From the premise that a discourse analysis about the Museum and the History of Art as conditions of possibility of Contemporary Art discourse is required, this event analysis suggests that the subject of theoretical discourse of the mac between 1946 and 1947 is to conceive, to select and to display the Chilean painting as a representative overview of the artistic activity and of the nation itself. This also supposes a deeply rooted belief about Chilean art development: the formal evolution of (...) art runs parallel to the emergence of the nation from the beginning of the Republic until the forties of twentieth century, the first one is conceived as a mirror of the second one in its landscapes and genre paintings. (shrink)

Language and thought are intimately related: philosophers have long debated how a given language may condition the oral and written expression of thought. The language chosen to communicate scientific discoveries may facilitate or impede international access to such knowledge. Vector and message may become intertwined in ways not yet fully understood: comparing and contrasting dictionary definitions of key terms, such as the Humboldtian Weltansicht, may provide useful insights into this process. Semantic prosody, a linguistic phenomenon brought to light by corpus (...) linguistics through the analysis of ever vaster corpora, may have unsuspected and even unconscious impacts on the perception of a message. A case study of data from WebsTerre, a diachronic corpus of geological English, explores a twentieth-century Kuhnian paradigm shift in Earth Science, from continental drift to plate tectonics, to demonstrate how interactions between semantic prosody and translation have the potential to alter the history of science. (shrink)

El autor de este libro plantea varias interrogantes de enorme importancia para entender la historia reciente de nuestro país. ¿Cómo explicar la modernización económica de Chile durante la dictadura militar? ¿Cómo el liberalismo económico se instaló en nuestro país antes de la caída del muro de Berlín y de las experiencias conservadoras de Ronald Reagan y Margaret Thatcher? ¿Cuáles son los fenómenos que permitieron la aceptación de este modelo neoliberal? ¿De qué manera se gestaron las elites ..

I hope I'll be forgiven for including this piece about the infamous Priory of Sion, which, as, anyone who has read The Da Vinci Code can tell you, is a secret organization dedicated to keeping the secret of the Holy Grail — an organization led down the centuries by eminent scientists, thinkers and artists including Da Vinci himself. While not strictly philosophical, this article is an excellent exercise in the kind of scrupulous detective work rarely done by those who spread (...) such myths. It also nicely illustrates how such myths are often started. (shrink)

Maître de théologie, Gauthier de Château-Thierry a été chancelier de l’université de Paris de 1246 à 1249, et évêque de Paris pour quelque mois, avant sa mort cette année-là. Sa question sur l’office de prédication est la réflexion systématique la plus complète, au sujet de la réglementation de la prédication, que nous avons de cette époque. Elle parle de la prédication des femmes, laïcs, moines, excommuniés, pécheurs, maîtres de théologie, jeunes hommes, etc. L’édition critique est accompagnée d’une brève introduction sur (...) l’auteur et ses ouvrages, sur la tradition du traitement scolaire sur la prédication, et analyse certains points intéressants du texte. (shrink)

Antoine de Baecque proposes a new historiography of cinema, exploring film as a visual archive of the twentieth century, as well as history's imprint on the cinematic image. Whether portraying events that occurred in the past or stories unfolding before their eyes, certain twentieth-century filmmakers used a particular mise-en-scène to give form to history, becoming in the process historians themselves. Historical events, in turn, irrupted into cinema. This double movement, which de Baecque terms the "cinematographic form of history," disrupts the (...) very material of film, much like historical events disturb the narrative of human progress. De Baecque defines, locates, and interprets cinematographic forms in seven distinct bodies of cinema: 1950s modern cinema and its conjuring of the morbid trauma of war; French New Wave and its style, which became the negative imprint of the malaise felt by young contemporaries of the Algerian War; post-Communist Russian films, or the "de-modern" works of _catastroika_; contemporary Hollywood films that attach themselves to the master fiction of 9/11; the characteristic _mise en forme_ of filmmaker Sacha Guitry, who, in _Si_ _Versailles m'était conté (1954), filmed French history from inside its chateau; the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who evoked history through his own museum memory of the twentieth century; and the achievements of Peter Watkins, the British filmmaker who reported on history like a war correspondent. De Baecque's introduction clearly lays out his theoretical framework, a profoundly brilliant conceptualization of the many ways cinema and history relate._. (shrink)

