La DéontoLogie Ethnographique À l’Épreuve du Documentaire

This article offers a comparison of the legal suits filed by the interviewees against the director of the documentary être et avoir (to have and to be) with the rights of interviewees in ethnographic investigations, focusing particularly on image copyrights and labor law. To say that interviewees contribute to such investigations in anonymity does not solve the main problem - they are crucial to the investigation, marginal to the analysis, and then are assigned no publication credits. While information about the interviewees should remain confidential, this article argues, that contribution and role in the making of a publication should not be ignored.     

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.     

Des Considérations inactuelles au coeur de l'Occupation: Le Cogito à rebours d'Hélène Berr

Written in Paris during the darkest moments of the German Occupation, but only published in 2008, Hélène Berr's Journal was immediately hailed for its dramatic testimony and striking insights. With precision and lucidity, the young Jewish student at the Sorbonne records the human tragedies unfolding all around her in the wake of the Holocaust, while at the same time reviewing her own manner of experiencing these traumatic events through her personal reflections and emotions. The present article analyses her astute and poignant observations in the light of Emmanuel Lévinas's notion of the ethically grounded subject. Beyond its documentary value, Hélène Berr's Journal thus takes on significant philosophical dimensions. At the same time, Lévinas's concept of the Other's incursion into the realm of the self proves to be firmly anchored in the firsthand experience of the twentieth century's greatest historical catastrophe.

Écrit aux jours les plus sombres de l'Occupation de Paris, mais publié en 2008 seulement, le Journal d'Hélène Berr s'est tout de suite présenté comme un insigne témoignage. De manière aussi précise que perspicace, Hélène note les drames qui se déroulent tout autour d'elle tout en revenant sur tout ce qu'elle parvient à vivre et à penser au jour le jour. Nous nous proposons de lire ce Journal à la lumière d'Emmanuel Lévinas et de découvrir ainsi la profondeur non seulement humaine mais aussi philosophique de ce carnet intime tout en confirmant l'ancrage de la pensée de l'Autre dans le vécu historique de la plus grande catastrophe du XXième siècle.     

Un « Artiste Connaisseur» ? L’Expertise du Restaurateur Dans L’Institution Muséale à la Fin du XVIIIe Siècle

The conservator's expertise is defined in Paris in the museum at the end of the 18(th) century. On the one hand, this article analyses the competences claimed by the conservator in order to give proof of his expertise and to create a professional identity distinct from other implicated actors. On the other hand, this text shows how this expertise is constructed through the collaboration between the curator and the conservator, and underlines the negotiation and porosity of their respective fields of competence.     

L’articulation du scepticisme religieux et du scepticisme profane dans l’Histoire du scepticisme d’Érasme à Spinoza, de Richard H. Popkin

The History of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza by Richard H. Popkin is not just an account of various sceptical doctrines of the 16th and 17th centuries: a thread gives the whole a coherence. In fact, a general conception of modern philosophy underlies his analyses. According to Popkin, philosophy, from the Renaissance to the Englightenment, was faced with the difficulty of overcoming the sceptical crisis which was born in the context of a religious quarrel and which quickly spread to all other intellectual fields. Thus, Popkins gives an original interpretation of modernity, an interpretation that can be questionned nevertheless in so far as he does not make a clear enough distinction between modern and ancient scepticism and does not take into account the specificity of fideism.     

Les Berlaimonts. Manuels Plurilingues à L’usage des Marchands (XVIe–XVIIIe Siècle)

From the 16(th) 16 to the 18(th) century, a plurilingual manual attributed to No?l de Berlaimont, a schoolmaster in Anvers, met with unprecedented success. This article sheds light on the role and evolution of this type of manual by looking at its social and cultural context - the transformation of commercial and urban culture. This transformation triggered a revolution in the material shape of knowledge, and plurilingual textbooks were both symbols and engines of this transformation.     

L’autobiographie allemande du XVIIIe siècle,interprétée à la lumière de la sociologie de niklas Luhmann

With the help of Luhmann’s theory, this essay tries to define the connection between the boom of autobiographical writing in the late 18th century and the rise of the middle classes. Central to this, is his definition of “career”, with which he describes the individuals’ behaviour in the new functional bourgeois society. Strictly speaking, the individual gains personal and social identity, through his or her spoken or written autobiography as can be seen clearly in Jung-Stilling’s autobiography, which was published bit by bit. The individual hereby improves its prospects of social advancement. On the other hand, K. P. Moritz in hisAnton Reiser describes his hero’s life as the “career” of a failure whose hyperactive imagination interferes with the formation of his identity. Thus autobiographical writing in the 18th century shows itself as the literary autopoiesis of the authors’ concrete individuality.     

Les « Causes Secrètes » Causalité et Déterminisme à L’âge Classique

The notion of the “secret cause”, which appears in many classical texts is tied to a particular practice of science and a conception of its methods where the “law” finds itself at the center of the nexus. If certain phenomena appear to escape the law, one is obliged to amend the law through the introduction of a series of “small equations.” If the calculation of probabilities is deployed, this is to precisely reveal causes which are, at their origin, secret, but which will gradually become less so and eventually conform to laws.