MF; Be that as it may, to me it seems
difficult
to deny that today work is no longer a moral problem.
Foucault-Live
One speaks of metalanguage in dealing with literary criticism, the history of science, the history of philosophy, etc.
Naturally, one can talk about it in dealing with medicine as well.
I wonder whether it might not be preferable to return to the more rigorous definition of meta- language, one which says that it is the discourse through which the elements and the rules of construction of a language are defined.
Q: In fact, in mathematics, metalanguage is the lan- guage through which mathematics is formalized. But beyond the definition, the most important aspect of the question is something else: that is, that the structure of the metalanguage can be different from that of the language.
MF: Possibly.
Q: But I am constructing my discourse within the
episteme of my civilization, or outside it?
MF: What meaning are you giving to the term epis-
teme?
Q: The same one you gave to it.
MF: Yes, and I'd like to know what that meaning is.
? Q: For my part, as a good neo-Kantian, I intend to refer to the categories.
MF: Now we're at the crux. What I called episteme in The Order of Things has nothing to do with historical cate- gories, that is with those categories created in a particular historical moment. When I speak of episteme, I mean all those
? ? 76 An Historian of Culture
? relationships which existed between the various sectors of sci- ence during a given epoch. For example, I am thinking of the fact that at a certain point mathematics was used for research in physics, while linguistics or, if you will, semiology, the science of signs, was used by biology (to deal with genetic messages). Likewise the theory of evolution was used by, or served as a model for historians, psychologists, and sociolo- gists of the 19th century. All these phenomena of relationship between the sciences or between the various scientific sectors constitute what I call the episteme of an epoch. Thus for me episteme has nothing to do with the Kantian categories.
? Q: Yet when you speak of the concept of "order" in the 17th century, aren't you dealing with a category?
? MF: I simply noted that the problem of order (the problem, not the category), or rather the need to introduce an order among series of numbers, human beings, or values, ap- pears simultaneously in many different disciplines in the 17th century. This involves a communication between the diverse disciplines, and so it was that someone who proposed, for example, the creation of a universal language in the 17th cen- tury was quite close in terms of procedure to somoeone who dealt with the problem of how one could catalog human beings. It's a question of relationships and communication among the various sciences. This is what I call episteme, and it has nothing to do with the Kantian categories.
? Q: I call these categories, because they are formal, universal, and empty.
MF: Do you consider historicity, for example, to be a category?
? An Historian of Culture 77
? Q: Yes, it's a category of 19th century culture.
MF: But this isn't Kant's meaning of "category. "
Q: It depends on how one reads Kant.
MF: Then I recognize that even my own are catego- ries in this sense.
Q: Let's go on now to another topic. I would like to ask you a question concerning your interest in Nietzsche. What is the Nietzsche that you like?
MF: Clearly, it is not that of Zarathustra. It is that of The Birth of Tragedy, of The Genealogy of Morals.
Q: The Nietzsche of origins, then?
? MF: I would say that in Nietzsche I find a question- ing of the historical type which does not refer in any way to the "original" as do many of the analyses of Western thought. Husserl and Heidegger bring up for discussion again all of our knowledge and its foundations, but they do this by beginning from that which is original. This analysis takes place, how- ever, at the expense of any articulated historical content. In- stead, what I liked in Nietzsche is the attempt to bring up for discussion again the fundamental concepts of knowledge, of morals, and of metaphysics by appealing to a historical analy- sis of the positivistic type, without going back to origins. But clearly this is not the only thing that interests me in Nietzsche.
In your writings, I find another more important as- pect; the retum to the discussion of the primacy, or, if you prefer, of the privilege of the subject in the Cartesian or Kan- tian sense, of the subject as consciousness.
? ? 78 An Historian of Culture
Q: It's precisely on that point that I wanted to ask you another question. I have the impression that for you, as for the majority of French philosophers, the subject coincides with consciousness.
? MF: For me this isn't true; but it is true that the over- whelming majority of philosphers from the 17th to the 19th century has equated subject and consciousness. I would say, rather, that this holds true also for the French philosophers of the 20th century, including Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. I think that this equation of subject-consciousness at the transcenden- tal level is a characteristic of Western philosophy from Des- cartes to our own time. Nietzsche launched one of the first, or at least one of the most vigorous, attacks against this equation.
? Q: It's a question of consciousness as the subject of "I think. " But what I don't understand is the position of con- sciousnenss as object of an episteme. The consciousness, if anything, is "epistemizing," not "epistemizable. "
MF: Are you speaking of the transcendental con- sciousness?
Q: Yes.
? MF: Well, I am not Kantian or Cartesian, precisely because I refuse an equation on the transcendental level be- tween subject and thinking "I. " I am convinced that there ex- ist, if not exactly structures, then at least rules for the function- ing of knowledge which have arisen in the course of history and within which can be located the various subjects.
? Q: I am afraid that all this may be a trap in which we are prisoners. What you are saying is undoubtedly true, but on
? ? An Historian of Culture 79
? the other hand, it is exactly this transcendental consciousness which conditions the formation of our knowledge. It is true that transcendental consciousness arises in a particular phase of our history and civilization, in a particular situation; but it is also true that, once arisen, it manifests itself as a constituting and not a constituted thing.
MF: I understand your position, but it is exacty on this point that our views diverge. You seem to me Kantian or Husserlian. In all of my work I strive instead to avoid any reference to this transcendental as a condition of possibility for any knowledge. When I say that I strive to avoid it, I don't mean that I am sure of succeeding. My procedure at this mo- ment is of a regressive sort, I would say; I try to assume a greater and greater detachment in order to define the historical conditions and transformations of our knowledge. I try to his- toricize to the utmost in order to leave as litu? e space as pos- sible to the transcendental. I cannot exclude the possibility that one day I will have to confront an irreducible residuum which will be, in fact, the transcendental.
? Q: Let's try to look at the question fi-om another point of view. Since it is said that you are a structuralist (for- give me for saying this), I would like to know whether you think that some kind of relationship exists between the concept of "structure" and the Freudian notion of the "unconscious. "
? MF: I'll answer you in an offhand way, though I will begin by making a statement of principles: I am absolutely not a structuralist.
Q: I know that, but public opinion has linked you to the structuralists.
