Le territoire englouti de Mologa

The fate of the people of Mologa, a provincial village in central Russia, was forever marked by two consequences stemming directly from a single major event when the Rybinsk dam went into service in 1941. Not only did the waters of the lake it created cover their homes, but ene entire population was displaced as well. From then on, the inhabitants' new-found mobility was assimilated to the attachment to their territory, which on a symbolic level constituted their collective identity. In this sense, their forced displacement was incorporated into a culture of mobility: based on the spatial overlaying of individual and collective identities, it expressed its true dynamic nature in the principle of a potential return. The case of the community of Mologa is in many ways emblematic of the Soviet redistribution of populations; the bond between identities (personal, familial, or collective) and a territory seems to have been constructed in such a way that the displacement, rather than putting this bond into jeopardy, established or activated it. It did this by stimulating a living relationship within the spatial dimension. This dialectical movement between distance and return contributed to the formation and the preservation of a communal identity taking the form of mobility.     

Figures des passions: La pathognomonie de Charles Le Brun

King Louis XIV's official painter, Charles Le Brun, elaborated two models of “reading”; the body. The first one, inspired by the ancient physiognomists, surveys the analogies between human and animal features. The other, ushering in a modern pathognomy partly inspired by Descartes, codifies the signs of passion displayed on human faces: in such a perspective, the movements of the body (and more specifically those of the eyebrows) are supposed to express clearly and distinctly all the emotions of the soul by which they are produced. Thus, using the cartesian physiology as his starting point Le Brun built a semiology of gesture and a rhetoric of emotion that he systematized in the illustrated lectures held at the Royal Academy in 1668. They exemplify how classicism joined the picturesque and the discursive, the natural and the convention, the meaning of gesture and the meaning of words.     

Le gaullisme et la crise de l'Etat

The heritage of 1789 left French politicians and political analysts with the complex task of reconciling the two antithetical ideals of the Revolution: the desire to make the nation the sole political arbiter through its representatives with the need to maintain its unity. The history of France from 1789 to de Gaulle reflects France's fearfulness toward a strong executive as well as its fundamental mistrust in the people's capacity to maintain the cohesion of the nation and serve the general will. Here it is argued that de Gaulle overcame these contradictions by retaining French liberalism's emphasis on a dual executive, while the Bonapartist ideal of a strong executive could, erroneously, appear to be de Gaulle's deliberate choice. Finally it is argued that 'cohabitation', the debate surrounding the duration of the presidential mandate and the changing attitude toward France's relationship to the Vichy regime, reveal transformations proper to the French state in the late 20th century as much as a crisis of Gaullism and the loss of its basic meaning.     

Living With the Other's Pain: The Ethical Implications of Mitsein in Simone de Beauvoir's Le sang des autres

This article establishes that the suffering of the other represents a serious philosophical and ethical problem in Beauvoir's first post–World War II novel. In fact, the other's suffering poses such a complex problem in Le sang des autres particularly because Beauvoir depicts her characters’ world as a kind of Mitsein, which is Heidegger's word to describe how our lives necessarily intertwine with and envelop the lives of others while still allowing for the existential experience of separation. In the novel, the main characters’ potential responses to the other's suffering—quietism, indifference, charity, and empathy—fail according to the novel's existentialist ethical framework because of the ways these responses deny the fundamental ambiguity of Beauvoirian Mitsein. Only in accepting separation and connection as codependent ethical values do the characters find an ethically palatable response to the other's suffering at the end of the novel.     

Le zervanisme et les manuscrits de la mer morte

Sans résumé     

The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Corneille's Le Cid

This article theorizes that it was an aesthetic motivation that prompted Corneille to leave Le Cid open-ended, despite his assertion in the 1660 examen that it was respect for the bienséances that obliged him to close the tragedy on such an uncertain note. While moral reservations may have played a role, surely an artist as committed to his craft as Corneille was motivated by some overriding aesthetic goal as well. In consequence, Chimène's defiance at the play's end must be viewed as an integral component of the tragedy and not just a reflection of the author's reluctance to violate dramaturgical precepts. I argue that by leaving the dénouement in doubt, Corneille draws deliberate attention to his aesthetic manipulation of the well-known historical/literary precedent. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, his aesthetic manipulation of history shields Chimène's heroism from the quotidian reality of degradation and devolution that are the defining traits of non-aesthetic realities.     

Cleansing Les Halles: Discourses of Health and Disease in Zola's Le Ventre de Paris

The analysis of hygiene and nutrition in Samuel Beckett's oeuvre will guide us to the relationship his characters establish with their own bodies and with existence, as well as clarify the liaison between that of the intimate and the social. Undoubtedly, Beckettian bodies are willingly badly known, poorly treated, and continually exposed to degradation. However, scorn over nutrition and sleaziness toward hygiene allow an époché of the body that consents to the enlargement of the space of consciousness.