As he makes transitions from literature to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Lukacher displays a theoretical imagination and historical vision that bring to the ...

... he writes of the destruction of Mnemosyne's city and of the severing of the locks of the goddess herself: From her also, when God put off his cloak, ...

Ce texte a déjà paru dans Recherches en didactique des sciences et des technologies, N° 4, 2012. Nous remercions Maryline Coquidé, Michèle Dell'Angelo, Stanislas Dorey, Corinne Fortin, Magali Gallezot, Sandrine Henocq, Faouzia Kalali, Jean-Marc Lange, Guy Rumelhard et la RDST de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Résumé : Les travaux de la biologie intégrative remettent en cause le déterminisme strict de l'organisation spatiale et temporelle du vivant. Ce texte, travail collectif de notre (...) - Biologie – Nouvel (...) article. (shrink)

Alain Lévêque, né en 1942 à Paris, est l'auteur notamment de Bonnard, la main légère (Deyrolle Editeur/L'Arbre voyageur, 1994 ; Verdier, 2006), et le préfacier des Observations sur la peinture de Pierre Bonnard, parues aux éditions L'Atelier contemporain en 2015. Il faut miser pour voir. Savoir jouer, ruser, cacher, mais aussi dévoiler son jeu, s'attendre à perdre, à gagner, réfléchir, avoir des coups de tête, de la chance, se recueillir, tout dépenser. Ne pas retenir quelques mots bien au chaud pour (...) l'hiver, dans son bas de laine pour les temps de disette. Tout dépenser. Il faut à chaque fois écrire toutes voiles dehors, au risque de se trouver fort dépourvu quand la bise n'est pas venue. Je ne connais rien de plus difficile que ces commandes d'un " petit texte " pour une exposition de peinture, le travail d'un sculpteur. Car jamais de moi-même je n'irais me fourrer dans pareil pétrin (encore qu'il est tentant de mettre ses mains dans la pâte qui finira par s'échauffer et lever, mais c'est une autre histoire). Il s'agit qu'on m'invite à jouer, et si le jeu est engageant, je ne peux m'empêcher de dire chiche et de jouer à perdre haleine, me fiant à l'excitation, à l'emportement, et croisant les doigts pour qu'à la fin je puisse enlever le bandeau que j'ai sur les yeux et reconnaître ce que j'ai cru toucher. Ecrire pour voir. Est-ce écrire en regard du tableau? On peut bien écrire quelques mots dans un carnet devant le tableau, il ne s'agit jamais d'un tête-à-tête. Le tableau a une et même plusieurs longueurs d'avance. Qu'il soit peint comme de toute éternité et ne demande rien à personne crève les yeux. Le tableau est immobile, cela crève aussi les yeux, on ne peut pourtant pas le fixer. Ecrire dans son carnet oblige à baisser les yeux. Lorsqu'on les relève, le tableau a détalé. On envoie des mots en éclaireur. L'ensemble des textes écrits par Maryline Desbiolles (parus pour la plupart dans des catalogues ou revues, ou inédits) sur l'art, autour de l'art, à partir de l'art est ici réuni : une première partie rassemble les approches les plus réflexives sur la création ; dans le second chapitre les textes s'articulent autour de deux thématiques chères à l'auteur : l'Italie, la cuisine ; le troisième chapitre réunit les essais et poèmes consacrés aux sculptures de Bernard Pagès ; sont ensuite regroupés les essais consacrés à des artistes ou des oeuvres ; le volume se clôt enfin sur des oeuvres de fiction dont l'élément déclencheur de l'écriture fut la fréquentation d'oeuvres plastiques. L'ensemble des textes a été revu en prévision de cet ouvrage, tout autant essai sur l'art qu'oeuvre littéraire. (shrink)

L’histoire du Kronprinzenpalais, dans sa lente émergence vers la reconnaissance de son existence, ainsi que du rôle majeur qu’il joua sur la scène muséale allemande, en tant que premier musée d’art moderne, demeure étroitement lié au sort de son unique conservateur, Ludwig Justi. Cet article s’attache à restituer les innovations didactiques et muséographiques menées par Justi, les très nombreuses expositions temporaires aussi bien que l’enrichissement des collections, de même que la fondation de la revue Museum der Gegenwart, lesquels eurent un (...) rayonnement sur l’ensemble des musées d’art allemands. (shrink)

La prise de rendez-vous dans un service de consultation conjugale est un aspect spécifique du travail de la secrétaire-réceptionniste. Les différentes tâches qui s’y associent sont le tri des appels et l’évaluation des demandes, l’écoute, l’information et l’orientation. Le rôle de la secrétaire est d’assurer le premier contact, de recueillir les éléments de la demande et de présenter le cadre de travail du conseiller conjugal. Les rendez-vous sont pris selon des règles et des consignes définies dans un cadre institutionnel.

