This paper is concerned with the description of the process of measurement within the context of a quantum theory of the physical world. It is noted that quantum mechanics permits a quasi-classical description of those macroscopic phenomena in terms of which the observer forms his perceptions. Thus, the process of measurement in quantum mechanics can be understood on the quasi-classical level by transcribing from the strictly classical observables of Newtonian physics to their quasi-classical counterparts the known rules for the measurement (...) of the former. The remaining physical problem is the delineation of the circumstances in which the correlation of a peculiarly quantum mechanical observable A with a classically measurable observable B can result in a significant measurement of A. This is undertaken within the context of quantum theory. The resulting clarification of the process of measurement has important implications relative to the philosophic interpretation of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the description of the process of measurement within the context of a quantum theory of the physical world. It is noted that quantum mechanics permits a quasi-classical description of those macroscopic phenomena in terms of which the observer forms his perceptions. Thus, the process of measurement in quantum mechanics can be understood on the quasi-classical level by transcribing from the strictly classical observables of Newtonian physics to their quasi-classical counterparts the known rules for the measurement (...) of the former. The remaining physical problem is the delineation of the circumstances in which the correlation of a peculiarly quantum mechanical observable A with a classically measurable observable B can result in a significant measurement of A. This is undertaken within the context of quantum theory. The resulting clarification of the process of measurement has important implications relative to the philosophic interpretation of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Depuis les années 1960, Gilbert Durand a fondé et développé une méthodologie et une épistémologie novatrices de l'étude des imaginaires individuels et culturels qui ont inspiré une Ecole de Grenoble, qui n'a cessé d'essaimer à travers un grand nombre de centres de recherches en France et dans le monde. Sa pensée, connue à travers la mythocritique et la mythanalyse, enrichie par une vaste culture historique et pluriculturelle, a été appliquée dans les domaines les plus divers des sciences humaines et (...) sociales. Loin d'être un système clos, son oeuvre a inspiré une épistémologie ouverte qui a permis, sur la base des acquis fondamentaux, de se préciser, de s'adapter à des champs nouveaux, de recevoir les apports d'autres écoles, courants ou traditions culturelles. Les contributions ici rassemblées permettront de mieux situer l'émergence de la problématique de l'imaginaire dans différentes disciplines ou champs d'études, de présenter les innovations théoriques apportées par l'anthropologie de l'imaginaire de G Durand, d'illustrer les innovations qu'elles auront permises, d'amorcer des éléments de prospective pour les chantiers actuellement en cours d'exploration. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose to reconstruct Schürmann’s early concept of translation in dialogue with Eckhart and Heidegger and in connection with the concept of releasement. Taking recourse to the different versions of his research on Eckhart’s German sermons, from his early thesis and dissertation to the French and American editions of Wandering Joy, I comment on Schürmann’s practice of translation and seek to elucidate the stylistic, existential and ontological dimensions of his translation theory. In conclusion, I discuss the relevance (...) of what I call “wandering translation” for contemporary philosophy of translation. (shrink)

