Showing papers in "Substance in 1996"

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

Abstract: Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts -- automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism -- as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of \"end of history\" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize \"everyday life,\" laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.

Power, subjectification and resistance in Foucault

Abstract: L'A. s'oppose a l'interpretation classique des theories de Foucault relatives a la problematique du pouvoir, de l'asservissement et de la resistance et propose une nouvelle lecture de l'oeuvre de l'ecrivain en revenant sur les concepts developpes par celui-ci, et en reflechissant a nouveau sur leurs articulations (rapports entre pouvoir, intentionnalite et non-subjectivite, relations entre pouvoir et resistance, idee de liberte)

George Sand and Idealism

Abstract: The importance of being George idealism in the novel - recanonizing Sand idealism and its discontents the politics of idealism the fraternal pact - \"La Petite Fadette\" and \"Nanon\" transmissions - \"Histoire de ma vie\" living on - Flaubert's idealism.

To have done with judgment : Beckett and Deleuze

Abstract: Comparaison de l'analyse du chaos, de la conception de l'existence immanente et de la critique de l'ordre moral chez Beckett et Deleuze, qui, face a la crise ethique des annees 1940 en France, cherchent a en finir avec la morale du jugement. Examinant les notions d'haecceite, d'univocite de l'etre et de temps, l'A. souligne l'incompatibilite entre une teleologie transcendante et le projet ethique de l'acceptation de l'existence

Shakespeare, the Stage, and the State

Abstract: In his Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587), Raphael Holinshed reports that, in her response to a parliamentary petition for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, Queen Elizabeth told the joint delegation of lords and commons, "we princes ... are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world dulie observed; the eies of manie behold our actions; a spot is soone spied in our garments; a blemish quicklie noted in our dooings."1 The putative royal phrase, "we princes . . . are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world," has sometimes been invoked to epitomize what Stephen Greenblatt has called "the whole theatrical apparatus of royal power," and to make the point that "Elizabethan power... depends upon its privileged visibility."2 Indeed, Greenblatt goes so far as to suggest that, because "a poetics of Elizabethan power" is synonymous with "a poetics of the theater," the drama produced in the Elizabethan public theatres is always already co-opted by the state: "It is precisely because of the English form of absolutist theatricality that Shakespeare's drama, written for a theater subject to state censorship, can be so relentlessly subversive: the form itself, as a primary expression of Renaissance power, helps to contain the radical doubts it continually provokes" (1988, 64, 65). My own perspective on the ideological location of Shakespeare's theatre is one that resists arguments that bind the practices of the professional Elizabethan theatre to the practices of the Elizabethan state, and that bind Shakespearean theatricality to political absolutism.3 Indeed, any general characterization of the relationship between the Elizabethan theatre and the Elizabethan state in terms of an either/or choice between

Persona: Reason and Representation in Hobbes's Political Philosophy

Abstract: REPRESENTATION IS USUALLY CONSIDERED one of the key concepts of modern political theory. As such, representation is viewed as a mechanism of legitimization that defines a form of government, and it is generally linked to modem democracy. A representative government is a type of political organization where power is held through the accord, agreement or authorization of those governed. From this point of view, "representation" is seen as a characteristic of the government or political poweras something political power does: it represents, or is taken as a condition that government satisfies (or should satisfy), as in the expression "no taxation without representation." There is another way in which the term "representation" is used in the context of politics: for example, in such expressions as "the representation of power," or when we say that "Versailles was constructed to represent the power of Louis XIV both to French nobility and to all of Europe." In cases like this, representation is taken as something exterior to political power itself, something added to it. Though in many instances this representing is done by government itself, it is not an intrinsic characteristic of a certain form of political power, but something that can be added to any type of power. Conceptually, these two meanings of "representation" are clearly distinct and logically independent. A non-representative government can represent itself, for example, through a personality cult. A contrario, a representative government can fail to represent itself (properly), as, for example, in Canada in a recent referendum campaign. At the conceptual level, two major characteristics seem to distinguish these two meanings of "representation." First, as hinted before, reflexivity in the case of representing power and non-reflexivity in the case of representative power. A government is representative only if what it represents is not itself: the people, the nation, interest groups, major social agents, etc. It is only through them that it finds its legitimacy and meaning as being a representative government. On the other hand, representing power is reflexive. It is power representing itself. Though others, like artists, historians or

