Au Fond Research Articles

Should German Courts Review Competition Law Awards on the Merits? Significance of the German Federal Supreme Court’s Decision of 27 September 2022

The extent to which courts are allowed to review arbitral awards for public policy violations in annulment or enforcement proceedings is a controversial topic. Recently, the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) conducted an exhaustive judicial review of an award (referred to as a ‘Révision au fond’), assessing its potential breach of competition law within the framework of Germany’s public policy. This marks the first time in more than five decades that Germany’s highest civil court has taken an unambiguous stance in the ongoing discourse. Even though BGH decisions have no binding effect for lower courts in Germany, it can be expected that other German courts will follow the decision for the purpose of a uniform application of the law. This article analyses whether German courts should take the BGH’s decision as guidance and similarly conduct a Révision au fond of arbitral awards relating to competition law. It is concluded that the BGH’s decision is not in line with the internationally prevalent view that a Révision au fond is to be prohibited. Moreover, the justifications provided by the court for conducting a Révision au fond are found to be only partly convincing. In fact, there are several points in which the BGH’s approach can be countered by arguments in support of a merely limited review. Révision au fond, full review, competition law, antitrust, BGH, public policy, ordre public, cartel senate, finality of awards, Germany

Дело о поджоге Рейхстага в 1933 г. с позиций психологической экспертизы достоверности показаний в Германии

The scientific discussion that has been going on in recent decades about the possibility and admissibility of examination of the reliability of testimony demands the study of some leading foreign countries experience, where such examination has long become a fact of practical jurisprudence. 
 The goal of the study is to analyse the theoretical insights of German scientists and experts into the most resonant facts from the perspective of modern psychological expertise.
 The object of the study is the case of the Reichstag fire, 1933. Marinus van der Lubbe, a worker from the Dutch Leiden, was accused of setting the Reichstag on fire and then sentenced to death. In 2007 the law on “Abolition of unjust judgments of the national socialist regime” (1998) granted a pardon to van der Lubbe without revision au fond. To this day, there are disputes about the involvement of van der Lubbe in organizing the arson and his guilt. The German psychologist Hartmut Böhm made an attempt to evaluate van der Lubbe’s testimony from the perspective of modern psychology and forensic psychological examination of the reliability of testimony. The article briefly outlines some results of this attempt to give a general idea of the logic of the developed and recognized tools applied.

AVILNet: A New Pliable Network with a Novel Metric for Small-Object Segmentation and Detection in Infrared Images

Infrared small-object segmentation (ISOS) has a persistent trade-off problem—that is, which came first, recall or precision? Constructing a fine balance between of them is, au fond, of vital importance to obtain the best performance in real applications, such as surveillance, tracking, and many fields related to infrared searching and tracking. F1-score may be a good evaluation metric for this problem. However, since the F1-score only depends upon a specific threshold value, it cannot reflect the user’s requirements according to the various application environment. Therefore, several metrics are commonly used together. Now we introduce F-area, a novel metric for a panoptic evaluation of average precision and F1-score. It can simultaneously consider the performance in terms of real application and the potential capability of a model. Furthermore, we propose a new network, called the Amorphous Variable Inter-located Network (AVILNet), which is of pliable structure based on GridNet, and it is also an ensemble network consisting of the main and its sub-network. Compared with the state-of-the-art ISOS methods, our model achieved an AP of 51.69%, F1-score of 63.03%, and F-area of 32.58% on the International Conference on Computer Vision 2019 ISOS Single dataset by using one generator. In addition, an AP of 53.6%, an F1-score of 60.99%, and F-area of 32.69% by using dual generators, with beating the existing best record (AP, 51.42%; F1-score, 57.04%; and F-area, 29.33%).

The exercise of the object

What is an object? A prior question: What is objecthood? Au fond, and to logic’s eye, object is a role to be played with respect to a thought (on a decomposition). It is to be a countable which that thought represent as being some way for such a countable to be; what restores the business of truth-of to that of truth outright. What plays that role for some given thought is then an object with respect to that thought. Given this, there are corresponding absolute notions, to be fit for this role, and to be fit only for this role. So the fundamental task here is identifying the conditions on playing this role at all. All this is a contribution, however limited, to a topic called ‘ontology’. This last word also occurs in the plural in several contexts. The end of this essay considers how these notions (non-countable, and the several countables) might relate, and what assumptions underlie what some have seen them to.

Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and the Malicious Muse

Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and the Malicious Muse Jeffrey Meyers (bio) “Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?” —Baudelaire, “Le Voyage” I From Homer in classical Greece to Milton in the English Renaissance, epic poets have invoked the sacred muses for inspiration. In a perverse rejection of this noble tradition, Baudelaire and Nietzsche did not seek inspiration from the goddesses, embodiments and sponsors of art, but pursued destructive women who tormented and humiliated them. The women they loved were foreign, exotic beauties. Charles Baudelaire’s Jeanne Duval was West Indian, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Lou Salomé was Russian. Both women followed the same destructive-yet-creative pattern. They made the writers suffer, suffering inspired their art and their art portrayed the malicious muses who made them suffer. Though permanently scarred, they wrote two of the most important works in modern literature: The Flowers of Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Baudelaire’s mulatto mistress, Jeanne Duval, had many traits in common with another muse, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets. She has dark skin and black hair, and causes exquisite pain in love: “If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head” (Sonnet 130). Like the Dark Lady, Duval is mendacious: “When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her, though I know she lies” (138). Both are described as satanic women who drive their lovers to damnation: “To win me soon to hell, my female evil” (144), and as beauties who end up as carrion: “Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, / Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?” (146). [End Page 543] Hostile to and resentful of women but enslaved by his passion for Duval, Baudelaire compared love to a surgical operation in which he was a patient etherized upon a table. He thought women were all flesh and lacked noble spirit, and exclaimed with wild exaggeration: Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable. I have always been astonished that they let women inside churches. What conversation could they have with God? Woman doesn’t know how to separate the soul from the body. She is simply like an animal. (Starkie, 1958, p. 90) And that’s exactly what he found appealing. “The strange thing about woman,” he added, “her pre-ordained fate, is that she is simultaneously the sin and the Hell that punishes it” (1958, p. 90) with Baudelaire as the damned and willing sacrificial victim. Duval’s background, despite extensive research, remains obscure. Her grandmother was a slave and prostitute (the family’s traditional occupation), born on the Guinea coast of West Africa. Duval’s mother, also a slave, was born in the West Indies. Duval was born around 1820, the year before the birth of Baudelaire. The photographer Nadar, Duval’s lover before Baudelaire took over the emotional burden, said she came from the Caribbean. Several sources, without providing firm evidence, specify the island of Haiti as her birthplace. Duval aspired to be an actress but lacked talent, and in 1838 played bit parts (“Dinner is served, Madame”) on the Paris stage. In June 1841, Baudelaire’s severe stepfather, Jacques Aupick, sent the twenty-year-old on a long voyage from Bordeaux to Calcutta, which was meant to remove him from bohemian life and end his dissolute habits. He had a brief liaison with an Indian nursemaid on the ship, and visited the tropical islands of Réunion and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. But he hated the passengers and the boring voyage, left the ship in October and, stopping en route in Cape Town, sailed back to France. In February 1842, soon after his return to Paris, Baudelaire began to court Duval—who was used to pretty rough treatment—like a wealthy suitor, with hothouse flowers and elegant carriage rides. He soon set her up in her own apartment, [End Page 544] which she richly furnished in oriental style. The poet Théodore Banville, who had also enjoyed her favors before Baudelaire, described her unusual mixture of debased and lofty qualities: “She was a colored girl, very tall, who carried her superb head covered...

Tennessee Williams, dramaturge et peintre : Vieux Carré et Something Cloudy, Something Clear à l'intersection entre texte et image

“Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence”, Tennessee Williams wrote in 1951 in an essay devoted to The Rose Tattoo, entitled “The Timeless World of a Play” (61). What the statement reveals is the American playwright’s conception of art as a means of fighting against the passing of time, against the “awful sense of impermanence” (61) that never stopped haunting him. But the stage is not the only place where, as Williams wrote in the same essay, “time is arrested in the sense of being confined” (61). The sketches and paintings he made throughout his life reveal the same obsession with time, the same desire to freeze the intensity of the moment into the work of art. Two paintings, made in 1975 and 1977, shed new light on two of his late plays, Vieux Carre and Something Cloudy, Something Clear. Written at the end of his life, both plays are attempts at capturing the totality of experience. In them, Williams intertwines past and present, life and art, combining movement and stasis to achieve a synthesis his paintings echo, or mirror, though in a very different way. The examination of these unknown paintings in relation to the plays is meant to engage us in a dialogue between texts and images. What the dialogical perspective reveals is a temporality that is circular rather than linear, anachronistic rather than chronological. Williams the painter and Williams the playwright blur the limits of space and time to reach that region where the distinctions between text and image collapse as one becomes the mirror of the other, its “horizon,” as Jean-Luc Nancy writes in Au Fond des images. There, words fail and figures dissolve; there, silence and haziness confront the reader/spectator with the timelessness of art, not as something eternal or transcendent, but rather as a magic interval where the intensity of the vanishing moment can be captured. In the scripts of his plays as well as in his paintings, Williams faces us with the mystery of time, with an elusiveness that he considers as the only true essence of his art. Through a comparative analysis of two of his paintings with two of his late plays, I intend to show how the verbal and the visual interconnect in Williams’s art, how his texts as well as his paintings convey a sense of “intense immobility” that is the artist’s way of beating “the game of being against non-being” (Williams 2009, 61).

