Ce travail opère une relecture de deux textes de jeunesse de Th. W. Adorno dans l’optique d’une réévaluation de leur importance pour son œuvre ultérieure, en particulier pour sa philosophie de l’histoire. Ces deux textes, dans lesquels est défini le concept d’interprétation philosophique de l’histoire, ou Deutung, seront abordés à partir d’une question issue des philosophies de l’histoire classiques du xixe siècle, celle du lien entre cette interprétation philosophique et une expérience commune de l’histoire. Nous montrerons que, loin de pouvoir (...) constituer un programme univoque pour la suite de la philosophie adornienne, ces textes de jeunesse sont au contraire travaillés par une ambiguïté. Fondamentale pour toute la philosophie adornienne de l’histoire, cette ambiguïté prend place entre un fondement méthodologique de la Deutung et la tentative de l’originer au contraire dans une expérience dialectique de la réalité historique. (shrink)

Chris Fujiwara _Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall_ Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001 ISBN 0-8018-6561-1 xii + 328 pp.

The belated genre classification, “film noir,” is a contested one, much more so than “Western” or “musical.”2 However, there is wide agreement that there were many stylistic conventions common to the new treatment of crime dramas prominent in the 1940s: grim urban settings, often very cramped interiors, predominantly night time scenes, and so-called “low key” lighting and unusual camera angles.3 But there were also important thematic elements in common.Two are especially interesting. First, noirs were almost always about crime, usually murder, (...) often cold-blooded, well-thought-out murder. Even more surprisingly, the larger social context for such deeds, the historical American world in which they take place, was itself just as bleak, amoral, and ugly as the individual deeds and the characters themselves. Secondly, and perhaps most distinctively, many films challenged, in sometimes startling ways, many of our most familiar assumptions about psychological explanation. In ways that seemed both mysterious and credible, characters who had been righteous, stable, and paragons of responsibility all their adult lives were seamlessly and quite believably transformed in a few seconds into reckless, dangerous, and even murderous types, all suggesting that anyone, in the right (or wrong) circumstances, was capable of almost anything, and that one’s own sincere avowals of basic principles could be ludicrously self-deceived.4 This last theme—that a virtuous character can be as much a matter of moral luck (of having avoided by mere chance the particular temptation that would reveal the fragility of one’s principles) as an individual accomplishment—is connected with an even larger philosophical issue. (shrink)

Introduction -- Trapped by oneself in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the past -- "A deliberate, intentional fool" in Orson Welles's The lady from Shanghai -- Sexual agency in Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street -- "Why didn't you shoot again, baby?": concluding remarks.

[Esotericism. One-day Workshop about the Annale n. 25 of the Storia d'Italia Einaudi]. This section contains the proceedings of the one-day workshop on the book Esoterismo, published as the Annale n. 25 in the collection "History of Italy" by Einaudi. The workshop was organized by ISPF on the October 26, 2011 to promote the discussion on the significance of Western esotericist traditions in Italian history. S. Caianiello’s introduction highlights some major concepts and goals of the recent field of studies about (...) Western Esotericism, and some open problems about its definition. M. Cambi comments on the substantial transformation of esotericist themes in Giordano Bruno’s natural philosophy, whereby the sources of the magician’s power are completely enclosed in the realm of nature, thus rejecting any transcendent foundation. M. Conforti focuses on "the function and opportunities" offered by the Western Esotericism approach "to the genesis and development of early modern science" and comments from this perspective on different contributions in the volume, emphasizing however the importance of largely pre-existing traditions in the history of science and medicine which have long challenged the wiggish separation between science and magic, rational and irrational thought. L. Simonutti provides new material to the general theme, with a historical-philosophical analysis of the esotericist elements in Picart’s iconography of the 18th Century edition of "Cymbalum mundi". F. Sofia discusses the effective role of esotericist traditions in the attempts to establish a "civil religion" in Italy from Risorgimento to Fascism, a history in which, she argues, it is difficult to establish "how much esotericism was an intentional choice or the product of an unavoidable nicodemism". C. Castellano reviews the contributions dedicated to the "political teology" of Italian Risorgimento, dealing in depth with the complex relationship between Freemasonry and Carbonari in Italy – in her view, more of a cultural than of a strictly political connection – and highlights the relevance of the anticurial component in their esotericist inspiration. G.M. Cazzaniga, author and editor of the Annale, beyond reacting to the different stimuli offered by the discussion, provides a brief history of Western Esotericism studies in Europe and of the reasons of their difficult reception in Italy. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage part d'un constat : nul n'est au monde s'il naît au monde. Le dogme de la résurrection des corps restera en ce sens un mot vide tant qu'on ne le rapportera pas philosophiquement à un mode de l'expérience : la naissance. Nicodème, déjà, en avait interrogé le sens : " Comment un homme peut-il une seconde fois entrer dans le ventre de sa mère et naître? " Confrontée à la philosophie contemporaine, une phénoménologie de la naissance corporelle (...) fera donc office de paradigme à une théologie de la renaissance spirituelle et charnelle. Car la " Résurrection change tout " en christianisme - monde et temps bien sûr, mais aussi notre propre corps transformé dans la figure du Christ transfiguré. Puissions-nous alors en recevoir la forme pour en être " in-formé ", puisque de la manière dont aujourd'hui je vis mon corps dépend la façon dont demain je ressusciterai charnellement en Dieu. De " l'analytique christique de l'angoisse, de la souffrance et de la mort ", ce livre passe, comme en un second volet pouvant être lu indépendamment du premier, à " l'analytique de la résurrection comme mode d'être de la naissance ". Ce dont le Fils pâtit, il en opère ici le passage vers son Père qui, dans la force de l'Esprit, en accomplit pour nous la métamorphose. (shrink)

