人说，伯林是二十世纪最好的书信写作者之一，也有人说，书信集是伯林留给后世的最大遗产，这四大本书信集的出版，无疑凝聚了哈代及其合作者的巨大心血。

编完书信集，哈代约25年的伯林专属编辑生涯也大体告一段落。两年多前，他从牛津大学沃尔福森学院退休，跟太太一起住在利物浦附近的海边城市，用他自己的话说，"仍像从前那样努力工作"。近些年，哈代渐为中国的伯林读者所知，读伯林著作的人无不受益于他，研究伯林的学者无不感谢他。近半个世纪过去了，当年研究维特根斯坦的哲学青年已年近古稀，可看上去，他至少年轻十岁。

三

东京学界以一场聚餐会欢迎哈代。日本一些专治政治哲学和思想史的学者济济一堂，地点正是邀请伯林来访的国际交流基金会所在地，这个基金会还邀请过雷蒙·阿隆等人访日。

有位学者带来了哈代编辑的那本The Book of Isaiah，指着里面前华盛顿邮报女老板Katharine Graham在伯林去世后写的悼念文章说，前两天刚看完电影The Post，没想到在哈代编辑的书里读到了她写伯林的文章。哈代说，她与伯林是好友，Graham访问英国，有时就住在牛津的伯林家。

四年前的三月，哈代为我指点过伯林的家。门口挂了块铭牌，上面写着：思想史家、功勋章获得者以赛亚·伯林1956年至1997年居住于此。彼时已是人去楼空，伯林夫人那年98岁高龄，据说住在伦敦，房子托管；5个月后，她过世了。那天也巧，刚好有人进去，大门开着，我征得管理员的同意，向内眺望，竟一眼没有看到房屋，可见面积之大。伯林就是在这座豪宅里接待过各路名流，包括Graham、去年刚去世的法国思想家托多罗夫，当然还有阿赫玛托娃。

有位年轻学者问哈代，为何伯林不怎么提二战时犹太人被纳粹屠杀的事。哈代说，伯林当时并不太清楚发生的事情，是战后才了解的。后来他不太提及，也是出于这样一种考量：因为从前犹太人被纳粹屠杀过，所以现在犹太人就有资格那样对付巴勒斯坦人——他不想为这种因果关系加任何料。

有位年长的学者是研究英国哲学的名家，他问哈代：半生为伯林编辑著作，有没有不赞同伯林的地方。哈代沉吟片刻说，他在宗教问题方面跟伯林有不同看法——我们知道伯林并不是宗教徒，但是据说晚年常去犹太教堂，有段时间还跟也是犹太人的法哲学大家哈特一起去。作为无神论者的哈代就觉得，伯林在这方面思想与行动有不一致之处。伯林虽然不相信犹太教的信条，但热衷于甚至是急切地去参加犹太教的仪式和活动，因为在他看来，这是保持犹太人文化一体性（cultural identity）的重要手段。在哈代看来，这种观点在知性上和道德上都是无法接受的；这种宗教观印证了马克思说的"宗教是人民的鸦片"，鸦片意味着奴役，而非解放。

席间还谈到，伯林的文体受俄文影响很大。记得伯林去世不久，我听过一个BBC的悼念节目，伯林的一位好友说，有一次跟伯林通电话，突然听不懂他在说什么，后来才反应过来伯林在说俄语。虽然伯林11岁时就移民英国，但俄国文化对他的影响非常大，不仅是语言上的，更是思想上的。伯林思想上的英雄不是人们通常以为的小穆勒，而是写过那本伟大自传《往事与随想》的赫尔岑。在理解伯林的思想时，他的俄国背景是无法忽略的，而哈代在学生时代学过俄文，他称之为"一个令人欢欣的巧合"。

哈代酷爱古典音乐，学生时代就会谱曲，2003年出版过《少年音乐曲集》（Tunes:Collected Musical Juvenilia）。古典文学、哲学、心理学、音乐……各种学养的加持，令他在智识上不输任何专门研究伯林的学者，而他更多一份用心。

四

在东京期间，哈代夫妇基本上自由活动，只在去镰仓附近的江之岛时，考虑到行程远，我陪同了半天。位于相模湾的江之岛地方不大，景致却妙。岛上有神社，鲜花处处开，海鸟不断从头顶飞过，平添生趣。哈代说，喜欢海滨之城。漫行在春日里，我们边走边聊，多有逸事。

