The (Jean) Nouvel Other: Primitivism and the Musée du Quai Branly

The Musée du Quai Branly, located beside the Eiffel Tower in Paris, opened in June 2006. Constructed to house France's important collection of non-western art, the museum has been promoted as ‘decidedly post-colonial’ and a place of ‘reconciliation and sharing’. Historians have situated the creation of the museum within political debates over the restructuring of several of France's museums and, more broadly, the country's position in a post-colonial world, while focusing little critical attention on the building itself. The author argues that Jean Nouvel's architectural program for the Musée du Quai Branly—a ‘primitive shelter’ surrounded by a ‘sacred wood’—gives physical form to a primitivist aesthetic. The unproblematised binaries of self versus other and culture versus nature evident in Nouvel's design reveal a surprisingly unsophisticated theoretical standpoint. As a frame in which to view and understand the objects on display, the Musée du Quai Branly invites a primitivist—and colonial—reading of its collection.     

The Musée d'Histoire des Sciences,Geneva Mathematics,light, and Pompeian delight

Abstract

The City of Geneva can be proud to have a jewel in the crown of science museums which is here described. Housed in a nineteenth century palace built in the Palladian style, the Villa Bartholoni, it displays a splendid collection of astronomical and other scientific instruments. Particularly noteworthy, as only appropriate for Geneva, is its connection with the family of de Saussure, recalling the famous eighteenth century physicist, alpinist, and meteorologist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure.     

La Pensée Comme Expérience Vécue

The core of our essay is the “psychology of thought” (Denkpsychologie), which was elaborated by the Würzburg School at the beginning of the 20^th century. We will show how this School synthesized two contemporary trends: Brentano’s project of a psychology from an empirical point of view and the use of experiments beyond the limits of perception. Through the works of Karl Bühler, we will criticize the legitimacy of the psychologistic approach, which was applied to all psychological schools of thought participating in the debate on the nature of thought. We will also discuss the Bühlerian idea of a present knowledge, which aims to avoid the consequence of mind localization, a very tempting issue for the psychology of thought.     

L'arrivée des premiers métallurgistes sur l'Ogooué, Gabon

Résumé Au Gabonca 2400–2300 BP, les dernières cultures néolithiques des savanes de la moyenne vallée de l'Ogooué, succombent face à une rapide expansion de populations porteuses de fer. Cet événement, identifié sur des critères céramologiques et des mesures radiométriques, paraît situer l'arrivée des premiers métallurgistes — probablement Bantu — sur les berges de l'Ogooué.

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In the savannas of the middle stretches of the Ogooué valley in Gabon,ca 2400–2300 bp, the last neolithic cultures succombed to the rapid expansion of ironworking populations. This event, identified on ceramic criteria and radiocarbon dates, may represent the arrival of the first Bantu ironworkers on the banks of the Ogooué.

     

Droit et Théologie Dans la Pensée Scolastique

What place is made for the right of men in a christian society? We will first study the entry of right in exegesis, with Hugues de Saint-Cher, than the case, privileged, of the oath and lie, analyzed here in the work of Jean Olivi (ca 1280). We will see emerging the notions of engagement and obligation — toward our neighbor and toward God. The obligation is realized through the pronunciation of words which take precedence over all other circumstance of the act. It rests upon the recognition of a norm which refers back not only to expressed propositions, but also to implications implicit in a community.     

On Will and Reason in L'astrée

This article sheds light on the technique of amplificatio by which Boccaccio expands the stories of famous women he finds in Valerius Maximus's De fide uxorium. Boccaccio's work on famous women situates itself between the genres of fiction and the historical treatise. It analyzes in philological detail Boccaccio's citation technique and his elaboration of the ancient model, showing how the greatest narrator of the Italian Middle Ages revitalizes and actualizes it and crafts an original literary product.     

Le Marché au Cœur de L’Invention Muséale?

Before Vivant Denon, the dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun played a crucial role in the creation of the Louvre collections, despite the revolutionary discourse which opposed the market to the museum. Lebrun's position as a polemicist is interpreted here as a strategy of self-presentation which made possible the controversial birth of the figure of the museum expert. With Lebrun, the Louvre imposed itself as a public space of artistic expertise, where values imported from the market - such as attributionism, materiality, and authenticity - became prominent in the evaluation of paintings.     

Tenue de soirée de rigueur: Incursion chez les warocqué

The Warocqué family, “nouveaux bourgeois”, were characterised by their constant intention to change the world in which they lived. They were thus industrialists and businessmen and political representatives as was appropriate, but also inventors, paternalist, philanthropists and employers. The Warocqués thus present a multitude of facets and possibilities for study. It was necessary to give greater importance to one of them, particularly as everything could be encompassed as family business. It is precisely the evolution and progression of the family in its local, Belgian and even international contexts that is analysed here—family, tradition and dynasty even: inaugurated by Nicolas, it progresses, develops and reaches its apogee with Raoul, who benefited from the power of the name. This social rise was also interpreted on the level of traditions, of family, of prestige or of a way of life. The article aims to study this particular aspect while successively reviewing some ‘chapters’ in the life of this dynasty: the family (taken as it should be in the broad sense, joining the very current concept of ‘network’), its sociability and passions.     

La Méditerranée solide: un espace double en construction

There exists a space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’. This concept was first proposed by the Annales’s co-founder Lucien Febvre in 1944–45, during a course on Europe in the longue durée. The flexible borders of this double space, both conceptual and contextual, remain in construction within the on-going and global reality of the solid Mediterranean’s space. The comparative history of European societies promoted during the interwar period by Marc Bloch, the other Annales founder, contributes to the construction of said space. Examining this space allows us to concretely articulate scales of analysis from the local to the global. The article is based on a comparative analysis of two Italian and Spanish cases that appear to be particular and paradigmatic (‘exceptional normal’, Edoardo Grendi) of – respectively – Italy’s so-called ‘southern question’ (questione meridionale) and the Spanish ‘agrarian question’ (cuestión agraria). Thus the article helps to conceptualize the space of the Méditerranée solide, marked by the complex and long-term Southern European question. The article compares Il Ministro della mala vita (The Minister of the Corruption, 1910) by historian Gaetano Salvemini and Del caciquismo trágico (On Tragical Caciquism, 1913) by republican journalist Pedro Torres. Through these ‘exceptionally normal’ case studies, taken together and explained reciprocally, it is possible to better understand the space of the solid Mediterranean. The social realities of the Spanish cuestión agraria and the Italian questione meridionale, as well as the conditions of local historiographical production on such realities are, indeed, a consubstantial part of the European transnational, global space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’.     

Leibniz, Wolff et la Métaphysique Traitée Selon la Méthode Scientifique

Wolff’s philosophy is often defined by commentators as « dogmatic leibnizism ». However, if we try to read the expression in a positive light, we discover what exactly distinguishes Wolff’s metaphysics from that of Leibniz, thereby establishing Wolff’s real contribution to the history of thought. First of all, the notion of « dogma » presented in Wolff’s philosophy is analyzed. This notion recalls the demonstrative model provided by mathematics and especially, Euclid’s Elements. According to axiomatic patterns, ontology is thought of as the « first philosophy ». This aspect cannot be separated from the function of a posteriori knowledge in Wolff’s thinking. This permits us to comprehend the function of ontology, Wolff’s cosmology, and his invention of the notion of « teleology ».