Shutter Island is a much-criticized and highly debated film. Scorsese, in fact, has been accused of distorting the facts and altering his historical sources. The depictions we see of the Holocaust are false, not based on visual documents, a mix of incompatible evidences and iconographies, an amalgam of irreconcilable informations and representations. The director has created a visual style and a sound design that vacillate between thriller and horror, drama and fantasy, while betraying the medial transparency of the reconstruction and (...) the ethical responsibility of interpretation. The viewer sees and believes in the images of the concentration camp of Dachau which are, in reality, dialectical imaginings of another scene: in these images, constructed according to the clinical and critical vision of Scorsese as cinephile, the past and the repressed return in the present. In our present too. On the one hand, in fact, the viewer participates empathically in the mental images relived and suffered by the protagonist in his post-traumatic hallucinations; on the other hand, the viewer is prompted to recall the pictures quoted or paraphrased from the archives of the imagery of cinema and of the photojournalism of war–in which Pontecorvo, Resnais, Fuller, George Stevens and John Huston live side by side with the RKO horror films of Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson. For Scorsese, the images of the violence of war and of the horror of extermination cannot be linked to an origin or past that have definitively been concluded. They are more than recorded pictures or concrete evidences: they are clues and symptoms. They come from a conflictual and endless descent of which cinema is the living and ambiguous memory; they are the open wounds of an original struggle between human and inhuman and of man–they still survive, here and now. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 263 Blaise Pascal, Pensdes sur la Religion et sur quelques autres su/ets. Edited by Jean Steinmann. (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1961. Pp. 505 + tables and 3 portraits of Pascal. 16.80 N.F.) This edition of the Pensdes by the late Abb~ Steinmann claims to be the first to utilize the radical discoveries of Tourneur and Lafuma and to incorporate the revisions of the text resulting from (...) their work, while presenting a readable Pascal, unencumbered by tons of erudition. The achievement of Tourneur and Lafuma is one of the most remarkable of modern scholarship. They have shown that the standard text of Pascal was not that which the author left to posterity, and that the manuscript copy (not in Pascal's hand) in the Biblioth~que National, 9203, preserves Pascal's original organization to the extent that he had completed his work, and preserves Pascal's order of the remaining fragments; whereas the holograph manuscript, BN.9202, represents a posthumous ordering of the materials from the early eighteenth century. On the basis of a really fantastic amount of detailed analysis of the paper, the ink, the glue, etc., Tourneur and Lafuma have brought about a monumental revision of the text of one of France's major classics, three centuries after the author's death. It is now finally possible, after a wide variety of reconstructions over a period of almost 300 years since the first edition of the Pensdes, to read the work as Pascal left it, and to see it in the form that Pascal had given it. The revised edition put out by I.afuma in 1951 was primarily a scholar's edition, incorporating all the details that were vital in convincing people that BN.Ms.9203 was the correct text, and that it contained a mine of information about variants. The present edition by Steinmann is an attempt to present the revised text without all of the encumbrances of scholarship, thereby preserving the Pens~es as a readable document. This edition is elegantly printed, following the main classifications of the Lafuma edition, with some of the variants appearing in the margins, and lots of notes in the back giving translations of Biblical and other texts, and some relevant data. In some of the sections the order of the Pens~es differs to some extent from Lafuma's text, and no explanation is offered for the variation. The excellent printing, separation of variants from text, and the absence of footnotes certainly make Steinmann's edition easily readable. The volume includes a section of personal notes of Pascal not intended for publication ("The Memorial," "Mystery of Jesus," and other items), twenty-seven sections classified by Pascal, and the unclassified Pens~es, given in the order of BN.Ms.9203 (excluding the sections on miracles, on the grounds that these were not intended as part of the same work). One grave difficulty in using any of the revised editions is that of locating passages known according to their numbers in the Brunschvicg edition. Stcinmann offers a concordance which is only partially helpful, giving the pages in his edition on which the Brunschvicg items appear. This makes it difficult to identify the Brunschvicg equivalent of one of Steinmann's passages, but not vice versa. This problem, and several others, have been solved in a more recent edition done by Lafuma (Pascal, Oeuvres completes, Macmillan, 1963). Lafuma has presented the text with each pens~e having two numbers, its new one as it appears in the revised text and its Brunschvicg number. (Thus the crucial text on the Wager is now 418-233. Steinmann did not number the individual pens~es.) The variants are given in parentheses in italics, and other features of the author's original are preserved without causing confusion or clutter. On the whole, if one wants to read the "new" Pensdes, with enough additional data, guidelines, and the like, this most recent Lafuma edition seems preferable to Steinmann's because it is more scholarly, and yet easier to follow with the notes, the variants and the numbers 264 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY right at hand, without getting in the way. If it had been printed in... (shrink)

