This article is a study on Paul’s mystical experiences using an interpretive framework that relies on multiple grounds: Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology of the “multiple realities” applied to the problem of religion, political anthropology and general scholarship on Paul. The aim of this study is also multiple: I seek to draw an interpretive insight into those mystical experiences that have been traditionally attributed to Paul by using a hermeneutic lens provided by Schutzian phenomenology, to clarify this hermeneutic method as such and (...) explore its interpretive potential for the phenomenology of religion in general, and to interpret the results of this analysis from the reflexive-historical perspective of political anthropology. (shrink)

This paper pursues three goals: First, to develop a lateral reading of Camus’ Stranger. A lateral reading is characterized by the displacement of the central conflict. In the case of The Stranger, I argue that the central conflict in the novel lies in the relation between the author and the protagonist, not, as direct readings would have it, in the relation between the protagonist and his predicament. Second, to spell out more precisely why it should be read as an anti-existentialist (...) novel. Here I argue that a lateral reading shows that the foundational existentialist opposition between telling and living is ironically dismantled by the very lateral structure of the novel. Third, to develop the notion of a lateral reading with a view to its potential advantages. Here, I point out that literalism involves positionalism and dynamicism. Positionalism refers to the reduction of fictional entities to their role in relation to each other. Dynamicism refers to the resulting view that those roles are further reducible to forces. I conclude that the lateral reading, with its commitments to positionalism and dynamicism is a model generalizable to the analysis of other fictional works. (shrink)

Interfaces have partially replaced editors. They now administer and have industrialized the processes of content circulation. Web platforms mediatize cultural memory and one example of this is that of online audiovisual archives which are a paradigmatic case involving interfaces mediating our image of the past. Therefore, their role as an enunciative framework is clearly worthy of thought and study. We will thus use a semiotic approach based on the starting hypothesis that digital interfaces shape our belief systems through a discursive (...) framing of content to which they give access. By analyzing two case studies, we will argue that the transparency of interfaces appears to recall the notion of “mechanical objectivity” and thus refashion the reliability of the archives. However, a final counter-analysis of a document read in the framework of an on-site consultation invites us to reshape our considerations and enlarge the perspective from semiotic visual analysis to include the social processes linked to the publication of digital heritage. (shrink)

This article provides a detailed account of the year that Michel Foucault spent as Director of the Institut Français in Hamburg and as a guest lecturer at the Romance Studies Department at the University of Hamburg. It discusses the beginning of Foucault’s time in Hamburg, the courses he taught at these two institutions, his interactions with German students in his classes, and events with invited guests from the French intellectual sphere. But it also sheds light on the friendships he made (...) in Hamburg, in particular with Rolf Italiaander; the completion of his own projects including Histoire de la folie and the translation of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View; and finally his nocturnal wanderings through Hamburg’s red light district, Sankt-Pauli. (shrink)

This paper argues that, by allowing recognizable patterns of human action to emerge through the intimidating foreignness of a linguistic medium, narrative deserves a privileged place in language education. To overcome the inhibiting effect of strangeness, and thus facilitate the adoption of a foreign language by new users, it helps if the listeners embark upon a regression toward the narrative origins of their familiarity with the world as articulated in their mother tongue. Harking back to the early childhood comfort of (...) being held conjointly by a story-telling nurse and a linguistic substitute of the amniotic liquid, narrative acts as indispensable companion of our estrangement in general—linguistic, or otherwise. The argument brings into play the Greek notion of paideia, in which disciplined training and childish amusement converge, in an effort to accommodate the conclusion that the intellectual version of self-growth—including acquisition of foreign languages—benefits massively from the good old nurturing of narrative, its time-revered nurse. (shrink)

Beginnings can be empirically described, philosophically debated, fictionally recounted or theatrically staged – each kind of discourse approaches beginnings via an examination of representation as an impossible return to source. The work of French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe articulates the problem of beginnings by considering them as a form of subjective collapse, loss of integrity and aggravation of emotion resulting from the paradoxical logic of representation. While Lacoue-Labarthe’s position has been largely developed in his philosophical writings, this study focuses more specifically (...) on his literary production, namely his collection of short stories, L’ “Allégorie”, and his staged debate with Jean-Luc Nancy in Scène: suivi de Dialogue sur le dialogue, in which the two writers present opposing views on the theatre. The analysis of the above texts centres on the two key “locations” for beginnings, namely narrative voice and the theatrical stage. (shrink)