The nihilists are right, admits philosopher Loyal Rue. The universe is blind and aimless, indifferent to us and void of meaning. There are no absolute truths and no objective values. There is no right or wrong way to live, only alternative ways. There is no correct reading of a text or a picture or a dance. God is dead, nihilism reigns. But, Rue adds, nihilism is a truth inconsistent with personal happiness and social coherence. What we need instead is (...) a new myth, a noble lie. Only a noble lie can save us from the psychological and social chaos now threatened by the spread of skepticism about the meaning of life and the universe. In By the Grace of Guile, Loyal Rue offers a wide ranging look at the importance of deception in nature and in human society, concluding with an argument for a noble lie to replace the religious beliefs rejected by modern thought. Most of the book is a provocative apology for deception, illuminating its role in the shaping of history, evolution, personality, and society. Ranging from the Bible and Greek philosophy, to Saint Augustine and Montaigne, to Galileo, Kirkegaard, and Freud, Rue shows that it may be more accurate to describe the history of our culture as a flight from deception than as a quest for truth. He turns then to the natural world to reveal how deception works at every level of life, ranging from plants that mimic dung, carrion, or prey to lure insects that then spread pollen, to a remarkable African insect (Acanthaspis petax) that bedecks itself with dead ants and enters the ant colony undetected to binge at will. Moreover, he points out that psychological research has shown that strategies of deception and self-deception are essential to our personal well-being, that we sometimes shore up our self-esteem by deceptive means, by leaving others in a state of ignorance, by manipulating others into a state of false belief, by suppressing information from consciousness, and by fabricating or distorting our own sense of reality. And he argues that social coherence is achievable only within certain optimal limits of deception--the social fabric would be threatened by an overabundance of lies and false promises, of course, but it would also collapse if everyone were perfectly honest all the time. Finally, he argues that society is caught up in a Kulturkampf with nihilists promoting intellectual and moral relativism and realists defending objective and universal truths. The noble lie, says Rue, would introduce a third voice, one which first agrees with the nihilists that universal myths are pretentious lies, but then insists, against the nihilists, that without such lies humanity cannot survive. The challenge, he concludes, is ultimately an aesthetic one: it remains for the artists, poets, novelists, musicians, filmmakers, and other masters of illusion to seduce us into an embrace with a noble lie. We need a new myth that tells us where we have come from, what our nature is, and how we should live together--a story with the courage and presumption to say how things really are and what really matters. (shrink)

This exhilarating tale of natural history illuminates the evolution of matter, life, and consciousness. In Everybody’s Story, Loyal Rue finds the means for global solidarity and cooperation in the shared story of humanity.

Background: Informed consent in clinical research is mandated throughout the world. Both patient subjects and investigators are required to understand and accept the distinction between research and treatment.Aim: To document the extent and to identify factors associated with therapeutic misconception in a population of patient subjects or parent proxies recruited from a variety of multicentre trials .Patients and methods: The study comprised two phases: the development of a questionnaire to assess the quality of informed consent and a survey of patient (...) subjects based on this questionnaire.Results: A total of 303 patient subjects or parent proxies were contacted and 279 questionnaires were analysed. The median age was 49.5 years, sex ratio was 1 and 61% of respondents were professionally active. Overall memorisation of the oral or written communication of informed consent was good , and satisfaction with the process was around 70%. Therapeutic misconception was present in 70% of respondents, who expected to receive better care and ignored the consequence of randomisation and treatment comparisons. This was positively associated with the acuteness and severity of the disease.Conclusion: The authors suggest that the risk of therapeutic misconception be specifically addressed in consent forms as an educational tool for both patients and investigators. (shrink)

In the roots of political culture in the USA, Tocqueville long ago noted with concern an individualism that could undercut needed structures of shared community. This individualism, argues the author, is one key feature of American culture that tends to empower military interventionism by empowering American elites to go their own way and pursue their own interests, without too much worry that they will be held accountable to more communitarian standards. Yet, American culture is not one-sided, and the author encourages (...) public appeals to another, balancing cultural value, that of republicanism. The author also touches briefly on the cultural tradition of American messianism and its value to globe-conquering elites. (shrink)

Après une présentation des grands moments de la vie de Teilhard de Chardin, l'auteur étudie ses idées les plus novatrices : la notion d'évolution et l'origine des formes dans la nature, en les confrontant avec les éléments majeurs de sa pensée, dont la notion d'Immanence divine, la Création, l'Incarnation et la Rédemption, le Christ universel, la Route de l'Ouest.

The Spanish conquests of the Americas were not yet completed when famous Humanists already began to appear in the first generation of native-born Spanish-speaking Americans. A mestizo born in 1539 and who liked to call himself “the Indian whose mouth is full” thus published in 1590, in Madrid, the first-fruits of the Humanism of the New World. The son of an Indian woman, he succeeded in very unusual circumstances in writing a superb Castilian version of a classic work of Renaissance (...) Neoplatonism. Its title reads: The Indian's translation of the three Dialogues of Love by Leone Ebreo, from Italian into Spanish, by Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, a native of the great city of Cuzco, capital of the Kingdoms and provinces of Peru. (shrink)

