Les Mots Research Articles

Je parle comme je suis: ce que nos mots nous disent de nous by Julie Neveux

Reviewed by: Je parle comme je suis: ce que nos mots nous disent de nous by Julie Neveux Chloe Mais Hagen Neveux, Julie. Je parle comme je suis: ce que nos mots nous disent de nous. Grasset, 2020. ISBN 978-2-246-82173-1. Pp. 293. In this lexical exploration, Neveux offers a window into twenty-first-century French society and invites us—the reader and assumed native French speaker in France—to reflect on the words we use and what they reveal about our lives. Neveux contends that our language “nous tend un miroir plus réaliste que ne le fait le selfie” and allows us to form conclusions on the changing state of the world around us (286). Her conversational, tongue-in-cheek narration mixes literary, linguistic, philosophical, and pop culture references with personal observations in an informal, broadly accessible work that distills complex social issues into bitesized lexical entries. The book is organized in eight chapters structured around a hundred lexical entries on themes ranging from technology and ecology to emotions and social connectivity. For example, the chapter “Les mots de l’homme-machine: être ou ne plus être humain” laments our growing overreliance on technology, to which we risk losing our sense of self (17). The chapter “Vrai ou fake? La crise de confiance” unpacks such terms as le fact-checking and troll(er) that polarize or lead us to question the nature of truth (211). A typical lexical entry is several pages long, describes a new word or phrase that has gained prominence in France in the past several decades, traces its etymology, gives examples in context, and addresses the often-consequential social implications of its use. As a linguist of English, Neveux is uniquely positioned to trace the etymology of loan words into French from English such as story and date, which originally came into English from French. For example, notes Neveux, the reader will be “sans doute très fier d’apprendre que ‘story’”—now reemerging in French as a descriptor of status updates on Snapchat or Instagram—came into English from the Old French “estoire” (149). Although at times emphasizing the playfulness and richness of the living French language and inviting readers to draw inspiration from it, Neveux’s frank and honest writing can come across as insensitive, especially when writing about terms linked to race or gender. The tone of the book is open, philosophical, and humorously cynical as it laments how the use of certain lexical terms, such as fake news, smombie, and like(r), disrupt the French language and reflect a cheapening of the human experience. Writing about the word smombie, a neologism derived from combining smartphone and zombie, Neveux notes that “le mot nouveau exprime un rapport à la vie réelle problématique” on both a personal and linguistic level (56). Similarly, Neveux defends written French against the insidious emoji: “le visuel impose une seule image (stylisée et réductrice) [...] nos mots valent toujours plus que leurs images” (77). For readers outside of France, Je parle comme je suis contextualizes and provides insights into popular French opinion on English loan words, current political buzzwords, written and spoken tics, and other innocuous expressions typical of twenty-first-century France. [End Page 264] Chloe Mais Hagen St. Olaf College (MN) Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

The Evasion of Literary History

The Evasion of Literary History

Number and Things

Ian Hacking has repeatedly pointed out the influence that the work of Michel Foucault had early in his work, an influence that came mainly through his reading of Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses (1966). In this sense, it is reasonable to trace the Foucauldian lineage in many of the notions Hacking proposes for “how we found out how to find out” (Hacking 2010, April 21, 3), and, more particularly, in the latter’s assessment of how to work in the human sciences is carried forth. However, I argue that Foucault exerted an even more fundamental influence that underlies the totality of Hacking’s work: namely, having stimulated Hacking’s interest in analyzing the historical conditions of possibility of the emergence of scientific objects and concepts. To show this, in this article, I first focus on two works by Hacking—The Emergence of Probability (1975) and Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (1975a)—in which he adopts an archeological perspective which, I argue, clearly adumbrates Foucault’s influence. I then turn to The Taming of Chance (1990), Rewriting the Soul (1995) and Mad Travelers (1998), where I contend that, added to the archeological contributions, it is possible to identify traces of Foucault’s genealogical period.

