French Edition Research Articles

A Critique of Elie Halévy

The prestigious French publisher Presses Universitaires de France has recently brought out (November 1995) a new French edition of Elie Halévy's well known book The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, first published in France in three volumes as La formation du radicalisme philosophique (1901–1904) and translated into English in 1926. The prevailing opinion on this book is that it gives an excellent account of English utilitarianism. Thus, in the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Talcott Parsons speaks of it as the ‘virtually definitive analysis of utilitarianism’ More recently Donald Winch, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, describes Halévy's book as: ‘Still the best study of the ideas and activities of the school taken as a whole’.In this short essay I express a very different opinion. I show that Halévy, who qualifies utilitarianism (with obvious disgust) as ‘a plebeian or rather bourgeois morality’, as ‘much too simple’, completely misunderstood the writings of the English and Scottish utilitarian philosophers.Halévy's understanding of Utilitarianism and the Principle of UtilityThere is no clear or precise definition of utilitarianism in Halévy's book, but he obviously understood it to be a descriptive theory, and took the ‘principle of utility’ for a psychological law explaining human behaviour: ‘the fundamental principle of the doctrine is that pleasure is the natural end of human actions’, ‘The principle of utility [...] meant that all men naturally incline towards pleasure and flee from pain’.

A Pound of Flesh: Lacan's Reading of The Visible and the Invisible

A Pound of Flesh: Lacan’s Reading of The Visible and the Invisible Charles Shepherdson (bio) This cut in the signifying chain alone verifies the structure of the subject as discontinuity in the real. —Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject” This moment of cut is haunted by the form of a bloody scrap—the pound of flesh that life pays in order to turn it into the signifier of signifiers, which it is impossible to restore, as such, to the imaginary body. —Lacan, “Direction of the Treatment” A philosophy of the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology. —Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible 1. The Limit of Language When The Visible and the Invisible was published in 1964, Lacan was teaching for the first time at the École normale supérieure. In the fall of 1963, the previous semester, the French Society for Psychoanalysis had excluded Lacan from its list of approved training analysts, which also meant his rejection from the society founded by Freud himself, the International Psychoanalytic Association. 1 As a result, Lacan cancelled his seminar at Sainte-Anne [End Page 70] Hospital, where it had been running for ten years, and began teaching for the first time before a university audience (at the invitation of Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and other supporters who had arranged for him to continue his teaching). Philosophers like Jean Wahl and Jean Hyppolite had of course taken an interest in his work for many years, but this was the first time that participants in his seminar no longer needed the special credentials required to enter the psychiatric clinic at the teaching hospital. The seminar was now open to the public, was considerably larger than it had ever been, and its participants came mainly from the university. Lacan was now obliged to make a case for his work before the academic world. The seminar he had planned for that year was called Les noms-du-père (The Names-of-the-Father), but only one session took place. 2 When he moved from Sainte-Anne to the École normale, he offered a different course, which was published as Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, although it was originally entitled Les fondements de la psychanalyse (The Foundations of Psychoanalysis). 3 It is clear, therefore, that this seminar constitutes a new beginning of sorts, a return to fundamental principles. It also involves a concerted effort, on Lacan’s part, to prove himself. If we begin with these historical details, it is not because of their intrinsic importance, or because a theoretical text can be reduced to its historical milieu, but because Lacan’s remarks on The Visible and the Invisible can be grasped only if we recognize the specific concerns that occupied him during this course. 4 Before we turn to that course, however, let us sketch its horizon more precisely. The ill-fated session from the Names-of-the-Father seminar, which has been published in the English (but not the French) edition of Television, contains an analysis of the “voice” which is very close to the account of the “gaze” that organizes his discussion of Merleau-Ponty [see Salecl and Zizek]. The session on the “voice” develops through a reading of the biblical account of Abraham and Isaac [see Derrida], which is in turn elaborated by reference to Caravaggio’s depiction of the sacrifice of Isaac and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling—the entire session providing a brief summary of Lacan’s course on anxiety from the previous semester (the unpublished Seminar X: L’angoisse, 1962–63), in which Heidegger is never far away. 5 The context for his treatment of Merleau-Ponty is therefore extremely complex and overdetermined, opening in many directions, but at the same time it is extremely precise, in the sense that Lacan’s purpose in exploring these materials is not primarily philosophical, but concerns the development of a fairly narrow and technical point within psychoanalytic theory, namely, the problem of the drive. 6 [End Page 71] We thus have an initial orientation: as objects of the drive, the “voice” and the “gaze” are not properties of the subject (the...

