TURGID AND BAFFLING

by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

If you had to nominate a moment in history when the great American culture wars really took off, you could do worse than October 21, 1966. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato had chosen the date to schedule their first academic conference, mainly as a way of showing off Johns Hopkins’ shiny new “Humanities Center”. But by the time the date rolled around, even the large, expensively appointed lecture hall was starting to look inadequate. “People were falling out of the windows,” Macksey later recalled. Latecomers had to be ushered into the staff lounge, where a closed-circuit video link had been set up to make sure no one missed a word. Nor were the attendees wrong to be excited. Without realizing it, Macksey and Donato were about to inaugurate a whole new academic discipline. You have probably heard of it via one of its vague almost-synonyms: “postmodernism”, “poststructuralism”, “continental philosophy”, “the linguistic turn”. Perhaps the most accurate name for it, though, is “French Theory”.

There was not a whole lot that united the speakers at the Johns Hopkins conference. Macksey and Donato had opted for breadth over specificity, giving the event a deliberately vague title and inviting nearly 100 speakers from all over the academic map: philosophers like Jean Hyppolite and Gilles Deleuze, literary critics like Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov, the linguist Nicolas Ruwet, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the historian Charles Morazé, and the anthropologist Jean-Pierre Vernan, to name only a few. If there was one indispensable criterion for invitation, it seemed to have more to do with nationality than departmental affiliation: virtually all the speakers were from France or wrote in French, and there was a definite sense, in the news reports that heralded the conference and the publications that followed it, that the real theme of the Johns Hopkins conference was France itself. Local papers published bemused articles on the flocks of Frenchmen that had alighted in downtown Baltimore, to fire off “a ninety-six-gun French dispute,” as one journalist quipped. Macksey and Donato, along with a little help from the Ford Foundation, had opened a kind of portal to the country which, as every American intellectual knows, is where all the most glamorous new philosophical trends, from vitalism to existentialism to surrealism, start life.