En juin 1959, Elena Spirgevičienė, de Kaunas (Lituanie), saisit le comité central du parti communiste d’Union soviétique d’une plainte contre l’attribution à titre posthume du titre de Héros de l’URSS au partisan Alfonsas Čeponis. En 1944, affirme-t-elle, cet homme faisait partie d’une bande qui a assassiné sa sœur, l’a violée elle-même, et a tenté de violer puis a tué sa fille. Fondé en particulier sur des documents d’archives originaux publiés dans ce même numéro de Clio, cet article retrace les différentes (...) étapes de l’affaire et les récits contradictoires qu’elle met en jeu. Il oppose la figure du héros soviétique Čeponis à sa déconstruction par la plaignante qui le dépeint comme un bandit. Il montre le retournement qui a lieu lors de l’examen de la plainte par le Comité central du parti communiste de Lituanie : non seulement le viol commis contre la plaignante est nié, mais c’est elle qui se retrouve en position d’accusée. Enfin, il retrace comment la tentative de viol de la fille, suivie de son assassinat, est utilisée par le discours lituanien dissident dans les années 1970, dominant aujourd’hui, pour construire une nouvelle figure de martyre. (shrink)

The place of the subjective -- Everything that is of a whole constitutes an obstacle to it insofar as it is included in it -- Action, manor of the subject -- The real is the impasse of formalization : formalization is the locus of the passing-into-force of the real -- Hegel : "the activity of force is essentially activity reacting against itself" -- Subjective and objective -- The subject under the signifiers of the exception -- Of force as disappearance, whose (...) effect is the whole from which it has disappeared -- Deduction of the splitting -- A la nue accablante tu? -- Any subject is a forced exception, which comes in second place -- Jewelry for the sacred of any subtraction of existence -- Lack and destruction -- The new one forbids the new one and presupposes it -- On the side of the true -- There are no class relations -- Every subject crosses a lack of being and a destruction -- The subjects antecedence to itself -- Torsion -- Theory of the subject according to Sophocles, theory of the subject according to Eeschylus -- Of the strands of the knot, knowing only the color -- A materialist reversal of materialism -- The Black sheep of materialism -- The indissoluble salt of truth -- Answering to the sphinx demands from the subject not to have to answer or the sphinx -- Algebra and topology -- Neigborhoods -- Consistency, second name of the real after the cause -- So little ontology -- Subjectivization and subjective process -- The topological opposite of the knot is not the cut-dispersion but the destruction-recomposition -- Subjectivizing anticipation, retroaction of the subjective process -- Hurry! hurry! word of the living! -- The inexistent -- Logic of the excess -- Topics of ethics -- Where? -- The subjective twist : and -- Diagonals of the imaginary -- Schema -- Ethics as the dissipation of the paradoxes of partisanship -- Classical detour -- Love what you will never believe twice. (shrink)

Dans cet entretien qu’il a accordé à un journaliste allemand, Alain Badiou revient sur son parcours, sur l’influence du contexte politique sur sa pensée, sur ses relations avec Sartre, Derrida ou Lacan, sur sa philosophie du sujet notamment, dans laquelle ce n’est pas l’infini mais la finitude qui pose problème. C’est par l’échange autour de sa lecture de Marx qu’il en vient à discuter de l’idée du communisme, et de son actualité possible. Toute la question du rapport entre théorie (...) et pratique se pose alors. Les années de dictature invalident-elles de fait cette idée? Dans un langage très accessible, Alain Badiou revient ainsi sur l’un des plus grands malentendus intellectuels du XXème siècle et sur la force de cette idée, qui porte en elle la conviction qu’un autre type d’organisation de la société est possible. (shrink)

L'Adhésion littéraire est son dernier ouvrage : un livre testament, dans lequel il partage sa conception de la littérature comme objet politique, qui engage nos valeurs, nos croyances, notre manière d'être ensemble."--Page 4 of cover.

