Stefanos Geroulanos

HETEROGENEITIES, SLAVE-PRINCES, AND MARSHALL PLANS: SCHMITT'S RECEPTION IN HEGEL'S FRANCE *

This essay examines the French reception of the Carl Schmitts thought, specifically its Hegelian strand. Beginning with the early readings of Schmitts thought by Alexandre Kojeve and Georges Bataille during the mid-1930s, it attends to the partial adoption of Schmitts friend/enemy distinction and his theories of sovereignty and neutralization in Kojeve and Batailles Hegelian writings, as well as to their critical responses. The essay then turns to examine the reading of Kojeve by the Jesuit Hegelian resistant Gaston Fessard during the war, a reading specifically intended to delegitimate Vichy as a “slave-prince,” resistance to whom would be legitimate. The final section returns to Bataille and his 1948 book The Accursed Share in order to propose that his Maussian understanding of the Marshall Plan suggested an overcoming of the friend/enemy distinction, a suggestion that was later made explicit in a 1957 talk by Kojeve at Dusseldorf before Schmitt and a group of his supporters. At stake throughout are both the thoroughly critical reception of Schmitt, the particular political inflection of Hegel carried out by and in Kojeves reading, and certain methodological links between conceptual history and the reception history.

A Graft, Physiological and Philosophical: Jean‐Luc Nancy's L'Intrus

Jean-Luc Nancy begins his essay L’Intrus with a definitive statement: ‘The intruder enters by force, through surprise or ruse [...]’ In this philosophical reflection on a heart transplant he had received a decade earlier, Nancy turns intrusion into a necessary (non-)foundation of his self and uses a series of philosophical displacements and reorganizations to undo any notion or illusion of an ‘organic, symbolic and imaginary’ continuity of selfhood. Punctuating a philosophical oeuvre dominated by questions of singularity and corporeality, L’Intrus mobilizes intrusion as a concept for force that explains and addresses the status and significance of transplantation and suffering, the body and finitude today. If, for philosophical systems since Descartes’, the body as a single, integral form has been a marker of singularity, then how do disease, organ transplantation and medical intervention more generally affect, disrupt and also reconstruct this singularity? If, moreover, as Nancy says ‘Modern humanity, at least since the era of Descartes, has made the wish for survival and immortality an element of a general program of ‘‘mastery and possession of nature’’’, then how is the experience of one’s singularity and integrity affected by this ‘programme’? How does life bend to medical intervention, while survival and intrusion clash or co-operate on a terrain of disrupted singularity?

Transparency, Humanism, and the Politics of the Future Before and After May ’68

The chapter considers the effect of May ’68 on French critiques of “transparency,” and argues that a significant gap existed between (a) principally epistemological critiques published shortly before 1968, and (b) the rise of a new set of political critiques of transparency in the 1970s. The three years before May ’68 saw the publication of Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech, Foucault’s Order of Things, and Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which all took for granted that no mind/world transparency was available to the human subject. All three works signaled that a certain transparency might be possible—even imminent—in the near future, provided a certain humanism was jettisoned, and with it the expectation that transparency would be achievable by humans themselves. May ’68 completely obviated this line of thinking.

Eurasianism versus IndoGermanism: Linguistics and mythology in the 1930s’ controversies over European prehistory

In 1935, the Russian linguist Prince Nicolai S. Trubetskoi and the French mythologist Georges Dumézil engaged in a vicious debate over a seemingly obscure subject: the structure of Northwest Caucasian languages. Based on unknown archival material in French, German, and Russian, this essay uses the debate as a pathway into the 1930s scientific and political stakes of IndoEuropeanism – the belief that European cultures emerged through the spread of a single IndoEuropean people out of a single “motherland.” Each of the two authors held strong commitments to visions of European order and its origins – in “Eurasia” for Trubetskoi and a Northern European Heimat for Dumézil. The North Caucasus, long a privileged site for Russian and European scholars, now became key to the renegotiation of the origins and reach of imagined prehistoric IndoEuropean conquerors, but also the 1930s’ debate over the value of different disciplines (linguistics, mythology, archaeology, folklore studies) for the origins of language, myth, and the European deep past. As a moment in the history of modern speculations about prehistory, pursued in the shadow of Nazi scholarship, the debate transformed fields of research – notably linguistics, comparative mythology, and structuralism – and the assumptions about the shape of Europe.

An Army of Shadows: Black Markets, Adaptation, and Social Transparency in Postwar France*

Few facets of French culture in the three decades following World War II are as storied as the antagonism that beleaguered the relationship between state and society. Anxiety underlying this relationship confronted officials, intellectuals, and society at large with a severe conflict over the transparency of social relations: the state was prying into society, prying it open, while elements of society, in turn, at times seemed noncompliant to the point of threatening the stability of France as a governable unit. In the midst of a strongwelfare state, with high regard and legal protections for the individual and privacy, and with laws that even allowed for feedback from families and social organizations in the planning of everyday life, sectors of intellectual life, politics, and society bent nevertheless toward antistatist paranoia, occasionally even the celebration of a stateless society, on the grounds of the state’s reach into everyday life. The tension has long been explained as a result of a communism-driven intellectual scene that decried the republic and the state as violent bourgeois shams ðan approach mirrored in the 1950s anti-tax poujadiste movement’s denunciation of machinations of the “corrupted brain” and the “vampire tax state” against the “little,” “free,” truly FrenchÞ; as a result of the experience of Vichy and the heroization of the resistance; as a general Western phenomenon; or as the afterlife of a disappointed early postwar hope for a superior political regime ða hope that returned at important moments, notably the later 1960sÞ. Such explanations mistake particular political constellations for a set of concerns that reached deep into the tissue of everyday life; this article proposes to address the mutual constitution of state and society, and the antagonism between them, by focusing on the complex imagery of social transparency negotiated in this competition from 1944 to about 1968.

Dead Man de Jim Jarmusch. La poésie du fusil Arriflex

Quand meurt le mort? Quand meurt le mort? Est-ce quil meurt quand il est presente dans le generique comme « Dead Man», «Le Mort», ou quand il est blesse la premiere fois? Quand Personne, son compagnon indien dAmerique, lui demande: «As-tu tue le blanc qui ta tue»? Quand Personne voit un crâne a la place du visage de Blake? Quand Blake recoit une balle pour la deuxieme fois? Quand Personne negocie le passage de Blake a travers la grande mer, ou quand Blake est place dans le canoe? Et est-ce que tout cela a vraiment une importance: le «quand», le «comment», le «pourquoi»? Si Bill Blake nest pas un cadavre, il est bien mort, mort tout de meme, un mort vivant: ses blessures temoignent dune mort imminente, il est poursuivi, marque par la mort, une mort a laquelle il finira par se soumettre tout comme il accepte le nom a la portee mythique de «William Blake», qui lui a ete confere. Or, cest precisement en tant que mort vivant que Blake pose une serie des problemes aussi bien philosophiques que cinematographiques. Problemes philosophiques, parce que son passage a travers le film propose une veritable melete thanatou, une «meditation continue de la mort», investie du pouvoir de donner le sens dune vie, dune traversee du mourir, et de le faire reconnaitre. Problemes cinematographiques, parce que cette meditation de la mort est faite a meme la matie-