De Mort Research Articles

Berührung auf Todeshöhe: Maurice Blanchots Uneingestehbare Gemeinschaft (Bataille, Nancy, Duras)

Abstract Focusing on Maurice Blanchot’s La Communauté inavouable (1983), this text investigates possibilities of thinking and performing communities that interact with and constitute one another “à hauteur de mort” (Bataille).Following the twofold structure of Blanchot’s text, the first part of the essay in its first part unfolds the notion of communitas in order to show how Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and Jean-Luc Nancy formulated a new concept of community by distinguishing it from liberal, socialist, Christian or fascist forms of community that all had become extremely problematic by the beginning of the Second World War at the latest. By doing so they themselves performed an ‘unavowable community.’The second part of the essay engages with Marguerite Duras’ La Maladie de la mort, a novella that is the main subject of the second part of La Communauté inavouable. Here, the performative power of language is delineated by means of the idea of a ‘community of lovers’ that manifests itself, in contrast to romantic forms of togetherness and unity, precisely in the breakdown of communicatio and communitas.

Death and Fairy Tale

The music of the spectralist composer Claude Vivier is often considered through the lens of autobiography. However, from his abandonment as an infant to the circumstances of his murder at the age of thirty-four, certain aspects of Vivier’s life also seem to resist any straightforwardly autobiographical account. Borrowing the concept of “autothanatography” from Jacques Derrida and others, this essay explores how Vivier’s works inscribe a relationship to death, to the end and impossibility of autobiography, into its very origin. I argue that such an inscription occurs prominently in Vivier’s musical and dramatic portrayals of childhood, particularly those in Kopernikus: Opéra—Rituel de mort and Lonely Child. Drawing on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s writing on queer childhood and Lee Edelman’s early essay on homographesis, I further argue that this displacement of the autobiographical in Vivier’s works is also marked by his sexuality, or, more precisely, by its spectral repercussions.

Literaturas de la pena de muerte o Hugo contra Kant. Para una deconstrucción del hombre

A partir del Séminaire La peine de mort de Jacques Derrida, el artículo centra su atención en aquello que la literatura de la pena de muerte ha excluido. Poniendo a dialogar el abolicionismo de Hugo con el anti-abolicionismo de Kant, el texto escribe una interpretación de ese diálogo desde cierta violencia sexual. Se trata de pensar qué ocurriría si preguntásemos: ¿es la pena de muerte lo propio de la mujer?

The Traumatic Structure of the récit de mort: Camille Laurens’ Philippe

One year after the perinatal death of her son through medical negligence, Camille Laurens published Philippe (1995), a brief récit de mort detailing the conditions which led to his loss, and her own grieving process. This article proposes that the immediacy of the scriptural act gives the reader direct access to the traumatic scene. Through pronounced hybridity and fragmentation, Laurens reproduces in textual form her own experience of trauma. The text is a site which replicates the incomprehensibility of the traumatic encounter in a twofold manner, for both writer and reader. The death of a child as a “limit-experience” (Wilson) exceeds the bounds of representation and challenges the strictures of a flowing narrative.

From Deconstruction to Disaster (Derrida, Blanchot, Hegel)

Derrida's Glas (1974) found one of its most attentive readers in Maurice Blanchot, whose fragmentary volume L'Ecriture du désastre (The Writing of the Disaster) (1980) responds in a number of ways to Derrida's book, in particular to its reading of Hegel. This article retraces the silent dialogue between Derrida and Blanchot as it unfolds in the two texts mentioned as well as in several others, including some of Blanchot's earlier essays and fiction, notably La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day) and L'Arrêt de mort (Death Sentence).

