“Traverser les signes”: Michel de Certeau in Italy

Reconstructing the Uncertain Past: Cracked Docudramas That Question Their Own Authority

In 1974, Michel de Certeau published « L’opération historique », which was the first paper of the collective book Faire de l’histoire, now considered the “manifest” of the third generation of the École des Annales. In 1975, he reproduced this text in his proper book L’Écriture de l’histoire, with another headline, “L’opération historiographique”, in a version which was augmented of a third part. While comparing these two versions of a single text, we can understand how Michel de Certeau then considered the historian’s work, in the light of literary theory and psychoanalysis, at time when this position was rare among French historians. By the way in which Certeau undermined the distinction between archive and historical text, and between past and present, he went to characterize literary space as a democratic one, where all the speakers, dead or alive, are in an equal position.

This article considers the theme of discernment in the tradition of Ignatian spirituality emanating from the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). After a brief introduction which addresses the central problematic of bad influences that manifest themselves as good, the article turns to the life and work of two Jesuits, the 16th C English missionary to India, Thomas Stephens and the 20th C French historian and cultural critic, Michel de Certeau. Both kept up a constant dialogue with local culture in which they sought authenticity in their response to ‘events’, whether a hideous massacre which shaped the pastoral commitment and writing of Stephens in the south of the Portuguese enclave of Goa or the 1968 student-led protests in Paris that so much affected the thinking of de Certeau. Very different in terms of personal background and contemporary experience, they both share in a tradition of discernment as a virtuous response to what both would understand as the ‘wisdom of the Spirit’ revealed in their personal interactions with ‘the other’.

En 1974, Michel de Certeau publia le texte « L’opération historique » en ouverture du collectif Faire de l’histoire, considéré comme le « manifeste » de la troisième génération des Annales. L’année suivante, il le reprit dans L’Écriture de l’histoire sous un nouveau titre, « L’opération historiographique », et dans une version augmentée d’une troisième partie. La comparaison des deux versions du texte éclaire la manière dont Michel de Certeau définissait alors le travail de l’historien, à la lumière de la théorie littéraire et de la psychanalyse, à un moment où cette position était encore rare dans le milieu des historiens français. Par la manière dont il subvertit l’écart entre l’archive et le texte historique, entre le passé et le présent, Certeau construit l’espace littéraire comme un espace démocratique où l’ensemble des locuteurs, morts ou vivants, sont placés à égalité.

The purpose of this contribution is to show the various implications of the subject-theme of the threshold in Maurice Maeterlinck’s poetry and essays, connecting it to the platonic myth of the cave and to other philosophical references of modernity (De Certeau, Benjamin, Blumenberg, Bachelard, Durand, Deleuze) through a comparative method of crossed reading between literature and philosophy. The results obtained concern the subject-matter of the glasshouse, a central theme in Maeterlinck’s poetry, as a nocturnal centre of transvalorization, according to the imagination theory by Gilbert Durand; the importance of glass and silence as bodies of a mystical production of secret and cipher language, after the Loss of a direct symbol of Divinity (De Certeau); the presence of Leibniz’s categories of Possible and Virtual as interspaces between dead and living creatures, according to the interpretation of Leibniz’s thought by Deleuze; the importance of the cave in its relationship with the glasshouse as a space devoid of the perturbations of historical time and as utopia of the end of History (Benjamin, Blumenberg). The conclusion shows Maeterlinck’s evolution from a poetry of nocturnal closed space as wait of event (Death), to a day-like conception of nature as space of allegorical purification of desire, in contrast with the underground spaces of the totalitarian states. This conception finds in the figure of the temple-cave an important configuration, as the title of an essay of 1902: The buried Temple (Le Temple enseveli) shows.

L’esplorazione dell’arte armena iniziò nel diciannovesimo secolo grazie a storici dell’arte francesi, russi, tedeschi, finlandesi, austriaci e armeni e continuò nel ventesimo secolo prevalentemente con studiosi russi, armeni, ucraini, americani e italiani, che hanno portato all’attenzione del largo pubblico, non solo dei ricercatori, il patrimonio artistico di un territorio che supera i confini dell’attuale Armenia, e investe un’area definita Subcaucasia, termine con il quale si intende il territorio che dal Caucaso meridionale trapassa negli altopiani iranico e anatolico. L’interesse per l’arte armena, dai manoscritti miniati, ai khachkar, alle architetture, è cresciuto negli ultimi vent’anni conferendo a queste testimonianze una dimensione globale. Il volume illustra le caratteristiche, i temi e i metodi dei vari percorsi di ricerca emergenti dalle diverse tradizioni storiografiche tracciando così una mappa che aiuta ad orientarsi tra i fenomeni artistici e culturali di questo complesso territorio, fornendo diverse chiavi per comprenderli e ragionamenti utili per le future indagini scientifiche.

