Le rire et le théâtre dans la Lettre à M. d’Alembert

Often interpreted as a field of contradictions and fragmentation, the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau presents an inner unity. This inner unity, though, is structured around regulated contradictions. I will examine here the distribution of those regulated contradictions by focusing on the preface to the Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles and the relations between the Lettre and the Essai sur l’origine des langues. What Rousseau rejects as agents of corruption—theater and laughter—constitute at the same time the principles of his argument. The values of representation and technique implied by theater and laughter come to compose with those of presence and nature. Taking as a point of departure the work of Jacques Derrida on Rousseau, but also engaging it polemically, I will show in the analysis of the preface to the Lettre the distribution of regulated contradictions as well as the essential difference between language and theater in Rousseau throughout his reflection on the origin of theater and language.     

‘La rue du 19 mars 1962 c'était la rue de la liberté’: Personal and Collective Memory Spaces in Rachid Akbal's Commemoration of Peace

Rachid Akbal is a French-born Algerian playwright, director and actor whose company, ‘Le temps de vivre’, took up residence at the Théâtre de Belleville in Paris in 2012 to perform his Trilogie Algérienne (three plays with a loosely autobiographical element: Baba la France, Ma mère l'Algérie and Alger, Terminal 2). On 19 March 2012, to mark the 50th anniversary of the first day of the ceasefire between Algeria and France, Akbal held an open evening at the theatre. The first half offered a run-through of the history between France and Algeria. The second half was a more personal, lyrical narrative of what the date represented for Akbal; unpublished elsewhere, Akbal has given permission for it to be reproduced here. In its hour-long performance, the narration was accompanied by sounds (natural elements, gunfire and sirens, and music), and at the end the lights went up and Akbal took a seat on stage, to begin a half-hour discussion with the audience. In so doing, Akbal created a discreet space of remembrance which allowed interested parties to come together in collective commemoration. Setting theorisations of cultural memory in dialogue with commentaries published during the commemorative period, this article sets up a framework to interrogate the possibilities of personal and collective remembrance offered by Akbal's event, opening these up via publication of the text and analysis of it as a ‘memory space’.     

Le déplacement des pôles du théâtre francophone: Malcolm de Chazal et l’arrière-scène tibétaine

Acclaimed by the Parisian Surrealist circles in 1948, Malcolm de Chazal, the French-speaking Mauritian writer and painter, opted for unchartered literary territories in his subsequent works. In the 1950s, he wrote a collection of dramas that tended to decentre his writing practice towards Asian perspectives. References to Indo-Mauritian culture assuredly provided him with a major source of inspiration to deliver a culturally hybrid theatre. Yet Tibet may seem at first a rather unlikely referent in his work. One can nevertheless demonstrate by comparing the author’s numerous references to Tibet that it is not only meaningful in his entire work but also that it is a central and neglected aspect of his geo-literary agenda.     

Gabriel Germinet and the ' Livre d'or du théâtre radiophonique français ' (1923-1935)

The Ecole de Brive represents one of the most successful examples of marketing literary texts in recent years. The Ecole consists of eight authors all of whom publish with Editions Robert Laffont and write novels that deal with the rural France of bygone eras. Laffont has grouped these writers together, created a ‘school’ and then marketed their work as a healthy alternative to the overly introspective fiction produced by Parisian intellectuals. With the Ecole de Brive Laffont has cleverly exploited the traditional tensions between the city and the country, the widespread dissatisfaction with the political and cultural status of contemporary France, and the perceived inaccessibility of currently fashionable literature, in order to sell novels that claim to renew average French peoples’ contacts with their putative roots in the quasi‐mythic world of la France profonde.     

Parité, la nouvelle ‘exception française’

This article shows how a movement for gender parity in politics, distinct from the second-wave women's liberation movement, formed in the 1990s, and how the subsequent parity reforms, which public opinion strongly favoured, gained support among political elites. It highlights the triumph of a conception of democracy based on the idea that political representation is to be shared between two equal and different sexes. Nevertheless, what appears to be a common sense victory, namely, the establishment of a universalism finally made real by the increase in the number of women in elected assemblies, is in fact ambiguous, especially when considered in relation to the feminism of the 1970s.     