Reciprocity and the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments: a lot of bark but not much bite

This article’s main purpose is to analyse the implications of some recent developments relating to reciprocity on the practice of the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. It shows that reciprocity has become a toothless principle that should not pose serious concern. It also argues that even if it is not abolished entirely, reciprocity no longer plays a significant role in the field of the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments, and therefore, should not be an issue of concern for jurisdictions that accept the principle of recognition. This is because, the test for establishing reciprocity has now become so relaxed that the requirement will normally be met if it is shown that the courts of the rendering State are likely to recognize the enforcing State’s judgments. In other words, reciprocity can prove to be a serious hurdle only when it comes to the recognition of judgments rendered in a State that manifestly adheres to an unduly restrictive recognition regime such as regimes where recognition and enforcement are subject to the existence of a treaty or based on the outdated practice of révision au fond.

Against Recuperation: The Fictions of Art in L’ɶuvre

The exact status of Zola's has always been problematic. For Pissarro, it was livre romantique, for Edmond de Goncourt, in a no less double-edged judgment, bonne construction du roman vieux jeu. (1) Other early readers moved uncertainly between professed admiration for its emotional power and reservations about ideas expressed by l'ecrivainphilosophe in footsteps of Diderot and Balzac's Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu. Its critical reception, when it was first published, intuitively highlights generic admixture that a modern scholar like David Baguley has analyzed to such revealing effect. Yet Patrick Brady's compendiously titled study of 1968 accommodates its plurality in an exclusively recuperative direction that has seldom been properly challenged L'oeuvre d'Emile Zola- roman sur les arts; manifeste, autobiographie, roman a (2) And, over four decades later, even most authoritative of summations reverts to such terms of reference: S'agit-il d'un roman a clefs? C'est la lecture qui s'impose d'emblee, confirmed by fact that aujourd'hui, le debat critique continue, pour l'essentiel, de tourner autour des cles du roman. (3) Part of reason for this ubiquity of emphasis has been, of course, L'oeuvre's privileged position within attempts by art historians to cross disciplinary boundaries while, paradoxically (or unsurprisingly), losing from sight its fictional specificity. Exemplary in this respect is Kermit Champa's question-begging conclusion that Zola's novel of 1886 is, as he puts it, the most unreliable art-historical text of period (71). Wayne Anderson's apparently more judicious aside that character of Claude Lantier has been recklessly interpreted by many art historians as a portrait of (4) (82) is equally indebted to extraliterary, hors texte of real-life painter's friendship with Zola himself, brought to an end after forty years in famously ambiguous response Cezanne sent to him on receipt of a copy of L'oeuvre; (5) ensuing personal silence has provided not merely biographers with justification for treating novel as a roman a clef. The aim of this article, by contrast, is to alert its readers to properly imaginative processes of its composition. For by exploring from a very different perspective precisely those dimensions of foregrounded by Brady, we can both view this particular novel with renewed clarity and suggest wider implications of out rereading of Zola at some distance from habitual approaches to his aesthetic. Emblematic in this regard are novel's interpolated descriptions of Claude's grand tableau, some five meters by three and titled Plein air, vicissitudes of which play such an important narrative and symbolic role in text. Doubtless further encouraged, beyond approximate analogies of subject-matter and internal geometry, by hypothetical objection (voiced by character of Dubuche) to a depiction of ce monsieur, tout habille, la, au milieu de ces femmes nues (48), which had also scandalized Manet's contemporary critics, modern commentators have too often unhesitatingly identified fictional painting as a transposition of Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe. (6) It is, indeed, instantly recognizable as such, according to a respected Manet specialist. (7) But to look at description of Plein air much more closely is to be struck instead by significant differences between Claude's inventions and Manet's considerably smaller (208 x 264 cm) picture of 1863: Dans un trou de foret, aux murs epais de verdure, tombait une ondee de soleil; seule, a gauche, une allee sombre s'enfoncait, avec une tache de lumiere, tres loin. La, sur l'herbe, au milieu des vegetations de juin, une femme nue etait couchee, un bras sous la tete, enflant la gorge; et elle souriait, sans regard, les paupieres closes, dans la pluie d'or qui la baignait. Au fond, deux autres petites femmes, une brune, une blonde, egalement nues, luttaient en riant, detachaient, parmi les verts des feuilles, deux adorables notes de chair. …

