Rethinking the Political demonstrates that the Collège de Sociologie's quest to create a new place for the sacred in modern collective life ostensibly entailed avoiding the theorization of both aesthetics and politics. While the Collège condemned manipulation by totalitarian regimes, its understanding of community also led to a rejection of democratic and communist forms of political organization, leaving the group open to accusations of flirting with fascism. Acknowledging these political ambiguities, the author goes beyond a narrow ideological (...) reading to reveal the Collège's important contribution to our thinking about the relationships between community formation, politics, aesthetics, and the sacred in the modern world. She expands her historical account of the members' thought, including their relationship to Surrealism, beyond the group's dissolution, and shows how the work of Claude Lefort extends, but also resolves, many of the Collège's key theoretical insights. A fascinating study of some of the twentieth-century's most daring thinkers, Rethinking the Political offers crucial insights into the contradictions at play in modern notions of community that still resonate today. (shrink)

The dating of the beginning of the Third Sacred War. The interpretation of the Delphic accounts revisited. The chronology proposed by CID II for the Third Sacred War is not as assured as may appear at first sight. One must keep in mind that the reconstructions proposed there constitute no more than one possibility among others. The numbering of the pylées provides an excellent example : J. Bousquet connects it to the levying of the phocidian fine in the period after (...) the Peace of Philokrates, but other readings remain possible, even preferable. Moreover, the dating of the occupation of the sanctuary to the end of the archonship of Herakleios is based on the testimony of Pausanias, on this point very much subject to caution, as well as a very slanted reading of CID II 10 and CID II 31. Only the absence of a reunion of the college under Aristoxenos in the autumn appears to constitute a certain indicator of the phocidian occupation of the sanctuary. (shrink)

The Predicament of Culture is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, James Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in post-colonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance: Who has the authority to speak for any group’s identity and authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a (...) culture? How do self and “the other” clash in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations? In chapters devoted to the history of anthropology, Clifford discusses the work of Malinowski, Mead, Griaule, Lévi-Strauss, Turner, Geertz, and other influential scholars. He also explores the affinity of ethnography with avant-garde art and writing, recovering a subversive, self-reflexive cultural criticism. The surrealists’ encounters with Paris or New York, the work of Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the Collège de Sociologie, and the hybrid constructions of recent tribal artists offer provocative ethnographic examples that challenge familiar notions of difference and identity. In an emerging global modernity, the exotic is unexpectedly nearby, the familiar strangely distanced. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 3-6MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Whispers of the Flesh Essays in Memory of Pierre KlossowskiIan JamesRussell Ford Pierre Klossowski—novelist, essayist, painter, and translator—was one of the most startling, original, and influential figures in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. The older brother of the well-known painter Balthus and a close associate of Georges Bataille, Klossowski's diverse oeuvre includes novels, philosophical essays, and translations, as well as paintings and films. (...) Confined thus far to an undeserved but somehow fitting shadow existence in the margins and notes of theorists who have become mainstays of Anglo-American criticism, Klossowski's own work has increasingly become a focus of critical interest for its decisive contribution to the development of thought and aesthetics in France from the 1950s onward. Born in 1905, the eldest son of Polish émigrés, Klossowski spent his first ten years in Paris in an artistic milieu, heavily influenced by the neoimpressionism of figures such as Bonnard and Derain. His father, Erich Klossowski de Rola, was a painter and art historian, the author of an important monograph on Daumier. His mother, Baladine, was also a painter and trained under Bonnard. While still a teenager Klossowski was introduced to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom he became close and who in turn introduced him to the novelist André Gide. At eighteen he became Gide's secretary and assisted him with the drafts of his famous novel Les faux-monnayeurs.Not until 1930, however, did Klossowski's own career properly begin, when he translated with Jean-Pierre Jouve a collection of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. Throughout his life Klossowski was a prolific and influential translator from both German and Latin into French, translating amongst others Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein from the German, and Suetonius, Virgil, Augustine, and Tertullian from the Latin. While working for the prominent Parisian psychoanalyst René Laforgue, Klossowski published his first philosophical essay on the Marquis de Sade in 1933 in the Revue française de la psychanalyse. Scandalized by Klossowski's Nietzschean-inflected psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade's writing, Laforgue dismissed Klossowski immediately. Throughout the 1930s Klossowski made a number of key friendships and acquaintances, most importantly with Georges Bataille, but also many others, including Walter Benjamin, André Masson, Jean Wahl, and Maurice Heine. During this period he published several articles and collaborated with Bataille on the review Acéphale and in the avant-garde experiment of the Collège de Sociologie (where, it is said, he would attend meetings dressed in a soutane). During the war years Klossowski trained in a number of Catholic seminaries, a vocation which ultimately failed and led to the writing of his first novel, La vocation suspendue. In the postwar period he married [End Page 3] a war widow, Denise Morin Sinclair, who had been interned in Ravensbrück for her activities in the Resistance and who became the model for Roberte, a key figure in much of Klossowski's fiction and painting. After the war Klossowski began to publish the influential works for which he will chiefly be remembered: literary-philosophical essays on Sade and Nietzsche (among others), as well as six important novels written between 1950 and 1965, La vocation suspendue (1950), the three works, originally published separately, which went on to form the Lois de l'hospitalité trilogy—Roberte ce soir (1954), La révocation de l'Édit de Nantes (1959) and Le souffleur ou le théâtre de société (1960)‚—and, finally, Le Baphomet (1965).Klossowski's seminal 1947 work, Sade mon prochain, was one of the first full-length literary and philosophical studies of Sade's work to be published in France and marked a decisive break from earlier accounts. Whereas earlier treatments of Sade had focused either on biographical detail or on the medical and psychosexual import of his life and writing, Klossowski's reading was concerned with the intertwined figures of law and transgression in Sade's work. After Sade mon prochain French intellectuals and writers... (shrink)