著名评论家Franke Kermode当年主编Fontana Modern Masters丛书，哈代曾经向他推荐伯林，可他认为伯林分量不够。后来他看到哈代编辑的那么多的伯林著作，有点后悔了，改口说可以收进丛书，可那会儿，写伯林的书已经花落别家。我有不少Kermode的著作，也读过一些他的文章和访谈，非常佩服他的学问见识，这样的硕学大家如此评论伯林，也就不难理解有关于伯林的各种酷评了——现在的一些年轻后生动辄将前辈评得一文不值，或是用完人的尺子去量，而忽略了那些人在他们的年代做到那样的程度就已经很了不起了——好在有哈代，让伯林得以"著作俱在"，仁者见仁，可以继续争辩。

四年前，就在伯林担任过首任院长的沃尔福森学院，我参加了"伯林与启蒙研讨会"。会上，包括齐切利政治社会思想教授沃尔德隆在内的大多数发言者都向伯林开炮，令我颇感意外。后来一想，齐唱赞歌反而奇怪，思想的生命力本来就在于反思和批判。记得牛津大学名誉教授里德（以研究歌德、席勒和托马斯·曼著称的大学者）在总结那场研讨会时说，伯林是位重要哲人，虽然多有批评，但是值得认真对待。

离开东京的前一晚，哈代夫妇欲往著名的书店街神保町去看浮世绘，我代为指路。哈代耐心地帮太太打开一个个装有浮世绘的抽屉，轻声细语共挑选，那场景，分明也可以入画。当晚在一家很居家的日式料理店用餐，话题依然不离伯林。

不久前，跟哈代对谈过的日本年轻学者蛭田圭告诉我，指导过哈代博士论文的汉普夏尔看完叶礼庭写的伯林传记后说，那不是他所知的伯林。我听了不免一惊，于是向哈代求证。哈代说，汉普夏尔从年轻时就跟伯林交往，一起讨论哲学，是终生挚友，对他的了解自然跟叶礼庭不太一样。二战时，汉普夏尔也跟伯林一样，临时中止学术，做过情报工作，还随盟军一起占领柏林，审问过纳粹，不是一个只待在书斋和教室里的哲学家。战后重返大学，仍是与伯林交往最密切的分析哲学家。伯林去世后，他发表的悼文非常感人。哈代说在编《个人印象》时，本想约请汉普夏尔撰写导言，可惜没能如愿。

如今汉普夏尔也离世十多年了。托尼·朱特说雷蒙·阿隆和萨特、列维-斯特劳斯他们堪称"黄金世代"（golden generation)，伯林、哈特（被誉为牛津的双星子座）和汉普夏尔他们那一代又何尝不是"天才成群结队地来"？

哈代告诉我，今秋他写伯林的著作将要面世，书名已定为In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A literary Adventure，书的封面也已设计完毕。

"伯林有你做他的编辑，真是太幸运了。" 我说。

"那是我的幸运，可以为这样一位杰出的思想家编书。他的一生，完全可以拍成电影。"哈代由衷道。

"在跟伯林合作的那些年里，你觉得跟他合作顺利吗？"我问。

"伯林很配合我的工作。他去世之后，他的家人也很热情，都为编辑提供种种方便。但也有困难，就是伯林很多时候不愿意出版自己的著作，这也许是那一代学者的一个共同特点吧——不是那么急着要出版，总想修改到满意了再说，或者就是不太重视自己写过的东西。比如我最早编辑的那本《概念与范畴》，书已经编好了，伯林说不想出了，我只好搬救兵，找来伯纳德·威廉姆斯（伯林挚友，著名哲学家），请他劝说伯林改主意。威廉姆斯跟伯林在许多方面有共同观点，伯林很信任他，也很尊重他的意见。最后威廉姆斯建议去掉一篇，其它全部保留。"

多亏威廉姆斯，我们今天才能读到伯林用力于分析哲学那段时期的著作。虽然作为分析哲学家，伯林也许不是破冰者，但他是牛津日常语言学派的创始人之一，在哲学方面并非毫无建树。

