La Parole Research Articles

Is Literature Secular? Transsecular Politics of Literature and Hermeneutics of Hospitality

ABSTRACT Here I introduce the transsecular concept for the development of a politics of literature in a syncretic, transsecular society. If literature, as per Jacques Rancière (literature as a contradictory discourse in La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature) and Michel Foucault (madness as principle of social partition in Folie, langage, littérature, 2019) is a laboratory of experiences that makes it possible to think outside of binary logic, through non-dialectic contradiction, which does not transform the dual into the univocal. Then, the transsecular approach aims to articulate these identity differences based on a principle of “hospitable” reading, a transsecular hermeneutics, which is in the very origin of the texts that form literary traditions. This hospitable principle of reading proposes a hermeneutics of literary texts as ethics of the care of the self. The transsecular approach is thus based on a synctretic hermeneutics of texts of both secular and religious origin, which live alongside and set different cultural traditions to dialog with each other, following the model of literature that is by nature really transtextual.

Histoire de la description de la parole: de l'introspection à l'instrumentation éd. par Christelle Dodane, et Claudia Schweitzer

Reviewed by: Histoire de la description de la parole: de l'introspection à l'instrumentation éd. par Christelle Dodane, et Claudia Schweitzer Wladyslaw Cichocki Dodane, Christelle, et Claudia Schweitzer, éd. Histoire de la description de la parole: de l'introspection à l'instrumentation. Champion, 2021. ISBN 978-2-7453-5595-9. Pp. 404. This collection of eleven papers (plus a preface and an afterword) deals with aspects of the historical development—from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries—of the description of speech as found in research on French. The main theme is that the notations and analytical techniques currently used in phonetic research were developed over a long period of time. Before the nineteenth century, knowledge about speech was limited to what could be perceived by auditory perception, physical observation, or intuition. However, major developments in speech research were to take place in the late nineteenth century with the invention of analytical instruments such as the kymograph, palatographic mirrors, and magnetic recordings. This theme is developed in each of the three sections of the book. The first section discusses the description of prosody. While sixteenth-century grammarians considered prosody to be an important part of rhetorical art, they tended to avoid it in their research because they had difficulty describing it. The discovery of instruments that brought into focus the acoustic features of fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration helped in the creation of notational systems that were sensitive to the organization of rhythm and intonation. The second section of the book presents the development of transcription systems for segmental sounds. Research began with two types of systems, "organic" notations based on physiological articulation and writing systems that were close to the Latin alphabet; these would eventually lead to the invention of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The third section of papers outlines the growth of experimental phonetics laboratories in Paris, Grenoble, Montpellier, and Strasbourg. It establishes connections between this development and research on déclamation, gesture, and singing. Among the topics covered are the legacies of Abbé Jean-Pierre Rousselot, the phonetician and dialectologist who was the founder of experimental phonetics, and Maurice Grammont, whose research on phonetic variation was a precursor to the field of sociophonetics. Many of the nineteen specialists who contributed papers to this volume are associated with the Praxiling Laboratoire de linguistique at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, and they represent different fields: phonetics, phonology, speech pathology, musicology, history of linguistics, and traditional grammar. This diversity may account for some of the differences in writing style and for the loose cohesion between chapters. A noticeable shortcoming is the small number of illustrations in the chapters that discuss the development of transcription systems. It is noteworthy that the volume is accompanied by an online booklet that provides links to videos and excerpts from rare manuscripts (including portraits, descriptive texts, and demonstrations of instruments like the kymograph). This book will be of particular [End Page 171] interest to phoneticians and advanced students of phonetics as well as to those who study the history of linguistics. More generally, anyone who carries out computer-based analysis of speech—using software such as Praat, for example—will find useful historical nuggets that inspire an appreciation of and reflection on the origins of current notational and instrumental practices. [End Page 172] Wladyslaw Cichocki University of New Brunswick (Canada) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Les voies négatives de Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett’s negative paths The author evokes some hypotheses on the question of the negative way as a structural data in relation to the process of Beckettian writing (the critical position with respect to language; the practice of dispossession; disfigurement) by taking up elements of his books published by Classiques Garnier in 2019: La parole trouée. Beckett, Tardieu, Novarina, and Les Voies négatives de l’écriture dans le théâtre moderne et contemporain.

