In this article, originally published in 1946, Michel Tournier builds a new system of the world both inspired by Sartre’s philosophy and turned against his recent conversion to humanism. Tournier describes an impersonal world full of impersonal emotions and thoughts from which, suddenly, emerges the subject conceived on the model of the Cartesian Cogito. The appearance of the subject is indeed required by the world itself as long as the Cartesian ego, although mistaken and irrelevant, paradoxically contributes (...) to the rational process of History. (shrink)

In the final scene of Michel Tournier’s postcolonial novel La Goutte d’or, the protagonist, Idriss, shatters the glass of a Cristobal & Co. storefront window while operating a jackhammer in the working-class Parisian neighbourhood on the Rue de la Goutte d’or. Glass fragments fly everywhere as the Parisian police arrive. In La Goutte d’or, Tournier explores the identity construction of Idriss through a discussion of the role that visual images play in the development of a twentieth-century consciousness (...) of the “Other.” At the beginning of the novel, a French tourist takes a photograph of Idriss during her visit to the Sahara. The boy’s quest to reclaim his stolen image leads him from the Sahara to Marseille, and finally to the Rue de la Goutte d’or in Paris. The Rue de la Goutte d’or remains one the most cosmopolitan neighbourhoods of the city. In Tournier’s novel, the goutte d’or also corresponds to a symbolic object: a Berber jewel. It is the jewel that Idriss brings with him, but which he also subsequently loses upon his arrival in Marseille. From the very moment that the French tourist photographs him, a marginalization of Idriss’s identity occurs. Marginality, quite literally, refers to the spatial property of a location in which something is situated. Figuratively speaking, marginality suggests something that is on the edges or at the outer limits of social acceptability. In this essay, I explore the construction of the marginalized postcolonial self through an examination of the function of visual representation in the development of a postcolonial identity in La Goutte d’or. In the end, I conclude that the construction of a postcolonial identity is based upon fragmentation and marginalization, which ultimately leads its subject to create an identity based upon false constructions. (shrink)

This paper by Camille Chamois examines the role played by the notion of “impersonal” in Michel Tournier’s work. The notion is present in the title of the article “L’Impersonnalisme”; however, it is absent from the text itself. We show that Tournier’s article can be compared with three corpuses: the analysis of the “impersonal consciousness” in psychology at the beginning of the 20th century; the Sartrean theory of an “impersonal field of consciousness”; and the Deleuzian theory of a (...) “field of experience”. (shrink)

본 논문은 미셸 투르니에의 초기 철학 논문 “L’impersonnalisme(비인격주의)”(1946)에 관한 연구이다. Espace지 창간호에 실린 투르니에의 이 1946년 논문을 살펴보면, 투르니에가 이후 문학작품 활동을 통해 계속 다루고 발전시키는 타인 개념에 관한 그의 철학적 입장을 매우 명확하게 알 수 있다. 이 논문에서 투르니에는 주체와 의식의 동일성에 기반한 철학으로부터 출발하여 데카르트적 코기토의 문제들을 면밀히 파헤치며, 자신의 독특한 타인 이론을 구축한다. 본 연구는 투르니에가 46년 논문을 통해 밝히는 관념론의 문제들과 코기토의 인식론을 따라 코기토가 실존을 시간화하는 방식과 오류의 사출을 통한 세계의 합리적 조화로의 회귀라는 결론에 이르기까지 (...) 투르니에 논문의 전체 내용을 일별하는 것을 가장 중요한 목표로 삼는다. 또한 투르니에의 결론인 ‘오류’의 문제에 대하여, 투르니에의 영향을 깊이 받은 들뢰즈가 이를 비판하면서 ‘어리석음’의 물음을 제기하는 이유에 대해서도 살펴본다. (shrink)

