"The thesis is radical," writes Marshall Sahlins of this landmark text in anthropology and political science. "We conventionally define the state as the regulation of violence; it may be the origin of it. Clastres's thesis is that economic expropriation and political coercion are inconsistent with the character of tribal society - which is to say, with the greater part of human history."Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive state apparatuses? (...) In this beautifully written book, Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, although without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing he refutes the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a radical critique of our own Western state of power.Born in 1934, Pierre Clastres was educated at the Sorbonne; throughout the 1960s he lived with Indian groups in Paraguay and Venezuela. From 1971 until his death in 1979 he was Director of Studies at the fifth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and held the Chair of Religion and Societies of the South American Indians there.Robert Hurley is the translator of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and cotranslator of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (shrink)

This article examines the political anthropological work of Pierre Clastres in light of the emergence of the subfield of comparative political theory. In particular, it argues that Clastres’ recons...

Per l’antropologo Pierre Clastres, i concetti di “Stato” e di “politico” sono sempre stati colti, nel mondo occidentale, come due elementi interdipendenti: lo Stato è politico, non c’è politica senza Stato. I suoi studi etno-antropologici tentano di ribaltare questa visione, concettualizzando le società primitive come “senza” e “contro lo Stato”. Il presente testo esamina i testi di Clastres cercando di inserire le sue riflessioni all’interno di paradigmi giuridici e politologici consolidati e di dimostrare come l’antropologia politica e (...) le scienze politiche possano mettersi in comunicazione. (shrink)

This article looks at the relation between the ideas of philosopher Claude Lefort and ethnologist Pierre Clastres. Both French authors worked in the same paradigm. They were convinced that politics is the “infrastructure” of society: all societies are politically constituted and can only be understood by interpreting the workings of political power. Yet they strongly disagreed on the dividedness of society. Clastres believed that a good solution to the problem of power is possible, while Lefort believes that (...) the presence of power points to the impossibility of any society to coincide with itself. This article also discusses the way they both use the expression “the place of power” and asks to what extent non-Western societies were, both for Clastres and for Lefort, ever more than just a foil to present and illuminate their strongly held theoretical beliefs. (shrink)

How are we to conceive of the genealogy of the state without reducing tribal societies to the status of ancestors of state societies? It is the genealogy of political power that is at stake in this question. In Ibn Khaldûn's work, power is an integral part of an ontology that anchors the political in the biological. When Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari come up against the radical separation between state societies and stateless societies, which they perceive in Pierre (...) class='Hi'>Clastres’ work, they borrow the concept of group feeling from Ibn Khaldûn, which allows them to posit the relationship between states and what is external to them. This article identifies an anthropology of power in Ibn Khaldûn in order to better understand his role in Mille Plateaux by Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)

Buscar-se-á no presente trabalho analisar os discursos acerca da formação do Estado em Rousseau e Locke. Os autores compartilham a teoria de uma forma de contrato social – um acordo deliberado entre seres humanos cuja condição selvagem se extingue neste momento decisório. Dessa forma, em ambos os autores, o Estado surge como um agente, ou corpo, protetor. Em contrapartida, os estudos de Pierre Clastres – etnólogo francês – referentes a grupos primitivos contemporâneos demonstram a existência de uma permanente (...) conjuração contra a possibilidade do surgimento de um poder político alienado do controle do grupo como um todo. Ou seja, uma conjuração contra o Estado. Nesse sentido, o objetivo geral desse trabalho é colidir tais ideias, assim como suas possíveis reverberações atuais. (shrink)

Based on a discussion of the theoretical contributions of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres, this article explores social relationships as more than a human dimension. Though strongly analysed by both anthropologists, these relationships appear to involve indigenous societies’ whole ecological and cosmological system. In this sense, reciprocity, social cohesion, and exchange can be understood as material and immaterial interrelationships between entities of a more than a corporeal world. I argue, then, that to go beyond the mere anthropocentric conceptualisation (...) of sociality in a nature good to think, we need to holistically conceive the interconnected levels of trophic, socio-structural and socio-cosmic relationships and exchanges between human and non-human beings in the ecosystem. (shrink)

