Du Regard Research Articles

Kołysanka jak terapia w relacji matki z córką. O powieści „Widziane z drugiej strony” Ken Bugul

The aim of this article is to present the lullaby as a special song based on the intimate relationship between a mother and a daughter in the artistic works of a Senegalese writer, Ken Bugul. An analysis of the novel De l’autre côté du regard is preceded by a short introduction that explains the concept of a lullaby and presents its functions. The author of this article attempts to show how the lullaby can influence the relationship between the main character and her mother, showing the therapeutic role of the song.

Sperimentalismo e dissenso: l’ engagement neoavanguardistico del nouveau roman

The use of the definition «nouveau roman» closely links to the activity of the French neo-avantgardist group of the ecole du regard. The group’s members draw their inspiration from a critical reflection on literature and its meaning, in opposition to tradition. The idea, which reunites as different writers as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor, is the reliance on the novel as a form of critical elaboration of reality. The main objects of this collective experimentation are in the forms and the structures of the novel.The present article focuses on the issue of the engagement as presented in Robbe-Grillet and Butor’s essays: the result of a retrospective consideration on their novels, combined to their ideas about literature and its possibilities, whose outcome is the opposition to «sclerotized» structures of traditional realism.

BENTUK DAN FUNGSI DEIKSIS DALAM KOMIK TINTIN: LE SCEPTRE D’OTTOKAR

(Title: Deixis Form and Function on Tintin Comic’s: Le Sceptre D’ottokar). This study aim to identify deixis form and describe function of deixis lexicons on Tintin: Le Sceptre d’Ottokar (T.LSO). The data were gathered through observation, as the basic technique was tapping technique. Then it was followed by Uninvolved Conversation Observation Technique and combined with record technique. The data analysis that used are referential [identity] method.The results of the study show that: 1) symbolic deixis has referential function, conative function and emotive function, 2) gestural deixis de la tête: un objet, un lieu et une personne is not found, 3) gestural deixis désigne de la main/ pointage has referential and conative function, 4) gestural deixis du regard has referential and emotive function, 5) anaforic deixis has referential and conative function. Keywords: deixis, comic, pragmatic

Living with asthma in 19th-century France: The doctor, Armand Trousseau, and the patient, Emile Pereire.

Major advances in the French medical system following the French Revolution have stimulated a rich historiography of which Michel Foucault's Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (1963) and Erwin H. Ackerknecht's Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794-1848 (1967) are of lasting significance. Changes in the organisation and structure of hospitals accompanied the development and availability of new medical technologies and procedures and encouraged a more intense study of the aetiology and pathology of disease. Theories about asthma and its treatment profited from this dynamic environment as Classical Greek doctrines about the effect of the humours on bodily imbalance gave way to an increasingly more precise understanding of the nature and cause of asthma. The clinician and teacher, Armand Trousseau (1801-1867), who held the chair of Clinical Medicine at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris and was himself an asthmatic, promoted new theories about the illness and developed innovative ways of dealing with its effects. Among his patients was the banker and financier, Emile Pereire (1800-1875), a lifelong asthmatic. Based on the Pereire Family Archives (hereafter AFP), the case of Emile Pereire provides a preface to the later case of that other, more famous, asthmatic, Marcel Proust.

La littérature dans l’enseignement du FLE éd. par Anne Godard

Reviews 209 Godard,Anne, éd. La littérature dans l’enseignement du FLE. Paris: Didier, 2015. ISBN 978-2-278-07613-0. Pp. 338. 14 a. What role does literature play in the effective teaching of French as a foreign language? La littérature dans l’enseignement du FLE attempts to address this question, as well as others pertaining to the use of literature—“La littérature est-elle reservée à certains publics? À certains niveaux?”—and, most interesting from a cultural point of view: “Comment permet-elle un enrichissement linguistique et culturel et conduitelle à une modification du regard sur la langue et la culture?” (6). In seven chapters, this insightful collection of essays traces the development of literature in the FLE curriculum and explains how its importance came into question. Finally, the authors present strong arguments for the focused, deliberate inclusion of literature as an effective means of facilitating successful language acquisition. The first chapter, “La littérature dans la didactique du français et des langues: histoire et théories,” traces various stages in the evolution of French language teaching from the second half of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Godard explains how historical periods and developments, such as French colonial expansion, the First World War and the Cold War, either privileged or set aside the use of literature in teaching French. Chapter Five, entitled “Le rôle de la littérature dans les apprentissages langagiers: de l’écriture creative à la conscience de la langue,”addresses the challenge of using literary texts in a language course, which often presents texts too challenging for students still developing their language skills. This chapter explains how the use of literature, along with creative writing exercises led by professional writers, have assisted students at all levels to develop a more subjective, personal use of French as they negotiate levels of interlanguage.“L’alterité dans la langue: ouverture au plurilinguisme par la littérature,” addresses the use of French literature in teaching the diversity of French culture. This seventh chapter explores how the careful study of Francophone texts both enriches the vocabulary of the language learner and provides opportunities to explore how various Francophone writers used the versatility of the French language to demonstrate cultural differences in the Francophone world. La littérature dans l’enseignement du FLE is an engaging and informative work that makes a strong argument for the active use of French literature in order to increase linguistic competence. This collection of essays assumes that the reader has a thorough familiarity with various language teaching methodologies; therefore, readers without a background in second-language acquisition may find certain parts of this book challenging.An excellent bibliography of recent scholarship on the teaching of French literature is included.Graduate students in linguistics, coordinators of French language programs, and departments looking for practical guidance on how to incorporate literature into a French program will find this book a valuable source of information. Jackson State University (MS) Tomaz Cunningham ...

