L’animal, entre personne et chose?

The contemporary call for a respect of nature finds one of its concrete applications in the theme of animal rights, either understood as a «natural right» applied to the living or as a positive right describing new relationships between the members of the community of all natural beings. Law, defined as an emanation of some possessive «humanism», is urged to acknowledge a newscala natur? and to give a fresh look upon living beings, by throwing into confusion its own notion of Subject, getting rid of anthropocentric and metaphysical norms. In such a debate, what is involved behind the appearance of a plastic and instrumental concept of Subject, is the very banalization and finally, in different ways, the destruction of the Subject. The conflict between Human rights and the right to live is not a social problem, but clearly appears as one of those which show the urgency of the neverending question of man’s essence in relation to the confused and contested specific difference between man and animal.     

Gisèle Halimi entre plainte et plaidoyer: ‘On naît avocate,on ne le devient pas’

This intellectual portrait of defence lawyer and feminist activist Gisèle Halimi tests the hypothesis that her writings function like one long closing argument in a courtroom, where a passionate ‘I’ fights for Justice not only by making sure that the Law is upheld but, when necessary, trying to change the Law with the weapons authorised by the judicial system—narratives and stories. Each word is at the service of the overall agenda. One of the unexpected textual consequences of this ethical position is that it becomes radically impossible to separate autobiography from history, or the voice of the renowned public figure of Maître Halimi from Gisèle's ‘I’.     

Sur le terme yóga,le verbe yuj- et quelques-uns de leurs dérivés dans les hymnes védiques

Summary The term yóga must have designed an essential part of the sacrificial cult as known in the gveda: the putting in motion (“Int?tigkeitsetzen”, following Geldner), the launching of a specific activity with the ultimate goal to yoke, to join together or to pair the objects and the entities which match or can match each other or which can be viewed as comparable and even identical according to Vedic archaic speculative thought. Vedic sacrifice is in fact a powerful explicatory device, a set of gestures and of designs condensing a speculative experience. The verb yuj- and its derivates translate thus one of the central themes of the Vedic religion where the poet officiating in the sacrifice has to proclaim the connections and the identifications between the phenomena to be correlated (“yoked, harnessed”). The hippological vocabulary in the gveda as applied to the representation of the speculative practice is less an accidental metaphor than a true and meaningful translation of one of the basic principles this practice.      

La vertu des images. Analogie, proportion et métaphore dans la genèse des sciences sociales au XVIIIe siècle

Moral newtonianism, in fashion by the middle of the XVIII^th century, is not only a metaphor. Based on the oneness of nature, it assumes a law of society equivalent to the law of distance innewtonian physics, perhaps offering the possibility of measurement. This method of inductive analogy (A/B=C/D) underlies Jean-Jacques Rousseau'sSocial contract: Rousseau uses classical metaphors of clockwork, modeling his notion of government on a watch and including mathematical proportions used by clockmakers to design the parts. Similarly, in hisTheory of moral sentiments, Adam Smith uses the old metaphor of the eye of the mind, modeling his social system on the recent notions of perspective: two persons, when they meet, will regulate their passions — of any type except interest — according to an imaginary distance between them, which varies according to the nature of the passion and its level. It is essential to restore these translations and the subsequent debates in order to understand the implications for sociology throughout the XIX^th century.     

Mémoire et histoire dans un roman graphique en six volumes: double jeu,infotainment, obsession française?

In October 2012 the sixth and last volume of the graphic novel Il était une fois en France [Once upon a time in France] was released. The six volumes, published at the rate of one per year since September 2007, cover the 60 years of the Jewish protagonist's life. It spans the time from Joseph Joanovici's birth in Kechinev [today's Moldavia] in 1905 to his death, alone and ruined, in Paris in 1965, and covers his four years of collaboration and resistance in Occupied France that saw him become a multi-millionnaire. The series is acclaimed by the public and critics alike. My article demonstrates that this graphic novel cannot belong to what Henry Rousso, in his book Le Syndrome de Vichy, called ‘the French Obsession’, but rather, its narrative qualities, which emphasize the protagonist's ambivalence by using techniques similar to those used in movies like Once upon a time in America and Miller's crossing [both of which are cited by the series' authors in several interviews and are obvious in the visual and narrative style of the series], place this graphic novel in what I see as a new period of infotainment that is closer to the new generation of readers who are immersed in globalization and the spectacularization of history.