If, as asserted by the French collective Tiqqun, we are essentially living in a global colony, where the 1% control the 99%, then it follows that the revolutionary struggle should strategically reorient itself as guerrilla warfare. The agents of this war, Tiqqun characterize, in part, by drawing on ethnologists Pierre de Clastres and Ernesto de Martino, specifically their figures of the Indigenous American warrior and the Southern Italian sorcerer, respectively. Hybridizing these two figures into that of the “warrior-mage,” (...) the present article posits an actionable exemplar thereof in players of the massively popular trading and online card game, Magic: The Gathering (MTG). More specifically, I propose a strategic mapping of MTG’s five colors of magic onto the five divisions of a coalition against late capitalist Empire, which I call the “Warrior-Mage Guild,” including liberation clerics, animal rights activists, propagandists, anti-psychiatrists, hackers, saboteurs, and those who threaten decolonizing force contra Empire. (shrink)

This article is a study of the trajectory of the contemporary French liberal philosopher Marcel Gauchet from his early, ‘anarchist’ commitments through the 1970s to his discovery and defense of liberalism, notably as expressed in his 1980 revival and interpretation of his 19th-century countryman Benjamin Constant’s post-revolutionary liberalism. Discussed in the article are Gauchet’s devotion to and revision of the portrait of primitive society he inherited from the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres, how his early political and theoretical concerns (...) are transmuted in Gauchet’s reading of Constant, and the relevance of this trajectory for comprehending even Gauchet’s most recent pronouncements about the nature and future of liberal society. (shrink)

Writing involves risks—the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of inadvertently supporting a reader’s prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must “clear a passage within the agitated world of passions,” an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their own speech. In _Writing: (...) The Political Test, _France’s leading political philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the ideological and contextual traps that would doom their attempts to articulate a new vision. Lefort examines writers whose works provide special insights into this problem of risk, both literary artists and political philosophers. Among them are Salman Rushdie, Sade, Tocqueville,m Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Orwell, Kant, Robespierre, Guizot, and Pierre Clastres. In Tocqueville, for example, Lefort finds that the author’s improvisatory and open-ended expression represents the character of the democratic experience. Orwell’s work on totalitarianism shows up the totalitarian subject’s complicity in this political regime. And Rushdie is remarkable for his solid attack on relativism. With the character and fate of the political forms of modernity, democracy, and totalitarianism a central theme, Lefort concludes with some reflections on the collapse of the Soviet Union. This intriguing and accessible exploration of literature’s political aspects and political philosophy’s literary ones will be welcomed by those who have been stymied by current efforts to bridge these two fields. Taken together, the essays in this volume also stand as an intellectual autobiography of Lefort, making it an excellent introduction to his work for less experience students of political theory or philosophy. (shrink)

The article presents an overview of the intellectual trajectory of Alain Caillé, the founder and animator of the anti-utilitarian movement in the social sciences (MAUSS) in France. Going back to early influences of Claude Lefort, Karl Polanyi and Pierre Clastres, it shows the centrality of the symbolic constitution of the economy in the development of an intellectual front against rational choice. It also considers how Marcel Mauss’s famous Essay on the Gift has been developed into a ‘gift paradigm’ (...) that aims to unify the various social sciences into a comprehensive alternative to the interest paradigm. (shrink)

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as (...) on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

In ‘Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands’, Gilles Deleuze presents a mythological and scientific vision in which new islands and new humanity emerge from the opposition between the land and sea in desert islands. However, what Deleuze cannot explain is how such new territory and people are produced and reproduced while rejecting old and conventional generational ways. To break this impasse, which is also present in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze and Guattari intend to retain the absolute movement of deterritorialisation, while (...) acknowledging that deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation always comingle. This theoretical project is found in the critique of Pierre Clastres on counter-state societies, and is taken up by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? In this latter work, by creating concepts and constituting a new plane, Deleuze and Guattari offer some conditions of a third reterritorialisation that, after the second reterritorialisation in the democratic states, presents a new way of forging a political and revolutionary philosophy. In this essay, we criticise the opinions that consider Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy as one version of radical democracy. Their political philosophy should be situated in the post-democratic era to come. (shrink)

