Manuel Braganca

Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas ?

Résumé La Seconde Guerre mondiale demeure très présente dans les mémoires des Français qui seraient plongés dans une « phase obsessionnelle » depuis le début des années 1970 selon l’historien Henry Rousso. Notre étude se propose de vérifier dans quelle mesure cela reste vrai de nos jours. Elle entend le faire non pas en se basant sur ses occurrences dans la presse ou dans les médias – ce qui, paradoxalement, pourrait ne faire ressortir que ce qui est du domaine de l’épidermique – mais indirectement, à travers les romans et, plus précisément, les best-sellers qui sont, selon de nombreux critiques, des miroirs privilégiés de l’inconscient collectif ou de l’imaginaire d’une époque que, en retour, ils contribuent à façonner. Nous distinguerons quatre phases depuis 1945. Or, les best-sellers contemporains, ceux de la quatrième et dernière phase, présentent nombre de caractéristiques communes qui suggèrent que ce passé difficile est bel et bien en train de passer.

Le Survivant de la Shoah face au texte de fiction: Un écran protecteur ou un écran projecteur? L’exemple d’Anna Langfus

La terminologie ‘écriture écran’ est souvent utilisée dans un sens proche de celui que lui donne Annie Ernaux lorsqu’elle écrit que ‘la fiction protège’ en permettant à un auteur de dire tout en gardant le lecteur à distance. Pourtant, de Blanchot à Genette, de nombreux critiques ont souligné que le texte est par essence un espace qui n’existe que dans et par cet échange, le lecteur – surtout dans le cas des textes de fiction – devant s’investir, se projeter dans le texte lu. Le texte de fiction serait-il donc un écran protecteur pour celui qui tient la plume et un écran projecteur pour celui qui tient le livre ? En nous basant principalement sur des textes de la psychanalyste Rachel Rosenblum et de l’auteure et survivante de la Shoah Anna Langfus, nous suggèrerons que, pour l’auteur comme pour le lecteur, le texte de fiction est à la fois un écran protecteur et un écran projecteur, ces deux fonctions étant étroitement liées et nullement contradictoires. Nous montrerons en effet qu’aucun genre n’est a priori protecteur puisque c’est l’acte de lecture ou d’écriture qui peut se transformer en morbide compulsion de répétition quand la mémoire d’un lecteur ou d’un auteur est devenue pathologique.

Introduction: Ego-histories, France and the Second World War

The introduction considers the origins, development and challenges of the ego-history genre. It refers to previous ego-history projects, often situated within historical studies and a specific national context, and presents the international and multidisciplinary outlook of the current volume, as well as its thematic unity, centred on the study of the history and memories of the Second World War in France. The introduction also analyses how the ego-history genre explores the relationships between the subjective and the objective in academic writing, offering insights into individual and collective intellectual trajectories. Finally, it considers the continuing presence and significance of ‘Vichy’, its afterlife in contemporary French culture and its transnational dimensions.

Conclusion: Cross-Perspectives on Ego-history

The concluding remarks in this final chapter build on individual singularities as well as collective patterns that emerge from the ego-histories presented here. First, this text reflects on how scholars in the current volume have engaged with what can be seen as certain passages obliges, essential and perhaps unavoidable steps of the ego-history genre, namely the questioning of the origins of one’s research (‘why?’, but also ‘how?’ and ‘when?’) and of the links between personal identities and intellectual trajectories. Second, it focuses on the research shifts and developments observed in the wake of the ‘Paxtonian turn’. A third section looks at interdisciplinary and collaborative openings along with the social and public role played by scholars working on this period. A fourth and final section considers ego-histories of France and the Second World War from an intergenerational perspective.

Interview with Robert O. Paxton, on the Writing of History and Ego-history

In this interview, Robert O. Paxton is invited to reflect on the writing of his own ego-history, published in 2007, and, more generally, on the writing of history across different national and academic contexts. The discussion then moves to the influence of other disciplines on history, including on his own work. Finally, Paxton reflects on the reception of his work and on the importance of the Vichy period in contemporary France.

Entre peurs et impatiences : quelques remarques en guise de conclusion

‘Only art has the power of redeeming suffering from the abyss.’Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair, xvCe numero special ne fait evidemment pas le tour de la question qu’il se proposait d’examiner. Il ...

Penser la violence en France au XXIe siècle

The extensive body of work on violence that precedes this special issue is daunting. In a French context alone, several major thinkers have contributed to shape this intrinsically multidisciplinary area of research, including: Georges Sorel, whose views on collective and revolutionary violence were immensely influential in the first half of the twentieth century; René Girard, whose theory of mimetic violence emerged from his literary analyses; JeanPaul Sartre, and his reflections on terror, oppression and group violence; Frantz Fanon, and his perspectives on racism and colonial violence; Pierre Bourdieu, whose work helped to think and define symbolic violence; and Michel Foucault, of course, whose influential work on power has inspired numerous studies across the world. In addition, from Simone de Beauvoir to Monique Wittig, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, many French thinkers have significantly and durably informed and contributed to debates on feminism and the multifaceted aspects of violence in the oppression of women worldwide. Sociologist Michel Wieviorka, one of the major thinkers on violence of our time, is certainly not far off the mark when he writes that ‘il n’est pas de penseur important, dans les sciences sociales comme en philosophie politique, qui n’ait pas, d’une façon ou d’une autre, exprimé un point de vue sur la violence ou élaboré une perspective pour l’aborder’ (2004, 143). Wieviorka’s omission of scholars in the Arts and Humanities in this quotation may be explained by his own background. Nonetheless, it is true that, even though this topic has been central to many fields or subfields of the Arts and Humanities—including postcolonial, gender, memory, war and conflict studies—, few volumes written or directed by scholars in such fields have focused on violence, and even fewer have attempted to reflect on violence in France in the twenty-first century from a multidisciplinary perspective.1

Divided Memory: French Recollections of World War II from the Liberation to the Present

Roffe treats The clamour of being simply as an incitement for Deleuze’s readers to read Deleuze’s works all the more carefully. The majority of Badiou’s Deleuze is dedicated to just such a careful reading of Deleuze’s central texts, such as Difference and repetition and The logic of sense, but there is no attempt to establish Badiou’s position beyond a basic surface reading. Without engaging with Badiou’s set theoretical ontology in some detail, as set out in Being and event, it is not possible to understand his particular treatment of the problems of totality and closure, based on the inconsistency of a set of all sets. Only from this perspective can one see how, for Badiou, Deleuze must appear as a philosopher of the One, the principal charge against Deleuze. This is of course contrary to Deleuze’s own presentation of the Univocity of Being, but the value of Badiou’s reductive reading can only be appreciated by assessing what he gains through such a reading, rather than discarding it as incorrect. In a market saturated with studies of Deleuze it seems a missed opportunity to reject a balanced assessment of the relation between these two philosophers, which could have broadened the appeal of this book beyond the confines of Deleuze studies. The originality of Badiou’s approach and the role that Deleuze plays in his philosophy as a whole is lost in the decision to restrict the focus of the book to an analysis of The clamour of being, and to present Badiou’s challenge simply as an occasion to reflect more deeply on the work of Deleuze. Badiou’s Deleuze is a complex study of key concepts and ideas within the field of Deleuze studies, but offers little insight into the work of Badiou.