Comment éviter les contradictions et les impasses de la double conscience inhérentes à la prise de parole depuis la subalternité? En s’appuyant sur les travaux de l’historien algérien Daho Djerbal, cet article d’Ulysse Rabaté instruit une lecture décoloniale des mobilisations dans les « quartiers populaires », depuis la marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme de 1983 jusqu’à aujourd’hui. L’auteur, militant et chercheur en sciences politiques, propose de comprendre comment ces activismes des banlieues ou des cités, comme on (...) les a nommés, ont été marginalisés voire exclus du domaine de la politique légitime. (shrink)

Today, an extensive body of research has been produced on the history of mobilisation by residents of working-class neighbourhoods in France and by those who identify with them. These analyses have changed our understanding of contemporary mobilisations, but the existing discourse should not prevent us from reflecting on the alternative modes of engagement that are emerging in these neighbourhoods. These commitments contribute to the “making” of a distinct political culture, rooted in practices and discourses hybridised within working-class lifestyles. Is there (...) an elective affinity between Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and the mobilisations of working-class neighbourhoods? If so, how can this framework provide a productive interpretation of the ordinary actions interwoven into the daily fabric of these social spaces? One way of answering these questions is to consider these actions as a form of political knowledge that reveals alternative ways of considering politics. (shrink)

Les mobilisations qui émergent depuis plusieurs décennies dans les quartiers populaires français se font à distance des structures établies d’énonciation de la politique. Ce que nous pourrions considérer avec le vocabulaire de Guattari comme un mouvement de déterritorialisation s’est réalisé dans le cadre de rapports de pouvoirs spécifiques, invisibilisés par la grammaire des conflits politiques. Identifier les lignes de fuite élaborées dans la pratique par des mobilisations souvent considérées hors-radars (« ce n’est pas de la politique »), impose de « (...) sortir de la langue » et contourner les modes de signification qui sont aussi modes de confiscation. Les outils légués par Félix Guattari nous aident à affronter une question qui demeure : réside-t-il dans cette brèche creusée en conflit avec les « données » de la domination, un mouvement irrépressible vers la transformation des rapports sociaux du capitalisme, et donc une cohérence des subjectivations et des pratiques en direction de cet objectif? (shrink)

Jean-Michel Rabaté uses Nietzsche's image of a "pathos of distance," the notion that certain values cannot originate in a community but are created by a few gifted and lofty individuals, as the basis for a wide-ranging investigation into the ethics of the moderns. The expression of "pathos of distance" impressed would-be modernists like the American James Huneker and the Irish poet W. B. Yeats as they confronted the new in the arts. Later, it helped Deleuze and Barthes make sense (...) of modernity when they tried to tease out all the implications of "distance." Despite Benjamin criticism of Nietzsche's doctrine of the "eternal return of the same" in the Arcades Project, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Benjamin envisions a redeemed history that follows Nietzsche's basic intuition about the need to make every moment count for history. By first establishing this unlikely meeting of Nietzsche and Benjamin through their ideas of history and ethics, Rabaté is able then to provide an original genealogy for the ethics of the modern, moving through figures and moments as varied as Yeats and the birth of Irish Modernism, the ethics of courage in Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Apollinaire, and others in 1910, Gide and Genet's ethical impulse to combine erotic liberation with the motivation for political revolution, and Derrida's reading of Joyce's Ulysses and a modern mode of writing that sought to get closer to the senses. The result is a fascinating critique of Nietzsche, Benjamin, affect theory, and the origins of the ethics of modernism. (shrink)

This paper examines how semiotics, in conjunction with hermeneutics, can illuminate the structure of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' as a literary text. The paper begins with an account of two poet-critics who examined Joyce's novel in terms of classical myths and literary precedents. A crucial turning-point in the essay occurs when Jean Michel Rabate's Lacanian reading of the novel is introduced to clarify Joyce's use of the "signifier of absence" to clarify the meaning of paternity in the novel. The function of (...) the intertext is then examined, particularly in view of the relationship between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. The conclusion of the paper shows how a dialogical reading supports the belief in a 'hermeneutical self' as part of the text's underlying meaning. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan is renowned as a theoretician of psychoanalysis whose work is still influential in many countries. He refashioned psychoanalysis in the name of philosophy and linguistics at a time when it faced certain intellectual decline. Focusing on key terms in Lacan's often difficult, idiosyncratic development of psychoanalysis, this volume brings new perspectives to the work of an intimidating influential thinker.

Acknowledging that he cannot speak about the future of Theory without taking stock of its past, Rabaté starts by sketching its genealogy, particularly its ...

