Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Foucault's Gulag

2002; Slavica Publishers; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/kri.2002.0027

1538-5000

Jan Plamper,

Canadian Identity and History

On the evening of 21 June 1977, while French President Giscard d'Estaing was toasting the General Secretary of the CPSU and State President of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, on the occasion of Brezhnev's first visit to France, an odd mix of people embarked upon a curious counter-celebration. At the small Théâtre Récamier a group of French intellectuals and Soviet dissidents gathered to stage a symbolic protest against what they saw as a political farce unfolding at the Élysée Palace. The dissidents present at the theater included Andrei Amal´rik, Vladimir Bukovskii, Natal´ia Gorbanevskaia, Leonid Pliushch, and Andrei Siniavskii; among the French guests were Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, André Glucksmann, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The French Left had come a long way from its Sovietophilic days, and this June evening might well have been the most harmonious that the two ends of the political spectrum had ever enjoyed together. The principal host and organizer greeted his guests: "We simply thought that, on the evening when M. Brezhnev is being received with pomp by M. Giscard d'Estaing, other French people could receive certain other Russians who are their friends." 1 These words came from Michel Foucault.