La prise de rendez-vous dans un service de consultation conjugale est un aspect spécifique du travail de la secrétaire-réceptionniste. Les différentes tâches qui s’y associent sont le tri des appels et l’évaluation des demandes, l’écoute, l’information et l’orientation. Le rôle de la secrétaire est d’assurer le premier contact, de recueillir les éléments de la demande et de présenter le cadre de travail du conseiller conjugal. Les rendez-vous sont pris selon des règles et des consignes définies dans un cadre institutionnel.

For over two and a half millennia human beings have attempted to invent strategies to “discover” the truth of time, to determine whether time is infinite, whether eternity is the infinite duration of a continuous present, or whether it too rises and falls with the cycles of universal creation and destruction. _Time-Fetishes_ recounts the history of a tradition that runs counter to the dominant tradition in Western metaphysics, which has sought to purify eternity of its temporal character. From the pre-Socratics (...) to Ovid and Plotinus, and from Shakespeare to Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, _Time-Fetishes_ traces the secret tradition of the idea of eternal recurrence and situates it as the grounding thought of Western philosophy and literature. The thinkers in this counter-history of the eternal return lingered long enough on the question of time to learn how to resist separating eternity from time, and how to reflect on the possible identity of time and eternity as a way of resisting all prior metaphysical determinations. Drawing out the implications of Nietzsche’s reinvention of the doctrine of return, Lukacher ranges across a broad spectrum of ancient and modern thinkers. Shakespeare’s role in this history as the “poet of time” is particularly significant, for not only does Shakespeare reactivate the pre-Christian arguments of eternal return, he regards them, and all arguments and images concerning the essence of time and Being, from an inimitably ironic perspective. As he makes transitions from literature to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Lukacher displays a theoretical imagination and historical vision that bring to the forefront a host of pre- and post-Christian texts in order to decipher in them an encounter with the thought of eternal recurrence that has been too long buried under layers of rigid metaphysical interpretation. (shrink)

“More than fifteen years ago,” Jacques Derrida writes in the prologue to this remarkable and uniquely revealing book, “a phrase came to me, as though in spite of me.... It imposed itself upon me with the authority, so discreet and simple it was, of a judgment: ‘cinders there are’.... I had to explain myself to it, respond to it—or for it.” In _Cinders_ Derrida ranges across his work from the previous twenty years and discerns a recurrent cluster of arguments and (...) images, all involving in one way or another ashes and cinders. For Derrida, cinders or ashes—at once fragile and resilient—are “the better paradigm for what I call the trace—something that erases itself totally, radically, while presenting itself.” In a style that is both highly condensed and elliptical, _Cinders_ offers probing reflections on the relation of language to truth, writing, the voice, and the complex connections between the living and the dead. It also contains some of his most essential elaborations of his thinking on the feminine and on the legacy of the Holocaust in contemporary poetry and philosophy. In turning from the texts of other philosophers to his own, _Cinders_ enables readers to follow the trajectory from Derrida’s early work on the trace, the gramma, and the voice to his later writings on life, death, time, and the spectral. Among the most accessible of this renowned philosopher’s many writings, _Cinders_ is an evocative and haunting work of poetic self-analysis that deepens our understanding of Derrida’s critical and philosophical vision. (shrink)

Lukacher claims that the theory of eternal recurrence is the secret alternative approach to time and man’s relation to it in western thought. Eternal recurrence has been buried in philosophy by the dominance of Christian thought and theology and its concomitant linear approach to history. Lukacher seeks to resuscitate the pagan theory by tracing its path of development from the pre-Socratics Heraclitus and Anaximander through Nietzsche and into contemporary thought with Derrida.

