The fear of ‘alienation’ from a perceived state of harmony has a long and winding history. Western culture is replete with stories of expulsion from paradise…

Archéologie et morphologie du désir dans la pensée occidentale - Lecture 1

Plan de l'article
Sociologie du temps présent. Modernité avancée ou postmodernité ?, de Y. Bonny
Le hors-série de Sciences Humaines sur Foucault-Derrida-Deleuze, et la question du devenir de la pensée postmoderne
L’individu hypermoderne, Sciences Humaines n°l54
Les actes du colloque L’individu hypermoderne, dirigés par N. Aubert
L’invention de soi, de J.-C. Kaufmann
Citot Vincent, « La modernité et son devenir contemporain. Notices bibliographiques sur quelques parutions récentes», Le Philosophoire 2/2005 (n° 25) , p. 153-162
URL : www.cairn.info/revue-le-philosophoire-2005-2-page-153.htm.
DOI : 10.3917/phoir.025.0153.
Downloaded via iPhone to DBOX

Plan de l'article
Une clarification sémantique préalable
I - La querelle de la sécularisation et l’interprétation de la modernité
II - Malaise dans la civilisation post-moderne
III - La modernité sortie de la modernité ?
Duvoux Nicolas, « Les grammaires de la modernité. Notices bibliographiques autour de trois débats essentiels», Le Philosophoire 2/2005 (n° 25) , p. 135-152
URL : www.cairn.info/revue-le-philosophoire-2005-2-page-135.htm.
DOI : 10.3917/phoir.025.0135.
Downloaded via iPhone to DBOX

Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1/2, Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850 (1997), pp. 153-177 -- downloaded pdf to Note

Recensé : David Lapoujade, Fictions du pragmatisme. William et Henry James, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2008, 287 pages, 29 €. -- Qu’est-ce que Henry et William James ont en commun, à part d’être frères ? Peut-être d’avoir partagé une même vision du pragmatisme. Le livre de David Lapoujade renouvelle la comparaison entre l’œuvre de l’écrivain et celle du philosophe à travers une analyse deleuzienne qui ne le cède en rien aux approches biographiques. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Thomas Pfau’s presentation of modernity in Minding the Modern fails to incorporate both the sociopolitical dimensions of modernity’s emergence and its positive aspects. He sees modernity as the home of the “modern subject” of the Western world, or the “quintessentially modern, solitary individual” in his “palpable melancholy,” both “altogether adrift” and without “interpersonal relations.” (..) a challenge to those whom he sometimes calls the “modern apologists of secular, liberal, Enlightenment society.” -- Pfau draws upon a narrative which might be called the “middle age voluntarism to modern alienation theory.” This has many predecessors in the second half of the 20thC (..). The geopolitical situation in the 1980s and 1990s is one of the important features of the historical context of many of these narratives (..) a variety of intellectual assaults were waged in the Western world against what had become the dominant intellectual paradigm in the West. (..) Over the last 30 years (..) this critical diagnosis of modernity has become more precise; there has been a consolidation of the sources and arguments -- Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael J. Buckley, Charles Taylor, Colin E. Gunton, Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, Michael Allen Gillespie, and more recently David B. Hart, Adrian Pabst and Brad S. Gregory. Pfau’s Minding the Modern is a new contribution to this anti-modern diagnosis of contemporary Western culture and the modern individual. (..)some of the arguments can be found in the French Catholic reform theologians of the early 20thC. There were also many German-speaking intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s who were developing sweeping narratives that cast a dark light on modernity and thus, both implicitly and explicitly, called into question the rationale and legitimacy of the liberal political order. Pfau claims that his book does not provide one of these narratives (..). It does seem to be similar, however, to the classic decline-and-fall narratives. Even the essays at the end of the book about “retrieving the human” are analogous. -- downloaded post as pdf to Note