Filming the face of death: representations of the perpetrators in S-21, la machine de mort Khmère rouge and The Act of Killing

The present work explores the depictions of the executioners in the documentaries S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (S-21, la machine de mort Khmère rouge, Rithy Panh, 2003) and The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, 2012). In this analysis we study different strategies used in both films to make present the past through the memory in the body language and the processes of empathy. Torturers and murderers from the Khmer Rouge regime and from the killings of communists in Indonesia between 1965 and 1966 take part of these strategies to reveal the past. To such purpose, this study firstly proposes a reflection on the way the dominant modes of representation have depicted both historic episodes; and then a three-phase study determined by the strategies applied by both filmmakers: confrontation between the victims and the executioners, reenactment of the acts of torture and killing and the persistency of the past in the today empty spaces. The film analysis is applied on the mentioned films, focused on the analysis and depiction of the mise-en-scène and the expressiveness of the faces of the executioners, and particularly on those sequences that display a shared discourse by both directors.

Conduite à tenir devant une dyspnée obstructive haute – questions

Le geste suicidaire chez l’enfant est un phénomène rare et dramatique. En 2011, 36 enfants se sont donnés la mort (Cepidc). Dans l’ordre de fréquence, les moyens les plus utilisés sont la pendaison, l’auto-intoxication, le saut dans le vide et la décharge par arme à feu. Le développement de la notion de mort chez l’enfant s’acquiert progressivement. Le sens du mot suicide est compris aux alentours de 8 ans mais il n’est pas nécessaire que l’enfant ait une représentation aboutie de la mort pour effectuer un geste suicidaire. La médiatisation de tels gestes, l’émoi qu’ils provoquent ainsi que la difficulté à les étudier scientifiquement nous invitent à une rigueur particulière sur la lecture des études et l’interprétation des résultats. Nous ne disposons pas encore de théories ni de recherches sur le traitement du processus suicidaire chez l’enfant. Les principales recommandations consistent à prendre au sérieux les idées suicidaires, à privilégier la sécurité du patient en cas de situation aiguë, à mener une multiple évaluation, à empêcher l’accès aux moyens létaux et à mettre en œuvre une prise en charge maximaliste, dirigée et planifiée.The suicidal gesture at the child is a rare and dramatic phenomenon. In 2011, 36 children committed suicide in metropolitan France. Among these children, 27 (75%) died by hanging, strangulation and oppression, 4 (11%) died by auto-poisoning, 4 (11%) died further to a jump in the space and 1 (3%) died by discharge of a firearm. Twenty-three were boys and 13 of the girls. Suicide attempts at the child are more difficult to quantify. Three French studies having concerned the suicide attempts of the minors under age 15 show that the girls are more numerous than the boys. Most of the suicide attempts take place in the family place of residence by voluntary medicinal ingestion. The development of the notion of death at the child acquires itself gradually and requires to understand five fundamental notions: the termination of biological office, the irreversibility, the unpredictability, the universality, the determinism and the inescapability. The sense of the word commits suicide is understood near 8 years whereas most of the children know how to name at least a means of potentially mortal auto-aggressive acting out. The clinical presentations show that it is not necessary that the child has an accomplished representation of the death to make a suicidal gesture. The suicidal gesture does not still mean a real will to die but frequently the wish to obtain a change of his own internal state or the state of its environment. Rather than to die, the patients wonder how to exist. The mediatization of such gestures, the emotion, which they so cause, and the difficulty studying them scientifically invites us in a particular rigor on the reading of the studies and the interpretation of the results. It seems besides essential to distinguish the childhood of the adolescence in the epidemiological studies, to watch the definition of the suicidal gesture which is used, to be all eyes in the excessive generalization of the results, to distinguish staff and rates of committed suicide, to distinguish the causes and the suicidal motives, to study the rate of rescue and to examine the method of interrogation of the patients. We do not still arrange theories nor researches on the treatment of the suicidal process at the child. The main recommendations consist (1) to take seriously suicidal elements (ideation, threat), (2) to practice a somatic examination in case of actual suicidal gesture, (3) to use a protocol of dismantling of the crisis, (4) to practice a multidisciplinary evaluation following the rule of “4 evaluations” (evaluation of the risk factors, the family and social situation of the child and the possible elements of danger, evaluation of a psychiatric pathology, evaluation of the psychological processes, evaluation of the suicidal process [preparatory behavior, suicidal ideation…]), (5) to relieve immediately the suffering of the child, (6) to imply families and social network and to inform the patient and the circle of acquaintances about the care, (7) to prevent the access to the lethal means, (8) to practice a structured, managed and strategic maximalist care, (9) to implement a suicidal monitoring at the exit of hospitalization (regular and moved closer consultations, phone reminder, house call), (10) to operate a follow-up of prevention of the suicidal relapses, (11) to establish the long-term treatment (ambulatory, psychotherapy, etc.). Most of the authors recommend the development of a better accessibility of the professionals to the formations in suicidology and a regular supervision for those who are daily confronted with acts or threats containing such violence.

