LITMIR.BIZ

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possibilities.

      The appeal of shared conceptual preoccupations is not to be forsworn. But it is also not to be taken as self-evidently “serious” in relation to all other forms of knowledge, including consciously embodied ones—particularly in history.

      Conceived somewhat differently, it is a good thing that many contemporary histories are suspicious of heroic, promethean subjectivity. But calcified into an ideological commitment to affirm its opposite, this suspicion itself becomes implausible, and can only sustain itself by tendentious and peremptory readings, ones determined not to see that distinct and consequential events of thought and action indeed happen within complex and unique historical moments. This in turn discloses a striking professional contradiction: from their graduate student days forward, historians are often evaluated supremely on the basis of their ability to do individually distinctive and original work, and yet a principle underwriting a great deal of that individually distinctive and original history-writing assumes either that individual singularity and originality do not exist, or that they are not historically significant.

      Péguy is a practitioner of distinctive thinking, and hence he does not fit neatly into our historiographical models. He is not easily collapsed into the standard model of late modern history or the technocratic historicism that accompanies it. He is indeed always inflected by and in conversation with the history around him, but is not encompassed by it.

      We shall have to look elsewhere to understand this history—and that is a rare and precious historical opportunity. As the philosopher of science William Wimsatt puts it, “When testing philosophical theories [or historical explanations, one might add] look for the tough cases; ones capable of producing deep and rich counterexamples we can learn from.”⁵²

      In this way, instead of contemporary scholarly guides precluding a free encounter with Péguy and his singular writing, we shall remember those thinkers—Christian, Jewish, and nonbelieving, European and African, men and women alike, from Bespaloff to de Gaulle, from Deleuze to Senghor, von Balthasar, and Benjamin—who were able to read Péguy before the preeminent contemporary models for historical thinking emerged as obstacles to that encounter.

      The meeting with Péguy in these pages will take life from the following commitments. First, both the partisans of an immanent becoming and a mechanical, arrested immanence are still very much with us, more than a century after their emergence. Given that reality, simply repeating the predictable, inexorably immanent “contextualizations” in ever more sweeping terms will do precisely nothing to improve our historical understanding—nor will it improve our ability to discern the needs and possibilities of our own historical moment.

      Deep historical understanding is not the same as airless, rigidly contextual historicism, in which diverse, one might say, pluperfect pasts only become present as “representations” in circumambulated linguistic, discursive, social, or institutional fields. Péguy’s thought draws deeply and creatively from immediate contemporaries, the philosophy of Henri Bergson in particular, as well as the general tendency of thinking in philosophy of science and history associated with Émile Boutroux, Henri Poincaré, and others, not to mention the evanescent cultural and technological opening for intellectually ambitious philosophical journalism. But he is also indebted to, for example, a careful, sustained, and creative reading of Blaise Pascal—he is by no means always repeating the representations of Pascal’s thought among his teachers and contemporaries.

      The possibility of an encounter with pluperfect pasts may seem odd, given our present intellectual commitments and their penchant for modular, linear time. Yet the possibility of noncumulative, not immediately contextual historical influence is at work well beyond political thought, metaphysical reflection, and literature; it is at work in the most rigorously cumulative and demonstrative disciplines. It is this, as it were, “spooky action at a distance” that allowed Gödel’s Platonism to deliver such an extraordinary mathematical riposte to the prevailing logicism of David Hilbert,⁵³ or that allowed the cataphatic theological commitments of the Moscow school of mathematics—drawn from long-standing prayer practices in Eastern Orthodox Christianity—to open the way to different paths in twentieth-century set theory, beyond those dreamed by French-Cartesian mathematicians.⁵⁴ In this way, the present—which is of course simultaneously connected to the recent past and more distant pasts—can also encounter a given distant past as a source of surprising renewal; what Péguy called, in his own very influential neologism, ressourcement (“going back to the sources”).⁵⁵

      Péguy’s life and writing offer us a rigorous conversation between past and present, where one can test the tensile interplay of historical contact and distance, inquiring about whether our received categories are truly able to fathom the past and the present alike.

      The list of Péguy’s distinctive allegiances and positions is remarkable in variety and depth. To start cautiously, Péguy was a socialist, but an anti-Marxist. In France at the turn of the last century, that was not remarkable in itself,⁵⁶ but he also refused to align himself with any party, even as he insisted on his socialism and a robust critique of capitalism. To this end, in 1900 he founded his own journal, the Cahiers de la quinzaine (Fortnightly Notebooks), for which he refused all advertising in order to guarantee its complete editorial independence. The decision to strike out on his own—before he had earned a university degree, while renouncing expected sources of funding—led him to pursue a life of at times oppressive poverty, occasional if never quite total intellectual isolation, and sometimes resented marginality.

      Yet for all that, Péguy was able to bring his work into the life of French and ultimately global letters. In its fourteen years of publication, the Cahiers could count among its subscribers the philosopher Henri Bergson, the politician Raymond Poincaré, and the novelists Anatole France, André Gide, Romain Rolland, and Marcel Proust, as well as Alfred Dreyfus and many famous Dreyfusards.⁵⁷ Many of them also contributed articles—notably Rolland and France—as well as Julien Benda and Georges Clemenceau. Péguy edited and produced the journal regularly until his death on the eve of the Battle of the Marne.

      Within the pages of the Cahiers and elsewhere, Péguy was a critic of the emerging intellectual and institutional power of social science, and an advocate of an education dedicated to Greek and Latin, as well as the classics of France literature as they had been gathered into a canon in France over the course of the nineteenth century. Yet Péguy’s own poetry often in no way comports with the formal rules of prosody, and it owes a great debt to an incantatory encounter with a very earthy world redolent at once of French peasant culture as well as the meditative, suspensive qualities of compositions by early modernist artists like Claude Monet and Claude Debussy.

      Similarly distinctive commitments can be found throughout Péguy’s life. Péguy was a great admirer of Émile Zola as a political activist, but not as a novelist. He criticized parliamentary corruption, and the modern ambitions that he believed sustained it, in intemperate language, but was convinced that the countries that had long offered freedom to their citizens were representative democracies like France, Britain, Switzerland, and the United States.⁵⁸ He admired both the pastoral serenity and the silent grandeur of the countryside and also his beloved Paris, with its ceaseless bustle and crowds. He could be a turn-of-the-last-century polemicist against modern culture and also an unwavering supporter of the French Revolution and its universalism, as well as a lifelong, very public opponent of anti-Semitism, assuring Bergson months before his own death that he alone could best defend Bergson against the anti-Semites who attacked him.⁵⁹

      In those same years, Péguy exhorted his readers to ready themselves for what he wrongly believed would be its world-historical destiny to fight a short, defensive war against a German invasion, in which France would be vindicated as an agent of liberation. Yet he had for some time been skeptical about European imperialism, both in his own writings and by publishing in his journal famous critics of imperialist injustice like E. D. Morel.

      Péguy’s religious convictions also confound easy preconceptions. In 1907, Péguy returned to Catholicism and became fascinated by what he called “the Christian Revolution.” Yet he remained anticlerical and volubly, caustically suspicious of ecclesiastical politics to the end of his life. Upon his death, he was in a remarkable

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