François Jullien and the Methodological Viewpoint Presented in his Detour and Access. Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece. Hermeneutical Perspective

François Jullien’s Detour and Access. Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece may be interpreted as an interesting example of the methodological challenge that arises around the question: to what extent does a specific strategy of meaning (stratégie du sens) taken as the subject of research influences the form and content of the results of this research? In addition, this may be viewed backward as well: to what extent a specific assumption regarding the form and content of research may affect its results? From this point of view, it is worth noting two fundamental tasks that constitute almost continuously double-intertwined obstacles in the narrative attempts of the Chinese cultural area. On the one hand, frequently observable chains of different proposals of translations of words and sentences. On the other hand, the presence of different strategies of meaning, which, in a way that is often not easy to grasp, influence the shape of “what” and “how” had been said, suggested, or maintained unexpressed at all. In this context, Jullien emphasizes the difference between “the word as definition” (la parole de définition) characteristic of the mainstream of Western culture and “the word as indication” (la parole indicielle), which the French philosopher attributes to articulations frequently occurring in the space of Chinese culture. Thus, there is a difference here within strategies that articulate meaning, which extends between what is general, and therefore abstract or abstracted, and what is holistic, and therefore constituting an inseparable unity. So, on the one hand, we are dealing with “knowing”, on the other hand, with “realizing”. This distinction underlines an extremely important challenge in the field of methodology, which should direct our attention to issues related solely to the scientific and philosophical thought devoted to human beings, and which is particularly clearly present with such attempts of interpretations at cross-cultural and multilingual insights.

“Measuring Silences” in the Translation of Awa Thiam's La Parole aux Négresses

An overlooked, yet significant text in the genealogy of intersectionality and Black feminist theory is Awa Thiam’s 1978 text La Parole aux Négresses. This paper examines the ways that the English translation, Speak Out, Black Sisters: Feminism and Oppression in Black Africa,though widening the audience for Thiam’s work, engages in various practices of erasure that undermine Thiam’s academic authority, theoretical contributions, activist insights, and ultimately, her own voice. Namely, I contend that these practices, which scholars have linked to receptions and English translations of Black Francophone texts in particular, include de-formalization, domestication, de-philosophizing, untracing, and invisibilisation. I seek not just to focus on the “negative” aspect of these silences, but also to enact a partial restitution of Thiam’s insights from the original French text. Further, re-engaging with her text, contributions, and insights calls for more reflexivity around the politics of translation, English language hegemony, and recognition of African feminist scholarship.

In Search of a Feminist Theory of Expression

In the Tractactus Logico Philosophicus, Wittgenstein concludes that what cannot be spoken about is better left unsaid, which would correspond to everything that is not scientific language susceptible of being formalized in the propositional framework. It is not until Philosophical Investigations that he will find the formula of the “expression” taken in an encompassing sense with its notion of “seeing aspects”. For his part, in his course “Le problème de la parole”, Merleau-Ponty, elaborates a reflection on language that begins with the consideration of the scientific and logical naivety of language, in relation to Saussure's linguistics, and ends with the comparison between Proust and Stendhal. In this last part, he proposes that literature, as a creative language and an expressive operation, is both true life, connected with the ontological foundation of what exists, and phenomenology that shows the institution of that life. In both authors, the logical consideration is overwhelmed by the expressive power of language. Our contribution will make a comparison between Wittgenstein's and Merleau-Ponty's reflections on language and expressiveness. With this, we will seek to propose the bases of a feminist theory of expression, that is, a theory that seeks to show the particularity of female expressiveness.