The Equality of the Gaze: The Animal Stares Back in Chris Marker's Films

This article considers a selection of Chris Marker's films in the context of noted differences between Emmanuel Levinas's and Jacques Derrida's positions on the animal as Other, the potential for the animal face. Derrida (2008) himself argues that Levinas ‘did not make the animal anything like a focus of interrogation within his work’ (p. 105). Statements such as this about Levinas's ethics seem to make his position clear. In contrast, Derrida's thinking on the matter of the animal, and in particular human responsibility for them as Other, stands as a thorough and influential body of ethical thought, probing the limited and limiting boundary between human and animal. His autobiographical texts, according to Lynn Turner (2015 , p. 135), welcome animal others. Marker's images, I will argue, address an equity between species through what he refers to as the égalité du regard, an equality in the gaze (of the camera). These images speak to a space beyond themselves and it is within this territory, I will argue, that the animal does have a face, that can occur via that of the human.

What do we know about eye movements in Alzheimer's disease? The past 37 years and future directions.

What do we know about eye movements in Alzheimer's disease? The past 37 years and future directions.

Winnie entre temps et être

Contrasting with Bergson’s time of consciousness as the subjective perception of a time stream, Winnie embodies the repetitive time of anxiety. Every major somatic event (the one Winnie experiences, as well as the patient being told of a life-threatening condition) consigns the subject to a temporal anomie, that Lacan has worked out in theoretical terms. His stressing of three separate sequences : l’ instant du regard (the instant of a glance), le temps pour comprendre (the time to understand), le moment de conclure (the moment to conclude), may help us to understand how and why one can immobilize oneself, as Winnie does, in repetition.

Malcolm de Chazal’s Sens-plastique as Aesthetic Remainder

Malcolm de Chazal’s Sens-plastique as Aesthetic Remainder Alexander Dickow L’idiot bêle du regard. * Nuages bas servent de presse-papier au vent. * L’écorce est le crâne des plantes; et la sève en est la matière grise. * Seul Le Feu Peut Lécher Sa Propre Langue. * L’huître En S’ouvrant La bouche Se Parlait Dans L’oreille. * Les lèvres sont le potier des sons. Comme des doigts appuyés sur l’argile, les lèvres moulent les sons que leur transmettent les cordes vocales à vitesses variantes, autour du pivot flexible de la langue.1 [End Page 109] One is best introduced to the Mauritian Francophone writer Malcolm de Chazal by encountering his work, such as the aphorisms above, before his history. Neither the details of the writer’s life as a telephone serviceman, nor his role as a self-styled visionary and eccentric provide much insight into the strangeness of Chazal’s thousands of aphorisms and poems, a strangeness that in the 1940s prompted the immediate admiration and praise of the likes of André Breton, Jean Paulhan and Francis Ponge.2 While this sudden fame has assured Chazal a relative place in literary history, that place remains on its periphery: like other writers far from Paris, far from the center, Chazal is made to play the at once prestigious and marginalizing role of literary Other. Such writers are caught in a machinery that cannot fully integrate them as a working part. Their foreignness makes them hypervisible as Other, yet institutionally invisible, relegating them to the uncomfortable space of the footnote and the passing allusion.3 Chazal’s critical reception has reproduced this double bind in a peculiar way: criticism has privileged his most obscure work rather than the works for which he acquired notoriety. This notoriety arose when Jean Paulhan, his curiosity piqued by the Mauritian poet’s strange work, arranged for Gallimard to publish Chazal’s Sens-plastique in 1948. To the literary world (as opposed to the public at large), this collection of some two thousand aphorisms or mini-essays remains Chazal’s signature work, and the only one to have been completely translated into English.4 Shortly after its release, André Breton would publically praise Sens-plastique; Jean Dubuffet and others noticed and extolled the book, while Ponge compared its importance to that of Lautréamont’s work.5 This brief moment of fame helped establish Sens-plastique as an admired curiosity up to the present day. Some part of Chazal’s readers also know the longer essays of La Vie filtrée (1949), the second and last of Chazal’s books to be published by Gallimard. Yet in-depth critical discussions of Chazal’s work do not generally focus on Sens-plastique, nor on later aphoristic volumes like Sens magique (1957). Instead, they involve charting Chazal’s vast mysticism, developed from the 1950s to the 1970s in books such as Petrusmok: roman mythique (1951), Pentateuque (1953), or L’Évangile de l’eau (1952), among countless others. A relative invisibility, or minoration, of Sens-plastique and the aphoristic corpus results within Chazalian critical discourse.6 In short, Chazal’s critical reception largely runs counter to his broader readership, for whom the aphoristic corpus remains Chazal’s principal legacy. Of what, then, does this legacy consist? Chazal’s aphorisms and poems seem to push the logic of decoration to its furthest confines. His stunning [End Page 110] conceits display the superlative inanity of a fireworks show: all gratuitous spectacle, without consequence or implication beyond themselves. As I will argue in this essay, this aesthetic purity, this nearly subconceptual quality effectively remove Chazal’s work from the realm of critical visibility, making his aphorisms almost philosophically and ethically irrecuperable. In other words, what makes Chazal hypervisible—his singular investigation into aesthesis—is also what renders him, in a sense, invisible. Chazal’s mystical discourse represents an attempt to rationalize the aphorisms’ purely aesthetic project by artificially grafting a metaphysical project onto it. But Chazal’s mystical, metaphysical project, in the end, cannot effectively recuperate the aesthetic project. Along with works like Sens magique, Sens-plastique constitutes a critical remainder, unaccounted...