Voidance: Linguistic Negativism in Maurice Blanchot's Fiction

This article charts the shifting patterns of linguistic negativism in Maurice Blanchot's fiction, from his early works of the mid-1930s, through the novels of the 1940s, to the major recits from L'Arret de mort (1948 )t oL'Instant de ma mort (1994). Particular attention is paid to Blanchot's deployment of negative affixes and negative modifiers. This stylistic analysis provides the groundwork for my exploration of the 'voidance' of the semantic in Blanchot's fiction, achieved through an epanorthotic retraction of the said that becomes ever more prevalent, reaching its most extreme form in L'Attente, l'oubli (1962). This voidance serves as a form of resistance to semantic hypostatization and reification, but at the risk of an evacuation of sense. Through a charting of these patterns of linguis- tic negativism, and an appreciation of their function as a form of voidance, it becomes possible to detect a trajectory away from a prose that recalls Mallarme ´, through one that recalls Kafka, to one akin to Beckett's. Analysing this trajectory, this article aims to situate Blanchot's writing of the negative within a broader, language-sceptical tradition that achieves its literary flowering in European late modernism.

Albert Camus: le souci des autres

This mercifully brief addition to the plethora of publications coinciding with the centenary of Camus's birth is partly based on two previous studies by Ève Morisi. Distinguishing Camus's souci from Foucault's and from Heidegger's Sorge, Morisi argues that for Camus ‘[le souci des autres] est, d'une part, inquiétude, anxiété, trouble, et, de l'autre, attention, sollicitude, soin’ (p. 35). The body of the text is divided into four chapters, ‘Les Miséreux’, ‘Les Condamnés’, ‘Les Frères ennemis’, and ‘Les Taiseux’. In ‘Les Miséreux’, focusing on Misère de la Kabylie, Morisi rejects the characterization of Camus as a colonisateur de bonne volonté. She argues that, although he did not question the French conquest of Algeria or escape from essentialist and paternalistic discourse, he defended ‘active’ assimilation (in other words, the extension of civil rights to indigenous Algerians). Claiming that Camus did not support French ‘domination’ (p. 58), she concludes that Misère is anti-colonialist — a claim that clearly depends on how one defines the terms in question. ‘Les Condamnés’ examines Camus's opposition to capital punishment, frequently referring to Morisi's earlier collection of his writings on the subject, Albert Camus contre la peine de mort (Paris: Gallimard, 2011; see French Studies, 66 (2012), 576–77). Skipping over the details of Camus's disillusionment with the épuration, Morisi does not mention his earlier support for the execution of the former Vichy Interior Minister Pierre Pucheu, the first leading collaborationist to be executed under de Gaulle's jurisdiction. She does, however, include some less familiar material, quoting a letter by Camus that prefigures his controversial declaration about defending his mother before justice, and an outspoken comment on the Arab colonization of Algeria by the Berber writer Kateb Yacine (p. 92 note 2). ‘Les Frères ennemis’ discusses the Cain and Abel theme in Camus's work, exemplified by the relationship between Meursault and the ‘Arab’ in L'Étranger. Uncontroversially, Morisi sees Camus as presenting the Algerian soil as both the origin of the conflict between Europeans and indigenous Algerians, and what unites them. Unfortunately, in taking issue with postcolonial interpretations of L'Hôte, she also feels the need to retell the story. ‘Les Taiseux’ focuses on ‘Les Muets’ but brings in additional autobiographical elements from L'Envers et l'endroit, Le Premier Homme, and other writings. Morisi refers to a number of thinkers in the course of her study, from Agamben to Rancière and Todorov, but gives only one mention to Levinas (also absent from the bibliography). Perhaps the most damaging omissions, however, are the lack of any reference either to Colin Davis's searching studies of Camusian ethics in relation to the Other, or to Camus's 1958 preface to L'Envers et l'endroit (1937), in which he made the astonishing admission that since writing the work he had learnt less about what he called ‘les êtres’ than about himself, although he had at least learnt that they existed. Overall, Morisi's book offers some balanced judgements, but too often tends to quote at length (one quotation runs to nearly two pages) with little or no comment or analysis.