我又问："记得你说过，伯林的思想在今天越发显示其重要性，很想听听阐释。在特朗普当选后，我在电邮里跟你讨论过，他的当选简直推翻了我学到的关于西方自由民主政体的知识，而你回答说不仅没有否定，反而给那些政治哲学增添了一个极佳的例子。你也说到，伯林若地下有知，肯定也会大吃一惊的。"

"你知道，伯林相信思想的力量。他自己的思想就常常跟主流相左，我认为他的思想在今天愈发显得有意义。今天，全球化大势之下，移民不断增加，人们似乎更密切地关联在一起，但这其中并没有凝聚，民族差异反而越来越明显，社会越来越分裂。这些现象所内涵的多元文化问题和不同文化之间的宽容问题，都是伯林曾经阐述过的。

"伯林所说的价值多元论，就是说承认植根于我们生命最深处的价值观多元到无法简化（irreducibly multiple），彼此可能冲突并且无法解决，除非付出悲剧性的代价。伯林的这个观点告诉我们，由价值的多元性带来的问题是植根于人性内部的，提醒每一个政治权威和每个人都要面对他所揭示的无法解决的冲突。

"现在伊斯兰激进主义和西方自由主义之间的对立就是典型的一元论和多元论的对立。我们该如何面对这样的局面，我想伯林的答案是很清楚的。原教旨主义、恐怖主义和攻击性民族主义都是被一些错误而强大的观念驱动的。那些观念也许是粗暴的，也没有经过很好的梳理，但是颇有力量。它们源自无知与偏见，等等。这些需要用所有可能的教育手段来回应：我们的敌人的敌人是知识。

"有句名言说：自由的代价是永远的警惕。在今天，保卫自由和复杂性这个任务不会变得更轻松和不再紧迫。这些也适用于我们反击所有知识上有害的东西。我们天性上容易受意识形态的错误和操纵的影响，而面对这些问题时，伯林是我们值得信赖的向导。"

"你在一次访谈里说过，伯林还有不少手稿。很多中国读者都想知道，伯林还会不会有新书出版？" 向哈代夫妇举杯后，我最后问。

"是还有不少手稿，不过主要的都已经出版了。我觉得有意思的，一个是他早期哲学方面的著述，主要是一些讲义和手稿，不是完整的文章，但显示了跟他后来的思想史研究的连贯性，也有很多学人对此有兴趣，这些会陆续发表在伯林网站上。另一个就是关于文化史方面的文章，包括他在五十年代早期为大英百科全书年鉴写的三篇长文，显示了他的兴趣和阅读的广博，对了解二十世纪也很有意义。再有就是尚未结集、伯林自己也没有出版过的文章，这部分基本上都收入普林斯顿大学出版社新出的伯林著作里了。"

当晚回家，我立刻预定了哈代的新书，有近三百页。亚马逊网站上已有介绍，研究过伯林的约翰·格雷写了新书推荐词。格雷说，任何想了解伯林这位二十世纪自由主义思想家的人，都绕不开这本书，这是哈代为后来者准备的重要文献。

今 日 作 者

王前

东京大学教养学部特任副教授，专攻政治哲学和思想史。在日本出版《中国是如何阅读西方思想的？》，合著《近代日本政治思想史》《现代中国与市民社会》等。

本文刊于《289艺术风尚》2018/5-6月合刊

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Was a Renowned Literary Theorist Also a Spy?

The strange case of Julia Kristeva

By Richard Wolin June 20, 2018

Julia Kristeva

"Oh, I tried the Left Bank. At university I used to go with people who walked around with issues of Tel Quel under their arms. I know all that rubbish. You can't even read it."

— Philip Roth, The Counterlife

Illisibilité: During the 1960s, Tel Quel authors wore this epithet, which means "unreadability," as a badge of honor. It was the Age of Structuralism, an era of high intellectual fashion. Left Bank intellectuals who were less enamored of the journal's supercilious brand of semiotic hermeticism accused the high-powered literati who regularly appeared in Tel Quel's pages — a list that reads like a Who's Who of French Theory — of practicing "theoretical terrorism."

