Getting back to Cusset, in chapter one, he opens with a quote from Malraux. But I think Cusset should have started with a quick sketch into the American founding fathers, and their relationship to the French revolution. The founding of the nation state system was the embodiment of enlightenment ideals. The French went nuts with the rational system project for all the institutions, converting them from divine right of kings and clerical administration of education into a national system of institutions. This political-philosophical anti-clericalism drove everything from converting calculus into analysis to development of the metric system, or now the SI units. The Americans didn't really have to fight these battles because they simply hadn't lived for a thousand years under feudalism. The consequence of this was that for a long time the US society wasn't particularly struggling over the concepts of reason and its ability to tyrannize social systems.
Much of that changed dramatically after WWI through the economic developments in the `rational' work place, or the Ford production line. Meanwhile there is the whole internationalization of the European avant garde. Where the US writers and painters go to Paris and bring those developments back. Cusset goes into the 1930s and the Euro exiles coming to the US. The impact of that immigration was very large in everything from arts, humanities, philosophies to the sciences and mathematics. There is an underlying problem though, because the US education system had almost none of the `humanistic' background in languages, national culture, literature, the euro gymnasium system had. What that meant meant was the German math crowd who came here had a much better humanities background than any of their US colleagues.
Wow, the next section on the NYC crowd and the divisions that Greenberg et al sowed between the polticized surrealists was just stunning. Man, that had an impact that carried on for twenty years. That kind of formalist criticism in art, not only stripped art of its political dimension, it basically stripped it of any meaning whatsoever.
Cusset says it much better:
``The gradual disappearance of this precious intellectual arena--dispersed as it was by individual trajectories and political reversals and soon finished off by the McCarthyite backlash--opend a void at the heart of AMerican public space. At the same time, the demographic boom of students and the rise of the major research universities around new pradigms of knowledge in the United States (legalism, positivism, functionalism) contributed to the technicalization and compartmentalization of an intellectual field that was becoming more and more specialized and, henceforth, almost exclusively academic. It was in this context that three rather fashionable intellectual currents in postwar France crossed the Atlantic.'' (22p)
Cusset mentions a conference in 1966 in Baltimore as setting the stage. But I think it goes back to Kennedy in the 1961-2 period. You can find mention of this kind of re-awakening of awareness of Europe in the US at least in some circles in the Arendt and Jaspers letters. There was also a more material reason and that was that European cars, food and wine cultures, as well as films was getting over here (or out here). Also there was a great importance to the boom in paperback production here.
These developments (and the generation of revolt against all that system stuff) in the US set the stage of reception for the french theory crowd and their own struggles with french rationalism. There are also many correspondences or parallel currents between the long legacy of Descartes and the less theoretical but just as important a tradition of American `individualism'. This shows up most in the almost automatic uptake of something like the erasure of the subject (whoever gets credit for that project), and the US constructivist theories about the individual identity and its privilege of place in American letters and the great man theory of history.
Thanks. This is going to be a fun read.
CG