An Area Studies Division was created at the 6th Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the mid-1950s. It was devoted to several world regions, including the USSR and eastern Europe. This article investigates the links between its institutionalization and the international scientific and financial transfers underpinning it: the transatlantic support granted to the nascent division by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and the academic cooperation programme that it launched with eastern Europe. The Russian, Soviet and (...) East European programme served, thus, as an East/West interface and a platform for broader intellectual exchanges. Local French scientific, academic and political rationales favoured the specific pathways it took. The article also shows that the EPHE 6th Section was discreetly linked with American players in Cold War intellectual warfare whose forms of action gradually changed in the context of the thaw. In particular, it had connections with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. These collusions attest to the entanglement of scientific and political issues, their intricacies increasing when external factors compounded domestic ones. (shrink)

Depuis le début des années 1980, Georges Didi-Huberman, philosophe et historien de l'art, enseignant à l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), s'attache à penser le devenir des images, et plus généralement le travail des formes, avec des outils théoriques empruntés à des champs de recherche multiples (philosophie, anthropologie, histoire de l'art, psychanalyse...) et pour des périodes historiques très diverses (Renaissance, XIXe siècle, art moderne, art contemporain...). La fécondité de cette pensée, la richesse des propositions théoriques (...) qu'elle a su inventer, en font aujourd'hui une référence majeure dans le champ de l'histoire et de la théorie de l'art. Ce volume propose un ensemble de lectures de cet être-devant-les-images, en explorant sa tonalité essentiellement heuristique. Il montre combien, ici, l'art et l'histoire trouvent des outils capables de les faire travailler ensemble. (shrink)

This doctoral thesis was prepared in 1975-77 at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, under the supervision of Prof. Raymond ARON. It was submitted in 1977 in fulfilment of the requirements for a Ph.D. degree in Social Sciences (Doctorat de 3e cycle en sciences sociales). The oral examination (soutenance de thèse) was held in January 1978, with the examination committee consisting of Prof. Aron, Bartoli, Boudon and Brochier. This 250 page unpublished dissertation was (...) the first study ever written in French on Karl Marx's Grundrisse - a 1857-58 manuscript preparatory to Marx's main economic work, Capital. The dissertation reviews Marx's successive projects for his economic work since the 1844 Manuscripts and then proceeds to a presentation and critical discussion of Grundrisse. The proposed interpretation explains the linkage that Marx operated in 1857-58 between Ricardo's economics and Hegel's dialectics, and it emphasizes that Marx was at that time primarily trying to reconstruct the dynamics of capitalism, without going to the stage of developing a formal theory of value and exploitation, as he will eventually do in Capital. (shrink)