Derrida, quel diable d'homme! Preux de la pensée, partant en guerre contre tous et contre lui-même, chevalier de l'idéal comme Don Quichotte et politicien pragmatique comme Sancho Pança, il n'aura cessé de bouleverser de fond en comble nos idées reçues pour les relancer, accroître leur vélocité et en faire des armes concepƯtuelles redoutables. Ce livre s'attache à suivre certaines de ses campagnes, retraçant une trajectoire qui va de son enfance et adolescence algériennes vers un avenir messianique ouvert à l'Autre. Au (...) passage, il lui aura fallu en découdre avec un ami trop proche de certains thèmes éthiques, Emmanuel Levinas, ainsi qu'avec un ennemi plus vulnérable, Giorgio Agamben. À travers leurs méditations croisées, Derrida insiste sur le fait que la lutte polémique est préférable à la paix, car elle en fonde la possibilité tout en mettant en question les théologies guerrières. Le roman récent de J.M. Coetzee, Une enfance de Jésus, et les poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé vont servir à illustrer ces attentes et ces tensions entre chien et chat, entre futur et avenir, entre drôles de trêves et drôles de guerres : entre hospitalité et hostilité."--Back cover. (shrink)

Part of the task of doing moral philosophy is to strengthen our confidence in morality or to bring back the gravitas of morality. I argue that this cannot be done by a representational view of moral reality and by downplaying the importance of human sentiments that make our moral assertions more natural and authentic.

Efforts have been dedicated to the understanding of social-ecological systems, an important focus in ethnobiological studies. In particular, ethnobiological investigations have found evidence and tested hypotheses over the last 30 years on the interactions between human groups and their environments, generating the need to formulate a theory for such systems. In this article, we propose the social-ecological theory of maximization to explain the construction and functioning of these systems over time, encompassing hypotheses and evidence from previous ethnobiological studies. In proposing (...) the theory, we present definitions and two conceptual models, an environmental maximization model and a redundancy generation model. The first model seeks to address biota selection and its use by human populations. The second emphasizes how the system organizes itself from the elements that were incorporated into it. Furthermore, we provide the theoretical scenario of plant selection and use from an evolutionary perspective, which explicitly integrates the phylogenetic relationships of plants and human beings. (shrink)

According to contemporary moral realism a moral property, like goodness or badness, is either a natural property or a non-natural property of actions or situations. Contemporary moral naturalists like Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink are a group of philosophers who are often referred to as Cornell realists because of their connection with Cornell University. Frank Jackson is another contemporary moral naturalist who is one of the leaders of The Canberra Planners at the Australian National University with which he (...) is connected. Jackson defends “the most extreme form of naturalism.” Jackson’s view is considered extremeby those who disagree with him because he believes that moral properties are reducible or identical to natural properties. This view of Jackson is opposed by contemporary non-naturalists like Jonathan Dancy, Derek Parfit, and Russ Shafer-Landau for reasons which in my view are not successful. Despite Jackson’s reductionism about the ethical, the Cornell realists, nevertheless, agree with him that moral properties are natural properties. (shrink)

Raoul Moati intervenes in the critical debate that divided two prominent philosophers in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s, the British philosopher J. L. Austin advanced a theory of speech acts, or the "performative," that Jacques Derrida and John R. Searle interpreted in fundamentally different ways. Their disagreement centered on the issue of intentionality, which Derrida understood phenomenologically and Searle read pragmatically. The controversy had profound implications for the development of contemporary philosophy, which, Moati argues, can profit greatly by returning (...) to this classic debate. In this book, Moati systematically replays the historical encounter between Austin, Derrida, and Searle and the disruption that caused the lasting break between Anglo-American language philosophy and continental traditions of phenomenology and its deconstruction. The key issue, Moati argues, is not whether "intentionality," a concept derived from Husserl's phenomenology, can or cannot be linked to Austin's speech-acts as defined in his groundbreaking _How to Do Things with Words_, but rather the emphasis Searle placed on the performativity and determined pragmatic values of Austin's speech-acts, whereas Derrida insisted on the trace of writing behind every act of speech and the iterability of signs in different contexts. (shrink)

Efforts have been dedicated to the understanding of social-ecological systems, an important focus in ethnobiological studies. In particular, ethnobiological investigations have found evidence and tested hypotheses over the last 30 years on the interactions between human groups and their environments, generating the need to formulate a theory for such systems. In this article, we propose the social-ecological theory of maximization to explain the construction and functioning of these systems over time, encompassing hypotheses and evidence from previous ethnobiological studies. In proposing (...) the theory, we present definitions and two conceptual models, an environmental maximization model and a redundancy generation model. The first model seeks to address biota selection and its use by human populations. The second emphasizes how the system organizes itself from the elements that were incorporated into it. Furthermore, we provide the theoretical scenario of plant selection and use from an evolutionary perspective, which explicitly integrates the phylogenetic relationships of plants and human beings. (shrink)

