In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Adventures of Telemachus [1699] by François de Salignac de la Mothe-FénelonJean–Michel RacaultFrançois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon. The Adventures of Telemachus [1699]. Translated with an introduction and notes by A. J. B. Cremer. London, Anastasis Books, 2022, 419 pp. Hardbound £24.50. Paperback £15. ISBN: 9781739798314.Fénelon’s 1699 novel The Adventures of Telemachus—or more precisely, the epic poem in prose—was one of the major bestsellers in many European countries (...) for nearly two centuries. The book inspired paintings, operas, fashions, and even wallpaper motifs. It gave birth to a literary subgenre, the “archeological novel,” such as Terrasson’s Sethos (1731) or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s L’Arcadie (1788), in which the action is located in an antique setting. Still part of French schools’ syllabi a century ago, this book mainly owes its survival today to highly specialized academic research, stimulated from time to time when an “Agrégation” program generates new publications, papers, and conferences, as happened in 2009–10. The situation is similar in English-speaking countries, if perhaps just a bit worse: new editions are scarce and generally based more or less on revised versions of eighteenth-century translations, such as those editions by John Hawkesworth’s (1768) or Tobias Smollett’s (1776).The publication by A. J. B. Cremer of an entirely new translation, featuring a close rendering of the French text into modern English and preserving the original’s formal dignity without resorting to a pastiche of the classical language, is therefore a landmark in the history of Fénelon’s reception, and in the valuation of Telemachus particularly. This edition, while intended for the general reader, includes most of what is expected of a scholarly edition. In a comparatively short introduction, the editor recalls the essential facts about the author’s background (as a descendent of high nobility) and about his ecclesiastic career, which was compromised by both his involvement in mystical spirituality (the quarrel over Quietism) and his critical attitude toward the absolutism of Louis XIV’s régime. [End Page 140]In fact, Fénelon’s appointment as Archbishop of Cambrai (1695) was a kind of exile. In 1689, however, he was appointed tutor to Louis XIV’s seven-year-old grandson, the young Duke of Burgundy, second in the line of succession to the throne after his father (though both died prematurely). Fénelon wrote for this boy The Adventures of Telemachus as an educative fiction in the tradition of the “mirrors of Princes.” Of course, such a book was not intended for publication, and when it appeared in 1699—strangely enough, in a fully legal manner and with a printing privilege—it was against Fénelon’s will and in a very faulty form, which was corrected in later editions. An editor today therefore faces solving some highly complex textual problems, and choosing between the manuscript traditions. Cremer’s translation is based upon Jacques Le Brun’s authoritative text, published in Fénelon’s Œuvres, tome II (Paris: Gallimard, “Pléiade,” 1997).1After surveying the critical reception of Telemachus, particularly in England, starting at the text’s first publication and reaching the present time, the introduction discreetly hints at an apparent trend, among some interpretations, toward Christian allegory. If the figure of Mentor obviously “represents Fénelon” in his tutorial role, Cremer notes, this character, also an incarnation of Minerva, embodies humanity and divinity simultaneously, and thus may be seen as a “Christ-figure,” with Telemachus as his disciple and Ulysses, with his pursuit of a never-ending quest, as the symbolic form of the Divine. These observations are not entirely new; they have been formulated before by various critics. The editor himself concurs with a well-known article by André Blanc that describes Fénelon’s neo-platonician turn of mind: for Fénelon there is no contradiction between Christian revelation and the pagan fables of classical mythology, which he considers prefigurations or allegories of Christianity.This interpretation is abundantly and convincingly confirmed in the editor’s annotations. While as expected the commentaries point frequently to Greco-Latin mythology or classical literary sources... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Trois récits utopiques classiques: Gabriel de Foigny, La Terre Australe connue; Denis Veiras, Histoire des Sévarambes; Bernard de Fontenelle, Histoire des Ajaoïens ed. by Jean-Michel RacaultAndrew CremerJean-Michel Racault, ed. Trois récits utopiques classiques: Gabriel de Foigny, La Terre Australe connue; Denis Veiras, Histoire des Sévarambes; Bernard de Fontenelle, Histoire des Ajaoïens. Saint-Denis (La Réunion): Presses Universitaires Indianocéaniques. 2020. 539 pp., illus. Paperback, €16. ISBN: 978 2 490596 (...) 24 9.M. Jean-Michel Racault, Emeritus Professor of the University of La Réunion and general editor of the Œuvres complètes of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in progress under the Classiques Garnier imprint, is an acknowledged expert in utopian studies, and works edited and presented by him in this field will be justly welcomed with keen interest and appreciation. It inspires confidence [End Page 168] that this edition should be the fruit of many years’ study and find its origins in his two theses of 1981 and 1987 and articles of 1991, 2003, and 2010 (21 n. 21). The blurb announces this volume as bringing together “three major works of political thought of the end of the seventeenth century representative of ‘Louis XIV utopias,’” a label that could be supposed to imply an anti-absolutist outlook in the three writers. But Racault argues that the idea, as put forward by the late Myriam Yardeni in her 1980 study Utopie et révolte sous Louis XIV, that these classical utopias express revolt against the monarchy of Louis XIV should be treated in a nuanced way, even with serious reservations (7, 217–18).Racault writes with impressive depth and clarity and makes a superb guide, yet it by no means follows that these works are easy to interpret. Indeed, part of his achievement is to show they may not be so and to offer evidence to suggest that they may invite “multiple possible readings.” The blurb gives fair warning of irony, ambiguity, and contradictoriness, and states that the utopia of these experimental fictions can be inverted to become an “anti-utopia.” As Racault observes with admirable honesty in his preface, “Ambivalence, uncertainty, and a sense of complexity are in fact characteristics of these utopias, in which one sometimes has the impression that the author develops lines of thought that are ideologically incompatible and does not know himself on which side he stands” (19). Racault exemplifies this paradox by reference to Foigny’s hero, “a Pascalian libertin as well as a Christian deist” (19–20). One might be allowed to object that this is to offer the reader who seeks it no clear utopian vision, and that such ambiguity leads to confusion worse confounded; indeed, I am tempted to wonder if ambiguity here reveals subtlety of thought less than a mere lack of perspicuity. Racault makes the highly important point that a similar duality “penetrates the accounts of Veiras and Fontenelle and prevents one from seeing them as simple preludes to Enlightenment thought” (20). Two more vigorous quotations may suffice to convey the flavor of this argument of duality: “the deism of La Terre Australe connue can also be read as a critique of deism, the [...] democratic humanism of the Histoire des Ajaoïens includes a utilitarian system of colonial domination” (21). Again, “the ‘heliocratic’ Sevarambian system inspired by the empire of the Incas after Garcilaso de la Vega [?1501–36] is essentially a theocratic absolutism in the end not much different from the monarchy of Louis XIV. Ajao, on the other hand, has no monarchy, and no ministers” (460). As to this variety between the texts, another indication is that Foigny’s land is anarchical (but [End Page 169] well ordered!), whereas Veiras’s can be understood as embracing certain policies of Colbert (236 and n. 14, 292 and n. 46), to whose protégé Pierre-Paul Riquet, baron de Bonrepos (1609–80), Veiras’s account is dedicated (231–34, 306–7).This substantial but not overlong volume is tastefully adorned with attractive covers and five splendid and richly annotated plates of maps illustrating the subject of the “Imaginary Voyage” or “Extraordinary Voyage,” a term used in a... (shrink)

