In order to reflect on the social conditions of the international circulation of ideas, it is possible to use an economics vocabulary that always produces a rupture effect, such as, for example, the notion of intellectual import/export. Without pretending to describe the laws of such circulation – for want of a real inquiry authorizing the use of such pretentious language – we can reconstruct the tendencies of these international exchanges that are usually described in a language that owes more to mysticism than to reason and then elaborate a programme for a science of international relations with respect to cultural matters.

To begin with, we need to consider the history of relations between countries such as France and Germany since the Second World War, and more specifically all the work that has been done, particularly in the political arena, to foster communication and understanding between these two countries. We need an uncompromising historical analysis of the symbolic work that has been necessary to exorcize all the fantasies of the past, at least in a certain segment of the populations of both countries. In addition to the symbolic and practical aspects of the official work carried out by official bodies, we need to analyse the various actions that helped transform the attitudes of the French and Germans, in all their social diversity. In the case of French intellectuals, there was a reconciliation, followed by a fascination with the ‘German miracle’, and then the current phase of ambivalent admiration, sublimated into a kind of voluntarist Europeanism through which many eleventh-hour workers are trying to find a substitute for their defunct nationalism. But one cannot be satisfied with such considerations, which are as superficial as they are summary.

What can one do today, if one has a genuine desire to further the internationalization of intellectual life? People often have a tendency to think that intellectual life is spontaneously international. Nothing could be further from the truth. Intellectual life, like all other social spaces, is home to nationalism and imperialism, and intellectuals, like everyone else, constantly peddle prejudices, stereotypes, received ideas, and hastily simplistic representations which are fuelled by the chance happenings of everyday life, like misunderstandings, general incomprehension, and wounded pride (such as might be felt at being unknown in a foreign country). All of which makes me think that a truly scientific internationalism, which to my mind is the only possible ground on which internationalism of any sort is going to be built, is not going to happen of its own accord.

Regarding culture, my beliefs are the same as those I hope for every thing else: I don’t believe in laissez-faire. What I hope to show here is that all too often, in international exchanges, the logic of laissezfaire favours the circulation of the very worst ideas at the expense of the best. And here, as so often, I find myself inspired by that most outmoded of ideas in this postmodern world – a deeply held belief in scientism. And this scientism leads me to believe that if one undefstands social mechanisms, one is not necessarily master of them, but one does increase one’s chances of mastering them, by however small an amount, particularly when the social mechanisms in question rest largely on misunderstanding. There is an autonomous force of knowledge that can destroy, to a certain extent, ignorance. I say ‘to a certain extent’ because the ‘intrinsic force of true ideas’ is hit with resistances stemming from interests, prejudices, and passions.

International exchanges are subject to a certain number of structural factors which generate misunderstandings. The first factor is that texts circulate without their context. This is a proposition that Marx noted in passing in the Communist Manifesto, an unusual place to look for a reception theory. Marx notes that German thinkers have read French thinkers very badly, seeing texts that were the result of a particular political juncture as pure texts, and transforming the political agitators at the heart of such texts into a sort of transcendental subject. In the same manner, many misunderstandings in international communication are a result of the fact that texts do not bring their context with them. For example, at the risk of surprising and shocking you, it seems to me that only the logic of this structural misunderstanding can explain the staggering fact that a Socialist President of a French Republic awarded a decoration to Ernst Jünger. Another example might be the consecration of Heidegger by certain French Marxists in the 1950s. I could equally use contemporary examples. But because I would often be implicated in these examples myself, I shall refrain from doing so, as it might be thought that I was taking advantage of the symbolic power invested in me here today to avenge myself on absent adversaries.

The fact that texts circulate without their context, that – to use my terms – they don’t bring with them the field of production of which they are a product, and the fact that the recipients, who are themselves In a different field of production, re-interpret the texts in accordance with the structure of the field of reception, are facts that generate 11ome formidable misunderstandings and that can have good or bad consequences. From this account, which I believe to be objective, one could draw either optimistic or pessimistic conclusions. For example, if someone who is an authority in his own country does not bring that authority with him abroad, then foreign readers and commentators sometimes have a liberty not to be found in the country where the text originates, where a reading might be subject to the effects of symbolic Imposition, domination, or even coercion. All this lends some credibility to the idea that foreign judgements are a little like the judgements of posterity. If, in general, posterity is a better judge, it is doubtless because contemporaries are competitors and often have a hidden interest in not understanding, or even in preventing understanding from taking place in others. Foreign readers, like posterity, have in some cases a distance and autonomy regarding the social conditions of the field. In fact, this effect is often slightly illusory, and it does happen that institutionalized authorities, Pascal’s ‘grandeurs d’etablissement’, cross frontiers very well, as there is an all-too-real international old boy network that functions with great efficiency.