Résumé Le rapprochement de Whitehead avec le courant émergentiste, notamment Samuel Alexander, Conwy Lloyd Morgan et Charlie Dunbar Broad, met en lumière l’articulation entre la dimension processuelle de sa philosophie et son effort pour rendre compte du caractère signifiant de l’univers. Pour tous, la philosophie se doit de montrer que ce qui relève de l’esprit appartient pleinement à la nature, et n’a pas à être rejeté dans un non-lieu métaphysique. Mais, chez Whitehead, cet effort prend une tournure différente, impartiale, en (...) décentrant la notion d’« esprit » de la référence exclusive à la mentalité humaine. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar a semântica da palavra Eros dentro da tradição cristã. Limita-se a algumas dessas significações. A reflexão mostra a limitação dessa expressão na língua portuguesa. Seu significado é muito mais rico na língua grega. Se a tradição cristã carregou esta palavra de forma negativa, outros Padres leram-na em sintonia com Ágape e com outros significados. A relação mística a interpreta como uma relação “erótica” entre homem e Deus. Esta intimidade procura explicar o aspecto do desejo (...) de Deus e da relação mútua entre aquele que ama e o amado, que tem sua raiz na busca mais íntima da humanidade. Negar por preconceitos palavras carregadas de desejos não divinos e nem dignos da humanidade, como na Antigüidade, é reduzir demais seu campo semântico na história. Esta palavra reflete o amor da alma para com Deus numa perspectiva mística, assume variações significativas, dentre tantas, como o amor de Jesus Cristo, como sinônimas de Ágape, do amor de Deus para com os homens, como amor individual ligado a Deus, o Eros como virtude e como castidade. A compreensão das dimensões do amor se realiza na capacidade de ver que todas elas são positivas e importantes para obtermos o equilíbrio da vida humana, numa harmonia destas dimensões constitutivas e importantes para a vida. Palavras-chave: Eros; Patrística; Amor; Alma; Mística; Virtude; Castidade e Ágape. ABSTRACT This article aims at demonstrating the semantics of the term Eros in Christian tradition, pointing out the limitations of the term in Portuguese. The scope of its meaning is much wider in Greek. If Christian tradition has charged the word with a negative feature, other priests have read it in tune with Agape and other meanings. The mystical perspective interprets it as an ‘erotic’ relationship between man and God. Such intimacy attempts to explain God’s desire and the mutual relation between the one who loves and the beloved, rooted in mankind’s most intimate longing. To deny, on account of prejudice, words charged with non-divine desires unworthy of humanity, as happened in antiquity, is to reduce their semantic field in history. That word reflects the soul’s love for God in a mystical perspective and assumes meaningful variations, among which Christ’s love, ‘Agape’ or God’s love for men, and individual love connected with God: ‘Eros’ as virtue and chastity. The comprehension of the dimensions of love takes place in the capacity to realize that they are all positive and relevant to human life’s balance, in the harmony of those dimensions that constitute life. Key words: Eros; Patristics; Love; Soul; The mystical; Virtue; Chastity; Agape. (shrink)

TRECHO DO DISCURSO DE PROMULGAÇÃO DA CONSTITUIÇÃO FEDERAL DE 1988, EM 5 DE OUTUBRO.

Die thematisch breit gefächerte Reihe umfasst Schriften zur Kunst- und Bildwissenschaft, Kulturgeschichte und Philosophie.

La place qu’occupe la matière dans la définition de la substance sensible évolue au cours des livres Z et H de la Métaphysique : là où les chapitres 10 et 11 du livre Z affirment que la matière doit être exclue du definiens de la substance sensible, le chapitre 2 du livre H affirme, au contraire, qu’il se doit de l’inclure. Le présent article montrera que cette différence de doctrine est issue d’un approfondissement de la manière dont la priorité causale (...) de la forme est exprimée dans la définition. Elle l’est d’abord, dans le livre Z, au moyen d’une réduction des termes du definiens aux seules « parties de la forme », réduction qui est d’emblée jugée superflue et insatisfaisante. Elle le sera ensuite, dans le livre H, par la position de prédicat de la matière qu’elle occupe et qui a précisément vocation à exprimer sa priorité. En ce sens, les deux ensembles de textes ne constituent pas une volte-face théorique de la part d’Aristote, mais l’approfondissement d’un seul et unique modèle de définition visant à exprimer la priorité de la forme. (shrink)