In this paper I compare and contrast the reproduction of elite strata in Randall Collins’s path-breaking book, The Credential Society (1979), with Pierre Bourdieu’s important discussion found in The State Nobility (1996). Although both approaches draw on Weber and Durkheim, focus on the interaction between material and cultural processes, subscribe to a relational form of analysis, and share a similar political world-view – social democrat and radical republican respectively – they also differ. These differences relate to their respective philosophical anthropology, (...) the nature of their long-term analysis, the different contexts within which their work emerged – Algeria and the post-war constellation and early Cold War period – and the divergent nature of the broader substantive sociological problems they are engaged with. In terms of their dissimilarities, not only is each approach useful for criticizing the other, but it will be argued that these divergences need to be synthesized into a broader, more powerful explanatory theory. (shrink)

In multicellular organisms, cells are frequently programmed to die. This makes good sense: cells that fail to, or are no longer playing important roles are eliminated. From the cell’s perspective, this also makes sense, since somatic cells in multicellular organisms require the cooperation of clonal relatives. In unicellular organisms, however, programmed cell death poses a difficult and unresolved evolutionary problem. The empirical evidence for PCD in diverse microbial taxa has spurred debates about what precisely PCD means in the case of (...) unicellular organisms. In this article, we survey the concepts of PCD in the literature and the selective pressures associated with its evolution. We show that definitions of PCD have been almost entirely mechanistic and fail to separate questions concerning what PCD fundamentally is from questions about the kinds of mechanisms that realize PCD. We conclude that an evolutionary definition is best able to distinguish PCD from closely related phenomena. Specifically, we define “true” PCD as an adaptation for death triggered by abiotic or biotic environmental stresses. True PCD is thus not only an evolutionary product but must also have been a target of selection. Apparent PCD resulting from pleiotropy, genetic drift, or trade-offs is not true PCD. We call this “ersatz PCD.”. (shrink)

We study the minimal complexity of tilings of a plane with a given tile set. We note that every tile set admits either no tiling or some tiling with.

Much of contemporary scholarly opinion rejects the attempt to construct a general theory of religion (that is, its origin, structure, and functions). This view says that particular religious traditions are unique, sui generis, incommensurable, and cannot therefore be generalized. Much of contemporary opinion also rejects the attempt to explain religious phenomena using the categories and concepts of the natural and social sciences. This view says that the phenomena of religion cannot be understood apart from a recognition of “the sacred,” or (...) some element of transcendence, implying that religion cannot be naturalized. This article begins to show how the phenomena of religion can be both generalized and naturalized. (shrink)

University Of Exeter, England The central argument of this article is that there is no fact of the matter, no evidence, however tentative or questionable, that will serve adequately to identify actions "chosen" or "determined" for the purposes of sociological theory. This argument will be developed with reference to the two theorists of the greatest importance in advocating the sociological value of the concept of agency: Talcott Parsons, with his "voluntaristic theory of action," set the scene for the whole agency (...) and structure debate in modern sociology, and Anthony Giddens, in his theory of structuration, provides the most comprehensive recent account. Both theorists put forward grounds and justifications for their use of the concepts of "choice" and "agency," but it will be argued here that in the last analysis, none of them has any sociological merit. (shrink)

Mates’s Puzzle has flown below many philosophers’ radar, despite its relations to both Frege’s Puzzle and the Paradox of Analysis. We explain the relations amongst these puzzles on the way to arguing that Mates’s Puzzle suggests a generalization of Frege’s Puzzle, and of the sense-reference distinction itself, in the form of hierarchy of senses. We explain how Mates’s Puzzle and the hierarchy, to different degrees, illuminate each other, and how their connection is missed in the literature. However, we argue that (...) the potential of Mates’s Puzzle to illuminate the hierarchy is yet to be fully actualised. We suggest that in order to do better, we need to formulate Mates’s Puzzle as a puzzle in the philosophy of thought and not as puzzle in the philosophy of language. What is needed, to which the present paper is a precursor, is an account of the cognitive significance of higher-order senses. (shrink)

To be able to make “change” happen in the lives of patients entrusted to his care, Watzlawick says he tried to produce a theory about it. He was forced to acknowledge that the mechanisms of change resist systematization and, therefore, all wishes to elicit them as well.Well-being is to therapy what discovery is to thought and the event is to History: the position – unforeseen, unforeseeable – in reality of what did not hitherto exist. And heuristics would be, if not (...) a science, since there could be no science of change, then at least the name given to reflection on its mystery. (shrink)