Theatricality, Public Space, and Music in Rousseau

Abstract: advocate of community, the second is almost always that he was morally opposed to theater, as being destructive to community morals.2 The source for this judgment is the Letter to D'Alembert, a text Rousseau addressed to his cosmopolitan friend when the latter had (on the probable urging of Voltaire) suggested in his article on Geneva in the Encyclopedia that opening a theater in Geneva would bring together "the prudence of Lacedemonia and the urbanity of Athens" (LA 4/ Bloom 4). Rousseau was not primarily concerned with the supposed corrupting effects of actors and actresses (D'Alembert had seductively suggested that with proper regulation, Geneva might have a group of morally well-behaved actors), but with the experience of theater itself. His apparent hostility has two elements-one moral, and the second, epistemological. On the moral level, Rousseau's concern is with the status of the audience. He argues that in the contemporary theater, what the audience experiences as emotion is not really their own. Thus one can afford to be upset or take pleasure in the spectacle, for in the theater "nothing is required" of the audience (LA 23/Bloom 24). By "nothing is required," Rousseau means that our emotions have no life-consequences. It is, as it were, irresponsible to be an audience member, a bit as if one were on holiday from one's everyday, common humanity. For Rousseau, this irresponsibility is associated with the experience of an isolation that keeps one from being at

Literary Studies and Literary Pragmatics: The Case of "The Purloined Letter"

Abstract: Cet article montre comment la theorie des jeux peut etre utilisee dans le domaine de la critique litteraire, a la fois pour mieux comprendre, d'un point de vue pragmatique, les rapports auteur-lecteur, et dans le cadre d'une interpretation semantique de la fiction. La theorie des jeux est dans cette optique appliquee a la lecture de l'oeuvre d'Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined letter afin de mettre en lumiere les strategies de cooperation sur lesquelles repose le fonctionnement de l'oeuvre

Georges Perec : écrire pour ne pas dire

Abstract: Le present ouvrage Georges Perec: ecrire pour ne pas dire etudie les artifices d'une ecriture qui temoigne d'une experience qui ne peut se dire dans la transparence. Si l'ecriture correspond a la volonte d'etablir une relation solidaire entre l'ecrivain et le lecteur, comment dire l'absence, comment dire le bannissement identitaire, comment dire l'incertitude, le doute ou l'ecroulement des valeurs qui fait suite au cataclysme historique que la deuxieme guerre mondiale a fait subir a la pensee occidentale. A travers la chronique d'une anthropologie endotique et par l'application de multiples programmations oulipiennes, Georges Perec invente une esthetique qui repond a l'expression d'une histoire personnelle mais aussi aux exigences de representation et d'expression de l'histoire contemporaine.

The Stage of Power

Abstract: THE IMMEDIATELY NEGATIVE PERCEPTION of the word "spectacle" linked to the word "political" has complex origins. It arises from a tradition as old as it is persistent, which can be located very precisely in Plato, where the notion of spectacle is associated with illusion, simulacrum, artifice (and as such, necessarily opposed to the exigency of truth). Further, the play of illusion, as a concern with "appearances" or as the "staging" of power, remains associated in our historical memory with a time of ostentatious luxury and the privileges of the powerful. Thus, it is associated with an era of striking inequalities that the social revolutions from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century have aimed to abolish. More recently, and more seriously, we cannot forget the way in which the Nazis and the Fascists elaborated a whole art of staging and managed to play on the fascinating effect of mass parades. The idea of a "stage of power" does indeed seem suspect. Today, however, the problem is very different: the most ordinary political activity is transformed, via audio-visual means, into a kind of collective game, reduced to being only a variant of the generalized spectacle of which even the daily news is a part. Hence there is an increasingly banal confusion between public space and private space, between the citizen and the consumer, between the political realm and that of the marketplace. This leads public representation to depend on an "image" that must be made as attractive as possible, in order to win the competition decided by the electors. Everything happens as if the principal duty of a political class, made up of paid professionals, was to occupy the so-called public "stage," to play set parts as efficiently as possible, and to prepare themselves for the verdict of the citizens, on precise dates, based less on their platforms than on the quality of their performance in the media. One might underline the fact that such a "game" is inherent to the democratic system, which supposes a plurality of choices, and demands of those incarnating them to win public opinion. But must this be at the expense of confusing convincing with seducing? Surely not. However, one must immediately object: can one manage without this seduction? Is it not part and

Contradictory passion : Inspiration in Blanchot's The Space of Literature

Abstract: Etude du concept d'inspiration, et des rapports que celle-ci entretient, selon Blanchot, dans une litterature vue comme experience-limite, avec l'exigence, l'oeuvre, le lecteur, et l'ecrivain. L'A. analyse et commente la theorie de l'inspiration de Blanchot en la resituant parmi les traditions deja existantes, et en en developpant le sens et les consequences

Against Narrative Poetics: Postmodern Narrative Returns

Abstract: Cet article traite de la maniere dont les recits postmodernes parviennent a interroger et a remettre en cause les fondements poetiques meme sur lesquels ils reposent. Pour ce faire, l'A. montre comment ces recits thematisent une origine du recit historique analogue a une poetique narratologique qu'ils vont de fait nier en revenant a leurs fondations propres et en exposant par la l'impossibilite d'une origine extra-thematique du recit

