Marcel Gauchet Research Articles

História política e história dos conceitos: um estudo sobre o “político” em Pierre Rosanvallon e Marcel Gauchet

O artigo pretende estudar o conceito do “político” presente nos trabalhos de Pierre Rosanvallon e de Marcel Gauchet, e, a partir deste, travar contato com os seus objetos de investigação e metodologias históricas. Em suma, uma pesquisa sobre teoria e metodologia de história que se interessa pelos campos da história dos conceitos e pela renovação da história política. Em destaque, uma noção de poder e de política que se enraíza e se distribui pelo conjunto da sociedade, diminuindo a dependência em relação ao poder central e buscando pensar formas de evitar o absenteísmo em nossa sociedade.

Autonomy and modern liberal democracy

Marcel Gauchet’s recently published theory of democracy sheds light on the way his understanding of modernity emerged from Castoriadis’s notion of autonomy but also deepened it by contextualizing it within a discussion of modern historicity. Modern autonomy means re-shaping the world through a new, transformative, form of power that draws on humanity’s capacity for imaginary creation. Gauchet’s theory of modernity, however, rejects the possibility of radical historical creation. Faithful to the teachings of structuralism, it explores the structural conditions behind the genesis of modern power, which favoured the emergence of a new societal form that produces its own future. Encompassing capitalism, Gauchet’s modern power proposes an essentially paradoxical definition of modern democracy that stresses its essentially liberal dimension neglected by Castoriadis. In modern democracy, humans make their own history by liberating individual subjectivities but this deprives them of the means to direct history: liberalism goes against the aspirations to collective sovereignty.

ENCHANTING SOCIAL DEMOCRACY: THE RESILIENCE OF A BELIEF SYSTEM

Marcel Gauchet's theory of democracy focuses on the secularization of Western societies and the emergence of “autonomy” in them—Weber's “disenchantment of the world.” The nineteenth-century liberalism that resulted failed to generate a sense of collective purpose that could fill the gap left by the retreat of religion. Totalitarian ideologies achieved this by harnessing the passions unleashed by World War I, but at the cost of radicalization. Conversely, the (unexpected and lasting) post-1945 “social state” set the groundwork for modern individualism and established new legitimacy for the regulatory and protective nation-state, conceptually bonded directly with its voter-citizens. Democracy is thus impossible to disentangle from social democracy—regardless of its actual effectiveness. If Gauchet is right, the left's embrace of “voice” over “exit” mixes a deep insight with flawed prescriptions, as it overlooks the national nature of the experience of citizenship, whereas classical liberals favoring the “exit” option risk undermining the core of the democratic compact.

Stijn Latré- on the Religious Sources of Autonomy and Self-Expression: Charles Taylor and Marcel Gauchet

Self-expression is often called upon as a fundamental individual or collective right. In this article, the author explores the anthropological and historical conditions that constitute self-expression. For that purpose, he looks at two contemporary thinkers, Charles Taylor and Marcel Gauchet. The first part reflects their anthropological presuppositions. The second part focuses on the historical implementation of these presuppositions in both thinkers, thereby paying special attention to the way religion is involved in shaping the phenomenon of self-expression. It will turn out that self-expression and its underlying notion of autonomy are not won against forms of religious paternalism, but are rather the result of transformations established by (Christian) religion itself. As to the contemporary role of self-expression, Stijn Latre concludes by pointing out the fundamental divergence between Taylor and Gauchet.

Dosse, François Pierre Nora - homo historicus

As part of the genre of ‘intellectual biography’ of French authors who marked the second half of the twentieth century (Michel de Certeau, Paul Ricoeur, Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari), Francois Dosse has written an extensive work on Pierre Nora. A singular figure in the French intellectual space, this author looks in a discrete and silent manner at different domains of production and diffusion (literature, journalism, publishing and essays) during the last 50 years. Known by historians as one of the coordinators (with Jacques Le Goff) of ‘Doing History’ and the idealizer of ‘sites of memory,’ Pierre Nora is above all seen as the editor of maison Gallimard and the creator of the famous ‘Bibliotheque des sciences humaines.’ In this collection the ‘cream’ of the French and foreign intelligentsia (Michel Foucault, Georges Dumezil, Emile Benveniste, amongst so many others) promoted in the 1960s and 1970s “the golden years of the human sciences.” A university professor (assistant professor in Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Institut d’Etudes Politiques during the 1970s and 1980s), idealizer of different collections of human sciences (initially in Julliard publishers afterwards in Gallimard), the founder in 1980 (with Marcel Gauchet) of the journal Le Debat (an important intellectual media anchored on the critique of ideas and the analysis of current events), and an immortal (having been elected to the Academie Francaise in 2002), Pierre Nora still plays a leading roles in the current debates of the Cite (the public sphere) notably in relation to the imbroglios of memory, history and French heritage. Nevertheless, author of a single book, published during the Algerian war, Les Francais d’Algerie, and of numerous articles (never put together in a single collection) about the history of the present and the epistemology of history, Pierre Nora incarnated the solitary intellectual, the talented writer who

