Personalist Papers
Probing Overlooked Sources of a Prescient Critical Tradition
Introducing Personalist Papers
Why this, why now:
I feel both validation and frustration whenever I see the name of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) come up in current discussions of the absorption of all human reality by autonomized, even divinized Technique. Yes, he did warn us about this in his 1954 eponymous book to be translated a decade later as The Technological Society. But barely more than a handful of experts in the English-speaking world suspect that this book represents not the beginning of an academic career, but the tail end of a grassroots revolutionary movement against industrial society, initiated by Ellul’s friend and intellectual mentor Bernard Charbonneau (1910-1996). For over a dozen years prior, it was as a tandem of young activist thinkers that they had hashed out the ideas they would later develop in their comparable bodies of work. But whereas Ellul managed to find some kind of audience, especially outside France, such relative success eluded the even harder to place, indeed more original Charbonneau for most of his life. I have been trying to bring him out of Ellul’s shadow and to the attention of Ellulians and a wider public since the beginning of my independent scholarly career, devoted to rewriting the history of the French Personalist movement in light of its origins outside the familiar Catholic framework of Emmanuel Mounier’s influential and still active review Esprit. My dissertation placed these origins squarely in the mostly ignored or misrepresented Ordre Nouveau group, with its own distinct revolutionary doctrine and praxis, that would reverberate in the post-war European federalist movement. Closer to Ordre Nouveau while initially working with Esprit, Charbonneau and Ellul represent a distinctive regional strand of Personalism as a technocritical political movement that I have dubbed the Bordeaux School, a term that revives its own belated self-definition as a critical project comparable to the Frankfurt School. In this, they were often drawing from the thought of Ordre Nouveau’s founder Arnaud Dandieu (1897-1933), the other unknown genius whose largely unpublished or forgotten body of thought, tragically cut short by his early death, I am also trying to reconstruct and reinsert in contempory discussions, e.g. of Science and Technique.
It should come as no surprise that even respected scholarly work on near-complete unknowns, in an uphill battle to counteract their absence from the canon of twentieth-century thought, let alone public discourse, is not exactly a recipe for career success. If truth be told, I have never had an academic position (not for lack of trying), so I have turned to crowdfunding to help me carry on my work on these authors’ original, often prescient takes on topics that do find echoes among alert minds trying to figure out the unfolding of a civilizational crisis whose outline they had ascertained nearly a century ago. To try to inject an awareness of these overlooked bodies of thought into the critical thinking of our own time, I am now more actively turning to the blog medium where said thinking is taking place in real time. As I am about to wrap up my translation of Bernard Charbonneau’s Mediatized Society, as carried out on a dedicated Patreon page over the last few years, finding my networking impact and revenue stream on that platform disappointingly negligible, I will now endeavour to switch to Substack with a more varied range of offerings.
My initial idea was to use this site to produce English versions of many of my older French publications introducing this field of inquiry, to try to make up for a recent botched French collection in book form of a couple of them, which I am inclined to disown. As with Mediatized Society, this would be with the idea of eventually coming up with a manuscript I can submit to publishers, sharing translations of the texts involved with subscribers in at least monthly instalments on the way there. I would still allow myself to stray from this book project by sharing other relevant texts, especially when I don’t find the time to translate its ‘chapters’. This would be the case over the coming summer, while I gradually transition from my Patreon project, even as I juggle unrelated translation projects that fall into the rubric of what is called in French ‘travail alimentaire’: jobs to feed the creative writer and keep him alive as a precondition for doing work that matters.
This is where you come in: taking a subscription now will get you some interesting teasers for the next few months, until this fall, when regular instalments of my book come out, documenting in almost day-by-day detail the fascinating back story of Jacques Ellul, Bernard Charbonneau, and the unsuspected lineages and treasure troves of critical thought I have uncovered over four decades of dealing with the elders of the French Personalist movement and their rich, often untapped legacy. Until I submit the finalized manuscript of Charbonneau’s book to publishers within a couple of months, I am even considering sharing it with early subscribers who bother to ask for it, such as it is, very nearly complete. (This is where I get to recycle the tongue-in-cheek byline of my Patreon page: ‘If you liked Ellul’s Technological Society, you’re gonna love Charbonneau’s Mediatized Society!’) My hope is that this will help launch a community where discussions of the crisis of civilization can be sparked and fed by a Personalist critical angle, one that will appear novel even to people who might not be unfamiliar with the Personalist tradition of non-conformist and Third-Way thinking. This is still very much the sketch of a work-in-progress, whose outline will only take shape and develop specifics over the coming month. It may help to consider this introductory post and the next few ones as a place-holder to seize the moment and the momentum I sense, just giving a foretaste of coming attractions.