Les Elements du droit naturel et politique sont la premiere oeuvre politique de Hobbes. Ecrits en 1640, ils circulerent en manuscrit, juste avant que Hobbes ne rejoigne la France ou il demeurera en exil pendant onze ans pour echapper aux affres de la guerre civile anglaise. La redaction de cet ouvrage est donc directement liee au contexte politique. Pourtant, Hobbes y accomplit une deterritorialisation radicale du politique. Loin de partir comme tous ses predecesseurs de l'histoire ou de la nature, il (...) arrache le politique a l'une et a l'autre pour l'enraciner dans une theorie de la nature humaine. On a sans doute de la peine a mesurer la revolution que constitue une telle decision. Sans doute Hobbes a-t-il pour but d'eclairer ses concitoyens sur les veritables regles qui regissent l'artifice politique et sans lesquelles le corps politique s'ecroule comme un chateau de cartes dans la guerre civile, mais pour y parvenir il faut fonder la politique comme science. Il decontextualise donc le politique pour atteindre son essence et sa verite. C'est la l'audace extreme de cette philosophie a laquelle sont aveugles ceux qui entendent la lire comme s'il s'agissait d'un ecrit de circonstance dont le sens serait entierement reductible au moment de sa redaction. Le present volume comporte la premiere edition critique de ce texte depuis l'edition Tonnies, laquelle se trouve, sur bien des points, corrigee ici. La traduction est en effet fondee sur un etablissement du texte a partir de l'ensemble des manuscrits que nous connaissons. Le texte de base est fourni par le manuscrit qui comporte des corrections autographes de Hobbes. On trouvera aussi des annotations textuelles, historiques et philosophiques qui eclairent la lecture. (shrink)

Résumé À partir du catalogue de l’exposition « La peinture photographe », voici l’évocation d’une collaboration qui commence en 1975 au Musée national d’art moderne, se continue au château d’Oiron et croise parfois l’œuvre de Marcel Duchamp. Passant de la « peinture photographe » à l’idée d’une « peinture sculptrice », Jean-Hubert Martin interroge le non-peint et les postures de la peinture.

L’abbaye du Mont-César a célébré lors de diverses manifestations religieuses et culturelles le premier centenaire de sa fondation. C’est le 13 avril 1899 que des moines, venus de l’abbaye de Maredsous, prenaient possession de la première aile d’un nouveau monastère bénédictin, édifié sur une butte historique, au nord de la ville de Louvain. Autrefois s’y était dressé, face à la ville, un château des ducs de Brabant. Nul doute que la proximité de l’université de Louvain avec ses multiples facultés n’ait (...) largement contribué à cette fondation bénédictine. (shrink)

John Taylor's brilliant new book examines the work of many of the major poets who have deeply marked modern and contemporary European literature. Venturing far and wide from the France in which he has lived since the late 1970s, the polyglot writer-critic not only delves into the more widely translated literatures of Italy, Greece, Germany, and Austria, but also discovers impressive and overlooked work in Slovenia, Bosnia, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands in this book that ranges over nearly all (...) of Europe, including Russia. While providing this stimulating and far-ranging critical panorama, Taylor brings to light key themes of European writing: the depth of everyday life, the quest of the "thing-in-itself," metaphysical aspiration and anxiety, the dialectics of negativity and affirmation, subjectivity and self-effacement, and uprootedness as a category that is as ontological as it is geographical, historical, political, or cultural. The book pays careful attention to the intersection of writing and history, as several poets featured here have faced the Second World War, the Holocaust, Communism, the fall of Communism, or the war in the former Yugoslavia. Taylor gives the work of renowned, upcoming, and still little-known poets a thorough look, all the while scrutinizing recent translations of their verse. He highlights several poets who are also masters of the prose poem. He includes a few novelists who have fashioned a particularly original kind of poetic prose, that stylistic category that has proved so difficult for critics to define. Into the Heart of European Poetry should be of immediate interest to any reader curious about the aesthetic and philosophical ideas underlying major trends of contemporary European writing. In a day and age when much too little is translated and thus known about foreign literature, and when Europeans themselves are pondering the common denominators of their own culture, this book is as indispensable as it is engaging. John Taylor has lived in France since 1977. A frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, Context, the Yale Review, the Antioch Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and Chelsea, he has introduced numerous European writers and poets to English readers, often for the first time. Some of his works include The Apocalypse Tapestries, a book of poetry and prose based on the famous tapestries in the Chateau of Angers, and Paths to Contemporary French Literature. (shrink)

