"A driving force in all Sartre's writing is his serious desire to change the life of his reader." -- Iris Murdoch.

Theory from the south -- On personhood : a perspective from Africa -- Liberalism, policulturalism, and ideology : thoughts on citizenship and difference -- Nations with/out borders : the brave neo world and the problem of belonging -- Postcolonial politics and discourses of democracy : an anthropological take on African political modernities -- History on trial : memory, evidence, and the forensic production of the past -- Alien-nation : zombies, immigrants, and millennial capitalism -- Beyond bare life : AIDS, (bio)politics, (...) and the neo world order. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Lyotard Reader is a collection of Jean-Francois Lyotard's most important and significant papers to date. While they are all written from within philosophy, they seek to address subjects as wide-ranging as film, painting, psychoanlaysis, Judaism and politics. The originality of Lyotard's work means that it cannot be readily situated within any one philosophical tradition. Instead he returns philosophy itself to debates across a range of areas and, in so doing, redefines the philosophical enterprise.

Little consensus exists about the effectiveness of transnational private governance in domains such as labor, the environment, or human rights. The paper builds on recent scholarship on labor standards to emphasize the role of labor agency in transnational private governance. It argues that the relationship between transnational private regulatory initiatives and labor agency depends on three competences: first, the ability of workers’ organizations to gain access to processes of employment regulation, implementation, and monitoring; second, their ability to insist on the (...) inclusion of employers and state agencies within such processes; and third, the ability of workers to effectively exercise leverage in pursuit of particular goals. The paper develops a framework, called hybrid production regime, for examining how workers’ capacity to act at the local level depends on how these three collective competences are addressed in the institutionalization of capital–labor relations between the transnational and national levels. (shrink)

The ontology of Stoic causes and effects was clearly anti-platonic, since the Stoics did not want to admit that any incorporeal entity could have an effect. However, by asserting that any cause was the cause of an incorporeal effect, they returned to Plato’s syntax of causes in the Sophist, whose doctrine of the asymmetry of nouns and verbs identified names with the agents and verbs with the actions. The ontological asymmetry of causes and effects blocked the multiplication of causes by (...) reducing it to an efficient cause. However, while ontology and syntax merged into the doctrine of the effect as an incorporeal predicate, this was further complicated by a relational description of a cause as the effect of a body on a body and by the distinction of causes. Since there are different kinds of causes, not every kind of cause has the same syntactical role in the nexus of causal relations. This refinement of the original syntactical model presumably allowed the Stoics to give a more coherent view of human action than is usually assumed. (shrink)

En lieu et place du « retour aux choses mêmes » prôné par Husserl, la phénoménologie françaiseoscille aujourd’hui, dans un paysage philosophique surdéterminé par la question du « réalisme »,entre une description « traumatologique » de l’événement et une herméneutique infinie destinée à l’y rendre « résiliente ». La présente étude tente de comprendre, de manière critique, un tel état de chose, en le reconduisant à ce qui apparaît rétrospectivement, chez Husserl lui-même mais, finalement, dans l’ensemble de la philosophie transcendantale, (...) comme un présupposé voire un dogme qui exige d’être analysé comme tel : celui d’une impuissance de l’apparaître. (shrink)

