Let X be a non-reflexive Banach space such that X ∗ is separable. Let N be the set of all equivalent norms on X , equipped with the topology of uniform convergence on bounded subsets of X . We show that the subset Z of N consisting of Fréchet-differentiable norms whose dual norm is not strictly convex reduces any difference of analytic sets. It follows that Z is exactly a difference of analytic sets when N is equipped with the standard (...) Effros–Borel structure. Our main lemma elucidates the topological structure of the norm-attaining linear forms when the norm of X is locally uniformly rotund. (shrink)

Jean Godefroy Bidima's La Palabre examines the traditional African institution of palaver as a way to create dialogue and open exchange in an effort to resolve conflict and promote democracy. In the wake of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the gacaca courts in Rwanda, Bidima offers a compelling model of how to develop an African public space where dialogue can combat misunderstanding. This volume, which includes other essays on legal processes, cultural diversity, memory, and the internet in (...) Africa, offers English-speaking readers the opportunity to become acquainted with a highly original and important postcolonial thinker. (shrink)

A practice, a technique, an expertise cannot be left unexplored by an account that can explain their basis and organization as well as their objectives. Whether the internet is understood as a practice, or seen as a journey through a space that knows no borders, or cursed as humanity overreaching itself yet again (hybris), nevertheless its reality raises questions about our experience of the world (experimentum mundi) and explores its nature, giving an exact measure, beyond assumptions, of the relationship between (...) humans and machines. With this in mind a multicultural, multidisciplinary study was set up in the USA through the publication of Academy and the Internet, jointly edited by Helen Nissenbaum and Monroe Price (2004). The book sets out to examine the relations between the internet and economic issues, the internet and social problems of equality, politics (the question of public space), the communicative relationship in a virtual world. Interculturally speaking, only the Chinese contribution gives the debate - which is almost tribal since it is American to the core - an off-centre tone. A debate makes statements and analyses, but it also omits and may skate over other perspectives. Africa, which is absent from this debate, almost forces its way in via this paper. What is the position with the relationship between the internet and present-day African experience? Hardly coping as it is with the consequences of the recent introduction of writing, how is Africa experiencing this internet adventure, in which the status of images, words and time seems to be called into question? This brief presentation will look first at the status of technoscience - under which heading the internet is subsumed in Africa - and then at the challenges the internet throws up in the region. Our method will be to examine internet capacities from the viewpoint of oral cultures that are dominated economically. (shrink)

We have never come face to face with ‘Philosophy’, that goddess who was courted, scorned, hated, and betrayed throughout history by those who claimed to represent her - we only come into contact with her officers: philosophers, that is, human beings who exist in an economic context, have religious ideas, support political opinions, find a way through their emotional history, are paid by institutions, fanstasize about a vision of hope, have appetites, can fight, are mad keen to be noticed and (...) recognized and above all frequently make certain types of statements that have claims to validity. So philosophers are not only creatures in history but also historical creatures who interrogate the meaning of the world and particularly their own work. However, one of the tricks of instrumental rationality - if we follow Marx's analysis - is to focus first on the product rather than the producer. This is the basic reason for the fact that a passion for the exegesis of philosophical texts often conceals philosophers’ practices. And this is why - where African philosophers are concerned, and they are not the only ones - people focus first, with benign curiosity, on their books, the theories that they expound and that may provide matter for heated discussion, but questions are hardly ever asked about the stance of African philosophers, in other words, the actual conditions in which their position is created, the particular abilities of African philosophers to achieve their emergence as ‘philosophers’, and their recognition in the international arena. The rhetoric about the acceptance of multi-culturalism argued on the basis of the complexity of present-day societies often hides practices and processes of legitimation that are revealed by their relationship to those two phenomena, economics and the state. The love of little abstractions that philosophy resists in the name of its historical position, the haste with which African philosophers, among others, clamour for recognition from their peers in other cultures are partly intended secretly to conceal their true relationship to money. Not that ‘disinterested’ philosophers ‘in love’ with knowledge do not exist, but we need to recognize that they often fail to say, as Adorno does in Dialectique négative, that ‘philosophy's freedom is simply the ability to allow its non-freedom to be expressed’. The purpose of this article is less to question philosophers’ capacity for knowledge than to urge them to have the courage to proclaim and challenge their non-freedom. (shrink)

With the disenchantment with independence in Africa, economic failure, the crimes of the elites from the independence years, the paralysis of symbolism, and finally the states' loss of dynamism, the 1990s ushered in a so-called phase of democratization. This was about rethinking citizenship and the relationship to politics. This democratization was a response to the notion of diversity. This paper claims that the answer to this diversity issue fell far short of expectations and proceeds different examples taken from social, cultural (...) and political life, including the struggle for recognition and the appearance of terrorist violence in sub-Saharan Africa. Multiparty systems designed to respond to the diversity question produced only many versions of the same by ignoring that true diversity is the encroachment on the same of the strange, the different and the unexpected. (shrink)

This volume explores African philosophies’ expression of transitional acts where thought interacts with history and proposes solutions to problems. Influential thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic engage with the realm of criticism and imagination, public spaces in Africa, and the relationship between historical politics and poetics.