Après Ulysse: vers une poétique de l’hospitalité en Méditerranée. Par André Benhaïm

Through the trope of Odysseus’s Mediterranean travels, André Benhaïm’s erudite book delineates a poetics of hospitality tethered to the figure of the migrant, the ‘passant de la Méditerranée d’aujourd’hui’ (p. 7), an absolute stranger whose endless intrusion redraws the very boundaries of community. Thinking in the wake of The Odyssey (‘après Ulysse’, a phrase to be read both chronologically and spatially) raises the question of how to construe the space of the Mediterranean beyond the framework of return proffered by Homer’s ­Odyssey. Après Ulysse adopts a francophone intertextual approach, weaving together the study of Mediterranean literatures in French with the Proustian intertext and an assortment of francophone Caribbean and Algerian authors in a transcolonial gesture. One of the book’s strongest contributions lies in its substitution of a future-oriented paradigm of hospitality (the search for another, more welcoming home, which here materializes through movement across the Mediterranean) for one of nostalgic return. By recasting ­Odysseus as an undesirable intruder in his own land, the book blurs the dichotomy between insider and outsider, same and other. It recalibrates the experiences of time pertaining to the welcoming of the other; the act of carving out space for their irruptive existence. In this argument, hospitality is a horizon of thought infused with concurrent poetic, political, and ethical currents. In Benhaïm’s lyrical prose, the liminal space of the Mediterranean stands at the intersection of all three. As a mnesic space, the sea carries the echo of multiple histories of displacement that bred hospitality — in both its conditional and unbounded forms. Odysseus here symbolizes poetic invention and the power of parole rather than the nostos of return. Hospitality, for Benhaïm, lies in ‘l’usage créatif de la parole libérée, et l’écoute, la sensibilité au mot inattendu’ (p. 65). Sophisticated analyses delve into the multiple incarnations of this po-ethics of parole in works by Albert Cohen, Albert Camus, Assia Djebar, and Edmond Jabès, as well as ancient Greek philosophers. From this survey three tropes emerge, each designating one ‘énigme à recueillir’ (p. 45), a series of clues to piece together to complete the quest into the fluid meaning of this ‘poetics of hospitality’ — namely, the refuge, the passport as shorthand for mobility, and the anticipated destination (p. 96). What is left aside, in this volume with its primarily francophone focus, is a capacious and nuanced reading of the Mediterranean in terms of its polyglossia beyond the strictures of French imperial history. A consideration of the rich theoretical corpus dedicated to the Mediterranean as concept across languages and disciplines might have further highlighted the realities of Mediterranean mobility beyond the merely textual, in a move more closely attuned to the political dimension reclaimed in the book. Further, the disregard for recent Mediterranean-focused criticism in francophone studies results in a somewhat truncated perspective, especially in relation to Camus whose examination might well count among the book’s most consummate close readings. This dexterous monograph will nevertheless leave its mark for its subtle theorization of hospitality and the poignant engagement with fraternité reverberating through its pages.

Neology in the Coserian Linguistic-Philosophical Vision

Eugeniu Coșeriu (1921-2002) was one of the most influential linguists of the twentieth century. On the occasion of his hundredth anniversary, different events have been held throughout the year of 2021. These included international fora, national and international symposia, hybrid-held lectures with online and offline attendance, just to name a few. Over the years, the “Intertext” journal of the Institute of Philological and Intercultural Research (ICFI) ULIM has published several materials dedicated to this far-reaching contemporary linguist. This article is also intended as a text to pay homage to the illustrious linguist. It deals with the subject so close to Coșeriu, namely that of lexical flexibility. In our case it is about the French lexicon that manifests itself through neologisms, formulas, new constructions, recently created in scientific centers, laboratories, technological centers (néologismes de langue). We pay special attention, however, to neologisms with a stylistic character and function (néologismes de la parole), which attract our attention both by their extraordinary form (forme à rebours) and by their strictly individual character. These units have their author and strict context: they belong as a creative act to writers and poets, journalists and screenwriters and are closely related to individual creativity and the character of the imagination of each subject. E. Coșeriu's linguistic vision in terms of lexical creativity, lexical and semantic neology helps us fully and objectively to decode the linguistic nature of the phenomenon.

