Le Temps Research Articles

Gifts for No One or Anyone: Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida on Personne

In Parages, Jacques Derrida writes that the ‘Donner – le temps’ seminar ‘led up to’ a study of Maurice Blanchot’s La folie du jour. That study is the improvised fourteenth session of Donner le temps II. Derrida turns to La folie du jour to treat in more explicit terms the structure of the ‘ récit’ which was particularly relevant to his reading of Charles Baudelaire’s récit ‘La fausse monnaie’ earlier in the seminar, but which is almost entirely absent from the sessions included in Donner le temps II. This paper proposes one possible reason for Derrida’s insistence on Blanchot in the seminar and for thinking the gift: La folie du jour’s narrator, which is not someone determinate, but personne (which, in French, can mean either an indeterminate ‘no one’ or a substitutable ‘anyone’ depending on the context). I argue that the aporetic structure of the gift is best expressed when the gift’s subject and object are indeterminable and substitutable, which is the case when the gift is given to or received from an impersonal personne (to or from no one or anyone).

Between the Ocean and the Ground: Giving Surfaces

Beginning right at the start of the recently published volume II of Donner le temps, at its ‘bord’ or ‘boarding’ upon or out of a calmy oceanic surface, this essay examines the functions and movements of distinct surfaces in between Heidegger and Derrida. Confronting thus the tradition of the ‘Grund’, ‘Abgrund’, ‘Urgrund’, ‘Ungrund’, with the khôra-like surface of archi-writing and dissemination, the essay proposes an investigation of the philosophical and writerly space of Derrida/Heidegger not through their marks and letters, but instead through the different surfaces of inscription and – simultaneous – effacement as the ‘proper places’ of thought and experience, of Destruktion and deconstruction.

“Anarchy” against “Order”: French Elite Perception of the Conflict in Manchuria

Abstract The fall of the French empire in Asia is directly linked to the Second World War and France’s policy of appeasement that preceded it. The issue of France’s attitude to the invasion of Manchuria is important for understanding what French policy in East Asia was during the 1930s. For these reasons, this article intends to show the attitude of French political leaders and how, unable as they were to condemn the aggressor, Japan, it led to the policy of appeasement pursued by all French governments with regard to Japan during the rest of the decade. To do so, this article is based on the published diplomatic archives of the United States and the articles published by the newspaper Le Temps, the unofficial organ of the Third Republic.

Time and the Materiality of Reading

This review is devoted to several events that took place in the field of the study of the materiality of reading at the round table of the Higher School of Social Research (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), held at the Alcazar Library in Marseille. The organisers of the round table designated its topic as “Reading Time” (Le temps de la lecture). The second element of the review was the recent publication of a book by André Frejomil “Art of the Poacher: a Material history of reading according to Michel de Certeau” (Arts de braconner: une histoire matérielle de la lecture chez Michel de Certeau). The material history of reading, an activity rather perceived as immaterial, comes methodologically from analysis of Michel Foucault’s discourse. As such it is sensitive not only to the materiality of the signs placed on the page, but also to the context of the publication that determines the meaning of what is being read (and not only written and “programmed” by the author). It restores the rights of the material bearers of texts and considers them, along with the techniques of the body-at-reading, as factors involved in the deployment of procedures of comprehension. The material history of reading allows us to see our object as an empirical, social and historically contextualised practice involved in certain communities — not only “interpretative” communities but also in those that could be called “motor”.