This article seeks to re-evaluate the importance of the political in the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The article first shows that Sartre’s description of Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual trajectory as one of increasing political apathy from the 1950s onwards is inaccurate. The article then demonstrates that throughout the post-war period, including in his project for a new ontology, Merleau-Ponty believed that a revised version of Marxism would provide the methodological framework within which philosophical work could address the political challenges of the present. (...) This revised Marxism was to be a direct alternative to the reifying uses of Marx’s thinking. It would rely upon the latter’s self-reflexive historicism, which meant its very failures showed how philosophy might transform itself in connection with its own time. Cet article tente souligner la place du politique dans la pensée de Maurice Merleau-Ponty. On contestera d’abord la description faite par Sartre de sa trajectoire intellectuelle, selon laquelle il aurait fait preuve d’une apathie croissante, à partir des années cinquante, vis-à-vis des questions politiques. On montrera ensuite que durant toute la période d’après-guerre, jusque dans les recherches ontologiques ultimes, Merleau-Ponty a pensé qu’un usage renouvelé du marxisme permettrait au travail philosophique de répondre aux défis politiques du présent. Une telle révision du marxisme représentait une alternative directe aux usages réifiant de la pensée de Marx. Cette révision serait rendue possible par la réflexivité historiciste de cette pensée, qui fait que, dans ses erreurs mêmes, celle-ci révèle la capacité de la philosophie à se transformer au contact de son temps. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Edmund Husserl’s Influence on Karl Jaspers’s Phenomenology”Jean Naudin (bio) and Jean-Michel Azorin (bio)Keywordsphenomenology, intentionality, intuition, empathy, ambiguitySchwartz and Wiggins’s paper clearly shows that Jaspers’s comprehensive psychiatry draws mainly from Husserl’s phenomenology. This thesis enters a current debate opened by Chris Walker and German Berrios about the influence of Husserlian philosophy on Jaspers’s work. This debate, which emerged at the end of the so-called decade of (...) the brain, could be considered perfectly obsolete. But its topicality relies on taking up the challenge of the scientific bases of comprehension in psychiatric experience. Wiggins and Schwartz perfectly achieve this aim by opposing a theory of seeing and a theory of thinking. Works such as Walker’s are grounded on thinking; they are works about theory. They are not works about experience, but rather epistemological or historical works. In contrast, Wiggins and Schwartz suggest to see, as Jaspers did, and not to think, following Husserl by grounding their psychopathology on intuition and presuppositionlessness. They emphasize Jaspers’s method of “making present” by doing a perfect analysis of the issues of translation of vergegenwärtigung as a co-experiencing of mental processes as if they were directly given. These main principles of direct-givenness, presuppositionlessness, and making present pull the Jaspersian concepts to the Husserlian phenomenological reduction and seem like the foremost principle in Husserlian phenomenology: the intuition of the thing in itself. Whereas Jaspers refuted the principle of eidetic reduction, Wiggins and Schwartz clearly show how much he grounded on the basis of the concept of intentionality, discovered and enlightened during Husserl’s life within the horizon of phenomenological reduction. Actually, it seems that the authors take the side of Jaspers to better support their own vision of psychiatric experience, which they more explicitly argued in Husserlian terms of the later period in some other papers (Schwartz and Wiggins 1985; Wiggins and Schwartz 1988, 1991; Wiggins, Schwartz, and Northoff 1990). However, they take care here to struggle exclusively with the epistemological field of their opponents, considering only Jaspers’s own writings and the Husserlian texts that were accessible to Jaspers when he wrote his psychopathology. There is no room for Kant in Jaspers’s main [End Page 37] principles, and this assumption must lead us to consider the horizon opened by Jaspers, that is, the horizon of a science of meaning essentially built on the lived experiences and the bracketing of any kind of a priori. In contrast to the slight influence of Kant, one idea that emerges is that of the straight impact of Dilthey on both Jaspers and Husserl. We perfectly agree with Wiggins and Schwartz that Jaspers, grounding both on Husserl and Dilthey, arrives at a methodological principle that is all his own, by considering both the connections of the life-stories and the objectivity of symptoms. In other words, we can find the originality and maybe the astonishing modernity of Jaspers in his perfect description of the balance between comprehension and observation, between empathy and its limits, that are obviously found in psychotic processes.We thus focused our comments on the following critiques to Jaspers, although they were already well argued in the brief conclusion of Wiggins and Schwartz: (a) the issue of empathy, (b) the limits of Jaspersian phenomenology, and (c) the merits of its genuine ambiguity.The Issue of Empathy. Indeed we have no reliable scientific mean to guarantee the correctness of our intuitions of the other’s mental life, and this problem might lead one to globally reject the method. The discussion of this problem, classical in the Continental literature since the twenties, led the Continental psychiatrists to unfortunately abandon their own traditions. And it is surprising for a Continental psychiatrist to see this debate coming back into the English-speaking literature. When we address the issue of empathy, we have no easy means to abandon folk psychology. Using philosophical slang weakens the attempt to enlighten its foundations instead of describing its values. The suspicion regarding empathy is partially legitimated by the prejudices of Jaspers himself. As psychiatrists, we have to carry on the Jaspersian research by progressively abandoning it and coming back... (shrink)

