Alain Finkielkraut

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Alain Finkielkraut (b. Paris, 1949) is a French essayist, and only son of a Jewish Polish artisan manufacturing fine leather goods who was deported to Auschwitz. He currently teaches at the École polytechnique, an elite engineering college, as professor of the "history of ideas" in the department of humanities and social sciences. Author of a number of books, Finkielkraut is among France's cohort of public intellectualls who appear regularly on talk shows and publish columns in the French media, in Finkielkraut's case from what in France is known as a humanist standpoint.

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Philosophy

Alain Finkielraut studied philosophy at the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud. Broadly speaking, his ideas may be described as being in the same vein as those of Emmanuel Lévinas and Hannah Arendt, a filiation he has repeatedly pointed out.

Finkielkraut first came to public intention when he and Pascal Bruckner co-authored a number of short but controversial essays intended to question the idea that a new emancipation was underway; these included The New Love Disorder (1977) (Le Nouveau Désordre amoureux) and At The Corner Of The Street, The Adventure (1979) (Au Coin de la rue l'aventure).

Next Finkielkraut began publishing singly-authored works on the public's betrayal of memory and our intransigeance in the presence of events which, he argued, should move the public. This reflection led Finkielkraut to address post-Holocaust Jewish identity in Europe (The Imaginary Jew (1983) (le Juif imaginaire). Seeking to promote what he calls a duty of memory, Finkielkraut also published The Future Of A Negation: Reflexion On The Genocide Issue(1982) (Avenir d'une négation : réflexion sur la question du génocide) and later his comments on the Klaus Barbie trial, The Vain Memory (La Mémoire vaine).

Finkielkraut's debt to Emmanuel Lévinas, in particular, is one that Finkielkraut has made much of. In The Wisdom Of Love (La Sagesse de l'amour), Finkielkraut discusses this debt in terms of modernity and its mirages. Finkielkraut continues his reflection on the matter in The Defeat Of The Mind (1987) (La Défaite de la pensée), The Ingratitude: Talks About Our Times (1999) (Ingratitude : conversation sur notre temps).

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Essayist on society

In recent years, Alain Finkielkraut has given his opinion of a variety of topics regarding society, for instance the Internet in The Internet, The Troubling Ecstasy (2001) (Internet, l'inquiétante extase. In the book Present Imperfect (2002) (L'Imparfait du présent), akin to a personal diary, he writes his thoughts about different events in the world (especially the events of September 11, 2001).

During the Balkan civil wars that resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia, he was one of the first to strongly condemn Serbian ethnic cleansing.

In November 2005, he stirred up controversy by publishing in Haaretz an interview in which he gave his opinions regarding the 2005 civil unrest in France, which he attributed to popular culture as organized along ethnic and religious lines, and for which he assigned responsibility solely to the rioters. Critics of Finkielkraut alleged that his opinions on the matter were racist; Finkielkraut himself later said that he had been misquoted and misunderstood, but that his point had been that while many thought that the answer to racism was a multiracial society, a multiracial society could also become a "multiracist" society.

However, Finkielkraut's remarks, in the same interview, about the fact that the French Soccer Team was "Black, Black, Black" (as opposed to the expression "Black, Blanc, Beur", coined after the 1998 World Cup victory to honor the African and Afro Caribean, European and North African origins of the players) caused a great deal of outcry as it was obviously racially insensitive.

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