“O religioso após a religião”: um debate entre Marcel Gauchet e Luc Ferry (“The religious after religion”: an debate between Marcel Gauchet and Luc Ferry) - DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2010v8n19p71

A riqueza do debate ocorrido entre os filosofos Luc Ferry e Marcel Gauchet, em janeiro de 1999, deu origem a este artigo, em que os autores exploram os temas e as questoes discutidas naquela ocasiao. O artigo apresenta as diferentes posicoes dos dois pensadores franceses, cuja preocupacao maior e pensar as condicoes de possibilidade da religiao e do religioso nos tempos atuais. Tempos em que, segundo os debatedores, predomina a individualizacao da crenca e nos quais a presenca de uma religiosidade sempre mais inquieta, difusa e incerta convive com o enfraquecimento institucional das religioes. Longe de desaparecer num universo cada vez mais laicizado, o religioso, como indagacao sobre o sentido ultimo da vida ou como aspiracao ao absoluto, tende a permanecer como um substrato insuperavel. Como, entao, pensar o religioso apos a religiao? O texto apresenta as diferentes e divergentes posicoes de Ferry e Gauchet acerca da pertinencia do uso de termos classicos como sagrado, divino, transcendente, dentre outros, para tratar os constituintes dessa religiosidade contemporânea e inquieta, propria de uma epoca na qual se torna impossivel a edificacao de um mundo de parte a parte estruturado pela religiao e na qual o religioso impregnaria todos os setores da vida publica e privada. Palavras-chave: Religiao; Religiosidade; Secularizacao; Autonomia; Heteronomia. Abstract This paper analyses the questions and problems that was discussed during an important debate between the French philosophers Marcel Gauchet and Luc Ferry, which take place at Paris on January, 1999. The paper discusses the different conceptions of these thinkers about the status of religion and the religious in nowadays. Days that witnesses the individualization of religious belief and the presence of a restless, uncertain and spread religiosity which however, lives side by side with an institutional weakening of the historical religions. Far from disappearing in a more and more laicized world, the religious as an inquiring about searching on ultimate sense for our lives seems to remain as a permanent individual issue. Nevertheless, how is it possible to conceive the religious after the deregulation of historical religions? Classical terms like sacred, divine, transcendent and absolute are sufficient to qualify and analyze the elements of this restless and uncertain religiosity, which seems to be constitutive of societies that do not need religious legitimacy anymore. Keywords: Religion; religious; secularization; autonomy; heteronomy .

On the Religious Sources of Autonomy and Self-Expression: Charles Taylor and Marcel Gauchet

Self-expression is often called upon as a fundamental individual or collective right. In this article, the author explores the anthropological and historical conditions that constitute self-expression. For that purpose, he looks at two contemporary thinkers, Charles Taylor and Marcel Gauchet. The first part reflects their anthropological presuppositions. The second part focuses on the historical implementation of these presuppositions in both thinkers, thereby paying special attention to the way religion is involved in shaping the phenomenon of self-expression. It will turn out that self-expression and its underlying notion of autonomy are not won against forms of religious paternalism, but are rather the result of transformations established by (Christian) religion itself. As to the contemporary role of self-expression, Stijn Latre concludes by pointing out the fundamental divergence between Taylor and Gauchet.

THE ASSUMPTION BY MAN OF HIS ORIGINAL FRACTURING: MARCEL GAUCHET, GLADYS SWAIN, AND THE HISTORY OF THE SELF

This essay reconstructs conceptually and situates historically contemporary French philosopher Marcel Gauchet's theory of the origins and development of modern selfhood. It argues that his history of the self as the interiorization of constitutive alienation, and of the history of self-consciousness as the progressive recognition of this alienation, originated out of a unique combination of historical factors—the radical politics of May 1968, the rise of the antipsychiatry movement, and (perhaps most surprisingly) the new psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. The essay considers Gauchet's study, together with his partner Gladys Swain, of the foundations of psychiatry, and investigates the connections of their narrative of origins to Michel Foucault's work. The essay concludes by turning to Gauchet's more recent contributions and considering the implications of his history of the self for Anglo-American scholarship.