No concept attracted as much controversy, or muddled ideological identifications so thoroughly, as ‘myth’ in interwar France. By the late 1930s, ‘la mythomanie’ was drawing systematic attention from existentialists, Surrealists, ethnologists, sociologists, and nascent fascist movements. This essay reconsiders this polemical and misunderstood moment in interwar thought. It focuses on the intellectuals most central to its notoriety: the members of the Collège de sociologie and their fascination with Georges Sorel. Though interwar mythomania has long been treated as an (...) antiparliamentary cultural politics designed to secure enthusiastic mass conformity, this essay argues that such accounts are incomplete. They misunderstand the deeper philosophical debate unfolding about the conditions of revolutionary agency in a desacralized society. Bringing this debate back into focus helps liberate mythomania from historiographic commonplaces. It emphasizes how, for better or worse, many of those who advocated for new political myths aimed to spur human agency, not confiscate it. (shrink)

The translation of Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle finally provides an English-speaking audience with access to one of the most influential texts in the French Nietzsche tradition. First published in France in 1969, Klossowski's text consummated over three decades of intense work and discussion on Nietzsche's most enigmatic and original ideas. Working with Bataille and the famous College de Sociologie, Klossowski published a series of important studies of Nietzsche culminating in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle which Foucault (...) described in a letter to Klossowski as "the greatest book of philosophy I have read" in addition to Nietzsche himself. Deeply influencing Deleuze, Lyotard, and other major Nietzscheans, Klossowski's work remains a seminal text of the contemporary French reading of Nietzsche. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 119-135MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Evaluating Klossowski's Le BaphometIan JamesLiterature, under historical conditions which are not simply linguistic, has come to occupy a place which is always open to a kind of subversive juridicity. [...] This subversive juridicity supposes that self-identity is never assured or reassuring.—Jacques Derrida, "Préjugés: Devant la loi"The ControversyOn 14 June 1965, Roger Caillois resigned from the jury of the prestigious Prix des Critiques. (...) His resignation was provoked by the majority decision of the jury to award the critics' prize that year to Klossowski's final novel, Le Baphomet.1 Le Baphomet, a singular, Walter Scott-inspired tale about the Knights Templar, is set, initially at least, at the beginning of the fourteenth century just before the dissolution of the Templar Order at the behest of the then French king, Philippe Le Bel. After the historical prologue the action is transferred to a seemingly atemporal sphere, where the disembodied souls of the former Knights Templar await the moment when the Last Judgment will be pronounced and they will be reunited once more with their earthly bodies. The setting, tone, and style are at first gothic, but with the appearance of the disembodied spirit of Saint Teresa of Avila baroque elements begin to dominate and to mix with evocations of Masonic and esoteric ritual, Gnostic heresy, and theological but also philosophical discussion. These are accompanied by the appearance of Philippe le Bel himself and the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche, the "Antichrist," initially in the form of an anteater. With its unorthodox and often archaic vocabulary and syntax and, after the historical prologue, its discontinuous and fantastical narrative presentation, in which the boundaries between persons and identities appear permeable and insecure, Le Baphomet engages the reader in a textual experience that can be both baffling and obscure. It is also a work that can appear to lack any intellectual or formal coherence, one whose multiplicity and evident complexity may seem to promise rich possibilities of interpretation and literary value but whose narrative disorder and stylistic singularity can ultimately leave the reader frustrated with the sense of having been exposed to something of a literary mess.This, at least, was the view of Roger Caillois when he resigned in protest at the decision of the Prix des Critiques jury to confer its honor on Klossowski's novel. Caillois was himself a singular writer whose work can be situated at the intersection of a [End Page 119][Begin Page 120]number of disciplines, including mythology, sociology, aesthetics, biology, and literary criticism. He had known Klossowski since 1936, when they collaborated along with Georges Bataille and others in the antifascist avant-garde grouping Contre-Attaque and then later, again with Bataille, on the review Acéphale and in the Collège de sociologie.2 Defending his resignation from the Prix des Critiques jury a few days after the event, Caillois published an article in Le Monde in which he drew attention to what he saw as Le Baphomet's primary weakness: its poor formal organization and in particular what he perceived as its stylistic insufficiency and grammatical inaccuracy.3 Perhaps with the desire to avoid accusations of prudery or Puritanism he denied that the content of the work was the cause of his disapproval. The infatuation of certain Knights Templar with an adolescent page, Ogier de Beaséant, oblique references to possible acts of sodomy, together with the stylized description of scenes involving mutilation, penetration, and ejaculation are all elements of the narrative. On the content of the work Caillois writes: "Some may see in this a novelistic exposé of an original and subtle theology, others only mystico-pederastic rubbish. For a literary prize I hold solely to the literary value of a work." According to Caillois the content of such a work may be interesting or absurd depending on one's tastes but has nothing to do with its literary value. The invocation of literary value, here, necessarily implies a set of criteria for the judgment of the standing of a work... (shrink)