Let us look first at poetry. It is well known that by the fifteenth century, lyric poetry had undergone a radical transformation; the early lyric fluidity and formal variability had hardened into the nonlyric and even, some maintain, antilyric forms fixes which characterize the poetic formalism of late medieval France. Dispensing with the details of how and why this occurred, the essential point is that by the end of the Middle Ages, the poet in France and Burgundy saw himself as (...) an artisan of words, not as a singer.6 He refers to himself as a craftsman , and it is plain, sometimes painfully so, to anyone who reads the works that the rhétoriqueur is, indeed, an artisan of forms—or, if you will, an architecte de la parole, a specialist in verbal matter. He works words, sounds, metric and strophic forms into intricate patterns and arranges his elaborate designs in blocks of exact and harmonious symmetry. He is, in fact, from Machaut on, a virtuoso of the verbal equivalent of the architectural art of carrelage which adorned the princely château in which he worked and lived. No one familiar with the period will avoid noticing the strikingly similar types of patters in the poet’s works and in his surroundings.I have gathered elsewhere the visual documentation which bears out Zumthor’s suggestions quoted above with respect to the meticulously constructivist mentality of the Franco-Burgundian artisan. But the analogies I found are much more than perceptual. It is true that the elaborate designs on the walls, floors, ceilings, windows, woodwork, and so forth of the early Renaissance château are, indeed, composed of intricate blocks of material; but their function is not merely decorative , it is also narrative, with emblematic motifs and allegorical figures arrayed in linear patterns of “visual” discourse—the invariable “discours de la gloire” which silently proclaims the magnificence of the patron prince and proprietor of the château .7 6. A summary of internal and external factors in the transformation of lyric to Rhetoric is provided in my review of Die musikalische Erscheinungsform der Trouvèrepoesie by Hans-Herbert S. Räkel , in Romance Philology 34 : 250-58.7. This following collage of fragments from ML was constructed ôto serve as commentary on photographs of tile designs compared with verbal texts, in an earlier version of this paper , from which the examples in figs. 1-4 are taken.Culte de l’objet subtilement travaillé, au-delà de toute fonctionnalité primaire *** primat du labeur ardu, patient, du difficile, de l’inattendu *** les mots mêmes semblent travaillés d’un besoin de scientificité fictive, d’anoblissement par le savoir *** les … mots ne sont plus que les particules d’une parole dont la seule signification est globale *** matériau émancipé des contraintes de la phrase, transposé sur un plan où le signe devient le nom vide de ce signe *** goût du bricolage plutôt que de l’industrie; … du bariolage plus que du fondu et de la nuance; de l’équilibre numéral des parties plus que de la synthèse; du multiple plus que de l’un. Outil forgé martelé d’ “aornures” sans fonction utilitaire; enchâssements cubiques, coniques, pyramidaux, cruciformes du bâtiment … meubles marquetés, forrés de tiroirs minuscules et secrets [and so forth].For the iconography of these examples , see Emile Amé, Less Carrelages émaillés du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance , pp. 61-108. Jonathan Beck is associate professor of French at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Théâtre et propaganda aux débuts de la Réforme , a sequel to his edition and study, Le Concil de Basle: Le Origines du theater réformiste et partisan en France. (shrink)

From the very outset of his literary and intellectual career Rousseau saw himself as an uncompromising critic of contemporary society. As he has vividly related in his personal writings, the famous moment of ‘illumination’ when he was on the way to visit his friend Diderot imprisoned in the Chateau de Vincennes not only gave him a vision of ‘another universe’ but transformed him into ‘another man’. An overwhelming ‘enthusiasm for truth, freedom and virtue’ made him henceforth reject the corrupt (...) values of the society he saw around him; ‘to be free and virtuous and above fortune and opinion’ seemed a greater and nobler attitude than servile acquiescence in the ‘maxims of his age’. (shrink)

