Abstracts for
the 2009 Society for French
St Anne’s
College,
Guy Austin
Against Amnesia: Remembering in Recent
Algerian Cinema
In
2003, after a decade of civil war in
This
paper will place the issue of amnesia and of film images in the context of
Theoretical
underpinning will be provided by readings of Fanon, Bourdieu and Rousso.
Chimène Bateman
Narrative Voice and the Female
Dedicatees of Verse Romance
The
critic Michel Zink, in his stimulating study of literary subjectivity in Old
French literature, identifies a number of verse romances where the role of
poet-narrator as fiction-maker is rendered particularly visible. This paper
seeks to explore a phenomenon not mentioned by Zink: the fact that nearly all
the romances in question are addressed to female dedicatees, both real and
imagined. From celebrated romances such as Le
Chevalier de la charrette and Le
Roman de la rose, to lesser-known examples such as Partonopeu de Blois, Le Bel
Inconnu and Joufroi de Poitiers,
the inscribed woman reader is a figure that enables the romance author to
experiment with narrative voice and to conceptualise narratorial identity in
new ways. The status of these female dedicatees is complex: they function
simultaneously as historical referents and rhetorical devices, and reveal the
ethics and poetics of the text to be closely intertwined. Discourse addressed
to a woman is a trope familiar from lyric poetry, but when transferred to the
context of narrative, such language often acquires new and ironic connotations.
In the twelfth-century text of Partonopeu,
parallels between the voice of the narrator and the voices of individual
characters gradually undermine the narrator’s perspective, and make it possible for the reader to identify with the unnamed and resistant female dedicatee. The
thirteenth-century romance of Joufroi
goes further: by pushing the notion of the female dedicatee into the realm of
parody, it creates a narratorial voice that is overtly comic. While
representations of gender relations vary dramatically from romance to romance
in these texts addressed to women, the figure of the female dedicatee continues
to be intimately associated with innovative first-person discourse.
Bill Burgwinkle
The Fictional Crusades: Saladin and Homonymous
Christian Knighthood
Accounts of history are bound with the waging of war
from the earliest monuments of writing and it was the wars in the Middle East,
fought for two centuries against ill-defined and often little understood
enemies, that inspired a rebirth of interest in ‘historical’ writing in
twelfth-century France. What that term
‘historical’ means is what is at issue in this paper and it is from that
perspective that I will approach a series of texts that take Saladin, the great
Kurdish Islamic hero, the ‘liberator’ of Jerusalem, as their topic. Saladin moved from being a vilified tormentor
of Christian pilgrims in the late 1180’s to an honourable proto-Christian
(though without conversion) by the turn of the century. This move from black devil to son of
Christian nobility is established first in the Fille du Comte de Ponthieu, an early thirteenth-century narrative,
and is supported by the mid- to late-thirteenth-century Estoire d’Outremer et de la
naissance de Salehadin, the Ordene de
chevalerie, and finally the fifteenth-century closing to the second cycle
of the Crusades, Saladin, the third
part of the much longer narrative of Jehan
d’Avesnes. Finally, the Italian Novellino, the earliest known collection
of tales written in the Italian vernacular (mid-13th), includes an
important section of short texts that recount anecdotes that contribute to
Saladin’s fame as the most famous Christian knight manqué. What is perhaps most
interesting about all of these accounts (and they are exceptionally interesting
on every level) is the impossibility of drawing a clean line between what is
history and what is fiction, what is fact and what is imagination. In this sense, they are essential texts for
theorizing the historiographical divides that were enacted in later periods,
particularly in the nineteenth century, and for questioning these divides on
the very grounds on which they were made.
Using Hayden White’s discussion of narrative/history and epistemology,
Walter Benjamin’s Theses on History,
and a bit of psychoanalysis, I will defend medieval historiography as valid and
still useful precisely because it allows for the encoding of events and facts
into narratives that allow for the processing of that material. Events such as the Crusades are almost
inevitably recounted through recourse to fiction, however true the events and
character’s names in question, because they are otherwise indigestible or
simply dissolve into a morass of details and dates, with little cohesion and no
point of view. History cannot be pulled
apart from its cognitive wrapping without substituting another wrapping in its
place. Saladin and the grafting of his story
onto medieval Frankish concerns is instructive both in understanding the occluded
side of the Crusades (What did the warriors think they were doing? Where did they think they were? Who told them what? How did they get there? Whom did they
believe? How did they see their
opponent?) and in conceptualizing history as a fictional enterprise, in which
‘fiction’ rather than ‘history’, or rather ‘history as fiction’, might be our
surest guarantee of truth.
Catherine Burke
Proust’s Homer: An Epic Transformation
Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is one
of the cornerstones not only of French literature but of the Western literary
canon. The presence of mythology in Proust has generated a plethora of
criticism, with critics such as Topping providing a comprehensive analysis of
the mythological allusions in the work of Proust. Yet Proust's relationship
with epic has yet to be the subject of a sustained analysis. This paper shall
address this question through an in-depth analysis of A la recherche du
temps perdu as a twentieth-century reworking of Homer's epics, the Iliad
and the Odyssey. Fin-de-siècle
Emma Cayley
‘La puce
en l’oreille’: Erotic Friendship in Alain Chartier’s Debat Reveille Matin and Guillaume Alexis’ Le Debat de l’omme mondain et du religieulx
The
proverb which introduces this paper recurs frequently in fifteenth-century
French poetry. Pointing both to disquiet and to sexual desire, it stands as a
metaphor for the debate vehicle where it is most often found. The male
protagonists of Alain Chartier’s Debat Reveille Matin (c.1423), and the Debat de l’omme mondain et du religieulx,
attributed to Guillaume Alexis (c.1450), both draw on this same source of
proverbial wisdom to express their frustrated desire. In the first debate this
unfulfilled desire leads to sleeplessness for both interlocutors, in the second
it leads to religion.
I
focus in particular in this paper on the way in which the conflicts and
oppositions represented by the debate form act as a motor of erotic arousal in
which interlocutors, narrator and audience are implicated. Homoerotic tension
is exploited intradiegetically through the bonds of friendship and identity
established between male interlocutors and narrator. Perpetuation of desire is
ensured by the characteristically unconcluded debate form. The study of
single-sex debating in the fifteenth century has obvious resonances with work
on earlier troubadour lyric, and voice and gender, while its fascinating
material context has wide-reaching implications for the study of fifteenth
century poetic composition and transmission.
Fiona Cox
haec
olim meminisse iuvabit – Proust’s Ghostly Cities
The
Virgilian intertext is one of the most pervasive in A la recherche. In particular Proust’s imaginative treatment of the
myth of Orpheus has generated much critical attention and is one of the most resonant vehicles of Proust’s response to
loss, death and the limitations of art. This paper will revisit one of the most
Virgilian episodes of the book, and one which helps to establish the Orpheus
myth as a leitmotif of the work –
Swann’s pursuit of the elusive Odette through night-time
Fanny Daubigny
Marte
Bibesco, lectrice de Proust ou les « Conjonctions » de l’Ecriture :
Les femmes et l’avant-garde
au début du XXiècle, une conjonction
inclusive ou dislocative?
A travers l’exemple de la
figure mondaine de l’écrivaine franco-roumaine, lectrice et critique de Proust,
Marthe Bibesco, je propose dans cette étude d’étudier le statut paradoxal de la
femme de lettres dans les cercles esthétiques parisiens des années 1920.
Figurant parmi les pionniers
d’une critique proustienne, qui sut très
tôt relever le génie littéraire de l’écrivain, Marthe Bibesco, n’eut pourtant la possibilité de son vivant de rencontrer
l’écrivain que lors de trois « conjonctions », ou entrevues
facilitées par l’injonction masculine de deux de ses cousins, Antoine et
Emmanuel Bibesco, tous deux proches amis de l’écrivain.
En racontant dans un ouvrage
autobiographique, Au Bal avec Marcel
Proust, la nature de ces trois rencontres, Marthe Bibesco, en pionnière
d’un style narratif nouveau, reprend la thématique des
« conjonctions » développées par Proust dans son œuvre à propos des
théories sur l’homosexualité pour mettre en évidence le statut problématique de
sa légitimité en tant que femme de lettres, et réactive la dimension proprement
linguistique de sa double relation conjonctive à l’écriture, qui à la fois la
sépare et l’unit à son identité de femme moderne, résolument hybride.
Du point de vue de
l’écriture, j’analyserai en particulier, comment la relation conjonctive au texte proustien
exprime une double allégeance qui se manifeste par une écriture à la fois mimétique et critique, épousant jusque dans
forme narrative la multiplicité du je/jeu proustien.
Henry Dicks
Home and Chez-Soi: A Linguistic
Obstruction to the Development of Philosophical Ecology in
A large international conference entitled ‘Ecosophies: la philosophie à l'épreuve de l'écologie’ was held in May 2008 at the Cité des
Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris. The
aim of the conference was for American philosophers of ecology to present their
research to French philosophers, whom everyone at the conference agreed are as
yet not very interested in ecology. In this paper, I will argue that part of
the reason for this lack of interest in ecology among French philosophers
concerns the French language.
