In late spring 2016, Julia Pagnamenta ’06 went to visit Bernard Harcourt ’81 at his office at the Columbia University Law School, where he is Professor of Law and Political Science, and the founder and director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought.
After the Lycée, he went to Princeton, and later pursued a law degree, and a PhD in Political Science at Harvard University. Born and raised in New York to French parents, his father and aunt fled France in 1940 and settled in New York. Born in Geneva, Switzerland, his mother moved to New York City after the war to work for the International Labor Organization (ILO) at the United Nations.
Harcourt spoke about how his early intellectual life at the Lycée and his paternal aunt, Alix Deguise, also a Lycée alumnus, who served in de Gaulle’s Free French, inspired his legal work in civil rights and political theory.
Harcourt is the author of books that tackle pressing national issues from the war on terror to the broken windows policy of the 1990s. His most recent book, The Counterrevolution, deals with the new ways in which we are governed in the post 9/11 period. His previous book, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age discusses the harmful and often ignored effects of living in an increasingly digitized world.
Like many of us at the Lycée, you navigate between two cultures. What is that experience like for you?
I have both American and French nationalities, but I have an aversion to nationalistic tendencies, and patriotism. I tend not to consider myself anything. I think sometimes when you navigate between different nationalities and cultures so fluidly and constantly what it produces is not one or the other, but instead something like a resistance to the very idea of having to belong.
On both sides everywhere everybody is always treating you as somewhat other, and then at some point you embrace that and you start to see its value.
What are your most formative memories from your time at the Lycée?
In Première, we read Les Mains Sales by Jean-Paul Sartre, and that was formative intellectually. It stayed with me for a long time. It was because of being exposed to Sartre in Première that I wrote my senior thesis at Princeton on Sartre.
Are you still friends with some of your former classmates?
Oh yeah, there were three of us. Olivier Picard, Sylvain Pascaud, and I were inseparable. And then my high school sweetheart, Norah Lincoff, invited me recently to a get together with former classmates.
Olivier moved out to Chicago, so I saw him when I taught at the University of Chicago.
And now I live one block away from Sylvain.
You have such a rich and eclectic career path. Can you tell us about how you went from practicing law to teaching political and legal theory?
I had an inkling that I wanted to be a political theorist when I was in college. As I said, I had written my senior thesis on Sartre on questions of political violence, and I spent the year studying Hegel and Sartre. But then my life has generally taken fortuitous paths, and I ultimately went to law school feeling that I wanted to actively do civil rights work.
My aunt Alix was a mentor and model figure. She escaped France with my father in 1940. They were Jewish, and when they got to New York, she spent some time at the Lycée and then lied about her age so that she could take a boat to London to join de Gaulle’s Free French. Her husband, Pierre Deguise, was a member of the resistance, so there was always a sense of public service on that side of the family.
In my third year of law school I was exposed to what was, and tragically is still going on in death penalty cases in many Southern states. A guest lecturer came to campus to talk about the cases he worked on in Atlanta, and I couldn’t believe it. In January 1989, I created a special one-month clinical externship for myself at what is now the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia to see if it was true. And the first day, the first case that got thrown at me made it clear that it was.
Alabama doesn’t have a state-wide public defenders system. There are only a few counties that have public defenders. The majority of the state uses an appointment system where an attorney is appointed to take the case. The standards are very low. The compensation was extraordinarily low, and the result was that the quality of representation was and still is pretty abominable.
I moved down to Montgomery, Alabama to work with Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI).
In 1993, you and Bryan Stevenson represented Walter MacMillan, an African-American man who had been held for six years on Death Row after being falsely accused and convicted of killing a white woman. Your representation and reopening of the case led to his release. Can you talk more about the work you did at EJI?
There were times when it was exhilarating and successful, such as the case with Walter. I worked on that case, and I was there when he walked out of prison. We picked him up from prison to free him. That was one of the most remarkable days of my life.
Bryan and I felt we had to help him readjust. He had just spent six years on Death Row. We get to the front, and there is all this barbed wire, all these doors, and as we stepped out, all of a sudden his arms go up like a bird, like a flying motion.
There were a lot of times that weren’t as fortunate as Walter’s case, and that was pretty tough. Overall it’s a pretty disillusioning experience just because it’s so clear that people view these men and women, many of whom have committed serious crimes, as disposable, as not worth the time or energy to try and understand them.
The process is that someone gets convicted for capital murder, and then there is the penalty phase where the jury decides whether you should live or die. It starts at 8:15 in the morning with opening statements, the jury is out for an hour and a half for lunch, and by 4:30 they’ve sentenced the person to death. It’s crazy.