? ? 80 An Historian of Culture
? MF: I am obliged to repeat it continually. I have never used any of the concepts which can be considered char- acteristic of structuralism. I have mentioned the concept of structure several times, but I have never used it. Unfortunately critics and journalists are not like philosophers; they do not recognize the difference between "mention" and "use. " Thus if I now speak of struchire and the unconscious I do so from a completely external standpoint; nor do I consider myself bound by the answer that I give. Anyway I am quite incompe- tent in this field. I will say that it seems to me that in recent years (I am speaking as a historian of culture) an unexpected discovery has occurred: I mean the discovery of the existence of formal relationships, which can indeed be called structures, exactly in areas that appear in all respects under the control of consciousness, for example in language and formal thought. It has also been observed that these relationships existed and operated even when the subject was not truly conscious of them--conscious first in the psychological sense of the word, but also in the Kantian or Cartesian sense. Thus through lin- guistics, logic and ethnology one arrives at the discovery of a sector which stands outside consciousness in the usually ac- cepted meaning of that word. Is it necessary to fit this sector into the realm of the? unconscious, understood in the Freudian sense? Students of psychoanalysis have found themselves with two choices. The first involves asserting that this "structural" unconscious, if we want to term it that, is subordinate to the Freudian unconscious. Fortunately many investigators have avoided this error, or should I say ingenuousness, and have put the problem in different terms.
The problem is to find out whether the Freudian un- conscious is not itself a locus in which this system of formal relationships operates. These relationships are operative in language, in formal thought, and even in certain social struc- tures. Perhaps the Freudian unconscious as well is, shall we
? An Historian of Culture 81
? say, "touched" by this structural unconscious. This is the point at which many psychoanalytic investigations have arrived.
Q: But doesn't this "structural" unconscious perhaps coincide with the unconscious as defined by Jung?
? MF: Certainly not. One can say with confidence that we are not speaking of an individual unconscious, in the sense that psychoanalysis generally understands that notion. Yet nei- ther is it a collective unconscious, which would be a kind of collection or reservoir of archetypes at the disposition of eve- ryone. The "structural" unconscious is neither of these things.
? Q: Please explain to me your interest in a writer like Sade. Does it have to do with the dissolution of the "ego" in his work, or perhaps with his eroticism, with that kind of alge- braic combination which eroticism undergoes in him?
? MF: Sade's great experiment, even with all that might be considered pathetic in it, lies in the fact that he seeks to introduce the disorder of desire into a world dominated by order and classification. This is precisely the meaning of what he calls "libertinism. " The libertine is a man gifted with a desire stroong enough and a mind cold enough to allow him to succeed in fitting all the potentialities of his desire into an absolutely exhaustive combination of events.
? Q: But according to you, doesn't one perhaps arrive at the death of desire in Sade? These combinations which know neither time nor the dynamics of desire, but only some abstract sexual acts--don't these combinations of all possible modes of behavior lead us perhaps to a situation in which Eros no longer exists, in which Eros becomes only a pretext?
? 82 An Historian of Culture
? MF: I'll say only a few things in reference to this. It is evident that if I want to make love (or rather, when I want to make love) I do not resort to Sade's prescribed methods, to his combinations; not so much because I wouldn't like to try, but because I've never had the opportunity. Thus I agree with you that in these perfect successive combinations it is not possible that desire should be multiplied or divided as it is in Sade's works. But in Sade I don't seek a formula for making love or a stimulus leading to it. For me Sade is a symptom of a curious movement which becomes evident within our culture at that moment when a thought, which was basically dominated by representation, calculation, order and classification, gives way, simultaneously with the French Revolution, to an element which up to then had never been conceived in this way, that is desire or voluptuousness. . .
Q: Thus, according to you, Sade is the last defender of the esprit de geometrie?
MF: Exactly. I see in Sade the last representative of the 18th century (the milieu from which he came also testifies to this), rather than a prophet of the future. Perhaps the real qustion is why we today should be so passionately interested in him. At any rate, I don't make Sade out to be a god, and I don't make him the prophet of our age; my interest in him has been constant principally because of the historical position he occupies, which is at a point of transition between two forms of thought.
Q: Why is our era so interested in Sade?
? MF: The reason probably is that Sade sought to in- sert into the combinations of representations the infinite power of desire, and when he did so he was obliged, almost as an
? An Historian of Culture 83
? afterthought, to take away the ego's privileged position. The ego became just one element within a combination. In the philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries, the ego was king. Later, in the 19th century, with the philosophy of will, the ego remains king, though in a different way. Yet at the moment at which these two currents are joined, the ego is dissociated and dispersed among the various combinations. I believe that one of the most noteworthy characteristics of our era is that the sovereignty of the ego has been put in doubt. The dissociation which characterizes our own time was already present in Sade.
? Q; But don't you think that the popularity of Sade is due rather to the pansexuality which reigns in our day, the op- position to all order and all morality? I feel that for many people Sade represents above all the liberation of Eros, a spirit that mocks virtuousness, or the victory of the anarchistic Juli- ette ("Vice") over the timid and conformist Justine ("Virtue").
? MF: That's true. However, I maintain that the desire to liberate oneself from sexual taboos has always existed, in all epochs. People have always been famished, from the sexual point of view; there are no societies which do not regulate sex, and thus all societies create the hope of escaping from such regulations. The point is to decipher what form that hope takes today. It's true, today we set Juliette against Justine. But when we do that, aren't we perhaps admitting, or agreeing to, a kind of sexuality which goes beyond the subject, which stands be- hind the ego, so to speak, or which supersedes it? Thus the kind of sexuality that we recognize today in practice contrib- utes to the dissociation of the ego, at least in the form in which that term is understood from Descartes onward. So we see that in fact the basic theme of Sade's Juliette is this: "I will do with you anythiing that my desire wants, though it is agreed that you will do the same with me. No part of you will escape my
? 84 An Historian of Culture
? desire, but the same goes for me. " Thus neither of the two controls his or her own body anymore, and the loss of one communicates with the loss of the other even if the subject itself does not exercise any real control. It is exactiy this orgi- astic quality of contemporary sexuality that has raised the question of the subject's position.
Q: But many, for example Marcuse, speak of the lib- eration of Eros as an affirmation of the ego.
MF: I think that Marcuse is trying to use the ancient themes inherited from the 19th century to salvage the ego, understood in the traditional sense.
Q: Again, for me things appear differemly. Pansexu- ality is a phenomenon analogous to protest; it is a refusal of authority, of morality. The struggle is not so much against the subject as against constituted society, the "establishment. "
? MF: When I speak of the particular forms which ero- tocism assumes today, I don't mean to say that it is the only factor leading to a dissolution of the individual. I believe that we ? ue passing through a profound crisis of our civihzation, in the course of which the ego, the individual person as under- stood in traditional terms, has come to be questioned.
? Q: You have written that moral problems today are entirely reducible to political and sexual problems. Why?