Algérie 1962: une histoire populaire. Par Malika Rahal

Early in her remarkable ‘histoire populaire’ of the advent of Algerian independence, Malika Rahal, Director of the Institut d’histoire du temps présent, twice cites Benjamin Stora. As the pre-eminent scholar of the conflict, Stora appears in his expert capacity, but also as a witness to the lived experience of a revolutionary moment. The eleven-year-old Jewish boy who left Constantine with his family in June 1962 takes his place among the exiled pieds-noirs, in counterpoint to myriad ‘indigenous’ Algerian voices, as Rahal weaves a complex narrative that throughout exemplifies the writer’s commitment to letting the subaltern speak. Wide-ranging, frequently moving, and — inevitably — at times disturbing, these collectively inspirational testimonies reveal the fine grain of profound societal change. As Rahal’s incisive study makes clear, this process was not only practical and organizational, but also conceptual and symbolic. Her historical assemblage mobilizes interviews conducted in Arabic and French, underpinned by extensive archival research and related primary documentation. The ­investigation also draws upon prominent scholarship in the field, notably that of ­Natalya Vince in her own pioneering oral history of female nationalist combatants (Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954–2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015)). Rahal thus offers an intricate and engrossing chronicle of a pivotal year, her structuring chronology punctuated by three key events: the ceasefire instituted by the Accords d’Évian (19 March); the national celebration of Algerian independence (5 July); and the proclamation of the Algerian Republic (25 September). This essential contextualization allows the author to develop a detailed case study in each of her twenty-two substantive chapters. The resulting analyses are as individually absorbing as they are cumulatively compelling, so allowing 1962 to emerge as a political and cultural totality: simultaneously event and effervescence, empowerment and performance, things falling apart while others coalesce in modes ranging from the patriotically heroic to the festively euphoric. Rahal maintains the coherence of this ambitious project by dividing her findings into four thematic sections: ‘Violences’, ‘Corps’, ‘Espaces’, ‘Le Temps’. These broad headings provide an appropriately inclusive space for her compendium of telling tales, as male and female, young and old, urban and rural, arabophone and francophone contributors find a space in which to articulate their imbricated stories of this year of revolution(s). ‘Le long 1962’, as scrutinized by Rahal, is a crux in the fullest sense: a touchstone to Algeria’s past, present, and future, in which the all-too-evident threats — military, diplomatic, economic — are counterbalanced by hitherto unimaginable social opportunities. Rahal charts this post-conflict reordering in spheres as diverse as medicine and agriculture, education and housing, political infighting and trade union organization. Elsewhere, she targets demobilization, returns from exile and liberation from captivity, reunions for some and the often drawn-out confirmation of loss for others. Through this close reading of a momentous year, Rahal makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the transition from colonial rule to Algerian sovereignty and thereby to the broader histories of France in Algeria and Algeria since independence. Her monograph is essential reading in our own times and is likely to remain indispensable for future scholars.

Crisis Narrative and Affective Intermediality: Figuring Disaster in Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf

Abstract Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (Le temps du loup, 2003) depicts a grim vision of the world in the aftermath of an unnamed catastrophe. Haneke turns the genre of dystopia into an experimental terrain where he can test the limits of the cinematic medium in the sense of “negating cinema in order to let reality speak for itself” (Nagib 2016, 147). An existential parable, Time of the Wolf envisions a sombre post-millenium age. It is a sharp analysis of what remains of man and society when the frame of civilization collapses. It scrutinizes the functioning mechanisms of the individual, the family and the social community in times of civilization undone. A harsh experiment towards a negative dialectics of the image, the film’s exceptionally austere cinematic language confronts the spectator with the aesthetics of the “unwatchable” (Baer et al., 2019) and “cinematic unpleasure” (Aston 2010). The paper explores the ways in which Haneke’s “intermedial realism” (Rowe 2017) also manifests in this film through photo-filmic images and painterly compositions, perceptions of stillness and motion, and cultural remnants of the past, giving way to affective sensations of intermediality.

Algeria and the crisis of theimage-mouvement: checkingcinéma colonial’s imperial gaze inMuriel ou le Temps d’un retour(Resnais, 1963)

One of the most cryptic characters in Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963) is a returning veteran who edits his own amateur video footage of North Africa while contending with his traumatizing memories of torturing a young woman in Algeria. This article’s fundamental argument is twofold: first, Bernard’s experience of editing and watching his footage is co-extensive with his private interrogation of the reductive, propagandist images of Algeria that he viewed in classic colonial cinema prior to serving in the war; second, Resnais’s portrayal of this process provokes spectators to reassess their own consumption of retrograde colonial culture and its impact on their perception of the colony. Key to this analysis is the imperial gaze that E. Ann Kaplan associates with colonial cinema’s reductive construction of the female colonial “other,” Stanley Cavell’s understanding of how film spectator’s “check” their engagement with cinematic narratives, and Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of politics in the image-temps. This article ultimately aims to deepen present understandings of questions regarding preservation, research, and interpretation that Muriel continues to raise sixty years after the signing of the Évian Accords.