This paper is not an article in a regular sense. It is a dialogue between François-David Sebbah, one of the two editors of this topical collection, and Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the most eminent representatives of the contemporary French Thought. This dialogue took place in the first half of 2022 in a written form, because of the sanitary restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and because Nancy was heavily sick. Sebbah sent to Nancy a text, corresponding to Section 2.1, (...) and Nancy responded to it with another text, corresponding to Section 2.2. Unfortunately, Nancy died on August 23, 2022, and could not revise his own text nor pursue the dialogue, as it was originally planned. For this reason, an introductory clarification by Sebbah, corresponding to Section 1, has been added. The purpose of such clarification is to introduce the reader to Nancy’s philosophy of technology—although technology never had a central role in Nancy’s reflections. In Section 2.1, Sebbah proposes a distinction between “French Theory,” “French Thought,” and “French Philosophy.” He also proposes a list of twelve possible intersections between the French Thought and the philosophy of technology. In Section 2.2, Nancy criticizes the use of expressions such as “French Thought.” He also insists, in a Heideggerian vein, on the fact that Technology (with a capital “T”) does not depend on human ends but has its own ends. (shrink)

Building on the storytelling, political storytelling, and religious storytelling literatures, I examined the role religious stories play in the formation of revolutionary convictions. This study’s primary sources of data are volumes I, II, and III of The Gospel in Solentiname, a historical record of religious discussions that took place in an isolated campesino community at a seminary-like setting under a growing national revolutionary scenario in 1970s Nicaragua. My analysis of these discussions reveals that religious discourse based on stories of prophecy, (...) Christian virtue, miracles, and social challenges to revolutionary action allowed story-users to assert, explore, and promote models of action and moral orientation consistent with the making of revolution. (shrink)

The ambition and proposal for data modeling of myths presented in this paper is to link contemporary technical affordances to some canonical projects developed in structural anthropology. To articulate the theoretical promise and innovation of this proposal, we present a discrete-event system specification modeling and simulation approach in order to perform a generative analysis and a dynamic visualization of selected narratives, aimed at validating and revitalizing the transformational and morphodynamic theory and methodology proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his structural analysis (...) of myth. After an analysis of Lévi-Strauss’s transformational methodology, we describe in detail how discrete-event system specification models are implemented and developed in the framework of a DEVSimPy software environment. The validation of the method involves a discrete-event system specification simulation based on the extension of discrete-event system specification models dedicated to provide a dynamic Google Earth visualization of the selected myth. Future work around the discrete-event system specification formalism in anthropology is described as well as future applications regarding the impact of computational models to new contemporary anthropological domains. (shrink)

This article starts, on the one hand, with a consideration of the paradoxical way in which, namely when he wanted to evoke those intellectual figures that have decidedly contributed to the revelation of the "true Pascal", i. e., of the Pascal that had known the good usage of reason, Fortunat Strowski comes to the idea of putting side by side Pierre Duhem and Leon Brunschvicg. On the other, a reference is made to the fact that Duhem only published two articles (...) and a preface on Pascal while Brunschvicg is the author of a major work on the great figure of the XVIIth -Century. Hence, the question raised is about the consideration that shall be given to a paradoxical affirmation that seems to place on equal terms the few pages that Duhem has written on Pascal with the imposing contributions of Brunschvicg. For the author of the article, it would not be very consequent to take such affirmations as if they were unreflected ones, since it is clear that Strowski knew exactly what he was writing as we can see from the very good knowledge he had of the writings of both Blaise Pascal and Pierre Duhem. Indeed, and more than anyone else, Strowski was in a very good position to enlighten us about these two thinkers and to write about them in the terms he effectively did. The goal of the article, therefore, is to justify that assertion, which on its face is quite paradoxical, by showing in concrete terms the extent to which Pierre Duhem was truly influenced by Blaise Pascal. ––– O presente artigo começa por realçar o modo paradoxal como, uma vez que ele se dá ao trabalho de evocar aqueles autores que contribuíram para a revelação do verdadeiro Pascal, ou seja, daquele que conheceu o bom uso da razão, Fortunat Strowski não hesita em colocar o nome de Pierre Duhem lado a lado com o de Léon Brunschvicg. O facto, porém, é que Pierre Duhem não fez mais do que publicar dois artigos e um prefácio sobre Blaise Pascal, ao passo que Brunschvicg lhe dedicou uma obra que haveria de ficar famosa. O problema, portanto, consiste em saber qual o valor que se deve atribuir a uma tal afirmação desconcertante, a qual parece simplesmente equalizar as poucas páginas de Duhem sobre Pascal com as imponentes contribuições de Brunschvicg. Nesse sentido, a estratégia do autor do artigo consiste em não tomar de forma ligeira uma tal afirmação, como se Strowski não tivesse considerado bem as consequências e o alcance daquilo que escrevia, pois a verdade é que ele conhecia não só a obra de Pascal mas também a de Duhem. Ou seja, mais do que ninguém, ele estava perfeitamente à altura de nos comunicar algo de substancial acerca de cada um destes pensadores e de escrever a seu propósito aquilo que ele efectivamente escreveu. Em suma, o presente artigo não tem outra pretensão que não a de justificar essa afirmação aparentemente paradoxal segundo a qual Pierre Duhem foi um verdadeiro pascaliano. (shrink)