OverviewEn 1979, la revue Meta publiait, sous la direction de Jean-Claude Gémar, un numéro spécial consacré, pour une première fois, à la traduction juridique comme activité et discipline autonomes au sein de la jeune traductologie [8]. Ce numéro reste une référence devant la persévérance et la rigueur manifestées par le Bureau des traductions d’alors et l’action, inspirée et audacieuse, du ministère de la Justice du Canada , qui laissaient entrevoir l’avènement d’une «jurilinguistique» en gestation. Cette tentative de refrancisation du langage (...) du droit canadien par le biais de lois bilingues, corédigées et non plus traduites, allait connaître une fortune peu commune. L’exemple canadien et son modèle de «lisibilité» de la loi se sont en effet répandus, inspirant de nombreux États aux quatre coins du monde. Quelques années plus tard, en 1982, le Conseil de la langue française du Québec publiait, sous la direction de J-C Gémar, un ouvrage collectif bilingue trai .. (shrink)

What we generally regard as ‘the face’ should be semiotically understood not as something given and monolithic, but rather stratified – it is at least threefold: biological (face), physiognomic (expression), perceivable (visage) – and relational as it has to be put within a narrative in order to make sense. The face lies at the centre of a whole semiotic system, the form of life, revolving around the issue of identity (which the face – the visage, to be precise – embodies (...) and still does not resolve). What we may call ‘the natural face’ is not, as common sense would suggest, the precondition of the ‘culturalized’ one (featured with modifications ranging from make-up and proper masks to surgery), but rather just one of the possible semiotic masks a person may choose to wear. At the same time, the mask does not have to be reduced to a deceptive device only (nor to be meant merely as a material object), being in fact at the centre of a more complex axiology. The classic veridictory square articulating the opposition between Being and Seeming may provide a suitable model for the semiotic square of ‘visageness’, so that we would have: Face, Disguise (the place of the mask proper), Fake, Anonymity. Based on these theoretical premises, the paper finally addresses popular music and outlines a provisional map of the pragmatics of the mask (subtractive vs. additive, ritualistic vs. continuous, material vs. virtual, mask as face vs. face as mask), as a suggestion for further studies. (shrink)

Ce texte a été publié dans Carnets, n° 6, janvier 2016 – Exotopies de Barthes, p. 130-142. Résumé : L'idiorrythmie, terme que Barthes emprunte au vocabulaire religieux des monastères et qui répond à son « fantasme d'une solitude collective », d'un compromis entre retrait et engagement, est, selon nous, en germe depuis les premiers travaux et sous-tend toute son écriture. Car, parmi le foisonnement de métaphores littéraires ou philosophiques mobilisées pour mener à bien son combat d'écrivain contre le - Poétique (...) et Études littéraires – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Résumé Ce texte est la transposition d’un exposé de l’auteur à l’IRCAM dans le cadre du séminaire MaMuPhi où dialoguent mathématiciens, musiciens (compositeurs, interprètes, théoriciens) et philosophes. Ni glose sur les théories du style en mathématique, ni prolégomènes à une stylistique future, encore moins galerie de portraits d’auteurs, il s’agit d’un essai plutôt que d’une étude : un court essai, catalysé en partie par les caustiques « décalogues » de Gian-Carlo Rota, où l’on évalue la place de l’auteur et essaie (...) de dégager les enjeux, essentiels plutôt que décoratifs, des questions d’écriture et de style dans la mathématique d’aujourd’hui. (shrink)

In order to fully understand Michel Foucault’s archeology of knowledge it is necessary to put it not only in the context of the discourse theories of the French school, but also in that of the linguistic theories of science. On the one hand, Foucault rejects the representational theory of scientific language. In his analysis of the discourse of the human sciences, with its complicated definition of the statement, he aims to show that we cannot limit the language of knowledge to (...) a vocabulary. On the other hand, Foucault’s approach is a serious challenge to structuralism because it is impossible to analyze the language of savoirs without taking into account the statement’s correlate. If the discourse of sciences is an artificial vocabulary created by means of the purification of the natural language, Saussure’s semiology could not compete against the conceptual dynamics of representational semiotics, and should admit that, in the cognitive usage, signs are representations. Therefore, Foucault admits that the statement has a correlate, that this correlate is not a physical object and that it functions as a historical structure of the discourse. This structure can be seen as a norm; the changing of this norm cannot be identified but in the archive and its description is always retrospective, structural and archaeological. (shrink)