Seeking to promote what he calls a duty of memory, Finkielkraut also published The Future of a Negation: Reflexion on the Genocide Issue (1982) ( Avenir d'une négation : réflexion sur la question du génocide) and later his comments on the Klaus Barbie trial, Remembering in Vain ( La Mémoire vaine).įinkielkraut feels particularly indebted to Emmanuel Levinas. This reflection led Finkielkraut to address post-Holocaust Jewish identity in Europe ( The Imaginary Jew) (1983) ( le Juif imaginaire). Finkielkraut then began publishing singly authored works on the public's betrayal of memory and our intransigence in the presence of events that, he argued, should move the public. Broadly speaking, his ideas may be described as being in the same vein as those of Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, a filiation he has repeatedly pointed out.įinkielkraut first came to public attention when he and Pascal Bruckner co-authored a number of short but controversial essays intended to question the idea that a new emancipation was underway these included The New Love Disorder (1977) ( Le Nouveau Désordre amoureux) and At the Corner of the Street (1978) ( Au Coin de la rue), as well as The Adventure (1979) ( L'aventure). In 2010, he was involved in founding JCall, a left-wing advocacy group based in Europe to lobby the European Parliament on foreign policy issues concerning the Middle East and Israel in particular.įinkielkraut is the son of a Polish Jewish manufacturer of fine leather goods who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp.įinkielkraut studied modern literature at the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud. Finkielkraut deplores what he sees as the deterioration of Western tradition through multiculturalism and relativism. Īs a thinker, Finkielkraut defines himself as being "at the same time classical and romantic". He was elected member of the Académie française ( Seat 21) on 10 April 2014. He joined the Department of French Literature in the University of California, Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1976, and from 1989 to 2014 he was professor of History of Ideas in the École Polytechnique department of humanities and social sciences. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics, many on the ideas of tradition and identitary nonviolence, including Jewish identity and antisemitism, French colonialism, the mission of the French education system in immigrant assimilation, and the Yugoslav Wars. Alain Finkielkraut ( French pronunciation: , Yiddish: born 30 June 1949) is a French philosopher and public intellectual.
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