De Bergerac Research Articles

Social and technological aspects of the European utopia of Modern times

The subject of the study is the social and technological aspects of the European utopia of Modern times. The European utopia was influenced by the most iconic images and plots of the ancient and Renaissance utopia. It embodied and reinterpreted the images and plot elements of the famous "State" of Plato, the utopias of T. More and T. Campanella, the model of the ideal Christian state presented in the treatise "Description of the Christianopolitan Republic" by I.V. Andre (1586-1654). The article gives a general description of the New European Utopianism based on the concepts of F. Bacon, S. de Bergerac, S. Fourier. If in the Middle Ages social inequality and injustice were considered an expression of the natural order of things or a consequence of the imperfection of human nature, then in later periods of history people begin to try to improve the life of society through changes in the political, economic and social structure. The scientific novelty of the research topic is due to the correlation of European Utopianism with the most pronounced socio-cultural characteristics of the era. In the Renaissance, the social utopia was considered by the authors in an inextricable relationship with the architectural and urban aspects of the formation of the human habitat. In the Modern era, social utopianism correlates with technological utopianism. The conclusions of the article include the characteristics of the utopia of the XVIII century, when the utopians' attention is most focused on the legislative and political organization of society, as well as the XIX century, when the optimal economic structure is considered the key to social well-being.

Diagnostic Concepts of the Unconscious as a Foundation of Romanticist Identity: Maine de Biran’s Psycho-Physiological and Psycho-Pathological Self-Investigations

ABSTRACT The foundations of psychoanalysis in the German idealist concepts of the reflexive human self have been the subject of detailed investigations devoted to the intertwined processes of introspection, consciousness, and the unconscious. Much less consideration has been given to the contemporary French spiritualist philosopher Maine de Biran (1766–1824), whose physiologically-oriented philosophical psychology was (partially) known in its essence by some of the founding thinkers of psycho-analysis. According to Biran’s explicitly anti-Cartesian notion of individual identity, consciousness is constitutively generated through voluntary corporeal effort—by the resistance implied in the act of (ap)perception. Biran’s shift from an empiricist and sensualist outward perception to a spiritualist introspection (sens intime) marks the turn from Enlightenment to Romanticism. In his chef d’oeuvre, the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie (1811–ca. 1813), he distinguishes four concentrically layered, heterogeneous spheres or systems of consciousness. At its core is the instinctively motivated système affectif (shared by both animals and humans), followed by the système sensitif that is still subordinated to affections, albeit interconnected with consciousness. The système perceptif involves the tactile and visual senses of attention, while the outer système réflexif of communication via cultural signage is critically interconnected with terminology-based experimental sciences. Departing from Biran’s crucial transformation of Leibniz’s term “petites perceptions” (1704/1714) to “impressions affectives” (1807), this article examines the functioning of the affective unconscious, as analyzed in Biran’s diary, his first treatise (1799-1802), and a speech on obscure perception (1807), delivered during sessions of the Société Médicale de Bergerac.

Cyrano de Bergerac, miroir (déformant) des connaissances et des idées démographiques du XVIIe siècle

de Bergerac (the real as opposed to dramatic character) was a free-thinking author of mid-seventeenth century, whose utopian tales imaginary journeys to moon and sun-contain numerous comments and anecdotes about life and death, men and women, sexuality and fertility, and other themes of interest to demographer. Unlike what has been done for other utopian authors, however, any attempt to identify a consistency in these disparate elements in order to outline the demographic doctrine of Cyrano would be pointless. This provocative free-thinker was more concerned to shock than to present a consistent analysis. Nonetheless, just as his fantastical machines and wild theories represent a skillful vulgarization of science of his day, so many details in his output can be viewed as caricatural yet accurate indicators of knowledge and attitudes of period concerning reproduction, eugenics, health, longevity, and even demographic ethics.