Be aware... and you will be mindful of a notable ambiguity in semiotics as well as of those who have masterfully strived to transcend it. This event, commented on by Elize Bisanz (Texas Tech University) and chaired by William Passarini (Institute for Philosophical Studies), is part of the activities of the 2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing, cooperatively organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of (...) Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, the Deely Project, Saint Vincent College, the Iranian Society for Phenomenology at the Iranian Political Science Association, the International Association for Semiotics of Space and Time, the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Maritain Association, the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, the International Center for Semiotics and Intercultural Dialogue, Moscow State Academic University for the Humanities and the Mansarda Acesa with the support of the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Government of Portugal under the UID/FIL/00010/2020 project. *** Ionut Untea is currently a fellow-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, in Stuttgart, where he is researching on the semioethic and aesthetic coordinates of the “social compact” and intercorporeal relationships. In 2021, he has taught a course entitled “Intercultural Philosophy: Semiotic Approaches and Aesthetic Themes” as a Visiting Professor at Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro. Since 2016, he has been teaching History of Western Philosophy and Semiotics at Southeast University, Nanjing. He previously taught at the University of La Rochelle, and was a postdoctoral fellow of the Foundation for Interreligious and Intercultural Research and Dialogue (FIIRD) at the University of Geneva. He obtained his doctorate in 2013 at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), in Paris. He holds Romanian citizenship, having obtained his first degrees in philosophy and theology at the University of Bucharest. His focus is on the modern and contemporary intersections between semiotic, moral, political and religious thought. He has published recently “Peircean and Confucian Interpretations of Self-Development: Semiotic, Normative and Aesthetic Aspects,” Philosophy East and West 72.1: January 2022: 188–209. His recent work has appeared in academic journals such as The American Journal of Semiotics (2021), Semiotica (2021), Ethical Perspectives (2021, 2019), Philosophical Forum (2019), Journal of Aesthetic Education (2020), Politics and Religion (2019), The Monist (2018). *** Dr. Bisanz's education includes an MA (Philosophy) from the University of Lüneburg in Germany; Graduate Studies in Jacques Derrida's philosophy Seminars at l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris; a Ph.D. (History of Communication Sciences) from the Technische University of Berlin; and a post-doc Habilitation Degree (Image Studies), from the University of Lüneburg. Bisanz has published several interdisciplinary books reflecting her educational background; these include a major European edition of Peirce's writings The Logic of Interdisciplinarity: Charles S. Peirce, The Monist Series (Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 2009), which was realized with the aid of research and publication grants from State and private endowments; Prolegomena to a Science of Reasoning: Phaneroscopy, Semeiotic, Logic, which is a collection of manuscripts by Peirce on reasoning (Peter Lang Publishers, Berlin, 2016); Overcoming the Iconic Turn: Cultural Concepts of Images [in German: Die Überwindung des Ikonischen: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven der Bildwissenschaft] (transcript Verlag, Hamburg, 2010). Bisanz is a member of the advising board of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik and chair of the society's subdivision for Cultural Studies. Since her Fulbright scholarship in 2006 at Texas Tech University, Bisanz has been an active member of the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. She has organized several international congresses dedicated to Peirce and interdisciplinary research. *** Homepage: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s Auditorium: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s/auditorium *** Technical support assured by Robert Junqueira. The cover image for the video was designed by Zahra Soltani. (shrink)

Europe is at war and does not know it. She is overrun by invaders from the Global South, who seek to replace those who have inhabited her lands for at least the last 30,000 years. She is subject to an American overlord, whose world system dictates her de-Europeanization and globalization. She is mismanaged and betrayed by EU technocrats, corrupt politicians, and plutocratic elites. Without a revolutionary mobilization in her defense, the thousand-year-old civilization that grew out of the medieval Respublica Christiana (...) and that we today associate with 'Europe' - along with the unique genetic heritage of her peoples - will forever cease to exist. Guillaume Faye - doctorate from one of France's most prestigious Ècoles, social philosopher, author of numerous books and articles - is the Cassandra warning Europeans of their approaching extinction, and the need to prepare for the impending Battle of Europe. Michael O'Meara, Ph.D., studied social theory at the Ècoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and modern European history at the University of California. He is the author of New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (2004). (shrink)

