Poussin, à Rome, dit du Caravage qu'il était venu au monde pour détruire la peinture et cependant il est dit aussi qu'il possédait l'art de peindre tout entier. Ce livre cherche non point à résoudre une contradiction mais plutôt à développer une inconsistance du système représentatif dans le procès de peindre de Poussin au Caravage et vice versa. Il y sera donc question de mimésis et de fantaisie, d'histoire et d'action, de perspective et de ténèbres, de mort et de décapitation...

Utopics has two parts. The first is a study of Thomas More's Utopia, where the noun "utopia" appears for the first time. It attempts to provide the elements for a theoretical reflection on utopic signifying practice. The second part can be seen as an application of the first: It is an analysis of utopic and pseudo-topic spaces. Marin's analysis shows how utopian texts open the way to an alternative future.

This is a collection of twenty-two essays by an eminent philosopher, critic, and theorist that appeared between 1971 and 1992.

The ten major essays in this volume constitute his definitive statement on the painter who inspired his most eloquent and probing commentary. 17 illustrations. "[Marin's] mandarin prose, as foreign to our age of mass culture as Poussin's ...

"Marin's admiration (in both seventeenth-century senses) for the word made flesh, and hence the word made power, is what makes this book both fascinating and disturbing." -- Times Literary Supplement A wicked queen orders the palace cook to kill her grandchildren and serve them up for dinner -- "in a sauce Robert." But as any good cook knows, this sauce is properly served with game, not domestic animals. Does the ogress transgress? Perhaps, but the cook breaks the rules as (...) well. Deceiving his mistress, he rescues the children and instead serves goat and lamb. In this provocative volume, Louis Marin treats a subject to which some of the most exciting literary criticism has been devoted: the body as represented in text and image. From fairy tales to biblical narrative, from the divine body in the eucharist to the body of Louis XIV as described in his physicians' journals, Marin focuses on the peculiar relationship between verbal and oral functions--speaking and eating, boasting and gluttony, lying and cannibalism. Drawing on the methodologies of semiology, philosophy of language, and literary and art criticism, Marin explores works by Rabelais, La Fontaine, Perrault, and the Logic of Port-Royal. Throughout, he is concerned with the conceptualization of desire and pleasure, justice and force, natural violence and political power -- and questions their ideological as well as their symbolic bases. (shrink)

The work of the eminent French cultural critic Louis Marin (1931-92) is becoming increasingly important to English-speaking scholars concerned with issues of representation. To Destroy Painting, first published in France in 1977, marks a milestone in Marin's thought about the aims of painting in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A meditation on the work of Poussin and Caravaggio and on their milieux, the book explores a number of notions implied by theories of painting and offers (...) insight into the aims and effects of visual representaion. (shrink)

Beginning from a definition of philosophical discourse which states the necessity of rhetoric meant as the whole of the linguistic devices aiming to persuade the interlocutor of truth and justice, the author points out that Pascal's text would be an outstanding example of such a discourse, while showing, nevertheless, the specificity of the rhetoric he employs. Such a specificity would aim to carry out a complex logic of the secret, concerning chiefly the ackowledgement and identification procedures of the subject of (...) the discourse-enunciation, and its pronominal and nominal markers.The author studies this logic on one hand by starting from the pragmatic patterns developed by the linguistics of enunciation, and on the other taking into account the philosophical, ethical and religious themes of the Jansenist thought in the XVIIth century. The distinction between concealment and secret leads the author to set up the forms of political rhetoric against the actual Pascalian aspects of philosophical rhetoric. Such a logic of the secret, which is the projection of the hidden God teologema into the field of philosophical discourse, would enable us to position as “absent” the subject producing this discourse and thus to transform what he states into a discourse of truth and justice. The very careful examination of the anonymity strategies and mostly of the writing tactics concerning the author's real name (anagram) would seem to confirm this conception of the rhetoric of Pascal's philosophical discourse. (shrink)