Witchcraft,Human Nature,and Political Theology in Jean Bodin’s de la Démonomanie des sorciers

ABSTRACT

Jean Bodin (1530–1596) is most well-known as the thinker Carl Schmitt credits for modern absolutist sovereignty and political theology. Contemporary critics of sovereignty, following Schmitt, ascribe to Bodin a theological politics of obedience and the negation of individual and collective human freedom through authoritarian discipline (Cocks, Joan. On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). Yet, a dedicated study of Bodin’s own political theology remains wanting. His most extensive discussion of theology and law is in his more obscure work on the jurisprudence of witchcraft. In de la Démonomanie des sorciers (1580), Bodin provides a theological account of a divinely created rational order where benevolence and evil are at work in the world. Humans must exercise the free will to choose between them. Bodin’s theological anthropology anchors his political theology with important implications for the proper exercise of human political power within the natural and divine order.     

‘Designer’ Europeanization: Lessons from Jean Monnet

The European Council called for a period of reflection in each of the member states of the European Union (EU) after the people of France and the Netherlands rejected the Constitutional Treaty in referendums in 2005. The present article offers a contribution to this process by reflecting on the prospects for institutional design and redesign in the EU, a topic that became even more relevant after the Irish “no” to the Lisbon Treaty in June 2008. The discussions are based on a historical perspective, and the article discusses what lessons can be drawn from Jean Monnet, viewed as an institutional designer on the European stage. The article argues that the successful establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was a product of a robust deontological design in a constitutional moment for Europe, and that prospective designers in the EU can learn important lessons from how Monnet identified and exploited available spaces for institutional design.     

Les objets de la chose théorie du hasard et surréalisme au xxe siècle

On the basis of the trajectory of something made of paster which had impassioned the statisticians of the years 1880 and which furnished André Breton the very exemple for the notion of a surrealist object, one wonders whether the surrealist theory of chance was born by chance. By translating the issue which Ernest Coumet addressed in 1970 concerning the Pascalian geometry of chance, we investigate here the relationship between the history of science, art history and the history of scientific culture during the last century. In return, we hope to suggest why Coumet's article opened such a wide horizon in the history of the theory of probabilities thirty years ago.     

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.     

Pierre Bourdieu: from ‘sociologue de la domination’ to ‘sociologue des dominés’

While Pierre Bourdieu's reputation as a sociologist is internationally recognised, the more explicitly political aspects of his thought and life are less well known. This is in part because he operated primarily as an academic, eschewing polemics and, as can be seen from his early publications on Algeria and on education, employing scientific sociological method to analyse and inform. However, from the 1980s, Bourdieu started to become more obviously involved in things political, starting with his support for Coluche in the 1981 presidential campaign and his denunciation of state repression in Poland. In the 1990s, Bourdieu became still more overtly political. This is evident, for example, in La Misère du monde (1993), in his work highlighting the situation in Algeria, his much publicised opposition to neo‐liberalism in general and in his support for the 1995 mouvement social in particular. All these later political prises de position were, Bourdieu insisted, underpinned by his work as a scientific sociologist.     

Relativité d'échelle structure de la théorie

Résumé  La théorie de la relativité d'échelle développe les conséquences de l'abandon de l'hypothèse de différentiabilité des coordonnées spatio-temporelles. La première est he caractère fractal, c'est-à-dire explicitement dépendant des résolutions, qu'acquiert l'espace-temps. On redéfinit alors les résolutions comme caractérisant l'état d'échelle du référentiel, puis on postule un principe de relativité d'échelle, suivant lequel les lois de la nature doi vent être valides quel que soit cet état. Il s'agit ainsi de construire une extension des théories existantes de la relativité, qui s'appliquaient jusqu'à maintenant aux changements d'état de position, d'orientation et de mouvement. Par conséquent, la structure de la théorie suit un cheminement parallèle aux différents niveaux de la théorie relativiste (galiléenne, einsteinienne restreinte puis générale), auxquels s'ajoutent les effets du couplage entre échelle et mouvement. LaurentNottale, né en 1952, est directeur de recherche au Centre national de la recherche scientifique, à l'observatoire de Paris-Meudon. II est spécialiste d'astrophysique et de physique théorique.