The aim of this text is to develop an epistemological-technique approach which permit analyze the work of Juan Downey, and his use of technical medias and also include the struggle against the State in the political and cultural model of the primitive societies of the Yano- mani, particularly by the work of Pierre Clastres and Jacques Lizot, and also their point of view of the methods of production in the societies of abundance, as theorized the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, (...) considering these anthropological paradigms as a medium to understand the mediatic interaction and the technique development in the works of Juan Downey. (shrink)

The aim of this text is to develop an epistemological-technique approach which permit analyze the work of Juan Downey, and his use of technical medias and also include the struggle against the State in the political and cultural model of the primitive societies of the Yano- mani, particularly by the work of Pierre Clastres and Jacques Lizot, and also their point of view of the methods of production in the societies of abundance, as theorized the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, (...) considering these anthropological paradigms as a medium to understand the mediatic interaction and the technique development in the works of Juan Downey. (shrink)

« Entre Deleuze et Guattari, Clastres et Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, il sera question dans cet article de l’échange fécond entre philosophie et anthropologie. En 1972, Pierre Clastres trouve chez Deleuze et Guattari la théorie du marquage qui sera déterminante dans l’élaboration de sa thèse de la société-contre-l’État. Huit ans plus tard, ces derniers développent une théorisation du nomadisme dans Mille plateaux où tient une place importante la thèse de l’anthropologue. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, fin lecteur de (...) Mille plateaux, y puise pour sa part des outils conceptuels, notamment le concept de devenir, lui permettant de dépasser le clivage entre nature et culture en anthropologie et développer une interprétation du perspectivisme et du cannibalisme amazonien. Il relit en retour Clastres pour décentrer la thèse de la société-contre-l’État de son “sociocentrisme” et l’ouvrir à une cosmopolitique “par-delà nature et culture” qui se dessine clairement à l’horizon de Mille Plateaux. ». (shrink)

"The thesis is radical," writes Marshall Sahlins of this landmark text in anthropology and political science. "We conventionally define the state as the regulation of violence; it may be the origin of it. Clastres's thesis is that economic expropriation and political coercion are inconsistent with the character of tribal society - which is to say, with the greater part of human history."Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive state apparatuses? (...) In this beautifully written book, Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, although without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing he refutes the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a radical critique of our own Western state of power.Born in 1934, Pierre Clastres was educated at the Sorbonne; throughout the 1960s he lived with Indian groups in Paraguay and Venezuela. From 1971 until his death in 1979 he was Director of Studies at the fifth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and held the Chair of Religion and Societies of the South American Indians there.Robert Hurley is the translator of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and cotranslator of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (shrink)

"The thesis is radical," writes Marshall Sahlins of this landmark text in anthropology and political science. "We conventionally define the state as the regulation of violence; it may be the origin of it. Clastres's thesis is that economic expropriation and political coercion are inconsistent with the character of tribal society - which is to say, with the greater part of human history."Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive state apparatuses? (...) In this beautifully written book, Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, although without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing he refutes the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a radical critique of our own Western state of power.Born in 1934, Pierre Clastres was educated at the Sorbonne; throughout the 1960s he lived with Indian groups in Paraguay and Venezuela. From 1971 until his death in 1979 he was Director of Studies at the fifth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and held the Chair of Religion and Societies of the South American Indians there.Robert Hurley is the translator of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and cotranslator of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (shrink)