First published in 1975, this is a book of general intellectual interest about the role of the university in contemporary society and that of university teachers in relation to their subjects, their students, and their wider political commitments. Alan Montefiore offers preliminary analyses of the family of concepts most often invoked in discussions of these problems, taking the central dispute to be between those who hold a 'liberal' view of the university and those who regard this notion as illusory, dishonest (...) or undesirable. Six academics, representing, discuss issues of substantive conflict in light of Montefiore's initial distinctions. The volume is of particular interest to students of political and social philosophy, and political and educational theory. It is also intended for a wider readership among those who care about the political status of the universities and recognize the importance and difficulty of the problems involved in this. (shrink)

When its atmosphere processing plant's fusion reactor exploded, it turned it into a desolate, irradiated hunk of rock uninhabitable by humans for thousands of years. The explosion was not far off from what the surviving humans in Aliens were planning anyway: nuke the site from orbit. To set the stage for considering the military decisions of Colonial Marines from an ethical perspective, strap in like it's a simulated combat drop from low orbit. This chapter looks at the Aliens future of (...) the twenty‐second century. After the first tragic encounter with the Xenos in Aliens, the remaining humans are trying to figure out their next steps in the back of the armored personnel carrier (APC). Many of the ideas being tossed around in the APC (even slimy Carter Burke's) keep the Xenos distant and so actually reduce the threat, backing the humans away from the need to make decisions in a “supreme emergency”. (shrink)

Abstract:San Diego, California, is the eighth largest city in the United States and one of the least affordable cities in the world. Many people in San Diego experience significant ramifications from competition for space. Currently, the southern side of downtown San Diego is the hottest area for development in San Diego county. This article examines the redevelopment of Barrio Logan, a small Latino community that borders downtown San Diego. Barrio Logan is a part of San Diego's third oldest community. The (...) study interviewed ten planning board members who participated in redevelopment and rezoning processes and provided thematic data. In addition, ten U-T San Diego newspaper articles also provided data on a referendum initiated by the marine industry to repeal adopted zoning ordinances. The data are used to discuss the construction of personal, group, and institutional social reality that influenced the outcome of the redevelopment and rezoning processes. The successful Barrio Logan Redevelopment Project Area process was about both the restoration and the sociopolitical empowerment of the community. Due to that redevelopment process, Barrio Logan has begun to emerge as a vibrant, exciting community. A subsequent redevelopment effort, the Barrio Logan Community Plan Update (BLCPU), focused on instituting new zoning ordinances to address the incompatible land uses and toxins in Barrio Logan. Industry in the community has resisted these types of changes to the zoning ordinances for decades. This resistance culminated with a referendum that repealed the BLCPU, which had been passed by the San Diego City Council. The marine industry's central selling vision of jobs influenced a majority of San Diego City voters outside of Barrio Logan to reject the Plan 1A version of the BLCPU. The reasons for and ramifications of the rejection of Plan 1A are discussed and steps Barrio Logan and the other San Diego redevelopment districts could take to improve their chances of winning a future referendum election are recommended. (shrink)

Contribution for the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics' Special Issue no. 30 on "The Changing Ontology of the Image". The image’s power is a power of appearing without fully being what it allows to appear. In its strange relationship to what is lacking, the image also and simultaneously displays a remarkable excess—a phenomenal excess.

Destruir la pintura, resulta polémico y al mismo tiempo atractivo, debido a que ofrece un análisis de los conceptos Vorstellung y Darstellung desde un enfoque estético- pictórico, el cual toma la obra de Poussin y Caravaggio como principa- les objetos de estudio. Si bien, prima facie, estamos acostumbrados a pensar que los conceptos antes mencionados en filosofía suelen tener connotacio- nes e implicaciones epistémicas, lo que Louis Marin ofrece a lo largo de su estudio es un claro contraejemplo (...) de dicha ingenua creencia. (shrink)

Explores the sublime as an unmasterable excess of beauty that marks the limit of representation, in language that requires a firm grasp on the concepts and terminology of modern (that is, pre-postmodern) philosophy.