Sugar and Slavery, Family and Race: The Letters and Diary of Pierre Dessalles, Planter in Martinique, 1808-1856

Diaries of nineteenth-century plantation managers are rare; diaries of French sugar planters are rarer still. Although such works as the diaries of Ella Gertrude Thomas and James Henry Hammond provide insight into the plantation societies of the antebellum South, virtually no contemporary source treats planter-slave relations as extensively, or presents a white planter's views on slave society in as much detail, as do the letters and diary of Pierre Dessalles. Now Elborg Forster and Robert Forster have translated and edited the most historically and socially significant portions of this unusual work. Previously available only in a four-volume French edition, these materials treat a wide range of topics, including the slave economy, management and socialization of the labor force, the role of free blacks in society, the lives led by the plantation owners, and, significantly, black-white relations before, during, and after emancipation.

The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle (review)

Book Reviews 131 one receive the first blow, or merely avoid and parry those aimed at him."5 SelfDefense in International Law carries forward the classic scholarship ofGrotius and Pufendorff, with particular reference to Israel and anticipatory self-defense. As a jurisprudential case study, it deserves to be a modern classic in its own right. All readers ofShofar who are interested in the nexus between international law and Israeli security studies would benefit from Professor McConnack's outstanding work. Louis Rene Beres Department of Political Science Purdue University The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israelite Universelle, by Michael Graetz, translated by Jane Marie Todd. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. 340 pp. $49.50. This volume first appeared in Hebrew in 1982, in French translation in 1989, and then in English, based on the French text, in 1996. The translations do not appear to have been updated by the author to reflect new work since the original edition, although several chapters of the French edition have been deleted from the English, for unexplained reasons. The jacket blurb speaks of the book as a "deft revision of the accepted picture ofFrench Jewry," a somewhat puzzling remark in regard to a work that is now over fifteen years old-what is "the" accepted picture? Are we not dealing with a variety of them in a field that is fertile and very much ir flux since this book was published? Perhaps "once accepted views" would have been a more satisfactory fonnulation. Such reservations aside, the book contains much of interest and value, recognizing that its audience will be mostly specialists, even specialists among specialists, certainly people intimately familiar with French history, to say nothing ofJewish history. Having been twice translated may account for some of the stylistic oddities, opaque passages, and organizational clumsiness of the work. One must wonder if any editors examined the text after the translator had finished. A few sentences fairly beg for editorial intervention; they simply are not idiomatic English, whereas others are prolix and meandering in a way that may come across more acceptably in French or Hebrew but in English appear unpolished, undisciplined, or simply not well written, although undoubtedly the translator faced some difficult, perhaps impossible decisions. Some 5See: Samuel Pufendorff, On the Duty ofMan and Citizen According to Natural Law, Vol. II, tr. Frank Gardner Moore (New York: Oceana Publications, Inc., 1964), p. 32. 132 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No.1 chapters are burdened by repetitiveness (e.g., providing almost exactly the same identifying or background information that was provided in a previous chapter), while, in other places, key interpretive issues are made in an overly condensed, almost Delphic way; throughout connections are sometimes left unclear, points not adequately pulled together. Graetz persuasively argues that change among French Jews was more gradual than usually believed. Even the ostensibly sudden and sweeping transformations incorporated in the Constitution of 1791, ending the status of Jews as a corporate entity under the Old Regime and granting them civil equality in a modern nation, had important precedents and priming experiences in the Ancien Regime. De Tocqueville is relevant here as elsewhere. In these and many other areas, Graetz commendably offers us a narrative that avoids simplistic assumptions about historical causation-indeed, throughout this volume an unusual feel for rich historical texture, subtleties, ambiguities , and paradoxes is in evidence. Textbooks and general background accounts inform us that it was the Mortara Affair of 1858 that led to the creation ofthe Alliance Israelite Universelle in 1860. Graetz, with nods to Braudel, Le Goff, Agulhon and other French luminaries, explores the experiences and attitudes of Jews in the preceding decades in ways that make the Mortara Affair understandable more as a catalyst than a cause. He similarly demonstrates that such seemingly polar opposites as assimilation and Jewish particularism, rather than existing in hostile and separate worlds, often worked upon one another in a fruitful dialectic; pride in being Jewish persisted even in those who seemed to reject Jewish tradition in toto and who at times vigorously attacked the older Jewish establishment. At any rate, enthusiastic assimilation into the French nation and disdain for much...