"Games of Perfect Information": Computers and the Metanarratives of Emancipation and Progress

Abstract: In The Postmodern Condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that "knowledge has become the principle force of production" in the modem world. Because information is indispensable to productive power, it "will continue to be ... a major--perhaps the major--stake in the worldwide competition for power." Consequently, "it is conceivable that the nationstates will one day fight for control of information ... and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor" (5, original emphasis). Of course, knowledge can empower or enslave individuals as well as nation-states. Those who are "in the know" hold an

The Sacrificial Difference: Raymond Roussel and the Structure of Stereotype

Abstract: Anlyse de la thematique de l'Etoile au front, basee selon l'A. sur les personnages des jumeaux et de la metisse, et construite autour d'une dynamique reposant sur les notions de ressemblances, de differences et d'assimilation reliees en l'article au fonctionnement sacrificiel tel qu'il a ete modelise par Rene Girard

The Representation of Power and the Power of Representation

Abstract: CORNEILLE'S THEATER IS A POLITICAL THEATER, or rather, it is a theater of the political. By this I mean that his theater is not so much in the service of politics, nor the expression of political ideas, as much as it is the staging of a thinking about the political. Corneille is a political thinker, no doubt the most important political thinker of the seventeenth century. He is constantly raising questions about the nature of power, the foundations of its legitimacy, about the relationships between ethics and politics, about the legitimacy of force, or about state interests (raison d'6tat), in short, taking up all of Machiavelli's questions. From the point of view of political thought, Corneille's theater articulates an often critical dialogue with Machiavelli's writings. But what is interesting is that this political thought, this response to Machiavelli, is not enunciated in the form of a theoretical treatise, but rather in a theatrical form. For if there is unquestionably a political theory in Corneille's writings, a reflection on the state of power, Corneille himself is not a political theoretician, nor a philosopher, but rather a poet, a dramatic author. His thought is expressed through theater, within a genre that imposes its own demands and whose first rule, to which all others are subordinate, is to please the spectator. Corneille states as much in the beginning of his first Discours sur le pokme dramatique. For not only is Corneille a masterful political thinker, he also developed important reflections about the theater in his prefaces, his examinations (examens), and especially in his three Discours sur le podme dramatique published in 1644 with his examens, in the beginning of the first complete edition of his works. While Corneille's political theory is expressed in a theatrical form, Corneille's reflections on the dramatic arts, on the other hand, take a theoretical form. Taken together, these prefaces, examens and discourses constitute what could truly be called a poetics, where Corneille takes up all of the questions raised by Aristotle, in order to discuss them point by point. If Corneille's theater is a response to Machiavelli within the political realm, Corneille's poetics is a response to Aristotle. But, as Corneille himself states, contrary to all of the

Games Critics Play

Abstract: most important legacies: modern game theory. According to game theory, whenever people interact with each other they are playing a game. Fun and Games, Ken Binmore's 1992 study of game theory, illustrates the wide range of such games: If you drive a car on a busy street, you are playing a game with the drivers of the other cars. When you make a bid at an auction, you are playing a game with the other bidders. When a supermarket manager decides the price at which she will try to sell cans of beans, she is playing a game with her customers and with the managers at rival supermarkets. When a firm and a union negotiate next year's wage contract, they are playing a game. The prosecuting and defending attorneys are playing a game when each decides what arguments to put before a jury. Napoleon and Wellington were playing a game at the battle of Waterloo, and so were Khrushchev and Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. (3)

A wrinkle in historical time

Abstract: gained from the different meanings uncovered in the general march of history along the path which runs from Bossuet (Jacques-Binigne) to Toynbee (Arnold), and which is punctuated by the edifices of Auguste Comte and Karl Marx. Everyone knows very well that they are worth as little for directing research into the recent past as they are for making any reasonable presumptions about the events of tomorrow. Besides, they are modest enough to postpone their certainties until the day after tomorrow, and not too prudish either to admit the retouching that permits predictions about what happened yesterday." (Lacan, Ecrits 51) THE NARRATOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY, since the ground-breaking work of Hayden White (Metahistory) and Roland Barthes ("The Discourse of History") has succeeded in confounding many of the traditional assumptions regarding not only the methods and means of historical inquiry, but its ends as well. Having, in its most radical form, blurred the boundaries between openly rhetorical and fictive discourses and the supposedly objective pursuit of truth that was History, narratological analysis has managed to problematize the "historical," as both a category and a discipline in most fields outside of traditional history departments (the obvious example being literature). Paradoxically, perhaps, in these same disciplines-in particular that of literature-there has begun to appear a renewed interest in self-consciously historical approaches to the subject-matter, to the extent that, insomuch as the "historical" has undergone a severe critique of its epistemological foundations, it has at the same time emerged as a valid, and indeed preferred, parameter of literary research. One explanation for this curious phenomenon is that those of us who work in the field of literary studies, content with narratology's coup, have become complacent in the certainty of our relativistic claims, and have felt justified in settling the historical territories newly annexed by theory without taking into account the practical difficulties brought on by that "conquest." What are we, as "cultural historians," to do with the "historical" now? What does it mean to historicize a text? How do we rationalize "historical readings" in an epistemological

Reading Proust : in search of the wolf-fish

Abstract: Walks along the Meseglise Way Swann in love "A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs" "Le temps retrouve".