The article deals with Le Collège de Sociologie, an elective organization founded in 1937 by a group of French thinkers, among whom were Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris. It tries to show how the notion of `force' or of `power', constitutive to the `new mythology' the members of the Collège wanted to create, was in fact deeply ambivalent in nature. This ambivalence can be traced back to the internal ambiguities of the Durkheimian theory of the (...) `collective effervescence', which is shown to have influenced not only the collegians' notion of the sacred, but also their conception of power. This ambiguous theoretical heritage is curiously reflected in the conflicting conceptions Bataille and Caillois held of the notion of power — one of the major controversies, which later led to the dissolution of the Collège. The thesis defended here is that the seeds of this controversy lie already in the internal ambiguities of the Durkheimian theory and that these ambivalences were in a certain manner reproduced not only in the dispute between Caillois and Bataille, but also in much of the contemporary social theory drawing its inspiration from the Durkheimian sociology of the sacred. (shrink)

From starting his intellectual career as a surrealist, communist and co-founder of the Collège de Sociologie in 1937, Jules Monnerot (1911?95) ended it as a candidate for the Front National in 1989.In this article I offer an explanation for the unexpected trajectory of this thinker whose work is little known in the English-speaking world. Without overlooking the idea that the infamous College encouraged such tendencies, I argue that the notion of ?secular religion?, as Monnerot developed it in his (...) Sociology of Communism (1949), goes some way to explain his gradual radicalization from Cold Warrior to fascist, a path that otherwise seems unlikely for a French intellectual after World War II. In order to emphasize the unusualness of Monnerot's case, I contrast it with that of his erstwhile collaborator, Georges Bataille. I show that accusations of fascism often levelled against Bataille should be more accurately directed at Monnerot, indeed that the fascism inherent within the College of Sociology was brought out not by Bataille but by Monnerot. Monnerot's case is unsettling first because his definition of ?secular religion? contributed to his pro-fascist stance; and second, because it forces us tore think what is meant by ?philosophy after Auschwitz.? This term usually brings to mind scholars such as T.W. Adorno, Emil Fackenheimor Emmanuel Levinas. Monnerot provides a rare example of a thinker whose fascism only developed after the Holocaust, a shocking response that demands the attention of all those interested in the relationship between religion and politics. (shrink)