MF: It often happens that I say something just so that I won't have to think about it anymore; then, for this reason, I have some trouble in justifying it. Nevertheless, I made this statement because I was thinking about it and also in order to continue thinking about it.
? An Historian of Culture 85
? Q: But you went further; you said that sexuality could ultimately be connected to politics.
? MF: This I stated simply as hypothesis. But here is what I meant. Today, in our time (and I speak to you as a historian, even if my goal is to be a historian of the present), moral problems concern sex and politics exclusively. I'll give you an example. For a very long time, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the problem of work, or the lack of work, was or seemed to be a moral problem by nature. Those who did not work were not considered unfortunates who could not find work, but lazy evil creatures who did not want to work. In short, there existed a work ethic but it's hardly necessary for me to say this, because Max Weber said it all, and much better than I could. Today we know quite well that whoever is not working cannot find work, is unemployed. Work has left the domain of morality and entered into that of politics.
? Q: It's clear that you are not Italian.
MF; Be that as it may, to me it seems difficult to deny that today work is no longer a moral problem. In short, I would like you to give me an example of a moral problem recognized as such by everyone or by many people, and one which is not connnected to sex or politics. Do you think that my reduction is a bit too radical?
Q: I'm from another school. For me, morality is a hi- erarchy of values, of all values; every time we are forced to choose between values we find ourselves in the midst of a moral problem.
MF: But don't you believe that in the present world sex and politics define these values?
? 86 An Historian of Culture
? Q: They define the most visible and most discussed part of moral problems. I would say that they define rather the ethicality (Hegel's Sittlichkeit). You're right as far as Sittlich- keit is concemed, but not for the case of morality (Hegel's Moralita? t). The two things are not identical. Ethicality is cus- tom: habitual behavior, or at least the behavior expected from a person within a social group, in his relations with the mem- bers and the institutions of that group, in his dealings with them. Custom has its duties and its prohibitions, its idols and its taboos, which vary through history, from epoch to epoch, from place to place (a customs barrier suffices to mark a change in ethics). Morality is much wider, and includes ethics as one of its particular, determined aspects. But it actually sigiti? fies a general respect for values as such (for "all" values) inasmuch as they are objects of the will ("ends"); moreover, it is a respect for the hierarchy of values, and whenever the realization of some of these values appears impossible, there will be a conflict (the necessity of choosing). Robinson Crusoe, on his desert island, doesn't have ethical problems; but he continues to have a morality, and eventually moral problems as well. Morality is a category of the objective spirit, while ethicality is only a particular value (and perhaps it is merely an instrumental thing, if it is true, as I happen to think, that the individual represents a higher value than the group).
? MF: Here we find ourselves dealing with the same problem as before; you believe in the transcendental and I don't.
Q: But how, in your view, can sexuality be reduced to politics?
? MF: This is a question that I have asked myself, but I am not really sure. Perhaps one could say that, if certain as-
? An Historian of Culture 87
? pects of our sexual lives (marriage, the family, the corruption of minors, etc. ) raise moral problems, that happens as a func- tion of the particular political situation.
Q: But everything we do has a relationship to the po- litical situation. We are no longer in the midst of Rousseau's forest; in all aspects of our lives we are confronted with laws and institutions.
MF: I wasn't speaking of that. I was wondering how sexuality could raise moral problems; I'm not talking about problems of repression, but exclusively of moral problems. In what sense can leaving a woman or not leaving her constitute a moral problem? I'm not thinking of laws, which vary from one country to another. I think that such things can be because certain acts have connections with the political relationships that define our societies.
Q: According to you, what is the difference between political and social relationships?
MF: I label political everything that has to do with class struggle, and social everything that derives from and is a consequence of the class struggle, expressed in human rela- tionships and in institutions.
Q: For me politics is everything connected to the struggle for power and therefore constitutes perhaps only one aspect of class struggle. The social refers to everything con- nected to relationships between people in general.
? MF: If we give to the term "political" the meaning that you attribute to it--^and yours is the more precise defini- tion, I must admit--^then my definition cannot stand. I also
? 88 An Historian of Culture
want to give politics the meaning of a struggle for power; but it's not power understood only as government or state, but economic power as well. A
Translated by Jared Becker and James Cascaito.
? Note
? 1 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966). Langue (language) is the system of language; parole (speech) is the individual utterance.
? ? fj
8
? Film and Popular Memory
? ? Q: Let's start from the journalistic phenomenon of the "retro" style, the current fad for the recent past. Basically, we can put the question like this: how is it that films like Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien or The Night Porter^ can be made today? Why do they meet with such a fantastic response? We think the answer has to be sought on three levels:
? (1. ) Giscard d'Estaing has been elected. A new kind of approach to politics, to history, to the political apparatus is coming into existence, indicating very clearly--in such a way that everyone can see it--that Gaullism is dead. So it's neces- sary, insofar as GauUism remains very closely linked to the period of the Resistance, to look at how this is translated in the films which are being made.
? (2. ) How is it possible for bourgeois ideology to at- tack the weak points of orthodox Marxism (rigid, economistic, mechanical--the terms don't matter much) which has for so long provided the only framework for interpreting social phe- nomena?
(3. ) Lastly, what does all this mean for pohtical mili- tants? Given that militants are consumers and sometimes also makers of films.
? 88 An Historian of Culture
want to give politics the meaning of a struggle for power; but it's not power understood only as government or state, but economic power as well. A
Translated by Jared Becker and James Cascaito. Note
? 1 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966). Langue (language) is the system of language; parole (speech) is the individual utterance.
? 8
Film and Popular Memory
? ? Q: Let's start from the journalistic phenomenon of the "retro" style, the current fad for the recent past. Basically, we can put the question like this: how is it that films like Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien or The Night Porter^ can be made today? Why do they meet with such a fantastic response? We think the answer has to be sought on three levels:
? (1. ) Giscard d'Estaing has been elected. A new kind of approach to politics, to history, to the political apparatus is coming into existence, indicating very clearly--^in such a way that everyone can see it--that Gaullism is dead. So it's neces- sary, insofar as Gaullism remains very closely linked to the period of the Resistance, to look at how this is translated in the films which are being made.
? (2. ) How is it possible for bourgeois ideology to at- tack the weak points of orthodox Marxism (rigid, economistic, mechanical--the terms don't matter much) which has for so long provided the only framework for interpreting social phe- nomena?
(3. ) Lastly, what does all this mean for political mili- tants? Given that militants are consumers and sometimes also makers of films.