Writing involves risks—the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of inadvertently supporting a reader’s prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must “clear a passage within the agitated world of passions,” an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their own speech. In _Writing: (...) The Political Test, _France’s leading political philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the ideological and contextual traps that would doom their attempts to articulate a new vision. Lefort examines writers whose works provide special insights into this problem of risk, both literary artists and political philosophers. Among them are Salman Rushdie, Sade, Tocqueville,m Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Orwell, Kant, Robespierre, Guizot, and Pierre Clastres. In Tocqueville, for example, Lefort finds that the author’s improvisatory and open-ended expression represents the character of the democratic experience. Orwell’s work on totalitarianism shows up the totalitarian subject’s complicity in this political regime. And Rushdie is remarkable for his solid attack on relativism. With the character and fate of the political forms of modernity, democracy, and totalitarianism a central theme, Lefort concludes with some reflections on the collapse of the Soviet Union. This intriguing and accessible exploration of literature’s political aspects and political philosophy’s literary ones will be welcomed by those who have been stymied by current efforts to bridge these two fields. Taken together, the essays in this volume also stand as an intellectual autobiography of Lefort, making it an excellent introduction to his work for less experience students of political theory or philosophy. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the “state of nature” should be understood as describing a thoroughly political situation. Hobbes’s exemplification of the state of nature by resorting to the “savages” of America should be taken in its ultimately paradoxical character, one that puts in question the stark opposition between a prepolitical natural state and the properly political state resulting from the “social contract.” Through the lenses of ethnographic studies and anthropological theory, I propose a reinterpretation (...) of Hobbes’s characterization of the state of nature as a state of war. In the first section, I present my interpretation of Hobbes’s understanding of war, arguing that war is characterized not by actual battle but by the uncertainty of conflict, already entailing a social dimension to it. In the second section, I engage with Pierre Clastres’s theory of the society against the State to discuss how, for Amerindian peoples, war not only has a social character but is itself the basis of sociality. In the last section, I discuss Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s theory of potential affinity to propose that Hobbes’s state of nature is also a form of schematization of alterity as enmity. I conclude by showing how this provides an understanding of peace as a precarious situation, one that is the outcome of ethical practices ultimately independent from the State. (shrink)

Thinking Radical Democracy is an introduction to nine key political thinkers who contributed to the emergence of radical democratic thought in post-war French political theory: Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, and Miguel Abensour. The essays in this collection connect these writers through their shared contribution to the idea that division and difference in politics can be perceived as productive, creative, and fundamentally democratic. The questions they raise regarding (...) equality and emancipation in a democratic society will be of interest to those studying social and political thought or democratic activist movements like the Occupy movements and Idle No More. --Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Transformation, not transcendence -- The lesson of Pierre Clastres -- On self-alteration -- Realism -- Paul's Greek -- Every religion is idolatry.

This article aims, starting from a contemporary problem (the destruction of indigenous lives and cultures in Brazil), to think about ethical questions – especially in what concerns other ways of constituting subjectivity and (dis)obedience. Thus, the indigenous obedience issue will be based on Pierre Clastres’ societies against the State, giving an extent to Viveiros de Castros and possible relationships with our western reality. The subjectivity issue, then, will be approached based on what was pointed out to us by (...) Michel Foucault. Facing these Amerindian realities as heterotopias, how could we produce resistances and dissonant possibilities in our present reality? (shrink)

This article is a belated contribution to a Common Knowledge symposium on the “unanticipated conceptual practice” of “anthropological philosophy.” The basic argument is that the groundwork for this emerging approach, associated foremost with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's book Métaphysiques cannibales of 2009, was laid in the 1970s by the controversial French anthropologists Pierre and Hélène Clastres. It is argued that the Clastres took the intellectual practices of Guarani shamans and prophets as analogous to the those of ancient (...) Greek philosophers but also as sharply critical of the principles that underlay early Western metaphysics. (shrink)

This work by Pierre Bourdieu develops the anthropological theory which has formed the basis of his scientific research. It discusses the problems posed by "structuralist" philosophers in order to solve or dissolve them.