Revising Foucault's Model of Modernity and Exclusion: Gauchet and Swain On Madness and Democracy

This article reveals how Marcel Gauchet and his late wife Gladys Swain revise Foucault's history of madness and modernity by arguing that the history of modern civilization represents a recognition of the mad, rather than their exclusion. Turning to the French Revolution, the article then examines the relationship between disciplinary practices and a wider democratic context. It shows that while Foucault reduces democratic societies to proto totalitarian practices, Gauchet and Swain give a broader and more historically complex account of asylums and the democratic context in which they emerge. This allows them to see resistance in the asylum and in democratic societies in general: while Foucault thought the panoptic asylum revealed modernity's ultimate success, for Gauchet and Swain it proved only its failure. However, the article ends by arguing that, despite all their differences, Gauchet and Swain's critique of contemporary societies remains in some respects indebted to Foucault.

Von der Dissoziation zum System. Das Konzept des Unbewussten als Abkömmling des Reflexparadigmas in der Theorie Freuds

The paper tries to situate Freud's theory historically by referring it to a paradigm of psychological theory that Marcel Gauchet describes as the "Golden Age" of psychophysics and reflex theory, and that he situates between 1870 and 1900. I will show that until 1900 Freud thinks, in fact, in categories that correspond to this type of thought. His texts On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena (1893, with Josef Breuer) and A Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) still follow the conception of a psychological subject on the basis of the stimulus and response model, which can be found in numerous contemporaneous authors. In this model, the psyche is just a place of transit open to the exterior, and its unity can only be a sum of elements of consciousness having a physiological substrate. Nevertheless, Freud's early texts--although appertaining to the reflex paradigm--already contain elements that serve to construct another basic model of the psychic apparatus, which is finally introduced by The Interpretation of Dreams. Those new elements are the separation between interior and exterior, the introduction of endogenous energy, which is linked to the importance of emotions instead of sensations, and the problem of the adaptation to outer reality that results from it. Nevertheless, once more Freud is not the only theorist in whose thought the new paradigm can be found; I again refer his new premises to other contemporary psychologists. The question that arises from Freud's passage from one paradigm to another is how he handles the continuity of his own thought. I describe the difficult compromise between contradictory concepts he finds in his Project for a Scientific Psychology; but certain concepts that derive from the reflex paradigm subsist even during the later development of psychoanalysis. This is especially the case for the concept of the unconscious itself: As I argue, this concept originates in the reflex paradigm, and, in contrast to contemporary psychology, Freud only maintains it longer than other authors do.

Thinking between China and Greece: <i>Breaking New Ground</i>: An Interview with Marcel Gauchet

Marcel gauchet: You've reached a turning point in your ca reer: you've thrown yourself into a new cycle of studies, the first volume of which has just been released: If Speaking Goes without Saying: On Logos or Other Last Resorts [Si parler va sans dire, Du logos ou d'autres ressources] (Seuil, 2006). What led you to relaunch your project? And what does the whole of this new un dertaking consist of? Fran?ois jullien: Let's recapitulate: my work might give the impression of a succession of books with quite diverse titles, with an internal articulation that's not always clear. But basically I've been writing one book, whose different titles constitute so many chapters intended to back up and prolong each other. One book that finds itself commanded by a fundamental question, or more precisely an inquiry, which has led me to pass through China?but without leaving Greece behind. The entire project is effectively borne by this uneasiness?in my view, a properly philo

Reflexive Modernization and the End of the Nation State

The theory of reflexive modernization plausibly advocates postnational cosmopolitanism. As the nation state is eroding today, we are becoming citizens of a ‘global risk society’ whose unity and cohesion is generated by the (ecological) risk that is threatening us world-wide. By the same token, this world risk society is no longer unified in any political sense. There is no world state; its very idea is even rejected. In this sense, the cosmopolitanism argued for in the theory of reflexive modernization proves predominantly to be an extrapolation of (national) civil society on a global scale, while, strictly speaking, having no cosmo‘political’ counterpart. Building on Marcel Gauchet’s political philosophy, the article questions the cosmopolitanism-beyond-the-political position of the theory of reflexive modernization. To do so, it goes substantially into Gauchet’s view of the representational role of the political as an essential dimension in (political) society formation.