? 90 Film and Popular Memory
The thing is, that after Marcel Ophuls' film The Sor- row and the Pity, the floodgates have been open. Something hitherto completely repressed or forbidden has flooded out. Why?
? MF: I think this comes from the fact that the history of the war, and what took place around it, has never really been written except in completely official accounts. These of- ficial histories are to all intents and purposes centered on Gaullism, which, on the one hand, was the only way of writing history in terms of an honorable nationalism; and, on the other, the only way of introducing the Great Man, the man of the right, the man of the old 19th-century nationalisms, as an historical figure.
? It boils down to the fact that France was exonerated by de Gaulle, while the right (and we know how it behaved at the time of the war) was purified and sanctified by him.
What has never been described is what was going on in the very heart of the country from 1936, and even fi'om the end of the 1914 war, up until Liberation.
Q; So what has come about since The Sorrow and the Pity is some kind of retum to tmth in history. The point is really whether it is the truth.
MF: This has to be hnked to the fact that the end of Gaullism means an end to this exoneration of the right by de Gaulle and by this brief period. The old right of Petain and Maurras, the old reactionary and collaborating right, which disguised itself behind de Gaulle as best it could, now feels entitled to write its own history. This old right which, since Tardieu, had been upstaged both historically and politically, is now coming back into the limelight.
? It openly supported Giscard. There's no longer any
? Film and Popular Memory 91
? need for it to rely on disguises, it can write its own history. And among the factors which account for the present accep- tance of Giscard by half of France (a majority of 200,000), we mustn't forget to include films like those we're discussing-- whatever their makers' intentions. The fact that it's been pos- sible to show everything has enabled the right to carry out a certain regrouping. In the same way that, conversely, it's re- ally the healing of the breach between the national right and the collaborating right which has made these films possible. The two are inextricably linked.
Q: This history, then, is being rewritten both in the cinema and on television. It seems this rewriting of history is being carried out by film-makers who are thought of as more or less left-wing. This is a problem we should look at more closely.
MF: I don't think it's that simple. What I've just said is very schematic. Let's go over it again.
? There's a real fight going on. Over what? Over what we can roughly describe as popular memory. It's an actual fact that people--I'm talking about those who are barred from writing, from producing their books themselves, fi'om drawing up their own historical accounts--^that these people neverthe- less do have a way of recording history, or remembering it, of keeping it fresh and using it. This popular history was, to a certain extent, even more alive, more clearly formulated in the 19th century, where, for instance, there was a whole tradition of struggles which were transmitted orally, or in writing or songs, etc.
? Now, a whole number of apparatuses have been set up ("popular literature," cheap books and the stuff that's taught in school as well) to obstruct the flow of this popular memory. And it could be said that this attempt has been pretty
? 92 Film and Popular Memory
? successful. The historical knowledge the working class has of itself is continually shrinking. If you think, for instance, of what workers at the end of the 19th century knew about their own history, what the trade union tradition (in the strict sense of the word) was like up until the 1914 war, it's really quite remarkable. This has been progressively diminished, but al- though it gets less, it doesn't vanish.
Today, cheap books aren't enough. There are much more effective means like television and the cinema. And I believe this was one way of reprogramming popular memory, which existed but had no way of expressing itself. So people are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having been.
Since memory is actually a very important factor in struggle (really, in fact, struggles develop in a kind of con- scious moving forward of history), if one controls people's memory, one controls their dynamism. And one also controls their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles. Just what the Resistance was, must no longer be known. . .
? I think we have to understand these films in some
such way as this. Their theme is, roughly, that there's been no popular struggle in the 20th century. This assertion has been successively formulated in two ways. The first, immediately after the war, simply said; "What a century of heroes the 20th century is! There's been Churchill, de Gaulle, those chaps who did the parachuting, the fighter squadrons, etc! " It amounted to saying: "There's been no popular struggle, because this is where the real struggle was. " But still no one said direcfly, "There's been no popular struggle. "
? The other, more recent formulation--sceptical or cynical, as you prefer--consists in proceeding to the blunt assertion itself: "Just look at what happened. Where have you seen any struggles? Where do you see people rising up, taking up rifles? "
? Film and Popular Memory 93
? Q; There's been a sort of half-rumor going around since, perhaps. The Sorrow and the Pity, to the effect that the French people, as a whole, didn't resist the Germans, that they even accepted collaboration, that they took it all lying down. The question is what all this finally means. And it does indeed seem that what is at stake is popular struggle, or rather the memory of that struggle.
? MF: Exactly. It's vital to have posession of this mem- ory, to control it, to administer it, tell it what it must contain. And when you see these films, you find out what you have to remember: "Don't believe all that you've been told. There aren't any heroes. And if there aren't any, it's because there's no struggle. " So a sort of ambiguity arises; to start with, "there aren't any heroes" is a positive debunking of the whole war- hero mythology la Burt Lancaster. It's a way of saying, "No, that's not what war is about. " So your first impression is that history is beginning to reappear; that eventually they're going to tell us why we're not all obliged to identify with de Gaulle or the members of the Normandy-Niemen squadron, etc. But beneath the sentence "There are no heroes" is hidden a differ ent meaning, its true message; "There was no struggle. " This is what the exercise is all about.
? Q: There's another phenomenon which explains why these films are so successful. The resentment of those who really did struggle is used against those who didn't. The people who formed the Resistance, watching The Sorrow and the Pity for example, see the passive citizens of a town in central France, and they recognize their passivity. And then the resentment takes over; they forget that they themselves did sttuggle.
MF; In my view, the politically important phenome- non is, rather than any one particular film, that of the series.
? 94 Film and Popular Memory
? the network established by all these films and the place-- excuse the pun--they "occupy. " In other words, the important thing is to ask: "Is it possible at the moment to make a positive film about the struggles of the Resistance? " Well, clearly the answer's no. One gets the impression that people would laugh at a film like this, or else quite simply wouldn't go to see it.
? Q: Yes. It's the first thing to be brought up against us when we attack a film like Malle's. The response is always, "What would you have done, then? " And you're right; it's impossible to answer. We should be beginning to develop-- how shall I put it -- a left-wing perspective on all this, but it's true that one doesn't exist ready-made.
Alternately, this restates the problem of how one is to produce a positive hero, a new type of hero.
MF: The problem's not the hero, but the struggle. Can you make a film about a struggle without going through the traditional process of creating heroes? It's a new form of an old problem.
