Status
It is a debate you could only really have in a country that accords its intellectuals the kind of status other nations reserve exclusively for footballers, footballers’ wives or (if they are lucky) rock stars; a place where structuralists and relativists and postmodernists are invited on to primetime TV; a culture in which even today it is considered entirely acceptable to state one’s profession as ‘thinker’. That country is France, which is preoccupied with the fate of its ailing semicolon.