P.8.b.003 Therapist's role of primary health care in the management of patients with mental disorders

La maladie de Niemann-Pick de type C (NPC) est une maladie neuro-viscérale rare, de transmission autosomique récessive, ayant une présentation clinique extrêmement hétérogène. La forme adulte de la maladie est habituellement d’expression neurologique. On peut alors retrouver un syndrome cérébelleux (ataxie, troubles de la marche, dysarthrie), des mouvements anormaux, une cataplexie, des crises d’épilepsie, une dysphagie, une paralysie verticale du regard, ainsi qu’une détérioration cognitive évoluant vers une démence. Des symptômes psychiatriques non spécifiques (manifestations psychotiques de type schizophrénique, syndromes dépressifs, troubles bipolaires, troubles obsessionnels compulsifs, troubles du comportement) y sont souvent associés. Cependant, la maladie de NPC peut également se manifester sous la forme de troubles psychiatriques isolés. Ce tableau psychiatrique est le plus souvent atypique, s’associant à des hallucinations visuelles, une confusion mentale, une fluctuation des symptômes, une réponse inhabituelle ou paradoxale au traitement, une catatonie, une altération cognitive progressive, ou encore à des crises d’épilepsies. La découverte récente d’un traitement, le miglustat, permettant d’en améliorer l’évolution, doit amener les psychiatres à la rechercher devant tout tableau psychotique atypique. Cette revue complète de la littérature internationale vise à porter la maladie de NPC à leur connaissance.Niemann-Pick type C disease (NPC) is a rare hereditary disease, which psychiatrists do not face often in France. Indeed, only a couple of articles specifically describing the psychiatric-disorders in the adult form have been published. And for the most part, they were not written by psychiatrists. This comprehensive international literature review aims at providing knowledge on this disease to French psychiatrists.To achieve this literature review, we used the “PubMed” search engine, looking for the following keywords: Niemann-Pick type C AND (schizophrenia OR psychosis).Niemann-Pick type C disease (NPC) is a rare, neurovisceral, autosomal recessive disease, with an extremely heterogeneous clinical presentation. It is characterized by a wide range of symptoms that are not specific, such as neurological, systemic or psychiatric symptoms. The adult form of the disease concerns a small proportion (5 %) of the people affected and is usually expressed as a neurological form. A variety of progressive and disabling symptoms are encountered, mainly cerebellar signs (cerebellar ataxia, impaired gait, dysarthria), but also movement disorders, cataplexy, seizures and dysphagia. Patients face constant cognitive deterioration, which can result in severe dementia. Abnormal saccadic eye movement is often the first manifestation of the disease. Supranuclear gaze palsy is considered to be a specific sign and should be systematically searched for. In terms of systemic signs, the usual infantile hepatosplenomegaly is very fickle in the adult form; if present, it is usually asymptomatic. Non-specific psychiatric symptoms are often associated with NPC disease. For one third of cases, it can also express as an isolated psychiatric-disorder form, such as schizophrenia-like psychosis (paranoid delusions, auditory hallucinations, interpretative thoughts, and disorganization), depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive behaviour and behavioural problems (sleep disorders, hyperactivity, agitation, aggressiveness or self-mutilations). This psychiatric overview is mostly atypical and is accompanied by visual hallucinations, confusion, symptom fluctuations, treatment resistance or aggravation with neuroleptic drugs, catatonia, progressive cognitive decline, but also seizures. The late appearance of neurological manifestations is often wrongfully attributed to the effects of antipsychotic medication, which generates tardy diagnosis. Most of NPC affected patients die prematurely. NPC diagnosis is based on a filipin test on a fibroblast culture from a skin biopsy and also on a sequencing of the NPC1 and NPC2 genes. Routine laboratory biochemistry profiles are generally normal. The early diagnosis is fundamental to deploy the best follow-up care. The patient should therefore be in contact with a reference centre. Until recently, NPC treatment consisted in supportive therapies and symptomatic drugs, useful, however, with variable efficacy. The recent discovery of a medicine called Miglustat (N-butyldeoxynojirimycin; NB-DJN; Zavesca®, Actelion Pharmaceuticals Ltd.) which improves the disease evolution, should encourage psychiatrists to look for it in every atypical psychosis.

Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934) – I. Sa vie et son œuvre

The conceptual elaborations of G. Gatian de Clérambault are undissociable of the medical context of Infirmerie Spéciale of the Préfecture de Police, Paris. Atypical and brilliant author on theoretical and semiological levels, proponent of a clinique du regard, he mainly describes the syndroms of Mental Automatism and erotomania… Present in the background, some of his more underrated works (about spiritist delirium, phylogenesis of the intellect and archaic thought…) will have an heuristic function, as taking part in the definition of his “Dogma”. We settle on a critical examination of the attitudes of G. de Clérambault and about the psychopathological posterity of the Mental Automatism in the postmodern era.