A witticism that made the rounds of the Latin Quarter during the 1970s gleefully took aim at structuralism's lexical pomposity:

Q. What's the difference between a Mafioso and a structuralist?

A. The latter makes you an offer that you can't understand.

Unlike in France, among North American universities Tel Quel still seems to possess a solid coterie of reverential admirers. Be that as it may, there is no circumventing the fact that things ended rather poorly for the Tel Quel brain trust, as led by the prodigiously gifted, punctuation-averse, Philippe Sollers. (From 1974 to 1981, every issue of Tel Quel began with an excerpt from Sollers's unpunctuated work-in-progress, Paradis. Sollers explained that his omission of punctuation was a form of rebellion against the "tyranny of metaphysics": "Punctuation is metaphysics itself and incarnate, including the blank spaces and scansions.") By the late-1970s, Tel Quel'sadvocacy of far-left political causes, from Stalinism to Maoism, had become such an embarrassment that Sollers, along with his wife and co-editor, Julia Kristeva, elected to scrap the entire enterprise. In 1982, Tel Quel abruptly ceased to appear. The same year, with a few editorial tweaks, it was rebaptized as L'Infini.

The misadventures of the Tel Quel group come to mind in reviewing and assessing the recent revelations concerning Kristeva's alleged role as an agent of communist Bulgaria's State Security services, the Darjavna Sigournost, or DS — in essence, the Bulgarian equivalent of the KGB. According to DS files, Kristeva's activities as an informant spanned a seven-year period during the 1970s. Yet it appears that Kristeva was first contacted by Bulgarian intelligence agents in 1965, immediately before her departure for France as a 24-year-old scholarship student. The files state that, upon being informed that, at some point in the future, her services might be needed, "Julia assented."

The details concerning Kristeva's alleged involvement with the Bulgarian intelligence service were initially reported in late March by the estimable French magazine L'Obs, formerly Le Nouvel Observateur. In early April, the gist of that account was reported in an article that appeared in The New York Times.

Kristeva, for her part, has emphatically denied the allegations. They are the result of a malicious campaign to discredit her, she has claimed, dismissing the dossier as "fake news."

In April, Kristeva's lawyer, Jean-Marc Fedida, released a forcefully worded statement that was published in Le Monde and threatened legal action against journalists and news outlets that were responsible for circulating the contested allegations and claims. As Fedida told Le Monde, Kristeva is "outraged that her actions and her oeuvre could be called into question on the basis of documents … that make farcical use of totalitarian police methods." In other words, it is not Kristeva but her accusers who are the real totalitarians. Up until now, however, she has declined to explain who might be orchestrating the calumnious campaign against her, or what the culprit's motivations might be.

On this side of the Atlantic, Kristeva's professions of innocence have been echoed by her biographer, Alice Jardine, a literature professor at Harvard University. Jardine told The New York Times that, "Nobody who knows anything about her or her work believes this."

If that is the case, it is very likely because Kristeva's supporters, instead of heeding the facts and circumstances of the Bulgarian intelligence dossier, remain mesmerized by her aura as a luminary of the French Theory vogue, which, during the 1980s, had a far-reaching impact on literary studies in North America. Thus in a 1996 article, the French political historian François Hourmant described the peculiar "recognition cum veneration" that greeted Tel Quel's work in the United States. François Dosse's two-volume History of Structuralism (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) also attests to the widespread mood of uncritical adulation that surrounded Kristeva's work at the time. His chapter recounting Kristeva's arrival in France — an episode that, among acolytes of French Theory, would become the stuff of legend — is entitled: "1966: Annum Mirabile: Julia Comes to Paris!"

However, at this point, a panoply of experts has described the Bulgarian intelligence dossier as reliable and convincing. In the words of Ekaterina Boncheva — a former dissident who is now a member of the commission in charge of vetting State Security service files in accordance with lustration legislation passed in the 1990s to prevent former Communists and informants from regaining a foothold in public life — "In my 10 years of work on behalf of the Commission, there has never been a case of counterfeit files. … If Kristeva has a problem with the materials that have come to light, she should take it up with the DS, not with us."

Ironically, it was Kristeva herself who unwittingly set in motion the chain of events that resulted in the embarrassing disclosure when she sought to join the editorial board of a Sofia-based literary organ, Literaturen Vestnik ("Literary Journal"). According to the requirements of the post-Communist era lustration law, intelligence files of all persons who aspire to positions of cultural or political leadership and were born before 1976 require vetting by the seven-member Declassification Commission.