Paré as a neurosurgeon.

The Cowlishaw Collection gives a splendid representation of the works of a Ambroise Paré (1510-1590). His Complete Works, in the great French edition edited by J.F. Malgaigne, are essential in any study of Paré's achievement, but the 1649 English edition provides a good basis for consideration of Paré's practice in what would now be termed neurosurgery. Paré had a large clinical experience in head injury management. His patients included Henri II King of France, who died from a penetrating orbital wound, and be described a number of other craniofacial wounds sustained in war or in warlike sports. His surgical instruments and operative techniques do not appear very innovative, but were doubtless good in their day; his methods of trephination compare favourably with those of the English surgeon John Woodall, his younger contemporary. He operated on head injuries and cranial infection, but had no capacity to treat intradural conditions, such as cerebral abscesses and tumours: his technical limitations are obvious, and the physicians on whom he had to rely could give him no guidance in neurological diagnosis. He was keenly interested in developmental malformations, and described several conditions that would now be referred to a paediatric neurosurgeon. Paré is of great historical importance as an outstanding Renaissance surgeon, whose influence extended throughout the literate world, and as far as Japan. With him, France replaced Italy and Spain in leadership in European surgical progress, a position that France retained at least until the age of Hunter.

Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (review)

278 Short Notices to delineate the exact scope of his book: feudalism in the 'narrow, technical, legal sense of the word', as it existed in the regions between the Loire and the Rhine between the eighth and thirteenth centuries. His focus is on the two institutions in which this feudalism was embodied: vassalage and the fief. This book has had a lengthy life. First appearing in French editions in 1944 and 1947, its translation into English in 1950 was greeted with acclaim by English and American reviewers. The English version was subsequently revised for a second edition in 1961 and a thud in 1964. This n e w printing, in the series of reprints for teaching issued by the Medieval Academy of America, brings the third edition back into print after some years' absence. The reprint is a photographic one and no attempt has been m a d e to amend the text or the select bibliography in thetightof the scholarship of the last thirty years. It is evidence of the enduring quality and value of Ganshof's book that it can still be used profitably by undergraduates in its original form, and that it is sttil the best short introduction to vassalage and the fief in the Middle Ages. This reprint is therefore very welcome. Toby Burrows Scholars' Centre The University of Western Australia Library Kahn, Victoria, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation Milton, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994; pp. xv, 314; R.R.P. US$29.50, £23.50. Victoria Kahn's Machiavellian Rhetoric offers an innovative approach to the reading and reception of the works of Machiavelli and is a valuable addition to the corpus of research produced by scholars such as Raab, Pocock, Skinner and Worden. The book argues that the Machiavelli of force and fraud, the 'rhetorical Machiavel', is not simply the result of a naive reading of his works, but m a y be understood as a 'rhetorical dimension of his political theory' (p. 4). The primary objective of this investigation is to provide a revised history of Renaissance Machiavellism 'that sees the Machiavel and the Short Notices 279 republican as equally valid and related readings of Machiavelli's work' (p. 4). Kahn acknowledges that the image of the Machiavel could function independently of the author's work. This is an important caveat and one which is occasionally ignored. Milton, for example, was familiar with the political sentiments expressed in the Discorsi. His only direct reference to the 'Florentine Secretary', however, utilises the popular, pejorative signification. The reader requires no famtiiarity with Itatian prose to understand the meaning behind Milton's branding of the English clergy as 'MachiaveUian Priest[s]' (An Apology against a Pamphlet in Complete Prose Works, Yale, 1953, Vol. I, p. 908). Milton was merely employing a signifier which with time and frequency of use had become divorced from its original context. As Kahn's quotation from Clarendon suggests, Englishmen w h o had not read MachiaveUi's prose sttil understood the meaning of the term 'Machiavel' (p. 3). The idea that the powerful Renaissance images which portray the Machiavel as a figure of force and guile were initiated by a rhetorical reading of the works of MachiaveUi, and that this interpretation 'gave rise to anxieties associated with Machiavelli's divorce of poUtics from ethics' (p. x), is an insightful and intriguing observation. Yet although the book deals with reader reception it fails to examine closely the cultural and political forces at work which might have prescribed this meaning. Such a study would be a useful adjunct to this book. It would reveal whether readers' interpretation of the works of Machiavelli was personal and spontaneous or whether forces existed within the inteUectual consciousness of the Church and state which poticed its meaning. Victoria Kahn is currently based at the University of California, where she is in the process of preparing her n e w book for publication. Tentatively entitled The Romance of Contract: The Rhetoric of Political Obligation in England 1640-74, this work wtil be eagerly anticipated by aU students interested in the study of seventeenth-century England. Robert Hallam Department of English University of Western Australia ...