Antoine de Baecque proposes a new historiography of cinema, exploring film as a visual archive of the twentieth century, as well as history's imprint on the cinematic image. Whether portraying events that occurred in the past or stories unfolding before their eyes, certain twentieth-century filmmakers used a particular mise-en-scène to give form to history, becoming in the process historians themselves. Historical events, in turn, irrupted into cinema. This double movement, which de Baecque terms the "cinematographic form of history," disrupts the (...) very material of film, much like historical events disturb the narrative of human progress. De Baecque defines, locates, and interprets cinematographic forms in seven distinct bodies of cinema: 1950s modern cinema and its conjuring of the morbid trauma of war; French New Wave and its style, which became the negative imprint of the malaise felt by young contemporaries of the Algerian War; post-Communist Russian films, or the "de-modern" works of _catastroika_; contemporary Hollywood films that attach themselves to the master fiction of 9/11; the characteristic _mise en forme_ of filmmaker Sacha Guitry, who, in _Si_ _Versailles m'était conté, filmed French history from inside its chateau; the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who evoked history through his own museum memory of the twentieth century; and the achievements of Peter Watkins, the British filmmaker who reported on history like a war correspondent. De Baecque's introduction clearly lays out his theoretical framework, a profoundly brilliant conceptualization of the many ways cinema and history relate._. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Out of an Old Toy ChestMarina Warner (bio)The Soul of the ToyIn Baudelaire’s essay “La Morale du joujou,” written in l853, he remembers how the toyshop owner Madame Pancoucke, all wrapped in velvet and furs, beckoned the young Charles to choose something from her “treasure store for children.” Looking back down the years, the poet still sees in his mind’s eye the magic room overflowing with toys from floor (...) to ceiling that this “Fée du joujou” (Toy Fairy) opened to him. Without a second thought, he picked out “the most beautiful, the most expensive, the most garish, the freshest and the most bizarre of the playthings.” But his horrified mother insisted he choose another, less extravagant present, and the little Baudelaire had to resign himself and relinquish his toy.The word joujou (not jouet, the usual word for toy) is almost a pet name with a nursery ring like a “teddy” or a “dolly”; its repetition hints at baby talk and hence at playing, as when a child exchanges endearments and questions with a toy in imaginary conversations and elaborate scenarios. The toy in so many children’s games becomes part of an ongoing story and in this way initiates the first invented narratives in the child’s life.That scene of seduction, pleasure, and frustration with Mme. Pancoucke and his own mother catches Baudelaire’s lasting affection and reasoned admiration for toys. He called them “cette statuaire singulière” (this singular statuary); he was first a poet and then an art critic rather than a novelist, and as a flâneur of the boulevards and the galleries, he adopted a language of aesthetics, treating toys as an unusual form of sculpture. He recalls in pleasurable detail the miniature worlds conjured by Victorian nursery games and child’s play—from tiny “diligences” or mail coaches to detailed model furniture. But above all he muses in wonder at children’s ability to play without props or models, creating narratives, dialogue, and dramas [End Page 3] through fantasy alone: “All children talk to their toys; toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced by the camera obscura of their small brains. Children bear witness through their games to their great faculty of abstraction and their high imaginative power. They play without playthings.”1Significantly, Baudelaire goes on to make the connection to creativity in general: “[The child’s] facility to satisfy the imagination shows the spirituality of childhood in its artistic conceptions. The plaything is the first initiation of a child to art.” Nothing will ever attain again, he says, the same degree of liveliness, or, crucially, the same intensity of presence or belief. For Baudelaire, the realization of childish make-believe cannot be regained: “Isn’t all of life found there in miniature, and much more vivid in colour, cleaner and shinier than real life?”2Yet Baudelaire’s essay lingers on the frustration that dims these vivid, shiny colors, for children, he says, also want to see the soul of a toy. He describes how they will turn about their playthings and shake them, hurl them to the ground, and often break them in their bafflement and even rage at their stubborn refusal to awaken into life. His meditation hints that at the point when make-believe fails, the vitality of toys vanishes and produces a primal encounter with mortality: “But where is the soul? It’s here that bewilderment and sadness begin.”3 The beginning of imagining stories brings with it frustration that the story is not powerful enough—it is not the real thing. In a connected prose poem entitled “Le Joujou du pauvre,” published nine years later, Baudelaire pursues this thought, as he observes an exchange between a beautiful, pampered child inside the exclusive railed park of a chateau. He has “a splendid toy, as fresh as its master, varnished, gilded, clothed in a purple dress and covered with plumes and glitter.”4 But the rich child is not interested in his doll, for on the other side of the railings a ragged street urchin shows him, in a little cage which he shakes about, a living rat—”drawn... (shrink)

Le Musée National de Varsovie possède un chapiteau ionique monumental, provenant de la collection Radziwitt, qui avait décoré pendant plusieurs décennies le parc de Nieborow (Pologne centrale), où le château abrite les restes de la collection créée à la fin du XVIIIe s., en partie de dons et achats à la cour de Saint-Pétersbourg, où les marbres grecs étaient fournis par la flotte russe, qui explorait le bassin égéen. La matière, la forme et la décoration du chapiteau permettent de supposer (...) qu'il est d'origine insulaire (Délos?) et qu'il date de la fin VIe ou du début du Ve s. av. J.-C. (shrink)

Holbein produced a drawing of Sir Thomas More and his Family which was a preparatory sketch for a larger painting. The painting was acquired by Karl von Liechtenstein-Kastelkron, Archbishop of Olomouc, Moravia, and was last recorded in 1691 as being kept in the episcopal residence in Olomouc; it is generally assumed that the painting was lost in the 1752 fire at the Archbishop's château in Kroměřiž. There are, however, five extant versions of the Family Group. The three main versions are (...) the full-sized oil on canvas, The Family of Sir Thomas More, now at Nostell Priory, and two paintings of Sir Thomas More, his Household, and Descendants: one kept at the National Portrait Gallery, the other at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. There has been much discussion about the transformation from a family at prayer—as portrayed in the original drawing—to a conversation on Seneca. Based on editions of Oedipus prior to the Nostell painting, the history of More's descendants, and a cameo that belonged to More's family, this paper argues that the Elizabethan transformation is a story of conformity and non-conformity. (shrink)