Les villes assassines by Alfred Alexandre

discipline often outweighed doctrinal preoccupations, and provoked conflicts with the monarchy. Marriage issues, reception of the sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist, and the role of secular clergy as opposed to religious orders achieved paramount importance. French foreign policies also blurred the religious sphere. The marriage of the Catholic Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henri IV, to the Protestant Charles I of England forged a brief temporary alliance. Richelieu’s hostility to the Catholic Hapsburgs in Spain and Austria evoked strong opposition from many dévots. During all of these conflicts, the papacy played a changing role, as national interests began to outweigh religious concerns, especially with the evolution of French Gallicanism. The year 1629 marked a watershed on the French scene. It witnessed the death of Bérulle, increasingly at odds with Richelieu and religious orders, notably Carmelite nuns, and with the Jesuits. At this point, Richelieu’s checkered career seemed secure as a de facto minister of Louis XIII. This period also witnessed the rise of Jansenism. Saint-Cyran, bishop of Poitiers, was according to Wright, a central and destructive figure in the movement. Along with him, Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, Antoine Arnauld, future leader and author of the controversial De la fréquente communion (1643), and Mère Angélique Arnauld, superior of Port-Royal, gradually came into conflict with the Jesuits and with Richelieu. Although earlier documents suggest collaboration, these disputes eventually provoked “mutually exclusive interpretations” of the original dévot intentions (183). The criticism of French foreign policy also complicated the issue, and led to more overt Gallicanism. While the author contends that one cannot automatically deduce a link between these divisions and the eventual secularization of France, he does show a move in that direction. These tensions, he maintained , could hardly be helpful to French Catholicism, and the French Revolution later intensified their impact. Wright has used archival sources abundantly, including the Vatican Library, Jesuit records, and la Bibliothèque de Port-Royal. Thus a complex narrative, which can obscure interpretation, sometimes results. Many lesser-known personalities of seventeenth-century France appear, some loosely identified. Wright’s analysis is largely political and ecclesiastical, with little reference to social history or spirituality . He also notes the role of religious women as influential but less public. While a development of this aspect might be beyond the scope of the volume, it is significant enough to merit further consideration. However, one cannot but admire the meticulous research and profound scholarship of this compact volume. Chestnut Hill College (PA) Mary Helen Kashuba Creative Works edited by Nathalie Degroult ALEXANDRE, ALFRED. Les villes assassines. Paris: Écriture, 2011. ISBN 978-2-35905-0134 . Pp. 135. 15,95 a. Après Bord de canal (2005) et La nuit caribéenne (2007), Les villes assassines compl ète la trilogie foyalaise d’Alfred Alexandre. Dans ce récit il nous fait voir, entendre , respirer l’envers du décor: le quartier Sainte-Thérèse de Fort-de-France 1188 FRENCH REVIEW 85.6 où Évane vient tous les soirs voir Winona danser au fond d’une impasse nommée rue Sans-Retour. C’est un tableau des plus sombres que l’auteur nous présente: les dealers, les souteneurs, les junkies, les maquerelles et les danseuses qui se tortillent sous l’œil allumé de Slack, le “patron” du quartier qui “punissait [...] à coups de lame de coutelas” (40). La coke, les cocktails de rhum et d’essence, l’abrutissement et la honte, c’est le quotidien de Winona, dix-sept ans, la belle “à délirer” avec sa bouche “rose et rouge” (21). Vénaton garde l’entrée de l’impasse et Slack fait ce qu’il veut sur son territoire, “et tout le monde acceptait [...] même les babylones, [...] sans lui, jamais les marchandises en stockage n’auraient pu dormir intactes, sur le port” (40). Les trois parties du roman s’articulent comme la chronique d’une mort annonc ée. La première, avec une brutale précision, dresse la scène de la tragédie à venir. Rien de bon ne peut sortir de ces rues sans issues, de ces relations inhumaines et violentes. Abandonnée par sa mère, captive du regard...