Les Franciscains en Terre Sainte (1869-1889): Religion et politique: Une recherche institutionnelle (review)

Reviewed by: Les Franciscains en Terre Sainte (1869–1889): Religion et politique: Une recherche institutionnelle Romano Stephen Almagno O.F.M. Les Franciscains en Terre Sainte (1869–1889): Religion et politique: Une recherche institutionnelle. By Giuseppe Buffon. (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf and Les Éditions Franciscaines. 2005. Pp. 604. €58.) Giuseppe Buffon, currently a member of the Franciscan Order's Rome-based Antonianum (recently designated a pontifical university), has authored a study that is among the latest in a recent, and ongoing, spate of books about the Franciscans and the Holy Land. Coming on the heels of Giovannelli's La Santa Sede e la Palestina—La Custodia di Terra Santa tra la fine dell'Impero Ottomano e la Guerra dei Sei Giorni (2000), Pieraccini's Cattolici di Terra Santa 1333–2000 (published in 2003), and Fabrizio's Identità Nazionali e Identità Religiose. Diplomazia Internazionale, Istituzioni Ecclesiastiche e Comunità Cristiane di Terra Santa tra Otto e Novecento (2004), Buffon makes a substantial contribution to the unraveling and clarification of perennial and ever-present issues (some still unresolved or partially resolved) concerning the almost 800-year Franciscan presence in the Holy Land. [End Page 836] In what amounts to a well thought-out and well documented modern Apologia Pauperum, the forty-two-year-old Franciscan scholar (doctorate in history from the Gregorianum and in anthropology from the École des Hautes Études, Paris) begins by candidly admitting and then asking why—for centuries, and to this very day—the Franciscans have been perceived and judged (by some) to be "Moines inutiles . . . enfoncés au fond de leur monastère . . . incapables de faire du bien dans leur mission et de conserver plus longtemps les sanctuaires qu'ils se sont laissé enlever par les schismatiques" (p. 11). At the end of the nineteenth century, France—which had been the Order's protector for so very many years—tried to discard the friars and replace them with French religious (Carmelites, Christian Brothers, White Fathers, Assumptionists, Sisters of Charity, and Dominicans) who, in France's mind, would be much better in combating the Protestant efforts sponsored by England and Germany. Moreover, with the help of Cardinal Lavigerie, French diplomats had even convinced Rome (Italy and the Vatican) that it was time to replace the Franciscans. The friars, in turn, fought French nationalism with Franciscan internationalism. And the Franciscans won! Buffon, then, devotes the rest of his study to show just how and why the Franciscans were successful. In his opinion, the survival of the Holy Land Custody—at a time when political-religious forces were working for and predicting its elimination—did not occur because of good luck and a smiling fortune. Rather, the author demonstrates (and I think his adroitness in presenting historical documents proves) how, the Order's very organizational structure (or lack thereof, which Buffon describes as a kind of "anarchie rationelle") served as the bedrock of its successful resistance to European politics and ecclesiastical manoeuvres. Romano Stephen Almagno O.F.M. Holy Land Monastery Washington, D.C. Copyright © 2005 The Catholic University of America Press

Prosper Merimee le sang et la chair: une poetique du sujet (review)