The Closing of the Civic Mind: Marcel Gauchet on the `Society of Individuals'

According to Gauchet we are living in a `society of individuals'. But a central term is missing from that formula, and not by any accident, for contemporary society has lost it from view: the term of the political. In sum, thus reads Gauchet's diagnosis, society today is haunted by a kind of individualism out of which no society can be conceived, as it obfuscates its political dimension. The aim of this article is to elaborate this diagnosis, and more specifically the idea that there is no society, and therefore no individual either, without the political. In order to do so, I will explore the meaning of the formula `society of individuals'. Within the scope of this analysis, I shall primarily pay attention to the `primacy of the political' in Gauchet. To conclude, I will assess Gauchet's diagnosis, by fathoming in what sense contemporary individualism, besides being an `eclipse of the political', is also a threat to democracy.

Marcel Gauchet, Pierre-André Taguieff and the question of democracy in France

As its starting-point this article situates the new reactionaries controversy in relation to recent intellectual debates on the alleged national crisis of confidence in France's political and social models. The political ideas of Marcel Gauchet and Pierre-André Taguieff, two of the leading figures named by Daniel Lindenberg, are examined here to illustrate some key theoretical questions concerning the historical processes which have led to the current crisis, and the possible directions in which France could move in the future. Neither Gauchet nor Taguieff deserves to be labelled as a reactionary in the sense implied by Lindenberg. However they have both offered sophisticated perspectives on the problems of adaptation faced by France with regard to the practice of government, the evolution of democracy, changing patterns of civic participation, and the challenge of integrating ethnic minorities, during a period when Europeanization and globalization call the role of the nation-state itself into question.

The Contribution of Human Sciences to the Field of Disability in France over Recent Decades

This article only looks at France, and even within this narrow framework it does not pretend to be exhaustive. Several well-known authors have marked the way we think about disability. Goffman for example, with his sociology of interaction, provided a theory and stimulated research on the representations and analysis of institutions. By reconstituting the history of madness, Michel Foucault and Robert Castel legitimized the analysis of disability as a field of research and as a privileged locus of exclusion. As a counterpoint to Foucault, Marcel Gauchet revealed the difficult but necessary democratic requirement for inclusion. In addition to existing contributions, it is therefore necessary to highlight that which has not yet been mobilized. For example, Georges Canguilhem's reflection on the relationship between the living and the life milieu; Foucault's notion of “pastoral power” for an analysis of associations; Freud's concept of “uncanny”, which deserves greater attention than that which it has already received. Succinctly put, the area of disability in France would have a great future, if it were given the resources.

The Silence of the Secular

This essay describes the secular as a kind of silence, an inability to speak of or with immanent value, and such condition is linked to the pattern of transcendence in thought and life, the positing of ultimate value at a remove from experience. This diagnosis is stimulated by Sofia Coppola's film Lost in Translation and Marcel Gauchet's book, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. A reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay ‘Oversoul’, suggests how conversation counters the silence of the secular and takes on a religious value.

The Politics of Claude Lefort's Political: Between Liberalism and Radical Democracy

Claude Lefort's rethinking of ‘the political’ has been highly fruitful for political theory, yet its politics remain unclear. It has inspired transformative, radical-democratic projects, but has also served as a basis for more liberal conceptions. This article explores the sources and implications of this ambiguity by setting Lefort's work against the backdrop of the anti-totalitarian moment in French political thought and the trajectories of two of his students, Miguel Abensour and Marcel Gauchet. It emerges that although Lefort's democratic theory cannot be reduced to a defensive liberalism, neither is it as expansive as some might hope.

The philosophical implications of research on the social representations of human rights

The aim of this article is to show how human rights can be the object of another politics than the one Marcel Gauchet denounces as an “egalitarian ethnocentrism” and regards as grounding a “democratic counter-productivity”. Drawing upon the research developed by Willem Doise and his colleagues, we show that human rights, when they become social representations, rather than generating a society of undifferentiated individuals, allow the individual and collective differences to position themselves around a common stake. In this sense, the construction of shared social representations is an essential condition for the democratization process in our societies. We show how the use of human rights in the context of the French quarrel over the Muslim hijab has contributed to a gradual transformation of human rights into practical and representational matrices for the development of a truly democratic debate. Finally, the article addresses the need to reflect upon the conditions allowing the establishment of these social representations.