? Q: Let's go back to the ''retro" style. From its own standpoint, the bourgeoisie has largely concentrated its atten- tion on one historical period (the forties) which throws into focus both its strong and weak points. For on the one hand, this is where it's most easily exposed (it's the bourgeoisie which created the breeding ground of Nazism or of collabora- tion with it); while on the other hand, it's here that it's cur- rently trying to justify its historical behavior--^in the most cynical ways.
Q: In fact, in mathematics, metalanguage is the lan- guage through which mathematics is formalized. But beyond the definition, the most important aspect of the question is something else: that is, that the structure of the metalanguage can be different from that of the language.
MF: Possibly.
Q: But I am constructing my discourse within the
episteme of my civilization, or outside it?
MF: What meaning are you giving to the term epis-
teme?
Q: The same one you gave to it.
MF: Yes, and I'd like to know what that meaning is.
? Q: For my part, as a good neo-Kantian, I intend to refer to the categories.
MF: Now we're at the crux. What I called episteme in The Order of Things has nothing to do with historical cate- gories, that is with those categories created in a particular historical moment. When I speak of episteme, I mean all those
? ? 76 An Historian of Culture
? relationships which existed between the various sectors of sci- ence during a given epoch. For example, I am thinking of the fact that at a certain point mathematics was used for research in physics, while linguistics or, if you will, semiology, the science of signs, was used by biology (to deal with genetic messages). Likewise the theory of evolution was used by, or served as a model for historians, psychologists, and sociolo- gists of the 19th century. All these phenomena of relationship between the sciences or between the various scientific sectors constitute what I call the episteme of an epoch. Thus for me episteme has nothing to do with the Kantian categories.
? Q: Yet when you speak of the concept of "order" in the 17th century, aren't you dealing with a category?
? MF: I simply noted that the problem of order (the problem, not the category), or rather the need to introduce an order among series of numbers, human beings, or values, ap- pears simultaneously in many different disciplines in the 17th century. This involves a communication between the diverse disciplines, and so it was that someone who proposed, for example, the creation of a universal language in the 17th cen- tury was quite close in terms of procedure to somoeone who dealt with the problem of how one could catalog human beings. It's a question of relationships and communication among the various sciences. This is what I call episteme, and it has nothing to do with the Kantian categories.
? Q: I call these categories, because they are formal, universal, and empty.
MF: Do you consider historicity, for example, to be a category?
? An Historian of Culture 77
? Q: Yes, it's a category of 19th century culture.
MF: But this isn't Kant's meaning of "category. "
Q: It depends on how one reads Kant.
MF: Then I recognize that even my own are catego- ries in this sense.
Q: Let's go on now to another topic. I would like to ask you a question concerning your interest in Nietzsche. What is the Nietzsche that you like?
MF: Clearly, it is not that of Zarathustra. It is that of The Birth of Tragedy, of The Genealogy of Morals.
Q: The Nietzsche of origins, then?
? MF: I would say that in Nietzsche I find a question- ing of the historical type which does not refer in any way to the "original" as do many of the analyses of Western thought. Husserl and Heidegger bring up for discussion again all of our knowledge and its foundations, but they do this by beginning from that which is original. This analysis takes place, how- ever, at the expense of any articulated historical content. In- stead, what I liked in Nietzsche is the attempt to bring up for discussion again the fundamental concepts of knowledge, of morals, and of metaphysics by appealing to a historical analy- sis of the positivistic type, without going back to origins. But clearly this is not the only thing that interests me in Nietzsche.
In your writings, I find another more important as- pect; the retum to the discussion of the primacy, or, if you prefer, of the privilege of the subject in the Cartesian or Kan- tian sense, of the subject as consciousness.
? ? 78 An Historian of Culture
Q: It's precisely on that point that I wanted to ask you another question. I have the impression that for you, as for the majority of French philosophers, the subject coincides with consciousness.
? MF: For me this isn't true; but it is true that the over- whelming majority of philosphers from the 17th to the 19th century has equated subject and consciousness. I would say, rather, that this holds true also for the French philosophers of the 20th century, including Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. I think that this equation of subject-consciousness at the transcenden- tal level is a characteristic of Western philosophy from Des- cartes to our own time. Nietzsche launched one of the first, or at least one of the most vigorous, attacks against this equation.
? Q: It's a question of consciousness as the subject of "I think. " But what I don't understand is the position of con- sciousnenss as object of an episteme. The consciousness, if anything, is "epistemizing," not "epistemizable. "
MF: Are you speaking of the transcendental con- sciousness?
Q: Yes.
? MF: Well, I am not Kantian or Cartesian, precisely because I refuse an equation on the transcendental level be- tween subject and thinking "I. " I am convinced that there ex- ist, if not exactly structures, then at least rules for the function- ing of knowledge which have arisen in the course of history and within which can be located the various subjects.
? Q: I am afraid that all this may be a trap in which we are prisoners. What you are saying is undoubtedly true, but on
? ? An Historian of Culture 79
? the other hand, it is exactly this transcendental consciousness which conditions the formation of our knowledge. It is true that transcendental consciousness arises in a particular phase of our history and civilization, in a particular situation; but it is also true that, once arisen, it manifests itself as a constituting and not a constituted thing.
MF: I understand your position, but it is exacty on this point that our views diverge. You seem to me Kantian or Husserlian. In all of my work I strive instead to avoid any reference to this transcendental as a condition of possibility for any knowledge. When I say that I strive to avoid it, I don't mean that I am sure of succeeding. My procedure at this mo- ment is of a regressive sort, I would say; I try to assume a greater and greater detachment in order to define the historical conditions and transformations of our knowledge. I try to his- toricize to the utmost in order to leave as litu? e space as pos- sible to the transcendental. I cannot exclude the possibility that one day I will have to confront an irreducible residuum which will be, in fact, the transcendental.
? Q: Let's try to look at the question fi-om another point of view. Since it is said that you are a structuralist (for- give me for saying this), I would like to know whether you think that some kind of relationship exists between the concept of "structure" and the Freudian notion of the "unconscious. "
? MF: I'll answer you in an offhand way, though I will begin by making a statement of principles: I am absolutely not a structuralist.
Q: I know that, but public opinion has linked you to the structuralists.