The
‘eco-’ of ‘ecology’ comes from the Greek oikos,
which means something like ‘home’. Importantly, however, the French language
has immense difficulty translating the word ‘home’ and its cognates. Milan
Kundera discusses this difficulty in L’Art
du Roman, suggesting that the inadequacy of the common translations - patrie, which he thinks is too
‘political’, and foyer, which like maison he thinks is too ‘concrete’ - is
such that the only solution is to use the term chez-soi. The problem with Kundera’s translation, however, concerns
the ferocious attack that the term chez-soi
has received from philosophers such as Levinas, who associates it with Sartre’s
pour soi and thus opposes it to his
own ethics of substitution, which is rather pour
l’autre. In a similar vein, Derrida has persistently criticised Heidegger’s
use of a variety of eco-logical terms on the grounds that they are too closely
linked to proximité/présence-à-soi.
What this suggests is that recent French philosophy has a problematic tendency
to equate ecology with the subject’s presence to itself (its chez-soi), without realizing that what
philosophical ecology in fact requires is to see man’s ‘home’ (for which there
is no adequate translation in French), as Heidegger does, as the earth.
Julia Dobson
Amnesia and the Nostalgic Construction
of the Romantic Uncanny in Laetitia Masson’s Love me (2000)
Cinema
has long been fascinated by the figure of the amnesiac, employing their (lack
of) personal narrative as a central trope capable of functioning across a wide
generic range from film noir to farce and erotic fantasy.
Whilst
much contemporary film-making in France is described as constructing a ‘réel de
proximité’ (Jeancolas) to reconnect the histoires
of the individual and the social, and map the multiple exclusions operating
across social and economic realities, Masson’s work insists on the performative
nature of intimacy itself to foreground the representational hybridity of
subjective experience rather than framing political discourse within realist
conventions.
The
third part of a trilogy starring Sandrine Kiberlain, Masson’s Love me (2000) follows an amnesiac’s
obsessive pursuit of a fading singer in Memphis (Johnny Hallyday), whilst also
apparently working in a run-down fifties Americana bar in Le Havre.
Spectatorial identification switches between (grudging) acceptance of the
construction of meaning through the repeated mise en scène of the cultural imaginary and alignment with the
sinster quest for knowledge of the interdiegetic detective / analyst seeking to
resolve the narrative blindspots, and recuperate unconscious repression of
traumatic memory, into a coherent story.
The
alienating impact of amnesia is aligned in the film with that of economic
exclusion and with a retreat into narrative and sensual fascination with a
performative nostalgic uncanny to present an ambiguous framework for the
obsessive (re)construction of identity. The foregrounding of such explicitly
performative modes presents (gendered) identity as a sociohistorical construct
maintained through repeated imitation (there being no performer prior to the
performance) and suggesting amnesia as the subjective reality of social
exclusion.
Nicolas Doutey
Le concept
de scène à l’épreuve de l’expérience
beckettienne
Le théâtre de Beckett occupe, semble-t-il, une
place particulière dans l’histoire du théâtre, il constitue un point de
rupture, ou, pourrait-on dire, annonce une époque,
avec laquelle, selon certains, nous n’avons pas fini de nous expliquer.
Si l’on essaie de dégager les traits significatifs
de la pratique beckettienne de la scène, ou de sa pensée de la scène (à partir
de ses textes), on en vient à constater que les outils d’analyse que la
critique théâtrale traditionnelle nous fournit ne permettent pas d’en rendre
compte. En effet, l’opposition réalité dramatique / réalité scénique, ou encore
univers fictionnel / univers non-fictionnel (de la « régie »), qui
informe souterrainement la majorité de nos discours sur le théâtre, est issue
de – et reconduit – l’opposition métaphysique de l’esprit au corps, et empêche
de proposer un discours articulé sur les pièces qui ne cherchent visiblement
pas, par exemple, à présenter avant tout un univers strictement fictionnel, et
dont Beckett nous semble représenter, aujourd’hui, l’époque.
Pour sortir de cette opposition du corps à
l’esprit, qui renvoie le « drame » à l’esprit et la
« scène » au corps, nous invoquerons la théorie d’inspiration
déconstructrice de la scène, telle qu’elle est notamment développée par Esa Kirkkopelto
à partir des travaux de Jacques Derrida et Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe – dont
l’objet est précisément de sortir de cette opposition corps/esprit.
Cependant, nous verrons que la théorie
déconstructrice de la scène est solidaire d’une vision tragique (du monde, du
théâtre), tragique dont on peut par exemple voir un symptôme dans le programme
déconstructeur, digne de Sisyphe, de contraindre la figure à ne pas aller
jusqu’à son point d’achèvement. Or, en ce qui concerne l’expérience
beckettienne, il semble que la pratique de la scène soit plutôt liée à une
dimension comique. Nous tenterons
donc d’indiquer comment il est possible, sans retomber dans l’opposition
métaphysique du corps à l’esprit, de penser la scène sans la caractéristique
tragique que lui confère la théorie déconstructrice – et pour ce faire, nous
aurons recours à certains éléments développés dans le cadre du pragmatisme.
Helen Duffy
Could the Jew be the German’s Twin
Brother: Abjection as the Source of Anti-Semitism in Jonathan Littell’s ‘Les
Bienveillantes’
Without
expressing regret or attempting to justify himself, Maximilien Aue, a former
SS-officer and now a manufacturer of lace, divulges intimate and often sordid
details from his private life whilst recounting the horrors of World War Two.
Half-French, half-German, this committed National Socialist is a matricide who
also murders his best friend and has a penchant for incest and sodomy. Combined
with Aue’s dualistic personality, the leitmotifs of twins and narcissism may
illuminate, as I demonstrate in this paper, the Nazis’ hatred for the Jews in
terms of abjection as defined by Kristeva. The essential similarities between
the Germans and their victims, themselves creators of religious proscriptions
(dietary taboos, defilement rituals), provoke as a crisis of boundaries between
self and other, manifest in the horror and expulsion of a bodily jettison and
in a metonymic transformation of the ejected filth, menstrual blood or
excrement. Such a reading is corroborated by Aue’s nauseas and diarrhoeas,
intensified by his participation in mass executions, the dead body literalising
the breakdown of distinction between subject and object. Other signs of
abjection are Max’s inability to separate himself from his twin sister or his
allergy to the milk of his mother, construed by Aue as impure and therefore
abject. Similarly, the Germans’ attempt to create a homogenous nation
symptomatises the desire to expel what, conceived as ambiguous, threatens an
identity and, signalling a frailty of the law, potentially destabilizes social
order. That the Holocaust, which in itself, according to Kristeva, is the
ultimate source of horror, can be seen as an abject reaction of a
purity-obsessed society, thus becoming imaginable and dangerously commonplace,
is further confirmed by Céline’s anti-Semitic pamphlets. Linked to Aue’s story
by the theme of lace, Céline’s writings which portray the Jew as a reviled
brother and an object of an anal fantasy, are viewed by Kristeva – as may also
be Les Bienveillantes – as an attempt
at purifying the abject through literary exploration.
Anna M. Elsner
‘Désir de
Venise, désir de me mettre au travail’ : Hybrid Nostalgia in Proust’s
Depiction of Venice
Ever since Johannes Hofer put forward the neologism ‘nostalgia’ at the end of
the 17th century in order to describe the condition of homesick
Swiss soldiers, longing for one’s native country has been treated as a
collective rather than a private condition. Whereas nostalgia as a collective
project might be contrasted with the more private melancholia, I would like to
suggest on the basis of the Venice passage in A la Recherche du temps perdu that Proust makes use of a hybrid
form of nostalgia, as his narrator’s private grief over the loss of his
grandmother or Albertine is always woven into a broader longing for a lost
place and time.
From
his earliest age, Proust’s narrator longs for
David Evans
The Distorting Mirror of Memory and the
During the
Nicolas Ferrier
L’influence
du théâtre dans la pensée de Guy Debord
Notre
communication se propose de révéler l’influence du théâtre dans la théorie et
de la pratique situationniste élaborée par Guy Debord. Edifié dans le souci de
déclencher une révolution anti-capitaliste totale, le langage de
l’Internationale situationniste (1957-1972) fondée par Debord et quelques amis,
est parsemé d’incessantes références directes ou indirectes à des définitions,
à des pratiques, à des auteurs, des metteurs en scène et parfois des acteurs de
théâtre. Parmi eux, certains sont disqualifiées : Beckett, Adamov,
Ionesco, le Théâtre National Populaire dirigé par Jean Vilar… Mais d’autres
sont détournés en vue de la nouvelle révolution prolétarienne à venir :
Shakespeare, Racine, Brecht, à côté desquels on trouve des notions ou des
expressions clairement valorisées comme celles de « décor », de
« jeu », de « personnages d’une tragédie », de
« tragédie classique », des « trois unités au microscope »
– qui renvoie à la règle de trois unités (temps, lieu, action) de la tragédie
classique formalisée par Boileau –, d’« identification du spectateur au
héros », etc.
