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Tzvetan Todorov. Devoirs et Delices: Une Vie De Passeur. Entretiens Avec Catherine Portevin

2003; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

2374-6629

Karine Zbinden,

Diverse Academia and Research Topics

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 scries of well-structured interviews with a journalist, Catherine Portcvin, 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. …