21st-century interest in French Marxism within the American academy has been predominantly attracted to structuralist and post-structuralist variants originating in the 1960s, most centrally the works of Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou, and their circles. This important scholarship (such as Bosteels, Badiou and Politics [2011]; Nesbitt, The Concept in Crisis [2017]; Montag and Wasser, Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production [2022]) tends to position itself as a break with the postwar paradigm of French Marxisms, sometimes hastily reduced to their attachment with the humanism of the young Marx in his 1844 Manuscripts. Indeed, since the 1975 publication of Mark Poster’s Existential Marxism in Postwar France, only a few significant contributions have shaped the field, and the existing scholarship takes a relatively narrow view of the roots and dissemination of Marxist thought in French-speaking contexts. This panel will suggest new directions for exploring engagements with Marxism taking place in the margins of this hexagonal (metropolitan French) history, namely the decisive role of Marxist theory in anti-colonial struggles abroad and immigrant workers movements in France.
As a forum for reassessing this field, the panel focuses on primary sources dating from the Liberation to the early 1960s – a time frame defined by reconstruction, modernization, and decolonization. Combining methods of literary analysis and intellectual history, the presenters offer a balance between original approaches to metropolitan thought and to colonial/decolonial contexts, indicating future directions for Marxist literary research in French studies. The presentations thus illustrate how French studies can benefit from the renewal of experiments in critical humanist Marxism in other linguistic-literary fields – for instance, Lye and Nealon’s After Marx (2022).
Tadas Bugnevicius begins by re-examining the legacy of Georg Lukács, a figure situated at the inception of “Western Marxism.” Revisiting the work that first brought him notoriety in postwar France, his polemical Existentialism or Marxism? (1948), followed by the contested reception of his later works, Bugnevicius offers new insight into the political and intellectual formations that would shape decades of French Marxist thought, and returns to original source materials to reinvigorate our understanding of these foundational debates.
Vanessa Brutsche’s paper casts new light on another canonical work of postwar Marxism, Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life (1947), taking as point of departure Lefebvre’s striking definition of Auschwitz as the ultimate “capitalist city.” Placing Lefebvre in dialogue with the works of camp survivors David Rousset and Charlotte Delbo, Brutsche illuminates the nexus of literary-testimonial narratives that constitute crucial intertexts to Lefebvre’s theory of the everyday, which laid the groundwork for the emergence of urbanism as a privileged subject in his thought by the 1960s, and became formative for generations of left-wing activists and intellectuals.
Next, Patrick Lyons turns to the context of anticolonial struggle, analyzing the 1959 interviews with an Algerian worker named Ahmed published in the journal Socialisme ou barbarie, which covers Ahmed’s relationship to the Algerian Communist Party, his emigration to France, and his experiences as an unskilled worker in French factories. Presenting the interviews as an important, early attempt to disseminate the unmediated experiences of Algerian workers during a period of general suppression by the French State, Lyons considers the form of the dictated testimonial as a powerful means of amplifying the voices of a predominantly illiterate “subaltern proletariat.”
Lastly, Matt Trumbo-Tual extends the reflection on labor conflict and decolonial struggle through a reading of Ousmane Sembène’s 1960 novel, Les Bouts de bois de dieu, which depicts the 1947-1948 railroad strikes in French West Africa. Trumbo-Tual draws on references to the role of literature in the novel as well as Sembène’s engagement with Marxist political theory, contrasting the novel’s articulation of the strike as a dynamic space of social reorganization with Sembène’s own, more limited vision of the political potential of artistic and intellectual labor, ultimately reading the novel as a declaration of cultural autonomy.
As the goal of this panel is to explore new horizons of research on Francophone approaches to Marxist thought, each panelist will be strictly limited to a 12-15 minute presentation, allowing for 15-25 minutes of unstructured discussion, to prioritize open exchange amongst participants and audience.