The question arising from this article regards the meaning of sacrifice within the frame of Jan Patočka’s philosophy. Is human sacrifice aimed at reinforcing an institution or state of things as in the case of the Unknown Soldier narrative, or is it rather – as Patočka maintained – an essentially destabilizing deed, which has the power to shatter people’s knowledge and existence? In order to answer this question, I contrast Patočka’s standpoint with those of Émile Durkheim and of the main (...) representatives of the so-called “sacred sociology”: Roger Caillois, Georges Bataille and other members of the Collège de sociologie. In conclusion, I show how Patočka’s approach to the theme of sacrifice helps to understand whether and how a “proper sacrifice” can actually become an instrument of political dissent within human societies. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Cet article part des réflexions sur l'économie politique que Michel Foucault a présentées lors de ses cours au Collège de France dans les années 1977-1979 pour mettre en évidence l'originalité de sa réflexion sur le marché, entendu comme dispositif social de gouvernement des individus en vue d'assurer la sécurité des populations. Dans la deuxième partie, l'article propose un rapprochement de cette réflexion foucaldienne sur l'économie et celle de Max Weber en montrant que les techniques de soí développées par (...) Foucault sont des «méthodiques» et des formes de conduites de vie proches de cellesque Weber a étudiées, notamment dans ses travaux de sociologie de la religion. L'ensemble permet de dégager les pistes d'une histoire, encore inachevée, du comportement économique entendu comme une forme d'ascèse.ABSTRACT: This article deals with Michel Foucault's 1977-79 lectures on political economy. In the first part, we highlight his views on the market, which is equated to a social device instrumental in governing individuals so that they are induced to allow the ruler to reach his goal, which is providing security to the population. In the second part, we consider together Foucault's and Weber's views on the economy, since Foucault's concept of technique of the self is similar to Weber's concept of life conduct, which is central in his sociology of religion. This opens the way to a history of the modern economic behaviour considered as a form of ascetism. (shrink)

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)

De Montesquieu à Posner, de Durkheim à Foucault, la recherche d'un schéma de causalité qui expliquerait synthétiquement les variations entre les systèmes historiques de pénalité sur une échelle unique d’observation est une entreprise ambitieuse à l'intersection de la sociologie du droit et d'une matière peu à peu décriée : la philosophie de l'Histoire. Aujourd'hui, deux corps théoriques complexes et éclatés prétendent au titre de sciences de l'évolution pénale. Le premier est fondé sur une analogie poussée entre évolution culturelle et (...) évolution biologique, et emprunte à l'analyse économique du droit ainsi qu’aux dernières révolutions des sciences naturelles. Le second trouve ses racines dans la pensée marxiste et perçoit le système pénal comme une machine d'oppression qui évolue au gré des passations de pouvoir. Ces deux courants semblent à première vue théoriser l’évolution pénale d’une façon satisfaisante. Mais en imprimant leur volonté normative sur des considérations descriptives, ces doctrines occultent certaines discontinuités historiques et en façonnent d'autres, nous forçant à voir des ruptures matérielles là où il n'y a que des changements d'intention. En voulant présenter une histoire cohérente et intelligible, elles ont délaissé les contradictions et les rouages manquants de l'évolution pénale, tout ce qui, dans cette histoire, ne ressemblait pas à une machine dont les Hommes contrôlent la direction. En rejetant ce paradigme, la forme de l'histoire pénale se métamorphose, sa chronologie se redéfinit, et l’évolution pénale présente des problématiques nouvelles telles la porosité des législations, la concurrence des normes dans la fonction d’exclusion, la persistance des châtiments physiques ou les superpositions identifiables entre histoire juridique, histoire technique et histoire sacrée. (shrink)

Tristan Murail est, avec Gérard Grisey, un des deux grands représentants de ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler la "musique spectrale". L'expression indique une référence constante à la structure microscopique des spectres sonores : c'est la vie intérieure des sons, avec leur harmonicité ou inharmonicité, leurs transitoires d'attaque ou d'extinction, qui constitue chez Murail le modèle par excellence pour construire des formes musicales. Cet ouvrage - le premier entièrement consacré à l'œuvre de Murail - évoque sa situation esthétique face à d'autres (...) courants de la musique d'après 1945. Un long entretien donne la parole au compositeur, pour retracer un parcours qui l'a mené de Messiaen à Scelsi et au-delà, ainsi qu'au pédagogue (Murail enseigne depuis plusieurs années aux Etats-Unis). Une analyse approfondie de l'une de ses pièces marquantes, L'Esprit des dunes, permet d'entrer dans son atelier, de suivre le processus de création qui conduit de l'analyse des sons à l'invention des formes. Enfin, Tristan Murail lui-même revient en détail sur chacune de ses œuvres, nous livrant son regard rétrospectif en un document précieux. (shrink)