Dans
le cadre du colloque, nous nous attacherons plus spécialement à l’usage que
fait Debord de l’œuvre de Brecht. Nous verrons comment la théorie de la
distanciation brechtienne a permis aux situationnistes d’élaborer une
conception politique du « détournement », si chère aux
avant-gardistes. En effet, dans leur volonté du dépassement de l’art, Debord et
ses compagnons ont cherché à « exporter » les effets de la
distanciation propre au théâtre brechtien, en particulier dans son rapport aux
spectateurs, pour l’« importer » directement dans le champ social
afin de le bouleverser radicalement. Ce sont à ces tentatives de transferts de
certains dispositifs spécifiquement théâtraux au sein de dispositifs sociaux
que nous consacrerons notre étude.
Jane Gilbert
Extreme Fiction: The Roman de
la Rose
Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose piles
allegory upon mirror upon dream. The
highpoint is reached when the Dreamer falls in love with the rosebud that he
sees reflected in the fountain of Narcissus. Fictional mediations thus usher in
the intuition of a higher, poetic truth. In his lengthy continuation of the Rose
Jean de Meun follows and perverts Guillaume’s strategy, heaping illusion upon
distortion upon lie. At the height of this fictionality Faux Semblant,
deception incarnate, pronounces a professedly untrue and manipulative speech
which transports us unexpectedly out of the fictional frame into the
nitty-gritty of late thirteenth-century Parisian history, namely the bitter
conflict between secular clergy and mendicant orders over the control of
university Chairs. This kind of reality is jarringly alien in a poem otherwise
concerned with the relatively timeless domains of legend and abstract science.
Faux
Semblant’s defence of the seculars has been mined by historians for evidence of
a real-life state of affairs, however its literary relationship to the rest of
the poem has been somewhat neglected. This requires correction for the episode
is clearly central – and not only in coming at the centre of this highly
structured poem. Faux Semblant may be considered a personification of allegory,
thus his behaviour raises questions about the nature and value of the poem’s
own proceeding. The importance of the hermeneutic shift operated around him is
evident from its adoption by later writers, notably Machaut, who copied it in
the Fontaine amoureuse and reversed it in the Dit dou roi de Navarre.
I
propose in this paper to examine Jean’s short-circuit from extreme fiction to
contemporary history. I shall investigate the possible relationships that
Jean’s text suggests between imagination and history, and the ways in which
these categories of knowledge support or undermine each other.
Yves Gilonne
Maurice
Blanchot et la rhétorique de la pensée atomique
Selon Maurice Blanchot, l’énergie atomique
détermine le logos de notre époque,
même si la bombe n’est qu’un « obstacle à l’appréhension, cette fois
essentielle, de la menace invisible que toute technique moderne dirige contre
les façons de l’homme » et du danger sous-jacent d’une pensée asservie au
principe heideggérien selon lequel « sous le masque de l’information, le principe de raison
suffisante régit toutes nos représentations et caractérise ainsi l’époque
présente comme une époque où tout dépend de la fourniture d’énergies
atomiques. » (L’Entretien infini,
1969).
L’objet de cette étude sera donc de tenter de
comprendre comment la menace, en tant qu’épochè
du sens, désigne chez Blanchot une mutation (Kehre) essentielle de notre rapport au temps et à son écriture.
Nous verrons comment Blanchot dépasse l’« arraisonnement » (Gestell) de la technique et le
pessimisme sous-jacent de ceux qui sont « incapables d’accueillir sa
conséquence, qui est de ruiner toute appartenance et de mettre le Lieu en
question ». Suivant Levinas, pour qui « la technique est dangereuse,
mais moins dangereuse que les génies du Lieu », Blanchot interprète la
menace de la bombe atomique comme « dessaisissement de l’être ». L’Ecriture du Désastre (1980) répond
donc à cette libération (dés-astre) par rapport aux « astres » de la
pensée philosophique (l’homme, le monde, la raison, l’« héliotropisme
occidental »). Or, comme le rappelle Bernard Stiegler dans La Technique et le temps (1994),
« désastre ne signifie pas catastrophe, mais désorientation – les astres guident ». Nous verrons alors
comment cette perte du « guidage » philosophique pose de façon
nouvelle la question de la « responsabilité » et de
l’« intervention » de l’homme sur son destin et appel en retour la
rhétorique de la veille et du « contrôle », qui selon Heidegger fait de la cybernétique « la métaphysique de
l'âge atomique ».
Sima Godfrey
‘Shmatas R Us’: From
Jewish Rags to French Riches
In
this paper I address 1) the historical association between Jews and ragpickers
and, in the modern period, 2) Jews and the clothing industry. This latter
aspect of the subject is embedded in a broader discussion of the relation of
fashion to social mobility in 19th- and early 20th-century
In
particular, I consider the cultural-historic dimensions of Jewish
ragpickers and Jewish clothiers in a reading of a little-known novel of 1924 by
JH Rosny jeune (one of the founders of the Académie Goncourt), that was
very successful in its day. La Courtisane passionnée tells the
story of a beautiful young Jewish high fashion model who rises from her
Yiddish-accented ragpicker origins to become a wealthy and illustrious
Kathleen Hamel
Art, Survival and the Myth of Pygmalion
Proust’s
use of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a
repository of classical myth has generated much valuable and illuminating
criticism (in particular Miguet-Ollagnier, Murphy, Topping). One of the myths
that has received surprisingly little attention is the myth of Pygmalion,
though its treatment in Proust’s account of Marcel’s relationship with
Albertine offers an abundance of insights into the presentation of the beloved
as a work of art, an act of creation who subsequently becomes an object subject
to ownership and possession. Of all the myths from the Metamorphoses it is Pygmalion above all who reflects Proust’s
anxieties about the nature of the work of art; in turn Proust’s treatment of
this myth extends our understanding of the Ovidian original.
James Helgeson
Nostalgia
and Hermeneutics : Erasmus, Du Bellay, Montaigne
Early modern, and, in
particular, sixteenth-century studies have been resistant to the incursions of
‘theory’, more so, for example, than medieval studies inflected by contemporary
paradigms such as psychoanalysis and, more recently, post-colonial studies.
‘Renaissance’ scholars have hesitated to adopt theoretical models seen as
anachronistic, often remaining closer to familiar varieties of literary
historicism. This tendency is particularly noticeable in recent scholarship
from
Nostos—homecoming, and
the longing for homecoming, Odysseus’s malady—is a powerful metaphor for the
haunting anxieties of humanist philology and hermeneutics, and for friendship
and enmity for the past. The metaphor of nostos
is double-edged, suggesting both the desire for intimacy across time and space
and the violent reconquest of one’s own possessions. Erasmus writes of
communing with his ancient ‘friends’ (e.g. Jerome) through their books. He
reproduces well-worn topoi that he
also deploys to speak of letter writing, defined by Seneca as ‘a mutual
conversation, as it were, between absent friends’. Reconquest is perhaps most
famously evoked by Joachim du Bellay at the end the Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549). Erasmus
tends to stress the first of these two types of nostos, Montaigne both the first and the second, and Du Bellay
primarily the second. Finally, the current methodological hesitations about
‘theory’ and Renaissance texts might be articulated in terms of this double
nostalgia for intimacy and possession.
Ruth Hemus
Dada’s Bride – Suzanne Duchamp
A 2008 exhibition at Tate
Modern, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia,
celebrated a triumvirate of avant-garde greats. Both the exhibition texts and
accompanying catalogue emphasised themes of friendship, bonding, jokes, machine
images, eroticism and sexuality, all linked closely to a specifically male
aesthetic. Marcel Duchamp’s The Large
Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, was maintained as a
point (or rather the point) of
reference throughout the exhibition, and the concept of the bride invoked to
underpin a shared point-of-view. The selection of artists, works and themes
explicitly reinforced the idea of the avant-garde as an exclusive men’s club.
The dominance of these three men in their artistic milieu was not questioned,
and there was no attempt to interrogate their choice of tropes from a more
feminist-conscious standpoint. In an attempt to cross this gender boundary,
this paper brings into the mix one woman working in close relation to the trio,
in fact another Duchamp. Suzanne Duchamp was the sister of Marcel, the wife (bride)
of the Swiss artist Jean Crotti (a friend of Duchamp and Picabia), and – as has
too easily been forgotten – an artist herself. The small body of work she
produced used science and machine imagery, collaged industrial parts and
cryptic titles to treat similar themes to those emphasised in the exhibition –
representations of men and women, sexual desire, communication and
consummation. An examination of several of these key works will demonstrate
both common ground and subtle differences between her approach and that of her
colleagues, attesting to the presence of a woman in this avant-garde circle not
only as idea or object but as creator. It seeks to demonstrate that the massive
changes in art and society were being experienced, recorded and represented not
only by the bachelors, but by the bride too.