S'approprier un lieu pour l'habiter est un acte fondamental de l'homme. Mais ce que nous sommes, il nous faut aussi apprendre à le faire nôtre, en découvrant, exerçant et habitant nos possibilités. Cet espace intérieur est-il essentiellement celui de ma solitude, où nul autre ne peut pénétrer, ou peut-il être celui d'une hospitalité, un vide central où Dieu vient demeurer? Dans la continuité d'une tradition qui remonte à la Bible, nos diverses demeures (chambre, appartement, maison, temple, château...) ont permis de (...) figurer et de décrire l'intériorité humaine. Il s'agit de schèmes variés, tantôt pour explorer, tantôt pour construire notre personnalité, et par là pour penser le jeu de nos forces et de nos désirs, le déploiement de nos pensées et de nos actes, et en dégager des lois, selon une topique, du mot qui signifie la disposition des lieux. Une rupture et un renversement marquent cette histoire. La topique chrétienne, largement méconnue, forme un modèle diversifié et approfondi au long des siècles, lequel pose l'identité humaine comme habitable par une autre présence que la nôtre. A partir de la Renaissance, et depuis Montaigne jusqu'à Rousseau et Kant, tout comme dans la poésie et le roman, elle tend à s'effacer, avec son horizon mystique, au profit d'un face-à-face avec moi-même, tout en usant des mêmes schèmes. Ainsi se fondent l'identité moderne et la subjectivité. A travers la pensée de nombreux auteurs, de saint Augustin à sainte Thérèse d'Avila, d'Origène à Dante, de Baudelaire à Freud, ce livre décrit et médite, selon une généalogie, un axe oublié de la pensée de l'identité, lourd de questions toujours aiguës. (shrink)

From the very outset of his literary and intellectual career Rousseau saw himself as an uncompromising critic of contemporary society. As he has vividly related in his personal writings, the famous moment of ‘illumination’ when he was on the way to visit his friend Diderot imprisoned in the Chateau de Vincennes not only gave him a vision of ‘another universe’ but transformed him into ‘another man’. An overwhelming ‘enthusiasm for truth, freedom and virtue’ made him henceforth reject the corrupt (...) values of the society he saw around him; ‘to be free and virtuous and above fortune and opinion’ seemed a greater and nobler attitude than servile acquiescence in the ‘maxims of his age’. (shrink)

Étienne Souriau was a refined and demanding thinker, with an aristocratic demeanour, far removed from the currents of ideas dominant in his time. A difficult and erudite author, out of tune with the times he lived in, he would seem the least likely candidate to appeal to a hurried and globalised public like that of the twenty-first century. A sophisticated representative of a rationalist positivism, no stranger to the Husserlian canon and not even insensitive to the motivations dear to the (...) gnoseological debate of Cartesian and Kantian matrix (as well as to the major themes of classical metaphysics), Souriau pursues the ideal of a constructive philosophy, capable of understanding – and at the same time favouring – the advancement of the creative process conceived as a set of poetic acts and progressive dynamic operations. In his texts, Souriau is attentive to grasping the correspondences, exchanges and reciprocal transitions between one mode of existence and another, as well as the resonances between the various art forms in the different fields of knowledge, testing an original method that is epistemologically very fruitful. The aim of this monographic issue of Aisthesis dedicated to Étienne Souriau is to explore his thought in its multiple aspects, in order to measure its topicality in relation to the themes and problems that characterise contemporary philosophical debate, with particular reference to aesthetics and ontology as well as to the dense network of connections between the two fields. One of the most interesting characteristics of Souriau’s thought that has stood the test of time would appear to be its multifacetedness: the quality of lending itself to being applied even to spheres that are apparently very distant from reflection on art, such as cultural anthropology, political philosophy or morality. It seemed to us that it largely owes its relevance precisely to the intersections between one field of knowledge and another. The issue contains twelve contributions on Souriau that explore his main aspects in depth. They range from analyses devoted to the architecture of Souriau’s thought (his general philosophy) in the essays by Dominique Chateau and Filippo Domenicali, which can furnish a useful overall picture of the man, to essays that attempt to focus on the more properly ontological core of this thought, such as those devoted to the arabesque motif (Luigi Azzariti-Fumaroli), the theory of the soul (Sjoerd Van Tuinen) or the multiplicity of worlds (Noëlie Plé). Interspersed between these are contributions that focus more on the comparison between Étienne Souriau’s thought and the philosophers of his time, such as Dufrenne (Maryvonne Saison), or with well-known later philosophers who explicitly referred to him, prolonging his creative impetus, such as Gilles Deleuze (Casey Boyle) and Bruno Latour (Aline Wiame), the true architect of the current Souriau “comeback”. Finally, in addition to essays of a more theoretical nature, there are contributions that attempt to re-evaluate certain aspects of Souriau’s aesthetics, such as the fruitfulness of the cues that can come from his thought for the debate on animal aesthetics (Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis and Andrea Scanziani), or the possible topicality of his theory of forms (Isabelle Rieusset-Lemarie). In the “Miscellaneous” section, this issue hosts a number of studies that aim to explore the aesthetic implications of new technologies, the themes of ecological aesthetics, as well as to offer an unusual profile of Baumgarten. (shrink)