Topical Outline of the THEODICY

Since 1951, English-language readers of Leibniz's Theodicy (Essais de Theodicee) have been well-served by the elegant and readable translation of E. M. Huggard, published by Routledge & Kegan Paul (1951) and Open Court (1985), and edited by Austin Farrer. However, this edition has some conspicuous failings: it leaves Latin, Greek, and German phrases untranslated; provides a name index onl y, thus omitting Leibniz' s own useful topical index; and completely omits the interesting and substantial synopsis, Causa Dei Asserta (a translation of which can be found in Paul Schrecker, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays, Bobbs-Merrill [Library of Liberal Arts], 1965). The French paperback edition of the Essais de Theodicee published by Garnier-Flammarion (1969) does provide Leibniz's own topical index to his work, as well as compendious and invaluable notes on the text (589 in number !), but of course, this does not help readers with no French. There exists, then, very little help for the reader wishing to mine the depths of Leibniz's massive work, and who is thus forced to read it through from end to end to find out what is in it. The following topical outline is offered to help remedy this situation. I have provided a tag-line indicating the gist of each numbered section of the work, and some indentation to help convey a sense of Leibniz' s architectonic (progressive indentations indicating sections, subsections, and further sections of subsections). I hope that the outline may help make visible Leibniz's overall plan and argument, a forest otherwise invisible for the trees.

Art of the Renaissance (review)

192 Reviews Hunt's conclusion mainly emphasises the ageing Shakespeare's psychology as he seeks to embrace life through productive work. Indeed, a lack of interest in material history is a pervasive weakness of the book as Hunt uses contextual factors to explain instances in the plays without adequately demonstrating the relationship of text to context or perceiving the stage as itself contingent. Homogenising his own readers is a disconcerting continuation of the project offindingessential unity in the plays, discovering the inner self of the author and constructing play-goers as remarkably uniform. Representations of labour offer an exciting opportunity, not only to interrogate the ideological conditions in which theatre was constructed and which it challenged, but also to examine the cultural positioning of the playwright. In Shakespeare's Labored Art, Hunt passes up the opportunity, opting instead for an older style of author-centred criticism. Susan Penberthy Department of English University of Western Australia Jestaz, Bertrand, Art of the Renaissance, trans. I. Mark Paris, N e w York, Harry B. Abrams, 1995; cloth; pp. 608; 164 colour plates, 984 b/w figures; R.R.P. AUS$295.00. (Distributed in Australia by Thames and Hudson) The Art of the Renaissance: Raphael's 'Madonna of the Meadow' on the front dustcover, Michelangelo's 'Dying Slave', Donatello's Annunciation', and the D u o m o in Florence on the back; over 600 pages, nearly 900 illustrations, including 154 colour plates. Everything you wanted to know about Renaissance art, and not just in Italy, in one volume. It sounds promising—a textbook for university or Year 12 (but not for students to buy, at $295) and a coffee table book for browsing. Yet, looking more closely, one wonders how one is expected actually to use it. It consists of an introduction, followed by the colour plates, a 'documentation' section consisting of black and white illustrations with minimal captions, and a section of commentaries on individual buildings entitled 'Great Architecture of the Renaissance'. The introduction is a systematic overview of Renaissance art which covers the major figures in about 100 pages of unillustrated text in two columns with long paragraphs and no references. It belongs to a genre of art historical Reviews 193 writing which is largely unreadable. It is not that there are difficulties of content, or problems with the style or translation of the original French edition of 1984. (It must, however, be the only book published for many a year with the invitation, without evident irony, to 'Rest assured, dear reader!'). It is that examples of particular works are merely touched upon in a phrase or sentence, so that it is hardly worth the effort of looking up the illustration, and there is nothing to engage the reader with the works themselves. The reader who will gain most from the text will be one w h o is already familiar with the issues and works of art being referred to, and who reads it for new nuances or changes of emphasis. It makes one appreciate, for all its faults, Frederick Hartt's A History of Italian Renaissance Art (aimed at undergraduate survey courses in the United States) and its stmctured account in which both text and image appear on the same page and text engages with image. But this book should be understood for what it is: a corpus of illustrations with an introduction attached. The colour plates of architecture and sculpture are impressive, but those of the paintings less so, often looking tired and blackish, without the freshness that new photographs of conserved paintings and the best quality printing can convey. The general impression is that Renaissance paintings are brownish and shiny, with too many harsh reds. And who today in a book as expensive as this wants a fold-out plate and close-up details of the Sistine ceiling before it was cleaned? As a corpus the colour plates are a mix of the very familiar and the not-quite-so-familiar, without presenting systematically the old canon or advocating a new one. The 439 black and white illustrations are stmctured by medium, and then loosely by country and chronology. There are occasional forays into thematic groups...

