Nous reformulons la question du naturalisme sur le terrain de la pratique scientifique en privilégiant une analyse épistémologique fine des méthodes, procédures et concepts employés en psychologie. L’enjeu devient alors opérationnel: celui de la mise en place d’un cadre exact et expérimental permettant de rendre compte de la phénoménologie de l’expérience.

After more than a decade Alexandre Métraux is leaving his post as a co-editor of Science in Context and will remain as a member of the editorial board.

En este artículo se analizan las posiciones de José Imbelloni y Alfred Métraux respecto a la cultura de la Isla de Pascua. Abordar esta cuestión los llevaba a discutir sobre las relaciones que habían existido, o no, entre Oceanía y América. El debate que aquí desarrollamos se centra en dos elementos de la cultura material de la isla: los moais y las tabletas parlantes. El punto central, y en el que oscilarán ambos antropólogos, es entre la cuestión de la (...) originalidad, y autonomía, de los rasgos culturales de los pascuenses, o el préstamo, y origen foráneo, de esos rasgos. Se discute así cuánto hay de creativo y cuánto de copia en una cultura. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:No Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye: Transgression and Masculinity in Bataille and FoucaultJudith Surkis (bio)In August 1963 Critique published an “Hommage à Georges Bataille,” a special issue commemorating the death of its founder. How did the volume’s contributors go about the seemingly tricky business of pledging fealty to the philosopher of sovereignty? How did they profess loyalty to, in effect recognize, the sovereign subject known to (...) insistently refuse masterful identity?Apparently undisturbed by this difficulty, the articles written by Bataille’s acquaintances—Alfred Metraux, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, and Jean Piel amongst them—establish an explicitly fraternal relation to their contemporary. Piel begins his homage with an account of their initial encounter chez Queneau in 1927, noting his “impression of extraordinary fraternity, an impression which, through our last meeting days before his death, never diminished” [721]. Intermingling intellectual and personal history, these occasional pieces remember Bataille in a variety of contexts: the awakening of his interest in ethnology and work on Documents in the 1920s, his early “confrontations” with Hegel and work on Critique sociale and Contre-attaque in the 1930s, his sensitivity to events and developments in post-World-War-II Europe. While significantly diverse in focus, these articles manifest a similar approach, at once biographical and autobiographical, detailing the unfolding of shared intellectual amitié in favorite cafés, apartments, and studios. Bataille emerges here as a historical subject whose interests and investments, while multiple and, to use Leiris’s metonym, even “impossible,” are repeatedly linked to a variety of intellectual and political milieux.Michel Foucault’s “Preface to Transgression” assumes a more reverential tone than the pieces written by members of Bataille’s own generation. While framed as an explicit “homage” in its recognition of a certain debt to Bataille, Foucault’s essay also plays upon the contradiction of pledging loyalty to a “sovereign” who repeatedly renounces his own claim to mastery. Bataille’s death becomes an occasion on which to herald the “breakdown” and “shattering” of the masterful philosophical subject conventionally assumed to be in control of the “natural” language of dialectics [42–43]. For Foucault, a new possibility for philosophy is seen to arise in “the non-dialectical language of the limit which arises only in transgressing the one who speaks” [44], a transgression repeatedly performed, according to Foucault, in Bataille’s own writing and metaphorically enacted in and by his death. Bataille had, after all, proclaimed in the conclusion to Erotism: “To give transgression to philosophy as a foundation (it is the approach of my thought)...” Bataille’s theory of transgression aims to evoke a “world of play” in which “philosophy disintegrates” [275]. Yet, if the disintegration of philosophy in and through transgression is already Bataille’s “project,” we might inquire into why Foucault frames his article as a preface. [End Page 18]In introducing this presumably already achieved transgression, the “Preface” affects a curious, alternating temporality, a certain confusion of anteriority and posteriority. 1 At once following and preceding Bataille, Foucault remains out of sync and hence unable to coincide with Bataille in the shared amitié inscribed by the author’s contemporaries; it would appear that this generational gap introduces a certain shift in the recollection of Bataille’s legacy. Following in his footsteps, Foucault appropriates one of Bataille’s own disorienting gestures—the tactical use of prefaces, itself mentioned in the “Preface” [43]—in order to dislodge Bataille from his anterior position; instead, Bataille comes to epitomize the transgression predicted by Foucault’s “philosophical” preface. Bataille’s (and, by implication, Foucault’s own) “location” becomes confused and obscured; as I hope to show, Foucault is invested in achieving this state of indeterminacy for both himself and Bataille.To honor Bataille in death assumes a double significance for Foucault: it represents a “transgression of the philosopher’s being” which “has sent us to the pure transgression of his texts” [40] and simultaneously allows Foucault to sacralize Bataille. “Pure transgression” becomes liberated from the historically located being of the philosopher. And further, since the language of transgression is linked by Foucault to the “death of God,” Bataille becomes, in a sense, “deified” in the announcement and celebration of... (shrink)

Histories of economic development during the Cold War do not typically consider connections to race science and eugenics. By contrast, this article historicizes the debates sparked by the International Labor Organization’s Puno–Tambopata project in Peru and demonstrates how Cold War development practice shared common epistemological terrain with racial and eugenic thought from the Andes. The International Labor Organization project’s goal of resettling indigenous groups from the Peruvian highlands to lower-lying tropical climates sparked heated debates about the biological specificity of Andean (...) highlanders’ physiques and ability to survive in the tropics. Such concerns betrayed the antitypological consensus expressed in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Race Statements and defended by one of the main proponents of the resettlement project, the Swiss–American anthropologist Alfred Métraux. The concern with Andean racial types was central to the research agenda of the acclaimed Peruvian physiologist Carlos Monge, who endorsed modernization projects that did not entail moving highlanders outside of their traditional climate. The debates sparked by the Puno–Tambopata project demonstrate how Cold War development discourse grappled with racial and eugenic thought from Latin America and the Global South and thereby produced projects of indigenous “improvement.”. (shrink)