Grand relecteur des mythes, Michel Tournier revient régulièrement, dans son oeuvre, sur la Genèse. Ses grands héros pervers, particulièrement Abel Tiffauges du Roi des Aulnes, soumettent le texte à une herméneutique du détournement et de l’inversion. Ils font ainsi apparaître dans le texte biblique la figure de l’androgyne primitif dont ils tirent des considérations éthiques et esthétiques sur la relation de l’homme et de la femme. Quant à Caïn et Abel, ils deviennent les supports d’un système binaire qui (...) est une des grandes caractéristiques de l’herméneutique tournérienne. Négligeant la dimension instauratrice et fondatrice du mythe biblique, Tournier rappelle plutôt, dans ses interprétations, le monde de la mystique juive occupée à scruter ce qui était avant la création. Mais chez le romancier, elles sont toutes affectées par le grand détournement pervers. As a great re-reader of myths, Michel Tournier regularly returns to Genesis in his work. His great, depraved heroes, especially Abel Tiffauges from Rois des Aulnes, subject the text to a hermeneutic of corruption and inversion. In this way, they bring forth from the biblical text the figure of primitive androgyny, from which they draw ethical and aesthetic considerations on the male-female relationship. As for Cain and Abel, they become the basis of a binary system that is one of the great characteristics of Tournier’s hermeneutic. By neglecting the founding dimension of the biblical myth, Tournier evokes, in his interpretations, the world of Jewish mysticism, which seeks to peer into that which existed before creation. For the novelist, however, these interpretations are all affected by the great, depraved, corruption. (shrink)

Michel Tournier had a Sartrean youth. But his radicalization of existentialism pushed him to return to a Cartesian cogito. He thus compromised the transparency of our relation to things that phenomenology intended to guarantee. In this respect, the consciousness without thickness put forward by his friend Gilles Deleuze seems more satisfactory. However, the latter was particularly interested in the movements of subjectivation, belatedly following the path that Tournier had opened before him.

Michel Tournier's novel Friday is the subject of an important essay of Deleuze's, in which he presents the concept of the ‘a priori Other’. Alice Jardine and Peter Hallward have offered critiques of Deleuze via readings of this essay, but neither takes into consideration the full significance of Tournier's novel or Deleuze's commentary. Jardine and Hallward provide divergent and only partial perspectives on Deleuze. If there are several Deleuzes, each defined by a critical point of view, there (...) is also a single Deleuzian problem that informs the Tournier essay and Deleuze's thought as a whole. (shrink)

In Michel Tournier’s 1967 novel Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique—published in English under the abbreviated title Friday—the protagonist, stranded on an isla.

Michel Tournier’s “L’Impersonnalisme” provided the basis of Robinson’s philosophical meditations in chapter 4 of Friday, or the Other Island. In this paper Olivier Dubouclez shows how Robinson both repeats and transforms the impersonnalist doctrine and he claims that the philosophical achievement of the novel is not the creation of a “World without others” (Deleuze) but, on the contrary, the discovery of the other as “L’Impersonnalisme” conceives of him: a body expressing the world, like Friday’s fascinating “ostensoir de chair”, (...) and inviting to unity and brotherhood. (shrink)

Michel Tournier was a philosopher before being a novelist. And even when he decided to become a novelist, he introduced himself as a « smuggler of philosophy ». But it is impossible to take full measure of this statement without considering the one and only philosophical text he ever published, in 1946: « L’Impersonnalisme ». This article, which he considered to be his « system of the world », is here presented in its historical and philosophical context.

From the ancient Egyptian tale of a Shipwrecked Sailor through to Sinbad and Robinson Crusoe, the stranded castaway living and philosophizing alone on a strange, desert island is a theme which has captured the imaginations of writers spanning cultures and millennia. Most familiar to Western literary historians is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which inspired generations of writers from Jonathan Wyss and William Golding to Michel Tournier and J.M.Coetzee. However, little attention has been paid to Defoe’s antecedents, such as (...) the remarkable HayyIbn Yaqzan by twelfth-century Arab physician and philosopher, Muhammad Ibn Tufayl. Mahmoud Baroud here conducts a detailed comparative textual analysis of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe, and concludes that Daniel Defoe was likely to have been deeply influenced by Ibn Tufayl’s Arabic text. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative literature, along with medieval Arabic literature, culture, and philosophy. (shrink)