A Dictionary of Military History and the Art of War.

List of Contributors to the French Edition. List of Contributors to the English Edition. Acknowledgements. Illustration Acknowledgements. Abbreviations. Notes on Dates. Introduction to the French Edition. Introduction to the English Edition. A Dictionary of Military History A - Z. Index.

John Dos Passos, Blaise Cendrars, and the "Other" Modernism

The interwar French avant-garde long considered John Passos as an eminent literary figure. Passos's influence on French writers and editors, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude-Edmond Magny, is now, of course, a critical commonplace. Sartre, in his 1938 article on U.S.A., considered Passos to be greatest writer of our time (80). Magny, in her preface to the 1949 French edition of The 42nd Parallel, praised Passos as an innovative portrayer of la condition humaine (Stolzfus 218). Critics have also recognized the influence of avant-garde painters on Passos and extensively documented his various biographical associations with France.(1) But the influence of the French writer Blaise Cendrars on Passos's Manhattan Transfer has not been adequately treated. The present scholarship on the Passos-Cendrars link is severely piecemeal, and it often lacks the needed historical contexts. Many of Passos's most important interwar influences--French (Cendrars), Italian (Ungaretti), and Belgian (Verhaeren)--have been overlooked in Passos criticism. Historically, American critics have tended to neglect transatlantic twentieth-century influences, even those as important as Cendrars, and the valuable work of the many French poet-theorists (e.g., Soupault, Aragon, Desnos, Breton, Jacob) active during the 1900-1930 period. The large body of American criticism assigns Passos's main aesthetic influences to Joyce, Eisenstein, Eliot, and Whitman. Discussing the form of Manhattan Transfer, Iain Colley's Passos and the Fiction of Despair is representative in attributing Dos Passos's borrowings to what Colley calls the true experimentalists: Stein, Joyce, Carl Sandburg, Dreiser, Hemingway, and John Reed (60). Revealingly, Colley, contravening Passos's own statements on literary works particularly suggestive in determining the form of Manhattan Transfer, provides, like most other British and American critics, the traditional Anglophone list. Passos, however, in a letter to Melvin Landsberg (Sep. 23, 1957), has cited (with the exception of Stephen Crane) only foreign authors as possible influences on Manhattan Transfer: Baroja, Verhaeren, Zola, Flaubert, and Blaise Cendrars (243-244).(2) In light of this current critical dearth, Cendrars's role in Passos studies merits special attention. An overlooked origin of Passos's interwar fiction is Cendrars's early poetry (1912-1926). Poetry, as Passos recounts in The Best Times, more important than submarines or war guilt or brave little Belgium or the big board on the New York Stock Exchange (24). But it was less the poetry of Eliot, Pound, and other Anglophone modernists than the experiments of Cendrars and the French avant-garde that pushed Passos to try poetry as fiction. Passos in 1926 wrote an article on Cendrars, Homer of the Trans-Siberian (1926), published that same year in the Saturday Review of Literature. Passos's translations of Cendrars's Panama (1913), Transsiberien (1913), and selections from Documentaires (1923) and Feuilles de Route (1924) between the first and second volumes of U.S.A. attest to his continued, engaged interest in Cendrars's poetry. Passos, of course, began his writing career as a poet, publishing Eight Harvard Poets in 1917 and A Pushcart at the Curb in 1922, both of which contain a wide assortment of imagist and free-form poems. While there is, as Linda Wagner argues in The Modern American Novel, ample proof that Passos a staunch admirer of Ezra Pound (28), this is only part of the formative influence story. At the end of her modernist-imagist argument, Wagner asserts: Much of [modernistic writing] stemmed from the basically poetic technique of concentrating meaning and emotion in an image.... This new intuition, this relatively new way of apprehending, encouraged writers to accept the device of the image or scene as a means of making their perceptions fresh, clear, and immediate. …

