Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
Transit I - Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
Summary
Proust's play with his own Jewishness – and the career of the Jews in the ‘West’ it so spectacularly embodies, not despite but because of his profound ambivalence – has thus this dual salience: it can remind us both why we seek to deny the firm bounds of identity that our cultures construct for us … and why we should be wary of the claims of our abilities to escape those bonds altogether. It suggests that we cannot reimagine ourselves – as we know we can and must do – without reckoning with the ways we have been imagined. It means, put simply, that we cannot do without history. And history, as Fredric Jameson once reminded us, is what hurts (Freedman 2001: 546).
The following chapters are founded on the idea that a critical rethinking of Jewish assimilation in 19th-century France – or the process which has been interpreted as such – is important for an assessment of the moral legitimacy and practical wisdom of (re)introducing liberal-assimilationist discourses and practices in the European context. Rethinking Jewish assimilation will also help us trace assimilation's connections to secularisation in the France of the Third Republic. This will facilitate our understanding of the connections between secularism and assimilationism today. I try to contribute to such a rethinking of assimilation by scrutinising the ways in which assimilation's practical and discursive effects appear in Proust's oeuvre, and particularly in his novel In Search of Lost Time. This novel was written between 1909 and 1922. It allots a central place to the position of the Jews in the early French Third Republic (1870-1940), often in relation to the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906). I read the novel in connection to three other kinds of sources: historical documents about the Emancipation of the Jews, the interpretation of French Jewish assimilation by prominent historians of French Judaism – most notably Pierre Birnbaum and Esther Benbassa – and the more general interpretations of the paradoxes of assimilation in 20th-century philosophy and sociology.
Arendt was one of Proust's first readers to consider him a central witness of the paradoxes of assimilation as they came to prominence within the French context.
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- Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of MulticulturalismFrench Modernist Legacies, pp. 117 - 136Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013