Éric Méchoulan

Introduction: On the Edges of Jacques Ranciere

After the generation of Michel Serres, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu, a few French intellectuals, over the last ten or even twenty years, have developed original approaches to various objects of analysis (from aesthetics and literature to politics and science): Alain Badiou, Vincent Descombes, François Jullien, Jean-Luc Nancy, for example. Among them, Jacques Rancière occupies a remote position. Coming from an Althusserian position, after years of archival work on nineteenth-century workers’ writings, Jacques Rancière began to wander between social history and the poetics of historiography, between politics and aesthetics, between poetry and news, between cinema and social scenography, between great names like Plato, Aristotle, or Friedrich Schiller, and unknown thinkers like Joseph Jaccotot or Gabriel Gauny.1 For Rancière, one very fundamental motto is to take seriously, as equally intelligent, university professors and humble shoemakers. “Equally intelligent”—both terms are important: they lead the reflection towards the status of political equality, and the legitimacy of ordinary people appearing as intelligent. There should be a presumption of intelligence, just as we have conceived, as a right, a presumption of innocence. Unlike all the fearful pessimists who are anxious to keep everyone in his or her place in the city (artisans in their shops, and philosophers or the elite on the agora), and unlike all the happy pessimists who deconstruct and demystify subjective blindness, teaching poor people what they cannot know about themselves, Jacques Rancière is a confident critic: he simply assumes that everyone can think. It is true that people are denied the legitimacy to think (and they can internalize such a denial), but such a wrong must become a matter of litigation. The original wrong consists in hearing “noises” instead of voices, something “roaring” in place of someone speaking. This is where politics emerges. Jacques Rancière, in a very original move, tries to disentangle politics from the conquest or exercise of power. What he calls “police” is the management of human passions and the building of types of society and modes of life: it produces consensus. Politics is a dissensual form of human action, the way by which some people try to be heard even if (actually, precisely because) they have no legitimacy

Archiving in the Age of Digital Conversion: Notes for a Politics of "Remains"

����� ��� Over the last few decades, the public institutions responsible for archiving have been confronted with new challenges arising from electronic communication. Nevertheless, as a specialist in such national institutions has noted, “although some actions have been taken, digital preservation research and implementation are still in their infancy” (Steenbakkers). There have been numerous inquiries and research projects on archiving, and there is no doubt that studies on the digitalization of manuscripts, printed matter, photos, films, sound recordings and more have resulted in a number of short- or intermediate-term solutions. However, solutions often differ from country to country, and the rapidly evolving techniques for preserving and reproducing require frequent updating. Hence the problems posed still need to be pondered in their breadth and depth. The archive is located at the intersection, on the one hand, of the materiality of the means of preservation and communication of documents, and on the other hand, of the relationships of power and of the institutions of the past. The archive is a particular case of social transmission. One could even say that it transforms a text, an image, or a sound into a document, in the same way that a rubber stamp gives a letter an official status. The archive is an authorization to endure beyond the ephemerality that characterizes human productions. In the strict sense, an archive is “an assemblage of documents, no matter what their form or their material support, whose increase is ensured automatically through the activities of a private or public person” (Andre, 29). However, it is judicious also to think of the archive as every trace of the past that has been documented, thus giving it an authority (at least potential) by this act of conservation or of extraction. Now, in the age of digital communication, the ways of recording our present have mutated. Thus it is essential to address the question of the contemporary archive with epistemological and historical breadth, in order to better grasp its difficulties and possibilities. These stakes concern not only archival technology, though this is important. Recall the Stasi archives recovered ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: they were on the hard drive of an obsolete computer, whose

Introduction: The Editors of SubStance

This issue of SubStance is the first since 2010 not dedicated to a specific theme or author; it features ten eclectic essays submitted from different disciplines and countries by well-established as well as emerging scholars. We wish to take this opportunity to emphasize the importance of these varia, which illustrate the range of our speculative and critical interests, and to signal directions we anticipate the journal moving in the near future. Beyond its interest in French literature and theory, SubStance has always promoted a dialogue between contemporary theory and a multifaceted outside, an outside where contemporary theory may be used to investigate literary, philosophical, and artistic traditions, movements or historical periods; an outside where theory may be used to conceptualize contemporary cultural issues; an outside, finally, where contemporary theory may venture into hybrid and innovative writing. Exploring hybrid writing with theoretical impact is at the center of our current preoccupations. “Hybrid” writing refers to both media (multimedia and non-linear writing on internet platforms; more below concerning our ongoing reflections about a fourth hybrid print-digital issue and an e-book series) and genre-mixing critical and creative prose, exploring the potential for using fiction within theoretical speculation: not simply writing on fiction but with fiction. In fact, these projects include all possible (or not yet possible) literary modes—a poem, for instance (see below)—as long as this genre-bending writing authentically generates stimulating conceptual frameworks, and is something more than a style, or, rather, truly a style: a creative way to actually address and express ideas or concepts, to push literary thought and thought about literature into new territories.

