Bland Spongiformity

Before he became the lightening rod that he is today, member of the Académie française and philosopher Jean-François Revel traveled to Italy and returned with the accounts that would form the book Pour l'Italie ("For Italy"). The book was an argument about the nature of Italian society, its social conservatism, sexual practices and its treatment of women. Yet even before his transformative Vietnam-era visit to American University campuses (after which he wrote his pro-American polemic Without Marx or Jesus), one can see traces of the figure that was to emerge. Here's a quick rendering of a passage from page 136:

The commonplaces of international psychology are as stubborn as they are numerous and false. This is why the quality (and the demerit) of being cartesian is attributed to French intellectuals. The author of the most wooly-minded page will write: "We French, born cartesians...," etc. However, in our time, the French are anything but cartesian: they are claudelian, heideggerian, Christian, spenglerian or malrausian but not cartesian. Even scholarly works are beset with obscurity, prolixity and disorder. Given that the entire French system of evaluation and examination is founded on the art of dissertation, it is surprising to learn that most French academics can neither write not compose.

By contrast, the only true cartesians to-day are the English. Their academic works are the only ones that are rigorous and well-written. It is the same with their newspapers: reading the weekly The New Statesman [Oh! How the mighty have fallen!] is consolation for the bland spongiformity of so many French weeklies that think themselves "alive" and "spirited," etc.

UPDATE: I posted some of the dirty bits over at LOTF. In case you're interested...