The Wind from the East

Prologue ix Introduction: The Maoist Temptation 1 Part I: The Hour of Rebellion Chapter 1: Showdown at Bruay-en-Artois 25 Chapter 2: France during the 1960s 39 Chapter 3: May 1968: The Triumph of Libidinal Politics 70 Chapter 4: Who Were the Maoists? 109 Excursus: On the Sectarian Maoism of Alain Badiou 155 Part II: The Hour of the Intellectuals Chapter 5: Jean-Paul Sartre's Perfect Maoist Moment 179 Chapter 6: Tel Quel in Cultural-Political Hell 233 Chapter 7: Foucault and the Maoists: Biopolitics and Engagement 288 Chapter 8: The Impossible Heritage: From Cultural Revolution to Associational Democracy 350 Bibliography 371 Index 385

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History, Comparative Literature, and Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His books, which include Heidegger's Children and The Seduction of Unreason (both Princeton), have been translated into ten languages. His articles and reviews have appeared in Dissent, the Nation, and the New Republic.

The Wind From the East must be regarded as a monument of committed scholarship. It is also a fascinating chronicle of people who, however ludicrous they may seem at times, did on occasion think and act with profound seriousness. For that reason the book is a valuable addition to the literature of the era. -- David Gress, Wall Street Journal Wolin surveys a wide range of French intellectuals' responses to Mao's China. The best of these responses creatively appropriate the concept of cultural revolution, leading to a new libertarianism and to the embrace of causes such as gay rights, women's liberation, and prison reform; the worst of them became fatally compromised by a blind endorsement of the crimes of Chinese communism... Wolin skewers irresponsible intellectual posturing in a manner reminiscent of the late Tony Judt, but reveals an underlying sympathy with the goals and ideals, if not always with the choices, of the Gauchistes. A masterful performance. -- Choice Even as he is documenting the delusions of the sixty-eighters--often with considerable wit, and with a seemingly encyclopedic familiarity--Wolin grants credence to their skewed perception of the status quo in France and in the West more generally. Disagreements and exasperations aside, I found this book compulsively readable. The history of Sixties is a long way from being exhausted. -- John Wilson, Books & Culture [A] fascinating and dispassionate account of one of the more curious follies of recent times. -- Jeremy Jennings, Standpoint Wolin argues that fascination with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution reflected, not simply a taste for exoticism, but a delayed response to postwar capitalist modernisation. -- Scott McLemee, The National Richard Wolin has provided us with an informative and readable account of a fascinating episode in twentieth-century French intellectual history, knowledgeably placing it into its wider biographical and political contexts. -- Moritz Follmer, French History