The Fiery Pacific: Volcanic Eruptions and Settler-State Theatricality in Oceania, 1780–1900

In the closing scene of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt's melodramaLa Tête de mort; ou, Les Ruines de Pompeïa(1827), audiences at Paris's Théâtre de la Gaîté were presented with the spectacular cataclysm of an erupting Mount Vesuvius that invaded the city and engulfed the hapless characters in its fiery embrace. “The theatre,” Pixérécourt writes, “is completely inundated by this sea of bitumen and lava. A shower of blazing and transparent stones and red ash falls on all sides…. The red color with which everything is struck, the terrible noise of the volcano, the screaming, the agitation and despair of the characters … all combine to form this terrible convulsion of nature, a horrible picture, and altogether worthy of being compared to Hell.” A few years later, in 1830, Daniel Auber's grand operaLa Muette de Portici(1828), which yoked a seventeenth-century eruption of Vesuvius with a popular revolt against Spanish rule in Naples, opened at the Théâtre de Monnaie in Brussels. The Belgian spectators, inspired by the opera's revolutionary sentiments, poured out into the streets and seized their country's independence from the Dutch. These two famous examples, which form part of a long genealogy of representing volcanic eruptions through various artistic means, highlight not only the compelling, immersive spectacle of nature in extremis but also the ability of stage scenery to intervene materially in the narrative action and assimilate affective and political meanings. As these two examples also indicate, however, the body of scholarship in literary studies, art history, and theatre and performance studies that attends to the mechanical strategies and symbolic purchase of volcanic representations has tended to focus mainly on Europe; more research remains to be undertaken into how volcanic spectacles have engaged with non-European topographies and sociopolitical dynamics and how this wider view might illuminate our understanding of theatre's social roles.

The ‘Question’ of the Death Penalty

This essay addresses the ‘question’ of the death penalty in Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars: the question of the death penalty, if there is one, that is, if there is ‘la’ question de la peine de mort. For nothing is less certain. Not only must we speak of a proliferation of questions in the seminars, but we must also speak of Derrida's question about the question. How do the possibility and the reality of the death penalty, how does the question of the death penalty, force us to ask a question not only about what comes before the question but also about the future of the question, that is, about the future of reason, the principle of reason, and what is proper to man?

CRUELTY AND ITS VICISSITUDES: JACQUES DERRIDA AND THE FUTURE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

abstractThis paper discusses Jacques Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars (two consecutive seminars he gave at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in 1999–2000 and 2000–2001), as well as his 2000 Paris address to the States General of Psychoanalysis entitled “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul.” The paper is magnetized by two questions: what does it mean to say, as Derrida says in his provocative statement at the end of his 1999 seminar, “even when the death penalty will have been abolished . . . it will survive, there will still be some death penalty [même quand la peine de mort sera abolie . . . elle survivra, il y en aura encore]”? And why is psychoanalysis in a privileged position to address “this irreducible thing in the life of the animate being” that is the possibility of cruelty?