Una psicopatologia dell’espressione. Donato Del Piano di Federico De Roberto

The paper focuses on the role of De Roberto in the shift from an objective to a subjective narrative, which takes place in the late 19th century literature. His subjectivism is neither romantic nor esthetical, but develops within a climate of scientific and literary thought, which results from the insight of positivist scientism. Considering De Roberto’s prefaces, which testify to his eclectic poetics, the paper shows his concern with a problematic concept of realism, which draws upon Maupassant’s considerations on the relativity of true or truth. Also, the study investigates to what extent De Roberto’s theoretical insights, as illustrated in his “Preface” to Documenti Umani, are implemented in Donato del Piano through creative writing, thus bespeaking a metanarrative dimension. The main character struggles with the impossibility of finding a full correspondence between his feelings and ideas and the words to voice them. He also struggles with the problems related to language, thus anticipating some aspects of Pirandello’s thought. Another element of modernity is De Roberto’s perception of the unknowable nature of the Self, that he draws upon La Parole Interieure by Egger who can be considered as the first theorist of the interior monologue. Through an intertextual comparison with some of the outstanding authors in the context of Positivism (Maupassant, Taine, Egger), the study shows that De Roberto goes beyond simple forms of methodological eclecticism. Focusing on the recent achievements in psychology, De Roberto foreruns one of the major issues critical to the 20th century reflection over the crisis of subjectivity.

Incipit: On Poetry and Crisis

Incipit:On Poetry and Crisis Thomas C. Connolly and Liesl Yamaguchi For the next installment of this dialogic series, the journal asked Thomas C. Connolly (Yale University) and Liesl Yamaguchi (Boston College) to reflect on Stéphane Mallarmé's fleeting glimpse of a world without poetry, offering the following citation from "Crise de vers" (1897) as a prompt: "Seulement, sachons n'existerait pas le vers: lui, philosophiquement rémunère le défaut des langues, complément supérieur." They composed their initial essays without knowing the content of their interlocutor's essay; the ensuing exchange, by e-mail, took place in the order presented below. If, in his earlier writings, Mallarmé often turns to the preposition "après," his later writings are frequently inflected by the modifier "presque." I show how "presque" is a key instrument in Mallarmé's "jeu de la parole," a word that enables the "Glorieux Mensonge" that is literature, and that, in the case of "Crise de vers," appears to undermine central statements on language, Hugo, and vers libre. As a device that makes believe, as much as it removes the veils of illusion, "presque" is not unrelated to the roles played by magic and mysticism in Mallarmé's concept of rhyme, as well as the historical role of religion in French prosody, explored here, alongside a close reading of the central pages in "Un coup de dés." A signature term in Mallarmé's poetics, "presque" reminds us to return to notions of "play" and the "game," even where Mallarmé claims to speak of "crisis." (TC) The broad strokes of literary and art history offer a portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé as the author of "Un coup de dés": the poem that pivoted poetry away from metrical forms and toward visual ones. But how does rhyme figure in this narrative? An indispensable component of French verse from its medieval origins through the late nineteenth century, rhyme was as central to Mallarmé's conception of verse as it was to his process of composition. This essay investigates rhyme's role in Mallarmé's thinking about le vers at the moment of its crisis, finding the poetic structure to bear a peculiar capacity to mirror the mind. The essay proposes that critical attentiveness to this capacity—which is also identified as poetry's condition of possibility in "Crise de vers"—might point the way to a more coherent account of the crise, Mallarmé, and indeed the whole of modern poetry. (LY) [End Page 1] "Une exquise crise": Rhyme in Crisis liesl yamaguchi Seulement, sachons n'existerait pas le vers: lui, philosophiquement rémunère le défaut des langues, complément supérieur. – Stéphane Mallarmé, "Crise de vers" What would it take for poetry not to exist? Mallarmé omits the dependent clause on which his conditional sentence hangs, evading the syntactic structure that would have obliged him to name it ("Only, be aware [that if X were the case], poetry would not exist").1 At the same time, his italicized warning seems to assert that such a clause could be formulated. It is indeed possible to conceive of conditions under which poetry would not exist. It would therefore also seem possible to identify poetry's condition of possibility. As the paragraph preceding this quotation establishes, this condition is an absence: the absence of a supreme language in which human beings would be able to express themselves in words whose material forms would coincide perfectly with thought. Were such a language to exist, Mallarmé warns, poetry would not; poetry makes up for this fault, or failing, of languages. Poetry, then, is born of the friction between thinking and saying, between thought and linguistic expression. The possibility of poetry thus emerges as our compensation for the frustrating condition of never being able to say just what we mean. This is a rather different conception of poetry from the one generally associated with Stéphane Mallarmé. The broad strokes of literary and art history offer a portrait of the poet as, first and foremost, the author of "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard": the poem that propelled verbal art onto the printed page...