Passer la nuit by Marina de Van

avec son père, tous les destins s’y dessinent, chaque spectateur peut s’y inscrire et y découvrir des lignes d’avenir, des potentialités, un idéal. Seront exclus de l’image ceux qui en détournent le sens en s’accaparant à leur profit les forces de la représentation pour imposer leurs règles et leur pouvoir. Elle ne fera pas de place, ne laissera pas de voix aux deux méchants. On comprend aussi que Thomas, guide du regard, peintre de la toile imaginaire, narrateur du récit, garant des lois de la représentation, est aussi celui qui a brûlé les deux villas, et que ce livre sur la part du feu n’est pas un livre sur le passé pour redonner voix aux anciens chefs, aux identités figées, mais un livre sur l’éthique de l’effacement pour construire un lendemain meilleur qui n’entend pas retourner aux origines. Ainsi parle Thomas s’adressant à Anaïs: “Mais mon oncle pense que tu es spéciale, que ce que tu cherches au fond, plus qu’une origine, ce pourrait être un idéal. Que la vraie question que tu te poses, en passant par de longs chemins, c’est [...]: quel usage faut-il faire de sa présence au monde?” (39). La fin du roman est narrée par la jeune femme qui fait le bilan de sa visite et prend le relais de Thomas lui-même emporté dans l’effacement. California State University, San Marcos Marion Geiger VAN, MARINA DE. Passer la nuit. Paris: Allia, 2011. ISBN 978-2-84485-400-1. Pp. 142. 9 a. After graduating in 1996 from FEMIS, the French school for cinematic studies , Marina de Van began her career as an actress in, and scriptwriter for, films by François Ozon. She wrote and directed Dans ma peau (2002), in which she also starred, and Ne te retourne pas (2009), starring Monica Bellucci and Sophie Marceau. Passer la nuit, Van’s first novel, continues to investigate the difficult themes she so ingeniously explored in her films, such as the location of identity, the experiences of depression, mourning, and loss of memory, and in general, women’s place in the world. Van decidedly eschews the psychoanalytical approach in her films and continues to do so in her novel. Rather, she concentrates on what it actually means, feels, and looks like to experience an identity lost, or perhaps more likely, never achieved. One has the sense of following a person who is suffering from acute amnesia (or worse, the inability to formulate memories at all), but who nonetheless manages to function in a way that suggests she has no problem with recalling and performing the mechanics of her daily routine. She even establishes relationships and careers, but what she cannot do is ascribe meaning to them or, in fact, to any aspect of her life. Still she is not sociopathic— she is poignantly aware of her condition and knows there is something wrong with her. What Van’s films and now her novel explore is this condition of being outof -sync with one’s body and the world; not its potential causes or treatment, just what it means to live the condition, which has apparently always been with her. Passer la nuit is written almost as a journal recounting the life of the narrator over the course of a few days, which, we learn, could well describe her entire life: “La seule chose passée que je ressente avec certitude est celle que j’expérimente aujourd’hui, des années plus tard, à travers l’enfermement solitaire et la paralysie” (141). When she awakens in the morning, she immediately starts to wonder how she will pass the time of her day until it is time to go to bed again. Even a steady regimen of coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, anxiety medication, and sleeping pills does not alter her mechanical functioning: she wakes up in the morning, time passes, Reviews 431 she goes to sleep at night. During her waking moments, she keeps appointments, she imagines beautiful yet haunting fictions, but unopened mail overwhelms her to the point...

Les Romans de la Salpêtrière: réception d’une scénographie clinique: Jean-Martin Charcot dans l’imaginaire fin-de-siècle by Bertrand Marquer

others argue for a particular interpretation), there are sure to be interesting intersections with other topics (authors, movements, historical moments). Fans of decadence will rejoice. Texas A & M University Melanie Hawthorne MARQUER, BERTRAND. Les Romans de la Salpêtrière: réception d’une scénographie clinique: Jean-Martin Charcot dans l’imaginaire fin-de-siècle. Genève: Droz, 2008. ISBN 978-2600 -001153-2. Pp. 424. 49,65 a. Examining novels that run the gamut from the well known to the relatively obscure, from Realism to the Fantastic, Marquer traces Jean-Martin Charcot’s journey from eminent neurologist to cultural icon. Assuming that “la littérature, reflet de son époque, intègre les espoirs et les angoisses que la figure saillante du médecin peut engendrer” (12), he gauges Charcot’s influence on the popular imagination through the optic of the romans de la Salpêtrière, texts that integrate various facets of his work with hysterics. In the nineteenth century, hysteria was often linked to extremes of female sexuality—those suffering from the disorder were either over- or under-sexed (i.e., prostitutes or repressed virgins). Not surprisingly , then, novelists found “dans la vie mouvementée des hystériques une trame incitant à la fiction en transposant le savoir faire que la Salpêtrière entend rendre accessible” (160). At the same time, Marquer brings to light the way in which literature shaped Charcot’s clinical methods. As much a man of letters as a neurologist, Charcot understood the possibilities that literary devices offered the emerging discipline of psychiatry; his clinical writings on hysteria and other neurological disorders benefited from his creative use of narrative perspective. Endowed with a “parole pittoresque,” Charcot was “plus peintre qu’orateur,” (116) his often poetic descriptions more vivid and full of life than the photographic portraits of his patients that made him famous. Many of the novels in Marquer’s study target the unenlightened beliefs about hysteria that the anticlerical, republican Charcot sought to dispel, such as the association between hysteria and diabolical possession. He argues that Marie de Guersainte in Zola’s Lourdes exemplifies the Catholic Church’s view that hysterics were “des possédées corps et âme” (203) while the character of Geneviève in Jules Lermina’s Les Hystériques de Paris confirms that “la ruse principale de l’hystérie est, comme pour le Malin, de faire croire à sa non-existence, en substituant constamment à sa réalité la comédie d’un rôle qui pourtant le signale” (199). Nonetheless, both works implicitly credit Charcot with convincing clinicians and laypersons alike that hysteria was a medical, not a spiritual, concern, its treatment best undertaken by physicians instead of priests. What makes hysteria unique among psychological disorders is that the majority of its symptoms are external, manifesting in behaviors that are discernable even to the untrained eye. In part 3, “L’Esprit de Charcot: autopsie du regard clinique,” Marquer explains that Charcot’s “theater” was frequently filled not only with medical practitioners but with members of the general public. What is more, actors such as Sarah Bernhardt and novelists such as Léon Daudet visited La Salpêtrière seeking artistic inspiration in the “performances” provided by Charcot’s hysterics. In giving his patients a voice and medical practitioners a methodology, he presented artists and writers with “la structure d’un drame 596 FRENCH REVIEW 84.3 intérieur, et [a] offert un cadre dramatique à de nombreux récits exploitant la dimension proprement subjective d’une contemplation pathologique” (366). Marquer’s nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the romans de la Salpêtrière affords him a deep understanding of the place Charcot and his patients occupy in fin-de-siècle literature and culture. The more familiar novels Marquer examines —Zola’s Lourdes, Huysmans’s Là-bas—benefit from a fresh reading while the more esoteric ones—Léo Tréznik’s La Confession d’un fou, Jules Claretie’s Les Amours d’un interne—prove that the romans de la Salpêtrière were something of a literary phenomenon. Thanks to Marquer’s top-notch analysis and documentation , the reader comes away with insight into the myriad social changes...