Efforts to repudiate the charges that Kristeva, whose alleged DS code name was "Sabina," acted as an agent for the Bulgarian State Security apparatus, seem increasingly implausible. Shortly after the assertions first came to light, the Declassification Commission released the entire Kristeva dossier — some 250 pages — on its website. Included among the documents was Kristeva's DS registration card, attesting to her successful recruitment in 1970. (It begins: "Julia Kristeva, born in 1941 in the village of Sliven.")

Although previous instances have come to light in which Eastern European state-security services have fabricated or removed individual documents, it would be highly unusual if not unprecedented foran entire dossier to have been manufactured, let alone a file the size of Kristeva's. Coincidently, in January, the legality of Bulgaria's post-Communist lustration law was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights.

Prints from the Bulgarian intelligence agencies' files of archive material allegedly about the French-Bulgarian philosopher Julia Kristeva

Christopher Nehring, a German scholar who heads the research division of the Spy Museum in Berlin and who has examined the Kristeva dossier, has said that the wholesale fabrication of an intelligence file the size of Kristeva's is inconceivable. To do so would entail contriving lengthy conversations, index cards, registration records, archival notations and signatures, as well as duplicating the exact paper color and type used by the DS at the time.

The L'Obs journalist Roumiana Ougartchinska, commenting on Kristeva's disavowals, observed appositely that, "Instead of confronting her demons, she has sought refuge in denial."

To give an idea of the farcical cat-and-mouse games in which Kristeva allegedly was forced to engage: In the spring of 1974, according to the dossier, Kristeva insouciantly skipped out on a rendezvous with her DS overseers. In an effort to placate them, she mailed an amicable postcard from Brussels to the Bulgarian Embassy in Paris, conveying her regrets, and assuring them that she would get back in touch as soon as she returned from her forthcoming vacation. Then, in keeping with the spirit of the times, Kristeva signed off in French with a mock profession of revolutionary solidarity: "Vive le pouvoir populaire!" (Long live the power of the people!)

If there is a unifying thread that defines the Kristeva dossier, it concerns what she apparently perceived as a surfeit of pro-Israel sentiment among French intellectuals and media luminaries. In 1970, in one of her initial intelligence briefings, Kristeva allegedly told her Bulgarian handlers that French radio and television were crawling with "Zionists"; persons who were "quite adept at conveying their pro-Israeli views." "It's the same," she continued, "with weeklies and dailies that pride themselves on taking 'progressive' positions." As an example of such tendencies, Kristeva lambasted Le Nouvel Observateur for misleadingly portraying the Israeli general Moshe Dayan as "a man of peace." To conclude her report, she denounced the influential French Communist writer and former Surrealist, Louis Aragon, for refusing to support the brutal, August 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague.

Time and again, in scrutinizing Kristeva's dossier, it is hard to determine whether she was acting sincerely, or instead, merely telling her Bulgarian spymasters what she thought they wanted to hear.

It is also difficult to understand why Kristeva has responded to the incriminating dossier with such unconvincing disavowals, especially in light of the fact that the quality of the intelligence that she apparently delivered was of negligible value. In fact, one is tempted to say: Its value was less than zero. Kristeva's Bulgarian minders consistently judged the smidgeons of information that she provided as "weak" and "insignificant." In fact, one of the reasons that they apparently decided, circa 1978, to cashier her as an informant was that the intelligence that she furnished was so unfailingly meager. In one of the dossier's final entries, her DS handler, referring to Kristeva by Sabina, avows that, "having definitively adopted pro-Maoist positions as of 1973, she had been excluded from the list of 'collaborators.'"

Lastly, in light of the Orwellian, tentacular reach of the Bulgarian State Security apparatus — according to one estimate, some 14,348 meters of DS files remain extant — it is hardly surprising that the DS sought to force the 24-year-old Kristeva — clearly, a rising intellectual star — to play ball. The DS was a dastardly and nefarious cabal highly adept at ruining the "lives of others." Under the circumstances, with a prestigious scholarship awaiting her in Paris, what choice did Kristeva really have?

As an informant, Kristeva seems to have been a consummate failure. And by "failing," she succeeded at keeping her maladroit Bulgarian overlords at bay.