L’édition critique des œuvres de Moïse ben Sabbataï, philosophe juif actif (à Rome?) vers 1340, avait signalé, parmi d’autres sources latines lues dans les traductions en hébreu de son contemporain Juda de Rome, un exemplum présentant le sage athénien Solon sur son lit de mort en champion de la doctrine de l’élévation intellectuelle en vue de la vie éternelle. Cette note identifie comme sa source un chapitre d’Albert le Grand, De natura et origine animae II, 13, dont la traduction en (...) hébreu se trouve dans un ouvrage inédit de Juda de Rome, son Commentaire du Qaddīš et de la Qeduššāh. La traduction du chapitre est éditée, l’histoire de l’ exemplum reconstituée et son emploi par les trois auteurs, remis en contexte et interprété. (shrink)

The present volume consists of diverse individual texts, produced between 1980 and 1986, which take two forms: interviews in which Bourdieu confronts a series of probing and intelligent interviewers, and conference papers that clarify and extend specific areas of his research. Now that Bourdieu's work has achieved wide diffusion and celebrity, this is an appropriate time for this volume, a pause for retrospection and resynthesis, for corrections of misreadings and extension of previous insights, and for projection of the next stages (...) of his work. For this English edition, Bourdieu's celebrated inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Leçon sur la Leçon, has been added. The texts fall into two fundamental areas. The first area provides an overview of Bourdieu's central concepts, never before clearly explained. The second area clarifies the philosophical presuppositions of Bourdieu's studies and gives an account of his relations with the series of thinkers who formulated the problems in social and cultural theory that still preoccupy us: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Wittgenstein, Weber, Parsons, and Lévi-Strauss. Bourdieu's visions of these figures is personal and penetrating, and in his vivacious, spontaneous responses one sees at work a mode of thought that can in itself be a liberating tool of social analysis. Bourdieu applies to himself the method of analyzing cultural works that he expounds, evoking the space of theoretical possibilities presented to him at different moments of his intellectual itinerary. (shrink)

Over the last four decades, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died two years ago, he was considered to be a thinker on a par with Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan--a public intellectual as influential to his generation as Sartre was to his. Science of Science and Reflexivity will be welcomed as a companion volume to Bourdieu's now seminal An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (...) . In this posthumous work, Bourdieu declares that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, and military research--that it risks falling under the control of industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and profit. Science thus endangered can become detrimental to mankind. The line between pure and applied science, therefore, must be subjected to intense theoretical scrutiny. Bourdieu's goals in Science of Science and Reflexivity are to identify the social conditions in which science develops in order to reclaim its objectivity and to rescue it from relativism and the forces that might exploit it. In the grand tradition of scientific reflections on science, Bourdieu provides a sociological analysis of the discipline as something capable of producing transhistorical truths he presents an incisive critique of the main currents in the study of science throughout the past half century and he offers a spirited defense of science against encroaching political and economic forces. A masterful summation of the principles underlying Bourdieu's oeuvre and a memoir of his own scientific journey, Science of Science and Reflexivity is a capstone to one of the most important and prodigious careers in the field of sociology. (shrink)

During the last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles. _The Field of Cultural Production_ brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study (...) of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary art and cultural criticism in the last twentieth century: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertextuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority. Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power. The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power. The Field of Cultural Porduction will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Ce livre présente la théorie anthropologique que Pierre Bourdieu a dû construire pour fonder sa recherche scientifique. Qu'il prenne à revers, pour mieux les résoudre ou les dissoudre, les problèmes que les philosophes " structuralistes " se sont posés, comme celui du " sujet " de l'action, ou qu'il mette à l'épreuve les analyses de Strawson, Austin, Wittgenstein, Kripke - ou des philosophes, classiques, délibérément convoqués à contre-emploi -, le sociologue, bien qu'il se défende de " faire le philosophe (...) ", traite de manière tout à fait nouvelle un certain nombre de questions philosophiques essentielles. (shrink)

In this article, I analyse the role of the concepts of ‘practice,’ ‘relations,’ and ‘process’ in Rein Vihalemm’s philosophy of science and the way he defined and articulated these concepts to study the production of scientific knowledge. Then, following Vihalemm’s line of reasoning, I will show how this approach is promising for thinking in a new way about some developments in contemporary sciences and technology.