Unable to respond to the questions, to all the questions, I will ask myself instead whether responding is possible and what that would mean in such a situation. And I will risk in turn several questions prior to the definition of a responsibility. But is it not an act to assume in theory the concept of a responsibility? Is that not already to take a responsibility? One’s own as well as the responsibility to which one believes one ought to summon (...) others?The title names a war. Which war?Do not think only of the war that broke out several months ago around some articles signed by a certain Paul de Man, in Belgium between 1940 and 1942. Later you will understand why it is important to situate the beginning of things public, that is the publications, early in 1940 at the latest, during the war but before the occupation of Belgium by the Nazis, and not in December 1940, the date of the first article that appeared in Le Soir, the major Brussels newspaper that was then controlled, more or less strictly, by the occupiers. For several months, in the United States, the phenomena of this war “around” Pula de Man have been limited to newspaper articles. War, a public act, is by rights something declared. So we will not count in the category of war the private phenomena—meetings, discussions, correspondences, or telephonic conclaves—however intense they may have been in recent days, and already well beyond the American academic milieu. Jacques Derrida is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and also teaches at the University of California, Irvine. A teacher at Yale for ten years, he is the author of Mémoires: for Paul de Man .Peggy Kamuf is associate professor of French at Miami University. She is the author of Fictions of Feminism Desire: Disclosures of Heloise and Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship . Her article “Pieces of Resistance” is forthcoming in Reading de Man Reading. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida explores the ramifications of what we owe to others. Hospitality reproduces a two-year seminar series delivered by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris between 1995 and 1997. In these lectures, Derrida asks a series of related questions about responsibility and “the foreigner”: How do we welcome or turn away the foreigner? What does the idea of the foreigner reveal about kinship and the state, particularly in relation to friendship, (...) citizenship, migration, asylum, assimilation, and xenophobia? Derrida approaches these questions through readings of several classical texts as well as modern texts by Heidegger, Arendt, Camus, and others. Central to his project is a rigorous distinction between conventional, finite hospitality, with its many conditions, and the aspirational idea of hospitality as something offered unconditionally to the stranger. This volume collects the first year of the seminar. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida explores the ramifications of what we owe to others. Hospitality reproduces a two-year seminar series delivered by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris between 1995 and 1997. In these lectures, Derrida asks a series of related questions about responsibility and “the foreigner”: How do we welcome or turn away the foreigner? What does the idea of the foreigner reveal about kinship and the state, particularly in relation to friendship, (...) citizenship, migration, asylum, assimilation, and xenophobia? Central to his project is a rigorous distinction between conventional, finite hospitality, with its many conditions, and the aspirational idea of hospitality as something offered unconditionally to the stranger. This volume collects the second year of the seminar, which considers an Islamic problematic of hospitality, the relevance of forgiveness, and the work of Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)

An inquiry into the problematic of perjury, or lying, and forgiveness from one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. “One only ever asks forgiveness for what is unforgivable.” From this contradiction begins Perjury and Pardon, a two-year series of seminars given by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris in the late 1990s. In these sessions, Derrida focuses on the philosophical, ethical, juridical, and political stakes of the concept (...) of responsibility. His primary goal is to develop what he calls a “problematic of lying” by studying diverse forms of betrayal: infidelity, denial, false testimony, perjury, unkept promises, desecration, sacrilege, and blasphemy. Although forgiveness is a notion inherited from multiple traditions, the process of forgiveness eludes those traditions, disturbing the categories of knowledge, sense, history, and law that attempt to circumscribe it. Derrida insists on the unconditionality of forgiveness and shows how its complex temporality destabilizes all ideas of presence and even of subjecthood. For Derrida, forgiveness cannot be reduced to repentance, punishment, retribution, or salvation, and it is inseparable from, and haunted by, the notion of perjury. Through close readings of Kant, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Plato, Jankélévitch, Baudelaire, and Kafka, as well as biblical texts, Derrida explores diverse notions of the “evil” or malignancy of lying while developing a complex account of forgiveness across different traditions. (shrink)

An exploration of the political dimensions of forgiveness and repentance from Jacques Derrida. Perjury and Pardon is a two-year seminar series given by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris during the late 1990s. In these sessions, Derrida focuses on the philosophical, ethical, juridical, and political stakes of the concept of responsibility. His primary goal is to develop what he calls a “problematic of lying” by studying diverse forms of betrayal: infidelity, (...) denial, false testimony, perjury, unkept promises, desecration, sacrilege, and blasphemy. This volume covers the seminar’s second year when Derrida explores the political dimensions of forgiveness and repentance. Over eight sessions, he discusses Hegel, Augustine, Levinas, Arendt, and Benjamin as well as Bill Clinton’s impeachment and Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s testimonies before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The seminars conclude with an extended reading of Henri Thomas’s 1964 novel Le Parjure. (shrink)

In this intriguing study, Jacques Le Goff, one of the most esteemed contemporary French historians of the Middle Ages, presents a concise investigation of the problem that usury posed for the medieval Church, which had long condemned the lending of money for interest. Le Goff describes how, as the structure of economic life inevitably began to include financial loans, the Church refashioned its theology in order to condemn the usurer not to hell but merely to purgatory.Jacques Le Goff is Director (...) of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and the author of The Birth of Purgatory.Patricia Ranum is the translator of Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel. (shrink)

