Disarming Intelligence: Proust, Valry, and Modern French Criticism

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A critical account of the idea of intelligence in modern French literature and thought

In the late nineteenth century, psychologists and philosophers became intensely interested in the possibility of quantifying, measuring, and evaluating intelligence, and using it to separate and compare individuals. Disarming Intelligence analyzes how this polyvalent term was consolidated and contested in competing discourses, from fin de sicle psychology and philosophy to literature, criticism, and cultural polemics around the First World War.

Zakir Paul examines how Marcel Proust, Henri Bergson, Paul Valry, and the critics of the influential Nouvelle revue franaise registered, negotiated, and subtly countered the ways intelligence was invoked across the political and aesthetic spectrum. For these writers, intelligence fluctuates between an individual, sovereign faculty for analyzing the world and something collective, accidental, and contingent. Disarming Intelligence shows how literary and critical styles questioned, suspended, and reimagined what intelligence could be by bringing elements of uncertainty and potentiality into its horizon. The book also explores interwar political tensionsfrom the extreme right to Walter Benjamins engaged essays on contemporary French writers. Finally, a brief coda recasts current debates about artificial intelligence by comparing them to these earlier crises of intelligence.

By drawing together and untangling competing conceptions of intelligence, Disarming Intelligence exposes its mercurial but influential and urgent role in literary and cultural politics.

Author Bio

Zakir Paul is assistant professor of comparative literature at New York University.