In _Narcissus Transformed_, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren interprets Narcissus as thematizing the tragic situation of the postmodern subject. After showing the connections between Cartesian philosophy and narcissism, he proceeds to lay out the function of Narcissus as a poetic figure of discourse in the fields of psychoanalysis and modern fiction. He moves beyond the description of narcissism to an interpretation of the conditions necessary for Narcissus, the beautiful boy captivated by his own image, to become a different kind of subject. The topos (...) of narcissism, which is first articulated by Ovid, always includes within itself a mirror, a gap, self-referential desire, and death—all of which culminate in Narcissus's inability to make space for an Other. Kochhar-Lindgren contends that this is the founding topos of modern philosophy, which is then incorporated into and transmuted by the disciplines of psychoanalysis and fiction. With the extensive work of Freud on narcissism, it becomes a central concept for psychoanalysis; and with Lacan's interpretation of the narcissist as phantom, statue, and automaton, narcissism moves into a specifically textual interpretation of subjectivity. Kochhar-Lindgren then provides close readings of fictional texts-—_The Waves_ by Virginia Woolf, _The Ogre _by Michel Tournier, and _Daniel Martin_ by John Fowles—to show more explicitly the textual construction of the narcissistic subject and to suggest ways that Narcissus might be transformed into a subject not held in thrall to the "glassy-eyed stare of Thanatos." He concludes with an enactment, from a Lacanian and fictional perspective, of the beginnings of the undoing of the narcissistic topos of contemporary culture. Narcissus steps from the self-reflective mirror into a theater; he stops longing to be a purely self-reflexive work in order to become part of the play of a text. (shrink)

I have enjoyed reading fiction since I was young, and until I was twenty-eight I believed that I could write it myself. Then I read a novel by [Michel] Tournier and changed my mind. Imperceptibly, great changes have taken place in fiction. The difference between modern fiction and classical fiction is as great as the difference between the car and the horse-drawn cart. The finest of the modern novels cannot be read ten lines at a glance. Let me (...) cite an example, so that my readers can come to share my point of view. The first sentence of Marguerite Duras's novel The Lover is "I was already old." Innumerable vicissitudes are contained in that phrase. If you read on carefully, you will discover that more or less every sentence is written like that, and my views on modem novels were formulated by reference to The Lover. The great modern novels always contain a lot of information and are extremely elegantly written, delighting those who read them and scaring those who would like to write fiction. Of the classic writers, only the Russian Chekhov occasionally writes in this way, but by no means all his works command reverence. I have to confess that modern novelists used to shock me greatly. The novel by Tournier that I read, called Death and the Maiden, was only the first of a series of shocks. (shrink)

In his literary autobiography, Le vent Paraclet , Michel Tournier records how during his time at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly he and his fellow classmates found a source of great hilarity in their favourite bêtisier , a volume called Pensées de Pascal , in which one learns that painting is a frivolous exercise that consists in imperfectly reproducing objects that are themselves quite worthless. Fairness to Pascal – far from Tournier's mind in those early days – (...) demands that that offending pensée , which belongs in the sheaf of Vanités , be seen more as a summary of Saint Augustine's views than as a record of Pascal's own, and one that was rooted in a tradition stemming from Plato that deprecated all varieties of mimesis. Setting historical adjustment aside and reining back on the boys' sophisticated amusement, one may well wonder whether the view Pascal records does not contain a grain of truth. Are there not indeed kinds of painting that we prize, yet which are well chosen butts of this criticism? In particular, still life painting concerned to record the trivia of domestic life, pots and pans, fruits and meats, glasses and all sorts of everyday tableware looks to be sharply exposed to Pascalian scorn. If this Platonic or in Augustine's case, neo-Platonic, attack on painting is to be warded off in general then it had best be done here where it appears at its most pressing. And if it cannot be warded off here, then still life painting at least is moribund, probably lifeless, nature morte mort indeed. (shrink)

This article combines Deleuze’s extraordinary analysis of Michel Tournier’s Friday, where we find the presentation of a duplicated, perverted, version of Robinson Crusoe when compared to Daniel Defoe’s classical version, with a critical analysis of conceptions such as being-in-the-world, stemming from Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. My point is that without Others [Autrui], or what Deleuze calls the structure-Other [structure Autrui], it is the very possibility of ‘interpreting’ being-in-the-world which is at stake, being a world without Others, the structure-Other, one (...) wherein a pre-ontological comprehension of being is ‘uncomprehended', no longer being it possible to attain a facticity of being precisely insofar as one lives, suffers, without Others, a process of an inverted nature, not so much of the facticity of being but of its ‘defacticization’. I propose, therefore, a new conception of the limit of being-in-the-world not in terms of death but of Others, of what it is to lose Others, the structure-Other, and how this loss implies losing being-in-the-world, the very possibility of interpreting, of comprehending its different structures. The concept of Others functions then as a giant fold between being-in-the-world and what Artaud called ‘the other side of existence’, but also between the absence of Others and the creation of ‘worlds without Others’, all of which ‘minor’, ‘desert islands’, ‘plateaus’, constituted in the immanence of this absence, of the ‘outside’. (shrink)