What is palabre? Not only an exchange of words, but also a social drama, a procedure, and set of human interactions. Palabre is therefore a putting into scene, a putting into order, and a putting into words.

La théorie critique qui s’incarne dans plusieurs démarches épistémologiques et politiques, n’est pas un pur produit de consommation académique ni un dogme qui oblige à l’unanimité, mais un « miroir brisé » reflétant nos mondes si éclatés et déformés. Sa mission d’émancipation des années 1930 est sa carte d’identité. Elle poursuit dans les mondes du « Sud » cette mission par des « conversations » sur l’oralité (Benjamin), la crédulité (Adorno/Horkheimer), les utopies des arts (Adorno/Marcuse), les reconnaissances (Honneth) et la (...) place des intellectuels (Adorno, Horkheimer). (shrink)

Taking together place, time and manner, it would be possible to describe the encounter as comprising at least six modes: fragility, temporality, activity, integrity, causality and disparity. The author then explores what is meant by a rationality, and discusses the encounter between legal rationalities in Africa. The suggestion is that the law exists in Africa only in the tension between old and new, imposition and negotiation; the question at issue is the possibility of thinking ‘between-two-realities’, the ‘space-between’.

Reading the vast panorama of the history of Western medicine in general and psychiatry in particular sheds an interesting light not only on social constructions and representations but also on the perception of the Other by the medical institution. Colonial medicine in its struggle - praiseworthy, moreover - against epidemics, presents an interesting case here. We read in the Colonial Medical Archives at Berlin, that a certain Dr Roesener was sent to Kamerun (Cameroon), a German protectorate, to take charge of (...) the eradication of malaria, hookworm (anchylostoma), filariosa and sleeping sickness. But he also found himself faced with mental illnesses and, in his report of October 1909, reported the case of a sick man of the Dwala tribe claiming to be a friend of the Kaiser and presenting all the symptoms of mental illness. A problem of nosography arose - stemming from the cultural perception of an illness and above all of the Other: did this Dwala merit being mad? To understand the meaning of this question, we must return to the German anthropology of the last century, which made a clear distinction between ‘natural people’ (Naturmenschen) and those that were civilized, who were part of Kultur. Moreover, in this report Roesener used the word Naturmenschen to signify the Dwala. In this perspective, as the doctor notes, mental illness was, in the medical teaching of that time, a disturbance of the mind, a malaise of civilization. The prerequisite for being mentally ill was being implicitly part of a civilization. Mental illness was, moreover, translated in German by Geisteskrankheit, in other words, literally, illness of the mind. Now, the ‘natural person’ (the Dwala) has no civilization and in consequence cannot be sick in his mind. And yet he presented all the symptoms which made him a classic mental patient. Could one apply the nosography proper to illnesses stemming from civilization to ‘natural peoples’? Without resolving the problem which his terminological usage posed, Roesener insistently demanded that Berlin send the logistical means to Cameroon to build a lunatic asylum (Irrenhaus). To the problem of mental fragility that was posed came the answer of incarceration in a society that knew nothing of confinement of its ‘mental patients’, the latter often not being considered as inferior. (shrink)