Theology of Social Life in Augustine's "De civitate Dei." by Miikka Ruokanen

146BRIEF NOTICES in a five-year period, 1842—1847, were contemporary with other artists of that romantic time, George Catlin, for example. Some of these Point paintings appear in SacredEncounter, along with plain but authentic sketches and maps made by DeSmet. It is not easy to find reasons for criticism of this book. Two points, however, should be mentioned. First, the balance of the text and illustrations, especially the latter, weigh heavily in favor of DeSmet's European origins. Some outstanding pieces directly related to his work on the plateau, the focus ofPoint's paintings and the exhibition itself, have been overlooked, for example, DeSmet 's multi-colored chasuble used at Mass on the trail, the remnant of his buffalo robe, the cross with chain presented by DeSmet to arenowned Flathead Chief, and the exquisite Corpus for the cross, carved by Ravalli, used in the Flathead "Christ taken down from the cross ceremony" on Good Fridays. AU of these were readily available in the Jesuit Oregon Province collection. Obviously , not everything available could be used. These, however, were so intimately identified with the Sacred Encounter that their omission in favor of so much of DeSmet's Belgian memorabilia appears to be an oversight. A more specific criticism concerns an occasional lapse of fact, for example, the text concerning DeSmet's first printed book and the illustration (p. 126) which presents the title page of the 1848 French edition of Oregon Missions. In view of the broad sweep of the text and the splendid illustrations, rich in color and variety, this is not a severe complaint. It follows, then, that Sacred Encounters deserves to be in as many collections ofAmericana as Wilderness Kingdom, to which it is superior in some respects. Wilfred P. Schoenberg, SJ. (Gonzaga University) Ruokanen, Miikka. Theology ofSocial Life in Augustine's "De civitate Dei" [Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, Band 53] (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1993. Pp. 179 DM 68,-.) If the amount written about Augustine is massive, the City ofGod probably ranks second only to the Confessions as die work most frequently studied. Here a Finnish scholar reviews the older school of Augustinian scholarship and finds it wanting in its interpretation of the De civitate Dei Specifically, it failed to take note of changes in Augustine's views and deemed it sufficient to trace certain concepts from his earlier, more philosophically oriented writings which are more optimistic about the capabilities of human nature. The later Augustine is characterized as a "moral pessimist" even though still a "natural optimist." While remaining essentially good, creation has become thoroughly flawed because of sin, and for Augustine, says Ruokanen, sin is decisive. Thus, Augustine has long been mistakenly regarded as the ideological father of a sacral medieval political order. But the social order of this BRIEF NOTICES147 world is founded on pride and moved by the lust for domination. Even if all citizens were good Christians, human society would still be under sin. There is no such thing as a Christian commonwealth, only "a secular society based on the social contract of collective self-interested love" (p. 154). Christians must make the best of a bad situation but can, at most, make it less evil, not really good. They are sustained by the hope of heaven, their true goal. Her conclusions are based on analyses of ordo, civitas, and love. While her findings are not new, this work contributes to scholarship on the City of God by its synthesis of previous research. Robert B. Eno, S.S. (The Catholic University ofAmerica) Ryan, James G. (Ed.). Irish Church Records: Their History, Availability and Use in Family and Local History Research. (Glenageary, Co. Dublin, Ireland: Flyleaf Press. 1992. Pp. 207. »46.00.) Although Ireland is well known as the "land of saints and scholars," one of its richest historical lodes remains unmined for the most part—the records kept, often haphazardly, by various major and minor religious denominations over the past two centuries. James G. Ryan seeks to rectify this state of affairs by providing this very useful guide to the content, location, and accessibility of the extant ecclesiastical records of not only the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland...