Jean-Michel Beaudet est professeur d’ethnomusicologie à l’Université Paris-Nanterre. Spécialiste de la musique et de la danse amérindienne, il a publié en 1997 Souffles d’Amazonie. Les orchestres tule des Wayãpi, accompagné d’un CD qui restitue les enregistrements pratiqués lors de son séjour auprès des Wayãpi, et en 2010 Nous danserons jusqu’à l’aube. Essai d’ethnologie mouvementée en Amazonie, Paris, CTHS. Plus récemment, il a fait paraître Jouer, danser, boire. Carnets d’ethnographies musicales aux Éditions de l’EHESS, 2017, qui mêle réflexions sur la pratique (...) de l’ethnologie et souvenirs relatifs à son travail de terrain, qu’il conçoit moins comme une étude sur qu’une pratique avec les personnes rencontrées lors de ses différents voyages au Brésil (1975), en Guyane (1977-2023), en Nouvelle-Calédonie (1984-1988) – qui certes n’est pas en Amazonie – puis en Bolivie (1992-1998). (shrink)

The financial sector likes to call itself a "service industry". As such, its role is to guarantee the fluidity of transactions which are essential to economic activity by ensuring the best possible use of available capital. If finance is a service activity, it is important to specify what services it renders, to whom, in return for what, and for what purpose. In the absence of such clarification, finance may slide out of control and be left at the mercy of mass (...) enthusiasm or hysteria. This document, which is the result of work by people who hold senior positions in Geneva's financial sector or are external observers of the financial world identifies the issues and suggests some avenues for possible solutions. (shrink)

Comment comprendre que nous puissions avoir conscience de notre vie affective? Si l’on prend au sérieux les analyses de Michel Henry, cette expérience commune devrait être impossible. Si c’est la vie et l’expérience qui doivent nous servir de guides, alors il faut intégrer les acquis incontournables de la phénoménologie matérielle et la dépasser.