The paper describes the conceptual models used to understand the processes determining plant growth rates in response to environmental changes. A series of experiments and growth models were used at three organizational levels: the specific plant organs, the whole plant and the plant canopy. The energy conversion efficiency and the total plant carbon balance were first examined. The carbon partitioning amongst the plant parts was then studied. The energy conversion efficiency is generally understood. In modelling carbon partitioning it was first (...) necessary to establish the carbon demand for each plant organ. The carbon partitioned amongst plant organs was then calculated in two ways. The first one based on empirical data consisted in defining which organ received the carbon prior to other organs. The second one was based on the relationship between the carbon mass of specific organs and their trophic activity. This hypothesis allowed the optimization of the carbon partitioning in order to maximize the whole plant growth rate. The opportunities to use these theoretical approaches in plant growth modelling are discussed. (shrink)

This contribution reports on a study conducted as part of a research on early childhood educators’ vocational training in Geneva. We wish to better understand the interrelational positioning challenges that the students face during the activities in which they participate in the workplace. The multimodal analysis highlights the frequent shifts of the participants’ reciprocal positions in mentoring interactions, and shows the coexistence of two inverted asymmetrical relations in a form of “double-cross asymmetry”. In this context, the trainees’ positioning is vulnerable (...) to the professional events that emerge in the course of interaction. (shrink)

De 1905 à 1922, l uvre d'Alfred North Whitehead a pour but principal de montrer comment les objets fondamentaux de la géométrie, de la physique et de la perception sont abstraits à partir d'un seul et unique type d' entités définies comme les éléments ultimes de l'expérience sensible : les événements. WHitehead développe dès lors la méthode de l'abstraction extensive : un modèle logico-mathématique qui permet d'exprimer ces différents types d'objets dans les termes mêmes des événements et de leurs relations. (...) L'élaboration d'un concept événementiel de nature constitue l'une des principales lignes de force des recherches whiteheadiennes : l'identité doit être définie dans les seuls termes des événements. (shrink)

Cette communication examine les problèmes associés à l'usage de l'anglais comme un néoespéranto contemporain. Toutefois, l'anglais ne présente aucune des caractéristiques d'une langue internationale planifiée et son usage fait automatiquement retomber les organisations internationales qui l'utilisent comme langue de travail sous la houlette d'anglophones natifs. D'autre part, pour les natifs des autres langues, la perte des outils de définition et de représentation des connaissances stérilise leur créativité et les entraîne dans un conformisme réducteur, qui accélère leur déclin. La prise de (...) conscience de ces conséquences est essentielle avant que des mesures puissent être prises pour combattre efficacement la langue unique et aller plus loin que l'actuel multilinguisme et multiculturalisme de façade.This paper focuses on the problems caused by the use of English as if it were a new kind of Esperanto. However, English does not have any of the features of a language specifically designed for international communication. Moreover, the belief that English is neutral as a communication tool is just wishful thinking. Any international organization that uses English as its working language unavoidably falls back into the control of native English speakers. Furthermore, by spreading the use of English more and more into their own national settings, non-English natives lose their tools for definition and representation. This process turns them into trend followers, sterilizes their creativity and accelerates their decline. It is essential that people become conscious of the seriousness of the present situation for a mass reaction to crystallize that will eventually restore basic language rights which current national constitutions no longer guarantee beyond the paper on which they are written. (shrink)

Chapter Introduction Henry Sidgwick is one of the most influential and least remembered philosophers of the and 20th centuries....

"A stimulating and readable venture in the history of ideas. Blending arguments and material from philosophy, theology, history and science, Rue addresses a fundamental problem in Western Culture: the crisis of meaning and the eclipse of the shared value system upon which personal wholeness and social coherence in the West have been based." —Journal of Interdisciplinary Discourse.