Essay on the Relation between Space and Time in the Legal Event

Space is linked in many ways to time (from birth, the locus inside the mother to death, the loculus in the cemetery; from the mathematical and physical relation speed=distance/time). The place of the legal event, courtroom or tribunal, is linked to time, and space and time interact in a rigorous organised ritual. I aim in this essay to show how the judicial ritual described by Garapon operates in the same way as the time in clinical situation described by Lacan: instant du regard, temps pour comprendre and moment de conclure mixed with the three phases of the rite of passage within the legal event.

Perception, Imagination, and the Self: Pierre Alferi’s Fmn

Perception, Imagination, and the Self: Pierre Alferi’s Fmn Kate Lermitte Campbell (bio) Pierre Alferi plays directly on the visual dynamics of thought throughout his work, exploring what we see, what we don’t, and the extent to which this is conditioned by both sensory and linguistic habit. His poetry not only manifests the extent to which the relation between thought and experience is dynamic and interactive, it challenges the traditional dividing line between perceptual and imaginative experience. This has direct repercussions on our conception of the individual. In order to elaborate on these claims, I will focus on Fmn, drawing from recent work by the philosopher Colin McGinn. My aim is to suggest that Alferi’s concentration on the visual is bound to his belief that actual experience cannot be compartmentalized into experience of the real world on the one hand, and that of imaginary worlds on the other. Thought, for him, is characterized by the dynamic interaction of the two, and this makes experience what it is. All of his work is marked by his awareness of and attentiveness to this crossover. The role sensory experience plays in thought is largely dependent on perceptual habits developed throughout life. Film has, for example, become part of the way we see, and hence part of the way we think, and Alferi’s experimentation with film—reflected even in his most “textual” work—constitutes less an extrapolation from everyday experience of the world than a necessary outcome of his reflection on the nature of such experience. Hence his remark: “pour rendre compte de sa propre sentiment présent, il faut s’inventer des outils, des techniques ” (interview with P. Cassagneau, 2005). The alteration of perceptual habits necessitates the constant re-direction of the poet’s attention and the re-shaping of his tools in accordance with the matter of his experience. As I have discussed elsewhere, his “films-parlants” explore the nature of narrative structure and his “cinépoèmes” are direct reflections on the relation between the poetic act and the act of reading: they explore the way individual sentences can be made to function through manipulation of their syntax and of their visual and phonetic qualities (Campbell, 2008). Alferi’s experimentation with the DVD is therefore vital to his creative exploitation of the visual dynamics of thought. [End Page 91] In Alferi’s novel Fmn (1994), the nature of the narrator’s visual perception is not the result of self-imposed experimentation (as is the case in Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif); it stems from his hyperawareness of a potential other, manifested in the REGARD. The first line of the back cover description of this text reads as follows: “Un homme se dit prisonnier du regard d’une femme.” The first line of the book takes the form of a statement: “J’attendais une femme,” with an unexpected, added qualification: “cette femme était réelle” (9). The narrator’s use of the word “réelle” here is, however, rendered ambiguous, for it becomes clear that the woman’s presence does not imply her visibility: “jamais elle ne m’apparut” (11). What is more, throughout the book she remains nameless, and without any particular physical trait: Elle se logeait dans un regard, s’y résumait, s’y contractait pour s’y dissoudre, s’y émietter, s’y émettre et m’atteindre. Elle était ce REGARD sans yeux, le regard qui, dit-on, passe par eux quoiqu’il se passe d’eux peu souvent. Sans yeux, oui, non sans point d’émission, il se situait à quelques mètres en amont, inondant ma face de trois quarts. Onde et particules de conscience constamment renouvelées, feu nourri, rayon paisible régénéré. (13) Here, the “reality” of the woman is dissociated from any identity criteria we typically use to designate an individual; her existence seems to depend primarily on the dynamics of the narrator’s gaze. The word “virtuel” is relevant. It comes from the Latin virtus (defined as “la puissance souveraine de ce qui n’apparaît pas visiblement”) and is used to describe something that “n’est tel qu’en puissance, qui est à l’état de simple...