Penthésilée, reine des Amazones, est représentée sous les traits d’une guerrière armée de pied en cap sur une tapisserie appartenant à la collection du château d’Angers. Cette tapisserie mille-fleurs qui date du début du XVIe siècle rappelle le succès rencontré par le thème des Neuf Preuses à la fin du Moyen Age. Ces figures de guerrières qui appartiennent toutes à l’Antiquité ou à la mythologie classique connaissent une mode qui répond à celle de leur pendant masculin, les Neuf Preux. Preux (...) et Preuses évoquent avec une certaine nostalgie un monde chevaleresque dont la réalité militaire du temps vient bouleverser tous les repères. (shrink)

_Apres Deleuze: Philosophie et esthetique du cinema_ Edited by Dominique Chateau and Jacinto Lageira Paris: Dis Voir, 1996 ISBN: 2-912-308-003 152 pp.

Dans cet entretien avec David Christoffel, la cinéaste décrit et analyse les attentes qui ont pesé sur elle durant le tournage et la réalisation de son film La Vie de Château, qui donne la parole à des demandeurs d’asile regroupés dans un centre d’accueil du cœur de Bruxelles. Pour déjouer les clichés auxquels menace sans cesse de se réduire leur image, elle a réintroduit de la fiction et du merveilleux afin de mieux documenter leurs parcours complexes.

Alors que les travaux sur les cultures vestimentaires se sont multipliés et que les recherches historiques sur les cours aux époques médiévale et moderne sont fort nombreuses, de manière assez surprenante l’historiographie sur le vêtement de cour en Europe est restée peu fournie. Le colloque international tenu en 2009 au château de Versailles sur les « Cultures matérielles, cultures visuelles du costume dans les cours européennes (1400-1815) » se donnait donc pour objectif, sous la direction...

Cet article aborde la réception des éditions de Pierre Poiret dans les milieux piétistes séparatistes de Berleburg. Grâce aux manuscrits conservés aux archives du château de Berleburg, il est possible de reconstruire l’expérience spirituelle du comte Casimir von Sayn-Wittgenstein, auteur d’une traduction des vingt volumes de la Sainte Bible de Mme Guyon éditée par Poiret en 1713-1715.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Lily of the Valley, or Love as Breathing in the ScentChantal Jaquet (bio)The Lily of the Valley, published by Balzac in 1836, can be considered as a standard in olfactory literature since the novel is entirely built on the perception of odors and the central role of breathing in romantic relationships. As the title indicates, it is in the floral and olfactory registers that the essence of love (...) expresses itself. Perfume presides over the birth of love, the recognition of the other, and the definition of the woman's identity. We can read it as a poetics of breathing that tells another story and re-enchants the world. The Lily of the Valley offers a powerful antidote to the impediments to breathing nowadays. I try here to interpret it like an ode celebrating another way of inhaling the world through love and perfumes.Love at first scentThe Lily of the Valley tells the story of the platonic love of a young man, Felix, for a married woman, Madame de Mortsauf. From the beginning, their first meeting takes place under the auspices of breath and perfume. During a party, Felix, who is extremely bored, finds refuge on an abandoned bench; a woman, taking him for a child, sits next to him. Felix is then immediately drawn to the stranger's perfume and is pulled out of his sullen torpor to feel an unparalleled fascination:Immediately, I smelt a woman's fragrance which shone in my soul as oriental poetry was to shine later. I looked at my neighbour and was more dazzled by her than I had been by the ball.(15)Perfume thus triggers love and becomes the very essence of the beloved woman. Before he perceives any visual detail, Felix is flooded with an olfactory emotion, which will be taken over and amplified by the poetic evocation of the Orient and its fragrances. The woman's scent, which re-enchants his morose universe, dazzles him with its brilliance and eclipses vision by taking possession of its attributes. It is only afterward that he begins to examine the shoulders, bosom, and hair of the woman with the luminous perfume. It is the act of inhaling her perfume that triggers his [End Page 34] love at first sight and wrests the following confession from him: "All of a sudden, I was in love" (16).This primacy of olfaction and breathing continue to hold true in the absence of the beloved when the latter is no longer smelled, but simply evoked: "At the thought that my queen-elect lived in Touraine I breathed the air with delight [...]" (16). The feelings that develop even before a second meeting takes place do not belie the first romantic olfactory sensation, but strengthen it following a process of crystallization that transforms the soulmate into a fragrant flower. The stranger, under the influence of Felix's poetic imagination, becomes the lily of the valley, a symbol of beauty and purity. Despondent over the disappearance of the woman he loves, whose name he does not even know, the young man, pressured by his family to seek distraction, travels to Touraine, to the Château de Frapesle, to stay with a friend of his mother's. He discovers a magnificent valley near Montbazon, which, in his eyes, can only be where his beloved resides. Here we see the perspicacity of the lover who picks up the scent of his beloved and sees her face in the landscape:She lived there. My heart had not misled me. [...] She was, as you already know, though you know nothing yet, THE LILY OF THIS VALLEY, where she grew for Heaven, filling it with the perfume of her virtues.(18)The olfactory dimension of the lily prevails here over floral vision. It is the perfume of her virtues exhaled in the valley that defines the beloved permanently and immemorially, and makes her into a celestial creature with the odor of sanctity. The use of the imperfect tense in "she was the lily" evokes the magic of a love story that seems like a fairy tale. She was the lily, because once upon a time there was a woman who... (shrink)