Perhaps nothing so radically changes one’s value perspective as psychosis. In a moving article, writer Mark Lukach describes his wife Giulia’s struggle with an illness presumed to be bipolar disorder. A woman with a “concrete life plan … to become a director of marketing at a fashion company and have three kids by the time she turned 35”, Gulia’s acute psychosis resulted in her ranting “unintelligible babble about heaven, hell, angels, and the devil”. For her husband, Gulia had become a (...) different person; “the person you love is no longer there, replaced by a stranger who’s shocking and exotic”.Yet, change to value systems is ubiquitous and usually far less dramatic than that occurring in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Daemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the Question of ConscienceEric SpencerDaemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the Question of Conscience, by Ned Lukacher; x & 228 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, $37.50 cloth, $15.95 paper.Daemonic Figures is a specialist’s book twice over. Profiting from it requires not only considerable familiarity with Heidegger, but also unquestioning acceptance of the rhetorical conventions and critical methods of contemporary theory. Lukacher uses these (...) conventions and methods to argue that conscience, properly understood, poses uncomfortable questions about the origins of self-knowledge, and leads to a mysterious but presumably enriching encounter with the limits of our certainty. Shakespeare enters the argument as the supreme example of a poet who discovers, through sensitivity to the ambiguities of language, how to peer without flinching into the Heideggerian abyss. Although the book relies too heavily on Heidegger’s unforgiving idiom, and pauses too seldom to justify suggestive but tenuous claims, at its heart lie hard, interesting questions about what having a conscience means.Lukacher wishes to restore to the idea of conscience all its paradoxical force. As a silent inner voice carrying a moral imperative from elsewhere, conscience immediately suggests an internally divided self. And although, according to Lukacher, Christian tradition locates the source of the imperative in God, and classical tradition in natural law, conscience remains irreducibly “uncanny,” because “the most intimate site of human habitation [i.e., the self] is also the strangest of places, for it is there that the (unfamiliar) god comes to presence through the language of moral judgment that tells us that we are and that because we are what we are we should act thus” (p. 7). For Lukacher, then, the question of conscience is the question of being, a question without an answer because it involves the unthinkable idea of something prior to and beyond being. The book argues that whatever speaks to us under the name of conscience must be both within and without any categories we have to explain it.Hence “daemonic figures”: drawing on the Greek notion of a realm of daimones dwelling between the human and divine worlds, Lukacher claims that the “daemon is the cipher, the name, and the figure for the incontrovertible [End Page 240] ghostliness, the familiar strangeness, that dwells between the perceptions and reflections of consciousness and the enigmatic ground of Being itself” (p. 2), or “the medium in which we come to ourselves as precisely that which is divided from itself... from the outset” (p. 6). And because, in Lukacher’s scheme, language articulates this daemonic mediation, we must seek in literary works which explore conscience—like Hamlet and Macbeth—traces of uncanniness welling up through ostensibly coherent words. Literary value accordingly involves “giving us the words with which to bring that enigmatic lack to presence” (p. 92). Simultaneously ubiquitous and inscrutable, conscience both calls to and evades us, and literature makes its home in such paradoxical territory.It follows that Lukacher seeks in texts brief flashes of something else in the midst of what’s apparently going on, a procedure which constantly risks arbitrary idiosyncrasy. For instance, in his chapter on Hamlet, Lukacher notes that the Player’s description of Priam’s death includes a line—“and with a hideous crash / Takes prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear”—whose sequence of sounds produces a ghostly authorial signature: sh... akes... Pyr... ear. And because this “countersignature” appears fragmented, in a context of hesitation, destruction and decline, Lukacher claims it creates an allegory of the “nonrelation at the heart of self-revelation” (p. 135). That is, it (and the larger drama of Hamlet’s revenge to which it obliquely gestures) reveals that at the heart of authorship, of authorized speech, of the moral law of conscience, lies “the silent play of the letter” (p. 135), the “daemonic figure” of dissolution in the midst of self-assertion, which unsettles all authorization. Hence Hamlet’s famous difficulties—he hears the whisper of Otherness in what ought to be a straightforward moral imperative to vengeance.Lukacher justifies this procedure by noting that “Derrida’s writing, no less than that of Heidegger [and presumably Shakespeare], relies on the invention of figures and metaphors through which... (shrink)