Si Marx aujourd'hui doit retrouver la radicalité qui a porté en ses premiers commencements sa pensée révolutionnaire, il faut rompre définitivement avec les évidences les mieux établies de son interprétation. La pensée de Marx, loin de pouvoir être rattachée au sol du matérialisme, s'enracine au plus profond de l'idéalisme allemand dans ce mouvement de pensée qui vient contester en ses fondements ultimes la métaphysique et son ordre, l'ordre d'un entendement captif de l'horizon borné de la positivité. Pensée de subversion de (...) l'ordre de la positivité, la pensée de Marx se laisse alors définir comme un mouvement de déstabilisation du monde, mise en abyme de son fondement. Cette disqualification an-archique de l'arche est au principe de la pensée de la révolution radicale et de la mise en question fondamentale du pouvoir. Dans l'espace ouvert par cette double Bestimmung, idéaliste, an-archique, la pensée de Marx, en opposition à toute interprétation qui y voit une pensée du social, définit un individualisme radical qui se veut la critique absolue de toute volonté d'édification d'un nouvel ordre, individualisme qui ne laisse plus rien prévaloir qui fasse violence à la valeur de sens de l'autonomie.The road to Marx's thought supposes as its condition a movement of radical depositioning in relation to the classically established guidelines for journeying through his work. Marx's thought, in opposition to any interpretation which sees therein a reflection on the social sphere, defines a radical form of individualism which is intended as the absolute criticism of any desire to construct a new order, an individualism which allows absolutely nothing which might obstruct the value of the meaning of autonomy to prevail. (shrink)

Se saisir de la réalité, du monde sensible, de façon subjective énonce la 1re thèse sur Feuerbach. Qu'engage pour la pensée matérialiste de Marx un tel appel ? Que faut-il comprendre sous le terme du matérialisme quand il s'agit de la philosophie de Marx ? À quel matérialisme nous renvoie la révolution théorique qui s'effectue dans les thèses sur Feuerbach ?Notre texte vise à apporter une réponse à ces questions en montrant que si le matérialisme de Marx doit définir quelque (...) chose d'inédit, il ne peut en aucun cas s'identifier à ce qu'en a fait la tradition marxiste, tout au contraire il définit une pensée nouvelle de la subjectivité, celle de la « gegenstandliche Tatigkeit», pensée que requiert l'impératif pratique de la onzième thèse sur Feuerbach : la transformation du monde.The first thesis on Feuerbach calls for a subjective apprehension of reality and of the world perceived by the senses. What does such a program entail for Marx's materialist thought ? What should be included under the term "materialism" when we consider Marx's philosophy ? To what materialism are we directed by the theoretical revolution effected in the theses on Feuerbach ?Our text attempts to answer these questions by showing that if Marx's materialism must define something theoretically unprecedented, it certainly can not be identified with this interpretation within the Marxist tradition. On the contrary, it defines a new way of thinking about subjectivity, the « gegenstandliche Tatigkeit », a way of thinking which requires the imperative of praxis enjoined in Feuerbach's eleventh thesis : the transformation of the world. (shrink)

This paper praises Martin Hägglund for his general take on Derrida, while objecting to a certain rigidity in the use of the concept of survival. This concept allowed Hägglund to reject the temptation of a ‘religious’ Derrida in Radical Atheism, but in Dying for Time, it leads to a hurried reading of psychoanalysis. My objections revolve around several forms: the role of gods for Plato and Greek thought; the reductive reading of Diotima's speech in the Sympoisum, and an all too (...) rapid rejection of the idea of the Todestrieb in Freud and Lacan. I go back to Derrida's reading of Freud in The Postcard to point out that he too had misread Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Finally, I argue that there can be something like a non-proper or improper immortality. (shrink)

This volume is an introduction to the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Jean-Michel Rabaté takes Sigmund Freud as his point of departure, studying in detail Freud's integration of literature in the training of psychoanalysts and how literature provided crucial terms for his myriad theories, such as the Oedipus complex. Rabaté subsequently surveys other theoreticians such as Wilfred Bion, Marie Bonaparte, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek. This Introduction is organized thematically, examining in detail important terms like deferred (...) action, fantasy, hysteria, paranoia, sublimation, the uncanny, trauma, and perversion. Using examples from Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare to Sophie Calle and Yann Martel, Rabaté demonstrates that the psychoanalytic approach to literature, despite its erstwhile controversy, has recently reemerged as a dynamic method of interpretation. (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)

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)