French intellectual circles have been buzzing with the name of one outspoken philosopher: Michel Onfray. One of France’s best known and widely read philosophers, Onfray was born into a poor family and attended a Catholic school, where he was heavily indoctrinated into the ideology of Christianity. This unhappy experience led to his vehement rejection of the faith and its precepts.
Onfray’s revenge on religion came in the form of a book, Traité d’atheologie, translated into English as ‘A Defence of Atheism’. The book has sold over half a million copies in France alone and been translated into more than a dozen languages. But Onfray’s magnum opus consists of a series of books called Contre-histoire de la philosophie – a counter-history of philosophy.
Inspired by the rigorous materialism of Marx and the fiery polemics of Nietzsche, Onfray’s counter-history excavates the thought of history’s forgotten and neglected thinkers. From the Ancient Greek world, he finds the insights of Epicurus, Democritus and Leucippus more interesting than Plato or Aristotle. The Cynics and Cyrenaic schools of thought come in for high praise, while lost philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Le Curé Meslier, a communist-atheist priest, and Le Baron D’Holbach, Europe’s first confessional atheist, represent the pinnacle of European thought.
Onfray not only rejected the cannon of European philosophy, he also called into question the entire academic apparatus. In the town of Caen in northern France, Onfray and a group of intellectuals decided to bypass the traditional mode of teaching by setting up their own university, L’Université Populaire de Caen, in 2002. Onfray believes that education should be a life-long process and should be open to all members of society. The popular university lectures attract thousands of all ages every year.
But the radical philosopher’s latest sacrilege is an attack on the work of Sigmund Freud. It’s not particularly radical, original or polemical to denigrate religion in France, but calling into question the work of Freud is a strategy akin to blasphemy. Psychoanalysis, the discipline founded by Freud, is extremely popular in France, with thousands of troubled citizens regularly reclining on the couch of their respective ‘psy’ for analysis.
Since the work of Jacques Lacan in the post war period, psychoanalysis has occupied a central place throughout the human sciences in France from literature to psychology. Wild talk about the death of God will not trouble the French bourgeoisie, but wild talk about the death of Freud? Now that’s asking for trouble!
In his new book, with the rather Wagnerian title Le Crépuscule d’une Idole, l’affabulation freudienne (Twilight of the Idol, Freud’s fabulas), Onfray argues that the entire work of Freud is nothing short of a fraud. According to him, Freud is a mere charlatan, contriving notions and concepts that are more a reflection of his own lurid imagination than objective reality. Freud’s anti-social proclivities also undergo sharp scrutiny: he was an admirer of Mussolini, supported the right-wing dictator Egelbert Dollfuss in Austria in 1933 and opposed all emancipatory social movements.
Onfray’s book focuses heavily on psychoanalysis in France, but one could also cite the famous example of Freud’s grandson Edward Bernays, who worked as a public relations (read: propaganda) advisor in the United States for President Wilson and several of his successors. Bernays applied his uncle’s methods and ideas to turn America into a self-obsessed consumer society by brainwashing the entire population through advertising.
It has taken Onfray some time to come to terms with Freud, casting him from the Mount Olympus of history’s progressive thinkers. But Nietzsche and Marx still remain.