Reviewed by: Prosper Mérimée le sang et la chair: une poétique du sujet Corry Cropper Chelebourg, Christian. Prosper Mérimée le sang et la chair: une poétique du sujet. Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard, 2003. Pp. 158. ISBN2256904741 Prosper Mérimée le sang et la chair: une poétique du sujet, marks the first number devoted to Mérimée in the Archives des lettres modernes series since Eric Gans' 1972 Un Pari contre l'histoire. In his book, Chelebourg analyzes two themes that punctuate Mérimée's works and have long merited a book-length study: violence and sexuality. He examines various incarnations of these themes in Mérimée's fiction and attempts [End Page 192] to explain them based on a theory of the sujet. This subject is "un être de langage" whose essence can be extracted from "toutes les productions imputables à l'imaginaire du sujet" – from fiction to correspondence to manuscripts – and whose objective is to repair "une 'difficulté d'être' par le jeu sur les signifiants" (8 – here and throughout, all italics within quotes are Chelebourg's). In other words, Mérimée's subject depicts violence and sexuality as he does, "dans le but de compenser les traumatismes infligés à l'image du moi" (9). Chelebourg's study of violence in Mérimée is without a doubt this book's most important contribution to Mérimée studies. He begins by situating Mérimée's representation of violence in the context of Classsical/Romanatic debate of the early nineteenth century, its graphic description antithetical to the Classical rules of bienséance. Chelebourg further points to the lack of metaphors in Mérimée's language and his affinity for the "sens propre" as an indication of his contempt for Classical conventions. Violence is shown brutally – it is neither romanticized nor hidden off-stage. At times, the descriptions of violence serve to reduce the human body to a mere object, to transform "les victimes en simples choses" (55). Indeed, violence is at the center of nearly all Mérimée's narratives, with every plot-twist leading to a culminating violent act. To explain the abundant violence, Chelebourg suggests that "le sujet mériméen ne fait . . . rien d'autre que de se rassurer sur sa 'tranquillité' d'homme du monde" (39). He continues: "Mérimée, au fond, paraît bien être plus friand de modernité parisienne que son inspiration ne le laisse paraître à première vue: friand, mais inquiet et toujours forcé de se rasséréner" (39). Mériméen violence, then, would be nothing more than a way to reassure the subject, through contrast, that he is safe and isolated from violence in Paris (which in the nineteenth century he hardly is). But Chelebourg does offer another explanation. In the most developed argument of the first half of his study, he argues that Mérimée depicts violence in order to assert his own virility, offended as it was in 1823 when "Mérimée s'était vu réformer par le conseil de révision pour 'faiblesse de constitution'" (68). As a result, the only way to prove he is a man is to demonstrate "sa virilité . . . par la cruauté de sa plume" (69). The second half of the book deals with "la chair." Beginning with an outstanding reading of La Double Méprise, Chelebourg looks at various problems of the flesh: sexuality, love, desire, temptation, adultery, defloration, etc. There are persuasive moments in this analysis, particularly the readings of Carmen and Tamango. But ultimately, Chelebourg explains that the reason Mérimée depicts sexuality as he does – as was the case with violence – is to compensate for fears and failings on his part. "Mérimée a peiné à être un homme. Sa conception de l'amour est façonnée par ces vexations, ces atteintes à l'image du moi" (80). Or elsewhere: "Les blessures intimes sont réparées par un déplacement de la relation amoureuse sur le terrain de cet esprit dont les caractéristiques principales sont la littérature, la vie de salon et l'érudition...

Postmodernism's Self-Nullifying Reading of Nietzsche

To the extent they have adopted a cafeteria-style approach to Nietzsche's trademark conceptions, kneading and molding his words into chimerical constructs, postmodernist philosophers inevitably remind us of Zarathustra's description of 'scholars': 'They work like mills and like stamps: throw down your seed-corn to them and they will know how to grind it small and reduce it to white dust' ( TSZ , II, 16). If so, how much significance might we attribute to any postmodernist's 'findings' of any textual nuances in Nietzsche's relativism and stylistic multiplicity - nuances which at one moment appear intimately to apply and at the next to be hopelessly impertinent to whatever point that postmodernist is straining to make? The answer ought to be clear: By maintaining that there exist no intrinsically privileged vantage platforms vis-à-vis any text whatever, postmodernists in effect subvert their own analyses, and thus leave every work they consider unaffected. In that sense, we should be on target to advance that postmodernists are, au fond , engaged in writing for the sake of writing; indeed, what delivers them from sheer irrelevance is nothing but their clamorous advocacy of universal egalitarianism. This, however, necessarily reaffirms the nature and hankerings of the 'race' of the last man, and thus perverts the teleological direction of Nietzsche's aesthetics. Those who regard postmodernism as a regressive movement must therefore attempt to set the record straight by arguing that Nietzsche's relativism is, in fact, only a means to the eventual (phenomenal) realization of his Übermensch idea.