The Modern Library, which used for its 1941 monolingual edition of the combined Pensées and Provincial Letters the Trotter translation of the former work, has chosen for this bilingual edition of the Pensées the artful translation of H. F. Stewart. The work is divided by Stewart into a major Apology and chronologically arranged Adversaria which he considers to lie outside the scope of the original work. Stewart's scholarly introduction surveys both the incredibly confused situation of existing manuscripts and the evolution (...) of Pascal's thought. Stewart has arranged the material in accordance with Pascal's own plan, which was reconstructed by Filleau de la Chaise and by Pascal's nephew the abbé Périer. One could argue, as does Brunschvicg, whose own arrangement reveals a prime consideration of accessibility to the modern reader rather than historical accuracy, that the authority of Filleau de la Chaise and the abbé Périer is indeed questionable. For their reconstruction of the plan was made some eight years after Pascal had announced it in a lecture at Port Royal in 1658. Moreover, this initial arrangement could not take into account modifications made while writing during the last four years of the author's life. Stewart has nevertheless relied on both the Brunschvicg facsimile of the autographed manuscript and the Tourneur reading of the First Copy, and has consulted several editions of the Pensées. The result is certainly the best edition in English of this momentous work. Stewart's translation is superb, reproducing eloquently Pascal's paradoxical, contrapuntal phrases without losing any of his delightfully subtle wit.—C. M. R. (shrink)