Le super héros est un minable comme les autres, et ce sont les humains les plus ordinaires qui leur servent désormais de modèle. Des Watchmen à The Boys en passant par Le Maître du haut château et les derniers avatars de Star Trek, c’est grâce à leurs antihéros à la Philip K. Dick que bien des séries contemporaines interrogent nos valeurs, voire dynamitent avec un sourire parfois corrosif les dernières forteresses de la société bourgeoise et patriarcale.

De 'Essais' van de Franse filosoof Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) hebben in vier en een halve eeuw niets aan zeggingskracht en relevantie verloren. Dat concludeert historicus en schrijver Jeroen Lutters, die boek schreef over Montaigne als pedagoog. Hoe word je een goede leraar? In ieder geval niet door een leerling gedachteloos informatie te laten stampen.00Aan het prille begin van de moderne tijd waarschuwt Montaigne al voor een onderwijssysteem waarin leerlingen allemaal dezelfde geestdodende lesjes moeten volgen. Juist de verwondering en de (...) creativiteit van zowel de leraar als de leerling zouden in het onderwijs centraal moeten staan. Of zoals Montaigne het formuleerde: "Misschien kun je best geleerd zijn door de geleerdheid die je bij een ander vindt, maar wijs kun je alleen maar zijn door de wijsheid die je uit jezelf haalt."00Naast de reis die Jeroen Lutters in zijn boek onderneemt langs de ideeën van Montaigne probeert hij, ondanks de coronabeperkingen, ook de torenkamer van het Château de Montaigne in het plaatsje Saint-Michel-de Montaigne te bezoeken, waar de 'Essais' vierhonderdvijftig jaar geleden tot stand kwamen. Uiteindelijk lukt dat en staat Lutters op de plek waar Montaigne zich terugtrok uit het publieke leven om te werken aan zichzelf als een kunstenaar aan een sculptuur. In dit boek lezen we hoe wij dat allemaal kunnen doen.0. (shrink)

L'auteur propose un parcours a la fois modeste et ambitieux. Apres avoir dessine, dans plusieurs ouvrages (Lumiere, commencement, liberte, Construction d'un chateau, Les Actes de la joie, La Jouissance d'etre, La Nacre et le Rocher) une doctrine du sujet qui fonde une ethique du bonheur, l'auteur se retourne sur la culture qui l'a precede et presente quelques textes qui font echo a ses propres recherches. Les specificites de chaque auteur sont si patentes qu'elles permettent d'ecarter l'idee de redondances. Mais (...) la similitude des preoccupations, evidente en chaque etape existentielle, permet de souligner la parente profonde de tous les humains. L'auteur nous devoile ainsi un universel concret et un nouvel humanisme. A cette modestie philosophique s'ajoute une ambition, elle aussi philosophique. Car il s'agit, pour Robert Misrahi, d'organiser son regard retrospectif (la suite et l'enchainement des textes cites) selon un itineraire precis, a la fois existentiel et logique, un cheminement qui conduit des affirmations de l'angoisse aux constructions de la joie. A travers la nuit des souffrances, la quete du Desir, les denegations du renoncement, la decouverte des deux libertes, le courage de la conversion, les approches de l'accomplissement et l'instauration du bonheur d'etre, l'auteur trace un itineraire ascendant. Cet itineraire, maladroitement suivi par l'humanite au travers d'experiences discontinues, solitaires et mal pensees, est cependant revelateur d'un souci commun et d'un pouvoir partage. Il se pourrait donc que l'experience multiple de la litterature et de la philosophie, a defaut de cautionner entierement une doctrine reflexive de la jouissance de vivre, justifie au moins son mouvement et en confirme la pertinence. (shrink)