L'Arrêt de mort, Insomnia, Dreaming, Sleep: Derrida, Blanchot, Levinas

In L'Arrêt de mort, as Derrida suggests, an ‘epochal suspension’ manifests itself, compulsively pulsating so as to conjure a certain spectrality beyond all consciousness, perception, or ordinary attentiveness. Re-reading Blanchot's text, I argue that it is on the borderlines of sleep that the ‘arrythmic pulsation’ of the arrêt de mort happens as impossible event – ‘the state of suspension in which it's over – and over again, and you'll never have done with that suspension itself’, to quote Derrida once more. While ‘Living On’ makes little of sleep, however, I take this cue to follow a pathway which leads from Blanchot to Levinas. Blanchot's writing exposes the sleep of reason which occurs in the very promise of perfect day, a promise which mutates in the dream he associates with the ‘other night’, a dream which harbours the irrepressible return of ‘time's absence’, and which opens on to the very ‘outside’ which the world – and the self – lacks or wants (as much as ‘world’ or ‘self’ seek to overcome this ‘outside’ as such). Levinas, meanwhile, wants to think irremissible pure existing (il y a) in terms of insomnia; in contrast, consciousness seeks to assert itself over the unremitting presence of the ‘there is’ through its capacity for unconsciousness or sleep. This essay seeks to attend to the complexities of a certain ‘fatality of being’ that threatens to sweep away the ‘ego’ as consciousness's capacity to sleep is confronted by the radical vigilance of insomnia and the deep anonymity of the night (Existence and Existents).

The Making of a Condamné: State Power and the Ritual of Trial in Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné and Claude Gueux

Research Article| January 01 2011 The Making of a Condamné: State Power and the Ritual of Trial in Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné and Claude Gueux Briana Lewis Briana Lewis Allegheny College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Romanic Review (2011) 102 (1-2): 183–199. https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-102.1-2.183 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Briana Lewis; The Making of a Condamné: State Power and the Ritual of Trial in Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné and Claude Gueux. Romanic Review 1 January 2011; 102 (1-2): 183–199. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-102.1-2.183 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRomanic Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 The Trustees of Columbia University2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Longueur des télomères dans le cortex des patients atteints de troubles dépressifs

Telomeres are complex structures formed by the end of the DNA molecule at the tip of chromosomal arms. The telomeric sequence, which results from the repetition of the hexanucleotide TTAGGG, is partly single strand and is associated with more than ten proteins, including the enzyme telomerase. Because of the characteristics of the DNA replication process, only telomerase is able to elongate the telomeric sequence. Since the telomerase gene is repressed in virtually all the somatic cells, telomeres progressively shorten at each S phase of the cell cycle, and this shortening is accelerated by oxidative stress. A critically shortened telomere activates the genetic program of cell senescence and/or apoptosis. The telomere length measured in peripheral blood leucocytes is considered a reliable marker of biological age, mortality risk and exposure to various pathological conditions, including cardiovascular disease, dementia and metabolic syndrome. Telomere erosion has been observed in psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia and mood disorders, suggesting an accelerated aging of 10 to 20 years. Whether this peripheral dynamic is reflected by a similar pattern in the brain remains unknown. To address this issue, we have measured the telomere length in the occipital DNA cortex of 24 patients with major depressive disorder and 12 controls (donated by the Stanley Research Institute). The mean telomere length has been evaluated by a real time quantitative PCR technique, which amplified the telomere sequence and a reference single copy sequence. Results have been expressed by the ratios of Ct obtained for the two amplification curves. The mean Ct values were strictly identical (0.79 ± 0.001) and the 36 PCR curves were coincident. This study demonstrates for the first time that there is no shortening of telomeres in the cortex of patients with depressive disorder. Previous results have shown that in normal tissues telomeres length is inversely correlated to age, even in non proliferating tissues, but that the change is minimal in the brain. Thus, although consistent evidence for the role of a systemic and brain inflammation associated oxidative stress in depression has been provided, it must be concluded that the cerebral state of telomeres is not affected by the mechanism operating in the leucocytes. This observation raises the issue of the relation between the psychiatric pathological process and the peripheral telomere marker. It suggests the existence of specific telomere stabilizing factors in the cortex cells.