Over the past four decades, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be the most influential sociologist in the world and a thinker on a par with Foucault and Le;vi-Strauss—a public intellectual as important to his generation as Sartre was to his. Sketch for a Self-Analysis is the ultimate outcome of Bourdieu’s lifelong preoccupation with reflexivity. Vehemently not (...) an autobiography, this unique book is instead an application of Bourdieu’s theories to his own life and intellectual trajectory; along the way it offers compelling and intimate insights into the most important French intellectuals of the time—including Foucault, Sartre, Aron, Althusser, and de Beauvoir—as well as Bourdieu’s own formative experiences at boarding school and his moral outrage at the colonial war in Algeria. (shrink)

This chapter first evokes the objects of chemistry and the role played by experimentation in the constitution of its objects. It then studies how chemists set up experimental protocols to deal with the dependence of chemical bodies on the inert or living environments in which they are found. To this end, its pays particular attention to the preparation of reference matrices for measurement and for the validation of results. In so doing, it stresses the fact that chemists use a dizzying (...) pluralism of instruments, procedures, reasonings, and methods in order to characterize and quantify substances, which are never truly detachable, except in the case of approximations satisfying particular objectives, from the empirical complex {apparatus-methods-chemical substances-associated medium} in which they are scrutinized. (shrink)

These selections from Le système du monde, the classic ten-volume history of the physical sciences written by the great French physicist Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), focus on cosmology, Duhem's greatest interest. By reconsidering the work of such Arab and Christian scholars as Averroes, Avicenna, Gregory of Rimini, Albert of Saxony, Nicole Oresme, Duns Scotus, and William of Occam, Duhem demonstrated the sophistication of medieval science and cosmology.

El universo literario de hoy, territorio conquistado a las burocracias de Estado y a sus academias, no se configura hasta el siglo XIX. Nadie se encuentra ya en situacin de decidir taxativamente lo que debe escribirse y cules son los cnones del buen gusto: los escritores, los crticos y los editores libran la batalla del reconocimiento y la consagracin.El proyecto esttico de Flaubert cuaja en el momento en que la conquista de la autonoma ingresa en su fase crtica. As, a (...) travs de la descripcin de la gnesis y estructura del campo literario, Pierre Bourdieu demuestra en primer lugar en qu medida la obra de Flaubert est en deuda con la constitucin del campo, del espacio de las posiciones y de las tomas de posicin de las diversas corrientes, movimientos, escuelas y autores de la poca: en otras palabras, cmo el Flaubert escritor se produce precisamente por lo que contribuye a producir.Aplicando las reglas del arte al da de hoy - esa lgica a la que obedecen escritores e instituciones literarias y que se expresa en forma sublimada en las obras -, Pierre Bourdieu hace volar en pedazos el espejismo del genio todopoderoso del creador y, al mismo tiempo, sienta los cimientos de una ciencia de las obras, cuyo objeto sera no slo la produccin material de la obra misma sino tambin la produccin de su valor. Sin embargo, en lugar de aplastar al creador bajo el peso de los determinantes sociales que pesan sobre l y reducir as la obra al medio que la vio nacer, la extraordinaria contundencia del anlisis desarrollado en este texto permite comprender por fin la tarea especfica que el artista (y especialmente el escritor) debe llevar a cabo - en contra y gracias a esos determinantes sociales - para llegar aproducirse como creador, es decir, sujeto de su propia creacin.Un gran libro, que compart. (shrink)

Infants' own activities create and actively select their learning experiences. Here we review recent models of embodied information seeking and curiosity-driven learning and show that these mechanisms have deep implications for development and evolution. We discuss how these mechanisms yield self-organized epigenesis with emergent ordered behavioral and cognitive developmental stages. We describe a robotic experiment that explored the hypothesis that progress in learning, in and for itself, generates intrinsic rewards: The robot learners probabilistically selected experiences according to their potential for (...) reducing uncertainty. In these experiments, curiosity-driven learning led the robot learner to successively discover object affordances and vocal interaction with its peers. We explain how a learning curriculum adapted to the current constraints of the learning system automatically formed, constraining learning and shaping the developmental trajectory. The observed trajectories in the robot experiment share many properties with those in infant development, including a mixture of regularities and diversities in the developmental patterns. Finally, we argue that such emergent developmental structures can guide and constrain evolution, in particular with regard to the origins of language. (shrink)