Jacques Bouveresse is perhaps best known in the Anglophone world for being among the least well-known of contemporary French thinkers. Of the same generational cohort as Badiou, Rancière, Debray and Balibar during Althusser’s reign at the École Normale Supérieure, a long-standing friend and interlocutor of Bourdieu, elected in 1995 to the chair of Philosophy of Language and Epistemology at the Collège de France, his work has been translated into Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese, but so far rather little has appeared in English. Paradoxically, one reason for this may be the antagonistic stance he has generally adopted toward his native philosophical milieu: ‘Why I am so very unFrench’ was the title beneath which he introduced his work to the Anglosphere in the 1980s.

Badiou has famously characterized the moment of postwar French philosophy as encompassing ‘a new appropriation of German thought, a vision of science as creativity, a radical political engagement and a search for new forms in art and life.’footnote¹ Against this, Bouveresse has looked to Austria, rather than Germany; valued mathematical logic and discounted any heroic role for science; adopted a politics of modest reformism; and eschewed the seductions of performative rhetoric in favour of clarity and precision. Yet as the dominant modes of French philosophy have changed—existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, ‘new philosophy’, neo-Kantianism—Bouveresse’s relation to it has adjusted too. An outline reconstruction of his work may help to provide a view of French philosophy—its habitus, as Bourdieu would say—from the perspective of one of its fiercest internal critics, and offer the basis for a preliminary critical assessment of his own achievements.

Born in 1940, one of nine children, on a small farm high up in the Franche-Comté near the Swiss border, Bouveresse attended a village primary school and, as a child, helped out looking after the animals. His forebears were Swiss Catholics who had relocated across the frontier to the land of their co-religionists in the sixteenth century. The family was somewhat singled out—‘glorious’ figures, according to the local sarcasm—by its education: a grandmother had received a higher diploma, an uncle was a priest, an aunt a nun. Bouveresse, rather staggeringly, had read the entire Bible at the age of seven. On his own account, his early outlook was marked by a fervent anti-militarism and an idealism so extreme it was almost a denial of his lived reality. At eleven, he plumped to enter the junior seminary at Besançon, fifteen miles away, where he acquired the habit of hard, intensive study as a defence against the misery of daily life.footnote² His father, highly intelligent, had been a militant of the Catholic Young Farmers movement, an important force in this politically and religiously conservative region; dedicated to his work on the farm, he was also drawn to intellectual questions. Bouveresse recalled the two of them discussing Berkeley’s philosophy as they toiled in a field, armed with picks, dismantling a heap of pebbles. His father brought his pick down hard on a stone and asked if Jacques really thought that wasn’t real, but just a complex of sensations? Bouveresse would bring to Paris something of the same attitude towards the endeavours of philosophers that he has attributed to his father: a mixture of ironizing—‘fishing for the moon’, in his father’s phrase—with a certain respect, ‘above all, not wanting to give them an excessive importance.’footnote³

At seventeen, after the baccalauréat, Bouveresse went on to study scholastic philosophy for two years, still planning to enter the senior seminary at Besançon—Julien Sorel’s social springboard in The Red and the Black—and train for the priesthood. But it was now that he experienced a painful crisis of faith: he could no longer share in the necessary religious exaltation or take the formal expressions of devotion seriously; he was suspected of being ‘too intellectual’, to the detriment of the spiritual side. By 1959 his religious vocation was over. Instead, now with two top-grade baccalauréats to his credit, Bouveresse was advised to take the high road of preparation for the grandes écoles. He won a place at the intensely competitive Lycée Lakanal, on the southern outskirts of Paris, where his uncle the priest was a chaplain. Here, the class contrast was stark. His fellow-students seemed infinitely more cultured, self-assured and better read, remarkable to a farm boy not only for their quickness but for their cheek. Bouveresse’s defence was once again to throw himself into intensive reading, now of general culture. He already had good German and immersed himself in its literature, expressionist poetry—Gottfried Benn, Trakl—as well as the classics. His German teacher, a young Communist, introduced him to Brecht, through whom he discovered the voluminous writings of Karl Kraus.footnote⁴

In 1961 Bouveresse entered the École Normale Supérieure. If Sartre still dominated the public sphere in this period, Althusser reigned supreme at the rue d’Ulm. Bouveresse has described the milieu of the ens at that time as deeply disconcerting for the country youth he still was, encountering a cohort of great sophistication and philosophical brilliance, from whom he felt politically and culturally very much apart. Although on concrete political questions his views were not so different from those of Althusser’s students, he was wary of ‘what intellectuals understood by political engagement’, sceptical of ‘systematic political solutions’.footnote⁵ Of his distance from the pcf Bouveresse remarked: ‘I had already known one religion and had the strong impression this was another.’ In general orientation, he defined himself as ‘a man of the left of reformist rather than revolutionary tendency’, seeking to defend good causes, victims and the oppressed, but with little confidence in existing political movements—and so, ‘somewhat solitary’.footnote⁶ Later he would joke that his fellow students—Badiou, Rancière, Debray—had a military conception of philosophy: ‘We descend from the hills and launch waves of assault.’footnote⁷

As Bouveresse has acknowledged, however, there was no sectarianism in Althusser’s direction of the school: the widest range of thinkers were recruited, including rationalists like Gilles Gaston Granger and Jules Vuillemin, another son of rural Franche-Comté, who introduced Bouveresse to Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. Through Vuillemin’s classes, he discovered ‘a new way of doing philosophy: clearer, more precise, more technical’; Frege’s logic, in particular, offered a model of ‘sobriety and precision’.footnote⁸ There was also a contrarian spirit at work: if the Althusserians categorized Anglo-Saxon philosophy as ‘essentially an expression of capitalism, technocracy and political conformism’—albeit without underestimating its influence—Bouveresse set about systematically working through all the thinkers they dis-recommended. It sufficed to open the books of Mach, Russell or Carnap to find that what he had been told about those authors was a gross simplification—and ‘in philosophy as elsewhere, the principal difficulty is still to persuade people simply to open the books.’footnote⁹

At the same time, relations with both structuralists and post-structuralists were ‘correct’, as the French would say. After the agrégation—in which Bouveresse was placed first in his year, qualifying in literature (Latin, Greek, French and German) as well as philosophy—he taught the course in formal logic at the Sorbonne for ten years, while working on his thesis on Wittgenstein. This was published by Éditions de minuit as Le Mythe de l’intériorité: Expérience, signification et langage privé chez Wittgenstein in 1976. Earlier articles had already appeared in the leading Althusserian review, Cahiers pour l’analyse, and in Critique, famed journal of the post-structuralists, to which Bouveresse was recommended by Foucault in 1968 as a reviewer of Vuillemin’s work on Aristotle, and for which he wrote—on Peirce, Popper, Kraus, Cantor, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Frege, Dummett—throughout the seventies.footnote¹⁰ Of his position within the field of French philosophy at this time, he has said he was regarded by the structuralists as ‘competent and worthy’; there was a certain respect for formal logic, which was at least preferable to ‘humanism’.footnote¹¹ Meanwhile Le Mythe de l’intériorité was flanked by a growing number of companion studies on different aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought: anthropology, iconography, religion, aesthetics, architecture, music, Freud, modernity and the idea of progress.