Claude Lefort is one of the leading social and political theorists in France today. This anthology of his most important work published over the last four decades makes his writing widely accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time.With exceptional skill Lefort combines the analysis of contemporary political events with a sensitivity to the history of political thought. His critical account of the development of bureaucracy and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is a timely contribution to (...) current debates about the nature and shortcomings of these societies. His incisive analyses of Marx's theory of history and concept of ideology provide the backdrop for a highly original account of the role of symbolism in modern societies. While critical of many traditional assumptions and doctrines, Lefort develops a political position based on a reappraisal of the idea of human rights and a reconsideration of what "democracy" means today.The Political Forms of Modern Society is a major contribution to contemporary social and political theory. The volume includes a substantial introduction that describes the context of Lefort's writings and highlights the central themes of his work.Claude Lefort teaches social and political theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He was a founder, with Cornelius Castoriadis, of the influential independent journal of the left, Socialisme ou Barbarie. John B. Thompson is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. (shrink)

« Nos sentiments ne sont perceptibles qu’en s’enfermant dans les mots ». Dès son introduction Georges Vigarello, professeur à l’Université de Paris-V et directeur d’étude à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, rappelle cette phrase de Jean-Louis Flandrin pour à son tour s’essayer à ce terrain difficile que sont les mots, afin de penser une histoire de la beauté. Les mots, significatifs du point de vue de leurs auteurs comme de leurs époques, traduisent les prises de (...) conscience et... (shrink)

I shall speak of ghost [revenant], of flame and of ashes.And of what, for Heidegger, avoiding means.What is avoiding? Heidegger on several occasions uses the common word Vermeiden: to avoid, to flee, to dodge. What might he have meant when it comes to “spirit” or the “spiritual”? I specify immediately: not spirit or the spiritual but Geist, geistig, geistlich, for this question will be, through and through, that of language. Do these German words allow themselves to be translated? In another (...) sense: are they avoidable?Sein und Zeit : what does Heidegger say at that time? He announces and he prescribes. He warns [avertit]: a certain number of terms will have to be avoided . Among them, spirit . In 1953, more than twenty-five years later—and this was not just any quarter-century—in the great text devoted to Georg Trakl, Heidegger notes that Trakl always took care to avoid the word geistig. And, visibly, Heidegger approves him in this; he thinks the same. But this time, it is not Geist nor even geistlich that is to be avoided, but geistig.How are we to delimit the difference, and what has happened? What of this meantime? How are we to explain that in twenty-five years, between these two warning signals , Heidegger made a frequent, regular, marked use of all this vocabulary, including the adjective geistig? And that he often spoke not only of the word “spirit” but, sometimes yielding to the emphatic mode, in the name of spirit? Jacques Derrida is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and also teaches at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War” . An English translation of De l’espirit: Heidegger et la question is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Geoff Bennington, author of Lyotard: Writing the Event, is a lecturer in French at the University of Sussex. Rachel Bowlby, author of Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations, is a lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. (shrink)

Recorded in Ithaca, NY by Cornell University., Sponsored by: Andrew D. White Professors-At-Large Program., Speaker: Professor of the History of Philosophy, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large., Lecture, October 3, 1988.

This paper has been translated from the French by Cosmin Toma. It focuses on Jacques Derrida's very last lecture, given in Rio de Janeiro, on the 16thof August 2004, which Derrida drew from his ‘Le parjure et le pardon’ (‘Perjury and Forgiveness’) seminar held at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, from 1997 to 1999. In reference to this final lecture in which Derrida deals with ‘forgiveness,’ ‘truth’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘testimony’ and ‘genre’, the (...) paper also takes up the question of justice as well as of what he calls the ‘worst violence’ via testimonial writings by Sarah Kofman and Antjie Krog so as to rethink forgiveness. (shrink)