Un Chant d-amour. Le cinéma de Jean Genet by Jane Giles

Book Reviews JaneGiles. U n c h a n t d ’a m o u r . L e c in é m a d e J e a n G e n e t . Paris: Editions Macula, 1993. Pp. 160. This study transforms a doctoral dissertation (published under the title of Jean Genet. Un chant d ’amour [London: British Film Institute, 1991]) into a synthetic view of Genet’s relations with cinema. Organized around a shot-by-shot description (accompanied by 40 crisp photograms) of Genet’s only finished film, Un chant d ’amour (1950, 25 minutes), the work assembles all materials concerning the writer and his relations with cinema: the late Serge Daney’s terse summary of the film; Edmund White’s biographical preface that situ­ ates the paradoxically crucial and marginal role film making played in Genet’s writing; two essays by Jane Giles that review Un chant d ’amour, six other unfinished scenarios, plus Genet’s adaptations and appearances in other films; Philippe-Alain Michaud’s close read­ ing that touches on metamorphosis and deterritorialization, tactile and ocular perception, and relations of phantasm and framing; Genet’s scripts for the production of Le Bagne (1952), Le Bleu de l ’œ il (1976, with notes by Jean-Bernard Moraly); Albert Dichy and Edmund W hite’s interview that covers all of the principal themes (eroticism, poetry of incarnation, the penal gaze, cineasts who inspire Genet); a filmography listing the films Genet wrote, his adaptations, and the features in which he played roles or that influenced his writing; a complete biofilmography. Genet’s film figured prominently in underground cinema of the 1950s. It was shot by Jacques Natteau, director of photography for Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938), and pro­ duced by Nico Papatakis, director of Les Abysses (1963), a gory film about two maids who murder their masters, that inspired the plot of Les Bonnes. The film’s affinities with Cocteau’s Le Sang d ’un poète (1930) and Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) are striking. By using a cast of amateurs—vagrants, even criminals—to perform acts of homoerotic fan­ tasy Genet offers a reflection on the limits of the medium. Filmed images become desired objects because they mirror a viewer’s desire to order and control others’ bodies. Appear­ ing and disappearing, the same images occlude desire, thus yielding ambivalent drives that confuse creativity with perversion. For Genet close-ups synthesize a mute but stunningly erotic violence afforded through editing. They dedifferentiate gendered zones of the body, inspiring in us pleasures—with­ out which life would be insufferably violent or morose—of regressive phantasy. The closeup becomes an area where language and image intermingle (gros plan anticipating a “ fat project,” a throbbing body-part stuck—planté—in a receptive cavity. . .). Liminary figures of desire, all parts of “ dialogic’’ areas of consciousness, circulate through verbal fragments staging scenes of congress. As seen in Un chant d ’amour, two prisoners make love by means of a straw inserted through a wall by blowing cigarette smoke into each other’s throats. In the sight of the smoke being emitted we taste a rich mixture of spittle, semen, and language. But this is only one of many different pleasures we reap from this insightful, prismatic, and carefully documented study. The French edition of Jane Giles’ work is a welcome and powerful contribution to Genet and to film studies in general. T om C o n l e y University o f Minnesota VOL. XXXV, NO. 1 79 ...

Unpredictability: The Broken Dice and Other Mathematical Tales of Chance . Ivar Ekeland. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993. vi, 183 pp., illus. $19.95 or £15.95. Translated from the French edition (1991) by Carol Volk.

Unpredictability: <i>The Broken Dice and Other Mathematical Tales of Chance</i> . Ivar Ekeland. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993. vi, 183 pp., illus. $19.95 or £15.95. Translated from the French edition (1991) by Carol Volk.

Unpredictability: The Broken Dice and Other Mathematical Tales of Chance . Ivar Ekeland. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993. vi, 183 pp., illus. $19.95 or £15.95. Translated from the French edition (1991) by Carol Volk.

Unpredictability: <i>The Broken Dice and Other Mathematical Tales of Chance</i> . Ivar Ekeland. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993. vi, 183 pp., illus. $19.95 or £15.95. Translated from the French edition (1991) by Carol Volk.

Real-time scanning-slit in vivo confocal microscope based on bilateral scanning which solves the problem of specimen motion blur: Applications to ocular neuroimaging

The standard method to observe nerves in tissue is to use some agent such as silver or gold compounds which are localized in the nerve fibers and increase their contrast. These were the techniques developed by Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Cajal’s work was published in a two-volume edition in French in 1909 with the title Histologie du Systéme Nerveux de l’ Homme et des Vertébrés. This work was republished in 1952-1955 as Histologie du Systéme Nerveux by L. Azoulay, Instituto Ramón y Cajal.Alternatively a fluorescent compound may be introduced near the cell bodies of the neurons and the compound diffuses along the lipid membranes of the nerve. Subsequent observations of the specimen in a fluorescent microscope provides the observer with a bright, high contrast image of the nerve and its branches and bifurcations.The standard instrument for the observation of the cornea is the slit-lamp. The slit-lamp was invented by Allvar Gullstrand. Gullstrand made major contributions to the theory of astigmatism and to the mechanism of accommodation of the eye.

