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[hal-04006673] Le grand bazar de l'altérité. Petite phénoménologie d'une illusion.
Although otherness has long been an essential subject in our human and social sciences, particularly in our Western philosophies and anthropologies, the word itself is nonetheless the object of many real or imaginary and sometimes contradictory meanings. The aim of this article is to take a fresh look at a concept that needs to be revisited in the light of its contemporary uses and misuses. In particular, the aim is to understand how and why this concept attracts a number of misunderstandings and false fads, in contrast to what Sartre, in his time, called authenticity. By positing, and discussing, the self as profoundly other, both subject and object of experience, we will attempt to show that otherness does not reside so much in the other as in its very impossibility, insofar as it is pure exchange, infinite interactions, not given as a starting point, but given as a destination. Taking up the Levi Straussian perspective of Tristes Tropiques, this article proposes to think of otherness as that which constantly escapes us, that ontological failure by which the search for the grasp of the world, and of those who compose and inhabit it, imposes itself on us in the form of the impasse and the inaccessible. The world appears to us only insofar as it is ungraspable. So it is with what language calfs the other. Philosophers and anthropologists help us to understand that in seeking the other, we find only ourselves seeking the other. It is in this perpetual tension, this conatus so well defined by Spinoza, that we find what we call otherness. The good news is that at the end of this reflection we will understand that otherness exists, even and especially when it is denied. This is what the work of Frantz Fanon will point to in this context, as he shows that the highest otherness arises from the very negation of the otherness of the dominated. lt is by withdrawing from the incessantly minoritised other (woman, black person, foreigner, mentally il! person, poor person, homosexual) his or her part of being, that his or her irreducible otherness is conferred, in the same gesture and in the same movement. To think is to establish a relationship of similarity and difference. Ail thought is thought of the gap and it is in the microphysics (Foucault) of this gap that the other stands, miserable and munificent at the same time. ...more
[hal-04008213] Visage de l'Autre : l'altérité dans Moby-Dick et Billy Budd de Herman Melville
This paper addresses the key issue of the representation of alterity as "faces" in Herman Melville's two masterpieces, Moby-Dick; or,The Whale and Billy Budd, Sailor. The issue of otherness and the relationships between subjects stands as a major problem in literature, but also in philosophy and ethics, as it also logically entails a questioning about identity and sameness. The analysis uses the concepts of face from the point of view of Emmanuel Lévinas's ethics, but also that of faciality developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. The difficulty, or even impossibility to reach the Other who stands as pure exteriority in a nonreciprocal relationship leads to a number of communication deadlocks, that language itself cannot solve as the deadly face-to-face in Billy Budd makes it clear. The traditional vision of the western philosophy of representation, based on the Greek mode! ruled by the idea of the Same and identity must be therefore left and redefined in order to take into account the pure exteriority of the other. ...more
This chapter aims to illustrate a research project carried out in ltaly, during the period of lockdown, aimed at using digital communication and neogeographic platforms to collect and map testimonies of individuals. The main objective of the research titled "Il mio spazio vissuto" was to explore the different testimonies related to the resistances, experiences and practices of quarantine that occurred in the daily spaces ofltalians' homes. The research identifies what types of social and spatial activities are considered most important to individuals, dwelling on a geo-anthropological analysis of the testimonies. ...more
[hal-04006784] Le sujet trans, frontière et limite à l'altérité ou autre radical ?
Since the 1920s and 1930s, trans people have gone through several medical nosographies and as many categories and expressions of popular culture, intersecting over the decades: psychosis, dementia praecox, schizophrenia, mental illness, inversion, repressed homosexuality, anomaly, oddity, perversity, deviance, marginality, gender identity disorder, gender dysphoria and gender incongruence in the upcoming revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11, 2022) by the World Health Organization (WHO). Ali these items have continued to both describe and analyze, even to "cure" or "combat" the trans subject, inexorably shifting the borders or limits of belonging to humanity. It is therefore not surprising to find oneself faced with the disturbing and questioning question: where does this "other and his transbody" begin and end (Le Breton, 2016), in a biological and socio-legal binarity stated as [being] an anthropological invariant. Is the transgender subject placed in the otherness of the human race (a 3'd gender), in a "radical otherness" (Forget, 2014), expressed by language, self-denomination, lexical creativity, or even in the "jamming" of otherness itself, through the crossbreeding of gender expressions, the neutralization of "gender technologies" (de Lauretis, 2007)? In the light of feminist studies, transgender studies, among other studies, we will show how the people concerned go beyond, in terms of identity, the otherness of the difference between men and women, with new distinctions: transgender/cisgender, dyadic/intersexed, neurotypical/neuroatypical, binary/non-binary and their intersections (trans-non-binary-neuroatypical, for example ). ...more
[hal-04006687] La blessure quotidienne. L'Autre est nous et nous sommes solitude.
