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The author of over 150 books in various genres, the French writer Renaud Camus is perhaps best known as the man who coined the Great Replacement, his phrase to describe the sweeping demographic changes now transforming Europe and its diasporas throughout the world. In The Deep Murmur, Camus explores one source of our societies' heedless embrace of a post-European future: the prohibition on the word race and all that it has connoted over its long and storied history, now seen as irrevocably tainted by the experience of Nazism. Without the word, the thing ceases to exist. Thus gradually recedes, in the words of Bernanos, that deep murmur in which the race cradles its own - and, with it, the very possibility of transmission, of a place in the world that is nothing other than a place in time.
The volume opens with Camus' Elegy for Enoch Powell, written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Powell's (in)famous Rivers of Blood speech. Powell foretold our present; Camus is its chronicler.
In A Counter History of French Colonization, Franco-Moroccan author Driss Ghali surveys the modern history of French colonization in comparative perspective, from the capture of Algiers in July 1830 to the wave of decolonizations that followed the Second World War. The story Ghali tells is a tragic one: despite what were often the best of intentions, French colonial administration was generally a slapdash affair, ill-conceived, ill-executed, and largely indifferent to the well-being of native populations and the long-term interests of France alike.
But it was not just the French who squandered the opportunities presented by their colonial adventure: once liberated from their colonial oppressors and with a few notable exceptions, France's former colonies signally failed to make good on the promise of independence, in many cases reverting to the violent, corrupt, and unjust ways that had characterized their societies prior to the arrival of France.
As Ghali shows in the work's concluding section, these failures continue to reverberate to this day in the metropolitan heart of the former empire, where the memory of colonialism has contributed to driving a wedge between its immigrant-descended and native-stock populations. Should this conflicted memory not be overcome, a bleak future awaits France and, indeed, every Western society that has so blithely accepted that the crimes of colonialism be incorporated into its foundational narrative.
Enemy of the Disaster is the first authorized translation to appear in English of Renaud Camus' political writings and includes his notorious 2010 speech, The Great Replacement. Though forty-two years have passed since his work was last translated into English, Camus is endlessly and irresponsibly discussed in the media, his vast and complex oeuvre reduced to a single phrase devoid of all context. In the English-speaking world, at least, he is the opposite of an author; he is a floating signifier, a rumor, an element in someone else's narrative.
This volume aims to change that. Spanning the years 2007-2017, its ten chapters present a very different Camus, one freed from the opportunistic glosses of friend and foe alike. Instead of a conspiracy theorist, the reader discovers a committed opponent of conspiratorial thinking of all kinds. Instead of a proponent of rightwing terrorism, one discovers the founder of a political party devoted to the promotion of civic peace. Above all, one discovers in Camus a man of culture, of the high European culture that he sees everywhere in retreat amid a generalized debasement of humanity.
The book opens with a critical Introduction by its editor, Professor Louis Betty of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Betty seeks to free Camus from the various polemical misrepresentations to which he has been subjected in order to situate him in the context of recent French debates concerning immigration and identity, debates that have only become more intense since Camus first entered the fray. Each chapter is thoroughly annotated to help non-French readers better navigate what might be unfamiliar references.
Enemy of the Disaster will prove a precious resource to any serious student of contemporary France. The issues it addresses, however - issues, not just of immigration and identity, but of culture, education, and the future of humanity itself - resonate well beyond the French context. These are issues with which we all, sooner or later, will need to reckon. By showing us what we have so blithely abandoned in our mad embrace of an increasingly posthuman future, Renaud Camus helps us do just that.
First delivered as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882, Ernest Renan's What Is a Nation? is a seminal text in the study of nation, nationalism, and nineteenth-century European history. In it, Renan critically reviews the prevailing theories of nationhood of his time. Finding all inadequate to the task, he then develops his own, historically-informed theory wedding considerations of historical continuity to the imperative of present consent.
In an afterword, the political theorist Nathalie Krikorian-Duronsoy distinguishes Renan's idea of the nation from the social contract tradition, particulary in its Rousseauist variant. In Renan's view, the nation is not a mere sum of individuals but an autonomous entity in its own right. Only by grasping this may one move beyond the extremely partial reading to which What Is a Nation? has long been reduced and recognize the various ways in which Renan's thought intersects with contemporary debates regarding immigration, identity, and the future of the nation state.