It can be depressing and grueling, but I still practice a few cases, pro bono.
How did you transition from practicing criminal law to teaching legal and political theory?
My goal has always been to try to wed theory with practice.
I worked on a commission put together by Nelson Mandela to investigate allegations of human rights abuses by the African National Congress (ANC) during the struggle, because there had been some mutinies among the ANC fighters. I had spent a summer working as a clerk on the commission that Nelson Mandela had appointed to investigate and hear testimonies. In all these instances, I’ve been trying to bring critical theory in conversation with these practices.
You edited the original French lectures of Michel Foucault at the Collège de France: La Société Punitive and Théories et Institutions Pénales, as well as Surveiller et Punir in the Pléiade edition of Gallimard. How has Foucault influenced and informed your critical thinking?
Surveiller et Punir exercised a formative role on my thought. The first work that I did was on order maintenance or the broken-windows theory, which I am critical of. I took on the Rudy Giuliani administration. They were the big proponents of broken windows. Crime went down in the 1990s, but it went down everywhere in the United States, including in jurisdictions that didn’t come close to adopting broken-windows policies.
What it does is impose a particular vision of orderliness on the city, and it has racial and class effects that are really overpowering. Misdemeanor arrests, if you look at rates, are so disproportionately African-American and Hispanic, that when you think of a policy that is oriented on that basis it’s kind of outlandish. In the same way that Foucault’s theories on discipline created a “delinquent figure”, broken windows creates a disorderly figure: the squeegee men, the homeless, or the panhandler, and demonizes them in a similar way.
I immediately saw the importance of his work, also in relationship to sentencing. I have always tried to resist being a Foucault scholar, in the sense that I’ve always wanted to think of critical theory myself, and instead focus on the problems at hand, so most of my books do that.
Your most recent book, Exposed, is relevant as we are all so dependent on digital devices, and yet you warn against this increasingly digitized world. Why?
We are shaped as a result of this: the things you see, the suggestions and recommendations you get are all shaped by your digital exposure.
We are exposing ourselves to being shaped by everybody else’s interests: whether it’s to buy certain things, or read certain things, and what this digital universe makes possible is just a seamless stream of recommendations and suggestions of who you should be. It is reshaping our subjectivity, and of course, completely changing the way power circulates in our society. It means that corporations are governing. Apple gets to govern politically by rejecting certain apps, or by closing certain accounts.
But there must be some benefits to the digital realm, especially in the pedagogical sector?
It’s possible that it has some benefits. I ran a seminar called Foucault 13 13 at Columbia last year. We had 13 seminars, and they were live streamed, and we had more than five hundred people watching it around the world. But there are also these dark sides that we tend to ignore or forget. One of them in the educational setting is just the amount of distraction that these devices create. The effects on attention span, the effects on concentration are pervasive and problematic. I just think that we aren’t able to concentrate the way we have in the past.
Also, we are not paying attention to the dark side of the digital realm because it’s so pleasant, and so nice, and because you got another notification, or ping, or a new Snapchat, and you look at it.
But in the process, we lose touch with our analog selves and become these digital selves that become much more reliable, and documentable, and knowable. More than anything, I think there is a way in which we are being shaped by all of the recommendations that are coming at us, and we don’t even realize it. It’s strange that these technologies that are supposed to promote freedom are leading to these devices like iWatches that are not any different than ankle bracelets that are meant to monitor people on probation or under house arrest. These worlds are coming together in a strange way.
You currently direct the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, a joint project of the Columbia Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Columbia Law School. What are your aspirations for the Center?
My aspiration is to create a free university for critical thought. Most of our workshops and seminar series are open to the public, and we are trying to create an environment that is not disciplinarily bound.
We want to create a space for critical thought and critical action, so we have a number of different practical engagements, for instance, a Prison and Health Reform group. We try to make everything accessible, not just here, but also online.
This coming year we are going to have an amazing seminar series called Nietzsche 13 13, which will explore 13 critical theorists who were influenced and inspired by Nietzsche.
Here’s a look at the five most recent books he wrote:
The Counterrevolution (Basic 2018)
Exposed (Harvard 2015)
Occupy (Chicago 2013)
Illusion of Free Markets (Harvard 2011)
Against Prediction (Chicago 2007)
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Image courtesy of Bernard Harcourt and Columbia University.
About the Author :
Julia Pagnamenta graduated from the Lycée Français de New York in 2006.