The End Once Again: Art and Politics at the Close of the Century

Taking the measure of the zeitgeist is never an easy task, with every thing to recommend avoiding it. Yet here we are, near the end of a century, indeed a millennium, and the temptation seems more and more irresistible. Early indications suggest that this time no one is going to be caught up in glib repetition, that we have come to regard all that fin de siecle stuff as very suspicious. After all, anti-foundationalism flourishes and this time it appears as if we will take our existential freedom seriously, but minus the melodrama, and that we will also apply the lessons of poststructuralism -- the constructedness of all concepts, the decentered self, the privileging of undecidability -- but consistently, without exception. History, we believe, will sort itself out, or, more accurately, allow us to sort it out without benefit of metanarratives, repeated patterns or transcendent instances; for history, as one sage put it, is ultimately just one damn thing after another. If anything can escape rhetoric or emplotment, we tend to feel, it is sheer numeracy, and so one hundred years, or a thousand, is simply a unit of measurement, nothing to be grand or melancholic about. Yet can we really look at the numerals 2001 and see no figure at all? What lover of rhetoric can sneeze at a millennium? A more honest posing of the problem would admit that we will almost certainly see some figural shape, at the same time that we can decide, more or less freely, whether it will be an angel, a rough beast, or simply a human form that greets us, looking back or ahead, or even staring blankly. With respect to the question of whether it will it be human, all too human, or somehow less or more than that, at present the notion of the post-human appears entrenched, and the closing pages of Les Mots et les Choses, where Foucault's dream of the end of humanity is teasingly glimpsed, are frequently cited. What we need to bear in mind, however, is the extent to which this version of the fin de siecle might turn out to be an unhappy (or vanished?) reflection of ourselves, a version built on affectless irony and promises unfulfilled. In short, as we approach the year 2000 we are tempted by configurations of exhausted millenniums made new, because of the reassurance they give us, even while increasingly we suspect that such visionings are too secure in their closures and false significances. This double temptation--to chose to focus on the new, or to suspect all such configurations--shapes our political and artistic imaginations and traditions, and recently several contributions to the ages-long debate about art and politics have exhibited this temptation toward either the millennial (the figure of time redeemed) or the immediate (time left to its shapeless forms). My purpose here is to review this debate in order to shed some light on our political and artistic possibilities, and perhaps even to suggest -- without practical proposals -- a way beyond the impasse. I begin with a discussion of the political dimension, then move to a consideration of literary criticism that attempts to be political, and end with an argument about the nature of the literary imagination in relation to the rest of our experience. My claim is that we are seldom able to resist completely the temptation to schematize our history, despite knowing that this distorts our political hopes and esthetic dreams; my (tentative) suggestion is that a reconsideration of John Dewey's thought on these issues may improve our prospects. The post-communism currently being speculated on in various quarters can serve as the harbinger of how the end of an old order inevitably suggests the start of a new, and how the old-turned-new is a powerfully shaping trope. Few people see the events in Eastern Europe as having cleared away the falsehoods of actually existing so that we can now start to work on a true socialism. Other participants in the dialogue maintain, however, that socialism itself has not been discredited. …

Representations of Women in the French Imaginary

This article, the introduction to the special issue “Representations of Women in the French Imaginary: Historicizing the Gallic Singularity,” frames the work of contributors Tracy Adams, Christine Adams, Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, Whitney Walton, and Kathleen Antonioli by analyzing two especially important contemporary debates about French sexual politics, one popular and one academic: (1) the international controversy over Catherine Deneuve’s decision to sign a French manifesto against the American #MeToo movement in Le Monde; and (2) the mixed French and American response to the work of Mona Ozouf in Les mots des femmes: Essai sur la singularité française. The five articles in the special issue itself bring new breadth and depth to the study of these and related debates by exploring a range of different French representations of women in a series of key texts, topics, and historical episodes from the rise of the Middle Ages to the aftermath of World War I.