O conceito de outrem (autrui) não recebeu a devida atenção no conjunto da filosofia de Deleuze até recentemente (VENTURA, 2020; FERREIRA, 2021). Outrem aparece na obra deleuziana em alguns momentos de Diferença e Repetição, em O que é a filosofia? – obra escrita juntamente a Félix Guattari – mas, sobretudo, num texto presente no apêndice de Lógica do sentido intitulado “Michel Tournier e o mundo sem outrem”, no qual ele comenta o romance de M. Tournier, Sexta-feira ou (...) os limbos do pacífico. Outrem nada mais é do que a expressão de um mundo possível, ou ainda, uma estrutura que organiza a percepção e assegura as margens e transições do mundo. Quando esta estrutura se dissolve, os simulacros ascendem às superfícies, destruindo as formas e libertando as forças e intensidades. Acreditamos que o agente dessa dissolução é Sexta-feira, cuja vinda desarranja a ordem forjada por Robinson em sua ilha. Sexta-feira já não funciona como a estrutura outrem, visto que ele é um outro de outrem, que vai possibilitar o acesso a um campo transcendental impessoal, pré-individual, povoado de singularidades livres. Os conceitos de Emmanuel Lévinas de “rosto” e “absolutamente outro” (tout autre) auxiliará nesse movimento a fim de compreender o outro de Deleuze, embora seja necessário apontar a sua pertinência e as suas limitações. (shrink)

Outrem como desafio à diferença. Por uma nova ética dos afetos no mundo contemporâneo. Resumo: O artigo apresenta o conceito de Outrem através das perspectivas histórica e filosófica em conexão com o plano estético. O foco do trabalho consiste em apresentar as dinâmicas de Outrem a partir da obra Sexta-feira ou os limbos do pacífico, de Michel Tournier, precisamente por meio das novas versões dos personagens Robinson Crusoé e Sexta-feira em comparação com a proposta inicial de Daniel Defoe. (...) Para tanto, pensamos com Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari a apreensão de uma ética a partir de Outrem capaz de contribuir com a criação de outros mundos possíveis na passagem da literatura colonial para a literatura decolonial. Na relação entre os personagens observamos uma experiência de mundo mediada por uma troca horizontal. Sexta-feira e Robinson compõem outra existência ética a ser experienciada. O que desnaturaliza todo o ethos cultural europeu (de matriz colonizadora) responsável por estabelecer aquilo que é, ou não, civilizado. Palavras-chave: Outrem; Ética: diferença; Colonial; Decolonial. Others as a challenge to difference. For a new ethics of affections in the contemporary world. Abstract: The article presents the concept of Others through the historical and philosophical perspectives in connection with the aesthetic plane. The focus of this article is to present the dynamics of Others from Friday or the other Island, by Michel Tournier, precisely through the new versions of the characters Robinson Crusoé and Friday in comparison with the initial proposal of Daniel Defoe. For that, we examine Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s apprehension of the ethics from Others, capable of contributing to the creation of other possible worlds in the passage from colonial literature to decolonial literature. In the relationship between the characters, we observe an experience of the world mediated by a horizontal exchange. Friday and Robinson make up another ethical existence that would be experienced, which denaturalizes the whole European cultural ethos (of a colonizing matrix) responsible for establishing what is, or not, civilized. Keywords: Others; Ethics: Difference; Colonial; Decolonial. Outrem como un desafío a la diferencia. Por una nueva ética de los afectos en el mundo contemporâneo. Resumen: El artículo presenta el concepto de Outrem a través de las perspectivas históricas y filosóficas en conexión con el plan estético. El foco del trabajo es presentar la dinámica de Outrem desde la obra Sexta-feira ou os limbos do pacífico, de Michel Tournier, precisamente a través de las nuevas versiones de los personajes Robinson Crusoé y Sexta-feira en comparación con la propuesta inicial de Daniel Defoe. Para ello, pensamos con Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari la aprehensión de una ética de Outrem capaz de contribuir a la creación de otros mundos posibles en la transición de la literatura colonial a la decolonial. En la relación entre los personajes, observamos una experiencia del mundo mediada por un intercambio horizontal. Sexta-feira e Robinson conforman otra existencia ética aún por vivir. Lo que desnaturaliza todo el ethos cultural europeo (de matriz colonizadora) responsable de establecer lo que es, o no, civilizado. Palabras llave: Otro; Ética: diferencia; Colonial; Decolonial. Data de registro: 23/03/2021 Data de aceite: 15/03/2022. (shrink)

