Psychoanalysis: Its Image and Its Public is a perfect illustration of Tarde's claim that ‘beautiful’ should be reserved for ideas that lead to a discovery of more ideas and to an invention that we can judge as fruitful for the future. The article examines the influence of the book in geographical, historical and scientific contexts and traces the development and diffusion of the theory of social representations throughout four periods. The article highlights the difference between the first edition in 1961, (...) and the second one in 1976, and it examines the development of Moscovici's ideas over time. The first edition of Psychoanalysis, based on the criticism of sociology of knowledge, underlines common sense as a new object of study, attempting to capture complex social phenomena. It shows common sense as a legitimate object of study that interweaves social, cultural and individual dimensions in the constitution of social reality. The 1976 edition emphasises that language and communication and its role in the theory of social knowledge. The book has had manifold impact on new areas of study. An overview of international research in social representations shows how this work has inspired scholars all over the world, has lead to creating Schools of research and to innovative proposals not only in terms of domains that have been studied but also in terms of theoretical models and methodological concerns. (shrink)

La question se pose de savoir si la Justice est capable de réparer le tragique de l’histoire. François Dosse situe son analyse sur l’axe pragmatique de la préoccupation citoyenne exprimée par Ricœur, dès les premières lignes de La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, lorsqu’il se dit troublé par le trop de mémoire ici et le trop d’oubli ailleurs. On assiste en effet à une judiciarisation progressive de la discipline historique. Elle se traduit par une inquiétante inflation mémorielle depuis la loi Gayssot de (...) 1990. La fonction du juge et de l’historien a certes des points communs, comme l’a montré Marc Bloch dans Apologie pour l’histoire ou Carlo Ginzburg dans Le juge et l’historien. Le juge d’instruction peut s’apparenter à l’historien, mais pas celui du siège qui doit rendre un jugement. Cette emprise progressive de la justice sur le passé a pour effet pervers une tentative de sanctuarisation des questions historiques. Ricœur nous aide à repenser les relations entre justice, histoire et mémoire en distinguant et en articulant ces diverses dimensions par un travail de clarification des concepts. Il permet de mieux articuler la fonction judiciaire, le travail de mémoire et l’opération historiographique en respectant la validité de chacune de ces dimensions. (shrink)

Collective memory, social memory, professional memory: although these notions are in current use when we name the shared (or assumed to be shared) representations of the past, they are very ambiguous. The point at issue is to show how memories can become common to some or to all members of a group . In this paper, I shall base my arguments on the simplest situation imaginable: The sharing of a memory of an olfactory experience by two individuals, namely one of (...) my informants – a gravedigger – and myself. We can try to explain this shared olfactory memory, or the imagination of this sharing, by taking two facets into consideration. First of all, we must learn to take seriously those few seconds when a shared experience of the sensory world took shape between the anthropologist and his informant. Secondly, we must attempt to answer both of the following questions: what is the nature of this sharing? And what conditions make it possible? In the first part of this text, I examine the issue of the nature of sharing by weighing up its aspects as I consider protomemory, memory and metamemory. In the second part, I outline one of the essential conditions of sharing: the existence of what I call sociotransmitters. For the most part, my attention remains focused on that particular moment when the gravedigger said, “Smell this!” , and when what was at stake was to save the interaction. (shrink)