One could accuse me here of making a big deal and a whole history out of words and gestures that remain very clear. When Madame de Mainternon says that the King takes her time, it is because she is glad to give it to him and takes pleasure from it: the King takes nothing from her and gives her as much as he takes. And when she says, “I give the rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I would like to give (...) all,” she is confiding in her correspondent about a daily economy concerning the leisures and charities, the works and days of a “grande dame” somewhat overwhelmed by her obligations. None of the words she writes has the sense of the unthinkable and the impossible toward which my reading would have pulled them, in the direction of giving-taking, of time and the rest. She did not mean to say that, you will say.What if … yes she did [Et si].And if what she wrote meant to say that, then what would that suppose? How, where, on the basis of what and when can we read this letter fragment as I have done? How could we even hijack it as I have done, while still respecting its literality and its language? End of the epigraph. Jacques Derrida is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and professor of French, University of California, Irvine. In the past year, he has published Le Problème de la genèse chez Husserl , Mémoires d’aveugle, l’autoportrait et autres ruines , L’Autre Cap , and Circonfession in Jacques Derrida, with Geoffrey Bennington . Peggy Kamuf is professor of French at the University of Southern California and Directeur de Programme, Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. She is the author of Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship and most recently has edited A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. (shrink)

Some years ago a collection of historical and philosophical essays on sex was advertised under the slogan: Philosophers are interested in sex again. Since that time the history of sexuality has become an almost unexceptionable topic, occasioning as many books and articles as anyone would ever care to read. Yet there are still fundamental conceptual problems that get passed over imperceptibly when this topic is discussed, passed over, at least in part, because they seem so basic or obvious that it (...) would be time badly spent to worry too much about them. However, without backtracking toweard this set of problems, one will quite literally not know what one is writing the history of when one writes a history of sexuality.An excellent example of some of the most sophisticated current writing in this field can be found in Western Sexuality, a collection of essays that resulted from a seminar conducted by Philippe Ariès at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1979-80.1 As one would expect, Western Sexuality is characterized by a diversity of methodological and historiographical approaches—social history, intellectual history, cultural history , historical sociology, the analysis of literary texts, and that distinctive kind of history practiced by Michel Foucault and also in evidence in the short essay by Paul Veyne. One perspective virtually absent from this collection is the history of science, and since I believe that the history of science has a decisive and irreducible contribution to make to the history of sexuality, it is not accident that I am going to focus on that connection. But the history of sexuality is also an area in which one’s historiography or implicit epistemology will stamp, virtually irrevocably, one’s first-order historical writing. It is an arena in which philosophical and historical concerns inevitably run into one another. 1. Philippe Ariès and Adnré Béjin, eds., Western Sexuality: Practice and Percept in Past and Present Times . Arnold I. Davidson, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry, is assistant professor of philosophy and member of the Committees on General Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” appeared in the Winter 1987 issue. (shrink)

Those who have read me, in particular those who have read “Paul de Man’s War,” know very well that I would have quite easily accepted a genuine critique, the expression of an argued disagreement with my reading of de Man, with my evaluation of these articles from 1940-42, and so on. After all, what I wrote on this subject was complicated enough, divided, tormented, most often hazarded as hypothesis, open enough to discussion, itself discussing itself enough in advance for me (...) to be able to welcome questions, suggestions, and objections. Provided this was done so as to demonstrate and not to intimidate or inflict wounds, to help the analysis progress and not to score points, to read and to reason and not to pronounce massive, magical, and immediately executor verdicts. Five of the six “responses” that I reread last night are written, as one used to say, with a pen dipped in venom. Less against the de Man of 1940-42, perhaps, then against me . Less against me, in truth, than against “Deconstruction” . How can the reader tell that these five “critical responses” are not “responses,” critical texts or discussions, but rather the documents of a blinded compulsion? First of all, the fact that they are all monolithic. They take into account none of the complications of which my text, this is the very least one can say, is not at all sparing. They never seek to measure the possibility, the degree, or the form, as always happens in an honest discussion, of a partial agreement on this or that point. No, everything is rejected as a block; everything is a block and a block of hatred. Even when, here or there, someone makes a show of being moved by my sadness or my friendship for de Man, it is in order to get the better of me and suggest that I am inspired only by friendship, which will appear ridiculous to all those who have read me. Inspired by friendship means for those people misled by friendship. How foreign this experience must be to them! Jacques Derrida is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales as well as professor at the University of California, Irvine, and visiting professor at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. His most recent publication in English is the collection Limited Inc , which includes a new afterword, “Toward an Ethic of Discussion.” Peggy Kamuf is professor of French at the University of Southern California. Her most recent book is Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship . She has also contributed essays to Reading de Man Reading and Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism , and is currently editing A Derrida Reader. (shrink)