_Melanie Klein and Marcelle Spira: Their Correspondence and Context__ _includes 45 letters Melanie Klein wrote to the Swiss psychoanalyst Marcelle Spira between 1955 and 1960, as well as six rough drafts from Spira. They were discovered in Spira’s library after her death in 2006. As only a few of the letters that Klein wrote to her colleagues have been preserved, this moving, historically important correspondence sheds new light upon the last five years of Klein’s creative life. The common theme of (...) the letters is their discussion of the French translation of _The Psycho-Analysis of Children_ by Boulanger in collaboration with Spira. The translation, first undertaken by Lacan, went through many ups and downs until it was published in 1959 by the Presses Universitaires de France. Klein also discusses her current work, in particular _Envy and Gratitude_. She encourages her pioneering Swiss colleague Spira to be patient in the face of the resistance shown towards Kleinian thinking. Identifying herself to some extent with her younger follower, Klein reveals a very touching autobiographical account of the difficulties that she herself had encountered in her work and how she overcame them. In _Melanie Klein and Marcelle Spira: Their Correspondence and Context_, Jean-Michel Quinodoz brings together these important letters. This rare collection of their correspondence is a valuable contribution to the history of psychoanalysis and will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, trainee psychoanalysts and lay readers with an interest in the work of Klein and Spira. (shrink)

La philosophie ne se réduit pas à la pure réflexion ni à la quête d'une sagesse intemporelle. Elle est aussi invention ou création de concepts. Elle s'expose volontiers à traverser le cours des sciences, à inscrire son histoire dans le contrepoint de leurs développements. Quand il se veut ainsi passeur de savoirs, le philosophe expérimente des concepts qui filtrent des interprétations, établissent des relations inattendues, modifient des approches trop abstraites : le temps, l'infini, la matière, le cosmos. L'enquête astrophysique ou (...) les recherches sur le cerveau offrent autant d'occasions de mises en perspective propices à la pédagogie que d'invitations à reconstituer le tissu des idées qui fondent la culture et les idéaux de nos sociétés. Même s'il analyse parfois des méthodes et des paradigmes scientifiques, ce livre ne relève pas de la philosophie des sciences telle que l'Université en définit la discipline. Il entend surtout questionner les conceptions scientifiques du monde qui justifient, transforment ou bouleversent nos croyances, nos comportements et aussi nos décisions. Il témoigne que les seuls savoirs qui vaillent sont toujours déconcertants. (shrink)

L'epoque est troublee: les mutations anthropologiques sont si contraignantes qu'un nouveau concept juridique, la dignite humaine, a fait son apparition. Si le droit en fait un usage intensif, c'est dans la mesure ou face aux exces des Etats criminels comme aux avancees des biotechnologies, il a besoin de fixer les limites entre l'humain et ce qui ne le serait plus. Chacun pressent que la dignite n'est pas une notion objective. Son invention est nouee aux religions monotheistes et aux inflexions que (...) la philosophie d'abord, la psychanalyse ensuite, lui font subir. L'aspect psychanalytique de la dignite humaine sera ici privilegie. Comment la dignite serait-elle compatible avec la sauvagerie de la vie psychique? L'auteur met en tension les travaux de Freud, sur la religion et la culture, avec les ecrits d'Etty Hillesum qui, dans les trois annees precedant son extermination a Auschwitz, se livre a une reflexion, au bord de l'abime, sur la destructivite liee au destin de masse. Grace a la revolution psychique qu'elle effectue, il devient possible de resister en tant qu'individu singulier a l'emprise des masses sur l'esprit, de construire l'humain en chaque homme, rien n'etant acquis a cet egard par la seule appartenance a l'espece humaine. (shrink)

Jean-Michel Vienne; IX*—Locke on Real Essence and Internal Constitution1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 93, Issue 1, 1 June 1993, Pages 139–15.

