Intellectual Anarchy and Imaginary Otherness: Gender, Class, and Pathology in French Intellectual Discourse, 1890–1900

Abstract

This article uses the concept of “intellectual anarchy” to access the matrix of tensions and representations comprising French intellectual discourse at the turn of the century. It shows that, by accusing one another of fomenting intellectual anarchy, scholars, critics, and poets betrayed masculinist and elitist anxieties about gender and class which, while traditionally depicted as external to such “disinterested” pursuits, emerge as important organizing structures of the intellectual enterprise itself. While few proletarians and women actually participated in French intellectual life, specters of intellectual proletarianism and effeminacy allowed elites at once to articulate external anxieties regarding collectivism and feminism while using the same principles to distinguish themselves internally from rival groups. That is, as a relatively autonomous space within society, the intellectual field reproduced, according to its own internal logic, the structures of domination that marked the social field.