? ? 80 An Historian of Culture
? MF: I am obliged to repeat it continually. I have never used any of the concepts which can be considered char- acteristic of structuralism. I have mentioned the concept of structure several times, but I have never used it. Unfortunately critics and journalists are not like philosophers; they do not recognize the difference between "mention" and "use. " Thus if I now speak of struchire and the unconscious I do so from a completely external standpoint; nor do I consider myself bound by the answer that I give. Anyway I am quite incompe- tent in this field. I will say that it seems to me that in recent years (I am speaking as a historian of culture) an unexpected discovery has occurred: I mean the discovery of the existence of formal relationships, which can indeed be called structures, exactly in areas that appear in all respects under the control of consciousness, for example in language and formal thought. It has also been observed that these relationships existed and operated even when the subject was not truly conscious of them--conscious first in the psychological sense of the word, but also in the Kantian or Cartesian sense. Thus through lin- guistics, logic and ethnology one arrives at the discovery of a sector which stands outside consciousness in the usually ac- cepted meaning of that word. Is it necessary to fit this sector into the realm of the? unconscious, understood in the Freudian sense? Students of psychoanalysis have found themselves with two choices. The first involves asserting that this "structural" unconscious, if we want to term it that, is subordinate to the Freudian unconscious. Fortunately many investigators have avoided this error, or should I say ingenuousness, and have put the problem in different terms.
The problem is to find out whether the Freudian un- conscious is not itself a locus in which this system of formal relationships operates. These relationships are operative in language, in formal thought, and even in certain social struc- tures. Perhaps the Freudian unconscious as well is, shall we
? An Historian of Culture 81
? say, "touched" by this structural unconscious. This is the point at which many psychoanalytic investigations have arrived.
Q: But doesn't this "structural" unconscious perhaps coincide with the unconscious as defined by Jung?
? MF: Certainly not. One can say with confidence that we are not speaking of an individual unconscious, in the sense that psychoanalysis generally understands that notion. Yet nei- ther is it a collective unconscious, which would be a kind of collection or reservoir of archetypes at the disposition of eve- ryone. The "structural" unconscious is neither of these things.
? Q: Please explain to me your interest in a writer like Sade. Does it have to do with the dissolution of the "ego" in his work, or perhaps with his eroticism, with that kind of alge- braic combination which eroticism undergoes in him?
? MF: Sade's great experiment, even with all that might be considered pathetic in it, lies in the fact that he seeks to introduce the disorder of desire into a world dominated by order and classification. This is precisely the meaning of what he calls "libertinism. " The libertine is a man gifted with a desire stroong enough and a mind cold enough to allow him to succeed in fitting all the potentialities of his desire into an absolutely exhaustive combination of events.
? Q: But according to you, doesn't one perhaps arrive at the death of desire in Sade? These combinations which know neither time nor the dynamics of desire, but only some abstract sexual acts--don't these combinations of all possible modes of behavior lead us perhaps to a situation in which Eros no longer exists, in which Eros becomes only a pretext?
? 82 An Historian of Culture
? MF: I'll say only a few things in reference to this. It is evident that if I want to make love (or rather, when I want to make love) I do not resort to Sade's prescribed methods, to his combinations; not so much because I wouldn't like to try, but because I've never had the opportunity. Thus I agree with you that in these perfect successive combinations it is not possible that desire should be multiplied or divided as it is in Sade's works. But in Sade I don't seek a formula for making love or a stimulus leading to it. For me Sade is a symptom of a curious movement which becomes evident within our culture at that moment when a thought, which was basically dominated by representation, calculation, order and classification, gives way, simultaneously with the French Revolution, to an element which up to then had never been conceived in this way, that is desire or voluptuousness. . .
Q: Thus, according to you, Sade is the last defender of the esprit de geometrie?
MF: Exactly. I see in Sade the last representative of the 18th century (the milieu from which he came also testifies to this), rather than a prophet of the future. Perhaps the real qustion is why we today should be so passionately interested in him. At any rate, I don't make Sade out to be a god, and I don't make him the prophet of our age; my interest in him has been constant principally because of the historical position he occupies, which is at a point of transition between two forms of thought.
Q: Why is our era so interested in Sade?
? MF: The reason probably is that Sade sought to in- sert into the combinations of representations the infinite power of desire, and when he did so he was obliged, almost as an
? An Historian of Culture 83
? afterthought, to take away the ego's privileged position. The ego became just one element within a combination. In the philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries, the ego was king. Later, in the 19th century, with the philosophy of will, the ego remains king, though in a different way. Yet at the moment at which these two currents are joined, the ego is dissociated and dispersed among the various combinations. I believe that one of the most noteworthy characteristics of our era is that the sovereignty of the ego has been put in doubt. The dissociation which characterizes our own time was already present in Sade.
? Q; But don't you think that the popularity of Sade is due rather to the pansexuality which reigns in our day, the op- position to all order and all morality? I feel that for many people Sade represents above all the liberation of Eros, a spirit that mocks virtuousness, or the victory of the anarchistic Juli- ette ("Vice") over the timid and conformist Justine ("Virtue").
? MF: That's true. However, I maintain that the desire to liberate oneself from sexual taboos has always existed, in all epochs. People have always been famished, from the sexual point of view; there are no societies which do not regulate sex, and thus all societies create the hope of escaping from such regulations. The point is to decipher what form that hope takes today. It's true, today we set Juliette against Justine. But when we do that, aren't we perhaps admitting, or agreeing to, a kind of sexuality which goes beyond the subject, which stands be- hind the ego, so to speak, or which supersedes it? Thus the kind of sexuality that we recognize today in practice contrib- utes to the dissociation of the ego, at least in the form in which that term is understood from Descartes onward. So we see that in fact the basic theme of Sade's Juliette is this: "I will do with you anythiing that my desire wants, though it is agreed that you will do the same with me. No part of you will escape my
? 84 An Historian of Culture
? desire, but the same goes for me. " Thus neither of the two controls his or her own body anymore, and the loss of one communicates with the loss of the other even if the subject itself does not exercise any real control. It is exactiy this orgi- astic quality of contemporary sexuality that has raised the question of the subject's position.
Q: But many, for example Marcuse, speak of the lib- eration of Eros as an affirmation of the ego.
MF: I think that Marcuse is trying to use the ancient themes inherited from the 19th century to salvage the ego, understood in the traditional sense.
Q: Again, for me things appear differemly. Pansexu- ality is a phenomenon analogous to protest; it is a refusal of authority, of morality. The struggle is not so much against the subject as against constituted society, the "establishment. "
? MF: When I speak of the particular forms which ero- tocism assumes today, I don't mean to say that it is the only factor leading to a dissolution of the individual. I believe that we ? ue passing through a profound crisis of our civihzation, in the course of which the ego, the individual person as under- stood in traditional terms, has come to be questioned.
? Q: You have written that moral problems today are entirely reducible to political and sexual problems. Why?
MF: It often happens that I say something just so that I won't have to think about it anymore; then, for this reason, I have some trouble in justifying it. Nevertheless, I made this statement because I was thinking about it and also in order to continue thinking about it.