This article on the theme of the other and on the dialogue between us and the other, goes against the grain of previous anthropological studies and demonstrates, with a typically nihilistic accent, not only the total absence of the other, but the absolute impossibility of dialogue and of any relationship between us and others, between body and consciousness. Before we even embark and depart for remote, almost primitive or non-Western lands and populations, we must retrace our steps and observe our imprint to understand what really exists for us: this bodily shadow that the sun casts behind us is it our body or this one (and ourselves), foreign to the world and to our conscience, are only illusion? "The shadow of a dream is the man" Pindar already said and this article recovers the truth repeating that the other is us and that we are solitude. ...more
[hal-04006730] La spiritualité implicite et le sacré ou comment penser sa propre Altérité
Could one's own otherness lie in the domain of the unspeakable? Could this unspeakable be partly in the domain of spirituality and the sacred? How then can we give shape to this experience? Spirituality is studied here by the dimensions that characterizes it - in particular the sacred-, but it is never named to avoid confusion with the religious field or social thought. This article aims to present the scientific framework - in psychology - of the study of implicit spirituality and to analyze the "spiritual" experience of people, an experience that they do not name as such when they are questioned. To perceive the essence of the "sacred", to feel a connection with others and nature, to be in search of meaning, to experience a feeling of transcendence ... It is to develop or live an implicit spirituality and it is this awareness of a part of one's own Otherness that deserves a (re)discovery. ...more
[hal-04008299] Une éthique vivante depuis un "Nous" animal
As living forms of the world, we have in common that we meet and unfold through a multitude of sometimes unexpected and surprising relationships. The inter-species othemess (human-animal) leaves inspiring traces in us, crosses us and shapes us, questions what we are together within an event. The understanding of the singular experience of the encounter ventures into the realm of the sensitive, the nonvisible, and cornes to tell us something about this other, the intentionality, the emergence of a We, especially when it is a wild animal. I defend here that the encounter is however possible because a living ethics is the heart of the experience. However, beyond the respect for this other, near or far, ethics fails when science imposes a reading of reality through statistical manipulation and reification of the living, thus allowing to arrange the world and thus to possess the world, leaving us alone. ...more
[hal-04008194] Djuna Barnes, L'Autre, même
Born June 12, 1892 in Cornwall on Hudson, New York, Djuna Barnes died June 18, 1982 in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York, and is one of the most exciting writers of the Modernist era. It was with her stay in Paris during the 1920s in the circle of expatriate artists and American Bohemians that her writing career gained momentum, with important new, daring and difficult books that made her consider herself a spokesperson for lesbian writing. However, she herself is not situated in a claim to identity. Plus: as a critic of binarism she could in retrospect emerge as "the high priestess of Queer Hermetic High Modernity". Djuna Barnes 's writing goes beyond the separations ofexternal (nature, dead life) and internai (sex, gender, etc.) otherness in language, the overturning of the norm (sexuality, animality) and form, (metaphor, irony, depth, incomprehension) to seek a utopia that goes beyond gender and aspires to reunite with the living - even if this new alliance cannot, in the end, take place. ...more
[hal-04008279] Nous" sommes ensemble, mais nous ne sommes pas identiques
he COVID-19 pandemic is caused by the man-disaster-maker, his undue interference in the environment, the balance and the life of several species. Paradoxically, the pandemic has led to increased use of technology and digital mediation and raised hopes for vaccines and biomedical solutions. The dependence of humans on the very hightech economy of cognitive capitalism has thus intensified, even though this is the very cause of the problems. This combination of ambivalent elements in relation to the fourth industrial revolution and the sixth mass extinction is the distinctive feature of the post-human condition. This essay explores this condition further, offering both critical proposais and affirmative avenues for overcoming it. ...more
[hal-04006750] Portrait de famille en Révolution. Noirs, Femmes et Queer autour de 1789
Starting from the observation of my own family history, its discontinuities, deviations, adoptions, appropriations and other postcolonial indigestions, my attention turned to 1789 and the revolutionary period as a melting pot of French myths, with a simple question: what stories can I draw from it to feed the evenings of my future children? Gradually, a gallery of anti-heroes was born, some of whom will have their adventures told here, through the re-edition of an article from 1913. ...more
[hal-04008259] Espaces du quotidien et dynamiques de l'altérité pendant le confinement
This chapter presents a study conducted in Italy during the Covid-19 lockdown. Severa! volunteers were asked to send to a website with a text describing their everyday space. In total, 300 testimonies were collected. This chapter analyses some of them by a joint anthropological and geographical approach. The aim is to understand how, in a highly critical moment, testimonies give meaning to spaces related to everyday life, otherness, bodies and interactions. ...more
[hal-03872955] La naïveté dans The Wings of the Dove
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The Wings of the Dove (1902) and the other novels of Henry James's Major Phase are rightly seen as a sharp break from his novels of his 'Experimental Period' of the late 1890s, during which James sought, following his failed stint as a London playwright, to apply his hardleamed lessons from writing drama to his new novels. Most scholars see this period of intense experimentation as reaching its peak with The Sacred Fount (1901), an experiment gone so haywire that James would practically disown it, before the author, the experimental urge out of his system, returned to themes he had abandoned for years and, free of the self-imposed constraints of his experimental impulse, wrote his three most astounding, complex works of the Major Phase - his final, crowning literary achievements. However, upon closer examination one discovers that al! three Major Phase novels were initially conceived before the Experimental Period began, that The Wings of the Dove was in fact intended to be his first experimental work, and that in-depth comparison and contrast of The Wings of the Dove to the novels of the 1890s reveal more of a continuation and expansion of James's experimental impulse than a break from it. Those similarities and elements of continuity are vast and multi-faceted, but ail seem to fall under the umbrella term of a 'poetics of omission and indirection', which dominated both "phases" and clearly ties The Wings of the Dove to the six experimental novels of the 1890s at nearly every possible level: from overall construction, to staging, to focalization, to colloquy and dialogue, down to the elusive language that constitutes both narration and dialogue, the very fabric of Jamesian ambiguity. ...more
[hal-03137859] La naïveté dans The Wings of the Dove
Cet article explore les différentes acceptions, positives et négatives, de la naïveté, ainsi que son rôle dans le roman jamesien, où la naïveté apparaît à la fois comme une confiance vitale et une crédulité fatale, le ressort de la tragédie romanesque et le moteur de la création artistique. ...more