From the Editors: Foucault and Trump, "Les Mots Et Les Choses" (The Words and the Things) and the Unintended Consequences

From the Editors: Foucault and Trump, "Les Mots Et Les Choses" (The Words and the Things) and the Unintended Consequences

Les Mots et les choses du théâtre: France, Italie, Espagne, xvie–xviie siècles. Sous la direction d’Anne Cayeula et Marc Vuillermoz

The present volume is a careful and complex interweaving of a number of critical concepts in theatre studies, examined from interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. It gathers together seventeen articles first presented in 2015 at the international conference ‘Les Mots et les choses du théâtre’, itself a corollary of the major project Les Idées du théâtre, which interrogates liminary dramatic material in France, Italy, and Spain across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Les Idées du théâtre has also produced an extensive online collection of theatrical paratexts (<www.idt.paris-sorbonne.fr> [accessed 4 February 2019]), widely celebrated as a valuable research tool, and the articles assembled in this volume are a testament to the possibilities presented by this project and database. Bringing together wide-ranging and lucid insights into early modern and Golden Age drama in France, Italy, and Spain, it sets out with great erudition and clarity the reciprocal relationship between ‘mots’ and ‘choses’ in theatre, also making a convincing case for greater scholarly attention to be paid to the dramatic paratext. Although the arguments proposed in this collection are dense and largely interconnected, the volume is structured into five sections, which renders it more easily accessible to the general reader and to specialists in search of precise material. The first section focuses on the dramatic author and incorporates detailed studies of theatrical lexis: the term ‘travail’, for instance, is investigated and contextualized within dramatic culture; the power and significance of metaphor in liminary material is also considered in relation to the playwright. The second section moves on to aesthetics and dramaturgy and brings out more strongly the Foucauldian link between ‘mots’ and ‘choses’ in theatre: here, a particularly engaging article by Enrica Zanin traces frameworks of theatrical vocabulary in the earliest French, Italian, and Spanish dictionaries, drawing fascinating parallels with the reality of the practices denoted by this vocabulary. Turning to dramatic genres, the third section re-assesses the process of identifying a play with a genre and uses paratexts to explore how such classification can influence, undermine, or enhance the public understanding and reception of a comedy. The fourth section centres on actors and characters, presenting some innovative work on the often overlooked tension between author and performer; a further concern in this cluster is the French imitation of Italian comic stock types, frequently employed to political and polemical ends. The final section focuses on reception and evaluates the nature and impact of dramatic theory and the prologue in France, Italy, and Spain, also taking stock of the language of laughter and moral elevation in theatrical comic paratexts. Together these sections form a rich and productive discussion not only of theatrical practices in three countries which led the way for dramatic culture, but also of lexical, ideological, and transnational exchange across the centuries in question. This volume makes a substantial contribution to theatre studies and scholars of drama and of comparative literature will find it an exciting and insightful read.

CAVAILLÈS, MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS AND QUESTIONS

This paper concerns the role of mathematical problems in the epistemology of Jean Cavaillès. Most occurrences of the term “problem” in his texts refer to mathematical problems, in the sense in which mathematicians themselves use the term: for an unsolved question which they hope to solve. Mathematical problems appear as breaking points in the succession of mathematical theories, both giving a continuity to the history of mathematics and illuminating the way in which the history of mathematics breaks up into successive theories with different kinds of operations and, in a sense, different kinds of a prioris. We briefly compare mathematical becoming to the succession of episteme in Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses. We then come back to the necessity that Cavaillès attributes to mathematical becoming, and which the position of mathematical problems illustrates, in order to discuss its various consequences in Cavaillès’ later works but also in Canguilhem’s discussion of Cavaillès’ role in the Resistance. Finally, we study other types of problems, in Cavaillès’ writings: philosophical problems and what we will call “questions” rather than “problems,” and which contrary to mathematical problems, as Cavaillès uses the term, cannot be solved but pervade the whole of the history of mathematics. We will put these “questions” in relation to Lautman’s Ideas.

Leggere Anzaldúa con Foucault: Il Medesimo e l’Altro nelle Eterotopie delle Borderlands

With Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria Anzaldua offers a dramatic and revolutionary view on the life in the borderlands. Her ideas are still able to question the strictness of some cultural and political identities and the way they are used to reject diversity in the U.S.. And she does that by proving how diversity and complexity already characterize each and every identity in itself. Our aim was to re-read Anzaldua in the light of what Michel Foucault proposed in Les Mots et Les Choses (1966) and in Des Espaces Autres (1967). We tried to interrogate Anzaldua’s work starting from the principes chosen by the Foucault to identify heterotopies. According to Foucault in fact, “the site is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements”. Then, how is identity built out of spatial relations? We applied Foucault’s principles to Anzaldua’s work and to the American borderlands as a heterotopia within a heterotopia. We chose to consider both the border reality she denounces and the borderland conception she proposes.