? An Historian of Culture 85
? Q: But you went further; you said that sexuality could ultimately be connected to politics.
? MF: This I stated simply as hypothesis. But here is what I meant. Today, in our time (and I speak to you as a historian, even if my goal is to be a historian of the present), moral problems concern sex and politics exclusively. I'll give you an example. For a very long time, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the problem of work, or the lack of work, was or seemed to be a moral problem by nature. Those who did not work were not considered unfortunates who could not find work, but lazy evil creatures who did not want to work. In short, there existed a work ethic but it's hardly necessary for me to say this, because Max Weber said it all, and much better than I could. Today we know quite well that whoever is not working cannot find work, is unemployed. Work has left the domain of morality and entered into that of politics.
? Q: It's clear that you are not Italian.
MF; Be that as it may, to me it seems difficult to deny that today work is no longer a moral problem. In short, I would like you to give me an example of a moral problem recognized as such by everyone or by many people, and one which is not connnected to sex or politics. Do you think that my reduction is a bit too radical?
Q: I'm from another school. For me, morality is a hi- erarchy of values, of all values; every time we are forced to choose between values we find ourselves in the midst of a moral problem.
MF: But don't you believe that in the present world sex and politics define these values?
? 86 An Historian of Culture
? Q: They define the most visible and most discussed part of moral problems. I would say that they define rather the ethicality (Hegel's Sittlichkeit). You're right as far as Sittlich- keit is concemed, but not for the case of morality (Hegel's Moralita? t). The two things are not identical. Ethicality is cus- tom: habitual behavior, or at least the behavior expected from a person within a social group, in his relations with the mem- bers and the institutions of that group, in his dealings with them. Custom has its duties and its prohibitions, its idols and its taboos, which vary through history, from epoch to epoch, from place to place (a customs barrier suffices to mark a change in ethics). Morality is much wider, and includes ethics as one of its particular, determined aspects. But it actually sigiti? fies a general respect for values as such (for "all" values) inasmuch as they are objects of the will ("ends"); moreover, it is a respect for the hierarchy of values, and whenever the realization of some of these values appears impossible, there will be a conflict (the necessity of choosing). Robinson Crusoe, on his desert island, doesn't have ethical problems; but he continues to have a morality, and eventually moral problems as well. Morality is a category of the objective spirit, while ethicality is only a particular value (and perhaps it is merely an instrumental thing, if it is true, as I happen to think, that the individual represents a higher value than the group).
? MF: Here we find ourselves dealing with the same problem as before; you believe in the transcendental and I don't.
Q: But how, in your view, can sexuality be reduced to politics?
? MF: This is a question that I have asked myself, but I am not really sure. Perhaps one could say that, if certain as-
? An Historian of Culture 87
? pects of our sexual lives (marriage, the family, the corruption of minors, etc. ) raise moral problems, that happens as a func- tion of the particular political situation.
Q: But everything we do has a relationship to the po- litical situation. We are no longer in the midst of Rousseau's forest; in all aspects of our lives we are confronted with laws and institutions.
MF: I wasn't speaking of that. I was wondering how sexuality could raise moral problems; I'm not talking about problems of repression, but exclusively of moral problems. In what sense can leaving a woman or not leaving her constitute a moral problem? I'm not thinking of laws, which vary from one country to another. I think that such things can be because certain acts have connections with the political relationships that define our societies.
Q: According to you, what is the difference between political and social relationships?
MF: I label political everything that has to do with class struggle, and social everything that derives from and is a consequence of the class struggle, expressed in human rela- tionships and in institutions.
Q: For me politics is everything connected to the struggle for power and therefore constitutes perhaps only one aspect of class struggle. The social refers to everything con- nected to relationships between people in general.
? MF: If we give to the term "political" the meaning that you attribute to it--^and yours is the more precise defini- tion, I must admit--^then my definition cannot stand. I also
? 88 An Historian of Culture
want to give politics the meaning of a struggle for power; but it's not power understood only as government or state, but economic power as well. A
Translated by Jared Becker and James Cascaito.
? Note
? 1 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966). Langue (language) is the system of language; parole (speech) is the individual utterance.
? ? fj
8
? Film and Popular Memory
? ? Q: Let's start from the journalistic phenomenon of the "retro" style, the current fad for the recent past. Basically, we can put the question like this: how is it that films like Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien or The Night Porter^ can be made today? Why do they meet with such a fantastic response? We think the answer has to be sought on three levels:
? (1. ) Giscard d'Estaing has been elected. A new kind of approach to politics, to history, to the political apparatus is coming into existence, indicating very clearly--in such a way that everyone can see it--that Gaullism is dead. So it's neces- sary, insofar as GauUism remains very closely linked to the period of the Resistance, to look at how this is translated in the films which are being made.
? (2. ) How is it possible for bourgeois ideology to at- tack the weak points of orthodox Marxism (rigid, economistic, mechanical--the terms don't matter much) which has for so long provided the only framework for interpreting social phe- nomena?
(3. ) Lastly, what does all this mean for pohtical mili- tants? Given that militants are consumers and sometimes also makers of films.
? 88 An Historian of Culture
want to give politics the meaning of a struggle for power; but it's not power understood only as government or state, but economic power as well. A
Translated by Jared Becker and James Cascaito. Note
? 1 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966). Langue (language) is the system of language; parole (speech) is the individual utterance.
? 8
Film and Popular Memory
? ? Q: Let's start from the journalistic phenomenon of the "retro" style, the current fad for the recent past. Basically, we can put the question like this: how is it that films like Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien or The Night Porter^ can be made today? Why do they meet with such a fantastic response? We think the answer has to be sought on three levels:
? (1. ) Giscard d'Estaing has been elected. A new kind of approach to politics, to history, to the political apparatus is coming into existence, indicating very clearly--^in such a way that everyone can see it--that Gaullism is dead. So it's neces- sary, insofar as Gaullism remains very closely linked to the period of the Resistance, to look at how this is translated in the films which are being made.
? (2. ) How is it possible for bourgeois ideology to at- tack the weak points of orthodox Marxism (rigid, economistic, mechanical--the terms don't matter much) which has for so long provided the only framework for interpreting social phe- nomena?
(3. ) Lastly, what does all this mean for political mili- tants? Given that militants are consumers and sometimes also makers of films.
? 90 Film and Popular Memory
The thing is, that after Marcel Ophuls' film The Sor- row and the Pity, the floodgates have been open. Something hitherto completely repressed or forbidden has flooded out. Why?