The Musicalisation of Visual Arts

This article was first published in Images Numeriques: L'aventure du regard, 1997, O. Blin et J. Sauvageot (eds.), University Press of Rennes/Distique, pp. 147-151. Reproduced courtesy of the publishers.The work of French sociologist Antoine Hennion, along with that of other authors such as Tia DeNora (2003), represents the latest attempt to conceptualise the relation between society and works of art, or rather the work of art in society, without resorting to the kind of purely internalist readings favoured by aestheticians nor, in reverse, burying their material specificities under the weight of social determinants. In this dense but beautifully composed article (two fitting qualifiers for the topic of image processing), the reader will find two key terms in Hennion's analytical toolkit, namely mediation and amateurs, mobilised in a reflection on the changes brought about by the digital reordering of artistic practices (for a comprehensive summary of Hennion's sociological approach, see Looseley 2006). Needless to say, the media ecology of which the author speaks has gone through substantial changes since the article's first publication in French more than ten years ago. Using Hennion's example of the now residual technology of the CD-ROM, we could sum up this socio-technical evolution as having moved from a 'read-only' model to what has come to be known as a 'remix' culture, characterised by a 'relayed creativity' (Born 2005) in which the respective roles of producers and audiences are redistributed and the material status of the resulting work is more fluid than ever. Although Hennion's idea of 'musicalisation' shares many features with the equally musical trope of the remix - now prevalent in so many cultural spheres, from open-source software to footwear - his historical cross-analysis of music and the visual arts should remind us that the regimes of art result from complex and contingent mediation effects, through which possibilities for greater openness and performativity coexist with the more established processes of authoriality and stabilisation. Facilitated by new media technologies (laptop, internet, editing software, etc.), the emergent cultural forms such as audio mash-ups, fan videos, live soundtracking, VJing and the like, largely confirm the role of 'amateur instrumentalists' in our audiovisual culture. By pointing in the direction of this creative force, and away from the isolated works presented to us in museums, galleries and other institutional art spaces, Hennion's contribution should be taken as an invitation to investigate further the objects, procedures and collectives that are simultaneously constructing and constructed through new regimes of digital creativity. Beyond the oscillation between naive enthusiasm and conservative scepticism that inevitably greets the introduction of new technologies, it is possible - and perhaps even necessary - to draw a few insights from their recent dramatic proliferation in the realm of image and sound.First, it must be noted that it is the fundamental characteristics of the visual arts, once easily taken for granted, that have been affected by digital media technologies. Indeed, if the virtual image conjures up a sense of loss, or absence, it is not that of the real 'body' of the represented subject - be it the flesh of the model or the reality of a chosen landscape - but of the very texture of the picture and the stability of its support. What we see is truly a change of medium, as expressed in the change of vocabulary from painting and visual arts to images and their processing - a painting cannot be 'processed' (at best, it can be restored). The model suggested by the uses of computer technologies constitutes a mirrorimage of the model historically constructed by the evolution of painting:* The painter produces a fixed image, attributed to a single author, created on a given medium (or, in the case of sculpture, equivalent to this medium), and whose distinct occurrence is guaranteed by the indivisible link between the 'matter' of the painting and the image it reflects. …

Remember Mongo Beti (review)

Reviewed by: Remember Mongo Beti Cilas Kemedjio Remember Mongo Beti Ed. Ambroise KomBayreuth African Studies Series 67. Bayreuth, 2003. During our last meeting in his office at the Peuples Noirs bookstore, Mongo Beti surprised me by offering me a beer, thereby submitting to the Cameroonian tradition of hospitality. Mongo Beti's generosity at that moment was another confirmation of the [End Page 146] graciousness he had shown me on many previous occasions, especially the positive responses he had given me the numerous times I had solicited his assistance. Nevertheless, since my first meeting with Mongo Beti, I have been—and remain so—overwhelmed because the meekness of his temperament is in such stark contrast to the incendiary prose of the militant author. The present commemorative volume, among other things, sheds precious light on the multidimensional personality of "l'un des combatants les plus acharnés de notre indépendance et de notre souveraineté" 'one of the fiercest fighters for our independence and our sovereignty' (Ntonfo 254). Gustave Massiah, Mongo Beti's companion in the trenches of the anti-imperialist struggle, draws the contrast between "la gentillesse, la modestie, l'humilité et la prévenance d'Alexandre Biyidi et la violence flamboyante du pamphlétaire Mongo Beti" 'the kindness, modesty, humility, and thoughtfulness of Alexandre Biyidi, and the flamboyant violence of the pamphleteer Mongo Beti' (133). It is Bessora who attempts to find a rational explanation for this paradox: "La douceur du regard de cet homme si virulent dans ses textes me frappe. Et je pense: c'est logique, la violence est la réponse des tendres à la brutalité du monde" 'The sweetness of the face of this man who is so virulent in his writings strikes me. And I think: It's logical, because violence is the response of the tender-hearted to the world's brutality' (42). The dissidence that informs Mongo Beti's writings is situated in a long tradition of what the Cameroonian novelist PatriceNganang calls "l'intelligence critique du peuple camerounais qui aura toujours su lire dans les diverses formes de la réalité qui vivait le Cameroun une usurpation répétée, une illégalité instituée" 'the critical intelligence of the Cameroonian people that has always been able to read in the diverse forms of reality that Cameroon has experienced a repeated usurpation, an institutionalized illegality' (269), from the German colonial regime to the de facto imposition of the structures of French and English colonization, to the postindependence regimes. The militant path of this novelist, chronicler, and essayist has been governed by one obsession: the quest for the dignity of black African peoples: "Foi de primitif, j'atteste que Mongo Beti ne ressemble à aucun autre. Mongo Beti est un cas à part: c'est le loup solitaire, le dernier des Mohicans, le plus beau de nos factieux, la fraction saine de notre cerveau malade. Il émerge d'une autre galaxie, répond d'une tout autre ère géologique" 'On simple faith, I swear that Mongo Beti is like none other. Mongo Beti is a unique case: he's the lone wolf, the last of the Mohicans, the best of the seditious, the healthy part of our sick brain. He has emerged from another galaxy, and responds to a totally different geological era' (29). Monénembo's homage is the result of a life-altering experience caused by Remember Ruben, the novel he read at a turbulent and crucial period in African history that witnessed Lumumba being assassinated, the children of Sharpville sprayed by gunfire, the macabre parade of a dying colonialism in the streets of Algiers, and the angry outburst against apartheid that eventually led to Mandela's imprisonment in a cell on Robben Island. Writing, for Mongo Beti, became a dangerous activity that placed his life in jeopardy nearly every single moment. Therefore, fleeing Africa in order to save Africa was to becomethe temporary tactic for this "contemporain capital" 'first-rate contemporary,' a strategy illustrated in the affair of Main basse sur le Cameroun and the exalting adventure of the publication Peuples Noirs/Peuples Africains. Remember Mongo Beti is an intellectual, ideological, and emotional veillée that brings together four generations...