Towards a Cryptanalysis: Genealogies of ‘Lit‐Crypts’ from Poe to the ‘Posts’

Towards a Cryptanalysis: Genealogies of ‘Lit‐Crypts’ from Poe to the ‘Posts’

Shattering Silence: Traumatic Memory and Reenactment in Rithy Panh's <i>S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine</i>

. . . official silence . . . prevents public witnessing. It forges a secret history, an act of political resistance through keeping alive the memory of things denied. The totalitarian state rules by collective forgetting, by denying the collective experience of suffering, and thus creates a culture of terror. Arthur and Joan Kleinman1 This essay addresses the uses of documentary film in exploring a notorious Asian genocide2 and challenging the official silence that followed in its wake. During the Pol Pot regime (1975-79) nearly two million people, roughly a quarter of the Cambodian population, were systematically destroyed by means of starvation, overwork, torture, and execution. Filmmaker Rithy Panh, who is considered by many to be the cinematic voice of Cambodia,3 is himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge's killing fields. Arguably his best known and most affecting documentary is S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine/S-21, la machine de mort Khmere rouge (FR/KH, 2003), in which he recuperates memory to represent speechless horror and thereby shatter silence. With its unsettling reenactments, S-21 allows us to observe how memory and time may collapse to render the past as present and by doing so reveal the ordinary face of evil. During the Pol Pot regime, Rithy Panh's family was deported from Phnom Penh to a rural village, where, one by one, all but Rithy died of starvation, physical and psychological exhaustion, or disease. He was placed in a forced labor camp at eleven and escaped at age fourteen, eventually finding his way to a refugee camp in Thailand and then ultimately to France where he studied at IDHEC (l'Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques), graduating in 1985. He has since produced over fifteen award-winning dramatic narratives and documentaries, many inspired by the Cambodian genocide and its aftermath. His works include Site 2 (DE/FR, 1989), a documentary about a family of Cambodian refugees in a camp on the Thai-Cambodian border in the 1980s; Neak Sre/The People of the Rice Field, Les gens de la riziere(CH/DE/FR/ KH, 1994), a lyrical narrative about a rural family struggling with life in post- Khmer Rouge Cambodia, which introduced Panh to international audiences at the Cannes Film Festival; Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy/Bophana, une tragedie cambodgienne (FR/KH, 1996), a documentary about a young woman and a former Buddhist monk turned Khmer Rouge cadre; and The Burnt Theater/ Les Artistes du Theatre Brule (FR/KH, 2005), a dramatic narrative based on the lives of actors and dancers trying to maintain their art in the burned-out shell of Cambodia's national theater. In 2006, Panh helped found Bophana, an audiovisual resource center in Phnom Penh dedicated to collecting and preserving Cambodia's audiovisual heritage and training a new generation of filmmakers. Panh's most recent works include Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers/ Le papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise (FR, 2007), a documentary about the lives of Cambodian sex workers, and The Sea Wall/Un barrage contre le pacifique (BE/FR/KH, 2008), a fiction film starring Isabelle Huppert, based on a novel by Marguerite Duras. It was inevitable that S-21 would become the subject of one of Panh's films. S-21 was the code name for Tuol Sleng, a high school in Phnom Penh that was used as the prison where an estimated 17,000 Cambodians-men, women, and children-were interrogated, tortured, and executed. Only seven people survived: three were alive when Panh began the film, and two agreed to participate.4 Vann Nath is one, and he credits his survival to the fact that his paintings5 of Pol Pot and other high-ranking cadres were favored by the prison staff. Nath functions as the film's conscience and the filmmaker's alter ego, calmly holding up a mirror to each of his ex-captor's acts of inhumanity. . . . He seems the only man in full possession of his path, as one writer noted.6 The other survivor in the film is Chum Mey, an engineer, who plays a smaller role in this modern interrogation of the interrogators. …

For the Abolition of the Death Penalty in America: The Advocacy of Robert Badinter

This essay reviews two books by Robert Badinter, former President of France's Constitutional Council and former French Minister of Justice. Taken together, they describe his successful advocacy against the death penalty in France, both in the courtroom and in the political arena. The essay focuses on his current goal of advancing the cause of abolition in the United States, as expressed in Contre la peine de mort . After making the case that arguments against the death penalty are for the most part unoriginal and unconvincing to non-abolitionists, the essay maintains that successful opposition to capital punishment must be based primarily on the strategies and tactics of the advocate. It then goes on to explore and analyze the reasons for Badinter's success in France, and concludes by stressing Badinter's ability to exercise a highly nuanced judgment, grounded in his historical and literary sensibilities, that enables him to be flexible and adaptable as his advocacy takes different forms or as situations develop in unpredictable ways.