? MF: I think this comes from the fact that the history of the war, and what took place around it, has never really been written except in completely official accounts. These of- ficial histories are to all intents and purposes centered on Gaullism, which, on the one hand, was the only way of writing history in terms of an honorable nationalism; and, on the other, the only way of introducing the Great Man, the man of the right, the man of the old 19th-century nationalisms, as an historical figure.
? It boils down to the fact that France was exonerated by de Gaulle, while the right (and we know how it behaved at the time of the war) was purified and sanctified by him.
What has never been described is what was going on in the very heart of the country from 1936, and even fi'om the end of the 1914 war, up until Liberation.
Q; So what has come about since The Sorrow and the Pity is some kind of retum to tmth in history. The point is really whether it is the truth.
MF: This has to be hnked to the fact that the end of Gaullism means an end to this exoneration of the right by de Gaulle and by this brief period. The old right of Petain and Maurras, the old reactionary and collaborating right, which disguised itself behind de Gaulle as best it could, now feels entitled to write its own history. This old right which, since Tardieu, had been upstaged both historically and politically, is now coming back into the limelight.
? It openly supported Giscard. There's no longer any
? Film and Popular Memory 91
? need for it to rely on disguises, it can write its own history. And among the factors which account for the present accep- tance of Giscard by half of France (a majority of 200,000), we mustn't forget to include films like those we're discussing-- whatever their makers' intentions. The fact that it's been pos- sible to show everything has enabled the right to carry out a certain regrouping. In the same way that, conversely, it's re- ally the healing of the breach between the national right and the collaborating right which has made these films possible. The two are inextricably linked.
Q: This history, then, is being rewritten both in the cinema and on television. It seems this rewriting of history is being carried out by film-makers who are thought of as more or less left-wing. This is a problem we should look at more closely.
MF: I don't think it's that simple. What I've just said is very schematic. Let's go over it again.
? There's a real fight going on. Over what? Over what we can roughly describe as popular memory. It's an actual fact that people--I'm talking about those who are barred from writing, from producing their books themselves, fi'om drawing up their own historical accounts--^that these people neverthe- less do have a way of recording history, or remembering it, of keeping it fresh and using it. This popular history was, to a certain extent, even more alive, more clearly formulated in the 19th century, where, for instance, there was a whole tradition of struggles which were transmitted orally, or in writing or songs, etc.
? Now, a whole number of apparatuses have been set up ("popular literature," cheap books and the stuff that's taught in school as well) to obstruct the flow of this popular memory. And it could be said that this attempt has been pretty
? 92 Film and Popular Memory
? successful. The historical knowledge the working class has of itself is continually shrinking. If you think, for instance, of what workers at the end of the 19th century knew about their own history, what the trade union tradition (in the strict sense of the word) was like up until the 1914 war, it's really quite remarkable. This has been progressively diminished, but al- though it gets less, it doesn't vanish.
Today, cheap books aren't enough. There are much more effective means like television and the cinema. And I believe this was one way of reprogramming popular memory, which existed but had no way of expressing itself. So people are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having been.
Since memory is actually a very important factor in struggle (really, in fact, struggles develop in a kind of con- scious moving forward of history), if one controls people's memory, one controls their dynamism. And one also controls their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles. Just what the Resistance was, must no longer be known. . .
? I think we have to understand these films in some
such way as this. Their theme is, roughly, that there's been no popular struggle in the 20th century. This assertion has been successively formulated in two ways. The first, immediately after the war, simply said; "What a century of heroes the 20th century is! There's been Churchill, de Gaulle, those chaps who did the parachuting, the fighter squadrons, etc! " It amounted to saying: "There's been no popular struggle, because this is where the real struggle was. " But still no one said direcfly, "There's been no popular struggle. "
? The other, more recent formulation--sceptical or cynical, as you prefer--consists in proceeding to the blunt assertion itself: "Just look at what happened. Where have you seen any struggles? Where do you see people rising up, taking up rifles? "
? Film and Popular Memory 93
? Q; There's been a sort of half-rumor going around since, perhaps. The Sorrow and the Pity, to the effect that the French people, as a whole, didn't resist the Germans, that they even accepted collaboration, that they took it all lying down. The question is what all this finally means. And it does indeed seem that what is at stake is popular struggle, or rather the memory of that struggle.
? MF: Exactly. It's vital to have posession of this mem- ory, to control it, to administer it, tell it what it must contain. And when you see these films, you find out what you have to remember: "Don't believe all that you've been told. There aren't any heroes. And if there aren't any, it's because there's no struggle. " So a sort of ambiguity arises; to start with, "there aren't any heroes" is a positive debunking of the whole war- hero mythology la Burt Lancaster. It's a way of saying, "No, that's not what war is about. " So your first impression is that history is beginning to reappear; that eventually they're going to tell us why we're not all obliged to identify with de Gaulle or the members of the Normandy-Niemen squadron, etc. But beneath the sentence "There are no heroes" is hidden a differ ent meaning, its true message; "There was no struggle. " This is what the exercise is all about.
? Q: There's another phenomenon which explains why these films are so successful. The resentment of those who really did struggle is used against those who didn't. The people who formed the Resistance, watching The Sorrow and the Pity for example, see the passive citizens of a town in central France, and they recognize their passivity. And then the resentment takes over; they forget that they themselves did sttuggle.
MF; In my view, the politically important phenome- non is, rather than any one particular film, that of the series.
? 94 Film and Popular Memory
? the network established by all these films and the place-- excuse the pun--they "occupy. " In other words, the important thing is to ask: "Is it possible at the moment to make a positive film about the struggles of the Resistance? " Well, clearly the answer's no. One gets the impression that people would laugh at a film like this, or else quite simply wouldn't go to see it.
? Q: Yes. It's the first thing to be brought up against us when we attack a film like Malle's. The response is always, "What would you have done, then? " And you're right; it's impossible to answer. We should be beginning to develop-- how shall I put it -- a left-wing perspective on all this, but it's true that one doesn't exist ready-made.
Alternately, this restates the problem of how one is to produce a positive hero, a new type of hero.
MF: The problem's not the hero, but the struggle. Can you make a film about a struggle without going through the traditional process of creating heroes? It's a new form of an old problem.
? Q: Let's go back to the ''retro" style. From its own standpoint, the bourgeoisie has largely concentrated its atten- tion on one historical period (the forties) which throws into focus both its strong and weak points. For on the one hand, this is where it's most easily exposed (it's the bourgeoisie which created the breeding ground of Nazism or of collabora- tion with it); while on the other hand, it's here that it's cur- rently trying to justify its historical behavior--^in the most cynical ways.