This paper develops a response to the ethical conception of the human Other formulated by Gilles Deleuze in his review of Michel Tournier’s 1967 novel Friday. The central contention here is that although Deleuze develops a compelling notion of intensive ethics in response to Tournier’s novel, that ethics also remains deeply problematic in refusing to ascribe a positive role to the human Other. My wager is that some of these problems can be brought to light by placing (...) Deleuze’s philosophy in dialogue with that of Emmanuel Levinas. As I seek to show, Levinas’s philosophy of alterity not only reveals that Deleuze is mistaken in failing to ascribe a positive ethical role to the human Other, but also begins to point the way toward a more positive conception of ethics that does not oppose the Other to the intensive realm that Deleuze so much values. (shrink)

For Gilles Deleuze's two essays ‘Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands’ and ‘Michel Tournier and the World Without Others’, the crucial question is what the perception is, what its fundamental conditions are. A desert island can be a place to experiment on this question. The types of perception are described in many critical works about the history of art and aesthetical reflections by artists. So I will try to retrace some types of perception especially linked to the ‘haptic’, (...) the importance of which was rediscovered by Deleuze. The ‘haptic’ proposes a type of perception not linked to space, but to time in its aspects of genesis. And something incorporeal has to intervene in a very original stage of perception and of perception of time. Thus we will be able to capture some links between the fundamental aspects of perception and time in its ‘out of joint’ aspects. (shrink)

The text fragments that make up Blaise Pascal's “Penséesˮ are traditionally published in different sequences, according to the difference in the conceptual positions of the editors. So, the problem of correlating different editions is very difficult. Translations of “Penséesˮ reflecting several numbering systems are currently available to Ukrainian readers. The author offers two comparative tables for these numberings. In Table 1, the numberings of Louis Lafuma, Jacques Chevalier and Michel Le Guerne are expressed through the numbering of Leon Brunschvicg, (...) which is currently the most common in Ukraine. In Table 2, Brunschvicg's numbering is correlated with the First Copy of the manuscript, the Port-Royal edition of 1670, as well as editions by Bossuet, Lafuma, Chevalier, Le Guerne, Tournier-Anzieu, and Dolgov. (shrink)

Influential philosopher Michel Serres’s foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres’s arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue—creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought. Michel Serres is professor in history of science at the Sorbonne, professor of Romance languages at Stanford University, and author of several books, including _Genesis._ Lawrence R. Schehr is (...) professor of French at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. His books include _Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal _. (shrink)

«La recherche ici entreprise implique donc le projet délibéré d’être à la fois historique et critique, dans la mesure où il s’agit, hors de toute intention prescriptive, de déterminer les conditions de possibilité de l’expérience médicale telle que l’époque moderne l’a connue. Une fois pour toutes, ce livre n’est pas écrit pour une médecine contre une autre, ou contre la médecine pour une absence de médecine. Ici comme ailleurs, il s’agit d’une étude qui essaie de dégager dans l’épaisseur du discours (...) les conditions de son histoire.» (Michel Foucault) Naissance de la clinique constitue aussi, à travers une analyse historique et critique de la constitution du sujet, le malade, tel qu’il peut devenir objet de connaissance, la naissance d’une oeuvre philosophique qui va marquer durablement la pensée contemporaine internationale. (shrink)

The Care of the Self is the third and possibly final volume of Michel Foucault’s widely acclaimed examination of "the experience of sexuality in Western society." Foucault takes us into the first two centuries of our own era, into the Golden Age of Rome, to reveal a subtle but decisive break from the classical Greek vision of sexual pleasure. He skillfully explores the whole corpus of moral reflection among philosophers and physicians of the era, and uncovers an increasing mistrust (...) of pleasure and growing anxiety over sexual activity and its consequences. (shrink)