Being in language: Merleau-Ponty’s ontological examinations of language at the Collège de France

This article examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontological investigation of language in his recently published course notes Sur le problème de la parole of 1954. In the course notes, Merleau-Ponty approaches the relation between being and language: if our ontological thinking is thoroughly conditioned by the means of expression provided by our proper language, how are we then to understand its claims of universality? The article argues that the course notes elucidate the linguistic turn in Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology. In particular, this article stresses that the course notes show that Merleau-Ponty undertakes an ontological inquiry into language before his investment into Heidegger’s philosophy. Furthermore, the course notes elucidate the continuity between Merleau-Ponty’s earlier investigations into expression and the ontological inquiry into language in his later texts.

Merleau-Ponty y la filosofía de lo sensible como literatura

The article examines the possibility of identifying an incipient philosophy of the sensible as literature exhibited in the last period of Merleau-Ponty´s works. A philosophy understood in the terms of literature is a project that the philosopher foretells but which he does not achieve because of his sudden death. The aim of the article will be to propose three essential axes to elaborate this philosophy: 1. The philosophy of the sensible as a field of creation, 2. A philosophy that appeals to the literary use of language, and 3. The philosopher-writer subject of the philosophy of the sensible as literature. We will use the unfinished Merleau-Ponty´s diptych, composed of The Prose of the World and The Visible and the Invisible, and the two courses on literature dictated by him: Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage and Le problème de la parole, to trace these key aspects. The article examines the possibility of identifying an incipient philosophy of the sensible as literature exhibited in the last period of Merleau-Ponty´s works. A philosophy understood in the terms of literature is a project that the philosopher foretells but which he does not achieve because of his sudden death. The aim of the article will be to propose three essential axes to elaborate this philosophy: 1. The philosophy of the sensible as a field of creation, 2. A philosophy that appeals to the literary use of language, and 3. The philosopher-writer subject of the philosophy of the sensible as literature. We will use the unfinished Merleau-Ponty´s diptych, composed of The Prose of the World and The Visible and the Invisible, and the two courses on literature dictated by him: Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage and Le problème de la parole , to trace these key aspects.

Language as Gesture in Merleau-Ponty: Some implications for method in therapeutic practice and research

ABSTRACT The unexpected invention of a game with my grandchildren provided a new way of thinking about the nature of such unpredictable moments in therapy. The experience brought together a number of ideas, considered through the view of language taken by Merleau-Ponty where the chaotic primitive layers that pervade language are seen as having primacy over the rules of linguistics such as those set out by Saussure. Saussure is seen as providing a way of understanding linguistic structure whilst at the same time opening a number of ambiguities that then allow a way for thinking about language differently through Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the usage of language (la parole) as opposed the structural aspects of language (la langue). Initially, Winnicott’s ideas around the ‘spontaneous gesture’ are utilised to help show how this kind of unpredictable expression appears as something alive. Merleau-Ponty then shows how language as gestural phenomena takes hold of us through our bodies. Further questions then arise about the method in therapeutic practice and research. Here, it is argued that when the method is given primacy over experience, we are in a position that seeks the already known, which will not, therefore, permit some new expression to break through.