APARTHEID—may that remain the name from now on, the unique appellation for the ultimate racism in the world, the last of many.May it thus remain, but may a day come when it will only be for the memory of man.A memory in advance: that, perhaps, is the time given for this exhibition. At once urgent and untimely, it exposes itself and takes a chance with time, it wagers and affirms beyond the wager. Without counting on any present moment, it offers (...) only a foresight in painting, very close to silence, and the rearview vision of a future for which apartheid will be the name of something finally abolished. Confined and abandoned then to this silence of memory, the name will resonate all by itself. Reduced to the state of a term in disuse. The thing it names today will no longer be.But hasn’t apartheid always been the archival record of the unnameable?The exhibition, therefore, is not a presentation. Nothing is delivered here in the present, nothing that would be presentable—only, in tomorrow’s rearview mirror, the late, ultimate racism, the last of many. Jacques Derrida, professor of philosophy at the Ecole des hauts etudes en sciences socials in Paris, is the author of, among other works, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of Philosophy, and Dissemination. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry, “The Linguistic Circle of Geneva,” appeared in the Summer 1982 issue. Peggy Kamuf teaches French at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of Fiction of Feminine Desire. (shrink)

Connaissez-vous Daniel S. Milo? Il dit lui-même être « le seul témoin ici de [ses] propres exploits ». Il conviendrait donc de faire les présentations d’usage. Mais suffit-il de dire que l’homme est historien, romancier et philosophe, maître de conférences à l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales à Paris? Difficile, car malgré tout on en vient vite à s’écrier, sur le ton de parents excédés par l’insubordination de leur rejeton : « Qu’est-ce qu’il...

Pierre Manent is professor emeritus of political philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and is outspoken public intellectual in France. His book La loi naturelle et les dro...

The break necessary to establish a rigorous science of cultural works is something more and something else than a simple methodological reversal.1 It implies a true conversion of the ordinary way of thinking and living the intellectual enterprise. It is a matter of breaking the narcissistic relationship inscribed in the representation of intellectual work as a “creation” and which excludes as the expression par excellence of “reductionist sociology” the effort to subject the artist and the work of art to a (...) way of thinking that is doubly objectionable since it is both genetic and generic.It would be easy to show what the most different kinds of analysis of the work of art owe to the norms that require treating works in and for themselves, with no reference to the social conditions of their production. Thus in the now-classic Theory of Literature, René Wellek and Austin Warren seem to advocate “an explanation in terms of the personality and the life of the writer.” In fact, because they accept the ideology of the “man of genius” they are committed, in their own terms, to “one of the oldest and best-established methods of literary study”—which seeks the explanatory principle of a work in the author taken in isolation .2 In fact, this explanatory principle resides in the relationship between the “space” of works in which each particular work is taken and the “space” of authors in which each cultural enterprise is constituted. Similarly, when Sartre takes on the project of specifying the meditations through which society determined Flaubert, the individual, he attributes to those factors that can be perceived from that point of view—that is, to social class as refracted through a family structure—what are instead the effects of generic factors influencing every writer in an artistic field that is itself in a subordinate position in the field of power and also the effects specific to all writers who occupy the same position as Flaubert within the artistic field. 1. See Pierre Bourdieu, “Intellectual Field and Creative Project,” trans. Sian France, Social Science Information 8 : 89-119; originally published as “Champ intellectual et projet créateur,” Les Temps moderns no. 246 : 865-906. See also Bourdieu, “Champ du pouvoir, champ intellectual et habitus de classe,” Scolies 1 : 7-26, and Bourdieu, “The Genesis of the Concepts of Habitus and Field,” trans. Channa Newman, Sociocriticism no. 2 : 11-24.2. René Welleck and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature p. 69. Pierre Bourdieu holds the chair of sociology at the Collège de France and is director of the Centre de Sociologie européenne at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Among his most recent works are Distinction , Homo Academicus , and Choses Dites. (shrink)

