USSR & PC

Hélène Cixous gives an interesting description of the situation in France after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and surprise! the scapegoating of PC (whatever that means). I found this paragraph fascinating, especially in relation to the daily usage of PC in order to shut down any progressive left discourse.


Here is Cixous in Stigmata: 

"The disappearance of the USSR. I do not plan on giving a political presentation. I’m going to report on one effect, out of a thousand, of the disappearance of the USSR, such as it can be observed in France—a characteristic item of our period, inscribed across the French scene. A kind of flash effect of events on our ideology, on our discourse, on our desire: for example, in France, an effect on something that belongs to our recent memory and which is the downfall of what they called ‘PC.’ At the outset there were newspaper articles which I would call ill-intentioned or written in bad faith—as always: thus, the usual—articles on ‘PC’—but the American phenomenon! That is—and this won’t be news to you—on the notion of ‘Political Correctness.’ Typically, in French public opinion, a vast confusion was created, a hodgepodge of PC [French Communist Party] and ‘PC’: what the PC was in any case was infamous, because it was the PC. Inscription, therefore, of a phobia in France. France manufactures and sells phobias and phobogenic products. You have to be in Paris to smell the daily odor of the hunt, this desire to kill, this desire to set up for decapitations. Odor of newspaper. But in October, it was the French PC and the American ‘Politically Correct’ that were rejected, both of them, placed on the Index!"

photo from Museum of Communism Prague