Kant describes a conflict among the different theories of knowledge. A productive conflict whose emergence is the origin of a renewal: it awakens the spirit and it leads it to think critically. Philosophy becomes critique, Kant says, when it is not focused on the doctrines and on their demands, but on the relationship between general rules (the “sense”) that coordinates all the faculties – and their particular expression, that is to say the specific cases. Similarly operates the judge, that, in (...) court, has to invent (ausdenken) the rule capable of corresponding to the single case: a judge that, in order to decide (jus dicere) and utter the decision, tries to compensate the absence of adequate legal rules and often decides without the adapt general rule. The problem of the différend does not concern, thus, anthropology. It concerns language. Exemplary cases provide analoga of the sensitive data and are devices that allow the dialectic between different systems of value by connecting their core meaning, the proper names involved and what Kant defines the Darstellung. Nevertheless, against this background, a change of paradigm becomes necessary – a change that entails the break with hegelian philosophy of law and with a thought built on mediation, that is to say with the kantian Zusammenstimmung. It is not possible, nor desirable, to substitute the battle field with the court and to subordinate the individual interests to the general logic of argumentation, because the synthesis of the different voices might imply totalitarianism and the end of the différend might correspond to the beginning of terror. (shrink)

In an age of nationalisation of international educational policy, or vice versa, the politics and conflicts behind such policies often take centre stage to the detriment of professional expertise. In response, this article develops a nuanced critical realism to propose a practice-based development and implementation of educational policy reforms. Based on empirical reports of head teachers’ subversive practice, the article concludes by highlighting that professional expertise is a central component, dubbed ‘formless capability’, that all stakeholders use to turn policy intentions (...) into policy actions. Actuality consists of the three traditional domains of critical realism – the real, the actual and the empirical – whose importance is derived from whether it is a means to or an end in itself. It is argued here that empirical experiences of leading schools are the stage of actuality that is directly... (shrink)

This book revisits the theory of the sources of international law from the perspective of formalism.

Im Folgenden stellen wir drei aktuelle Forschungsbereiche zur formalen Logik bei Kant allgemeinverständlich dar und greifen dabei auf die trans zendentale Logik nur dann zurück, wenn sie ein besseres Verständnis der formalen Logik ermöglicht: Zunächst wird Kants Beitrag zur Rezeption und Weiterentwicklung von Euler-artigen Diagrammen dargestellt. Diese Diagramme wurden in den 1990er Jahren wiederentdeckt, als formales System interpretiert und werden heute insbes. in der Didaktik, in den Kognitionswissenschaften, in der Linguistik, in KI-Bereichen wie der (Logik-basierten) Wissensrepräsentation eingesetzt, und auch in (...) der Philosophie verwendet (Kapitel 2). Mehrere Studien haben in den letzten Jahren gezeigt, dass Kant in weiten Teilen seines Systems Oppositionsverhältnisse verwendet, die der Struktur des logischen Quadrats entsprechen. Das logische Quadrat ist heute Gegenstand intensiver Forschung, da es neben der klassischen, auch die paravollständige und parakonsistente Negation abbildet (Kap. 3). Jüngst wurde zudem die Implementierbarkeit der kantischen Logik in ein formalisiertes deduktives System bewiesen. Die Bedeutung dieses Ergebnisses wird insbesondere im Hinblick auf die formalisierte Umsetzung der Sätze vom Widerspruch, vom zureichenden Grund und der Ausschließung des Mittleren erläutert (Kap. 4). Abschließend möchten wir ein paar Perspektiven für die Forschung zur formalen Logik bei Kant nennen (Kap. 5). -- -/- Note: No financial support acknowledged by the second autor (S. Kovač). (shrink)