So the sense and function of a foreign work are determined not simply by the field of origin, but in at least equal proportion by the field of reception. First, because the sense and function of the original field are often completely unknown, but also because the process of transfer from a domestic field to a foreign one is made up of a series of social operations. There is a process of selection (what is to be translated, what is to be published, who it will be translated by, who will publish it); a process of labelling and classification (often the placing of a label on a product whose label had been removed) by the publishers; the question of the series in which it is to be inserted; the choice of translator and the writer of the preface (who in presenting the work will take some sort of possession of it and connect it with his own point of view and with a problematic inscribed in the field of its reception, only rarely going so far as to explain where and how it fits into its field of origin, as the difficulties presented by such an enterprise are too large); and finally the reading process itself, as foreign readers are bound to perceive the text in different ways, since the issues which are of interest to them in the text are inevitably the result of a different field of production.

The conditions and manner in which texts enter a field of reception is an urgent and important area that needs further research, for both scientific and practical reasons, particularly as our aim is to facilitate and improve communication between different countries. One should study these selection processes and find out who these people doing the selecting (who were recently termed ‘gatekeepers’ by an American sociologist of science) actually are. Who are the discoverers, and what interest do they have in discovering these things? I am aware that the word ‘interest’ might shock here. But I do believe that anyone, no matter how well-intentioned, who appropriates an author for him- or herself and becomes the person who introduces that author to another country inevitably has some ulterior motive. It may be sublime, or it may be sublimated, but it should be revealed, as it is clearly a determining factor in what is being done. (I think a little materialism isn’t at all out of place here and won’t take away the enchantment.) What I am calling ‘interest’ may simply be a sort of affinity through the occupation of a homologous or identical place in the different fields. To take one example, it is surely not an accident that the great Spanish novelist Benet is published in France by Les Editions de Minuit. To publish what one loves is to strengthen one’s position in a certain field, whether one likes it or not, whether one is aware of it or not, even if that effect was not part of the original intention. There is nothing wrong with this, but it should be more widely acknowledged. Choices which seem pure of other interests, and are mutually agreeable, are often made on the basis of homologous positions in different fields and in fact correspond to homologous interests and styles where the intellectual background or project is concerned. These exchanges can be understood as alliances, and they function in the same way as power relations, hence they might be used to reinforce a dominated or threatened position.

Besides these elective affinities between ‘creators’ (for which, as you have probably discerned, I feel a certain indulgence), there are also the mutual admiration societies which seem somewhat less legitimate as they exercise a temporal power in a cultural or spiritual sphere, and thus correspond to Pascal’s definition of tyranny. One thinks for example of the international establishment and of the series of exchanges that go on between people who hold important positions. A large number of translations can only be understood if they are placed in the complex network of international exchanges between holders of dominant academic posts, the exchanges of invitations, honorary doctorates, etc. The question that must then be asked is what is the logic of choice that makes a certain writer or editor become the importer of a certain thought. Why is writer X published by publisher Y? For there are obviously profits in such appropriation. Heretical imports are often the work of marginals in the field, bringing a message, a position of force from a different field, which they use to try and shore up their own position. Foreign writers are often subject to such instrumental use, and forced to serve purposes which they would perhaps ref use or reject in their country of origin. One can often use a foreign thinker to attack domestic thinkers in this way.

Heidegger is a case in point. Doubtless, many people here today wonder how it was that the French became so interested in Heidegger. There are many reasons of course, perhaps too many, but one particular reason leaps out to the eye: the fact that Sartre held the intellectual field in a stranglehold throughout the 1950s (as Anna Boschetti has demonstrated quite convincingly in her book The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and Les Temps Modernel’ ). One of Heidegger’s main functions for the French was to diminish Sartre’s impact, with teachers saying for example that all of Sartre’s major ideas were already there in Heidegger, where they were better elaborated. On the one side there was Beaufret, who must have been a contemporary of Sartre’s at the Ecole Normale Superieure, in a positipn of rivalry with him, taking the khdgne classes at the prestigious Henri IV school, preparing students for the rigorous entry exams to the Grandes Ecoles, managing to create a sort of status for himself as philosopher by bringing Heidegger to France. Elsewhere, in the literary field, there was Blanchot. And there was also a third category, in the review Argumems, the minor Marxist heretics. As straight Marxism was too obviously proletarian, they constructed a modish mixture of Marxism and Heidegger.

