Johann Michel

A Study of the Collective Memory and Public Memory of Slavery in France

ABSTRACT This article aims to analyse the conditions of the institutionalisation and transformation of the official memory of slavery in contemporary France, and to theorise a new version of the memory which I will call public memory. This theorisation will be put to the test of an ethnographic study, which has been conducted over several years, on associations servicing people originating from the French Antilles, and spearheading the struggle for the remembrance of slavery.

Herméneutique, pragmatisme et critique des institutions

This article examines the ‘question of meaning’ in institutions by distinguishing several levels of both meaning and analysis. The institution presents itself (semantic level) as an objectified configuration of meaning whose historicity (socio-genetic level) we should be able to reconstruct. Although it has stabilized over time, the objectified meaning is subject to modification by situated lived interactions (pragmatic level). If institutions cannot exist without a naturalized and pre-reflexive relation to rules and roles, we nevertheless need to distinguish intermediate levels of reflexivity without these necessarily having to challenge the established order. Because institutions, which are always contingent, are ‘fragile’, those who occupy dominant positions carry ‘additional meaning’, on top of the immanent meaning of the rules and roles. This additional meaning, as a legitimation device, is assimilated to a meta-pragmatic level. The present article, then, seeks to ‘graft’ a plurality of hermeneutic theories, stemming from textual science, onto these levels of analysis, in order to increase the intelligibility of the institutional phenomenon.

L’identité personnelle à l’épreuve de l’expérience concentrationnaire: essai de microanalyse de Si c’est un homme de Primo Levi

Mainly based on the testimony of Primo Levi in Si c’est un homme, and through a perspective inspired by the “interactionist” approach of E. Goffman, this article first aims at analysing the depersonalizing methods and techniques which were implemented by the Nazi institution on the detainees of Auschwitz concentration camp. Second, the article studies the tactics, the stratagems, the savoir-faire - unevenly shared according to each prisoner’s resources - by which means the oppressed tried to “put life back together”. Our approach is completely opposed to the idea that prisoners, “like lambs sent to slaughter”, passively suffered the injunctions of the concentration institution.