Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Zakir Paul. Disarming Intelligence: Proust, Valéry, and Modern French Criticism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2024. 288 pp.

Review by Bécquer Seguín

15 May 2025

Intelligence today means many things. It can refer to the famed misnomer “artificial intelligence,” or to the actual biological processes of the mind that lead some to reason more quickly and complexly than others. It can be grounded on a large language model, or, as Kathryn Paige Harden argues, on a “genetic lottery.”[1] It can function as a labor-saving device for capitalists, or as a reminder of the inequalities baked into the human genome that social policy ought to address. But intelligence, the scholar Zakir Paul reminds us in his book Disarming Intelligence, also has a literary history, one that might help free us from the shackles of narrow-minded thinking about what intelligence was, what it is, and what it could be.

One of the virtues of Paul’s book is to make staid, naturalized, and otherwise-lapsed critical concepts—intelligence, objectivity, intuition, instinct—come alive in fin-de-siècle debates that often feel unsettlingly contemporary. From Hippolyte Taine’s attempts to quantify intelligence and Henri Bergson’s emphasis on its essential ambiguity, through the literary reflections of Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, and the critics of the Nouvelle Revue Française, intelligence, we come to discover, was a replenishing source for creative thought. But, far from what one might expect, intelligence, for these major twentieth-century French writers, did not equal creativity.

Paul reveals how these and other writers each had their own way of defanging a concept whose meaning, as today, could be marshalled in support of nationalism and social exclusion. For Proust, for instance, intelligence was less a source of power than of confusion. He pointed specifically to its disruptive capacities. The logical organization of memories, he argued, was in many respects an act of misremembering. So much so that, as Paul writes, “One is tempted to conclude that only the forgotten is truly memorable” (p. 64). For Valéry, by contrast, intelligence appeared to be elusive, as were his repeated attempts to undermine its power. His use of the term, Paul shows, slips between the various antonyms against which he defines it: “Valéry’s range of alternatives includes sensibility, memory, instinct, and stupidity” (p. 122). For the critics of the Revue, especially its second-generation editor Jacques Rivière, intelligence meant affirming and reinforcing an interwar littérature désengagée, rather than éngagée, its more famous postwar foil.

As with any historical study of essays and criticism, confounding argumentative moves sometimes surface. In the chapter on the Revue, for example, Rivière arrives at a position one might call intelligence-as-neutrality in a way that seems quite bizarre. He makes an argument about intelligence that one might call a kind of Kantian anti-Kantianness, in which Kant is guilty of “weakening the conceptual virtues of the German mind” such that Germans pursued “duty over intelligence” (p. 143). This is like saying Kant is guilty of writing the First Critique when he should have written the Third. Paul doesn’t dwell on these moments. Nor should he. His job is to explain them, contextualize them, and keep us moving. And he does so with elegant simplicity: “Rivière,” he writes, “sought to preserve a space in language for the unforeseen” (p. 143). Strange as this reason may seem from a more philosophical perspective, it makes several moving parts click into place essayistically and politically.

Ending a book with Walter Benjamin, as Disarming Intelligence does, makes an implicit promise to its readers: something is to come. Benjamin alas often acts as a theoretical hinge for many scholars to the second half of the twentieth century. Whether that second half, or that second book, has to do with intelligence or another seemingly stale critical concept in need of historical reinvigoration, I await whatever comes next with interest.

[1] Kathryn Paige Harden, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (Princeton, N.J., 2021), p. 10.