Nick Hewlett
Political Violence in the Work of Alain
Badiou and Jacques Rancière
In recent years
there has been increasing interest in the work of two former students of Louis
Althusser, namely Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. In this paper I argue that
the implications of their work for the study of political violence may be
substantial. Badiou’s most overt treatment of political violence is found in
his De Quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (2007),
but violence is present in almost as clear a way at the heart of his philosophy
in his definition of politics as a momentous Event, which is necessarily
egalitarian (e.g. L’Etre et l’événement, 1988; 2006: Logiques des mondes. L’Etre et l’événement, 2, 2006).
For
Rancière, politics is virtually synonymous with democracy, which both take the
form of a complex (and often linguistic) assertion of the right of the
powerless to be taken notice of, to be heard. When Rancière argues that
radical, and in particular insurrectional, assertions cannot be recognised as
speech by those in harmony with the status quo, this is akin to what Bourdieu
might describe as ‘symbolic violence’ which often subsequently turns to
physical violence (e.g. La Mésentente:
politique et philosophie, 1995; La
Haine de la démocratie, 2005).
I will discuss the degree to
which Badiou’s and Rancière’s approaches towards violence are successful, by
asking such questions as: What is the
relationship between democracy and violence? What is the relationship between
popular uprising, violence and the creation of the political? What is the
relationship between uprising expressed in linguistic form on the one hand and
physical violence on the other? What is the
relationship between liberal and non-liberal left thought in the realm of
violence and democracy?
Jane
Hiddleston
Aimé
Césaire and Postcolonial Humanism
Commentators on Césaire
have frequently emphasised the sense of solitude surrounding the father of
Marian Hobson
Measurement in the Encyclopédie
This
paper is part of an extensive project on measurement in the Eighteenth Century
and explores various related articles and plates in the Encyclopédie, from the trades to medicine, mathematics, fine arts
and sculpture. I have long been interested in the ways in which advances in
mathematics and probability were understood and applied, both philosophically
and aesthetically, by Enlightenment thinkers. I have recently been extending
this work into the fields of architecture, sculpture, and physiognomical
theories of racial difference (see my ‘Comment prendre la mesure d'un
caractère?’, in Le travail des lumières:
pour Georges Benrekassa, ed. Caroline Jacot Grapa, Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre,
Yannick Séité, Carine Trevisan
(Paris : Champion, 2002), p.57-76 and ‘Measuring statues, or, special
neutrality’, in Paragraph: Editors'
Anniversary Issue 27:1 (2004), p.33-49). Here I come back to this most
important meeting-ground of Enlightenment thought to investigate whether
theories of measurement reflect philosophical lines of disagreement (in the way
that the vitalist and mechanist schools, for example, split the medical
articles into irreconcilable camps), or whether, on the contrary, they are
coherent across the very broad range of disciplines in which they are applied,
and, if, therefore, they may be understood to constitute a theory and
performance of analogy.
Aimée Israel-Pelletier
Jews of Arab Lands Writing in French:
Melancholy and Dhimmitude in Albert Memmi,
What
is an Arab-Jew? How is this designation invoked in the works of Jewish writers
exiled from their native land in
These
writers dramatize through autobiographical portraits and fictional characters
the psychology of melancholy and the trauma of exile in ways more alike than
dissimilar. They expose too the complicated politics and identity of the
Arab-Jew under Nazism, colonialism, and decolonization. Born in Arab lands with
ancestors dating back generations, they experience Arab culture as native. They
are anti-colonial without being anti-French, adopting French enlightenment
values, being keenly aware that colonialism delivered Arab-Jews from dhimmitude
(subjugation of non-Muslim populations by Muslims), and celebrating French
culture with its promise of equality and universality. In short, French culture
is portrayed in their work as a force of liberation and enlightenment as well
as a corrective corollary to Arab-Jewish identity and status. Complications
arise when Arab nationalism turns against them, their indigenousness is denied,
they are expelled from their native land, and when, at various difficult
moments, French colonizers withdraw their protection, revealing their profound
indifference. This drama of denial and indifference is played out against the
backdrop of Nazism and Zionism.
The
works of Jabès, Memmi, and Jacques reflect this drama. They are marked by melancholy, an
unwillingness to let go, and by a desire, both personal and collective, to
insert the history of Arab-Jews in the larger national narrative of their native
land.
Ian James
Bernard Stiegler and the Time of
Technics
This
paper will examine Bernard Stiegler’s thinking about technics as developed in
the first volume of La Technique et le
temps: La Faute d’Épiméthée (1994). It will do so against the contrastive
backdrop of Francis Fukuyama’s highly influential thinking about
technologically-driven historical progress in The End of History and the Last Man (1992). This paper will not
suggest that Stiegler’s is a direct response to
The
paper will conclude by briefly situating Steigler’s thought in relation to
Derrida’s discourse on originary technics and to
Christopher Johnson
André
Leroi-Gourhan: Language, Technology, Cybernetics
Prehistorian
and ethnologist André Leroi-Gourhan’s Le
Geste et la parole (1964-65) is probably his most seminal work, a key
reference point for Derrida’s theory of writing in De la grammatologie (1967) and the subject of an extended analysis
in the first two volumes of Bernard Stiegler’s La Technique et le temps (1994, 1996). Part of the continuing
interest of Leroi-Gourhan’s text derives from its ‘materialist’ or
‘technological’ theory of the origin of human language, which argues for the
absolute priority of technical intelligence in language evolution, the latter
being impossible without the capacity for advanced manual articulation. The
immediate context of this theory of language emergence were the important
discoveries of palaeoanthropologists Mary and Louis Leakey in East Africa in the
late 1950s, but the synthesis achieved in Le
Geste et la parole is clearly based on a much wider range of scientific
knowledge. The main focus of this paper will be on the different scientific
models – not always explicit – which form the background of Leroi-Gourhan’s
explanation of the mechanisms of technical and linguistic performance, gesture
and speech. One important component of the scientific-technological landscape
of 1950s and 1960s
Michel Julien
Vers une
approche poétique de texte ethnographique: ‘L’excès-l’usine’ de Leslie Kaplan
Au début des années 1980, nombre de sociologues se
tournent vers l’ethnographie pour observer au plus près les changements au sein
de l’entreprise manufacturière. Au même moment, on assiste à une remise en
cause systématique de l’anthropologie et de ses fondements. Au cœur de ses
critiques figure le texte ethnographique qui, confronté à la subjectivité de
l’auteur et aux limites du langage, ébranle même les fondements
épistémologiques de cette science. Les procédés littéraires et rhétoriques
deviennent suspects même si comme lieu de mise en forme et de transformation
interprétative de la réalité, plusieurs considèrent qu’ils facilitent
l’intelligibilité du lecteur face à un monde inconnu.
Pour interroger ces problématiques, notre
communication s’attardera sur un texte à portée ethnographique mais néanmoins
difficilement catégorisable. « L’excès-usine »[1] de
Leslie Kaplan ne ressemble en rien aux écrits des intellectuels qui se sont
établis en usine à la suite de Mai 68 pour rendre compte de la réalité ouvrière
au quotidien, ni même qu’au travail sur le terrain des chercheurs évoqués
précédemment. Marguerite Duras[2]
et Maurice Blanchot[3]
ont d’ailleurs été les premiers à affirmer que l’on retrouvait à l’intérieur de
cette œuvre une nouvelle forme d’intelligibilité poétique qui tout en
représentant la tension qui sépare Leslie Kaplan de cette culture ouvrière
participait à la reconstitution magnifiée d’un monde abject en soi. « L’excès-usine » de Leslie
Kaplan transgresse la neutralité et les modalités du texte ethnographique
classique en mettant à
l’avant-plan l'action transfigurante
d’une narration poétique aride mais révélatrice du quotidien des
ouvriers.
Cette communication s’interrogera à savoir si ce
texte est à proscrire du savoir anthropologique ou au contraire s’il ne
contient pas les premiers éléments
d’une solution à la remise en question de la scientificité de l’ethnographie.
Ashwiny
Kistnareddy
Diasporic
Nostalgia: Reading
This
paper focuses on the notion of nostalgia in the relationship between the
continent of origin (
Henriette
Korthals Altes
Nostalgia,
Photography and Affective Criticism in Barthes’s La Chambre Claire
Nostalgia
– the wistful longing for the past or a desire to return home – has been the
object of regained interest, with attempts to conceptualise and historicise it
anew. With its Romantic inception, the term referred to a literary mood. In 19th
century
Kristina
Kullberg
Writing
at the Crossroads: Ethnography and Literature in the French
The birth of French Caribbean
literature is in many ways tied to a non-theorized and circumstantial use of
ethnography (Antoine: 1992, Ménil: 1999). Ethnography is mainly referred to as
a discourse having to do with defining and questioning the notion of culture
which was important to Martinican authors trying to articulate identity. Thanks
to recent research on surrealism in the
Nataliya Lenina
L’espace
“nostalgie” dans l’oeuvre de Georges Rodenbach et de Suzanne Lilar ou “le chant
de sa terre”
Dans cette étude je me propose explorer et démontrer
dans les ouvrages retenus de Georges Rodenbach et de Suzanne Lilar, écrivains
belges d’origine flamande et d’expression française, la présence de la
« nostalgie » en tant que force motrice et créatrice.
