André Glucksmann, who died on Monday night, in Paris, was one of the great figures, and master thinkers, of contemporary French life, with the irony that much of his greatness depended on his passionate dismantling of the idea of “great men” and “master thinkers,” which he thought had disfigured European life for far too long. His death, at age seventy-eight, is more than painful; it is disconcerting and disorienting. If you were lucky enough to know him, it was always still possible to imagine taking one more Métro trip to his large, book-filled bohemian apartment in the north of Paris, and, with his brilliant wife, Fanfan, engaged alongside—in an atmosphere always somehow more Chekhovian than French—taking tea and talking about the world.
Glucksmann, whose silver bangs and hooded, eagle eyes became a familiar icon of French intellect—in the seventies, when he first emerged as one of the “New Philosophers,” his telegenic qualities had been an undeniable part of the package—was not the kind of philosopher who liked argument for its own sake. He preferred truth, if you could find it, for other people’s sake. He would take all the time in the world seeking that, however remote the case: the struggles of the Chechens and Ukrainians and Rwandans were as alive for him as the local worries of France. His globalism was a reminder of the best side of French universalism in a time of contracting horizons.
After a Glucksmann afternoon, you would emerge feeling somewhat ashamed, no matter what the subject had been, of the journalistic equivocations that you might have arrived with—and seeing, with a bracing clarity, the simpler moral truth of the circumstance. The last time I visited him was when I had come to Paris to write about the crisis of the Roma, the Gypsies. He listened as I worried about the many sides of the “issue”—the truth that the Roma were involved in petty crime, the comprehensible popular fear of immigrants, etc. Then he said, simply, “We must re-read Victor Hugo. Everyone is implicated. The happy face of nomadism is all the French gone to London to be bankers. The wretched face is the poor Roma in their camps.” By “we,” he meant “you,” and I did go home, and did re-read Hugo, and discovered what Glucksmann had known already—that, in “Les Misérables,” the cruel embodiment of the secret policeman’s mind, Inspector Javert, was the bastard son of a Romany family. We are all implicated.
The easy erudition was more moving for being so hard won. Glucksmann was born to a pair of passionate Jewish intellectual pilgrims of the kind that was once the glory of the European mind. (His parents met when, in thirties Jerusalem, each recognized the red binding of Karl Kraus’s journal in their pockets.) With his family, he had then been deported, during the war, to Bourg-Lastic, a waiting station en route to Auschwitz. (Seeing his mother stand up to the French police there, announcing candidly to the interned that they were being sent to their deaths, was, as he related in his urgent memoir, “Une Rage d’Enfant,” an anchor experience for him, proving that, faced with evil, resistance is always more worthwhile than compliance.) The experience of ’68 would turn him first radical and then, briefly, Maoist—this was when the illusions of Maoism suggested that it might be a populist alternative to the Stalinism of the French Communist party, a crazy-seeming notion now, but you kind of had to be there. Then, in the seventies, under the influence of Solzhenitsyn in particular, Glucksmann turned decisively and permanently against all forms of totalitarianism.
He sometimes regretted the earlier positions, but not the youthful experience. Because he understood how easy it was to pursue a passion for justice and revolution using obscene measures, Glucksmann could understand the totalitarian temptation as responding to a deep, inexpungible need in human nature for a master, a guide. His somewhat younger friend and colleague, the writer Pascal Bruckner, when asked to distill Glucksmann’s contribution to French thought, said that it was to put an end to any romance about Communism, but, more important, to reset the tuning of French understanding: he made it clear that building a more ideal world was a less important task than mending the evil in this one. “I cannot tell you what to be for. But I know what to be against,” was one of Glucksmann’s favorite locutions. It was hard to know how to make a better world. But it was easy to see what was making a horrible one. Designing the ideal order was impossible work. Saving the victims from those engaged in designing ideal orders was not, in truth, as hard as our laziness let us pretend it was.
So in Rwanda, or Chechnya, or wherever people were victims of the ogre, he was there—always in spirit, and often in person. We all, in the normal course of life, accept some cruelty or brutality as essential to the work of the world, or the integrity of our side, and build a wall of acceptable insulation around our souls. This drone attack, that massacre of innocents—well, regrettable, but, surely, perhaps necessary? He’d have none of that. One admirer said that Glucksmann was not for “human rights” but for the “rights of man.” This distinction, puzzling on the surface, was foundational: “human rights” might be assigned to groups, classes, nations, and movements. “The rights of man” reside only in individuals, who have a claim on our humanity no matter how much they may seem to stand in the way of the abstract general rights of some other, perhaps larger, group.
As Bruckner points out, one of the oddities of Glucksmann’s life was that, while he admired the American contribution to the definition of freedom, he never knew America at all. This made him susceptible, particularly at the time of the Iraq War, to a sometimes unrealistic view of the purity of American intentions. Though some have said that “anger”—that “rage”—was the keynote to his mind, the truth is that his “rage” was more like what we call indignation, and indignation can often be marked by innocence. (He shocked many of his friends by endorsing Sarkozy in the 2007 election—an endorsement that he did not exactly withdraw but did inflect after Sarkozy’s less than welcoming attitude toward helpless people like the Roma became plain.)
He was sometimes called the French Orwell, and he was, indeed, similarly fearless in his engagements, taking sides left and right without the least worry abut how it would strike anyone else at all—who it might alienate, or what bien pensant group might disapprove. But his style was far from Anglo-American lucidity, and though he was usually called a philosopher, he wasn’t at all a philosopher in our academic sense of one who explores a series of topics by summing up past thought and then arguing for a new conclusion. He was really an essayist, in the French tradition, bringing forth a dense entanglement of historical evocation, polemic, personal example, irony, and emotional harangue, all playing a role alongside the aphoristic précis of older philosophers’ ideas.
The style could be overwhelming at times, and was often a more effective instrument of intellectual pleasure than political persuasion. But, in return, it produced a thousand small epiphanies—for instance, his lovely mordant point, made at length in one of his books, that between the “raw” and the “cooked”—the simple binary beloved of structuralism—there was always the “pourri,” the rotting, the rotten. Our refusal to take in the rotting as a category of its own was, he suggested, with a delighted literary grimace, a kind of moral blindness, part of a fake dialectic that blinded us to the muddled, rotting truth of the world. The real world was not composed of oscillating dialectical forces; it was composed of actual suffering people crushed between those forces.
What was hard to see, through the high-minded obituaries this week, was how sweet a friend he could be: without pretension or arrogance, a man of pure intellectual passion but without the pomposity or self-regard that afflicts the kind. He would, on one of those long talking afternoons, listen to you lay out the many sides of a current dilemma, in France or elsewhere, watching you out of eyes at once sleepy and benevolent, and then brood and finally speak—more rabbinical than philosophical, seeking the core moral truth of a complicated circumstance. He would often begin such an intervention with a weary, broken smile and then say another of his favorite locutions: “Good. Now, let’s count to two.” The truth that the American war in Vietnam was wrong did not mean that we were obliged to idealize its victors, or see past the victims of North Vietnamese power. Yes, of course, there were elements in Chechnya who were less than admirable—that did not alter one’s duty to rescue them from Putinism. Or—a more disconcerting truth for an American liberal to tangle with—did it not seem extremely provincial to allow distaste for George W. Bush to blind one to the evil of Saddam Hussein? One kind of truth did not negate the other. One truth, indeed, demanded the other. Glucksmann’s legacy has an essential simplicity that’s almost Tolstoyan: be against the bad because you can never be confident about the good, and count at least to two when doing your moral arithmetic. They are good truths to leave behind, made more beautiful by how deceptively difficult they are to live.