RIASSUNTO: Paul Magnaud, magistrato e politico francese operante tra la fine del XIX e gli inizi del XX secolo e divenuto noto con l'appellativo di "bon juge", ci offre l'opportunità di riflettere su un nodo ineliminabile della teoria e della prassi giuridica: il rapporto tra legge ed equitá, tra certezza del diritto ed esigenze di giustizia. Nel saggio vengono ricostruiti i casi principali di cui egli si occupò quando era presidente del Tribunale di Chateâu-Thierry al fine di riportare alla luce (...) un episodio della storia del diritto che può dire ancora molto al dibattito giuridico e politico contemporaneo.ABSTRACT: Paul Magnaud, who was a French politician and magistrate, mainly active between the end of 19thand the beginning of 20th century and known as the “bon juge” provides the opportunity to reflect on an unavoidable issue concerning both legal theory and practice. The specific object of that focuses on the correlation between law and fairness, as well as, legal certainty and need of justice. This essay will retrace the most important legal cases he dealt with, when he was the president of the court of Chateâu-Thierry, in order to shed light on a specific case, pertaining to the annals of the history of law, which can enhance the current judicial and political debate.PAROLE CHIAVE: legge, equità, certezza del diritto, giustizia.KEYWORDS: law, fairness, legal certainty, justice. (shrink)

Le désir raisonnant ou, si l’on préfère, l’intellect désirant constitue un point d’ancrage crucial pour toute discussion se rapportant à la vie pratique. D’un point de vue à la fois historique et philosophique, l’apport d’Aristote représente non seulement une systématisation élaborée de cette question relative au principe de l’action morale, mais la position théorique qu’il défend demeure une référence pertinente et pose encore de nos jours un défi d’interprétation. Dans la longue série d’études consacrées à ce thème depuis les tout (...) premiers commentateurs aristotéliciens, il faut désormais compter celles qui furent présentées «lors d’une série de réunions de travail de professeurs de philosophie de l’Académie de Versailles», et que réunit Jean-Yves Chateau dans ce recueil. L’importance du livre VI pour la compréhension globale de l’éthique et de la philosophie d’Aristote est décisive, comme le souligne Chateau dans la présentation initiale de l’ouvrage: «Si nous ne le possédions pas [le livre VI], l’intelligibilité de sa pensée [d’Aristote] serait compromise ou très largement indéterminée [...]». Constituant l’un des trois livres communs à l’Éthique à Nicomaque et à l’Éthique à Eudème, le livre VI propose avant tout des éléments essentiels aux questions relatives à la coexistence de l’intellect et de l’agir moral. Le caractère bien délimité du thème du recueil rend possible une discussion à la fois élaborée et exhaustive. (shrink)

Let us hypothesize that there are three main "registers" of writing: narrative, description and commentary. "Narrative" and "description" are by definition concerned with diachronic and synchronic relationships ; and it may be said that taken together, they therefore exhaust the inventory of all relationships constituting the "world" our language regards as possible. It is often remarked that there is such an affinity between narration and description that on occasion they are hard to distinguish: narration is the description of an action (...) or change, and description mimes the action of relating items one to the other, and hence may have a narrative function. This solidarity of narration and description justifies their being grouped together as constituting the "topic" of literary discourse. But the function of "commentary," which correlates the text with a context, is to create a different type of relationship, in which makes the narrative/descriptive topic "meaningful." We are thus distinguishing "meaning" and "meaningfulness" on the grounds that "meaning" can be understood as the object of semantic analysis , whereas "meaningfulness" is the meaning bestowed on a set of relationships by an act of interpretation . This type of meaningfulness is what the moral of a La Fontaine fable most characteristically seeks to create. Thus, the two-line commentary segment in Le Chat, la Belette et le petit Lapin: Ceci ressemble fort aux débats qu'ont parfoisLes petits souverains se rapportants aux rois1 designates the narrative/descriptive relationships established on the fable proper , designates the pragmatic context , but also specifies the analogy/homology between the two which makes the text meaningful . Meaningfulness in this sense is thus definable as the perception of a text/context relationship. · 1. "This greatly resembles the debates which petty sovereigns have when they refer to kings." [My translation] Ross Chambers, Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is the author of Gérard de Nerval et la poétique du voyage, La Comédie au château, L'Ange et l'automate, "Spirite" de Théophile Gautier, and Room for Maneuver: Reading Oppositional Narrative. (shrink)