Le présent cahier thématique est centré sur une traduction fran­çaise de l’article de Hugo Dingler, « Sur l’histoire et l’essence de l’expériment », datant de 1952 et qui résume son livre du même titre paru en 1928. Cette traduction est le résultat d’un travail collectif effectué au sein de 1’« Académie Helmholtz » que nous présentons brièvement dans une note fournie par Alexandre Métraux avant de donner, à titre d’introduction géné­rale, quelques informations sur Hugo Dingler, sa philosophie, sa réception (...) et son intérêt pour l’épistémologie contemporaine. (shrink)

Moritz Geiger’s 1911 article on the consciousness of feeling, entitled “Das Bewusstsein von Gefühlen,” was an object of study for Husserl in a series of manuscripts recently published in Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins II. Gefühl und Wert (1896–1925) (2020). Geiger’s article and Husserl’s remarks on it received attention from Métraux (1975), but, more recently, an increasing number of publications have been devoted to the topic (Averchi, 2015a, 2015b; Crespo, 2015; Quepons, 2017; Marcos del Cano, 2023). These new publications (...) identify a central area of disagreement between the two authors concerning the nature of emotive consciousness, i.e., the mode in which affective states relate to their objects. For Geiger, emotions are directed toward their objects but are not regarded as intentional and, in certain forms of consciousness, can even lose their relation to their objects. By contrast, for Husserl, intentionality is an intrinsic feature of emotive consciousness. The aim of this paper is to place the authors’ disagreement in a broader historical context and to show that it reveals profound differences between their respective ontologies of the mind and the place of feeling within it. -/- . (shrink)

Das Nichtwissen ist in aller Munde. Von Nichtwissenskulturen in der zweiten oder reflexiven Moderne ist die Rede, von Agnotologie als neuem Forschungszweig, von wicked problems und ihren clumsy solutions. Wo Nichtwissen sich durch Komplexitäts­steigerung unwiderruflich im zu Wissenden einnistet, fordert es als Grenze, Schranke und Kehrseite des Wissens die sogenannte Wissensgesellschaft heraus. Vor allem Risiko­poten­ziale und Gefahren kommen hier in den Blick, von denen wir gerade genug wissen, um Wissensansprüche zu formulieren, die sich womöglich nie einlösen lassen. Das klassisch erkenntnistheoretische (...) Problem: „Was können wir wissen?“ steht heute in einem Spannungsverhältnis zu der wissenspolitischen Frage: „Was müssen wir wissen?“ Was wir wissen müssen, ist einerseits so viel wie nötig, wenn es um Fragen von Sicherheit und Gesundheit geht – andererseits aber so wenig wie möglich, wenn es in Alltag, Wirtschaft oder Wissen­schaft darauf ankommt, Wissen an technische Systeme oder Expertenkulturen zu delegieren. Bezeichnet politisch handlungsorientiertes und wissenschaftliches Nichtwissen zunächst ein Defizit, ist technisches Nichtwissen gleichermaßen erstrebenswert und problematisch. Einige, die Technik für angewandtes Wissen halten, mögen darin eine contradictio in adjecto sehen, manche sich um eine dem technischen Nichtwissen geschuldeten Technik­feindlichkeit sorgen, andere daraus die nötige Demut gegen verstiegene Allmachts­fantasien beziehen, während ihre Gegenspieler von Maschinen träumen, die über den Horizont intellektueller Nachvollziehbarkeit immer weiter hinauseilen. Mit Beiträgen von: Suzana Alpsancar, Lars Bullmann, Marcus Burkhardt, Eoin Carney, Pelle Ehn, Stefan Frisch, Gerhard Gamm, Petra Gehring, Till Greite, Hans Hasse, Andreas Kaminski, Gregor Kanitz, Matthias Koch, Christian Köhler, Johannes Lenhard, Alexandre Métraux, Alfred Nordmann, Tanja Paulitz, Tom Poljanšek, Sandra Pravica, Katrin Solhdju, Werner Sombart, Florian Sprenger, Sebastian Vehlken und Rüdiger Zill. (shrink)

Découvert par l’intermédiaire d’Alfred Métraux , l’enseignement de Marcel Mauss a profondément et durablement impressionné Georges Bataille, qui désigne explicitement l’ Essai sur le don comme l’« origine » de ses deux essais sociologiques , l’article sur La Notion de dépense publié en 1933 , et le texte intitulé La Part maudite , publié en 1949. Le degré et la nature de l’influence exercée par les écrits de Marcel Mauss sur la pensée de Georges Bataille ont fait l’objet de (...) nombreuses études.Il ne s’agit ici ni de prendre la mesure de la dette théorique de Bataille à l’égard de son inspirateur , ni d’évaluer les convergences ou les divergences de son interprétation sociologique du don d’avec la pensée de Marcel Mauss . Mais d’interroger l’usage qu’il fait du discours anthropologique produit par l’école française de sociologie pour fonder ses investissements politiques et artistiques personnels. (shrink)