The Author as Cannibal: Rewriting in Francophone Literature as a Postcolonial Genre, 1969–1995. By Felisa Vergara Reynolds

In this monograph, Felisa Vergara Reynolds develops a compelling framework for analysing postcolonial francophone literature — ‘literary cannibalism’ — to foreground the political dimensions of novels that explicitly rewrite canonical works from hegemonic cultures. Through Vergara Reynolds’s new theoretical lens, the pejorative label traditionally used to justify colonization and denigrate indigenous peoples is transformed into a mode of critique, through which authors may absorb and assimilate imperial canonical works to subvert them and destabilize their supposedly inviolable status. For Vergara Reynolds, the postcolonial text that devours another literary work constitutes a form of ‘postcolonial revolt’ (p. 31) that surpasses the dialogic relation of intertextuality underpinning all literary creation. While this gesture of re-inscription raises the question of colonial mimicry, Vergara Reynolds convincingly argues that literary cannibalism is no mere submissive imitation but, rather, ‘an act of menace’ (p. 27; original emphasis) that actively seeks to upend dominant power relations within a canonical text to restore agency to marginalized or oppressed characters. This is exemplified by Aimé Césaire’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623) as Une tempête (1969), in which the author empowers the most oppressed character, Caliban, who vomits out the colonizer in his first act as a free man — an apt metaphor for the liberating effect of literary cannibalism itself. The remaining chapters explore similar instances of literary cannibalism in works from across the former empire — Senegal, Algeria, and Guadeloupe — that all grapple with the implications of writing and publishing in the language of the colonizer, and also contribute distinct approaches to literary cannibalism. For example, Boubacar Boris Diop’s cannibalization of Prosper Mérimée’s Tamango (1829) in Le Temps de Tamango (1981) parallels Césaire’s critique of departmentalization to denounce the residual colonialism in post-independence Senegal, but Vergara Reynolds contends that Diop’s method of literary cannibalism also decolonizes the novel. In L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), Assia Djebar shifts our focus to imperial historiography as the source of literary cannibalism, constructing her novel as a means of restoring silenced female voices and writing women of colour back into history. Finally, a distinct aspect of this book that sets it apart from traditional literary criticism is the fact that Vergara Reynolds has drawn her theorization from a close working relationship with Guadeloupian author Maryse Condé, which has allowed for a more collaborative development of the concept of literary cannibalism. The last chapter draws on personal interviews with Condé on the rewriting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) into La Migration des cœurs (1995), during which the author reflects on literary cannibalism’s emancipatory potential within the narrative. While this monograph focuses on francophone authors of the former French colonial empire, Vergara Reynolds’s elaboration of literary cannibalism will certainly be of interest to other scholars of global postcolonial literatures: as Oswald de Andrade declared in the Manifesto antropófago (1928), ‘Only cannibalism unites us.’

Situação Limite do Analista: Uma crítica Sartreana a psicanálise em L'homme au Magnétophone

This article intends to develop an analysis about the limit situation in the analysand/analyst relationship through an analysis of the article L'homme au Magnétophone contained in Situations IX: Mélanges by Jean-Jacques Abrahams. In this text, published in the journal Le Temps Moderns, a controversial case is presented where an analysand (“A”) was frustrated with his analyst (“Dr. X”) because, after 18 years of analysis, the promise of a “cure” is still had not been achieved. During the clash, “A” accuses Dr. X of, throughout his analysis, having instituted control over his life and that, instead of curing him, he only aggravated the “madness” he sought to treat. For this debate we will bring Sartre's work, focusing on the existential psychoanalysis project, Sartre's proposal for the revision of psychoanalysis; bad faith, a self-referential structure that can be seen as an “intimate lie”; the violence of intersubjective behaviors in the analysand/analyst relationship and the limits of this relationship.

Le temps des cerises: efficient temporal stack safety on capability machines using directed capabilities

Capability machines are a type of CPUs that support fine-grained privilege separation using capabilities , machine words that include forms of authority. Formal models of capability machines and associated calling conventions have so far focused on establishing two forms of stack safety properties, namely local state encapsulation and well-bracketed control flow. We introduce a novel kind of directed capabilities and show how to use them to make an earlier suggested calling convention more efficient. In contrast to earlier work on capability machine models we do not only consider integrity properties but also confidentiality properties; we provide a unary logical relation to reason about the former and a binary logical relation to reason about the latter, each expressive enough to reason about temporal stack safety. While the logical relations are useful for reasoning about concrete examples, they do not on their own demonstrate that stack safety holds for a large class of programs. Therefore, we also show full abstraction of a compiler from an overlay semantics that internalizes the calling convention as a single call step and explicitly keeps track of the call stack and frame lifetimes to a base capability machine. All results have been mechanized in Coq.