In the intellectual lineage of sociobiology (understood as evolutionary social science), this article considers the place of moral discourse in the evolution of emergent systems for mediating behavior. Given that humans share molecular systems, reflex systems, drive systems, emotional systems, and cognitive systems with chimpanzees, why is it that human behavior is so radically different from chimpanzee behavior? The answer is that, unlike chimps, humans possess symbolic systems, empowering them to override chimplike default morality in favor of symbolically mediated moral (...) codes. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the power of religious symbols to influence moral behavior by reprogramming emotional systems. (shrink)

Résumé Rivalité des sièges, rapports de force entre le pouvoir civil, le corps épiscopal et la papauté dans l’histoire des conciles. Le mot homoousios : son origine, son insertion au symbole de Nicée, l’importance que lui donne Athanase. Amertume de Grégoire de Nazianze après Constantinople I, due à des offenses personnelles et au défaut d’exigences dogmatiques à l’égard des courants pneumatomaque et apollinariste. Utilisation de Theotokos à Éphèse par Cyrille, progrès de l’influence de celui-ci jusqu’en 444. L’expression « en deux (...) natures » de Chalcédoine a peut-être permis d’exclure Dioscore. (shrink)

Résumé L’équilibre des forces (le pape, l’empereur, le corps épiscopal) fut plus apparent que réel à Chalcédoine. Sa définition n’en a pas moins sa validité permanente : empêcher d’occulter la réalité humaine du Christ, tout en tenant qu’il est « un seul et le même » avec le Verbe. Deux christologies savantes, celle d’Antioche et celle d’Occident résumée par Léon, se sont ici heurtées et combinées avec la vision de la personne du Christ se constituant à Alexandrie, formulée non sans (...) imprécision par Cyrille. Refus par certains orientaux des « deux natures après l’union » pour « une seule nature incarnée du Verbe ». « Jacobites » et « melkites ». Éclaircissement de Constantinople II (553) relativement à la notion d’hypostase. Situation actuelle de la christologie chalcédonienne. (shrink)

In this paper I compare and contrast the reproduction of elite strata in Randall Collins’s path-breaking book, The Credential Society, with Pierre Bourdieu’s important discussion found in The State Nobility. Although both approaches draw on Weber and Durkheim, focus on the interaction between material and cultural processes, subscribe to a relational form of analysis, and share a similar political world-view – social democrat and radical republican respectively – they also differ. These differences relate to their respective philosophical anthropology, the nature (...) of their long-term analysis, the different contexts within which their work emerged – Algeria and the post-war constellation and early Cold War period – and the divergent nature of the broader substantive sociological problems they are engaged with. In terms of their dissimilarities, not only is each approach useful for criticizing the other, but it will be argued that these divergences need to be synthesized into a broader, more powerful explanatory theory. (shrink)

Minimally, myth means “story,” and religion means “that which binds” a community into a coherent unity. Myth and religion are closely associated because a shared myth is the most efficient and effective means for achieving social coherence. Ancient myths were initially formulated in terms of the science of their day, Thus, an integration of science, myth, and religion is essential to a healthy culture. As these elements become disintegrated there arises a need to generate new mythic visions. The question of (...) our day is whether science offers resources relevant to the expression of a new myth. (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)

Jonathan Durand Folco | : Cet article présente une analyse critique de l’institutionnalisation de la participation citoyenne, à différentes échelles, à Montréal. Nous prendrons l’exemple de la consultation publique de la Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal et du budget interactif du Plateau-Mont-Royal pour illustrer les modèles de la gouvernance métropolitaine et de la gestion de proximité, pour ensuite montrer en quoi ces deux types de dispositifs participatifs soulèvent le problème de la trivialité. Nous soutiendrons enfin qu’une application systématique d’une conception (...) forte de la participation citoyenne, basée sur l’idéal de la démocratie participative, permettrait de surmonter le problème de la trivialité et d’opérer une véritable démocratisation des institutions municipales. | : This paper presents a critical analysis of the institutionalization of participation in Montreal at different levels. I will use the examples of the Montreal Metropolitan Com-munity’s public consultation and the Plateau Mont-Royal’s interactive budget to illustrate the models of metropolitan governance and local management, and demonstrate that these two forms of participatory mechanisms face the problem of triviality. I maintain that a systematic application of a strong conception of citizen participation, based on the ideal of participatory democracy, can overcome the challenge of triviality and effect a real democratization of municipal institutions. (shrink)

