SOURCE: Smith, Lee. “Otherwise Engaged.” Artforum 39, no. 2 (October 2000): 45.

In the following essay, Smith discusses the opposing philosophical perspectives of Houellebecq and Jean-Paul Sartre and the negative reaction of leftist French intellectuals to The Elementary Particles, which was regarded as an assault on the ideals of individual freedom.

One of the more telling recent developments in French cultural life has been the sudden nostalgia for Jean-Paul Sartre coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of his death this year. No one really misses Sartre's ideas about “Being” or the Communist International, but a reconsideration of the place he filled in French culture has signaled a genuine EU-era cultural identity crisis. He was the last in a long line of engaged and very public intellectuals, a tradition that included, in the twentieth century alone, Zola, Malraux, Camus; if France is no longer turning out Voltaire-quality men of letters, then what is France...