Reviewed by: Pour une histoire de l'intime et de ses variations Lesley Walker (bio) Anne Coudreuse et Françoise Simonet-Tenant, eds. Pour une histoire de l'intime et de ses variations. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009. 196pp. 20€. ISBN 978-2-296-10791-5. We have reached a historical moment when a wealthy young Amer ican can declare that privacy is no longer a "social norm." In an interview with TechCrunch, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, declared provocatively: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people" (cited in Huffington Post, 18 March 2010). And thus, in December 2009, Zuckerberg and his programming posse did away with the privacy settings of some 350 million Facebook users! This wunderkind of technological exhibitionism recalls, however unintentionally, the very debates that gave shape to our modern period. That is, the invention of the modern self as a being with an intimate and private subjectivity that somehow requires expression. The collection Pour une histoire de l'intime, edited by Anne Coudreuse and Françoise Simonet-Tenant, charts the historical contours of this evolution in France from the eighteenth century to the present. The editors begin by recognizing that their project reposes on the shoulders of scholars from the 1970s and 1980s such as Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Michel de Certeau, and Philippe Lejeune, [End Page 551] who inaugurated and gave legitimacy to studies about the non-events of everyday living among mostly ordinary people, including girls. They likewise acknowledge the group of French historians such as Philippe Ariès, Georges Duby, and Arlette Farge who undertook the vast project of writing a history of private life from the Greeks to modern times. With these impressive predecessors in mind, Coudreuse and Simonet-Tenant nonetheless stake out new ground by attempting a diachronic synthesis of the malleable and slippery concept of the "intimate." Here is how they put it: "En quoi l'histoire des formulations de l'intime s'écritelle dans un itinéraire qui nous conduirait de la conquête du droit à l'intime jusqu'à son exhibition en passant par son appropriation progressive et accidentée?" (10). The ten essays in the book also explore how and why the eighteenth century can be said to have invented the intimate; why the nineteenth century made it a central preoccupation; how diaries and personal journals construct a sense of intimacy; and, finally, whether the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century diktat to express publicly one's most intimate self caused some to lose their souls. The collection begins with two solidly researched articles by Véronique Montémont and Simonet-Tenant that trace the evolution of the term "intimate" from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Based on statistical analysis, dictionaries, and the BnF catalogue of titles, the two essays offer quantitative evidence that the term does indeed develop through time. Montémont describes how the notion of the intimate evolves from a relationship of affection with another person in the seventeenth century to the idea of a self with interiority before the Revolution, and, finally by the end of the nineteenth century, the term comes to signify depth and profundity in four separate spheres: physical, moral, relational, and ethical. In Simonet-Tenant's article, we witness a parallel development with the secularization of the confession and its displacement from the confessional to letters and personal journals during the eighteenth century. One would be remiss, however, to assume that confidences and secrets were always shared in letters and diaries. To the contrary, Simonet-Tenant offers persuasive proof of a slow evolution in letter and journal writing towards an emotive self with secrets to tell that becomes a hallmark of nineteenth-century Romanticism but is hardly present earlier. Jean Goldzinck's article on Voltaire provides, fittingly enough, a witty refutation of this fashionable trendiness by the master himself. Goldzinck's Voltaire has nothing to confess: "Indifférence à soi en tant que sujet individualisé, indifférence à toute instance de culpabilisation morale ou religieuse (qu'ai-je fait de ma vie?), indifférence aux tabous (l'homosexualité, l'argent)" (71). Philippe Lejeune's...

Questo contributo ricostruisce il contributo storiografico di François Hartog a partire dai volumi più recenti e introduce una breve intervista con il noto storico francese.

One of the central methodological issues for contemporary practitioners of comparative ethics is how to conceptualize and relate to the “other” encountered in cross‐cultural studies. A valuable resource for reflection on this problem is the work of the French historian and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, whose diverse opus coheres around his notion of heterology—a “science of the other.” In this article I explore perspectives on the cultural “other” emerging from Certeau’s analyses of a series of “travel narratives” documenting the European encounter with the peoples of the New World. Certeau’s meditations on the metaphor of the voyage, the interplay of orality and literacy, the politics of ethnography, and the semiotics of the “return of the repressed” offer, I suggest, important insights for comparative ethicists.

<titre>R&#233;sum&#233;</titre> In a historical perspective of the field of everyday studies, this article assesses the relationship between Michel de Certeau and humour. On the one hand, it points out the many occasions in which, in key moments of his work on the everyday, the French historian made reference to humour, even while without ever developing these signs of interest into a coherent part of his work. On the other hand, and using Daumier&#8217;s lithographic works on everyday city life, this article argues first for the usefulness of de Certeau&#8217;s work for the interpretation of comedy of manners. Finally, it argues for an analogy and unexpected relationship between humour and the everyday.