Bien plus qu’un demi-siècle sépare ces auteurs, il
est tout à fait judicieux de rapprocher leur œuvre en la situant au carrefour
de deux cultures : française et flamande. La pensée scrutatrice d’un
« analogiste » accompli et l’intelligence fine « à la
française » qui animent leurs ouvrages se conjuguent harmonieusement avec
l’esprit mystique flamand, avec cette « nordicité » mélancolique dont
on parle souvent.
Chez eux, la belle Flandre et la vieille ville
flamande – pour Rodenbach, Bruges, Gand, pour Lilar – avec ses cathédrales, ses
bâtiments gothiques érigés dans des ruelles étroites, sont omniprésentes. Or,
Bruges et Gand dépassent les fonctions traditionnelles de l’espace littéraire
et se transforment en un espace « nostalgie » qui réunit le passé et
le présent, la notion de l’espace dit visible, réel avec celle de l'espace
imaginaire ou/et intérieur (l’espace intime des personnages ou du « soi » de l’auteur lorsqu’on parle
d’un ouvrages autobiographique).
Par ailleurs, la ville se présente souvent comme un
personnage à part entière. L’«âme grise[4] »
de Bruges la Puissante « façonne [tout et tous dans les romans de
Rodenbach] selon ses sites et ses clochers [5] ».
Tandis que chez Lilar, la ville de Gand participe conjointement avec l’auteur à
la découverte de la vie pendant une longue promenade au rythme de souvenirs
d’enfance, « enlacée » par l’exploration de la philosophie du visible et de
l’invisible. Le dialogue que mène Lilar pendant toute sa vie avec sa ville
natale et ses chefs-d’œuvre (on pense notamment au Polyptyque de l’Agneau mystique de Van Eyck, conservé dans la
cathédrale Saint-Bavon) est au cœur de sa formation sensuelle et spirituelle et
lui sert comme un « moyen supplémentaire de saisir la vie » (Rilke [6]).
Ann Lewis
Classifying
the Prostitute in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction
In his proposal for the
reform of prostitution, Le Pornographe
(1769), Rétif de la Bretonne classifies twelve different types of prostitute to
be found in eighteenth-century
In this paper, focusing on a selection of texts
by Rétif and Mercier, I will explore the shifting, and at times contradictory,
ways in which these different ‘classes’ of prostitute are defined. I will also examine the complex ways in which
the representation of the prostitute is used to articulate anxieties relating
to the structuring of society more generally: the terminology of ‘rang’,
‘classe’, ‘condition’ being used in both cases.
In this respect, the figure of the prostitute functions symbolically at
many levels. The rapidity with which she
ascends/descends the ranks, and her cult of ‘appearance’ and ‘luxe’, evoke the
spectre of social disorder, and of female ‘emancipation’. The recurring comparison between the
low-class prostitute (who works as a necessity rather than by choice) with
aristocratic ladies, whose ‘libertine’ behaviour is described as
indistinguishable from that of prostitutes, functions polemically as a form of
moral and social critique. These
representations cannot, of course, be seen as direct reflections of social
reality. But their mediation of a range
of cultural anxieties relating to social order, family values, and the position
of women in society, brings the question of class into sharp relief.
Raluca Lupu-Onet
Irène
Hamoir ou le cas d’une double marginalité surréaliste
En Belgique, le surréalisme se place d’entrée de jeu sous le signe de la
marginalité par rapport au Centre, source d’originalité et de longévité. Mais
cette marginalité – ou plutôt ex-centricité – en cache une autre : la
scène surréaliste belge compte parmi ses protagonistes des femmes auteures qui,
sans avoir gagné la place qu’elles mériteraient dans les anthologies ni
l’attention des exégètes, ont assumé un rôle actif dans la fronde culturelle de
Bruxelles. Parmi ces noms, celui d’Irène Hamoir : son « cas »
paradoxal est en réalité typique pour les femmes surréalistes, car son activité
à la fois littéraire et militante s’obnubile sous le statut d’épouse de Louis
Scutenaire, l’un des poètes les plus actifs du mouvement belge. Irène Hamoir
continue jusqu’à la fin des années 1980 le projet subversif et transgressif du
surréalisme. Son œuvre protéiforme et hybride (poèmes, romans, nouvelles, photographies)
propose la mixité de l’autofiction (qui laisse transparaître un moi composite à
la recherche de la liberté d’expression) et de l’histoire du surréalisme belge
(qui prend, par exemple, la forme de l’anti-roman Le Boulevard Jacqmain). Construits d’entrelacements de souvenirs et de
fiction, ses textes se réclament de la praxis surréaliste de l’ars combinatoria qui permet le dialogue
entre les genres et les arts. Un exemple de son écriture intermédiale et
plurigénérique se trouve dans La cuve
infernale, recueil de nouvelles qui se propose de déconstruire à la fois
les mœurs et les pratiques littéraires en juxtaposant récit et photographie. En
même temps, ses poèmes ouvrent l’espace d’une recherche identitaire pour donner
naissance à un véritable travail d’institution/destitution du sujet féminin,
une figuration et une défiguration de soi.
Comment le projet
autobiographique prend forme chez Irène Hamoir et quelles sont ses façons
multiples de se dire et de s’exposer, telles sont les deux principales questions
auxquelles nous nous proposons de répondre dans cette communication afin de
mettre en évidence la double marginalité de cette écrivaine et artiste :
d’abord en tant que surréaliste belge et ensuite comme « femme
surréaliste ».
Katherine
MacDonald
The
Hazards of History: Narrating Marie Petit’s Persian adventure (1705)
In
the final decade of Louis XIV’s reign, Jean-Baptiste Fabre, a bankrupt
businessman from
Marie’s
story, which blends elements of farce and tragedy, has come down to us in
several forms: letters written by Charles de Ferriol, resident ambassador at
Constantinople, to Jérôme Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, ‘secrétaire d’État de la
Marine’ in Versailles; letters from Marie in prison to Pontchartrain begging
for her release; a memoir by the Fabre mission’s surgeon, Louis Robin, and a
further autobiographical account by Pierre Victor Michel, who was Fabre’s
official successor, nominated by Ferriol, and Marie’s enemy. There are also
legal documents pertaining Marie’s trial for theft. Marie’s own narrative of
events has, however, regrettably been lost. Pontchartrain sent this version
Alain-René Lesage in the hope that he might turn it into a novel, but Lesage
refused on the grounds that it was defamatory. This paper proposes to examine
elements of fiction and history in these divergent accounts of oriental
intrigue.
John Marks
François Jacob and the Concept of bricolage
French
molecular biologist François Jacob’s classic paper ‘Evolution and Tinkering’
(‘Le bricolage de l’évolution’), published in 1977, is a synthesis of his work
as a molecular biologist, his ongoing interest in philosophies of evolution and
scientific progress, and the influence of cultural anthropology and
structuralism. Jacob’s central claim was that evolution is a process of
biological ‘tinkering’ (bricolage), a
formulation based on Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between the engineer and the bricoleur in La Pensée sauvage (1962). Whereas the engineer conceives of a
project in the abstract and then works with custom-made or pre-selected
components, the bricoleur starts from
whatever is already at hand in the material world, the residual ‘odds and ends’
of previous constructions. The raw biological materials of evolutionary bricolage are the range of existing
genes, which are either redeployed in new regulatory gene networks or
reassembled as new genes.
In
scientific terms, Jacob’s paper has proven to be prescient. Developments in
molecular biology have largely confirmed Jacob’s intuition that the diversity
of forms in the animal kingdom is not generated
by a corresponding diversity of genetic mechanisms. Instead, it seems that
evolutionary bricolage has managed to
‘tinker’ in a highly creative way with a relatively small repertoire of basic
genetic building blocks.
This
paper will consider how the concept of bricolage
functions as a bridge between scientific, philosophical and even social thinking.
Just as Lévi-Straussian bricolage expressed
the philosophical challenge to centralized and technocratic forms of thinking,
Jacob’s version of bricolage indicated
new ways of thinking about genes that moved away from the notion of single gene
functions. The claim has also been made, most notably by Claude Debru in Le possible et les biotechnologies (2003),
that Jacob’s exploration of ‘la contingence évolutive’ and ‘le bricolage
évolutif’ provides productive ways of thinking about the ‘modifiability’ of
biological structures.
