Disarming Intelligence - by Zakir Paul

Book Synopsis

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 siècle psychology and philosophy to literature, criticism, and cultural polemics around the First World War.

Zakir Paul examines how Marcel Proust, Henri Bergson, Paul Valéry, and the critics of the influential Nouvelle revue française 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 tensions--from the extreme right to Walter Benjamin's 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.

Review Quotes

"Paul offers a very clear presentation of the arguments in each chapter and provides compelling readings of the texts with ample citation, intriguingly tracing the ever-shifting meanings of intelligence, as well as the cultural contexts in which those changes occurred. . . . [T]he book deftly crafts a multifaceted account of intelligence that draws convincingly on the often-intertwined fields of psychology, philosophy, literature, and criticism in the time period under investigation, with helpful accounts of lesser known figures and fresh readings of highly canonical writers such as Proust and Valéry."---Joseph Acquisto, H-France Review

About the Author

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