Baudelaire et la sacralité de la poésie. Par John E. Jackson

In this lucid and persuasive essay, John E. Jackson, with the aid of close analysis of some of the most familiar poems of Les Fleurs du Mal together with others less commonly scrutinized, presents a mature reflexion on a perceived interplay between religion, myth, and word (parole), a triad that is seen to lead to Baudelaire’s sacralization of poetry. His discussion is divided into two closely related parts of unequal length, the first carefully entitled ‘Les Religions de Baudelaire’, and the second ‘De la parole dans Les Fleurs du Mal ’. Short shrift is given to Marcel Ruff’s non-theological discussion of ‘le mal baudelairien’, to Lloyd James Austin’s conviction that for the poet ‘le mal’ equated to Chateaubriand’s mal du siècle, and to the interpretations of ‘le mal’ advanced by representative scholars of a Marxist (or marxisant) persuasion. Instead, and with good reason, Jackson insists that it is from the starting point of key notions of Catholic doctrine that Baudelaire seeks to give expression to his troubled metaphysical state, while succeeding in transcending the pathological only through the unique form of satisfaction offered by poetic creation. It follows that Baudelairean metaphysics cannot be accessed in terms of explicit statements of religious belief but only through engagement with the poems themselves, which by their very nature defy conventional paraphrase. By his own admission, Jackson is the avowed enemy of over-interpretation. His subtle readings reveal the poems to be dictated by Baudelaire’s instinctive, if not always immediately apparent, commitment to self-contradiction, a phenomenon exemplified, for example, by ambiguous shifts of personal pronoun that betray uncertainty with regard to his identification with figures both addressed and treated as subjects. Such seemingly insignificant words as ‘enfin’, ‘encore’, or ‘parfois’ can likewise become singularly disruptive. In response to the complexity of the poetic voice (and its polyphonic splintering), Jackson’s analyses themselves are consistently tentative, employing the conditional mood, redefinition, and qualifiers (including regular recourse to ‘si l’on peut dire’). Paradox and (radical) ellipsis are duly central to his enterprise. Although the author is beyond doubt theologically literate, his fundamental concern is at no stage with calculating the extent (or limits) of Baudelaire’s Christian orthodoxy as such, just as he is quick to point out the essential irrelevance of designating certain of the poet’s utterances as blasphemous. It is, as his suggestive title indicates, the entirety of Baudelaire’s poetic universe that is in play here rather than an artificially circumscribed dimension. At the same time, this study makes patently clear that the poet’s sacralization of poetry is all the more powerful for drawing explicitly on religious and biblical archetypes. Even so, Jackson’s exemplary close readings of a strikingly varied range of poems have the undoubted potential to serve as models for analyses of further Baudelaire poems conducted independently of his overarching thesis. His essay also contains valuable observations for students of Mallarmé and (particularly) Nerval, as well as for those with a scholarly interest in ekphrasis.

Literature and the Expressions of Being in Merleau-Ponty’s Unpublished Course Notes

ABSTRACTIn this article I examine Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the relation between literature, being and perception. I focus especially on two of Merleau-Ponty’s courses at Collège de France: the first course, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, and the unpublished course Sur le problème de la parole. In the former Merleau-Ponty presents a new understanding of perception, according to which being is expressed in perception through the style of movement of the perceived phenomenon. In the latter he advances a notion of literary writing as an expression of the being that is itself expressed to us in perception. Through a reading of Proust’s work, he discusses how the literary writer makes his experience expressive by means of a stylization of what is experienced. Hence, literature expresses perception through an enhancement of the expressiveness that it already contains. This capacity of literature will be the main focus of my investigation.