This dissertation studies the theoretical approach of history proposed by the French historian Michel de Certeau (1925Certeau ( -1986)), focusing on the way the author introduces some psychoanalytic concepts in his argument. The most important between the concepts chosen is the approach of language developed within the reading of Freud by the French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan, which allows the historian to question the supposed ties attaching history's methods and discourse to a certain conception of reality. This leads Michel de Certeau to a reflection on the incidence of a sort of freudian time in the act of writing history. On the basis of this development is Certeau's critics of the role played by institutions in the construction of knowledge and identity, for which elaboration he also convokes psychoanalysis. Certeau's epistemic and ethical concerns are assembled in the concept of "theoretical fiction", brought up by a long length study of Freud's work.

Reviewed by: Réforme catholique, religion des prêtres et “foi des simples”. Études d’anthropologie religieuse (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) by Dominique Julia Joseph Bergin Réforme catholique, religion des prêtres et “foi des simples”. Études d’anthropologie religieuse (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles). By Dominique Julia. [Cahiers d’Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol. 118; Sous-collection Ad Deum nfl 2.] (Geneva: Librairie Droz. 2014. Pp. 525. €75,00/$98.40 paperback. ISBN 978-2-600-01753-4.) Now that the quarante glorieuses of postwar French historiography are themselves becoming an object of increasing historical curiosity, several scholars who are little known to a wider public have been gaining the recognition they deserve. The golden age of the French historical sociology of religion, as it was called, was inspired primarily by the distinguished medievalist Gabriel Le Bras; the subsequent shift toward religious anthropology was the work of an early modernist who was the radical opposite of Le Bras, Alphonse Dupront. Dominique Julia managed the feat of being a disciple of both men! It was Dupront, who published scarcely anything during his lifetime, that founded an influential research institute, the Centre d’Anthropologie Religieuse Européenne (CARE), of which Julia, an indefatigable researcher and participant in collective projects, has been a pillar over the years. The essays in this collection cover only part of his oeuvre, as Julia has been active in several other major fields of research without ever abandoning his earlier terres d’élection. These include the history of schooling, literacy, reading habits, universities, colleges, teaching orders, pedagogical credos, childhood, pilgrimages, miracles, and historiography. Nor is this all: from the outset, his publications have been accompanied by the hard-graft of inventorying and editing extant sources. Hardly any of this enormously varied output, which runs to approximately 200 items, has been in book form, apart two early forays—one with Michel de Certeau and Jacques Revel on language politics during the French Revolution, another with Roger Chartier on education in early-modern France. This reviewer has long considered Julia a master of the extended and thoroughly researched monographic article, which has become so rare in any language today. Indeed, the volume under review contains two such publications—“La Réforme post-tridentine en France” (pp. 137–231) and “Un miracle à Paris en 1725” (pp. 343–410)—both of which have hitherto been available only in Italian publications that can be difficult to find. The first of them dates from 1973 and remains the most comprehensive and lucid synthesis of the research done by Le Bras’s disciples on pastoral visitations as a source for the history of popular religious practices. It is supported here by two further essays on the Tridentine reform’s campaign to separate popular “profane” culture from authorized religion and on the culture of the French clergy in Champagne, one of whom, the famous Jean Meslier, was a secret atheist. A major debate of the 1970s concerned the subject of de-Christianization before 1789. Julia’s long essay on that question deals with the evolution of the eighteenth-century Diocese of Auxerre, where the religious culture [End Page 639] imposed by a Jansenist bishop and clergy led to bitter divisions by the 1760s, prefiguring similar changes elsewhere in France. A third essay examines the political questions—an unusual subject for Julia—which produced an ever-widening gap between church and monarchy under Louis XV. By contrast, the essay on the 1725 miracle in Paris, which dates from 2007 and arose from more recent research inspired by Dupront on pilgrimages and miracles at the CARE, is unfortunately the most isolated of the collection and would have benefited from being flanked by one or more essays from Julia’s pen on this subject. Finally, as Julia is also a learned and astute guide to historians’ methodology, with an impressively wide range of interdisciplinary reference, it is no surprise that the volume opens with three essays on historiography, but with a characteristic focus on sources and their relative value. One of the essays reprinted here was first published in the celebrated 1970s collection Faire de l’Histoire. In 1995, Julia coedited Passés recomposés...

