1989: THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF REVOLUTION

A failed effort at “reform from above” or a dramatic reassertion of “people power”? Almost thirty-five years on, studies of the Revolutions of 1989 continue to be framed by these two polarities. However, this historiographical focus has meant that scholars have often overlooked the actual content and character of protest itself. This article argues that one way of reinjecting agency and ideas back into our historical understanding of 1989 is through examining the chronopolitics of revolution: that is to say, by addressing how the control and interpretation of time became a political battlefield, a site of contention and negotiation, between Communist regimes, on the one hand, and political activists and society, on the other. Investigating events in the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia, the article contains two central claims: first, that an interrogation of the concept of “chronopolitics” can provide a new angle by which to grasp the revolutionary character of “1989” and the democratic transformations that resulted and, second, by way of inversion, that a study of the temporal experiences across 1989 and the early 1990s can in turn shed light on the analytical value of “chronopolitics” more generally.     

Social Exclusion: Towards an Analytical and Operational Framework

This article attempts to analyse the economic, social and political dimensions of social exclusion. After comparing the concept with the conventional notions of poverty and marginalization, we argue that social exclusion overlaps with poverty broadly defined, but goes beyond it by explicitly embracing the relational as well as distributional aspects of poverty. It is shown that the concept has universal validity although it has not gained much attention in developing countries. Indicators to measure different aspects of social exclusion are discussed; in this context, the article considers how appropriate it might be to use precariousness of employment as a measure. Finally, methodological problems involved in operationalizing the concept as a tool of policy formulation to fight exclusion are underlined.     

Chardin et sonPhilosophe

Did “the old character, so intelligent, so crazy”, evoked by Marcel Proust through Chardin’s self-portraits, depict himself in the projective mask of the wise man, in one of his most famous paintings, thePhilosopher of the Louvre? As the master of the still life wanted to rise in the hierarchy of the Academic ranks, he probably tried, in this early work, to make up for “this lack of training” in “the humanities”, through the representation of a character in keeping with current tastes, of a modern philosopher. A Philosopher, A Chemist in his laboratory, A Glass-Blower, or A Philosopher busy reading: is the painting of the Louvre (1734) an emblem? Our hypothesis, that this painting represents a chemist philosopher, not a quack or an alchemist, is constructed by comparing the painting with the lampoon entitledThe Philosopher, circulated, according to Voltaire, in the 1730s.     

Micro-imagerie de matériaux anciens complexes (I)

This article aims at presenting the first results of a transdisciplinary research programme in heritage sciences. Based on the growing use and on the potentialities of micro- and nano-characterization synchrotron-based methods to study ancient materials (archaeology, palaeontology, cultural heritage, past environments), this contribution will identify and test conceptual and methodological elements of convergence between physicochemical and historical sciences.     

ENTANGLED MEMORY: TOWARD A THIRD WAVE IN MEMORY STUDIES

This essay takes up the call for a “third phase” in memory studies and makes theoretical and methodological suggestions for its further development. Starting from an understanding of memory that centers on memory's temporality, its relation to language, and its quality as a social action, the essay puts forward the concept of “entangled memory.” On a theoretical level, it brings to the fore the entangledness of acts of remembering. In a synchronic perspective, memory's entangledness is presented as twofold. Every act of remembering inscribes an individual in multiple social frames. This polyphony entails the simultaneous existence of concurrent interpretations of the past. In a diachronic perspective, memory is entangled in the dynamic relation between single acts of remembering and changing mnemonic patterns. Memory scholars therefore uncover boundless cross‐referential configurations. Wishing to enhance the dialogue between the theoretical and the empirical parts of memory studies, we propose four devices that serve as a heuristic in the study of memory's entanglement: chronology against time, conflict, generations, and self‐reflexivity. Current debates on European memory permit us to explore the possible benefits that the concept of entangled memory carries for memory studies.