Putting Lives on the Record: The Book as Material and Symbol in Life Writing

This article develops an understanding of role of life writing in putting marginalized voices on by examining material and symbolic history of book and its relationship with life writing. Taking two key points in history of book as its focus, article argues that the record is a material and symbolic performative site that authorizes a life writer's claims to knowledge and experience. Through a reading of Jean-Paul Sartre's 1963 autobiography Les Mots ( The Words ) article demonstrates importance of book to how life writers and scholars of life writing conceptualize cultural, political, and social importance of telling stories from life.

MONSTERS AND PATIENTS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEDICINE, ISLAM, AND MODERNITY

ABSTRACTFoucault's analysis of the history of evolutionary thought in Les Mots et les choses introduces monsters as incomplete beings that form important steps on the evolutionary ladder toward the terminal species. Monsters represent attempts by nature to achieve the perfection of the terminal species and are, therefore, significant for naturalists in constructing the details of the natural continuum. Despite their incompleteness, monsters underwrite the natural continuum and evidence the grounding of this continuum in reality. To a great extent, the continuum of nature, proposed by Foucault, resembles a continuum of civilization through which the history of the world and the history of colonization were often seen. The non‐European emerged as the monster that showcased the deeper history of the more‐perfect European. In the same way that monsters were written into natural history as intermediary and incomplete beings, losing in the process their uniqueness as independent species, the colonized were written into the (new) World History as objects of colonization, modernization, and development and as the living fossils of a bygone European past. This new history was not only created for European consumption but was also an important part of European‐style education in the colony shaping colonial and postcolonial identities and perceptions of self and other.This article uses Foucauldian monsters to understand the making of historical narratives about the precolonial past in nineteenth‐century Egypt, where one of the earliest European‐style medical schools in Africa and Asia was built in the early nineteenth century. In this school and surrounding emerging educational system, narratives about science, modernity, and religion produced new histories that came to form colonial subjects. Finally, the article asks about a postcolonial/postmonstrous epistemology, what it might look like and whether and how it can emerge from the postcolonial condition.

Contre-jour

“Contre-jour” is the opening section of the coauthored book tourner les mots: au bord d'un film (2000), by the franco-maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Franco-Egyptian filmmaker and poet Safaa Fathy. Tourner les mots is about their experience of film generally and, in particular, about their collaboration on Fathy's 1999 film D'Ailleurs, Derrida, released in an English subtitled version as Derrida's Elsewhere. One meaning of the word tourner in the book's title is “to film.” But the word also shares with the English turn a wide range of meanings and associations, including “to turn,” “to revolve,” “to depend on,” “to shape or form,” “to consider,” and “to trope.” Thus Tourner les mots refers to cinematic practice (le tournage ‘filmmaking,’ ‘the shoot’) and to the relation between cinema and language (les mots ‘words’).