I will not dwell overlong on the “meaning” of this story. But let me make two essential points. Plato tells us this story as though it were true: it is “a tale which, though passing strange, is yet wholly true.” Those words were to be translated into every language in the world and used to justify the most realistic fantasies. That is quite understandable, for Plato’s story started something new. With a perversity that was to ensure him great success, Plato (...) had laid the foundations for the historical novel, that is to say, the novel set in a particular place and a particular time. We are now quite accustomed to historical novels, and we also know that in every detective story there comes a moment when the detective declares that real life is not much like what happens in detective stories; it is far more complicated. But that was not the case in the fourth century B.C. Plat’s words were taken seriously, not by everyone, but by many, down through the centuries. And it is not too hard to see that some people continue to take them seriously today.As for the “meaning,” following others and together with others, I have tried elsewhere to show that essentially it is quite clear: the Athens and Atlantis of ancient lore represent the two faces of Plato’s own Athens. The former, the old primordial Athens, is what Plato would have liked the city of which he was a citizen to be; the latter is what Athens was in the age of Pericles and Cleon, an imperialistic power whose very existence constituted a threat to other Greek cities. Pierre Vidal-Naquet is director of the Centre Louis Gernet de Recherches Comparées sure les Sociétés Anciennes at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His most recent publications are the second volume of Les Juifs, la mémoire et le present , La Grèce ancienne 1: Du mythe à la raison, with Jean-Pierre Vernant , and La Démocratie grecque vue d’ailleurs . Among his works to have appeared in English are Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, with Jean-Pierre Vernant , and The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World . Janet Lloyd is a supervisor for a number of colleges in Cambridge University, where she gives classes in French language and literature. Among her more recent translations are Yves Mény’s Government and Politics in Western Europe: Britain, France, Italy, West Germany and Marie-Claire Bergère’s Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937 . In progress are translations of works on Shakespeare, Pericles’ Athens, and a historical geography of France. (shrink)

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Professor e Director do Center for India and South Asia na Universidade da Califórnia, Los Angeles (UCLA) desde 2004, fez os seus estudos em Nova Deli, na University of Delhi e na Delhi School of Economics, onde leccionou até 1995. Nessa altura integrou a École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, de Paris, como Directeur d’ Études, e tornou-se, em 2002, Professor na Universidade de Oxford. É também Joint Managing Editor da Indian Economic and (...) Social History Review (No... (shrink)

Reading you, I very quickly realized that you had no serious objections to make to me, as I will try to demonstrate in a moment. So I began to have the following suspicion: what if you had only pretended to find something to reproach me with in order to prolong the experience over several issues of this distinguished journal? That way, the three of us could fill the space of another twenty or so pages. My suspicion arose since you obviously (...) agree with me on this one point, at least: apartheid, the more it’s talked about, the better.But who will do the talking? And how? These are the questions.Because talking about it is not enough. On such a grave subject, one must be serious and not say just anything. Well, you, alas, are not always as serious as the tone of your paper might lead one to think. In your impatient desire to dispense a history lesson, you sometimes say just anything. The effect you produce is quite determined, but in order to arrive at it, you are willing to put forward any kind of countertruth, especially when, in your haste to object, you project into my text whatever will make your job easier. This is a very familiar scenario, as I will try to demonstrate as briefly as possible. Jacques Derrida, Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, is the author of, among other works, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of Philosophy, and Dissemination. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Racism’s Last Word,” appeared in the Autumn 1985 issue. Peggy Kamuf teaches French at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author o Fictions of Feminine Desire. (shrink)