Delphica 6. Notes on the stairway of the theater at Delphi (SD 541) The stairway, made of limestone, by which one reached the theater at Delphi since its discovery (end of the 19th c.) was dismantled in 1974. Below it were discovered two earlier ones, made of poros, a third of the width and seemingly not related to the theater. The datings have varied according to time and author. The limestone stairway has even been considered a paleochristian construction. It is (...) true that its first narrow flight of steps resulted from a transformation of that date. But a trace still visible on the string wall permits documenting the original profile of this part and reconstituting a width equal to the rest of the structure, thus restoring a monumental aspect to the ensemble. The date must be that now attributed to the theater : 160-150. (shrink)

Axel Honneth, célèbre théoricien allemand de la reconnaissance qui s’inscrit dans la filiation de l’École de Francfort et notamment de Jürgen Habermas, et Jacques Rancière, éminent penseur français de la mésentente qui a rompu avec la tradition althussérienne, sont deux figures centrales du paysage intellectuel contemporain. Leurs pensées se situent dans deux traditions distinctes, mais elles ont toutes deux à voir avec le marxisme pris au sens large, qu’elles considèrent sous un angle critique. Les deux penseurs portent intérêt à des (...) domaines spécifiques au sein de la philosophie et hors d’elle. S’ils partagent tous deux un souci du domaine politique, Axel Honneth se meut dans la philosophie sociale, la philosophie morale et la philosophie du droit ; il fait un usage important et réfléchi des sciences sociales. Jacques Rancière se tourne, pour sa part, vers l’histoire, l’esthétique et la littérature. Mais une confrontation entre leurs deux pensées paraît s’imposer, tant leurs modèles sont influents dans le champ des sciences sociales, de la théorie politique et de la philosophie critique aujourd’hui. Il s’agit de savoir si les paradigmes qu’ils mettent en avant pour critiquer la société, pour rendre raison de son évolution et des transformations qui doivent la rendre plus juste ou plus libre, le paradigme de la reconnaissance et celui de la mésentente, sont concurrents, s’ils sont exclusifs l’un de l’autre, ou s’ils sont compatibles. (shrink)

Dans les premières lignes du compte-rendu substantiel qu’il fournit de l’ouvrage de Mikel Dufrenne paru en 1963 sous le titre Le Poétique, Paul Ricœur écrit : Le dernier livre de Mikel Dufrenne n’est pas seulement le fruit mûr d’une œuvre qui pousse comme une plante – les images végétales conviennent à merveille à une philosophie qui se veut fidèle aux voix de la Nature! –, il est aussi l’un des signes de la mue de la philosophie française : celle-ci, de (...) multiples façons, se rebelle comme l... (shrink)

En muchos de los refranes y comportamientos de los colombianos son identificables códigos e interacciones heredadas, en las que se acostumbra al ciudadano a formar parte de un sistema en el que se prolifera la corrupción social. Para equilibrar la balanza ante la necesidad de justicia, se utilizan sistemas sancionatorios, los cuales son también susceptibles de corrupción; es aquí donde, a partir de la reflexión en torno a la cultura y la educación, se propone el trabajo principalmente de la familia (...) y la escuela en la búsqueda de herramientas de prevención de todo tipo de corrupción, que permitan el desarrollo de una sociedad en la que prime la formación valores en la niñez y la adolescencia. (shrink)

rights is a normative concept. This gives rise to three desiderata for conceptualising rights: first, given the wide variety of contexts in which rights are invoked, an account of rights must be su...

Il n'est peut-être pas excessif d'avancer que toute l'œuvre de Merleau-Ponty n'est qu'une longue méditation sur le mystère de l'esprit incarné. Dès la Structure du comportement, il est longuement question des relations entre l'âme et le corps; le quatrième et dernier chapitre de ce livre s'intitule en effet les Relations du corps et de l'âme et le problème de la conscience perceptive. Plusieurs des chapitres de la Phénoménologie de la perception sont consacrés au corps: le corps comme objet; l'expérience du (...) corps; la synthèse du corps propre; le corps comme sexué, le corps comme expression de la parole. Merleau-Ponty revient ensuite plusieurs fois sur le problème de la structure de l'homme, dans des conférences, des cours et des articles. Mentionnons spécialement la conférence l'Homme et l'adversité et l'article le Philosophe et son ombre, tous deux contenus dans le recueil intitulé Signes. Enfin, dans le Visible et l'Invisible que Merleau-Ponty laisse inachevé au moment de sa mort, en mai 1961, ainsi que dans de nombreuses notes datées de 1959 et de 1960 et éditées avec le Visible et l'Invisible en 1964, nous trouvons encore de profonds développements non seulement sur le corps mais aussisur la chair, notion beaucoup plus compréhensive, nous le verrons, que celle meme de corps vivant. (shrink)