Impacting the University: An Archeology of the Future

It is generally agreed that the modern university originated in early 19th-century Prussia, under the inspiration of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Thus it was stamped with the seal of idealism and of German Romanticism. Today the entrepreneurial model that seems to be imposing itself on universities around the globe confounds this former ideal, particularly by requiring academia to report on its economically quantifiable “impact.” But an impact on what, exactly? On knowledge in general? On society at large? On industry? Is it a question of developing the critical acumen of each person in a democratic universe in which the citizen must be formed as well as informed? Or is it a question of favoring industrial innovation and producing workers for the job market? One often has the impression that the term “impact” belongs to some magical incantation: one has only to use it to align the university on the side of an economically viable 21st century. Thus it appears useful, in our highly utilitarian times, to examine the notion more closely and to grasp the very impact it can have on discourses and individuals.

Sade Before the Law

Vilmer, Jean-Baptiste Jeangène. Sade moraliste. Le dévoilement de la pensée sadienne à la lumière de la réforme pénale au XVIIIe siècle. Preface by Maurice Lever. Geneva: Droz, 2005. Ost, François. Sade et la loi. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005. Unlike the numerous readings of Sade that make him the apologist of evil, the theorist of crime, and the advocate of the most radical libertinism, Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer argues vigorously that we must not confuse Sade with his libertine characters, that the smoky legend of the divine marquis is precisely a legend, which has inflated facts that are very limited, and that he is above all a prisoner who has suffered the arbitrariness of a pseudo-justice. Vilmer undertakes to demonstrate that we must choose between the Sade of correspondence, who complains during more than 28 years of incarceration that he is an (almost) virtuous victim of immoral persecutors, and the Sade of libertine novels, who vaunts immorality and praises torturers. Vilmer launches an attack on the vague consensus of sadien studies— Sade’s basic immorality—against which he attempts to demonstrate: 1) that we cannot attribute to Sade the responsibility for the libertine pronouncements of his novels; 2) that the Sade of the correspondence and of the numerous implicit and explicit elements of his text—even the least outrageous (gazés)—distances himself from a doctrine that is a priori immoral, and 3) that the immorality of the libertine characters aims in fact at frightening the reader and setting his feet on the path of virtue. Thus the frenetic libertinage in Sade’s work operates like doubt in Descartes: one must be methodologically criminal in order to reconstruct a just penal system, surpassing (in a very Hegelian manner) both the old illusory justice, thanks to the libertines, and the new libertine injustice, thanks to morality, to arrive at moderation and reason. Vilmer’s vigorous demonstration begins with both a severe, even aggressive, critique of the readings of an immoralist Sade, and with a precise historic contextualization of the law in the Ancien Régime, in particular the penal reform that was exactly contemporary with the life of the marquis. Vilmer’s critique of the summaries that attribute to Sade the criminal pronouncements of his characters seems very judicious. The attempt to reconstitute Sade’s thought on the penal system is done in a precise and stimulating way, both by the mobilization of all his

On Power: Theology and Sovereignty in Pascal's Pensées

odern selves longei M If, for societies give the impression of being able to build themand independently produce what they are. They are no the pure legacy of God, traditions, ancestors, or nature. the ancient Greeks, the political problem was to determine what was the eu Zen, the good life in the city, it meant also that life itself was already social. But the modern political problem is to legitimize, first, life in the city: Why do we live together? The very fact that there is a social order instead of a disordered multiplicity must be conceived of and validated. Otherwise, there is the feeling that the actual social order lacks any legitimacy. Many fables of the origins of power or of the beginnings of the state were available on the philosophical market in the seventeenth century. The Hobbesian version is probably better known than the Pascalian one, since its legacy seems to have fueled most of the modern conceptions of sovereignty. I therefore will begin by outlining Hobbes’s representation of the origins of sovereignty, before coming to terms with the I’ascalian conception of power. Hobbes’s Leviathrzn seems to promote a powerful state organized to represent force. This is true, but we must acknowledge that such power originates in fear. For Hobbes, fear is the interior rumbling that society dispels but without which . society could not exist. Inasmuch as human beings’ first will is to preserve their life, fear is the consequence of human weakness. Not a weakness in front of God, the Almighty, because that would sound obvious, but a weakness even in front of the weakest of all people. If the strong were always able to beat the weak, there would at least exist a stable power, and society would be composed of masters and slaves. But in the social physics that Hobbes tries to describe,

The Rule of Art: On Kant with Wittgenstein:

I do not propose to compare the esthetics of Kant and Wittgenstein or to show the sometimes very Kantian basis of some of Wittgenstein’s reflections. I do not intend to take up the history of philosophy here (I will not, therefore, attempt to expound upon the relationship in Kant of the esthetic to the teleological or the moral, for example, or the relationship of art to ordinary language in Wittgenstein). That would not be without interest; quite the contrary, but I would prefer to compare the remarks of the one to