The objective of this article is to reflect on the impact that Ricoeur’s work on psychoanalysis (following his book on Freud) might have on his concept of narrative identity. In these texts, one of the points he draws from psychoanalysis is that resistance mechanisms can hamper the process of self-recognition of the subject through the story that he tells himself about himself. These resistance mechanisms cannot be put to an end simply by understanding them intellectually. These writings teach us that, (...) in order to be brought to an end, these resistance mechanisms require more than the willingness to appropriate one’s own narrative identity. An appropriate technique to handle energies must be put into place. This explains why the production of a narrative identity can sometimes take the form of a real work. (shrink)

Law and Economics deals with the economic analysis of legal relations, legal provisions, laws and regulations and is a research field which has a long tradition in economics. It was lost after the expulsion of some of the leading economists from Germany during 1933 to 1938, but then revived in Chicago. Both the subject of Law of Economics and the need for a concise Encyclopedia is particularly relevant in Europe today. Currently in the European Union there are several different legal (...) cultures: the Anglo-Saxon legal framework, the German legal framework, which for example also includes Greece, and the Roman legal family—three jurisdictions which have to be covered with one and the same theory. In the EU, the task of the European Commission to interact with the various European jurisdictions means different legal cultures collaborating and some degree of harmonization is necessary. The result is an immediate need, if only for the science, to show how a given problem is solved in each legal tradition and jurisdiction. This Encyclopedia provides both a common language and precise definitions in the field, which will be useful in the future to avoid misunderstandings during harmonization of EU Law. (shrink)

A une époque où se transforme l’inscription des sociétés humaines dans l’environnement biophysique, où se pose donc la question de l’énergie, des ressources et des besoins énergétiques, la catastrophe de Fukushima permet de poser et explorer divers problèmes. -/- Pour expliquer la catastrophe, l’analyse a mis au jour un niveau de la réalité sociale que les sciences humaines et sociales établies n’exposent pas complètement: elles explorent un niveau de la réalité sociale organisée selon la différentiation actuellement prévalentes des secteurs d’activité (...) propres aux systèmes sociaux observables. Les travaux de Michel Foucault, les problèmes qu’ils posent et les concepts qu’il formule, ouvrent la possibilité rendre compte des multiples connaissances produites depuis mars 2011. -/- Le but de ces diverses analyses de la catastrophe de Fukushima est de montrer comment, dans un système social donné, les différents réseaux de pouvoir sont agrégés en une structure qui assure leur stabilité, conditionnent leur capacité d’adaptation aux évènements perturbant cette structure, comment ces réseaux de pouvoir investissent l’environnement biophysique pour générer les écologies à la base de nos sociétés. Le cas Fukushima prouve qu’on ne connaît pas réellement une société sans atteindre ce niveau où les divers composants d’un système social sont associés et inscrits dans l’environnement biophysique sous forme d’écologies associées. (shrink)

This is a translation, by A. Létourneau, of a book by Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein previously published by Oxford U. Press The author provides a reading of Wittgenstein, and explains how theology as a discipline can take into account his main philosophical thoughts about religion and ethics.

This provocative book explores the ideology of truth and deception in China, offering a nuanced perspective on social interaction in different cultural settings. Drawing on decades of fieldwork in China, Susan D. Blum examines rules, expectations, and beliefs regarding lying and honesty. She argues that public lying is evaluated within Chinese society by culturally specific moral values. Chinese, for example, might emphasize the consequences of speech, Americans the absolute truthfulness. But many Americans also excel in manipulation of language, yet (...) find a simultaneous moral absolutism opposed to lying in any form. Blum considers Japanese and Jewish traditions as well, which similarly struggle to control the boundaries of honesty. (shrink)