Les désancrés par Marie-Thérèse Humbert

Reviews 265 dos pour qu’elle se tienne droite, suit le mouvement, s’éveille à la vie par ses discussions avec George sur Thomas Hardy et Joseph Conrad,ressent même des pulsions criminelles et sexuelles—auxquelles elle ne se laisse toutefois pas aller. Le dérèglement du temps saisi par Hochet ne signifie pas comme dans Shakespeare “le début de la tragédie” (131), et contrairement aux pièces du barde, après le topsy-turvydom provoqué par George, l’ordre ne sera pas rétabli. La fin du roman laisse entrevoir, avec Jack dans la RAF en 1940, un autre dérèglement socio-historique. Jouant de l’inspiration première de ce roman, la vie de l’auteure de A Room of One’s Own, un article paru dans le magazine Elle titrait“Si vous aimez Virginia Woolf, vous aimerez Stéphanie Hochet”— titre racoleur pour un roman certes agréable à lire mais qui n’exploite pas complètement le potentiel et la force de son personnage principal et le laisse disparaître alors qu’il se libère, nous abandonnant avec un épilogue hâtif et peu convaincant. Eastern Connecticut State University Michèle Bacholle-Bošković Humbert, Marie-Thérèse. Les désancrés. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. ISBN 978-2-07014744 -1. Pp. 656. 25 a. After a fifteen-year hiatus, Humbert offers an epic family saga that begins in a real, yet ghostly Louisiana and continues to Vesania, an imaginary island.Artfully revealing via the intermingling of past, future, and conditional tenses where characters’ paths cross at one time or another, Humbert builds a multi-dimensional mind map in which one follows the characters’ memories, emotions, obsessions, fantasies, desires, and frustrations. The heroine, Jane Harcourt, is fleeing a rich southern family by finding refuge on Vesania with her son Vincent, her friend Abigail Dodds (a large and very elegant black woman, daughter of Jane’s father Keith W. Canning and the Canning family cook Betty Dodds) and Abigail’s daughter Sarah. Bound by love and blood, they seal their fate in Jane’s wild hope of finding William, Jane’s second husband, who is nine years her junior, and Vincent’s father. Yet when a detective locates him, Jane claims he is dead. The reader is then left to wonder what exactly Jane seeks while on Vesania and what she is attempting to escape. Forewarned by Humbert in the novel’s “Avertissement”that her goal in writing Les désancrés was not to bear witness to events nor to denounce them. Rather, she takes great inspiration from painting, an art she admires despite her inability to paint. Thus, the reader comes to understand Humbert’s literary motives: “Alors je me suis servie de mon matériau privilégié: les mots” (9). Continuing to speak directly to her readers, Humbert elucidates that what one holds in one hand is “une manière de tableau romanesque, constitué de lieux autant que de fantasmes, et où s’entrelacent un certain nombre de trajectoires humaines imbriquées les unes dans les autres” (9). A family tree of the principal characters originating in Louisiana immediately follows Humbert’s warning. It is key to navigate the troubled, choppy waters of the narrative as the novel opens with “Vestibule: la fille de Kubla Khan,” which could be the beginning or the end of the story as the action takes place in Riverside Home, Louisiana, a few years before or after the stay on Vesania. Born in 1913, Jane is already senile at the age of fifty-four years and ends her days regularly visited by her friend Abigail. In the segregationist Louisiana, the relationship of these two women, one white and one black, is intriguing. The “vestibule” is also the place where Jane’s fantasies and memories are formed. For example, her father, Keith, the great seducer, was nicknamed“Kubla Khan”for having built a palace of Asian inspiration ; and, when she was only five, Jane witnessed the death of her mother, Marie Dufour, by the intermediary of a mirror, which has the long-term effect of Jane always needing some type of intermediary, such as Abigail, to...