This thesis is about the complex network of metaphors that emerged around late 19thC conceptions of economic self-interest — predatory, conflictual and exploitative basis of relations between nations, institutions, sexes and people in an outwardly belligerent fin-de-siècle economy. This thesis is about the vampire, cannibal and related genera of economic metaphor which penetrate many of the major discourses of the period. In chapters that examine socialist fiction and newspapers; the imperial quest romance; inter-personal intimacies in the writing of Henry James and Vernon Lee; and the Catholic novels of Lucas Malet, I assess the breadth and variety of these metaphors, and consider how they filter the concept of the conflictual ‘economic man’ . The thesis builds on Maggie Kilgour’s "From communion to cannibalism: an anatomy of metaphors of incorporation" (1990), which traces the genealogy – in literature from Homer to Melville – of what she terms ‘metaphors of incorporation’. These are metaphors that originate from a inside-outside binary and involve the assimilation or incorporation of an external reality. Kilgour attempts to demonstrate that with the increasing isolation of the modern individual .. acts of ‘incorporation’ previously imagined as symbiotic, were later conceived as cannibalistic. --However, deploying a combination of historicist and, at times, Post-Structuralist approaches, this thesis demonstrates that these metaphors refuse to accommodate themselves to a simple unified vision of the kind advanced by Kilgour. I map the complexities of these metaphors, explaining how they originate from divergent teleological impulses and how they articulate both simple ideological operations, and more complex feelings of ambivalence about economic realities in the cultural moment of the Victorian fin-de-siècle.

Didn't download but nice essay on Veblen's originality and later day relevance

Jeffery L. Nicholas, Providence College -- I argue that we must read Alasdair MacIntyre’s mature work through a Marxist lens. I begin by discussing his argument that we must choose which God to worship on principles of justice, which, it turns out, are ones given to us by God. I contend that this argument entails that we must see MacIntyre’s early Marxist commitments as given to him by God, and, therefore, that he has never abandoned them in his turn to Thomistic-Aristotelianism. I examine his reading of Marx, with its emphasis on the concept of alienation as a Christian concept, and explain how this reading differs from the dominant scientific-determinist reading of Marx. This examination then leads to a discussion of why MacIntyre abandoned both Marxism and Christianity in 1968. Finally, I turn to his more recent writing on Marx. I contend that if we view them through his argument about the principles of justice and which God to worship, we see MacIntyre’s mature philosophy as more Marxist than most people, perhaps even MacIntyre himself, would allow. -- Jeffery L. Nicholas. "Toward a Radical Integral Humanism: MacIntyre’s Continuing Marxism" Studia Philosophica Wratislaviensia (2014): 223-241. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Participants - Todd Cronan, Emory University, Michael W. Clune, Case Western Reserve University, Nicholas Brown, UIC, Jennifer Ashton, UIC, Chris Cutrone, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Marnin Young, Yeshiva University

Citation: Russo, Elena. “Slander and Glory in the Republic of Letters: Diderot and Seneca Confront Rousseau.” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (May 1, 2009): http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/40. -- in " Rethinking the Republic of Letters" issue -- downloaded pdf to Note -- Diderot’s earlier optimism vis-à-vis his status in the Republic of Letters and his role as a public intellectual gave way to a profound identity crisis like the one that gripped his former friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his final years, documented in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. By engaging both personally and by proxy in a battle against past and present enemies, Diderot forced himself to confront his own death and legacy, which he no longer imagined to be eulogies and loving praise, as he had in the letter to Falconet, but rather biased judgments of indifferent by-standers and prejudiced readers. In facing his eventual solitude as a writer, however, Diderot found comfort not among his contemporaries, but in the revived memory of the Republic of Letters’ classical past: in his newly discovered affinity for Seneca and in the embrace of his new role as Seneca’s advocate, faithful son, and alter ego.

JSTOR: Representations, No. 47 (Summer, 1994), pp. 64-84 From special issue on national culture before nationalism

Downloaded pdf to Note

Considerable discussion of French attempts to link epistemology (17thC rationalists and 18thC sensualist) with language structure - especially Condillac and Diderot. Voltaire and Frederick the Great prejudices pro French and anti German and Latin.

Aporia of civility - honnête homme was initially supposed to be transparent re virtue - by mid 18thC and Rousseau the aporia has become a total inversion- sociability as source of vice by encouraging misleading, self promotion etc

Further discusses French attempts to stabilize civility virtue by relegating politesse to the skeevy domain

Follows Herder, Fichte, Hegel who turn German syntax into virtue as closer to sensual experience, which they assert gives Germans access to supersensual and true inner sense of morality that French lack - according to Fichte they're trapped in nihilistic artificiality

Nietzsche shreds the German valorisation of supposed inner depths which aren't connected with transparent form