La presse satirique face aux assassinats politiques au Togo en 1992 : quel crédit pour l’historien ? Les exemples de La parole et Kpakpa désenchanté

Ao final da conferência nacional, chamada soberana, em 1991, o Togo foi cenário de uma sucessão de atos de violência política. Característicos dessa violência foram os assassinatos políticos em 1992. Na ausência de quaisquer fontes de arquivos que permitam estudar esta questão à luz da história imediata, o presente artigo aborda a imprensa satírica daquele ano (La parole e Kpakpa désenchanté) e mostra o contexto, os atores e os modos de operação dos ditos assassinatos políticos. Tenta-se ainda explicar como o historiador pode, na ausência dos arquivos, recorrer a esse tipo de fontes e como tratá-lo para escrever a história.

La solidaridad obrera de Pierre Leroux: una exploración de la fraternidad y la amistad entre la filosofía socialista de Pierre Leroux y los textos de La parole ouvrière

Este artículo explora la conceptualización de la experiencia de la solidaridad que se da en dos escenas de escritura, si bien contiguas, diferenciadas. Una de ellas es la que nos ofrece Alain Faure y Jacques Rancière en la antología de textos obreros que lleva por nombre La parole ouvrière. Contexto donde rastrearemos los elementos que articulan determinada noción de solidaridad y que se muestra en la base de una de las propuestas más significativas del movimiento obrero francés de la primera mitad del siglo XIX: la configuración de la Asociación como una “práctica de resistencia”. Analizaremos los obstáculos que enfrenta esta empresa colectiva, concentrándonos en la crítica a la caridad burguesa y la denuncia del egoísmo como elementos destructivos del movimiento obrero. A partir de ese estadio, nos aproximaremos a nuestra segunda escena, representada por la Doctrina de la Humanidad que nos propone el “filósofo obrero” Pierre Leroux, donde examinaremos determinados antecedentes y proyecciones de la solidaridad en tanto fundamento de un sistema filosófico socialista.

"La parole construit le pays": Théâtre, langues et didactisme au Katanga (République Démocratique du Congo) by Maëline Le Lay

