Tzvetan Todorov. Devoirs et delices: une vie de passeur. Entretiens avec Catherine Portevin

Tzvetan Todorov. Devoirs et delices: une vie de passeur. Entretiens avec Catherine Portevin. Paris: Seuil, 2002. 395 pp.

This latest book by a scholar who has chosen the path of the lone researcher is unusual in several respects. Firstly, it is an intellectual autobiography, in which, both as subject and object of study, Todorov puts himself at the center of his preoccupations, a fact with which he is not totally comfortable (383). In it he explores the motivations behind his wide-ranging choice of objects of study and examines the impact of his experience of totalitarianism on the development of his thought. Thus personal accounts of his childhood and early youth in Bulgaria, or of the first few years after his arrival in France, for example, mingle with summaries of his main ideas at various times, with memories of encounters with books and, sometimes, the men or women who wrote them; they also provide a background to works which, when taken in isolation, can appear to the reader somewhat removed from everyday life. As the book progresses, events from the author's life and his personal recollections give way to exposition of his thought and his philosophical position. The main strength of this chronological presentation is that it emphasizes the sense of continuity underlying the diversity in Todorov's thought; but it may also give the impression that Todorov is retreating ever more into a world of ideas, even though he constantly relates his humanist position to contemporary issues, such as racism (197-200), the pitfalls of"moral correctness" (328), the problems of international justice (339) and the terrorist attacks on New York (371-72), to name a few.

But another striking feature of Devoirs et delices is its genre: composed in the form of a series of well-structured interviews with a journalist, Catherine Portevin, who respectfully and efficiently probes Todorov's remarkably diverse thought, the book exemplifies a different form of dialogic criticism from the one Todorov has engaged with since the moment of his "ethical turn" in the early 1980s. He reflects on the book's hybrid genre in his epilogue, stating that life and work present themselves as two expressions of the same intention, and that the book puts biography into dialogue with the exposition of theses, without reading the former as the cause or explanation for the latter (383). This statement not only illustrates the distance Todorov has put between himself and his early works, but also the continuity or equilibrium between thought and life, which for him must remain in harmony. This striving to maintain a connection between abstract thought and everyday life finds expression in his writing style too: developing ideas remains meaningless if they are not communicated clearly to the reader, in accordance with his "principles of democratic humanism" (360; my translation). And indeed not least among the book's merits is that it is highly readable. Understandably, readers already familiar with Todorov's other works will benefit the most, but this reflection on his intellectual life, on the source of some of his ideas, on his affinities (from Raymond Aron and Louis Dumont to Germaine Tillion, an anthropologist who was active in the Resistance before being deported to Ravensbruck and later denounced the existence of the gulags and combated violence in Algeria) and on his abhorrences (including Jean-Paul Sartre, all forms of monism, Manicheism, moralism, relativism, etc.) helps give shape to a thought which, despite its author's prominence, remains somewhat overlooked. Portevin reminds us in her preface that Todorov is one of the most translated authors in the world. There is a contrast, however, between the breadth of his readership and the paucity of commentary on his thought.

Todorov occupies an ambivalent position, it is true, at the intersection of various disciplines and at the margins of dominant theoretical movements, such as poststructuralism and postmodernism. Marginality and mediation here operate as structuring themes in the sequence of chapters; mediation is central to his movement between various intellectual domains, such as poetics, narratology, and philosophical anthropology or history, and to his negotiations between various cultures, as expressed in his concern to publish translations of major texts in the journal Poetique, but also to his determination to surmount absolute (binary) oppositions which all too often drift into Manicheism, neatly separating good from evil. Todorov considers that there is always some evil in good and vice versa, noting for example that art and culture were encouraged and supported under the totalitarian regime in Bulgaria (342-43). He thus favors Primo Levi's "gray zone," which expresses the continuity between good and evil as well as the complexity of their interrelation (348). Consequently, Todorov chooses moderation or the middle way (346). He prefers Aristotle's refusal of extremes, or Nicholas of Cusa's "coincidence of opposites," which he re-names "contiguity of opposites," where the opposition is maintained but where neither term is positive, but both being equally necessary and complementary: key examples are nature versus culture or the feminine versus the masculine (349). Todorov thereby avoids both relativism and deconstruction (346). This predilection for moderate judgments translates, politically, into a centrist position. When confronted about the "softness of the center," Todorov confesses that "for someone like me, whose vision of the political world was structured by life under totalitarianism, the important term is 'democracy'; whether one is a left-wing or a right-wing democrat is secondary, since the choice depends on the circumstances" (347). But as he himself points out, a centrist position has the disadvantage of ultimately boiling down to the smallest common denominator between left and right, leaving dissent to antidemocratic extremism. His life under totalitarianism has become for him, in the last decade, his most formative experience, and his examination of the phenomenon a shaping influence on his whole worldview. Although one can only agree with him that totalitarianism is the worst possible regime, limiting his reflection to its condemnation would restrict the potency of his thought and the scope of his analysis of the workings of totalitarianism in Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1991) or in the more recent Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2003). There remains a surprising absence from his work: Denis de Rougemont, who is only alluded to in the title of his first chapter, "Paysan du Danube," which Todorov borrows from him; de Rougemont addressed many of the same preoccupations but strove to work out political solutions, for example propounding federalism and the need to construct a European federation of states as the best guard against totalitarianism.