The Banker Who Brought Down the Old Regime: Rediscovering Jacques Necker

Léonard Burnand, Necker et l'opinion publique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004). Pp. 128. € 30. Jacques Necker (1732–1804): Banquier, ministre, écrivain (Paris: Cahiers staëliens, 2004). Pp. 288. CHF 25 Jacques Necker, Compte rendu au roy (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 2005). Pp. 152. CHF 75. Despite the pivotal role he played in the last years of the Old Regime and early phase of the French Revolution, Jacques Necker has been relatively neglected by scholars. Perhaps it is due to what Marcel Gauchet calls Necker's "fatal handicap of moderation" (A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution [1989], ed. Furet and Ozouf, 287). Simply put, Necker was neither revolutionary enough nor monarchist enough to elicit much scholarly interest. In his own period he was a kind of centrist, whose middle-of-the road ideas and solutions were soon overtaken by revolutionary events. As these three books show, however, to ignore Necker is a mistake, for not only was he an extraordinarily influential political actor at a critical time in French history, but he was also an author and a thinker whose writings shed fascinating light on the major intellectual transformations taking place around him. The driving force behind the books is Léonard Burnand, a talented doctoral candidate at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Burnand's short and insightful book, Necker et l'opinion publique, thoughtfully explores the relationship between Jacques Necker and public opinion—a relationship Burnand suggestively refers to as a lifelong "dialogue." In his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Jürgen Habermas famously argued that the term public opinion first arose around 1750 in France and then spread throughout Europe. Since its translation into French in 1978 and into English in 1989, Habermas' work has been immensely influential, triggering a large and still growing body of scholarship. Burnand uses this work to great effect, interweaving insights gleaned from renowned scholars such as Keith Baker, Mona Ozouf and others with his own original insights. Indeed, one of the benefits of Burnand's book is the survey and bibliography he provides [End Page 546] of recent works on public opinion. Burnand notes that this scholarship tends to be split into two camps. On one side public opinion is treated as an actual thing—a measurable, sociological reality—while on the other it is regarded as a concept and rhetorical device. By focusing on a person like Jacques Necker, and discussing both how Necker viewed public opinion and how public opinion viewed him, Burnand hopes to reconcile both approaches. A first chapter recounts Necker's roller coaster career from the time of his appointment as Genevan resident minister in Paris in 1768 to his rise to director of finances for Louis XVI in 1776, and through the various bumps and turns in his career until his final fall from favor and definitive departure from Paris in 1790. Necker's meteoric rise to wealth, fame, and power from relatively humble origins in Geneva is a fascinating story in its own right. Whether it was through his own controversial writings, like the Eloge de Colbert (1773), or through his wife's well-attended salon in Paris, Necker assiduously courted public opinion, and did so with remarkable success for many years. Indeed, Burnand suggests that it was partly due to Necker's enormous popularity that Louis XVI hired him in 1776. We recall that it was rumours about Necker's dismissal in July of 1789 that snowballed into the taking of the Bastille. Things did not always go Necker's way; and, in the end, his fall from favor and loss of popularity were as spectacular as his rise. Necker's Compte rendu of 1781, in which he exposed the state of royal finances, made him enemies in high places, and his unwillingness to conform made matters worse. Among other things, he exposed the fact that the king was dispensing 8...

Re-Imagining Castoriadis’s Psychic Monad

Castoriadis portrays the psyche in its originary state as a ‘psychic monad’ - an infantile psyche that experiences itself as omnipotent, omnipresent, undifferentiated and sufficient unto itself. According to Castoriadis, this totality is fragmented in a ‘triadic phase’ through the experience of desire, which brings to the fore the encounter with the Other. In contrast, Marcel Gauchet rejects the concept of the psychic monad, arguing that the unformed psyche enters the world with a primordial openness to being formed and transformed. Psychic tension does not arise from the immersion of the closed monad in a hostile world, but from within the psyche itself, for the psyche must form itself and be formed by the world. Gauchet’s understanding of an inherent psychic tension provides an important corrective to Castoriadis’s theory of the monad that nevertheless remains consistent with Castoriadis’s anthropology.