Ondelettes: Wavelets and Operators . Yves Meyer. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1993. xvi, 223 pp., illus. $49.95 or £27.95. Cambridge Studies in Advanced Mathematics, 37. Translated from the French edition (Paris, 1990) by D. H. Salinger.; Wavelets . Algorithms and Applications. Yves Meyer. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, 1993. xii, 133 pp., illus. Paper, $19.50; to SIAM

Ondelettes: <i>Wavelets and Operators</i> . Yves Meyer. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1993. xvi, 223 pp., illus. $49.95 or £27.95. Cambridge Studies in Advanced Mathematics, 37. Translated from the French edition (Paris, 1990) by D. H. Salinger.; <i>Wavelets</i> . Algorithms and Applications. Yves Meyer. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, 1993. xii, 133 pp., illus. Paper, $19.50; to SIAM

VISION by Pierre Buser and Michel Imbert (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992)

This is a textbook on biological vision, translated from the 1987 French edition (Hermann, Paris) by R. H.~Kay, Emeritus Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, UK. The authors are Professors of Comparative Neurophysiology and Visual Neuroscience (respectively) at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris.

An Interview with Jean Genet

I interviewed Jean Genet in Paris in the Summer of 1983, a few years before his death, for a book I was working on a biography I sadly never finished about Barney Rosset and Grove Press.' Genet consented to talk to me because he liked Barney a lot and deeply respected what that brave publisher had achieved in the hot and heavy battles for freedom of expression, sexual and political, during the '60's. Like Genet, Barney had a hankering to incite revolution, that's why Genet liked him. It wasn't easy for me to find Genet who rarely gave interviews, was said to be constantly shifting his abode, and had no fixed address much less a telephone. His French editor told me not to worry, however, because from time to time the author came by to pick up messages, etc; and that once Genet learned that I wanted to speak to him about Barney Rosset, he would surely agree to meet with me he liked Barney that much. And so he did. A couple of days after my phone call to his editor, Genet climbed out of a taxi that pulled up before my door. He looked like a sweet-faced bum, someone who'd just been let out of prison, who was wearing the same clothes he'd slept in, including shoes and socks. There was nothing gay about him a point I mention here because of the misleading caricature of Genet, in that respect, which appeared in The New York Review of Books on October 21, 1993, for Tony Judt's review of Edmund White's biography, Genet.2 I think Genet did not much like my looks and wasn't impressed when I introduced myself as a professor of law and First Amendment lawyer. But when I reminded him that I was Barney Rosset's lawyer, his legal eagle during the '60's I'd taken on all of

An Interview with Jean Genet

I interviewed Jean Genet in Paris in the Summer of 1983, a few years before his death, for a book I was working on a biography I sadly never finished about Barney Rosset and Grove Press.' Genet consented to talk to me because he liked Barney a lot and deeply respected what that brave publisher had achieved in the hot and heavy battles for freedom of expression, sexual and political, during the '60's. Like Genet, Barney had a hankering to incite revolution, that's why Genet liked him. It wasn't easy for me to find Genet who rarely gave interviews, was said to be constantly shifting his abode, and had no fixed address much less a telephone. His French editor told me not to worry, however, because from time to time the author came by to pick up messages, etc; and that once Genet learned that I wanted to speak to him about Barney Rosset, he would surely agree to meet with me he liked Barney that much. And so he did. A couple of days after my phone call to his editor, Genet climbed out of a taxi that pulled up before my door. He looked like a sweet-faced bum, someone who'd just been let out of prison, who was wearing the same clothes he'd slept in, including shoes and socks. There was nothing gay about him a point I mention here because of the misleading caricature of Genet, in that respect, which appeared in The New York Review of Books on October 21, 1993, for Tony Judt's review of Edmund White's biography, Genet.2 I think Genet did not much like my looks and wasn't impressed when I introduced myself as a professor of law and First Amendment lawyer. But when I reminded him that I was Barney Rosset's lawyer, his legal eagle during the '60's I'd taken on all of

Advertising practices for self‐image projective products in the New Europe: a print advertising content analysis

Analyses the advertising content of three self‐image projective products (perfume, cosmetics, and women′s apparel) in the UK, German, French, Spanish, and Italian editions of Vogue magazine. Tests for the degree of standardisation versus localisation of the advertising of these products. Suggests that marketers/advertisers standardise perfume advertisements to a greater degree and apparel to a lesser degree.