Throughout the recent, highly public exchange of claims and counterclaims, accusations and counteraccusations, Kristeva has expressed concern that her reputation as an engaged intellectual would be unfairly and permanently harmed. In truth, however, the damage had been done long ago, the cumulative effect of her uncritical support, as a member of the Tel Quel circle, for left-wing dictatorships during the 1960s and 1970s: the Soviet Union, from 1968 to 1971; and Cultural Revolutionary China, from 1971 to 1976. What makes Kristeva's partisanship for those regimes and their draconian practices so hypocritical and so objectionable is that Kristeva, as a young woman, had experienced firsthand the ultra-repressive nature of Soviet-style, bureaucratic socialism in her native Bulgaria, where, from 1954 to 1989, First Secretary Todor Zhivkov of the Bulgarian Community Party ruled with an iron fist.

In 1968 the Tel Quel ensemble — which, in 1967, had myopically allied itself with the political fortunes of the French Communist Party (PCF) — endorsed the Soviet Union's military invasion of Czechoslovakia: an act of tyranny that succeeded in crushing the last vestiges of hope for "socialism with a human face" embodied by the Prague Spring. Aping the ideological rationalizations of the Stalin era, the Telquelians argued that those who criticized Soviet ruthlessness were merely providing aid and comfort to the bourgeoisie.

As it turned out, the Warsaw Pact's brutal Prague incursion proved to be the final nail in the coffin of the French Communist Party. Thereafter, it was substantially discredited in the eyes of French youth and intellectuals. Whereas the 1960s had been an effervescent celebration of "youth culture" and "youth revolt," the bureaucratic Communism of the Brezhnev era was overseen by a clique of senescent septuagenarians.

At the time of the invasion, Tel Quel's editorial director, Philippe Sollers, expressed a "secret enthusiasm" for the Bulgarian tanks that had participated in the lopsided Warsaw Pact assault. Identifying with the Bulgarian strike force was, he explained, a way of honoring his love for Kristeva.

The decision to endorse Soviet brutality in Prague was merely one among many political blunders that the Tel Quel group committed during this period. During May 1968, Sollers, Kristeva, and company sided with the PCF's condemnation of the French student uprising. Echoing the official party line, the Telquelians dismissed the student revolt due to its "insufficiently proletarian character." In mid-May, when a group of prominent French literati — Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras — sought to form a new writers' union in support of the student strike, the Tel Quel "salon Bolsheviks" expressed their disapproval by demonstratively walking out of the assembly. As Sollers, who, as it turns out, hailed from a family of wealthy Bordeaux industrialists, pontificated at the time: "All revolution can only be Marxist-Leninist!"

In 1971, after it had become indubitably clear that the cultural cachet of Soviet Communism had been irreparably tarnished, the Tel Quel cenacle, in yet another instance of poor timing, transferred its loyalties to China — precisely at the moment when a series of chilling revelations concerning the Cultural Revolution's excesses had come to light. Thus 1971 was the year that Simon Leys's devastating exposé, Chairman Mao's New Clothes, unmasked the Cultural Revolution as a well-orchestrated political purge initiated by Mao so that he could regain the standing he had lost following the debacle of the Great Leap Forward (1958 — 1962). In The Search For Modern China (W.W. Norton, 1990), Jonathan Spence recounts the Cultural Revolution as follows: "fear and tension … gripped the country, violence grew apace. Thousands of intellectuals … were beaten to death. … Countless others committed suicide. … Many of the suicides killed themselves only after futile attempts to avoid Red Guard harassment by destroying their own libraries and art collections. Thousands more were imprisoned, often in solitary confinement, for years. Millions were relocated to purify themselves through labor in the countryside."

Undeterred by the escalating supply of testimonials certifying the Cultural Revolution's depredations and persecutions, the Tel Quel groupforged ahead. In 1974, Kristeva and Sollers, accompanied by Roland Barthes, traveled to China for three weeks of Chinese Communist Party-sponsored "revolutionary tourism": in other words, the standard Potemkin Village treatment. On their return to France the Tel Quel delegation donned matching Mao suits as a gesture of solidarity with the Chinese revolutionary project. And in fulfillment of a prior understanding with their CCP hosts, the Tel Quel ensemble penned a series of fulsome paeans lauding the progressive achievements of Chinese Communism and the virtues of the "Yan'an way." (One Telquelian, François Wahl, did write an article that was highly critical of China, in Le Monde. Wahl's claims were pilloried and dismissed in a subsequent issue of Tel Quel.)