Readers of Style will particularly appreciate the early chapters, which deal with Todorov's first few years in Paris and his interaction with the structuralist milieu, and where he also evokes his encounters with, among others, Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovskii, and Emile Benveniste, as well as his friendship with Gerard Genette and their extended collaboration at Poetique. More perhaps than any other scholar, Roland Barthes left a profound mark on Todorov, who expresses a great fondness for and gratitude towards him. The importance of the individual contact and the significance of relationships with others are both central to his humanist worldview, and there is a real sense in Todorov's evocation of Barthes that the man was more important than the scholar and his theories, which Todorov goes so far as to regard as "a kind of intellectual terrorism," in contradiction with the antidogmatic irony that Barthes displayed (87). But for all the warmth and the vividness of these reminiscences, Todorov makes it clear that he has moved away from the preoccupations of those years. In an earlier book L'Homme depayse (1996), he has already explored his personal experience of crossing cultures and the insights he has gained into his culture of origin and his culture of adoption, as well as into American culture, which he examines as a privileged observer. Rather than providing equally detailed analyses of precise topics, even less a philosophical system, Devoirs et delices gives a comprehensive survey of his intellectual evolution, a kind of orientation map, but at times leaves the reader wishing for more in-depth analysis of his philosophical position.

Todorov emerges from this book as a European intellectual par excellence, one with a rich French heritage that includes Montaigne, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Constant, but one who at times appears strangely detached, preferring intellectual analysis to political commitment. This sense of his aloofness is perhaps nowhere more striking than in his evocation of May 1968, where he presents himself as external witness to a surreal situation, returning to Paris on May 31st after a year spent at Yale. He remarks on his participation in some of the demonstrations, commenting candidly (or perhaps ironically?) that "it was difficult to avoid them all" (148). However, he pursues his analysis of these events with the ambivalence he already felt at the time--a sense that, on the one hand, a social liberation was under way, while on the other hand that what took precedence among the students was a counterbalancing political indoctrination in Trostkyist, Maoist, and dogmatic communist discourses (49). If initially his anti-communism led him to adopt an anti-political stance (47, 141), he has since refined his position by claiming the precedence of individuals over abstractions and by placing love at the center of his system of values, thus reconciling "duty and delight" (an expression he takes from Rousseau and uses to entitle his book) in the concern for the other as the goal of one's actions. This is the crux of the matter: humanism provides a framework, but not a political program. Humanism, then, teaches us that a society should recognize all its members equally, respect their free will (without jeopardizing collective autonomy), and not instrumentalize them; but, in Todorov's conception, humanism remains an intellectual position by which to gauge action. In a paradoxical move, Todorov--whose attachment to Constant stems partly from the continuity in the latter's thought between theory and action and from his refinement of humanist principles on the basis of his political experience following the Revolution (235)--satisfies himself with simply delegating to politicians the task of "converting the principles into concrete measures, translating the framework into actions, prioritizing demands and finding the right compromises between conflicting interests" (256). Todorov reasonably defends his choice to act by writing books (255-56). But his propensity to overlook the link between citizen and state, or to take it for granted, could ultimately threaten the very heart of his moral reflection by confining it to the level of abstract thinking and divorcing it from its everyday, concrete anchorage. However, one can only wish that more politicians recognized the same responsibility towards intellectuals and measured their actions against humanist principles.

Other Works Cited

Todorov, Tzvetan. Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollack. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996; Henry Holt, 1997. Orig. pub. in French 1991.

--. L'Homme depayse. L'Histoire immediate. Paris: Seuil, 1996.

--. Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton UP 2003.

Karine Zbinden

Bakhtin Centre, University of Sheffield

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