When the “object” gazed at is called Africa and when the gazing subject is Africa, the observer cannot help but conclude that any gaze that is related to Africa is an intersection of gazes calling forth several questions: Who is looking at Africa? What is Africa looking at? Who looks at the one who is looking at Africa? Two problems emerge from this: the identification of the subject, and the discrimination among objects and themes produced by the limited scope of (...) these gazes. If the gaze at (or of) Africa is an intersection of perspectives, these perspectives will only find stability if they are related to the African history that is in the making. This is a plural history, for geographic diversity, and the multiplicity of acting figures and sociopolitical organizations give African history a “changeable and diverse” character. Any evaluation of the relationship of Africans to their history must be an attempt, a sketch that makes no pretense of providing a unique and certain interpretation of the African lived experience (Erlebnis) by implementing the kind of controlling philosophy of history that fixes the beginning, the length, and the order of a people's history. It is more a question of restating, with the uncertainty that characterizes any evaluation of a specific history, the problem of the relationship of African history to its becomings. How, by which conditions and through which actors does this plural history speak its moments of creation today? At its heart, how does it articulate the conflicting overlap of the gravity of existing institutions and the audacity of creation? The exploration of these questions first centers around the often discussed theme of African identity (self). The stakes at this level involve the detachment of the conditions of a dynamic re-appropriation from this notion of identity - at the very moment when globalization is conjugating itself by turns in the imperative, the indicative, and the conditional. Next, the examination will focus on relationships to otherness (the other). How can intersubjective relations be declined differently? (shrink)

Pt. 1. Rupture entre la tradition et la modernité -- 1. Condorcet -voltaire -- Introduction -- Courage de se servir de son entendement -- La lutte contre le fanatisme -- La conception voltairienne de Dieu -- L'appel à la tolérance -- La passion antireligieuse -- Le rejet de la métaphysique -- La religion comme superstition -- Conclusion -- 2. Joseph de maistre -- Introduction -- Le rappel du caractere protecteur de la tradition -- L'idée d'ordre -- Le providentialisme -- La (...) souveraineté -- La violence réactionnaire -- Le châtiment -- La violence réactionnaire -- Conclusion -- Pt. 2. Depassement de la rupture entre la tradition et la modernite -- 3. Rencontre entre tradition et modernite -- Introduction -- Ratzinger et habermas -- Les mérites de la raison moderne -- Rapport entre la raison et la foi -- Rejet de la double pathologie -- Ratzinger et kant -- Fécondité de la raison moderne -- Rencontre foi et raison -- Conclusion -- Pt. 3. Continuite entre la tradition et la modernite -- 4. Paul ricoeur -- Introduction -- Le champ hermeunetique de paul ricoeur -- Le champ herméneutique -- L'interprétation -- Le concept de tradition et la fecondite du champ hermeneutique ricoeurien -- Le concept de tradition -- Fécondité du système herméneutique de Ricoeur. (shrink)

Analyse de l'herméneutique du mouvement, ainsi que de son imprégnation dans la philosophie occidentale moderne, notamment en utilisant les figures centrales de Bachelard et de Merleau-Ponty. Les contributions tentent de mettre au jour les rapports qu'entretiennent imagination et mouvement, images dynamiques et schèmes moteurs.

A playful, personal, and profound interview with Gilles Deleuze, covering topics from “Animal” to “Zigzag.” Although Gilles Deleuze never wanted a film to be made about him, he agreed to Claire Parnet's proposal to film a series of conversations in which each letter of the alphabet would evoke a word: From A to Z. These DVDs, elegantly transtlated and subtitled in English, make these conversations available for English-speaking audiences? for the first time. In dialogue with Parnet, the philosopher (...) exhibited the modest and thrilling transparency that his seminal works reveal. The sessions were taped when Deleuze was already terminally ill; he and Parnet agreed that the film would not be shown publicly until after his death. The awareness of mortality floats through the dialogues, making them not just intellectually stimulating but also emotionally engaging. Because Parnet knew Deleuze so well, she was able to draw him out—as no one else had—to what might be the 1001st plateau: a place of brilliance, rigor, and charm. In “A as in Animal,” for example, Deleuze vents his hatred of pets: “A bark,” he declares, “really seems to me the stupidest cry.” Instead, he praises the tick: “... in a nature teeming with life, [the tick] extracts three things”: light, smell, and touch. This, he claims, in a sense is philosophy. “And that is your life's dream?” Parnet wryly asks. “That's what constitutes a world,” he replies. For Deleuze, doing philosophy meant not just creating concepts but living a life in philosophy. Gilles Deleuze from A to Z presents the mind of a great philosopher at work. (shrink)

"Gill's and Ryan's Parmenides is, simply, superb: the Introduction, more than a hundred pages long, is transparently clear, takes the reader meticulously through the arguments, avoids perverseness, and still manages to make sense of the dialogue as a whole; there is a fine selective bibliography; and those parts of the translation I have looked at in detail suggest that it too is very good indeed." --Christopher Rowe, _Phronesis_.

Suggests an open system of psychological exploration to cut through accepted norms of morality, language, and politics.