Very often with foreign authors it is not what they say that matters, so much as what they can be made to say. This is why certain particularly elastic authors transfer so well. All great prophecies are polysemic. That is one of their cardinal virtues, and explains how they have such general applications and are transmitted so well across cultures and down the generations. Such elastic thinkers are manna from heaven when it comes to serving expansionist strategic uses. After this process of selection and choice, there comes the attaching of a label which finishes the work. Hence, we don’t for instance simply get Simmel, we get Simmel with a preface by Mr X. The time is ripe for a comparative study of the sociology of the preface. They are typical acts of the transfer of symbolic capital, or at least this is what they most commonly are, as for instance when we find Mauriac writing a preface for Sollers. The celebrated elder writer in providing the preface is transmitting symbolic capital while at the same time demonstrating that he still has both the ability to recognize new talent, and the generosity to protect an admiring younger generation where his influence is to be discerned. A whole series of exchanges is going on (where bad faith plays an enormous role) which any objectifying sociology would render more difficult. But the direction in which the symbolic capital is circulating is not always the same. For instance, relying on the ruling assumption that the writer of the preface is identified with the author of the book, Levi-Strauss wrote a preface to Mauss where he effectively appropriated for himself the symbolic capital of the author of the famous essay on the gift.

At the end of all this, the imported text receives another label. The cover of the book acts as a sort of brand name. Seasoned academics have a good understanding of the sorts of covers that different publishers use and even of the sense of the different series published by the publisher in question. One knows what they all mean, and how they fit into the general scheme of scholarly publishing. If, for example, one were to replace a Suhrkamp cover by one from Le Seuil, the sense of the brand imposed on the work changes dramatically. When there is a sort of structural homology, the transfer can happen quite unproblematically. But there are often failures here, and writers fall awkwardly by the wayside as a result, sometimes simply by chance, sometimes by ignorance, but also often because they are unwittingly objects of a process of appropriation. In such cases, even the cover itself is already a symbolic imposition. Since, to my mind, Le Seuil was basically a left-wing Catholic publisher and identified at that time with personalist thought, Chomsky found himself with a new brand name, as a result of a typical expansionist project. For Le Seuil to publish Chomsky, in an environment where Ricoeur’s influence was extremely powerful, was to combat what was known as ‘subjectless structuralism’ with a creative, generative subject. And by the insertion of a book into a series, by the addition of a preface, by the contents of that preface, and by the position of the author of the preface, a whole series of transformations take place, whose end result was to considerably alter the sense of the original message.

In reality, the structural effects which (thanks to ignorance) make possible all sorts of transformations and deformations linked to the strategic use of texts and authors are constantly going on, independently of any intention to manipulate information. The differences are so great between historical traditions, in the intellectual field per se as well as in the ensemble of the social field, that the application to a foreign cultural product of the categories of perception and appreciation acquired from experience in the domestic field can actually create fictitious oppositions between similar things, and false parallels between things that are fundamentally different. To demonstrate this, one could analyse in detail the links between French and German philosophers since the 1960s and show how similar intentions have resulted, through reference to starkly different intellectual and social contexts, in the adopting of apparently opposing philosophical positions. To put this in a more striking but more fanciful manner, one might ask oneself whether Habermas would not have been much closer to Foucault than he appears to be, if he had been trained and brought up as a philosopher in France of the 1950s to 1960s, and whether Foucault would not have been much less different from Habermas, had he been trained and brought up as a philosopher in Germany at the same time. This is to say, by way of an aside, that both thinkers, while appearing to have great freedom in their contexts, are in fact both deeply marked by the context in which they found themselves, partly because (through their hegemonic intentions) they came into conflict with the intellectual traditions particular to their own countries, which were of course profoundly different.

Another instructive example. Before becoming self-righteously indignant, like certain German scholars, at the use to which certain French philosophers (notably Deleuze and Foucault) have put Nietzsche, one must understand the function that Nietzsche – for Foucault the Nietzsche of The Genealogy of Morals – fulfilled in a certain field of academic philosophy which was dominated at the time by a sort of subjective, spiritual existentialism. The Genealogy of Morals offered a sort of philosophical guarantee and philosophical respectability both to apparently old-fashioned scientific, positivist ideas (incarnated in the fading image of Durkheim) and to the sociology of knowledge and the social history of ideas. Thus, in an effort to combat ahistorical rationalism by founding a historical science of historical reason (complete with the idea of ‘genealogy’ and a notion like that of the episteme), Foucault was thought to be contributing to a movement which, when viewed from Germany, where Nietzsche had a totally different meaning, appeared to be a restoration of irrationality, against which Habermas, among others (like Karl-Otto Apel, for instance), set up his whole philosophical project.

