Contenu du sommaire : « Le grand Motchane » (1931-2017), intellectuel et socialiste

The author recalls the intellectual exchanges he had with Didier Motchane (1931-2017) in the late 1980s and in the 1990s on a regular basis. He attempts to capture the exceptionality of this figure, absolutely unique in French politics at the end of the XXth century. It seems to him to represent an utterly singular connection of philosophy and politics, one becoming interior to the other, while at the same time opening a kind of gap in it. In his view, this gap is extremely necessary. This configuration only makes it still possible to conceive of politics in terms of hope: hope for radical social transformation, which we need today even more than yesterday, insofar it seems that we have gone all the way down of the social drift that Didier Motchane had analyzed and anticipated.

Didier Motchane (1931-2017), an organizer and a thinker now largely unknown of French socialism, can nevertheless help an emancipatory left to take up important theoretical challenges in the first quarter of the XXIth century. His book Clefs pour le socialisme (Keys for Socialism), published in 1973, is particularly useful in this respect. Refusing to fetishize the State and the nation in positive or negative terms, irony for “ultra-leftism” as a posture, the place of individuality, sociological critique of social democracy, critical dialogue with anarchism, the place of active minorities in a democratic process or rejection of productivism without forgetting the satisfaction of popular needs: the tracks he formulates constitute an invitation to think in the tensions and even within the tensions of historical reality.

The theme of self-management (in French, “autogestion”) was widely discussed by the non-communist left in the aftermath of May 1968. The recently formed left-wing faction CERES (Centre for Socialist Studies, Research and Education), was instrumental in disseminating this idea in the Socialist party after it was reconstructed in 1971. The CERES, a left-wing movement formed shortly before the May 1968 events was instrumental in making the Socialist party receptive to the concept. On that occasion a new strategy to transform society was outlined: it combined the implementation of a platform of structural reforms with the mobilisation of grassroots workers. The relative decline of “autogestion” as a strategy towards the end of the decade, was a tell-tale sign of a change of era, marked by the rise of globalisation and neoliberalism. The article will shed light on the different stages of this evolution in which Didier Motchane (1931-2017), one of the major architects of this movement, played a decisive role.

Didier Motchane (1931-2017) was an important figure on the socialist left. A senior civil servant, he was both an intellectual and a militant. A proponent of the break with capitalism and a theorist of self-governance, he was one of the founders, with Jean-Pierre Chevènement, of the Centre d'études, de recherches et d'éducation socialiste (Ceres). In terms of the history of social democracy, his obsession was to avoid either betraying his ideas or perishing, which would have been another way of not seeing them succeed. The struggle of a lifetime.

This text brings together some of Didier Motchane's (1931-2017) recollections during the years 2000-2010, comparing him to two historic figures of socialism: the French Lucien Herr (1864-1926) and the Italian Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). It draws Motchane's intellectual and political contributions as an ultimate flicker of the Enlightenment in French socialism.

Occasionally, certain works experience death in images in a documentary gesture beyond all measure. Un Mensch, a film directed in 2023 by Dominique Cabrera, is such a work. While disappearance is a central theme in the director's work, this is the first time she has come so close, filming the last year of her husband Didier Motchane's life. Together, they take note of the coming death; absorbing the sensitive like a blotter by capillary action, as the slide towards loss occurs without a net. Looking Dominique Cabrera (the camera and the film) straight in the eye until his last breath, Didier Motchane stands at the intersection of life and death, for all eternity.

The thought of the modernist poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is a source of controversy. Stripped of the convenient mask of his heteronyms, his rare political publications revealed a nationalist and mystical ideology, at once anti-democratic, anti-communist, anti-socialist and anti-liberal. His only essay published during his lifetime, O Interregno, is a symbol of this: rarely read, this justification of the military dictatorship installed in Portugal in 1926 long placed him on the extreme right. However, the unpublished archives deposited in “his trunk full of people” now allow us to better understand the ideology of this liberal nationalist and his daring defence of the dictatorship, the keystone of his dream of Empire. Like many Portuguese and Brazilian intellectuals of his time, including those on the left, Pessoa saw in the military dictator a redeemer capable of reconciling the Portuguese and preparing the transition to the Fifth Empire announced in Message.

In this lecture (April 1940), translated below into French, Leo Strauss approached for the first time the theme of the intellectual genealogy of the crisis of the German mind (a theme he will carry on in 1941 in his analysis of the so-called “German revolution”: “German Nihilism”); a theme approached before him especially by Ernst Troeltsch and Thomas Mann. Strauss saw in historicism the most outstanding feature of the contemporary intellectual situation, the different aspects of which he analyzes here. The counterpart is the tendency towards irrationalism (Max Weber) and authoritarianism (Carl Schmitt). The liberation from historicism is to be searched by a reopening of the “Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns” through a return to Plato and Aristotle. He sees the germ of such a return in Husserl, but also in Nietzsche.