A Well-Staged Coup de Theatre: The Royal Lit de Justice of 1718

Abstract: ON AUGUST 26, 1718, ONLY THREE YEARS AFTER LOUIS XIV DIED, the testament of this monarch who attributed the highest glory to the absolute monarchy was overturned at a royal Lit de justice. This important political ceremonial, discussed below, generally consists of an extraordinary assembly between the king and the Parliament of Paris, intended for solving important state matters. The 1718 Lit de justice, held at the Tuileries, was formally led by the five-year-old Louis XV, but conducted in reality by the Duke of Orl6ans, nephew of the deceased king and Regent of France. During this Assembly, Louis XIV's two legitimated sons-the Duke of Maine and the Duke of Toulouse-were deprived of the right to inherit the crown. This important political event, recorded in official archives and in several testimonies, was also the object of a vivid account by the Duke of Saint-Simon. This author of the famous Memoirs about the reign of Louis XIV and the Regency was both a witness and a participant. We will examine through his narrative the theatrical paradigm underlying political practice in early modern France, of which this ceremony can be taken as a perfect illustration. In the ancien regime, politics were related in many respects to literature, particularly to theater. Although works such as Machiavelli's Prince or Naude's Political Considerations on Coups d'Etat took a somewhat theoretical stance, as a rule, political ideas were shaped and expressed in plays or in historical writings more often than in abstract treatises. Corneille's tragedies served to justify or elaborate absolutist ideology, the Cardinal de Retz's La conjuration du comte de Fiesque has been interpreted as a manual for political conspiracy in the form of historical narrative, and most thinkers of the seventeenth century, including Pascal and Finelon, developed their political theories through fictional dialogues or in the form of advice to the prince. Moreover, royal authority was itself firmly grounded in ceremonial representation. Its ritual enactment reaffirmed its sacred character, on the one hand, and served to reduce the consciousness of its violent origin, on the other. Kingship was indeed seen as rooted in an

Literary studies and the end of history

Abstract: L'A. s'interroge sur les traditions universitaires et critiques americaines et francaises, constate la fin des ideologies et le ralentissement du commerce des idees, et pose la question de la fin de l'histoire (Fukuyama) dans le domaine theorique litteraire. Il souligne la presence, dans le champ theorique, d'un esprit fin-de-siecle lie au postmodernisme, qui a a voir avec l'acceleration des techniques et des pratiques (informatiques), et ouvre le debat autour du futur de la recherche litteraire

The Enigma of the Political Stage Director

Abstract: stage where they are seen and play a role, the politician has to become as visible as possible. Every time Machiavelli talks about the condition of the prince, he speaks of the general condition of human beings-to be exposed to the gaze of others. Visibility is even more relevant in the case of the prince, since he is first the one who is seen, before being the one who sees. He is on view for others, and has to construct for himself an image of the view he supposes others to have of him, while he has only a partial view of himself, in profile. He has to seem good, or let fall words that make him seem good, just, pious, etc., because speech belongs to the domain of the visible, or is one of the resources of the stage's conspicuousness. For that reason, the prince must ensure that power has its ceremony. The latter defines the regular organization of the political, and also the prince's entrance on the stage, where, so long as he is in power, he should not lose his grip on appearances. This seems to be the main thing demanded of him: to make his entry on an already constituted stage and to assume his role in a scene ruled by the inflexible laws of perspective, which force him to position himself correctly, not pretending to see everything, but adopting a fragmentary, partial and limited view. For that reason, he has to construct an image that is adapted to circumstances, to seem good or bad according to the appearance required of him, and to go subtly and progressively from one appearance to the other, without creating the impression of inconsistency nor distortion in the succession of his masks. Nevertheless, the role of prince would be simple if he had only to preserve the stage while looking after himself. He would have to make his entrance on an already constructed stage, and find ways of remaining at the ideal distance, between the partial knowledge of his own frontal view, while having an oblique view of the other knowledge. To accomplish this, a distancing is not enough, nor are the counsellors' reports, nor even the report of the political writer who attempts to see from both perspectives. None of this is sufficient for the prince's view: He must guess.' However, even this sort of good view, no matter how sharp, however anchored in