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Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot were two foundational influences on both Lignes and many of the review’s contributors. Yet, in the period after Lignes’ creation in 1987, the political engagements of both these figures in the 1930s were coming under increasingly scrutiny as they were suspected of fascist sympathies and anti-Semitic views. This chapter returns to the pre-war period to firstly delineate the review’s trenchant defence of Bataille’s political record, and the influence of Bataille on Lignes’ dual political program of anti-fascism and a critique of economic and political liberalism is subsequently delineated. Secondly, the significance of the review’s historic defence and recent exposé of the right-wing past of Blanchot is discussed in depth. The reception of these two thinkers is thus historicised, especially in the 1980s context of the anti-totalitarian ‘liberal moment’ and the growing anxieties of intellectual complicity with fascism following the Heidegger affair.

This chapter identifies the literary neo-Nietzschean critical ethos that defined the review from its opening issues, whilst also tracing how this ethos shifted in response to changes in the French social and political climate. The review’s progressive emphasis on anti-essentialist and post-foundational thought is contrasted to the return to Enlightenment thought, French values and communicational rationality proposed by Jürgen Habermas and Alain Finkielkraut. In contrast to the more abstract, conceptual emphasis of Derridean deconstruction, the review’s materialist approach to literary writing is demonstrated with particular reference to the works of Jean-Noël Vuarnet and Michel Surya. The review’s early, staunch secularism is then seen to become more tempered after scandals surrounding Islamic headscarves, laïcité, and the terrorist threats made towards Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasreen, Robert Redeker and Charlie Hebdo, as the review refuses to be drawn into outright condemnation of France’s stigmatised Muslim minority. Lastly, the review’s Nietzschean stress on amoral philosophy is seen to be more responsible than nihilistic when placed in the context of shifting social mores, especially regarding changing philosophical perspectives on paedophilia.

Around 1996, the review re-orientated its political critique to examine how the globalisation of financial capitalism had hamstrung the progressive left. Michel Surya’s De la domination described capitalism as a form of domination that exercised a form of power without politics, and decried the moralisation of economics which suggested that as long as businesses behaved well, the global financial system itself was unimpeachable. The chapter demonstrates that Surya’s work was influenced by Jean Baudrillard, but that this latter thinker’s account of a now entirely virtual financial economy increasingly seemed inadequate, and the review turned back to Guy Debord for a more Marxist critique of the alienation produced by contemporary capitalism. After exploring this historical genealogy, the chapter explores the Lignes contributions of Groupe Krisis to see how this Frankfurt School-inspired group both predicted the 2008 financial crisis and provided an apocalyptic account of capitalism’s inevitable demise. Yet this account is also seen to be inherently de-politicising and foreclosing political action, and the chapter closes by contrasting it to the analyses of other Lignes contributors, such as Daniel Bensaïd, especially when discussing the EU treatment of Greece after the financial crisis.

The conclusion brings together the different threads of the book to highlight the significant contributions of Lignes in the present moment. Whilst French politics has drifted ceaselessly to the right since the 1980s, some intellectuals have of late seemed to re-embrace Marxism and the radical left, Lignes helping this rejuvenation to a large degree. Lignes is described as having preserved two major strains of la pensée 68, a literary deconstruction similar to Jacques Derrida’s (though one more focused on the opaque and material nature of language than abstract, conceptual deconstruction), and a post-Althusserian Marxism. Politically, the review is shown to have consistently carried out a dual critique of liberalism and the extreme right, providing a coherent account of the rise of the FN and the growing crises of liberal capitalism in the new millennium. Along with the review’s new interest in feminism, gay rights and the environment, suggestions are made to the future lines of thought Lignes could pursue in coming years.