Alexander Marr
Copying, Commonplaces, and Technical
Knowledge in Early Modern
Recent
work on the history of artisans has emphasized the importance of manuscripts
and, in particular, drawings for the circulation and use of practical knowledge
in the Early Modern period. My paper will shed new light on an important (but
largely neglected) manuscript compilation of text and images related to
technical subjects, made in the early seventeenth century by the French architect-engineer
Jacques Gentillâtre (1578-c.1623). To date, this manuscript has been discussed
exclusively within the context of the theory and practice of architecture, yet
the diverse subjects with which it is concerned (notably the numerous uses to
which instruments and machines may be put), demands that the document be
scrutinized from a wide range of alternative angles. I will consider the
manuscript within three key Early Modern contexts: the reception and
circulation of technical knowledge via printed books; copying practices; and
the adoption of the commonplace method by artisans. It will thus be shown that
in compiling his manuscript, Gentillâtre drew on long-established humanist
techniques of recording and ordering information, blending the commonplace method
with the ‘model book’ tradition of the artisan's workshop to suit the
increasingly sophisticated demands of practical work.
Laura McMahon
Derrida Touching
In
the aftermath of deconstruction’s unease with concepts of presence, realism and
embodiment, the work of Jean-Luc Nancy marks a recent turn in French philosophy
to rethink the body in terms of materiality, exteriority and exposure. Central
to
Derrida’s
Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) has been crucial in marking the
importance of this deconstructive spacing within
Anna-Louise Milne
Telling
Tales, or Performing Ethnographic Understanding: Jean Paulhan on
Best known as the ‘éminence grise’ of French literature
thanks to his role as editor of the Nouvelle
Revue Française, Jean Paulhan led another ‘hidden’ career as ethnographer.
Posted to
Isabelle Moreau
L’araignée dans sa toile
Je voudrais évoquer ici une image qui traverse les
textes de l’âge classique et des Lumières, l’image de l’araignée dans sa toile,
d’abord appliquée à la très ancienne théorie de l’âme du monde, puis utilisée
par Bayle, article « Spinoza », pour rendre compte de la doctrine de
la substance unique. Comme l’explique l’article SPINOSISTE de l’Encyclopédie,
il ne faut pas confondre les « Spinosistes
anciens » avec les « Spinosistes
modernes ». Exploitant les rapprochements suggérés dans l’article AME
entre l’animation générale du monde et la question de l’âme humaine, la
question de l’âme du monde se déplace du terrain de la physique à celui de
l’organisation du vivant. L’image de l’araignée dans sa toile ne sert plus à
proposer une modélisation hypothétique du monde physique, mais à suggérer une
solution au difficile problème de l’émergence de l’âme ex materia, retrouvant du même coup (par-delà le dictionnaire de
Bayle) l’héritage naturaliste des manuscrits philosophiques clandestins. Nous
nous proposons de suivre les pérégrinations de l’araignée des articles de
l’Encyclopédie au Rêve de d’Alembert
de Diderot, au Système de la nature
de d’Holbach.
Martin
Munro
Listening
to Aimé Césaire
The
modern, Western conception of the self constitutes itself in terms of
perception and seeing; and since the Renaissance Western thought has experienced
the “epistemological regime of the eye” (Connor, “Sound and the Self” 54). As
such, the rise of scientific and technological rationality was enabled by what
Heidegger called the Gestell, that is the visual objectification and
enframing of the world. This modern, Western emphasis on the visual was
conceived, tellingly, at the time of European colonialist expansion, and
allowed the world to be treated as an object, differentiated from the self, and
thereby liable to be controlled, dominated, and manipulated. The control that
modernity exercises over the world is dependent on an understanding of the seen
world as separate from the self. In the
Thomas Newman
Le
sort d'autrui chez Genet et Hegel
La
tragédie hégélienne, telle qu'elle est décrite dans l'Esthétique, s’inscrit dans la continuité de la description
aristotélicienne de l’action comme conversion de pragmata en dramata, par
l'élaboration d'une loi tertiaire d’exposition, de complication et de
conclusion qui conduisent à
l’aboutissement tragique. L'objet de cette intervention est d'analyser en
parallèle un autre présupposé tragique, qui lui est complice chez Hegel :
celui de l'acteur-guerrier de la Phénoménologie,
qui, dans sa beauté, succède à l’excès dionysien. Hegel compare implicitement
cette figure à celle du Christ qui, à travers la consubstantialité du pain et
du vin à la chair et au sang, devient le point focal de la fête précédemment
trop instable, furieuse ou bacchique.
Si
l'on compare cette réconciliation de forces opposées à la relation d'Apollon et
de Dionysos chez Nietzsche, comme nous y invite Derrida à la fin de Glas,
on entrevoit la possibilité de distinguer une tragédie de la synthèse
téléologique chez Hegel d'une tragédie du scandale pessimiste chez Nietzsche.
Tandis que la première serait, en suivant Lacoue-Labarthe, "une
philosophie de la tragédie qui est aussi une poétique de la tragédie", la
deuxième dans son scandale même possède la possibilité de mener ailleurs :
à un drame commun à Nietzsche et Lévinas, un drame dérivé non de l’action, mais
d’une certaine passivité.
Je proposerai ensuite une lecture de la
tragédie chez Genet, qui apparaîtra comme résistant à la téléologie au travers
d'un retour en-deçà du destin par un mythos diffus,
ou une percée au-delà de la tragédie par des trucages de genre rappelant la
comédie, mais qui nous dirigent en dehors des dramata. De surcroît, le rapport à l'idée du messie dans les pièces
(surtout chez Yeux-Verts et Saïd), permettrait de déceler une logique
différente de celles du sacrifice ou de la consommation tragique.
Lucy O’Meara
Since
the early 1990s, the Japanese metropolis has become a rich locus in French
literature. Writers as diverse as
François Laut, Jean Pérol, Éric Sadin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Jacques
Roubaud seek to combine the discourses of travel writing and of aesthetic
theory in their evocations of contemporary
Martin O’Shaughnessy
Amnesia, Labour and Class in Recent
French Cinema
Since
about 1995 one of the most significant strands of French film has been that
which figures the world of work and / or brings the question of class back to
public attention. Refusing the mythology of the post-class or consensual
society, this cinema has worked to bring underlying socio-economic violences
back to the surface. Struggles over the past and over memory have been one of
its key dimensions, partly because it operates in a space of amnesia, the
memory and tradition of struggle being erased and its language silenced, partly
because it itself seeks to combat this erasure, taking on itself to transmit
memory or finding ways to figure a struggle condemned to exist in a pure
present. Where the memory of class and class struggle has faded or become
unavailable, another memory sometimes haunts the films, the memory of the
wartime. Where films show isolated individuals who find themselves exposed to
an inhuman system without recourse to collective instances or traditions of
struggles, the choices they face are perhaps inevitably framed as between
resistance and collaboration. The evocation of a situation where the less
productive or recalcitrant are weeded out seems inevitably haunted by the
memory of other systemic ‘cleanings’. Between the memories threatened with
erasure and the memories that arise from the depths, French film seems haunted
by the past.
Sanja Perovic
From Diderot to Panckoucke: the Time of Critique in the Encyclopédie
This
paper takes its starting point from Reinhart Koselleck’s observation that the
“encyclopédie contains in one time many different times.” This conception of time is evident not just
in D’Alembert’s comparison of the encyclopédie to a “mappemonde” but also, and
especially, in the way it conceives of the reader as a free agent who is
encouraged to cut any path through the forest of articles and
cross-references. As Koselleck argues,
it is this “self-made link to the future” – in which the reader is encouraged
to draw any number of relations between past examples and (possible) futures –
that enables the reader to become a critic of the present. But if this is the case, what kind of
epistemological space does the Encyclopédie imply? On the one hand, if the present is constantly
made and remade with every “coup d’oeil”, this implies a punctual, even
catastrophic vision of time in which perspective is constantly reversed and
perception and reason ultimately never coincide. On the other hand, the metaphor of a “mappemonde”
can be equally taken to indicate a classification and division of a permanent
space suggesting, at least ideally, that all knowledge belongs to a systematic
unity.
This
paper addresses these issues by considering some of the differences between Diderot’s
original vision of the Encyclopédie and Panckoucke’s final version in which, I
argue, this radical notion of critique drops out to make way for a new linear
concept of time as scientific progress.
It is this latter definition of the encyclopedia’s function that remains
with us today.