Sollers waxed lyrical about having experienced firsthand "the true, anti-bourgeois Revolution." In About Chinese Women (1974), Kristeva, for her part, carried this uniquely French "pro-Chinese" mania to unprecedented heights. She disqualified all Western criticism of postrevolutionary China as suffused with illicit cultural bias. And she rationalized the traditional Chinese custom of "foot binding" — ignoring its debilitating and disfiguring consequences for millions of Chinese women — as a legitimate local cultural practice, comparable to ritual circumcision in Judaism. In fact, when perceived in the right light, Kristeva continued, foot binding constituted an emblem of Chinese female empowerment.

In retrospect, what stands out about Kristeva's and Tel Quel's intellectual-political excesses is that, at a point when the majority of French leftists, in keeping with the libertarian spirit of May 1968, had abandoned the ideological rigidities of Marxism-Leninism in favor of autogestion and grassroots democracy, the Tel Quel coterie remained inflexibly wedded to the dogmas and pretensions of tier mondisme.

In an article he wrote during the late 1970s, "The Great Rage of Facts," Michel Foucault relied on sarcasm to pillory the ever-inventive rationalizations and delusions that French intellectuals habitually contrived in order to justify all manner of political tyranny:

Yes, yes, there were massacres, but they were a terrible error. Just reread Marx or Lenin, compare them with Stalin, and you will see where the latter went wrong. It is obvious that all those deaths could only result from a misreading. It was predictable: Stalinism-error was one of the principal agents behind the return to "Marxism-truth," to "Marxism-text," which occurred during the 1960s. If you want to be against Stalin, don't listen to the victims; they will only recount their tortures. Reread the theoreticians; they will tell you the Truth about the True.

For a majority of French leftists, the Munich Olympic massacre of September 1972, in which 11 Israeli athletes and coaches died at the hands of Palestinian terrorists, represented a point of no return vis-à-vis the delusions of third world militancy.

Be that as it may, this bloody episode failed to diminish the Telquelians' enthusiasm for the glories of "armed revolutionary struggle." Instead, they responded to the Munich tragedy with a reaffirmation of their commitment to the goals of "total revolution."

In its political newsletter, "Bulletin du Mouvement de Juin '71," the Tel Quel editorial staff, restyled as the Support Group for the Palestinian Revolution (Le Groupe de Soutien à la Révolution Palestinienne), lauded the Munich attack as "necessary" in order to liberate 200 Palestinian fighters who were being held in Israeli prisons. Moreover, they asserted that responsibility for the bloody dénouement at the nearby Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base lay with the German police and the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, who purportedly "initiated the aggression."

Reflecting on Tel Quel's delusional infatuation with Cultural Revolutionary China, the French-American essayist Guy Sorman faults them for having succumbed to the temptations of a "boundless amoralism": an "amoralism" that is inseparable from a distinctively French tradition of "revolutionary romanticism." He continues: "What links the French intelligentsia to tyrants such as Stalin, Mao, Castro has very little to do with the quest for liberty, justice, and democracy. Such values were dismissed as suitable for dopes and stooges. … Our intelligentsia adored revolutionary violence and the aesthetics of violence. Was it not this spectacle of revolution that attracted Sartre, Barthes, and company?"

In 1981, Sollers proffered a retrospective mea culpa, "Pourquoi J'ai 'été Chinois" ("Why I Was Chinese"), in order to publicly confront his wayward political past. However, too often, he seemed to hedge his bets — especially when he claimed that, in France, Maoism had essentially served as an exit strategy through which left-wing intellectuals could escape the straightjacket of Communist orthodoxy. Such claims are belied by the pro-Chinese dogmatism of the Tel Quel group's own texts.

Kristeva, for her part, responded to her political excesses by renouncing politics in toto — including feminism — as inherently totalitarian: as a sphere that perpetually sacrifices individuals to the injustices and repressions of the "collective superego." As she explained in a 1989 interview: "We must try not to propose global models. I think that we, then, risk making politics into a sort of religion. … Of the political there is already too much." Instead of striving for political solutions, Kristeva recommended that everyone who could afford it should enter into psychoanalysis — her new field of professional expertise.

One wonders whether, once the smoke from the "Bulgarian dossier" has cleared, Kristeva will see fit to confront her past in a spirit of contrition and forthrightness.

Richard Wolin is a professor of history, political science, and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Wind From the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Second Edition: Princeton University Press, 2017).

Measure

Measure

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