Premodern Condition

In The Premodern Condition, Bruce Holsinger examines the influence of medieval studies on some of the major figures in the 1960s French avant garde. By “medieval studies,” he means both scholarship on the Middle Ages (Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, the Annales school, Denis de Rougement’s Love in the Western World) and also archival research that some of the main postmodern theorists engaged in. Holsinger finds precursors to theory’s interest in the medieval world in Heidegger, Max Weber, Hegel, Croce, Bergson, and French “New Novelists” of the twentieth century. Challenging scholars who ignore or belittle medieval influences on the making of theory, he argues that avant garde theorists did not look to the Middle Ages with Victorian nostalgia but plundered medieval literature and philosophy for fundamental philosophical concepts and language, systems of thought, and models of inquiry. Theory is, for Holsinger, partly a critique of modernity from the perspective of modernity’s “Other,” the medieval world. As Renaissance Humanists reached back to antiquity for resources to critique the medieval system, so postmodern theorists reach back to the Middle Ages for resources to critique modernity.

In particular, the book examines the influence of Thomism in the work of Georges Bataille (credited by Philippe Sollers with moving French thought from structuralism to poststrcuturalism), a lapsed Catholic trained as a medievalist; Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic use of the medieval courtly love tradition; the concept of habitus in Pierre Bourdieu, who also translated Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism into French; and the influence of Henri de Lubac’s Exegese medievale on the literary theory of Roland Barthes, both of whom, in Holsinger’s words, emphasize “the multiplicity of the text as the boundless object of hermeneutical delectation.” Holsinger also suggests that Derrida’s Of Grammatology, though not so explicitly indebted to medieval concepts as other avant garde treatises, offers a critique of the ideological assumptions underlying historical periodization by attacking Rousseau’s notion of the medieval as Gothic barbarism and Rousseau’s tragic story of the decline of language.

The implications of Holsinger’s book run in various directions. First, it is a fine specimen of intellectual history that rightly ignores contemporary disciplinary boundaries. Historical theologians trace the influences of nouvelle theologie on Vatican II and twentieth-century Catholicism, while intellectual historians concentrate on the avant garde circle of 1960s Paris. The notion that these worlds might intersect is jarring. It’s surprising to learn that Roland Barthes attended colloquia on the history of biblical exegesis and that Bataille debated the future cardinal Jean Danielou (editor of the French patristic collection, Sources chretienne and author of, among many works, the wonderful The Bible and the Liturgy) about Nietzsche in Marcel More’s living room in occupied Paris in 1944, or that Danielou might spend an evening in the company of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty to discuss Bataille’s work on sacrifice.

Second, as a footnote to the first point, Holsinger makes clear how important Catholic theology was to 20^th-century French intellectual life. This was partly a revival of Thomism, inspired by Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical, Aeterni Patris, which produced, for example, the “existential” reading of Thom found in Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson.

Third, Holsinger’s book tells a story of strange alliances. Not only were Danielou and Bataille debate partners, part of the same Parisian intellectual circle, but in a number of respects they made common cause against the paleo-Thomists of the day, who were so committed to the timeless absoluteness of Thomism that they even regarded the Sources chretiennes project with suspicion, fearing more widespread knowledge of the Fathers might undermine the primacy of Thomas. One of Bataille’s major works, La somme atheologique, brought forward a medieval mystical, apophatic challenge to the aspirations of Thomas’s comprehensive Summa and in so doing dovetailed with the work of Catholic neo-Thomists. Catholics called for an ad fontes return to the early church sources found echoes of their own projects in the work of one of the most radical avant garde thinkers, the debauched atheist, pornographer, and celebrants of limitless eroticism, Georges Bataille.

Fourth, the argument of Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern helps in assessing the theorists that Holsinger talks about. At the heart of the modern mentality, Latour argues, is a sharp distinction between the modern “Us” and the premodern (or primitive) “Them.” Latour’s argument is that, despite this modern assumption, in reality We are not so very different from Them. Postmodern theorists enter alliances with Them in order to critique Us. But Latour’s challenge to postmodernism in general applies to this particular postmodern move as well: Postmodern critiques of modernity often assume that modernity is what it claims to be, a wholly new thing in the history of humanity. Postmodern critiques accept that We are not like Them. And the effort to critique modernity with resources drawn from medieval thought and culture could be operating on the same assumption. To put it another way, do the theorists Holsinger examines recognize that, in spite of Terrors and deChristianizations and a thousand assaults on the ancien regime, modernity has never been able to expunge the medieval from our midst? Do they recognize the real and pervasive continuities between Them and Us? R. J. Rushdoony pointed out long ago that the “county” as a unit of government is a medieval holdover.