Critical Inquiry — Volume 34, Number 1

Tzvetan Todorov
Moving Targets: An Interview by Danny Postel

Translated by Gila Walker

Danny Postel: Among the twentieth-century thinkers you most admire is Raymond Aron. One of Aron’s defining traits was his penchant for intellectual combat and political debate. One thinks, for example, of The Opium of the Intellectuals, his frontal assault on the romance of the French intelligentsia with the Communist Party. But this is not at all your style. Not only have you never written a book like The Opium of the Intellectuals, you rarely even mention those of your contemporaries whose philosophical or political views are at odds with your own. There is no direct engagement with the likes of Badiou, Balibar, Rancière, or Baudrillard. I wonder why not. As a passionate advocate of liberal democracy, why have you not penned a critique, say, of antiliberalism in French thought today? As a critical humanist, why have you not published an essay, say, on antihumanism in contemporary European theory? I’m not suggesting that you should have done any of these things. I’m merely curious, particularly given your affinity for someone like Aron, why you haven’t taken up this sort of intellectual-political engagement. Is it purely a matter of temperament, or is there a question of principle involved?

Tzvetan Todorov: The question you are raising about the absence of a polemical thrust to my intellectual work takes my mind in two different directions, which are not necessarily independent: I can ask myself about the reasons I may give to justify this choice or about the causes that may have led me to it, sometimes without realizing it.

Tzvetan Todorov is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. A native of Bulgaria living in France for over four decades, he is among the most influential literary and cultural theorists writing today. Among his many books available in English translation are The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973), The Poetics of Prose (1977), Theories of the Symbol (1982), The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (1984), Genres in Discourse (1990), On Human Diversity (1993), Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1996), A Passion for Democracy: Benjamin Constant (1999), The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria’s Jews Survived the Holocaust: A Collection of Texts with Commentary (2001), Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau (2001), Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (2002), and The New World Disorder: Reflections of a European (2005). His most recent book is Les Aventuriers de l’absolu (2006). Danny Postel is the author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism (2006). A member of the editorial board of Common Review and the editorial advisory board of Logos, his work has appeared in Salmagundi, Daedalus, The Guardian, The Nation, Exquisite Corpse, and Philosophy and Social Criticism. Gila Walker is the translator of more than 100 works from French, including texts by Jacques Derrida, François Julien, and Yves Bonnefoy. She has just completed work on Todorov’s Duties and Delights: The Life of a Go-Between and Shmuel Trigano’s The Democratic Ideal and the Shoah: The Unthought in Political Modernity. Walker divides her time between her homes in New York and in the southwest of France. Her email is gila.walker@free.fr