Reviewed by: "La parole construit le pays": Théâtre, langues et didactisme au Katanga (République Démocratique du Congo) by Maëline Le Lay Judith G. Miller Maëline Le Lay. "La parole construit le pays": Théâtre, langues et didactisme au Katanga (République Démocratique du Congo). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014. Pp. 483. In this multi-faceted, sometimes awkwardly integrated, but rich study, Maëline Le Lay educates her readers as to why and how didacticism holds sway in Katangan theatre. She details the fascinating array of diglossic strategies (i.e. resemantization of French words and loanblends in Swahili speech; inclusion of Swahili proverbs and citations in French texts) theatre makers use to legitimize their lessons and convince their audiences. In contextualizing the mind set and artistic vision that makes didacticism inevitable, Le Lay also sets out a history of francophone literature in the Congo-Kinshasa, takes up a discussion of the changing concepts of "evolution" and "development," offers a story of the publishing industry, and most pertinently examines the destabilizing educational policy of Belgian colonizers, including the Catholic Church, who created linguistic hierarchies to separate an intellectual class from other "Congolese" peoples. Every successive strongman governing the Congo since independence (1960) has similarly instrumentalized language to divide the population and shore up power (for example, Mobutu promoting Lingala, Ciluba, and Kikongo to counter the prominence of French, or Laurent-Désiré Kabila making Swahili the language of his army.) Today's Congo promotes "la francophonie" as the path toward economic and cultural development, ironically in opposition to exiled Lubumbashi intellectual V.I. Mudimbé's well-rehearsed fear about the colonized mind (The Idea of Africa, 1994). The instrumentalization of language permeates Le Lay's sociological and sociolinguistic approach to contemporary theatre (1970–2010) in the Congo's second largest city, Lubumbashi, capital of a province still generating wealth for the few through mining. Her admirable fifteen months of fieldwork, myriad interviews with actors, directors, playwrights, and publishers, transcriptions of Swahili-language scripts into French, and extensive reading lead her to conclude that Katangan theatre makers, whether performing in French or Swahili, imitate in their theatre the way language works in the streets. In surveying a corpus of twenty-five plays in French and ten in Swahili, she demonstrates how such theatre almost uniformly ends with a lesson contrasting tradition and modernity, rural and urban life, or the treatment of the outsider. The didacticism of colonial era literature, meant to form Africans to European norms (Christianity, patriarchy), thus undergirds the structure and dialogue of contemporary theatre—although the learning goals are frequently more pragmatic (protecting against HIV, handling adultery, getting vaccinated, countering the widespread myth of child sorcerers). [End Page 143] Le Lay shows how French-language theatre and Swahili-language performances, while having a common ancestor in the missionary theatre of the early twentieth century, have arrived at quite different places. The first plays in French in the 1950s, which lionized African heroes to solidify national identity (as was true of African fran-cophone theatre in general), have given way to local melodramas. The Swahili companies, the formation of which signaled theatrical professionalization, have added street performances to their work in radio and television. Each has a distinct audience: plays in French are performed for a more educated population in theatre spaces usually sponsored by the French government; Swahili performances, most commissioned by N.G.O.'s or government agencies, play to audiences gathered together around a designated space in a town square. If the teaching impulse colors both forms of theatre, different dramaturgical strategies result in the greater success of the Swahili pieces. For example, in the case of Papa Mufwankolo's company, a key troupe Le Lay studies, actors have been playing fixed roles for over forty years. This makes them familiar and thus believable to their public. On the contrary, French-language texts, such as those by Katsh M'Bika Katende, another Lubumbashi theatrical star central to Le Lay's analysis, no longer seem realistic, the Swahili used, although providing local color, unsuccessfully capturing the speech patterns of the population. The francophone plays of Yvon Kibawa, another target author, read, Le Lay suggests...

Ghostwriting: The inception and reception of the Course in General Linguistics

AbstractStawarska 2015 The Course in General Linguistics presentes contemporary scholars of Saussure’s linguistics with a performative paradox: as in the case of any other Great Book, a critical study of this posthumously ghostwritten text contributes to its canonization. That is why one can offer a scholarly critique of the Course without diminishing the established legacy of this foundational text. The contribution of this essay is indeed chiefly critical: I reconstitute the process of ghostwriting – and reviewing – the Course by its two editors, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in order to raise doubts about book’s being a reliable statement of Saussure’s linguistics. I argue specifically that the received “official doctrine” articulated in the Course and appropriated within structuralism, which is based upon a set of oppositional and hierarchical pairings between la langue and la parole, synchrony and diachrony, is rendered suspect in light of the book’s complicated editorial history. This “official doctrine” emerged out of an institutional interest to establish general linguistics as a recognizable academic discipline with proper object and method; its enduring status as an unrivaled truth of Saussurianism can be deciphered by investigating the interrelation between dominant discourses and social relations of power.

Words that reveal: Jean-Yves Lacoste and the experience of God

Much of the contemporary discussion of religion seems to do away with the very possibility of revelation. In this article, I use Lacoste’s phenomenology of la parole to rethink a theology of revelation in terms of God’s personal self-giving in experience. After examining Lacoste’s views of the relationship between philosophy and theology, his liturgical reduction and what this means for an understanding of experience and knowledge, and his thought of la parole more broadly, I give critical consideration to how he thinks the possibility of God’s address to humanity. Lacoste maintains that God’s presence in experience may be known through affection, and, indeed, that the word may so move us that we are able to recognise that presence. He uses the notion of self-evidence rather than the usual phenomenological category of evidence to evince the reasonableness of this response. I argue that while Lacoste accords due deference to a traditional understanding of revelation as the repetition or unfolding of a word addressed to us in the past, his thought also allows us to think revelation as a contemporary event, the hermeneutics of which allow us to know God in ways that are new.