Life among Conceptual Characters

Life among Conceptual Characters Bruno Latour (bio) A letter to conclude the special issue of New Literary History on “Recomposing the Humanities—with Bruno Latour” Paris June, 1, 2016 Dear Rita and Stephen, Thank you for allowing me to conclude this set of papers with some personal—and I am afraid not terribly coherent—reflections on, or rather recollections of, my own encounters with what has been called the “humanities” in this symposium you have so kindly assembled. As you know, in French the word “les humanités” is no longer very common, and it certainly doesn’t refer to an organized field that is to be promoted, defined, or defended against other disciplines. So it would make no sense for me to situate myself inside the field of “les humanités.” This is why, following your suggestion, I would rather reminisce on my own connections with what French people would call “littérature,” “écriture,” “style,” “texte,” “textualité” in their relation to thought and politics—a series of links so typical of French culture that it will probably appear amusingly exotic to your readers. Please take the following attempt as no more than an ethnographic testimony to a quickly disappearing culture of writing. Oddly enough, i am able to date with a perfect degree of precision my connection with writing as a thought-producing activity: October 13, 1961. Even the hour—7 p.m.—is inscribed on the cover page of the first of my personal diaries! As far as I can tell, the fourteen-year-old writer had already made the connection between writing and thinking since he had penned as an incipit: “J’y noterai tous les soirs mes activités et surtout mes pensées” (I will report what I do and above all my thoughts). The “above all” is especially pleasant since [End Page 463] at this early age he had no thought whatsoever to jot down! At least not yet. Because, as everyone in the field of humanities suspects, thinking follows and does not precede writing—at least this highly specific form of thinking associated with mid-century bourgeois European techniques of scribbling. Considering that today I am taking notes in a (by now digital) notebook numbered 212, this means I have been allowed for the last fifty-five years to continuously learn what I should think through the deciphering of some twenty thousand pages of personal pattes de mouche! If I don’t need to belabor the point, this is because Jean-Paul Sartre in Les Mots marvelously diagnosed the bootstrapping operation by which a thinking subject is generated out of a neurotic obsession with penning page after page. Who is the writer? The one who is fabricated by writing. In the twentieth century, some bourgeois children could learn to become subjects and to “have thoughts” because they wrote as much as they read from their parents’ libraries. If “reading is an unpunished vice,” writing is the symptom of quite a few perversions. Although I am two generations younger than Sartre, it is fair to say that I have inherited the same atmosphere conducive to the various vices of a self-generating writing. The formative nature of writing private diaries, especially by adolescents, is a well-known phenomenon of Western media culture. Filling in blank pages allows for a distance to be introduced from the saturated world of daily existence. Writing diaries is like carving for yourself a breathing space, providing that it remains protected from any one’s else reading (something probably lost today with blogs and selfie-filled Facebook posts). My father (1903–1982) was a serious bibliophile, who read the classics out loud to us every weekend, and who had the good fortune of being trained by Jacques Copeau (1879–1949), the “renovator of French theater,” when he retired in my native Burgundy in the neighboring village of Pernand-Vergelesses. But even in the midst of a large, loving, and literate family, or I should rather say, because of this constant shower of privileges, a kid does need a breathing space. How would have I survived otherwise, with seven siblings and hundreds of cousins, nieces, and nephews? However, while most...

“And Yet the Body Is His Book”: Articles of Incorporation

A & Q 73 psychoanalytic turn in Asian studies is not a reduction of, but rather a return to, an epistēmē of Asia. Meera Lee is assistant professor of Asian/Asian American studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. 6 notes I have taken the term imaginary ethnography from the works of literary critic and psychoanalytic theorist Gabriele Schwab. 1. For a more detailed discussion of psychoanalysis’s transformation, see Oliver (2004, xiii). 2. The notion of “colonizing ratio” appears in the concluding part of Foucault’s (1970) The Order of Things. For an expanded account of “colonizing ratio” and “countertransference,” see also Lambert (2013), who explained the cultural imaginary between a literary critic and the stranger. 6 works Cited Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by Les Mots et les choses. New York: Vintage Books. Lambert, Gregg. 2013. “Strangers, Analysts, and Literary Critics: On the ‘Unhappy’ Marriage of Psychoanalysis and Ethnology.” Keynote address presented at the Affect, Politics, Psychoanalysis: International Conference, National Taiwan University. Oliver, Kelly. 2004. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schwab, Gabriele. 2012. Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, and Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press. “And Yet the Body Is His Book”: Articles of Incorporation Haun Saussy The three questions the editors ask are an invitation to Bovaryism, the lure of the lives one hasn’t lived—in Emma Bovary’s case, a poisonous enchantment. Who, in the literary profession, has not felt that lure? Like the rhapsode in Plato’s dialogue Ion, we know all about war, shipbuilding , economics, law, medicine, not from direct practical experience but 74 A & Q by being plunged into the representations of them all. And, because we read the dialogue well enough to see that it is a prolonged send-up of the self-satisfied rhapsode, we often think we ought to have gone into one of those fields that would teach us how to get our hands around something more substantial than a representation. Julie Stone Peters’s (2005) wonderful essay about interdisciplinary envy tells us what happens when we directly confront the objects of our professional “reality hunger”: the practical professionals in law, too, think of their field as overly technical , formal, distanced from reality, and look to us literature specialists to restore the living, breathing, bleeding texture of experience through our magical art. Something similar would probably happen on the other side of whatever interdisciplinary fence you chose. When I think about what “fields or subfields outside my current area of expertise” I could and should have gone into while I had the chance, it is not with the regret of having done the wrong things with the last twenty-five years of my life. I say this at the risk of sounding selfsatisfied . There are languages I should have learned (Russian, Sanskrit, Old Persian, Turkish, Portuguese) and reasons why I should have learned them: to plunge into Acmeist poetry, Chekhov and Formalist criticism; to consider the Vedas and the epics from close up; to understand another huge, multicultural, early empire; to have a handle on Central Asia as it impinges on China and Europe; to read Pessoa; and other reasons I can’t imagine before getting involved in those languages and the paths to which they might lead. That is how languages are. To learn a language is to start on a long-term relationship. In the unlikely event that I could show up (mirror, mirror on the wall) at my first squirrel-infested attic apartment in New Haven in 1983 to speak with my earlier self, the advice I’d want to give would be mainly about personal and sentimental matters—which are outside the scope of this article. About the things of the mind, here’s roughly what I’d say: “Soak up all of that good deconstruction stuff you can—it’s not going to be around forever. Learn a lot of classical philology, because, as you’re already surmising, that’s where the tools of deconstruction were first forged. Take some classes on philosophy with the professional philosophers , despite the flashes of antagonism occupying...

Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, eds., Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death

Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, eds. Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on Governance of and Death. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011, 389 pp. paper (978082230170) Beyond Biopolitics marks a significant contribution to flourishing field of biopolitics. Clough and Willse have assembled a collection that speaks from heart of a US radical tradition that is deeply antiracist, anticapitalist, internationalist, and (over past generation) queer positive. The volume brings concerns of this radical tradition into engagement primarily with Foucault's biopolitical work, and secondarily with Italian biopolitical tradition, specifically Agamben and Hardt and Negri. This collection marks a refreshing change from growing body of Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian work divorced from and sometimes antagonistic to critical scholarship. In common with broader body of contemporary biopolitical studies, its fifteen chapters are by turns fascinating, intellectually ambitious, and sometimes vague, as it is often not clear how authors conceptualize or life. Transdisciplinary in approach, Beyond Biopolitics takes as its problematic revision of neoliberalism since 9/11 and its relation to a of war. Tellingly, first empirical discussion (in introduction by Clough and Willse) pertains to waterboarding by US military. The collection has three thematic areas: a) governance, torture, and exception, 2) occupation, migration, and necropolitics (politically caused deaths), 3) a residual category of critical methodology and responses by artists to warfare and attacks against civilians. It remains centred on human rather than taking up any of concerns related to an ecological biopolitics. Overall collection is of a high caliber, with many excellent chapters. It would be suitable as a graduate course book in whole or part. Although this collection makes several important and original contributions to field, one of its major drawbacks concerns conflation of with governance. In preface to collection Clough and Willse (pp. 3-4) explicate their reasons for taking of and death beyond biopolitics as their theme, citing Foucault's statement about preeminence of as a power apparatus. The cited passage from Foucault's Security, Territory, Population is, however, a commentary on governmentality as preeminent power apparatus, not biopolitics. Foucault (2007:1) treats governmentality as a much broader power apparatus than biopower, latter being: the set of mechanisms through which basic biological features of human species became object of a political strategy. The effects of expanding to fill space of governance inflate its importance at expense of its specificity. Use of word is equally broad and unexamined in this edited volume. What does of life mean? Are there any social or cultural processes outside governance of life? Life occupies a key place in Foucault's formulation of biopolitics, but he (unlike Agamben) leaves it untheorized in his biopolitical work, as does this collection. Interestingly, biological concept of is theorized in Foucault's earlier work, Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things), although few of those with a biopolitical focus have cared to read it. If biopower was first constituted in late 18th century medicine and biology, then power apparatus that has come to be known as would consist of effects of biological governance on human embodiment, politics, and ways of living. It could be expanded in an ecological sense as many scholars of are doing today. In this sense then, political branding processes in digital and mass media, focus of contributions by Clough and Willse and Parisi and Goodman, is very important and consequential research, but it would not prima facie be biopolitical. …

“What Can I Do to Get Out of It?”: How Self-Help Readers Make Use of the Language Game of Resilience

Resilience is, as a concept and as a discourse, a cultural resource that has experienced a growing importance over the last two decades, especially in the field of psychology. In September 2013, the most important database for scientific productions in psychology (www.psycinfo.org) contained more than 14,000 references concerning resilience. In French-speaking countries, for example, each new book by Boris Cyrulnik, the famous neuropsychiatrist who imported the notion of resilience into the psychological field, sells like hotcakes, with total sales of several million copies (see Marquis).