The opposition is considerably less radical than it first seems, between, on the one hand, the rationalist and historicist approach that I pursue (with the idea of a social history of reason, or of the scientific field, as the place of the historical genesis of the social conditions for the production of reason) and, on the other hand, a neo-Kantian rationalism, which attempts to transform itself into a scientific sort of reason by basing itself on linguistic argwnents, as in Habermas and Apel. A rationalist relativism and a sort of enlightened absolutism can be of great mutual assistance in the defence of the Aujklarung, perhaps because they express the same intention through another system of thought. Of course, I exaggerate a little here. But I do believe that these differences are not as great as they have long been imagined to be, by people who fail to take account of the deforming prism effects (as much on production as on reception) generated by the national intellectual fields and their imposition of categories of perception and thought.

This is why today’s direct discussions (which constitute already an advance on the earlier period, when European scholars communicated only through an interposed America) so often remain artificial and unreal : the effects of allodoxia resulting from the structural mismatch between contexts provide inexhaustible resources for the polemics of bad faith and the mutual condemnations of self-righteousness in which mediocre and irresponsible essayists, such as the inventors of the myth of ‘la pensee 68’ or the righteous denunciators of ‘cynicism’, excel. One could think of the propensity of petty intellectuals to set themselves up as vigilantes, or, more accurately, as Fouquier-Tinville and Zhdanov, on the right or on the left, who, as we saw in connection with the ‘Heidegger affair’, replace the logic of critical discussion, committed to understanding the reasons – or causes – for opposing thought, with the logic of the trial.

The logical Realpolitik of which I am a ceaseless advocate must above all have as its aim an intention to work towards the creation of social conditions permitting a rational dialogue. In this context, this means working at raising awareness and knowledge of the ways in which different national fields function, for the greater the ignorance of the original context, the higher the risk that the text will be used in a different sense. This project will only appear banal so long as we fail to enter into the details of its realization. The aim must be to produce a scientific knowledge of the national fields of production and of the national categories of thought that originate there, and to diffuse this knowledge as widely as possible, notably by ensuring that it forms a component of studies of foreign languages, civilizations and philosophies. To give an idea of the difficulty of the enterprise, one could do worse than begin by examining the attitudes to be found among specialists in these fields. All too often, the so-called specialists in international exchanges have developed their own private sociologies to explain differences between national traditions. Germanists and Romance-language specialists, for example, constantly produce and reproduce views which have their basis in ill-thought-out half-truths: people who ‘know them pretty well’, ‘who aren’t so easy fooled,’ who ‘find them awful, but love them all the same’. Such convictions are particularly common among specialists of foreign civilizations (like ‘orientalists’ or ‘japanologists’) and betray attitudes which result in a sort of condescending amusement which is ultimately quite close to racism.

Freedom regarding national categories of thought – through which we think about the differences between the products of these categories – can result only from a sustained effort to think out those categories and render them quite explicit. It can only come from a social history and a reflexive sociology which would be critical in the Kantian sense, whose goal would be a scientific socio-analysis to illuminate the structure of a national cultural unconscious. Through a rigorous historical anamnesis of the different national histories, and above all through a history of the educational institutions and the fields of cultural production, it would unveil the historical foundations of various categories of thought, and the problematic areas that social actors unwittingly reveal (‘it is history which is the true unconscious’ as Durkheim said) through acts of cultural reception or production.

Nothing is more urgent than to undertake a comparative history of the different disciplines, along the lines of what has been done for ethnology under the direction of Isaac Chiva and Utz Jeggle. Indeed, only a comparative history of the social sciences can liberate us from the modes of thought inherited from history, by providing the means to ensure a conscious mastery of scholastic forms of classification, of the unthought categories of thought, and of obligatory problematics. As one clearly sees in the case of anthropology, comparison makes everything that was held to be necessary appear arbitrary or tied to the context of a contingent tradition. The very words ethnology or Volkskunde, which designate the discipline, are laden with a whole past of implicit traditions, which means that these two theoretically equivalent terms are separated by the entire history of the two fields. An adequate understanding of the objects and programmes of research undertaken in these two disciplines would enable us to understand the entire history of the relationship they have maintained with the political field, and which is encapsulated in the difference between the French ‘populaire‘ (Musée des arts et traditions populaires) and the German Volk or volkisch, between a tradition of the left, linked to the State and defended against a right-wing tradition, devoted to folklore and the people in the manner of Le Play, and, on the other hand, a conservative tradition, identifying the people with the nation and the Heimat or the peasant Gemeinschaft. It would also mean understanding the discipline’s position in the nation’s hierarchical space of disciplines: in France, on the side of the positive sciences, somewhat despised; in Germany, on the side of German Studies (‘germanistique’). And it would mean examining all the differences that arise from these principal oppositions.