I–Ian Rumfitt: Frege's Logicism

Frege’s logicism in the philosophy of arithmetic consisted, au fond, in the claim that in justifying basic arithmetical axioms a thinker need appeal only to methods and principles which he already needs to appeal in order to justify paradigmatically logical truths and paradigmatically logical forms of inference. Using ideas of Gentzen to spell out what these methods and principles might include, I sketch a strategy for vindicating this logicist claim for the special case of the arithmetic of the finite cardinals.

Benabou's Family Epic: A Story in Perpetual Labor

Bénabou’s Family Epic: A Story in Perpetual Labor Robert Elbaz (bio) Between Writing and Memory Postmodernist conceptions of literature have laid claim to the inability of the text to come to terms with its own narrative objects. Thus, the text has come to be apprehended no more as a synthetic totality, as was presupposed by the Realist ideological configuration, but as an indefinite process of incompleteness, in that the narrative cannot see its own end, given that it consists of an endless productive activity. The writings of Marcel Bénabou, “the definitively temporary secretary of the OULIPO” (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), 1 pose from the start the question of their generic affiliation. There is no doubt that given their Oulipian literary dimension, they reinscribe the textual practices inherent in the post-modern text, to wit, fragmentation, deconstruction and suspension—the basic strategies so characteristic to the post-modern novel in general. Indeed, Pourquoi je n’ai écrit aucun de mes livres and Jette ce livre avant qu’il soit trop tard, as well as his Epopée familiale —though in a less marked manner, 2 seem to be pure products of the Oulipian laboratory. They constitute, on the whole, metatextual elaborations on the activity of writing itself and its varied complex significations. But Bénabou combines as well another primordial dimension. For beside the self-reflexiveness of the writing activity in his books, (or should I say novels, though they resemble none), there is an autobiographical aspect, an attempt to recapture or rather (re)create a past without falling into the temptations or traps of the classical autobiographical (or biographical) narrative. However, for Bénabou, the question is how to reconcile an autobiographical project that manifests an irreducible socio-historical, ethnic, culturally and geographically determined identity with not only the tools and modes of expression that attempt to circumscribe it, but also with the activity of writing itself, which remains unsurpassable and at the forefront of the narrative experience. In this sense, his writings are doubly autobiographical, first and foremost the autobiography that involves the present of [End Page 47] writing and, second, the autobiography of that past the text attempts to relay in a most uncompromising way. For narration—and this Bénabou stresses time and again throughout his writings—cannot simply recover in a naive way the past that is presumably lying there waiting to be uncovered or recovered. That past is itself the product of the writing experience, and one cannot transcend this present of writing in order to get to that primary narrative content. This is why those memories at the bottom of the autobiographical venture are indissolubly connected to the very activity that seeks to render them. They are not only shaped by the writing experience; they simply have no being outside it. Au fond, tout mon embarras venait de ce que j’en étais resté à la vieille idéologie de mes vingt ans, qui ne concevait la littérature que comme dévoilement. Un livre n’a pas besoin d’être le reflet ou la transcription de quelque chose qui lui préexiste. Il est, tout simplement: on peut donc le créer de toutes pièces, sans crainte ni retenue, puisqu’il n’a d’autre justification qu’en lui-même. Pour contourner les obstacles qui m’avaient jusque là arrêté, il m’aurait fallu trouver un mode d’écriture qui ne risque ni de dévoyer ni de dévoiler son auteur. Une écriture en somme qui s’engendrerait elle-même. (P111) Hence the reason that the text concentrates mostly on the difficulties it has rendering those primary experiences. Autobiography, in contrast to the Western Rousseauist model, is limited in Bénabou’s case, and I believe in the case of all Maghrebian biographical narratives, to the ceaseless suspension of a story that perpetually fails to become a story for the simple fact that the narrative consciousness cannot let go of its problematic colonial past and tell it for what it was or may have been. The reflection of that past is caught repeatedly and obsessively within the linguistic meanderings of the narrative consciousness. For the...