La notion de transition énergétique est aujourd’hui l’une des figures de proue du concept plus général de développement durable. Elle est marquée par la double temporalité de l’urgence de sa mise en œuvre et du temps long dont elle se réclame. La mise en politique de cette transition génère des conflits – notamment autour des grands projets d’infrastructures – que cet article analyse en cherchant à croiser les temporalités et les échelles d’action des différents acteurs impliqués. Il met en évidence (...) un certain nombre de tensions qui existent entre urgence climatique et durabilité dans la mise en politique de la transition énergétique, mais aussi la complexité des temporalités dont se réclament les acteurs, qui s’emboîtent, se contredisent parfois et peuvent être source de conflit. Le propos s’articule en trois temps, organisés autour des échelles européennes, nationales et locales de la transition énergétique. Trois terrains viennent étayer les analyses proposées : une enquête auprès du réseau européen des gestionnaires de réseaux d’électricité chargé du plan d’investissement dans les réseaux de transports d’électricité, l’étude des conflits liés à l’implantation des énergies marines renouvelables en France et un cas d’étude grec sur les conflits liés à des projets de parcs éoliens en Crête. (shrink)

Organismal death is foundational to the evolution of life, and many biological concepts such as natural selection and life history strategy are so fashioned only because individuals are mortal. Organisms, irrespective of their organization, are composed of basic functional units—cells—and it is our understanding of cell death that lies at the heart of most general explanatory frameworks for organismal mortality. Cell death can be exogenous, arising from transmissible diseases, predation, or other misfortunes, but there are also endogenous forms of death (...) that are sometimes the result of adaptive evolution. These endogenous forms of death—often labeled programmed cell death, PCD—originated in the earliest cells and are maintained across the tree of life. Here, we consider two problematic issues related to PCD (and cell mortality generally). First, we trace the original discoveries of cell death from the nineteenth century and place current conceptions of PCD in their historical context. Revisions of our understanding of PCD demand a reassessment of its origin. Our second aim is thus to structure the proposed origin explanations of PCD into coherent arguments. In our analysis we argue for the evolutionary concept of PCD and the viral defense-immunity hypothesis for the origin of PCD. We suggest that this framework offers a plausible account of PCD early in the history of life, and also provides an epistemic basis for the future development of a general evolutionary account of mortality. (shrink)

El presente artículo busca mostrar la relevancia de la filosofía de Spinoza con respecto a la realización de la libertad. Su idea de libertad no rechaza las emociones, y las vincula con nuestra capacidad de ser seres racionales. Spinoza es de los primeros filósofos que aprecia una dimensión interna de las emociones y la considera como parte de nuestra propia naturaleza, pues afirma que la esencia humana es el deseo mismo. El ser humano es consciente de este deseo, el cual (...) lo lleva a buscar modos de afirmar su propia existencia. Su noción de libertad, por ende, debe considerar todos estos elementos para poder plasmarse como algo realizable sin dejar de lado lo que nos hace humanos. (shrink)

This article presents a new account of the Stoic theory of case. It argues that cases belong to the Stoic class of lekta and that they play a twofold semantic role. Firstly, they relate words to the world in a process akin to reference. Secondly, they encode syntactic information which captures structural elements of the world, contributing to language’s ability to represent reality and its structure by enabling it to capture both objects and the ways in which these objects relate (...) to each other. (shrink)

Dans la première moitié du xxe siècle, une tendance à la remythologisation caractérise le roman. Proust, Thomas Mann et Faulkner permettent à Gilbert Durand de dresser un portrait de « l’immortel » héros à partir de quatre traits : le temps sans mort et sans souci de sa propre fin ; le temps qui passe de l’entropie à l’infinie répétition ; l’obsession du sang ; l’absence d’âme et d’état d’âme. Le roman perd tout sentimentalisme, tout réalisme, tout psychologisme. Le (...) romancier mythographe accède ainsi à l’imaginaire immémorial du mythe. In the first half of the 20th century, novels are often characterized by a tendency to remythologization. Proust, Thomas Mann and Faulkner help Gilbert Durand to draw up a portrait of the new “immortal” heroes in a fictive world based on four features: time without death and without any concern for its own end; time which passes from entropy to infinite repetition of itself ; the obsession for blood; the lack of soul and state of mind. Consequently, the novel loses any sentimentality, realism or psychologism. So, the novelist as mythographer accedes to the immemorial imagination’s power of myth. (shrink)