Mudimbe’s homo absconditus: Towards a resurrection of the human

This article demonstrates that the notion of the ‘human’ – ‘man’, ‘anthropos’, ‘muntu’ (and their sub-human opposites: the pagan, the savage, the ‘docile’ body) – has played a crucial role in V. Y. Mudimbe’s work since the 1960s. Indeed, there is in the author’s production a tendency to explore the human sciences and the ways in which they have contributed to the real and imaginary shape, but also obfuscation, of sub-Saharan Africa and its people since the colonial era. From his early writings, Mudimbe, the humanist, the former Benedictine who at the age of 18 was ‘completely Francophonized, submitted to Greco-Roman values and Christian norms’ (Mudimbe 1991: 94), has conducted a systematic critique of humanism in order to identify the reasons behind Africa’s material, political and epistemological dependency on the West, and to envisage routes to its resurrection, a term also used here to reiterate the importance of religion and theology in Mudimbe’s trajectory. The first part of the article focuses on The Invention of Africa and examines Mudimbe’s adoption of a set of analytical models (previously developed by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les choses) to excavate the discursive orders presiding over the emergence of Black Africans as ‘objects’ of knowledge. The second part of this study registers Mudimbe’s partial dissatisfaction with structuralist anthropology that, although free from former racial prejudices, continues to address other cultures ‘allochronically’ (Johannes Fabian) and often circumvents the human in the name of scientific objectivity. Finally, the study reflects upon Mudimbe’s many attempts – for instance in essays such as Parables and Fables, Les Corps glorieux, Tales of Faith, and Cheminements – to blur the divide between the scholarly essay and the autobiography and to return to his ‘own foundation’ (Fanon) as an African artist and intellectual.

Catastrophe, Adherence, Proximity Sartre (with Barthes) in the Cinema

Sartre's recollection, in Les Mots, of his first visit to the cinema is a multi-layered and ambivalent text through which Sartre proposes a number of interlocking arguments: concerning the contrast between the 'sacred' space of the theatre and the non-ceremonial space of the cinema, between the theatre as associated with paternal authority, and the cinema as associated with a clandestine bond with the mother. But the text also sets up a quasi-sociological account of the public Sartre encounters in the cinema itself as revealing to him the truth of the social bond, a truth he expresses with the term 'adherence', and which he says he only rediscovered in his experience of being a prisoner in the Stalag in 1940. Rather than the basis of a sociological account of the social bond, which would seem at odds with Sartre's social philosophy, I read this as the expression of a desire for physical proximity. The space of the cinema thus develops a fantasy, and this is in continuity with the role of the cinema in the evolution traced in Les Mots, in which it is described as instigating a withdrawal into imaginary life and an indulgence in daydreaming. Through reference to Christian Metz and to Roland Barthes, whose essay 'En sortant du cinéma' is proposed as a parallel and a response to Sartre, I suggest that the 'true bond' of adherence which Sartre encounters is an unconscious rather than an epistemological truth.

O quem das coisas: etnografia e feitiçaria em Les mots, la mort, les sorts

Este artigo discorre sobre a relação entre a etnografia e a feitiçaria na obra Les mots, la mort, les sorts de Jeanne Favret-Saada. O seu objetivo inicial é apresentar os principais temas, e conceitos, propostos pela autora na descrição que faz da feitiçaria. Trata-se, nesse caso, de elaborar um comentário sobre o livro chamando a atenção para as inúmeras possibilidades que abre para uma "antropologia da feitiçaria". Destaco, entre muitas, o uso cuidadoso que a autora faz do que hoje chamaríamos de um "procedimento de equivalência" ou "princípio de simetria", a saber, do modo através do qual a etnografia e a feitiçaria, situadas em um mesmo "plano de imanência", descrevem-se mutuamente, dispondo-se em uma relação recíproca de transformação.