Dreaming a cinematic dream: Jean Cayrol's writings on film

Dreams, whose nature is cinematic, provide a fundamental link between Jean Cayrol's work in literature and his work in cinema making his novels, scripts and films, as well as his film and literary criticism, into an almost organic totality in which the same aesthetic ideas circulate. Cayrol's reading of his experiences in concentration camps, his dreams in particular, puts his writing apart from that of other Holocaust writers and reinforces his membership in the nouveau roman group marked by its active engagement with cinema. His conception of dreams as cinematic also points to surrealism as one of the most important elements to shape his creative imagination. Cayrol is unique among the nouveaux romanciers in extending his work in cinema beyond scriptwriting and directing into film criticism. The literary underpinnings of his conception of cinema outlined in Le Droit du regard challenge the phenomenological dogma of the fifties Cahiers du cinéma and foreshadow the linguistic turn in the mid-sixties, making Cayrol's writing on cinema a perfect reflection of the contemporary trends in film criticism.

Blaise Cendrars 5 — Portraits de l'artiste

Sous la direction de Claude Leroy. (La Revue des Lettres Modernes). Paris — Caen, Minard, 2003. 251 pp. Pb €22.00. This, as the title indicates, is a book of portraits: self-portraits, portraits by the artist, portraits of the artist. Cendrars himself appears as the artist of self-multiplication, of mystification, the fugitive from identity who, however, cannot bring himself to leave the scene of the crime. The volume opens with a section on the autoportrait. Luce Briche, to whose memory the collection is dedicated, plumbs the Cendrarsian mirror: the baleful accomplice of Medusa, the place of self-dissolution, the mirror of self-confrontation must be outwitted by Perseus' alternative mirror of oblique reflections and scattered rays, and by the multiperspectival hide-and-seek of language. Jacqueline Bernard constructs a Chinese portrait of Cendrars, of a self continually re-metaphorized in his writing (autofiction). In the hands of Renaud Ferreira de Oliveira, Cendrars assumes the guise of the hunter whose ultimate goal is the ‘prise de conscience de cette réversibilité du regard, par laquelle celui qui croit viser le monde est lui-même visé par une Conscience’. The second section is devoted to Cendrars the portraitist. For Frédéric-Jacques Temple, Cendrars is an ornithologist, for Michèle Touret the group portraitist of his Foreign Legion squad, for Jean-Carlo Flückiger the one who finds an ever-available, hypothetical alter ego in Charlot. We then move on to Cendrars as himself the portrait. Jay Bochner traces connections between Cendrars and the agents of American bohemia and counterculture, while his fame in Brazil, as Maria Teresa de Freitas observes, revolves around the paradox expressed by Mário de Andrade: ‘Et, poète français, il m'a libéré de la France’. Myriam Boucharenc explores the intricate interwovenness of the lives of Cendrars and Soupault, with their little betrayals, and Fabrice Humbert ponders Louis de Calaferte's adoption of Cendrars as a spiritual father, despite the contradictions embedded in this relationship. Alexandre Castant's examination of Doisneau's images of Cendrars, as a contribution to the dialogue between the media, leads into the final section, Cendrars as a character in literature: Marie-France Borot reads Manuel de Seabra's Portuguese lieutenant Conrado reading Cendrars in war-torn Angola (Coneixes Blaise Cendrars?, 1984); and Claude Leroy concludes with a tentative, synthesizing typology — ‘chroniques romancées’, subdivided into ‘Cendrars sous son nom’ and ‘Portraits masqués’; ‘Fictions à clefs’, subdivided into ‘Collages’ and ‘Pilotis’; and, finally,‘Le Livre de Blaise’ (the legend of the forename) — followed by a répertoire. As an appendix, the volume includes two uncollected articles (Cendrars's pen-portrait of Doisneau which served as a preface to the latter's Instantanés de Paris (1925), and a preface written for Erich von Stroheim's novel, Poto-Poto (1956)) and a selection from Cendrars's unpublished epigrammatic thumbnail sketches of contemporaries (‘Épinglés’). It is the documentary value of this collection of essays which is most to be prized, and the variety of its angles of approach. Theoretical thinking about biography and autobiography is less conspicuous.