Song without Words

Song Without Words Denis Donoghue (bio) We normally advert to eloquence when we note the exuberance with which a word, a phrase, a sentence, or a line of verse presents itself as if it had broken free from its setting and declared its independence. This explains why we remember a certain eloquent moment and, a split second or an hour later or never, the context in which it appeared. A selection from my own failing memory: "She should have died hereafter." "The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise." "The troubled midnight and the noon's repose." "In the mountains, there you feel free." "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young." "And sweet reluctant amorous delay." "J'ai tout lu, se disait-elle." "I coulda bin a contender." "You talkin' to me?" "Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown." "Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae." "So have I heard and do in part believe it." "And my poor fool is hanged!" "Those are pearls that were his eyes." "Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend with thee." "The fire that stirs about her when she stirs." "Inns are not residences." "But the snows and summer grieve and dream." "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone." "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" "Twice no one dies." "On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins." "Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end." What these have in common in my mind is their irreducibility: each has a context which in some cases I have forgotten, but each seems surrounded by empty space. Each exists in an eternal present moment. And each is so independent in that moment that it doesn't need to declare its independence. When one or another of these items comes to my mind, it makes me feel that nothing else in the whole world matters; that this is what life amounts to. The narrator in Blanchot's L'Arrêt de mort says: Je parle de faits qui semblent infimes et je laisse de cöté les événements publics. Ces événements ont été très grands et ils m'ont occupé tous les jours. Mais, [End Page 190] aujourd'hui, ils pourrissent, leur histoire est morte et mortes aussi ces heures et cette vie qui alors ont été les miennes. Ce qui parle, c'est la minute présente et celle qui va la suivre. A tous ceux qu'elle abrite, l'ombre du monde d'hier plait encore, mais elle sera effacée. Lydia Davis's translation, which I have slightly modified, reads: I am talking about things that seem negligible, and I am ignoring public events. These events were very important and they occupied my attention all the time. But now they are rotting away, their story is dead, and the hours and the life that were then mine are dead too. What is eloquent is the passing moment and the moment that will come after it. The shadow of yesterday's world is still pleasant for people who take refuge in it, but it will fade. II In "The Second Coming" Yeats tries to conceive an image of the impending historical dispensation, as he takes it for granted, dreadfully, but also with the force of desire for it, an image antithetical to that of the Christ child born two thousand years ago. What occurs to him is "a shape with lion body and the head of a man / . . . / moving its slow thighs, while all about it / Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds." Not birds but their shadows, the only parts of them that cannot escape from the weird shape in the sand. The eloquence of the passage breaks forth in "indignant." It is astonishing that the birds should be thought to feel what we would feel, faced with a new wild image that would govern our lives. Reel: to stagger or whirl, as here probably to whirl in circles, the birds being unable to release themselves from the appalling image below them in the desert. Indignant in this poem is the word...

Un rang impérial nouveau à l’époque de la quatrième Tétrarchie : Filius Augustorum.

The first part of this study has revised ten inscriptions mentioning the title Filius Augustorum that styled Maximinus and Constantine between 308 and 310 (AnTard, 12); this second part now demonstrates that this new title corresponded to a new imperial rank, and clarifies its chronology and its political implications. According to the inscriptions, the coins and the papyri, that confirm Lactantius’ assertion (De mort. persec., 32. 4), it appears that Galerius replaced the rank of Caesar by that of Filius Augustorum, which was halfway between that of Caesar and that of Augustus. The new imperial title offered a new definition of the divine filiation of Maximinus and Constantine, which served political purposes; it was the last of the series established after 305, and was set up as quite symetrical to that of Pater Augustorum which styled Diocletian as consul that very year 308. The assumption that Galerius established the new rank towards the 20th of December 308 was made possible by the examination of th...