The teaching system is one of the places where, in differentiated societies, systems of thought are produced and reproduced. It is the equivalent, albeit more refined, of the ‘primitive forms of classification’ that Durkheim and Mauss, as consistent Kantians, inventoried for societies lacking writing or teaching institutions. The structural oppositions between dry and wet, east and west, cooked and uncooked, listed in the table of categories of so-called ‘archaic’ understanding, correspond to the oppositions between explaining and understanding, or between quantity and quality, which the collective history of an educational system and the individual history of a school career have deposited in the cultivated understanding of each of the completed products of the educational system.

These systems of opposition include invariants (such as the oppositions mentioned above, which through a philosophical teaching deeply dominated by the German tradition – in which, if we are to believe Fritz Ringer, they were constituted – have penetrated French teaching) ; they also include national variations. Or, to be more precise, the dominant traditions in each nation can give inverse values to the terms of the same oppositions, as for example to all the secondary oppositions that gravitate around the central opposition, so important in German academic thought, at least until the Second World War, between Kultur and Civilisation, and which serve to distinguish the noble and authentic Germanic tradition from the adulterated and superficial French tradition : the opposition, precisely, between the profound or serious and the brilliant or superficial, or the opposition between content and form, between thought or feeling and style or wit, between philosophy or philology and literature, and so on. An opposition that France’s dominant tradition (which reconciled Henri IV’s hypokhdgne, the heart of the school system, with Alain and Valery’s La NRF) took up, but reversed the signs: depth became heaviness, the serious became scholastic pedantry, and the superficial became French clarity. You need to bear all this in mind to understand that Heidegger is a close approximation of Alain, and vice versa, whereas the former may have been perceived and used in France as the perfect antithesis of the latter.

And in fact, by one of those tricks of historical reason that make nccess to intellectual freedom so difficult, the mythical opposition hctween the two traditions, German and French, was as much imposed on those who rebelled against it in each country as it was on those who nuively took it up on their own account, on those who intended to find 11 form of freedom from imposed forms of thought by simply reversing the sign of the dominant opposition, accepted as it was by satisfied ntttionalists. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century in Germany, 11nd even today (how else can we explain the success of certain postmodemists?), many young progressive intellectuals sought in French thought the antidote to everything they detested in German thought, while young progressive French intellectuals did the same in the other direction -which left little chance of meeting each other along the way.

If there is no question of denying the existence of profound intellectuul nationalisms, based on what are perceived as important intellectuul national interests, there is also a less obvious point worth noting . f he international struggles for domination in cultural matters and for the imposition of the dominant principle of domination – I mean by this the imposing of a particular definition of the legitimate exercise of intellectual activity, for example the German valorization of ideas of Kultur, depth, philosophical content, etc., over what they saw as the French stress on Civilisation, clarity, literature, etc. – inevitably find their roots in the struggles within each national field, in struggles where the dominant national definition and the foreign definition are themselves involved. They are not simply arms in a struggle but are also themselves stakes of a struggle.

We can say why such conditions make philosophical confusion and misunderstandings more the rule than the exception in the international scene, as another example could show. A considerable amount of intellectual independence and theoretical lucidity is necessary to understand that Durkheim, revolting against a dominant intellectual order which included men like Bergson, is actually in the same camp as Cassirer (who in The Myth of the State made an explicit link between his ‘symbolic forms’ and Durkheim’s ‘primitive forms of classification’), while Cassirer was a target against whom Heidegger developed u variation of Bergsonian Lebensphilosophie. One could multiply 1lmost indefinitely such chiastic effects, which, by favouring alliances or rejections equally based on misunderstanding, work to prevent or minimize the accumulation of the historical assets of the internation- 1llzation (or the denationalization) of the categories of thought, which l1 the primary condition for a true intellectual universalism.