David Ravet
Le mythe
du Juif errant: de sa légende chrétienne à sa réinterpretation dans l’art juif
du XIXème et du XXème siècles
Le mythe du Juif errant, construit dès le 13ème
siècle par des chrétiens, eut de nombreuses répercussions en Europe, tant du
point de vue politique (antisémitisme, discrimination raciale, rejet de l’Autre
et de l’étranger), que du point de vue artistique. En effet, le Juif errant a
inspiré de nombreux artistes et écrivains européens et français, en particulier
au XIXème et XXème siècles comme Doré, Sue, Dumas, Apollinaire et Londres. Mais
ce mythe a également posé le problème de l’identité juive pour les Juifs
eux-mêmes. Il fut important pour le rapport entre les Juifs et la judéïté, surtout
à partir de la fin du XIXème siècle. La légende du Juif errant a ainsi
intéressé des artistes juifs comme Mauricy Gottlieb, Samuel Hirszenberg,
Ephraïm Moses Lilien ou Marc Chagall. Ces peintres ou graveurs ont présenté une
réinterprétation subversive de cette légende. Ce renversement leur a permis,
non seulement de dénoncer les stéréotypes antisémites que ce mythe a véhiculés,
mais de donner à leurs œuvres une force politique condamnant les persécutions
chrétiennes. Ainsi le Juif errant n’est plus considéré comme coupable envers le
Christ, mais comme la victime des bourreaux chrétiens, notamment lors des
pogroms très meurtriers d’Europe de l’Est. Ce personnage mythique est également
utilisé dans l’idéologie et l’art sionistes pour montrer l’urgence de la
création et du développement d’un état israélien. La figure du Juif errant est
alors opposée au pionnier.
Marine Roussillon
La
littérature chevaleresque : une littérature noble?
Je souhaiterais travailler sur les liens entre un
imaginaire chevaleresque issu des romans médiévaux et de textes plus tardifs
comme le Roland furieux ou la Jérusalem délivrée et l’identité sociale
du second ordre, à un moment (1640-1660) où cette identité est en crise. Le
rapprochement entre récits chevaleresques et identité nobiliaire a déjà été
souvent fait. Je voudrais ici le considérer, dans le contexte particulier des
années 1640-1660, comme une construction qui cherche à réaffirmer la légitimité
de la noblesse et à résister à la mise en place d’une idéologie nouvelle, la
galanterie, et à la construction d’un ordre social nouveau.
Pour ce faire, je souhaiterais travailler sur le Vrai Théâtre d’honneur et de chevalerie
de Marc Vulson de la Colombière, publié en 1648, long traité des tournois et
des carrousels largement inspiré de littérature chevaleresque. Vulson commence
son traité par un avertissement à la noblesse, qu’il exhorte à imiter l’exemple
des anciens chevaliers en cherchant la gloire dans les combats et à fuir les
plaisirs de la galanterie. Il est intéressant de remarquer qu’au même moment,
les milieux galants (Jean Chapelain dans De
la lecture des vieux romans, en 1647, par exemple) utilisent justement eux
aussi la figure du chevalier. Chez eux, l’imaginaire chevaleresque sert la
promotion d’une littérature nationale, et par contre coup des auteurs français
modernes. Ces usages divergents des récits chevaleresques voient s’affronter
une identité noble en crise et une idéologie nationale en construction. Ceci
permet de reconsidérer le lien entre noblesse et littérature
chevaleresque : Vulson de la Colombière est-il le représentant d’une
identification ancienne de la littérature chevaleresque à la noblesse, ou
construit-il ce lien pour mieux résister à l’émergence de l’idéologie galante
et à l’affaiblissement politique du second ordre ?
Mairéad Seery
Nostalgia and lieux de mémoire: from Postmodern Playfulness to Hypermodern Fair
Play
This
paper proposes to address nostalgia from a number of theoretical perspectives.
With reference to Jankélévitch’s analogy of Ulysees’ voyage, the paper will
show first of all show how nostalgia, in expressing a desire to return “home”,
is a mechanism to explore notions of identity.
However, in a 20th century postmodern framework based on the
collapse of meta-narratives, the notion of “home” has become destabilised, and
nostalgic endeavours are regarded as nothing more than an empty play of
surfaces, where the past is recycled like just another depthless sign.
The
focus of the paper will then move to Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, a useful concept to consolidate theories of
nostalgia and postmodernism, mainly through its emphasis on the visual. The role of lieux de mémoire is to arrest time, to hold memory intact and to
freeze-frame it, as though it were a photograph. More importantly, the concept of lieux de mémoire provides a corrective
to the dystopian view of nostalgia put forward by postmodern theories. Nora encourages us to see the postmodern play
of surfaces, where referents from the past are recycled nostalgically, in a
positive light; in other words, intertextuality is a solution rather than a
problem. Lieux de mémoire enable us to contrast past and present and
ultimately, in assessing the difference between then and now, to measure how
conceptions of identity have evolved.
Following
on from this, the paper proposes to update these postmodern theories with
reference to Lipovetsky’s recent writings on hypermodernism. Lipovetsky argues that, while nostalgia is
still prevalent, it is underpinned by strong moral values. In a 21st century hypermodern
paradigm, the past is recycled, playfully perhaps, but not without a sense of
fair play.
Geraldine
Sheridan
Visual
Approaches to Representing the Working Woman in the Encyclopédie and the Description des Arts
The paper will examine (and illustrate with reproductions) attempts to
represent the working woman in the early to mid eighteenth century. Categories of ‘unskilled’ and ‘skilled’
labour will be analysed, as well as the modes of representing women in
commerce. The impact of visual genres
and conventions of propriety on the manner in which the body of the working
woman is pictured will be highlighted.
The question of how such material can be useful as a source for cultural
history will be examined.
Finn Sinclair
Textual Truths: Jean Froissart and the
Writing of History
Jean
Froissart is principally renowned for his lengthy prose Chroniques, yet his poetic works are also bound up with history and
‘reality’ in varying ways. His dits
draw upon and rewrite existing literary models: the Prison amoureuse is substantially indebted to Machaut’s Livre du Voir Dit, while Froissart’s Joli Buisson de Jonece serves as a
reinterpretation of his own Espinette
amoureuse. Texts are open to appropriation, and history and experience are
glossed and rewritten, yet throughout his work, Froissart emphasises the
physicality of text and book and the importance of transmission.
The
history imagined by Froissart’s dits
is tied in much more closely with the personal than with the political, and the
poet’s life and experience are transmitted through dream, allegory, and
recollected memory. This paper will examine the role played by the written form
of the dits – prose, verse, or lyric
– in the creation of a textual web of imagined reality. In the fourteenth
century, prose was equated with ‘truth’ and history, while verse implied an
inherent fiction, yet in his Prison amoureuse Froissart uses both prose and
verse in his elaboration of a textual history. The ‘prison’ is implicitly
linked with the real incarceration of Froissart’s patron, Wenceslas de Brabant,
and the text continually glosses and reglosses the narrative and its origins,
shifting between different narrative voices: that of the poet-narrator,
epistolary dialogue in prose, and inserted lyrics. The dit’s structure and form shape the reader’s understanding of
events, as the accumulation of prose, verse and lyric produces a multi-faceted
text whose tone and content shift between the quotidian and the mythical and
allegorical. Emphasis lies on writing, and on the text as a physical object
that may be transmitted and copied, yet which may also be appropriated and
reworked to produce a new tale and a new ‘history’.
Kristen
Stromberg Childers
After
Aimé Césaire: Historical Reflections on Post-colonial
One
of the main architects of the project of Départementalisation, Aimé Césaire has
rightly occupied a prominent place in contemporary debates about the politics
of assimilation and the vicissitudes of Martiniquan identity. As mayor of Fort de France and
Brian Sudlow
Nostalgia as Flight or Fight: Rereading
the French Catholic Literary Revival
The
French Catholic literary revival 1880-1914 has been characterised as a
nostalgic moment. The social traditionalism of many French Catholic authors,
their preoccupation with an idealised Middle Ages, and their attachment to the
fading hegemony of French Catholicism are cited to sustain a characterisation
of their works as a retreat into the past. Their nostalgia is thus often
considered as ‘flight’.
Yet
‘nostalgia as flight’ when applied to the French Catholic literary revival is
in some ways a straightjacket deployed by a humanist academy to constrain a
phenomenon at odds with many of its assumptions. Notwithstanding their
undeniable conservatism and idealism, the writings of the French Catholic
authors reveal fragments of a vision countermanding a secularized worldview.
Nostalgia for these writers is not so much ‘flight’ as ‘fight’.
The
Weberian model of secularization describes religious individualism, a
disenchanted world, the fragmentation of social organisation, and the exclusion
of religious values from the worldviews informing social organisation. To
illustrate how the ‘past’ in the French Catholic literary revival is treated as
a resource with which to undermine these secularizing trends, I will make
reference to Bourget’s Le Démon de Midi,
Bloy’s La Femme Pauvre, Bordeaux’s La Maison and Péguy’s Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc.
‘Nostalgia
as flight’ is in some ways a product of a secular, linear view of history.
While not denying nostalgia’s role as a psychological analgesic, I find
‘nostalgia as fight’ a much more plausible interpretation of the French
Catholic authors’ treatment of the past. From this perspective, their nostalgia
is a gathering of diachronic ecclesial experience, directed towards a known
eschatological conclusion, rather than a flight from an unknown utopian or
dystopian future.