Cet article décrit les dispositifs psychologiques d’urgence mis en place en France pour prendre en charge les rescapés des attaques terroristes. Ceux-ci comprennent une prise en charge immédiate des victimes, temps d’étayage et de soutien, suivie quelques jours après d’un débriefing ou d’un groupe de paroles. L’auteur rappelle les conséquences psychologiques de l’effraction traumatique, puis rapporte des exemples d’interventions, tant dans l’immédiateté que dans les jours qui suivent. La première action psycho-thérapeutique initiée par ces dispositifs d’urgence est indispensable, mais une (...) attention à plus long terme doit se poursuivre. En effet des troubles psychotraumatiques chroniques peuvent se déclencher chez des rescapés plusieurs années après l’attentat, en particulier lorsqu’un autre se produit, comme cela est illustré par un cas. (shrink)

We seem to be abandoning the codes that told previous generations who they should love. But now that many of us are free to choose whoever we want, nothing is less certain. The proliferation of divorces and separations reveal a dynamic we would rather not see: others sometimes reject us as passionately as we are attracted to them. Our desire makes us sick. The throes of rivalry are at the heart of our attraction to one another. This is the central (...) thesis of Jean-Michel Oughourlian's _The Genesis of Desire_, where the war of the sexes is finally given a scientific explanation. The discovery of mirror neurons corroborates his ideas, clarifying the phenomena of empathy and the mechanisms of violent reciprocity. How can a couple be saved when they have declared war on one another? By helping them realize that desire originates not in the self but in the other. There are strategies that can help, which Dr. Oughourlian has prescribed successfully to his patients. This work, alternating between case studies and more theoretical statements, convincingly defends the possibility that breakups need not be permanent. (shrink)

There are at least two ways to dehumanize the world. The world can be dehumanized from the top or from the bottom. From the bottom up would mean letting a barbaric situation develop which would reduce us to an animal state. From the top down would mean striving to achieve and impose a wisdom appropriate to the angels. Two ways of ruining the sense of what is human. Neither angel nor animal, you will recognize there the ‘in-between’ which is the (...) site of humanity and which it is tempting, when it is threatened, to assert, for in this dehumanizing process - whether this is meant from the top or the bottom - we are the losers in both scenarios. We lose what makes humanity itself, in other words moderation, the in-between, finiteness, chance, the propensity to communicate. (shrink)

En prenant en compte l’article de Freud sur le Moïse de Michel-Ange et son dernier ouvrage L’homme Moïse et le monothéisme, il est possible de montrer comment le renoncement pulsionnel ouvre la voie à la sublimation et à la réalité spirituelle.

En prenant l’initiative de ce volume de Corpus, nous avions choisi de procéder à un appel assez large, afin de faire le point sur des tendances actuelles des travaux sur corpus ancrés dans la textualité des faits de discours. En nous associant, nous pensions attirer des chercheurs d’horizons différents et notre attente n’a pas été déçue. Les propositions furent très nombreuses et de sélection en sélection, en regrettant quelques contributions abandonnées pour des raisons de délais de rédactio...

Il est […] illusoire de vouloir affronter seul des problèmes qui appellent le dépassement des limites liées aux spécialisations disciplinaires et aux enjeux institutionnels. Après avoir lu l’ensemble des contributions au présent volume de Corela et m’être plongé dans un certain nombre de travaux cités dans ces articles, profitant du fait qu’Ingrid Mayeur et Marie-Anne Paveau ont eu l’élégance de me convier à un dialogue critique, je répondrai brièvement à cert...

This volume argues that contemporary narratives resist such influences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an ecology of attention based on poetic options that develop an ethics of the particularist type. The contributors draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: including psychology and sociology, but more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the Ethics of Care and Vulnerability. This volume is designed as an innovative contribution to the nascent field (...) of the study of attention in literary criticism, an area that is full of potential. Its scope is wide, as it embraces a great deal of the Anglophone world, with Britain, Ireland, the USA, but also Australia and even Malta. Its chapters focus on well-established authors, like Kazuo Ishiguro (whose work is revisited here in a completely new light) or more confidential ones like Melissa Harrison or Sarah Moss. (shrink)