The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in the collection of Michel Foucault's lectures at the College de France, one of the world's most prestigious institutions. Faculty at the college give public lectures, in which they can present works-in-progress on any subject of their choosing. Foucault's were more speculative and free-ranging than the arguments of such groundbreaking works as The History of Sexuality or Madness and Civilization . In the lectures comprising this volume, Foucault focuses upon the (...) ways the "self" and consequently "self-study" have been conceived since the days of antiquity, starting with Socrates. Definitions and conceptions of "self-study" in Greek and Roman literature, Foucault argues, remain in force today, and underlie modern interpretations of the self. Engaging, engrossing, and provocative, The Hermeneutics of the Subject reveals Foucault at the height of his powers. (shrink)

The second volume in an unprecedented publishing event: the complete College de France lectures of one of the most influential thinkers of the last century Michel Foucault remains among the towering intellectual figures of postmodern philosophy. His works on sexuality, madness, the prison, and medicine are classics his example continues to challenge and inspire. From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous College de France. These lectures were seminal events. Attended by thousands, they (...) created benchmarks for contemporary critical inquiry. The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it." Building on the themes of societal self-defense in the first volume of this series, Foucault shows how and why defining "abnormality" and "normality" were prerogatives of power in the nineteenth century, shaping the institutions--from the prison system to the family--meant to deal in particular with “monstrosity,” whether sexual, phsyical, or spiritual. The College de France lectures add immeasurably to our appreciation of Foucault's thought, and offer a unique window on his singular worldview. (shrink)

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique , few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization , Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all (...) prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them. (shrink)

« Qu’est-ce que la philosophie et quel est son rôle aujourd’hui? Entre juillet et octobre 1966, quelques mois après la parution des Mots et les Choses, Michel Foucault, dans un manuscrit très soigneusement rédigé mais qu’il ne publiera pas, apporte sa réponse à cette question tant débattue.À la différence de ceux qui, à l’époque, s’attachent à dévoiler l’essence de la philosophie ou à en prononcer la mort, Foucault l’appréhende, dans sa matérialité, comme un discours dont il convient de dégager (...) l’économie eu égard aux autres discours (scientifique, fictif, ordinaire, religieux) qui circulent dans un contexte donné.Le Discours philosophique propose ainsi une nouvelle manière de faire l’histoire de la philosophie, qui la décentre du commentaire des grands philosophes. Nietzsche y occupe toutefois une place particulière car il inaugure une conjoncture où la philosophie devient une entreprise de diagnostic du présent. Il revient en effet désormais à la philosophie de dire, à partir de l’« archive intégrale » d’une culture, ce qui en fait l’actualité.Si L’Archéologie du savoir, consacré aux enjeux méthodologiques d’un tel projet, s’y annonce, nulle part autant que dans Le Discours philosophique Michel Foucault n’aura explicité les ambitions de son programme intellectuel.»--. (shrink)

Veils -- Boxes -- Tables -- Visit -- Joy.

Volume 3 in the ESSENTIAL WORKS OF FOUCAULT series, a collection of articles, interviews and seminars on the subject of Western political culture, written by the twentieth century French philosopher, Michel Foucault and translated into English. It includes issues such as sexuality, psychiatry, discrimination and exclusion in human society.

The relationship between Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity and Hendrik A. Lorentz’s ether theory is best understood in terms of competing interpretations of Lorentz invariance. In the 1890s, Lorentz proved and exploited the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell’s equations, the laws governing electromagnetic fields in the ether, with what he called the theorem of corresponding states. To account for the negative results of attempts to detect the earth’s motion through the ether, Lorentz, in effect, had to assume that the laws (...) governing the matter interacting with the fields are Lorentz invariant as well. This additional assumption can be seen as a generalization of the well-known contraction hypothesis. In Lorentz’s theory, it remained an unexplained coincidence that both the laws governing fields and the laws governing matter should be Lorentz invariant. In special relativity, by contrast, the Lorentz invariance of all physical laws directly reflects the Minkowski space-time structure posited by the theory. One can use this observation to produce a common-cause argument to show that the relativistic interpretation of Lorentz invariance is preferable to Lorentz’s interpretation. (shrink)