Documents found
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222.More information
By reading some extracts of Plato's Republic, More's Utopia and Zamiatine's We, in which the enunciation process is thematized, the author shows that utopia, at least in its most canonic form, is based on a pragmatic paradox, on a contradiction between the statement describing the eternal and peaceful truth of the ideal community and its turbulent and precarious enunciation. The agonistic relation between the statement and its enunciation, that is shown through the topics of violence, deafness and solipsism, unveils not only pragmatic contradictions, but also epistemological, historical and political ones, and open the possibility of truly pragmatic ethics for postmodern utopias.
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223.
Par la brèche de la culture : le Canada français et le virage culturel de l'état canadien, 1949-1963
More informationMany researchers have studied the endogenous factors that would explain the Quiet Revolution and the transformation of French Canada. In this article, I look to the past in order to study federal policies related to culture and their relationship to the debates surrounding the question of nationalism in French Canada and in Québec. In 1949, the federal government took a cultural turn when it established the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. This report drew intense reactions from French-Canadian intellectual circles. Faced with the protomulticultural vision of Commissioners Vincent Massey and Georges-Henri Lévesque, André Laurendeau would polish his vision of a bicultural Canada. The debate was most notably on the definitions of culture and nation, as well as the place of the State in managing both. It is important to understand these debates, typical of the welfare state, so as to better understand the nationalist context in which the Quiet Revolution was articulated. These debates also allow for grasping the contemporary aspect of federal investment within minority Francophone communities.
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224.More information
This article deals with two novels (Les failles de l'Amérique by Bertrand Gervais and L'acquittement by Gaétan Soucy) which seek to foil the reading activity by creating fictional universes which seem to unfold only to better disintegrate. By analysing these strange devices, the author wants to show that these literary practices, which first give the impression to refuse the fictional game, finally end up reaffirming it by proposing a conception of fiction based on a principle of proliferation of universes and individuals, outside of all necessity of coherence. These novels turn the fictional game into a normative rule, while making the principle of proliferation its constitutive rule. If these novels dis-play ( déjouent ), it is certainly not without stakes (enjeux).
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225.More information
AbstractBuilding on the argument laid out in our book Incoherent Empire, where we offered a detailed examination of the military, political, economic and ideological powers of the United States, as well as a critique of the new imperialism of the Bush administration, in this article, we refine the argument by surveying the whole course of American Empire throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. We subsequently address the three main sub-types of empire, plus one predominantly non-imperial type of domination : the periods of direct, indirect, and informal empire, and hegemony. These four involve declining levels of violence. After putting the new imperialism in broader context of empires in general and the long-term trajectory of American imperialism in particular we finally analyze the Bush empire. The questions we seek to answer here are : where has the United States fitted into this typology in the past ? How far has the administration of Bush the Younger imperially escalated ? And will this be successful ?
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226.More information
In this article, the authors try to define the general conceptual framework of classical strategic thought in order to assess its relevance for the development of contemporary Strategic Studies. Our argument brings out the fact that classical strategic scholars tended to conceptualize strategy as the scientific study of conflictual actions between unitary actors, omitting by this very fact to study the sociopolitical dimensions of conflicts, the impact of military technology or the influence of organizational and decisional processes on the conduct of war. Nevertheless, classical strategic thought still offers an invaluable body of literature to understand the evolution of ideas on war, and a possible way of enriching strategic studies through the use of its distinctive comparative historical perspective.
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