"Leçons de Sociologie: Physique des Mœurs et du Droit" d'Émile Durkheim offre une exploration approfondie des concepts sociologiques liés à la moralité, aux mœurs et au droit. En tant que professeur de sociologie à la Sorbonne, Durkheim aborde ces sujets avec une approche empirique et structurale. L'ouvrage se divise probablement en deux parties : la première se concentrant sur la "Physique des Mœurs" et la seconde sur la "Physique du Droit". Dans la première partie, Durkheim analyse la manière (...) dont les normes sociales, les valeurs et les attitudes morales prennent forme au sein d'une société. Il explore les influences sur la moralité collective et examine les mécanismes sociaux qui régissent les comportements individuels. Cette partie vise à offrir une compréhension approfondie de la manière dont la moralité émerge et évolue dans un contexte social. La deuxième partie se concentre sur la "Physique du Droit", examinant la relation entre les normes morales et les systèmes juridiques. Durkheim analyse la façon dont les règles juridiques émergent et interagissent avec la moralité sociale. Il explore la fonction du droit dans le maintien de l'ordre social et de la cohésion, fournissant ainsi une perspective sociologique sur le rôle du système juridique au sein de la société. L'auteur illustre probablement ses idées à l'aide d'exemples concrets, d'études de cas et de données empiriques, offrant ainsi une approche scientifique pour comprendre les phénomènes sociaux. L'ensemble de l'ouvrage contribue à la compréhension sociologique des relations complexes entre la moralité, les comportements sociaux et le système juridique, renforçant ainsi l'héritage intellectuel d'Émile Durkheim dans le domaine de la sociologie. (shrink)

Dans l'ensemble de l'oeuvre de Gurvitch, les Eléments de sociologie juridique (texte de 1940) représentent l'effort de systématisation pour définir et rendre la sociologie du droit méthodique. Selon Gurvitch, la sociologie juridique est l'étude de la réalité sociale qui met en corrélation les espèces de droit avec les différentes formes de sociabilité. Il refuse l'ignorance réciproque entre le droit et la sociologie et développe une sociologie systématique ainsi qu'une sociologie différentielle qui prend en compte (...) les différents groupes sociaux. Ses convictions socialistes transparaissent dans ses écrits puisqu'il privilégie le groupe et la solidarité des groupes face au sujet individuel. Ce réimpression est présentée par François Terré, professeur émérite de l'Université Panthéon-Assas et membre de l'Institut. (shrink)

Résumé Parmi les nouvelles chaires créées au Collège de France au XIXe siècle dans le domaine des langues classiques, apparurent en 1861 et en 1877 l’Épigraphie latine et l’Épigraphie grecque. Il s’agissait de création de chaires. Pour la est conservé un dialogue entre l’Institut, le Collège de France et le ministère de l’Instruction publique, avec l’approbation de l’Empereur. À l’arrière-plan de la création ministérielle, on devine l’ombre de Philippe Le Bas et du projet de Corpus des inscriptions latines (...) organisé selon les normes définies par Theodor Mommsen, qui avait réuni du temps du ministère d’Abel Villemain des Français, des Allemands et des Italiens. Quant à la chaire d’Épigraphie grecque, la seconde, les lettres de justification de sa création en apportent la preuve : elles décrivent l’activité épigraphique telle que les concepteurs du Corpus d’inscriptions berlinois l’imaginaient. (shrink)

Contient le résumé du cours publié dans l'"Annuaire du Collège de France", 76e année, Histoire des systèmes de pensée, année 1974-1975.

This article discusses an important moment in the career of Alexandre Koyré, and the history of philosophy in France. It looks at the 1951 election of a successor to Étienne Gilson at the Collège de France, for which Koyré was one of the possible candidates, alongside Henri Gouhier and Martial Gueroult. Koyré came close, but Gueroult was elected to the chair. In time, Gueroult was succeeded first by Jean Hyppolite and then, in 1970, by Michel Foucault. Using archival documents (...) to discuss the process in detail, this article shows the weakness of Koyré’s proposers, and the strength of Gouhier’s application. Finally, drawing on Koyré’s outline of his proposed teaching programme, it discusses how success might have shaped his future career, using this as an indication of his position within and beyond a French tradition in the philosophy and history of the sciences. (shrink)