Le livre que j'ai fait, ce n'est pas l'histoire de la philosophie, c'est un livre que j'aurai voulu faire avec0 (Michel Foucault), avec l'idée que j'ai de lui et mon admiration pour lui. Si ce livre avait pu avoir une valeur poétique, ç'aurait été ce que les poètes appellent un "tombeau". Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers.

Until recently, cognitive science focused on such mental functions as problem solving, grammar, and pattern-the functions in which the human mind most closely resembles a computer. But humans are more than computers: we invent new meanings, imagine wildly, and even have ideas that have never existed before. Today the cutting edge of cognitive science addresses precisely these mysterious, creative aspects of the mind.The Way We Think is a landmark analysis of the imaginative nature of the mind. Conceptual blending is already (...) widely known in research laboratories throughout the world; this book, written to be accessible to both lay readers and interested scientists, is its definitive statement. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner show that conceptual blending is the root of the cognitively modern human mind, and that conceptual blends themselves are continually combined and reblended to create the rich mental fabric in which we live.The Way We Think shows how this blending operates; how it is affected by (and gives rise to) language, identity, culture, and invention; and how we imagine what could be and what might have been. The result is a bold and exciting new view of how the mind works. (shrink)

In this unconventional article, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg conduct a three-way ‘conversation’ in which they all take turns outlining how they understand the relationship among postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism. It begins with a short introduction, and then Ros, Sarah and Catherine each define the term they have become associated with. This is followed by another round in which they discuss the overlaps, similarities and disjunctures among the terms, and the article ends with how each one (...) understands the current mediated feminist landscape. (shrink)

Entretien avec Philippe Birden réalisé le samedi 25 mars 2017 par Gilles Plunian ergonome et membre de l'observatoire du temps. Gilles Plunian : Bonjour Philippe Birden pouvez-vous nous présenter les grandes lignes de votre parcours de cadre manager, au cours duquel vous avez été amené à intégrer et à réfléchir sur la question du temps? Philippe Birden : J'ai passé l'essentiel de ma vie dans la banque de particuliers au départ, puis d'entreprises, avec une spécialité qui était le (...) financement de la - Management – Nouvel article. (shrink)

This brilliant exposition of the critique of identity is a classic in contemporary philosophy and one of Deleuze's most important works. Of fundamental importance to literary critics and philosophers,Difference and Repetition develops two central concepts—pure difference and complex repetition&mdasha;and shows how the two concepts are related. While difference implies divergence and decentering, repetition is associated with displacement and disguising. Central in initiating the shift in French thought away from Hegel and Marx toward Nietzsche and Freud, _Difference and Repetition_ moves deftly (...) to establish a fundamental critique of Western metaphysics. (shrink)

A fascinating anthology of texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. "One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian," Michel Foucault once wrote. This book anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966, belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze's last book, Critique and Clinic. But philosophy clearly predominates in the rest of the book, with sharp (...) appraisals of the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza, Bergson. More surprising is his acknowledgement of Jean-Paul Sartre as his master. "The new themes, a certain new style, a new aggressive and polemical way of raising questions," he wrote, "come from Sartre." But the figure of Nietzsche remains by far the most seminal, and the presence throughout of his friends and close collaborators, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The book stops shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, and presents a kind of genealogy of Deleuze's thought as well as his attempt to leave philosophy and connect it to the outside—but, he cautions, as a philosopher. (shrink)

Praised for its rare combination of scholarly rigor and imaginative interpretation, _Nietzsche and Philosophy_ has long been recognized as one of the most important analyses of Nietzsche. It is also one of the best introductions to Deleuze's thought, establishing many of his central philosophical positions. In _Nietzsche and Philosophy_, Deleuze identifies and explores three crucial concepts in Nietzschean thought-multiplicity, becoming, and affirmation-and clarifies Nietzsche's views regarding the will to power, eternal return, nihilism, and difference. For Deleuze, Nietzsche challenged conventional philosophical (...) ideas and provided a means of escape from Hegel's dialectical thinking, which had come to dominate French philosophy. He also offered a path toward a politics of difference. In this new edition, Michael Hardt's foreword examines the profound influence of Deleuze's provocative interpretations on the study of Nietzsche, which opened a whole new avenue in postwar thought. (shrink)

In this extraordinary work Gilles Deleuze reflects on one of the figures of the past who has most influenced his own sweeping reconfiguration of the tasks of philosophy.

