Documents found
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81.
Le « principe archaïque de la richesse » ou le vouloir comme possession dans Mammon de Robert Alexis
More informationIn his novel Mammon, Robert Alexis paints a broad fresco that sums up all that is lust. In so doing, Alexis returns more pointedly to the thrust of his other books, heeding the true calling of desire. Much like the young female reporter invited by the wealthy Moreau to his castle, the reader is drawn into the author's narrative and schooled in the materialism of lust and the selfishness and sacrifice it requires in a constantly doomed, yet reborn nature. Beyond its appeal to the aesthete or the technically inclined, Alexis's style is also targeting the aristocratic milieu that it depicts, and which drives its readership.
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85.More information
Can we laugh reading Kafka and, if so, what are we laughing about? What in us laughs whilst The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, The Trial and The Castle are so widely reputed as nightmarish? Setting aside the serious mindset that allegorizes Kafka's novels, some critics also extoll a comic force in Kafka that still contains the metaphysical intent. This laughter arises unexpectedly, like a radical, heterodox offshoot, derived from the Talmudic tradition and the notion of an arms-length God, delegating to mankind the administration of the world, for better or for worse (and just for laughs too), to fend for themselves in their human quibbling. Walter Benjamin surely meant this when he wrote to Gershom Scholem: “I think the key to Kafka's work is likely to fall into the hands of the person who is able to extract the comic aspects from Jewish theology.”
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86.More information
This article follows the journey of ancient manuscripts from a center of condensation, the Library of Alexandria, through the diaspora that followed its destruction and into its dissemination during the Renaissance in Europe. Understood, first, from the point of view of its mnemonic function in the passage from orality to writing and second, from its prestige value as part of the Alexandrian constellation, the ancient manuscript, vector of representations, is saved from the flames, wanders and ends up contributing to the intellectual awakening of Europe during the Renaissance. This journey emphasizes the role of libraries within the dynamic of condensation and dissemination of knowledge. It tries to grasp how the book, through its mutations and trajectories, acts as a vector of cultural constitution and transmission.
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88.More information
Extension du domaine de la lutte (translated as Whatever) presents an anti-hero narrator who gradually falls into a depression, and comes to view the world he inhabits as increasingly strange. In a struggle to the finish with the human species, the protagonist tries to convince a colleague at work to commit murder before turning this violence against himself and ending up in a psychiatric institution. This article aims to review the notion of estrangement in light of the narrator's position, that of an observer-ethnologist who, despite his depressive state of mind, maintains the kind of hyper-acute vision and capacity for analysis that allows him to apprehend the world differently, while elucidating both a theory of economic and sexual liberalism and a poetic vision of reality informed by the experience of estrangement, as if depression opened the way to another field of consciousness, upsetting but crystal-clear, dark, yet salutary.
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90.More information
This article analyzes the implications of the notion of “ludique” in the work of Emmanuel Hocquard. Particularly following the philosophy of “language games” and “use of language” developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein (one of Hocquard's major influences), this paper demonstrates that “ludique” is much more than a simple style or witticism. Rather, for Hocquard, “ludique” entails a practical conception of language and meaning. Relating to ordinary ways to behave in the world, “l'intention ludique” challenges the idea of a distinct literary or artistic language. It can be conceived instead through connective and incidental operations on available resources in an environment of thought that includes areas of indeterminate borders. Also considered are the public or private nature of the “intention ludique” and the criteria of meaning proposed by this paper.