My first goal is to question a received view about the development of Analytical Philosophy. According to this received view Analytical Philosophy is born out of a Linguistic Turn establishing the study of language as the foundation of the discipline; this primacy of language is then overthrown by the return of the study of mind as philosophia prima through a second Cognitive Turn taken in the mid-sixties. My contention is that this picture is a gross oversimplification and that the Cognitive (...) Turn should better be seen as an extension of the Linguistic one. Indeed, if the Cognitive Turn gives explicit logical priority to the study of mind over the study of language, one of its central features is to see the mind as a representational system offering no substantial difference with a linguistic one. However, no justification is offered for the fundamental assimilation of the nature of a mental representation with that of a linguistic symbol supporting this picture of the mind, although the idea that a system of mental representations is identical in structure with a system of linguistic symbols has been argued over and over. I try to demonstrate this point through a close critical examination of Fodor's paradigmatic notion of 'double reduction.' My second claim is that the widespread contemporary assimilation of a mental representation with a symbol of a linguistic kind is no more than a prejudice. Finally I indicate that this prejudice cannot survive a rigorous critical examination. (shrink)

La relation entre l’art et la philosophie est à la fois ancienne et toujours en attente de sa véritable détermination. Rigoureusement, elle n’a pas encore eu lieu. Sait-on vraiment ce qu’est Art, sait-on ce qu’est Philosophie? D’où le sait-on? Qui en détermine la réalité? N’est-il pas évident, pour l’art, que c’est la Poétique? Si leur relation est ainsi ancienne, elle est demeurée celle d’un rapport, non à l’art mais aux signes, non à la peinture, mais aux images. Très strictement, la (...) ph... (shrink)

It is important for the materialist historian, in the most rigorous way possible, to differentiate the construction of a historical state of affairs from what one customarily calls its "reconstruction." The "reconstruction" in empathy is one- dimensional. "Construction" presupposes "destruction." Almost fourteen years after the death of Jacques Derrida, the least one can say is that his inheritance is as contested and fraught with rivalries, rejections, and appropriations as at the time of the flowering of Deconstruction in American universities in (...) the seventies and eighties. A halt was observed in 1988-89 after the posthumous revelations about Paul de Man's past in Belgium and Derrida's embattled defense of his friend. Today, in France, one often hears that "Derrida a fait l'Ecole mais n'a pas fait ecole," meaning that Derrida passed the entrance examination of the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure where he taught for a long time, where he met Paul Celan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and many other luminaries, whereas he never had a real "school" in France-no real institutional backing beyond the various Parisian places at which he taught later, or those that he founded like the College de Philosophie; his following constituted of young philosophers, only a few of whom became university professors in their turn and disseminated his teachings. However, the mechanisms of power within the French university remained closed to Derrida until the end; besides, he wanted to prevent the stereotyped reproduction currently observed from master to disciple. (shrink)

Le programme de recherche sur le domaine médiéval de Potamia, au Sud-Est de Nicosie, a conduit à la découverte d'un important ensemble de monnaies chypriotes du XIVe siècle. Ce trésor présente un intérêt exceptionnel dans la mesure où il est le seul des dépôts contemporains dont on puisse affirmer qu'il est connu dans son intégrité. Outre qu'il apporte quelques variantes nouvelles à des types connus, il fournit des éléments importants sur la production, la politique d'approvisionnement et la circulation monétaires. D'un (...) point de vue historique, il atteste la présence humaine à Potamia à une date plus haute que celle donnée par les témoignages précédemment disponibles et confirme l'importance de l'activité monnayée dans l'intérieur de Chypre. (shrink)

This article discusses Alfred Jarry as a precursor of French modernism. With a particular focus on Messaline, Roman de l’ancienne Rome and Le Surmâle, Roman moderne, I analyse the subtle ways in which the past and the future are intertwined and Jarry’s philosophy of sexual excess. In both novels, the main characters seek a paroxysmal erotic pleasure from which they die after reaching world records in sex-making. Read together, the novels work to create a lemniscate, the symbol of infinity symbolically (...) represented, in modernism, by the speeding bicycle. In both novels, sexual excess leads to a superhuman transformation of women and men into a rigid phallus, underlying which is the fantasy of bisexualism. (shrink)

Retention of structure across theory change has been invoked in support of a ‘structural’ alternative to more traditional entity-based scientific realism. In that context the transition from Newtonian mechanics to the Special Theory of Relativity is often regarded as a very significant instance of structural preservation, or retention, associated with correspondence-based recovery. The joint derivation, from a small set of elementary and ontologically neutral assumptions, of both the Galilei and the Lorentz transformation exemplifies the virtues of structural approaches to the (...) foundations of physical theories. The common origination of the resulting two relativistic frameworks sheds light on both the successes and the limitations of correspondence claims. However, the cognitive-operational character of the basic assumptions lends no support to the structural realist’s ‘inference to the best explanation’. (shrink)