Helen Swift
‘Je l’ay
faict ensuivant ma puissance et scavoir’ : Narrative Structures of Power
in Jehan Dupré’s Le Palais des nobles
dames (1534)
This
paper takes Jehan Dupré’s contribution to the querelle des femmes as a case study for the complex circulation of
power in multi-layered narrative verse fiction. In this dream-vision poem, the
narrative je (‘l’Acteur’) recounts
his tour of the chambers and garden of this palace, whose female occupants
addressed to him their claims to fame, which he subsequently set down as a catalogue
of noble women. Building on the scholarship of Adrian Armstrong and Cynthia J.
Brown concerning the relationships between patron, poet, je-narrator, and reported women’s speech, I probe how Dupré uses
the mode of fictional representation to develop power relationships between
himself as poet and his patron, Marguerite de Navarre, and between his
fictional self and the ladies he interviews. Dupré uses both the liminary
materials of prefatory poem and dedicatory epistle, and the main body of the poem
to cultivate a favourable relationship with his powerful dedicatee and pay
tribute to her poetic achievements.
Within the poem’s fiction, he deploys a series of slippery oppositions to
complicate the wielding of power: tensions are created between the je-narrator of the past who was accosted
orally by powerful, articulate women, and the je-narrator of the present who can manipulate these voices he now
commands through the written word. Comparisons will be drawn with two other
multi-layered narrative fictions of later medieval France involving power play
between a male narrator and his female subjects, namely Martin Le Franc’s Le Champion des dames (c. 1442) and the anonymous Évangiles des quenouilles (before 1480).
Marrying the ‘characteristically medieval’ narrative voice, embroiled in the
fiction of the récit, with the
‘characteristically early-modern’ assertive first person, standing apart from
the text’s characters, Dupré revivifies the querelle
catalogue form and multiplies the channels through which power relationships
may be performed and explored.
Rowan Tomlinson
Savoir-faire,
savoir-lire: Artisans, Autopsy, and Apprenticeship in Du Bellay, Ronsard, and
Montaigne
The status of artisans in the
early modern period has in recent years been the sustained focus of work by
social and cultural historians as well as by historians of science. Of
particular interest has been the contribution of artisans to the development of
the new philosophy and to the emergence of science in its modern form. What has
received less attention is the presence of the figure of the artisan in
cultural objects the modus operandi
of which is not straightforwardly functional, namely, in those forms of writing
that we would now classify as literary. The comparison of the poet to an
artisan reaches back to antiquity and is rooted in the etymology of the term
‘poet’, ‘maker’. In the sixteenth century, though, textual references to
artisans are not just incorporated as similes or metaphors for the poet. A
number of texts on poetics complicate and literalize the comparison by giving
space to the artisan not merely as a comparator but as a real and authoritative
figure from whom the poet can gather the knowledge essential to effective
representation. In this paper, I start by examining the status and function of
the figure of the artisan in texts on poetics by Du Bellay and Ronsard,
demonstrating how the poets’ interest in knowledge inherited from classical
sources is accompanied by a continued concern with a more practical form of
knowledge, the transmission of which relies on first-hand observation
(autopsy). I then move from artisanal writing to artisanal reading in
considering the motif of the reader as an apprentice or a novice artisan, an
image given prominence in Ronsard’s ‘Préface sur la Franciade’ but also in
Montaigne’s Essais. What I argue is
that the artisanal is not only central to the transmission of knowledge in the
period but is a key part of the currency of debates over textual representation
and interpretation.
Kate Tunstall
Blindness in the Encyclopédie
This paper explores several articles in the Encyclopédie for what they
can tell us about Diderot's Lettre sur
les aveugles, its meanings,
context and reception. Having shown elsewhere that there are links
between the Lettre and the article
‘BONNETERIE’, here I take a more
obvious approach and explore the complex relations between the Lettre
and the articles 'AVEUGLE' (D'Alembert) 'AVEUGLES' (Diderot) and
'AVEUGLEMENT' (Vandenesse).
Caroline Warman
‘L’arbre des connoissances’: the
Abstract and the Particular Tree in Materialist Thought
This
paper looks at the role and uses of the tree in the Encyclopédie, from the supremely well-known introductory “arbre des
connoissances” which claims “l’arbre du chancelier Bacon” as its parent,
displacing the differently significant “mappemonde” (discussed by Sanja
Perovic), to more humble figurings, and in particular, cases in which “the
tree” is used as an example, or as part of a narrative (here, in explanations
of language and then sight: “voir un objet, et y attacher un son, le son arbre ;
puis dire, entendre le mot arbre”; “examen expérimental de la manière dont se
fait la sensation de l’oeil sur un arbre, et dont l’âme a l’idée d’un arbre”).
It seeks to understand the significance of the tree as a metaphor which not
only organises knowledge but also unifies it into a single organism. The tree
is a consistent reference point: the ARTFL online Encyclopédie allows us to
see that there are at least 5446 instances of the word, ranging from the “arbre
encyclopédique” already mentioned, to the ironising “saint arbre”, botanical
explanations, clock-making applications – in which the “arbre” is the stem on
which the whole mechanism depends, etc. Yet the aim of this presentation will not
be to linger on the dazzling array of different usages, but instead to
investigate the hypothesis that the tree is in fact a privileged reference
point in materialist thought; my paper will therefore engage with Isabelle
Moreau and Kate Tunstall quite directly, the spider being an equivalent figure,
and the tree in fact offering one sort of response to the questions posed by
scepticism and solipsism, although the very abstractness of its use (“the
tree”) immediately detracts from the solidity of its answer. As a last stage in
my argument, I will therefore refer to figurings of the tree in the Encyclopédie and in Diderot’s work more
generally to consider the relationship of abstract to particular in materialist
thought.
Wes Williams
‘L’artisan par ce monstre a laissé sa boutique’:
Paré, Ronsard, and Montaigne
The
productivity of the relation between Pléiade poetics and the figure of the
artisan is a long-standing commonplace. New Historicism made excellent new
senses of the connection between the craft of literature and that of other
professionals of the word – lawyers, doctors, theologians and the rest. More
recent work in the field has explored the ways in which diverse forms of
artisanal ‘savoir faire’ (from cookery through midwifery to animal husbandry)
became codified as vernacular, printed ‘savoir’ across the course of the early
modern period. What goes unheard – all too often – in recent debate is the tone
of conflicted anxiety which sometimes characterizes discussion of the relation
between artisans and authors in the period itself.
My
title quotation is taken from Ronsard’s civil war invective against the monster
‘Opinion’, a force so destabilizing as to persuade simple folk of the authority
and public usefulness of their own untrained conceptions and ideas. In
juxtaposing certain moments in the very differently articulated texts of the
three figures named in my subtitle – the doctor, the poet and the essayist/
philosopher – I hope to gain a clearer sense of the theory and the practice,
the poetics and the politics, governing the peculiar character that is the
artisan-become-author in the early modern period.
Rachel Wimpee
A Catholic Avant-Garde? Rethinking
Representations and Roles of Catholic Women in ‘fin-de-siècle’
A Catholic aristocrat and mother of four from the
provinces, the Contesse d’Adhémar is not the typical model of the fin-de-siècle progressive woman. But her
writings favoring democracy, feminism, and women’s education repeatedly show
how during this period the lines blurred between the caricatures promoted by
conservative clerics on one side, and progressive anticlericals on the other.
Adhémar believed, for example, that democracy was the only form of government
compatible with Catholicism, and saw in the Church the principal advocate for
woman’s intellectual culture and the only guarantee for the success of the
feminist cause.
Drawing
on examples from popular visual culture, the work of Symbolist and Nabi
painters, and written examples from the press and literature from the period
1880-1905, my paper shows how devoutly Catholic women were portrayed as both
progressive – for example, as promoting a brand of feminism or in their focus
on the spiritual so exalted by Paul Gauguin as the future of avant-garde art –
and as a regressive, retrograde force to be stifled in the name of rationality
and science. More importantly, I show how these two opposing representations
were not always promoted by opposing sides of religious and political debates.
In
the context of this cultural backdrop, my study of one successful writer, the
Contesse d’Adhémar, explores this oscillation between progressive and
regressive tendencies both promoted by fin-de-siècle
culture and self-imposed, to define a spiritual and social identity during a
tumultuous period for religious, cultural, and gendered debates in modern
[1]
Kaplan, Leslie. 1982. L’excès-usine.
POL, Paris.
[2]
Voir notamment l’entretien entre Marguerite Duras et Leslie Kaplan dans la
deuxième partie (usine) publiée en 1987 dans la seconde édition de « L’excès-usine »
[3]
Maurice Blanchot fut l’un des premiers à lire le manuscrit de « L’excès-usine »
[4].
Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (Bruxelles,
Éditions Labor, 1986, 170 p.), p.51.