Journal Article Reviews of Books Get access The Possession at Loudun By Michel de Certeau. Translated by Michael B. Smith, with a Foreword by Stephen Greenblatt. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2000. xi + 251 pp £11. ISBN 0 226 10035 9. HENRY PHILLIPS HENRY PHILLIPS University of Manchester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French History, Volume 15, Issue 1, March 2001, Pages 111–112, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/15.1.111 Published: 01 March 2001

Reviewed by: Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History by Kara Reilly Minsoo Kang (bio) Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History by Kara Reilly. By Kara Reilly. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xii+200. $80. Recently published books on automata (self-moving machines designed to mimic living beings) have elucidated the significance of these fascinating objects from the perspectives of the history of science and technology, intellectual history, and cultural history. Kara Reilly’s new study of the topic makes a fresh contribution by looking at automata in terms of theatrical performance both literally, in the sense of an entity that appears onstage, and figuratively, as a descriptive representation of humanity in written texts. The book does not provide a continuous history of automata as theatrical objects, nor does it restrict itself to a comprehensive analysis of a single episode in that history. Rather, the author presents illuminating discussions [End Page 971] of the object’s appearance in five different historical contexts. As it is explained in the introduction to the book, this strategy is deployed to illustrate “historical breakages,” as described by Michel de Certeau, in which meanings attached to certain objects, ideas, and events sometimes undergo radical and unexpected changes. One of the book’s central topics is the automaton’s capacity for the mimicry of life and the complicated role it played, as such a mimetic machine, in the perennial Western debate on the relationship between nature and art. The first chapter deals with the role of the automaton in the history of iconoclasm, focusing in particular on the negative emotional reaction the object aroused among Christian theologians and activists, from Augustine of Hippo onward, who were wary of idolatry. Reilly recounts the fate of the sixteenth-century Rood of Grace, an image of Jesus that could mechanically move its head and facial features, that was destroyed by English Reformers. The second chapter moves to the seventeenth century, when Descartes and other mechanistic thinkers described the human body as an automaton designed by God that was joined with the immaterial soul, an idea that found a receptive audience in that machine-obsessed age. Reilly also provides a good account of actual hydraulic automata in royal gardens that inspired Descartes. The third chapter begins with a description of the remarkable mechanical theater at the Schloss Hellbrunn Palace Gardens in Salzburg, Austria, which features many moving figures of townspeople working at their tasks. Their performances, and those of eighteenth-century works by Jacques de Vaucanson and Pierre Jaquet-Droz, provide vivid illustrations of Reilly’s argument that the early modern period saw the transformation of automata from “aristocrats to autocrats.” The fourth chapter deals with fictional automata of the nineteenth century, beginning with Olympia from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 story “Der Sandmann.” Through her expertise in theater history and theory, Reilly presents enlightening accounts of theatrical works that were inspired by the Hoffmann story, as well as of highly original productions of the works onstage. The last chapter discusses Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), starting with an insightful analysis of the work itself, which is followed by a discussion of the play’s reception in different countries and its impact on the broader modernist culture. Reilly’s episodic presentation of the automaton as an object of theatrical performance is an important contribution to our historical understanding. As she points out in the introduction, the issues it raises—both the hopes and the fears—about the mechanical reproduction of life and nature are very much alive in contemporary debates on cyberculture. The book unfurls vivid and often entertaining illustrations of the myriad emotional reactions that were aroused by these self-moving, life-imitating objects throughout the centuries of Western culture’s struggle with its own [End Page 972] identity. While the topics covered in the first three chapters have been discussed in several recent works on automata, Reilly provides a number of original insights into the topic in the last two chapters dealing with theatrical adaptations and interpretations of the automaton in the modern era. Beyond the consideration of the object as a technological and...

In October 1632, the small town of Loudun in mid-France was convulsed by the belief that the nuns of the town's Ursuline convent were possessed with devils. Over the following months and years, as the cries and shrieks of the unfortunate nuns became ever louder and their bodily writhings more obscene, Loudun became a place of celebrity as a procession of priests, doctors, politicians, and tourists came to witness the extraordinary spectacle for themselves. The possession was not shortlived, and the execution of the supposed sorcerer, the parish priest Urbain Grandier, did not bring the closure that some hoped it would. The exorcisms of priests and the ministrations of doctors were to little effect, and there seemed to be no hope of deliverance until the arrival of the saintly Father Jean-Joseph Surin in Loudun in December 1634. Within a few months, the mother superior, Jeanne des Anges, was delivered from her demons, although the last devil was not reported to have departed until 1637. In his extended study of this remarkable episode, the French historian Michel de Certeau is not so facile as to provide a definitive (or even provisional) “explanation” of these happenings. But he does interpret them as, among other things, a “symptom” of a trauma – what might be described as the trauma of the birth of modernity. He says that the “diabolical crisis” (of which the Loudun possession was just one instance) “is not merely an object of historical curiosity. It is the confrontation (one among others, though more visible than others) of a society with the certainties it is losing and those it is attempting to acquire.” One of the certainties this society is losing is that of theism , and de Certeau sees in the possession an indirect expression of a repressed anxiety and fear of doubt and blasphemy. Such doubt was becoming a common feature of society at this time, with atheism emerging as a recognized phenomenon, in a way that was unknown a century earlier.