Don’t Look Down

Don’t Look Down

On Derrida’s Donner le temps, Volumes I & II: A New Engagement with Heidegger

Abstract This essay explores the importance of Donner le temps II within the context of Derrida’s writings on Heidegger and the gift. In the first section of the essay, I situate the publication of the latter half of Derrida’s 1978–79 seminar against his writings on the gift generally, beginning in 1968 and ending in 2000. In the second section, I explain how the second volume of Donner le temps relates to the first. In the final three sections of the paper, I focus on three prominent topics of the seminar, so as to show how they impact our previous understanding of major aspects of Derrida’s thought: first, the Heideggerian thinking of the es gibt, as it relates to the gift’s unconditionality. Second, the problematic of the Kunstwerk, as it informs Derrida’s thinking of récit. Third, the problem of Dichtung, as it is linked to the poématique.

Hauteur et profondeur dans l’écriture de Proust : une proposition de lecture

The following excerpt is drawn from a larger study on Marcel Proust, where I frame the topic of space within the totality of his writings, and I advance a comprehensive reading of À la recherche du temps perdu in the light of the spatial terminology that accompanies the aesthetic and existential revelations of Le Temps retrouvé. More specifically, I reconstruct the reasons behind Proust’s stylistic choices, and I highlight the correspondence between the protagonist’s experience of places and the elaboration of an adequate language aimed at expressing the spiritual content of the book. In this particular passage, I rely on close reading in order to show the assimilation of the truth of experience with the truth of art in Sodome et Gomorrhe, as it is expressed in the famous account of the sea landscape seen from La Raspelière, and in the last volume.

Review of The Age of Algorithms by Serge Abiteboul and Gilles Dowek

This book is about algorithms and their enormous influence on people in the current age. Algorithms are precise sets of rules to solve problems. They are ubiquitous and have a great effect on the lives of contemporary people, primarily due to technological advancement. A common example is searching for information using an Internet search engine such as Google. This book is not technical in nature and was first published in French as Le Temps des Algorithmes, by ´ Editions Le Pommier in 2020. The authors Serge Abiteboul and Gilles Dowek are computer scientists, with Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), Rocquencourt and ´ Ecole Normale Sup´erieure, Paris respectively. They believe that algorithms have made life easier, nevertheless, they dread that algorithms may subjugate humans. This book is intended to serve as an eye-opener on the impact of algorithms on daily life.

Henri Dutilleux, haunted by Baudelaire

One of the leading French composers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013) set only one text by Baudelaire, though he said that the poet was the artist in any medium who had the strongest impact on him; indeed, he said that ‘Baudelaire continues to haunt me.’ This article explores how this ‘haunting’ affected Dutilleux’s oeuvre, from his cello concerto Tout un monde lointain… [‘A Far Distant World’] (1967-1970) whose five movements are each preceded by a Baudelaire epigraph, through to his final completed work, the song cycle Le Temps l’horloge [‘Time the Clock’] (2006-2009) which concludes with a setting of Baudelaire’s prose poem Enivrez-vous [‘Be Intoxicated’]. Le Temps l’horloge also features settings of poems by Jean Tardieu and Robert Desnos, and Baudelaire’s poetry and art criticism were centrally important to both these writers. The multiple interrelationships between Baudelaire, Tardieu, Desnos, and Dutilleux are traced in this article, and analysis of ‘Enivrez-vous’ shows it to be the summation of Dutilleux’s output.

What Were You Synching? An Ethnographic Study of News Scheduling at a Digital First Legacy Newspaper

Digital first strategies at newspapers raise complex questions of temporality and scheduling. Yet there is a lack of ethnographic accounts for web-to-print newsmaking. While research has long been concerned with time in analog newspaper production, and online news time has mostly been studied through the prism of immediacy, almost nothing is known about dual-platform workflows. What happens to temporalities when web and print production factors and logics collide? Ethnographic research at legacy Swiss daily newspaper Le Temps provides a novel insight. Using a newsmaking reconstruction approach, we conducted an in-depth case study of a single day’s news production with a view to understanding publication times and scheduling. Despite their much-publicized shift to web-to-print production, the impetus for producing stories largely remained subordinate to filling the print pages via backwards scheduling. Tools, meetings and temporal labels defined broad categories of stories that reflected temporal publication objectives and associated production requirements. Many outside forces restricted scheduling options, while publication frequency invariably accelerated late in the day. When publication times were not imposed by external forces, the logics key newsworkers applied to scheduling involved smoothing the output curve, building sequences with variation in form and content, and catering to reader habits and preferences.