Connaissons-nous l'enfant? Au sortir du " siècle de l'enfant ", la différence de l'enfance ne cesse de nous interroger. Si l'exigence de penser l'enfance à nouveau est aujourd'hui partagée, les voies de cette entreprise, et plus précisément les problématiques au sein desquelles elle s'impose, sont diverses et mouvantes, à l'image du monde dont héritent ceux que Hannah Arendt appelait " les nouveaux-venus ". Emergent toutefois du foisonnement des pensées de l'enfance quelques paradigmes que l'ouvrage se propose de rendre visibles. Le (...) paradigme démocratique inscrit la question de l'enfance dans la dynamique égalitaire des sociétés démocratiques, et dans l'inéluctable effacement de la différence enfant/adulte auquel les conduit leur " passion de l'égalité ". Le développement de la " philosophie pour enfants " relève-t-il de cette passion de l'égalité? La figure de " l'enfant philosophe " participe-t-elle de cet effacement? Assurément son émergence au cours des vingt dernières années constitue l'un des faits marquants d'une histoire commune à l'enfance et à la philosophie. Que dire alors de la figure de l'enfant artiste, de l'enfance saisie dans sa proximité avec l'artiste? Elle participe d'une tentative de penser l'enfance autrement, d'une pensée esthétique de l'enfance alliant l'héritage schillérien des Lettres sur l'éducation esthétique de l'humanité aux tentations d'une pensée poétique de l'enfance. Que devient alors, dans cette pensée de l'enfance bousculée, cette autre figure qui ne cesse d'accompagner l'enfance, du moins depuis qu'on la pense comme éducable, la figure du pédagogue? Voilà peut-être l'un des points de résistance aux bouleversements postmodernes : l'impossibilité d'une connaissance de l'enfance qui n'en passe pas par l'éducation de l'enfance. Le point de vue paradigmatique n'épuise toutefois pas la question. Par-delà les paradigmes qui tentent de la saisir, quelque chose de l'enfance ne cesse de se dérober. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Naïve Somatism is a re-interpretation of Aristotle’s cognitive psychology in light of certain presuppositions he holds about the living animal body. The living animal body is presumed to be sensitive, and Aristotle grounds his account of cognition in a rudimentary proprioceptive awareness one has of her body. With that presupposed metaphysics under our belts, we are in a position to see that Aristotle in de Anima (cognition chapters at least) has a di erent explanatory aim in view than that (...) which the literature generally imputes to him. He is not explicating what we would call the “mental”—the private, inner realm which some take to be of a di erent kind than the physical—as most take him to be. His explanandum is content acquisition; the explanans is showing how the body becomes like various aspects of objects. Although he famously describes the mind (nous) as unmixed with the body, he is guided by functional constrains—nous cannot be limited or qualified if it is to potentially think all things. Thus, his inquiry into cognition is philosophically limited from a contemporary perspective. Aristotle is not doing philosophy of mind, for he doesn’t seem to find the “mental” philosophically perplexing. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce que penser? Question simple, en apparence, voire élémentaire, et cependant aussi complexe qu'essentielle. Le présent ouvrage, où le lecteur croisera la physique et la psychanalyse, la biologie et la linguistique, la logique mathématique et l'esthétique, tente d'apporter des éléments de réponse à cette question et de mener, en quelque sorte, une réflexion sur la réflexion. Il s'agit d'abord de suivre un itinéraire, en balisant le chemin qui va de la matière à la vie et de la vie à l'esprit (...) ; puis de parcourir les degrés d'une pensée qui gagne en clarté comme en efficacité depuis les brumes du préconscient jusqu'au triomphe de la rationalité ; enfin d'explorer l'esprit dans tous ses états en interrogeant les figures majeures de la pensée que sont la science, l'art ou la philosophie. (shrink)

01. Athènes, Attique, Mégaride (Despina Chatzivasiliou) Généralités 01.01 – Ces dernières années, nombreuses sont les études qui parcourent l’histoire d’Athènes et de l’Attique, proposent de nouvelles interprétations des trouvailles anciennes et remanient les théories existantes dans la bibliographie. Une attention particulière est portée à la géographie et à l’organisation topographique des espaces, et le besoin d’un éclaircissement dans la bibliographie en croissance constante est évident....

Two opposite statements must be rejected with the same rigor. First (1) is that a few countries have identified themselves with modernity by their scientific, technical and economic achievement and that the rest of the world, which is lagging behind the ‘advanced countries’, must follow in their footsteps and imitate their example. The article first of all sets out the falsity of such a statement, because there is not one but many western paths of modernization, and indicates that it is (...) nothing but a colonialist ideology, which spread from European and American societies and cultures and destroyed all independent efforts of modernization in other countries, in particular China. The hegemony of the western capitalist model is more than challenged by other ways of modernization, for though the soviet model has failed, other countries are ‘emerging’ or have already emerged. Second (2) the opposite representation defends the idea of a complete multiculturalism including political regimes and human rights. It fights against the previous colonialist model and supports a total relativism. But this view makes impossible the communication between completely different countries and cultures and reciprocal fear leads to an extreme conflict between ‘civilizations’, such as S. Huntington has described. This view leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable if each civilization has a complete internal unity and a complete control on all its activities. But the world is not divided into various theocratic states: no single theocratic state commands the whole or the majority of Muslim population. The central problem remains real and difficult: how to combine unity and diversity, the difference between cultures and the capacity for them to communicate with each other? The most useful idea is to elaborate one general definition of modernity, as a culture which is based on universalistic principles. The western mode of modernization is not the only possible one; nor is it at all sure that the western process of separation of temporal and spiritual powers is the only possibility. We cannot assert that universalism must penetrate social life only through political institutions and citizenship. It is beyond any reasonable doubt that modernity, with its universalistic components, cannot be identified with only one type of social organization and cultural values. (shrink)