Rape or Obscene Copulation?: Ambivalence and Complicity in Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia

Women In French Studies Rape or Obscene Copulation?: Ambivalence and Complicity in Djebar's L'Amour, lafantasia . . . lame de couteau dans la laine de l'abandon: tout à fait au fond, pourtant, comme une bête hurlant le refus, la révolte aveuglée, le durcissement dressé: 'Non!', un corps peut-il hurler 'Non!' en son profond et que ce soit pourtant un don?" Assia Djebar, Les Alouettes naïves Many Algerian women come to writing in French through the optic of war and inscribe in their texts a discovery of the female body and of personal sexual desire: "what we have is nothing less than a literary 'event'," as Marx-Scouras so accurately describes this contemporary problematic (174). Celebrating erotic self-discovery and sexual difference among women, western feminists have considered writers such as Assia Djebar a paradigm of liberation, despite accusations of imperialistic "internationalist" feminism that may be leveled at them as a result. Anne Donadey, for example, sees in the strategies structuring the use ofepigraphs in Djebar's L Amour, lafantasia an act of "reappropriating and subverting not only the discourse of (Western and Arabic) patriarchy about women, but also the discourse of colonialist imperialism about Algerians" (1 ??- ? 11). She relies on Irigaray's notion of mimicry to explain how Djebar's "deliberate repetition of a male discourse of female representation" (110) functions as resistance and illuminates "ce qui devait rester occulté" (qtd in Donadey 1 10, 74). Algerian women writing in French "sont aussi ailleurs" and thus are able to free themselves from the shackles of patriarchal discourse by virtue ofpositioning themselves at a vantage point above/beyond it (1 10, 74). Clarisse Zimra also reads liberation in Djebar's use of the French language, itself a legacy of colonization and war (or "war booty") deployed by Djebar against traditional Muslim subjugation of women. "She uses the colonizer's language against the colonized's own gender code, showing it for what it is, an argument ad feminam" (77). A means of escape from sequestration and the veil, French provides access to sexual liberation; it 42 Women In French Studies "brings freedom, a freedom expressed through the contrapuntal images of naked/clothed, covered/uncovered body" (77). Déjeux finds in Djebar similar reasons to applaud what could only be called a feminist consciousness. "Chez Assia Djébar nous découvrons avant tout la découverte du corps par la femme, la découverte ensuite du couple et de l'amour pour soi-même. Bref, la femme naît au monde, elle s'affirme elle-même et non plus en dépandence de l'homme, frère ou époux" (qtd in "The Evolution . . ." 11). Along the same lines, Tahon explores the use of homoerotic imagery as a form of subversion of the patriarchal economy of desire. While these readings are unquestionably valid on the one hand, it seems undeniable, on the other, that Djebar's relationship to French is at best ambivalent. Perhaps some of the feminist praise mentioned above may be on a certain level too hastily accorded, or rather, anchored in a convenient gloss of the problematic Djebar faces when writing in French as an Algerian woman. Several of these same critics have noted, to be sure, Djebar's ambivalence. In her analysis of Les Alouettes naïves, Zimra discusses the moment of sexual truth for the protagonist, Nfissa. "The last sentence remains poised between Man's passive fascination to watch and his active urge to sculpt; not much is left for Woman's desire to sculpt herself. As for Nfissa, the most intimate act uncovers absolute indifference" (74). Surprisingly, Zimra draws no conclusions from this revealing example of the lack of inscription of heterosexual female desire at a moment where, if any, it would most likely be located. In his article on the construction of textual identity of the colonized woman, Murdoch explores at great length Djebar's ambiguity in regards to the colonizer's language. Following Lacanian theory, he sees the central problem as one of the search for textual subjectivity: the Algerian woman desired as Other by the French and desiring as subject to be recognized in the oppressor's tongue (75...

The “six parts of tragedy” in Aristotle's poetics: Compositional Process and Processive Chronology

All students of the Poetics can see that Aristotle's theory of tragedy sometimes resembles a handbook on dramatic composition. The scope of this ‘resemblance’, however, is rarely acknowledged in modern times. ‘Aristotle's approach to tragedy’, writes Stephen Halliwell, is ‘au fond, a system of theoretical premises and reasoning.’ This, from the author of the most comprehensive, and most significant, discussion of the Poetics in recent years, sounds authoritative. It is none the less misleading.

The "Enforcement Clause": A New Development in the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments

relatively low level during most of the nineteenth century, the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments did not fully develop. Not until 1869 did the first modern treaty on recognition-the Franco-Swiss treaty-come into being; not until thirty years later was the second treaty-the Franco-Belgium treaty of 1899-signed. No multilateral convention to this effect was recorded. Recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments were mainly effected by the national laws of the countries concerned and were marked by cumbersomeness and heavy formalities. At common law, the original decision served only as prima facie evidence; it had to be examined by the executing court. Under the laws of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, it had to undergo revision au fond. In Holland, except in cases expressly provided for by law, judgments of foreign courts ... cannot be enforced within the kingdom (Art. 431 of Civil Procedure Code). The twentieth century has witnessed an expansion in the area of recognition of foreign judgments. The doctrine of reciprocity came to replace the doctrine of comity. The English case of Godard v. Gray (1870) and the American case of Hilton v. Guyot (1894) both embrace the doctrine of reciprocity. So did the British Administration of Justice Act 1920 and the Foreign Judgment (Reciprocity Enforcement) Act 1933. The latter Act removed two major difficulties. Previously, a new action had to be brought upon the foreign judgment; afterward the foreign judgment had merely to be registered. Before the 1933 Act, whether a foreign judgment was accepted as conclusive depended on case law; the 1933 Act provided a statutory

