Emerging from quarantine. The night of the intellectuals

Abstract

The article deals with the pandemic as an episode of intellectual history and a situation of reflection against the background of the “death of an intellectual”. The author proposes to question the very conditions of the possibility for philosophy’s response to the challenge of this or that current crisis in principle and the coronavirus pandemic in particular. The question is closely related to the phenomenon of the Intellectual, the crisis of which was announced by French researchers about forty years ago. Today one can talk about the simulation of its role and place in modern “reactions”, about the objective historical impossibility of reviving this figure and its inherent form of expression. The issue is considered based on the material of French intellectual history and criticism of the “media intellectual”. The starting point of the analysis is the political crisis in France in 2019, which falsely revived the forgotten structure of “intellectuals and power”. The author of the article draws attention to the similarity of the intellectual “calm” (reflexive inertia) of 1941 and 2021, suggesting to recall those forms of reflection that were involved by A. Malraux, J.-P. Sartre, J. Paulhan, M. Merleau-Ponty. The “reactions” of certain French intellectuals caused by the coronavirus crisis – E. Moren, R. Debray, J.-L. Nancy, B. Latour – reproduced in the article in the light of the interpretation of the pandemic as a “reductive situation” (M. Mamardashvily) with its inherent moralizing and neo-mania (R. Barthes). The author finds it problematic to appeal to criticism in the face of the “terror of the event” (M. Merleau-Ponty). Intellectuals themselves are a rare extinct phenomenon, which is important to consider in anticipation of their “response” in the face of the threat of a pandemic.