Voices Carry

AbstractThis article examines the urban fiction of Jeanne Marni’s 1898 Fiacres, a collection of twenty-five stories that first appeared in the daily newspaper Le Temps. The stories are presented in the form of dialogues transcribed by an invisible spectator from within the horse drawn carriages for hire, the fiacres, the fin de siècle taxi cabs. Training her eye on and lending her ear to Belle Époque Paris, Marni registers the conversations of Parisians as they move about the city. In these feminocentric, and by turns humorous or ironic texts, Marni hones an “urban comic” that merges two nineteenth-century figures: the “invisible” flâneuse and the “inaudible” rieuse, or funny woman. Focusing on the intersection of the representation of urban experience and the humorous in Fiacres, this article situates Marni’s sound bites within a genealogy of women writers and the city that looks back to Delphine Gay de Girardin’s witty chronicles of July Monarchy Paris, the “Courrier de Paris” (1836–1848), and ahead to Annie Ernaux’s ironic journal of urban selfhood in transit, Journal du dehors (1993).

Contrasted media frames of AI during the COVID-19 pandemic: a content analysis of US and European newspapers

PurposeDespite the growing interest in AI, the scientific literature lacks multinational studies that examine how mainstream media depict AI applications. This paper is one of the first empirical studies to explore how French and English-speaking mainstream media portray AI during a pandemic. The purpose of this study is to examine how media define AI and how they frame this technology.Design/methodology/approachThe authors selected five media outlets and extracted all news articles that mentioned AI over a period of 30 days. The authors constituted the sample to ensure a mix of global, national and local media newspapers. The authors included Le Temps (Switzerland), Le Monde (France), The Guardian (United Kingdom), Politico Europe (Europe) and the New York Times (USA). The authors used the NexisUni database to collect the news articles. This resulted in a sample of 54 articles, which the authors then refined to 35 articles mentioning at the same AI and COVID-19. They then manually coded to identify media frames about AI.FindingsAlthough no news article provides a definition of AI, most articles highlight two main characteristics: information processing and adaptability. This paper also shows that the coverage of AI in US newspaper is more optimistic than pessimistic. European newspapers offer a more balanced perspective of the risks and benefits associated with the technology, and highlight its use mainly in the context of the COVID-19. Media framing changes according to the evolution of the pandemic. While the USA were not yet heavily affected by the virus, Europe experienced the peak of the crisis. The authors argue that the framing of AI follows that of the pandemic.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is limited in terms of timeframe (30 days) and media outlets (5). It would be useful to extend this sample to verify the results, and also conduct interviews among journalists to understand their motivations and understanding of AI.Originality/valueDespite the growing interest in AI, the scientific literature lacks multinational studies that examine how mainstream media depict AI applications in society. This paper is one of the first empirical studies to explore how French and English-speaking mainstream media portray AI during a pandemic.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-09-2020-0393

Voices of silenced childhoods: Transience as decentering spatiality in three contemporary films

The interconnection between space production, place configuration, and identity development is interrogated in this essay through the lens of three film directors with transnational backgrounds. These auteurs introduce with Huelepega: La ley de la calle (Elia Schneider), Le temps du loup (Michael Haneke), and Children Underground (Edet Belzberg) the complications accrued by abandoned children and problem young adults whose erratic lives have forced them to dwell in transitional places. This essay looks at the spatial consequences of the confrontation of childhood and reterritorialization, and explores the ramifications of these interactions in terms of spatiality and place resignification.

Yves Navarre. About a postmodern epistolary writing

Yves Navarre's literary work is one of the greatest materializations of epistolary writing in postmodern literature. This article aims to analyze the different elements and procedures through which the epistolary matter becomes a practice of postmodern writing that continues to evolve throughout his prolix literary œuvre. First, the epistolary writing of fictional characters becomes an element of the renarrativization that participates in processes of discontinuity: a progressive fragmental writing—from his first novel Lady Black (1971) to the last Dernier dimanche avant la fin du siècle (1994)—and the hybridization with diaristic writing and literary metadiscourse—Le Petit Galopin de nos corps (1977), Kurwenal ou la Part des êtres (1977), Le Temps voulu (1979), Romances sans paroles (1982). Besides, these same practices are brought into the autofictional space, where the possibilities of hypertextuality are further deepened by quotation, intertext and metadiscourse—Biographie (1981), Romans, un roman (1988). Finally, the two spaces converge in an auto/alter-fiction in which postmodern diversel materializes through experimentation with alterity, giving rise to récits indécidables—L’Espérance de beaux voyages (1984), La terrasse des audiences au moment de l’adieu (1990). Throughout his entire literary work, and in all the aforementioned spaces, the abundant metadiscourse about epistolarity enables a postmodern phenomenology of epistolary activity.