Cet article porte sur les caractéristiques de la question et de l’interrogation. Dans une perspective énonciative, il présente les différents types de structuration, et leurs implications énonciatives et pragmatiques – modales et illocutoires. Il pose la question de la modalité épistémique et de sa pertinence, et de la plurimodalité sous-jacente à la motivation des questions et de l’interrogation. Il observe de quelle façon se construit la force illocutoire d’une question, et de quelle façon elle se neutralise dans les percontatives. Il (...) met en évidence la relation inter-énonciative et de quelle façon elle est exploitée pour solliciter le destinataire. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 291-293 [Access article in PDF] Schizophrenia and the Void Jean Naudin and Jean-Michel Azorin It was Eugene Minkowski who, from the 1920s on, introduced the French to the work of Eugen Bleuler, whose student he had been. In the introduction to his first book, Schizophrenia: Psychopathology of Schizoids and Schizophrenics (Minkowski 1927), Minkowski nevertheless notes with regard to Bleuler that he (...) could not allow himself "to be restricted to this student's task." For Minkowski, Bleuler certainly enjoys the great merit of having substituted the notion of schizophrenia for that of dementia praecox and of having described autism with precision. But—Minkowski says—autism is badly defined when, relying upon the concept of Spaltung, Bleuler fails to break free of associationist psychology. Minkowski justifies his critical attitude by appealing, as does Binswanger, to Husserl and above all to Bergson. For Bergson, dissociation is a normal feature of thought. If, for Minkowski, it is important to pay attention to autism, it is because it attests not to a certain fragmentation of consciousness, but rather to an attitude whereby the subject seeks to preserve the precarious equilibrium of a personality that is threatened by a void.The article translated into English for this special issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology prefigures Schizophrenia and, like an earlier article on the theme of "morbid rationalism," already announces certain key concepts. Here these concepts are, so to speak, caught in their embryonic state, and one is forced to recognize with Tatossian (1993) how radically Minkowski differs from his master, Bleuler, in the choice of specific cases. By according exemplary significance to cases of "poor autism," Minkowski focuses on the reflexivity of the subjective experience of the patient rather than on the proliferation of the delusional state, which lends itself more readily to clinical observation. We must remember that Minkowski is above all a healer. If, like Bleuler, he is interested in the problem that generates the illness, it is only in order to be able to heal the patient. It is therefore not so much the isolated problem that interests him as the way the person tries to deal with it. So it should not come as a surprise that one of the essential themes of this article is what Minkowski calls "compensation." Like the psychoanalytical concepts to which Bleuler refers, compensation is a dynamic concept. But Minkowski takes care to distinguish the compensation that characterizes the interrogative attitude from motives of a more psychological kind aimed at meeting a lack by symbolically satisfying a desire. In the purely phenomenological sense in which Minkowski takes it, compensation does not refer to a hidden motive. It represents a way of getting around the void or sense of emptiness that results from the schizophrenic person's inability to project himself into the future by pursuing the practical goals of normal, daily life. In this case, the dynamic does not feed off the vicissitudes of drive but off the élan vital—or rather, off the decline of élan vital that such persons suffer. [End Page 291]Minkowski particularly insists upon the fact that Paul's interrogative attitude is not simple curiosity, even if Paul's questioning began with sexual curiosity. Confronted with incessant questioning reminiscent of a child, a psychoanalyst would be likely to invoke infantile curiosity concerning procreation and sexual difference. Minkowski, however, seeks to show that the prevailing motive in Paul's case is not so much desire for knowledge as the vital necessity of finding a way of—can one put it this way?—playing for time. In other words, the interrogatory attitude is a way of avoiding confrontation with the realm of practical concerns that, at bottom, makes the patient suffer. If this realm makes him suffer, it is because the absence of any vital attachment leaves him floating in a kind of void. The fundamental problem of schizophrenia is therefore identified as the loss of meaning going along with a deficiency in the individual's attachment to practical reality. Practical reality, or to put it otherwise, an orientation toward practical activity... (shrink)