The Modern Library, which used for its 1941 monolingual edition of the combined Pensées and Provincial Letters the Trotter translation of the former work, has chosen for this bilingual edition of the Pensées the artful translation of H. F. Stewart. The work is divided by Stewart into a major Apology and chronologically arranged Adversaria which he considers to lie outside the scope of the original work. Stewart's scholarly introduction surveys both the incredibly confused situation of existing manuscripts and the evolution (...) of Pascal's thought. Stewart has arranged the material in accordance with Pascal's own plan, which was reconstructed by Filleau de la Chaise and by Pascal's nephew the abbé Périer. One could argue, as does Brunschvicg, whose own arrangement reveals a prime consideration of accessibility to the modern reader rather than historical accuracy, that the authority of Filleau de la Chaise and the abbé Périer is indeed questionable. For their reconstruction of the plan was made some eight years after Pascal had announced it in a lecture at Port Royal in 1658. Moreover, this initial arrangement could not take into account modifications made while writing during the last four years of the author's life. Stewart has nevertheless relied on both the Brunschvicg facsimile of the autographed manuscript and the Tourneur reading of the First Copy, and has consulted several editions of the Pensées. The result is certainly the best edition in English of this momentous work. Stewart's translation is superb, reproducing eloquently Pascal's paradoxical, contrapuntal phrases without losing any of his delightfully subtle wit.—C. M. R. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 263 Blaise Pascal, Pensdes sur la Religion et sur quelques autres su/ets. Edited by Jean Steinmann. (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1961. Pp. 505 + tables and 3 portraits of Pascal. 16.80 N.F.) This edition of the Pensdes by the late Abb~ Steinmann claims to be the first to utilize the radical discoveries of Tourneur and Lafuma and to incorporate the revisions of the text resulting from (...) their work, while presenting a readable Pascal, unencumbered by tons of erudition. The achievement of Tourneur and Lafuma is one of the most remarkable of modern scholarship. They have shown that the standard text of Pascal was not that which the author left to posterity, and that the manuscript copy (not in Pascal's hand) in the Biblioth~que National, 9203, preserves Pascal's original organization to the extent that he had completed his work, and preserves Pascal's order of the remaining fragments; whereas the holograph manuscript, BN.9202, represents a posthumous ordering of the materials from the early eighteenth century. On the basis of a really fantastic amount of detailed analysis of the paper, the ink, the glue, etc., Tourneur and Lafuma have brought about a monumental revision of the text of one of France's major classics, three centuries after the author's death. It is now finally possible, after a wide variety of reconstructions over a period of almost 300 years since the first edition of the Pensdes, to read the work as Pascal left it, and to see it in the form that Pascal had given it. The revised edition put out by I.afuma in 1951 was primarily a scholar's edition, incorporating all the details that were vital in convincing people that BN.Ms.9203 was the correct text, and that it contained a mine of information about variants. The present edition by Steinmann is an attempt to present the revised text without all of the encumbrances of scholarship, thereby preserving the Pens~es as a readable document. This edition is elegantly printed, following the main classifications of the Lafuma edition, with some of the variants appearing in the margins, and lots of notes in the back giving translations of Biblical and other texts, and some relevant data. In some of the sections the order of the Pens~es differs to some extent from Lafuma's text, and no explanation is offered for the variation. The excellent printing, separation of variants from text, and the absence of footnotes certainly make Steinmann's edition easily readable. The volume includes a section of personal notes of Pascal not intended for publication ("The Memorial," "Mystery of Jesus," and other items), twenty-seven sections classified by Pascal, and the unclassified Pens~es, given in the order of BN.Ms.9203 (excluding the sections on miracles, on the grounds that these were not intended as part of the same work). One grave difficulty in using any of the revised editions is that of locating passages known according to their numbers in the Brunschvicg edition. Stcinmann offers a concordance which is only partially helpful, giving the pages in his edition on which the Brunschvicg items appear. This makes it difficult to identify the Brunschvicg equivalent of one of Steinmann's passages, but not vice versa. This problem, and several others, have been solved in a more recent edition done by Lafuma (Pascal, Oeuvres completes, Macmillan, 1963). Lafuma has presented the text with each pens~e having two numbers, its new one as it appears in the revised text and its Brunschvicg number. (Thus the crucial text on the Wager is now 418-233. Steinmann did not number the individual pens~es.) The variants are given in parentheses in italics, and other features of the author's original are preserved without causing confusion or clutter. On the whole, if one wants to read the "new" Pensdes, with enough additional data, guidelines, and the like, this most recent Lafuma edition seems preferable to Steinmann's because it is more scholarly, and yet easier to follow with the notes, the variants and the numbers 264 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY right at hand, without getting in the way. If it had been printed in... (shrink)

A pioneering study that illuminates the connection of music, poetry, mystical praxis and social history underlying the ceremony of the Mevlevi Dervishes. Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, whose life and mystical poetry provided the inspiration for the Mevlevi Sufi order, is one of the world's best-known poets, yet the centuries-long musical tradition cultivated by the Mevleviye remains much less known. In this deeply researched book, renowned scholar Walter Feldman traces the historical development of Mevlevi music and brings to light the remarkable musical (...) and mystical aesthetics of the Mevlevi ayin - the instrumental and vocal accompaniment to the sublime ceremony of the 'Whirling' Dervishes. (shrink)