Christopher Gill offers a new analysis of what is innovative in Hellenistic--especially Stoic and Epicurean--philosophical thinking about selfhood and personality. His wide-ranging discussion of Stoic and Epicurean ideas is illustrated by a more detailed examination of the Stoic theory of the passions and a new account of the history of this theory. His study also tackles issues about the historical study of selfhood and the relationship between philosophy and literature, especially the presentation of the collapse of character in Plutrarch's Lives, (...) Senecan tragedy, and Virgil's Aeneid. As all Greek and Latin is translated, this book presents original ideas about ancient concepts of personality to a wide range of readers. (shrink)

Ce n'est pas le moindre des mérites de la pensée de Gilles Deleuze que de penser l'individuation de l'art sous le signe d'une logique du sensible où esthétique et clinique sont en présuppositions réciproques. En explorant les coupes et les tensions névralgiques qui irriguent cette logique, les études ici réunies trouvent leur commune impulsion dans le souci de remettre en chantier la cartographie deleuzienne des arts, et d'interroger les écarts et les résonances internes qui l'animent. La spécificité de cet (...) ouvrage est de croiser non seulement des lectures d'éminents spécialistes de la philosophie de Gilles Deleuze, venant sonder à nouveaux frais son rapport singulier aux variations du sensible, mais aussi des contributions de théoriciens de la théorie littéraire, de la musique, du cinéma ou encore de l'histoire de l'art, réinterrogeant depuis leur point de vue une pensée de la création dont on ne mesure pas encore pleinement la puissance et la fécondité. (shrink)

Comprendre les origines de l’informatique demande de s’intéresser à quatre concepts fondamentaux : ceux d’algorithme, de machine, d’information et de langage. De leur combinaison naît cette science nouvelle qu’est l’informatique.

"Mille Plateaux (Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1980) est le second des deux volumes ayant pour sous-titre Capitalisme et schizophrénie issu de la collaboration entre le philosophe Gilles Deleuze et le philosophe et psychanalyste Félix Guattari. Cet ouvrage continue à explorer par des voies inédites - en s'attaquant notamment à une série d'erreurs afférentes selon les auteurs à l'arborescence, à l'État, au langage... - la question déjà avancée dans L'Anti-Œdipe (premier volume) d'une ontologie révolutionnaire des devenirs ("presque imperceptibles") qui ne (...) cessent de défaire l'histoire des identités ("primauté des lignes de fuite") et de produire des "coups" imprévisibles au sociologue et au militant. Sans doute le livre politique de Deleuze et Guattari le plus important, grâce à sa conception originale du pluralisme (l'individu n'y est pas conçu comme fondement de l'organisation sociale : les subjectivités sociales sont toujours au-dessus ou en dessous du niveau de l'individu, composant et décomposant des collectivités de toutes sortes)"--Wikipedia = Mille Plateaux (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980) is the second of two volumes which comes in the series of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a result of collaboration between the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, philosopher and psychoanalyst. This book continues to explore new paths - including addressing a series of errors by the authors related to the tree, the state, the language... - that are already dealt with in Anti-Oedipus (first volume) of an ontology of revolutionary futures; the latter continues to unravel the history of identities ("primacy of lines of flight") and produce "coups" unforeseeable to the sociologist and activist. No doubt the political book of Deleuze and Guattari's is the most important, with its original conception of pluralism (the individual is not conceived as the foundation of social organization: social subjectivities are always above or below of the individual level, composing and decomposing communities of all kinds).". (shrink)

1. Pourquoi un volume sur les travaux de Gilles Fauconnier? La disparition de Gilles Fauconnier il y a deux ans a révélé un paradoxe scientifique et académique surprenant : alors que Fauconnier est aujourd’hui une référence internationale incontournable dans le domaine de la linguistique cognitive et plus largement des sciences de la cognition, ses travaux ont été peu publiés et mal diffusés en France, ce qui fait de lui un auteur relativement méconnu. Le développement de la linguistique cognitive (...) au niveau international doit effectivement beaucoup aux travaux de G. Fauconnier, mais la réception en France de la Théorie des Espaces Mentaux et du _Blending_ reste malgré tout trop modeste. En dehors des activités de l’Association Française de Linguistique Cognitive, qui avait invité G. Fauconnier lors du colloque de 2009 à Paris Nanterre, ce sont paradoxalement les conférences de Mark Turner au Collège de France en 2000 qui semblent avoir fait davantage connaitre leurs théories. La popu... (shrink)

Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between philosophy, science, and the arts - seeing each as a means of confronting chaos - and challenge the common view that philosophy is an extension of logic. The authors also discuss the similarities and distinctions between creative and philosophical writing. Fresh anecdotes from the history of philosophy illuminate this book, along with engaging discussions of composers, painters, writers, and architects.