Les études tentant de répondre à la question " Qu'est-ce que la justice? " et à cette autre, inséparable, " Qu'est-ce qu'une société juste? " sont assez nombreuses ces dernières années, mais elles ne sont pas toujours faciles d'accès, au contraire du livre d'Alain Durand. Par un discours systématique et structuré, il présente quelques réflexions occasionnées par des lectures ou par des événements et tendances de fond liés à l'actualité. L'auteur se confronte à de grands auteurs qui, depuis Aristote (...) jusqu'à John Rawls, sans oublier d'autres penseurs plus récents, ont substantiellement enrichi les approches de la justice sociale. Une attention particulière est accordée à l'apport du christianisme. La foi, en effet, ne cesse d'apparaître comme une force d'interrogations radicales pour l'élaboration d'une société plus juste. Et l'Eglise, qui doit être attentive aux priorités et aux dérives dans ce domaine, est ainsi conduite à des remises en question, tant en elle-même, que dans un monde devenu éthiquement pluraliste. La lecture de ce livre peut être faite assez librement, par les multiples portes d'entrée qu'il offre. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Logic of the SiteAlain Badiou (bio)Translated by Steve Corcoran (bio) and Bruno Bosteels (bio)The Commune Is a Site 1. Ontology of the CommuneTake any world whatsoever. A multiple that is an object of this world—whose elements are indexed by the transcendental of this world—is a site, if it happens to count itself within the referential field of its own indexation. Or again: a site is a multiple that happens (...) to behave in the world with regard to itself as with regard to its elements, in such a way as to be the support of being of its own appearance.Even if the idea is still obscure, we can begin to see its content: a site is a singularity, because it convokes its being in the appearing of its own multiple composition. It makes itself, in the world, the being-there of its being. Among other consequences, the site gives itself an intensity of existence. A site is a being that happens to exist by itself.We will ask: can we give a more concrete idea of what a site is? Is there a site?Let us consider the world "Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870." We are in the month of March 1871. After a semblance of resistance, and shot through with fear of revolutionary and worker Paris, the interim government of bourgeois "Republicans" capitulates to Bismarck's Prussians. In order to consolidate this political "victory"—very comparable to Petain's reactionary revenge in 1940 (where preferring an arrangement with the external enemy to exposure to the internal enemy)—it has an assembly with a royalist majority hastily elected by a frightened rural world, an assembly that sits in Bordeaux.Led by Thiers, the government hopes to take advantage of the circumstances to annihilate the political capacity of the workers. But on the Parisian front, the proletariat is armed in the form of a National Guard, owing to its having been mobilized during the siege on Paris. In theory the Parisian proletariat has many hundreds of cannons at its disposition. The "military" organism of the Parisians is the Central Committee, at which assemble the delegates of the various battalions of the National Guard, battalions [End Page 141] that are in turn linked to the great working-class quartiers of Paris—Montmartre, Belleville, and so forth.Thus we have a divided world whose logical organization—what in philosophical jargon could be called its transcendental organisation—reconciles intensities of political existence according to two sets of antagonistic criteria. Concerning the representative, electoral, and legal dispositions, one cannot but observe the preeminence of the Assembly of traditionalist Rurals,1 Thiers's capitulard government, and the officers of the regular army, who, having been licked without much of a fight by the Prussian soldiers, dream of doing battle with the Parisian workers. That is where the power is, especially as it is the only power recognized by the occupier. On the side of resistance, political intervention, and French revolutionary history, there is the fecund disorder of Parisian worker organizations, which intermingles with the Central Committee of the twenty quartiers, the Federation of Syndicate Chambers, a few members of the International, local military committees. In truth, the historical consistency of this world, which had been separated and disbanded [délié] owing to the war, is held together only by the majority conviction that no kind of worker capability for government exists. For the vast majority of people, including often the workers themselves, the politicized workers of Paris are simply incomprehensible. These workers are the inexistent aspect [l'inexistant propre] of the term "political capacity" in the uncertain world of the spring of 1871. But for the bourgeoisie they are still too existent, at least physically. The government receives threats from the stock exchange of this sort: "You will never have financial operations if you do not get rid of these reprobates." First up then, an imperative task, and a seemingly easy one to carry out: disarm the workers and, in particular, recuperate the cannons spread throughout working-class Paris by the military committees of the National Guard. It is this initiative that will make... (shrink)

Cutting through simultaneously the conventions of sinology and a capitalist universalism modeled on the West, Jullien unfolds a difference between Chinese thought and philosophy that allows it to be thought out without taking sides. His unusual move insists on the irreducibility of the difference yet at the same time renders the irreducibility intelligible; Jullien gives us a world structured by distinct lines of thought.