Naturwissenschaft und Ethik als paradoxe Sch�pfungen der Vernunft

The contradictory relation between Western science und ethics is attributable to the paradoxical nature of human reason. For the fundamental, intuitive (or Kantian a priori) concepts, thanks to which we construct reality from experience, turn out to be, au fond, mutually inconsistent. By contrast, the Far-Eastern world-view seeks to repress reason and thus avoid its troublesome paradoxes.

Canada's Immigration Policy: Some Comments

people concerned, but that would involve abandonment of the old environment, may be disregarded. 3. Self-deceiving professional interest. Social scientists who specialize in rural problems, or politicians who depend on rural voters, have a selfinterest in preserving the societies on which their work depends. But this may place at risk the real welfare of the rural population being 'preserved' against their need. At one point in his article (p. 214), Matthews comes close to raising these questions. He remarks that 'social scientists who have analysed the process of resettlement cannot be faulted for siding with the subjects of their concern' and follows 'but they can be criticized if they have failed to examine their own values and the extent to which these affect their decisions.' Regrettably, he does not pursue this latter insight with any reference to the kind of valueconfusing errors to which the social commentator may easily fall prey. I would suggest that some of these may be found in the emotional needs of social romantics and the career interests of politicians and academics. With this in mind, the identification of writers, researchers and politicians with people subject to their interest deserves closer scrutiny. To what extent is their 'commitment' based on true concern for the welfare of subject people? To what extent is such 'commitment' self-deceiving, in that it reflects, au fond, the emotional need of the commentator or the material interest of the analyst? We owe it to ourselves and to our public constantly to examine and re-examine our motives in this respect.

A Parisian Colloquy of 1566: Holy Spirit or Holy Church

Mary Stuart was accused of many things, but never of being a theologian. Nevertheless, at the end of the summer of 1561, the recently widowed and star-crossed Queen, in an extraordinary interview with the intrepid Reformer, John Knox, put her finger on what was perhaps the fundamental question of the Reformation. Concerning the respective credentials of the Kirk of Scotland and the Kirk of Rome, she pleaded: ‘Ye interpret the Scriptures in one manner, and they interpret in another. Whom shall I believe? And who shall be judge?’ Knox's reply was, au fond, an appeal to the Holy Spirit.

Some Philosophic Comments on Cultural History

Philosophy abstracts and generalizes and, au fond, it is normative. Philosophy of history, as a branch of philosophy, thus quite rightly attempts to find out of what logical stuff history is made and to make explicit the criteria by which the adequacy of historical work is to be measured. Still, it makes a difference from what vantage point a philosopher chooses to look at history, for the laws of perspective hold for concepts and logical features as much as they do for shapes and colors. There are advantages to being up close: while one take in little, what one sees appears in great detail. But there are at least two dangers in proximity, and not enough analytic philosophy of history has succeeded in avoiding either of them. If one's nose is too close, one may take the molehill for a mountain and mistake a peculiar local feature for a characteristic of the whole landscape. Some philosophers of history are too impressed by the very words historians use and are thus prevented from penetrating fully to the conceptual structure that lies beneath the verbal surface. And lack of scope gives rise to a second type of error. One forgets to look around to see what else might be examined and too readily concludes that what holds for the particular specimen that has been subjected to analysis holds for everything else as well. I want to make a small contribution toward the correction of this second consequence of myopia in the philosophy of history. Without enlarging the gap from great distances many things have a tendency to look alike I want to recommend that philosophic reflection about history consider more and different kinds of historical writing than it generally does. I shall do so by actually taking up some examples of historical work. History embraces more than writers about history sometimes appear to think more than the telling of stories about what happened, together with explanations of why the events in question occurred. Much else besides narratives so conceived is to be found in historical work that is produced by members of academic departments of history; and when one looks at history that is often done outside history departments or at least outside the tradi-