Six Memos for the Next Milllenium , and: Alienation in Giuseppe Berto's Novels (review)

Reviewed by: Six Memos for the Next Milllenium, and: Alienation in Giuseppe Berto's Novels Anthony J. Tamburri Italo Calvino . Six Memos for the Next Milllenium. Trans. Patrick Creagh. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. 130 pp. $12.95. Giacomo Striuli . Alienation in Giuseppe Berto's Novels. Potomac: Scripta Humanistica, 1987. 102 pp. $26.50. Italo Calvino is no stranger to the American reading public. His fiction has consistently appeared in English over the past three decades, and a collection of his essays, The Uses of Literature, appeared in translation only two years ago. This collection provided the English speaker with an array of essays never before available, which in turn offered the opportunity to witness a progression in Calvino's [End Page 723] intellectual development. A companion piece to The Uses of Literature, Six Memos for the Next Millenium offers the English reader an opportunity to understand more fully the later Calvino. Six Memos for the Next Millenium is divided into five chapters: "Lightness," "Quickness," "Exactitude," "Visibility," and "Multiplicity" (Calvino had planned to write a sixth, "Consistency," but he died before completing it). At the outset, Calvino wrote that he wanted to "situate [certain literary values] within the perspective of the new millennium." Although this effect is surely the case, Calvino also engages in a type of intellectual autobiography, as he often refers both to his own works and to those of his favorite authors. Thus, we find Cavalcanti, Dante, Ariosto, Leopardi, and Gadda, among the Italians; and Balzac, Flaubert, de Bergerac, Lucretius, Proust, Kafka, and, most importantly, Borges, among others. In discussing each "value," Calvino also brings into play its opposite. Whereas he extols the value of lightness, he also discusses weightiness. Calvino considers Cavalcanti and Leopardi two true "poet[s] of lightness"; yet he also recognizes that when even "Dante wants to express lightness, . . . no one can do it better than he does." But Dante's "real genius lies in the opposite direction . . . in transmitting the sense that the world is organized into a system, an order, or a hierarchy where everything has its place." Lightness, on the other hand, implies the absence of a hierarchy for Calvino, and he refers to Ovid (the Metamorphoses) as one who saw the "essential parity between everything that exists." The "weight of matter . . . dissolved" and the "equality of all existing things" are two major characteristics Calvino extols, especially in Cavalcanti. Placing all things on the same level allows for the greater multiplicity of things, "the combinatoria of elementary figures." In addition, lightness and parity constitute literature's underlying raison d'être for Calvino: he sees in literature "an essential function, the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of the world." More precisely, literature constitutes, for Calvino, "a search for knowledge . . . extended to anthropology and ethnology and mythology"; it is the notion of knowledge as encyclopedic, "a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world." Quickness, the second Memo, is not a value in itself for Calvino. Narration "is carried out on the length of time involved, an enchantment that acts on the passing of time, either contracting or dilating it." In fact, after a brief discussion of De Quincy, Leopardi, and Galileo, Calvino tells us that quickness means "above all agility, mobility, and ease, all qualities . . . where it is natural to digress, to jump from one subject to another, to lose the thread . . . and find it again after a hundred more twists and turns." As weight was important to lightness, so too is lingering important to quickness. Repetition and digression are two qualities pertinent to lingering; and Lawrence Sterne's greatest invention, according to Calvino, was the novel "composed of digressions . . . a strategy for putting off the endings." Indeed, the first two values recall Calvino's own literary production. His notion of combinatoria was never so evident as in the second half of his literary career (from the Cosmicomics to his latest, Under the Jaguar Sun). In his later works—Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night, and Mr. Palomar especially—Calvino put off endings as he went in search of "the equivalent of some inner energy, some motion [End Page 724...

MEMOIRES D'UN PROTESTANT

A French galley slave's description of an engagement in the Thames estuary between a fleet of French galleys under the command of Captain M. de Langeron of the French Navy and a British convoy under the protection of H.M.S. Nightingale (frigate 36 guns) on 5 September 1708. De Bergerac was a galley slave in the ship commanded by de Langeron. Translated from the original documents by LADY FAWCETT.