AN ESSAY ON SECURITY FOCUSED
GOVERNEMENTALITY

Frédéric Gros

How has the political emphasis on security come to pose
an ever greater threat to constitutional freedoms in this
age of globalization ? Mireille Delmas-Marty’s clear,
compelling argument sets out to explore this issue at a
individual, national, and global level. In cases of detention
on grounds of security, states of emergency, and the
precautionary principle, together with the outsourcing
of security management, Spinoza’s “sad passions” of
jealousy, envy, frustration, and greed tend to oust the
shared joys that create solidarity. Yet the author – herself a
lawyer – cannot be accused of naive optimism or idealism.
Our world is indeed dangerous, as the title of her work
makes clear. However, this does not change the fact that
security-based policies are dehumanizing, unreasonable,
and, in the final analysis, lead to greater insecurity.

 A SOCIOLOGY OF GLOBALIZATION

Philippe Raynaud

More than any other field of research, sociology sheds
light on what makes globalization a single, united process,
while globalization in turn invites sociology to alter its
own paradigms. The value of Saskia Sassen’s book lies
in her demonstration of how the unity of globalization
is rooted in the local (through urban networks), while
(apparently) weakening the old order of the nation state.
Her argument, which opposes both the rose-tinted myth
of globalization and anti-globalization rhetoric, leads her
redefine the relationship between denationalized social
classes in this new context.

 PLANTS AND MEDECINE : NEW ISSUES IN
TRANSPLANT SURGERY AND THE “TRADE” IN
BODY PARTS

François Roussel

François Roussel explores the connections between a
number of recent works on the topic of bio-ethics in general
and organ transplants in particular. Does the practice
represent a commodification of the body ? Should we be
worried about potential abuses ? Is the protective ethical
underpinning of a fundamental human right threatened
by dubious, or even outright scandalous, practices ? The
answer is not so simple. When each case is studied in
isolation, it becomes clear that there is a sizeable gap,
even at the level of individual consciences, between, on
the one hand, the abstract knowledge of overwhelming
reality and – more harmful still – the knowledge which
opposes forms of knowledge on scientific and technological
practices currently undergoing rapid expansion, and on
the other, the beliefs of “responsible” doctors and politicians,
who remain smugly moralistic and paternalistic
in the finest French tradition.

  THE RECEPTION OF LEVINAS

Marc Crépon

How can we draw on Levinas’s inheritance to study
contemporary society ? François Sebbah asks how Levinas’s
writings should be received in the light of “a number of
contemporary events”. Marc Crépon’s review focuses on
the fourth of these : war. Levinas describes humanity in
terms of war and peace because, as triumphant inhabitants
of the world, we look to defend our right to enjoyment
and property, or the right to happiness, which bears war
along with it. Yet this does not obliterate the hope for a
radical interruption signified by the enduring vulnerability
of other people’s faces. Being is not enough.

  BREAKING INTO CAPTIVE THOUGHT, OR
OBLITERATING TRACES

François-David Sebbah

To mark the publication of the first volume of Emmanuel
Levinas’s complete works, François-David Sebbah focuses
on the Carnets de captivité, an act of inner resistance. While
readers learn little about life in the Stalag, they are granted
access to the hesitations of Levinas’s writing and many
of the traces obliterated in the work. It is apparent that
the younger Levinas – a devoted reader of Proust and
Léon Bloy – planned his work to be hybrid to a great
extent, including philosophy, criticism, and literature,
with fiction taking deformation to the level of fantasy. For
Levinas, a friend of Blanchot’s, these “pure experiences
of pure being” reveal traces other than those he placed at
the heart of his work. François-David Sebbah notes that
this creates a certain feeling of discomfort alongside the
pleasure of discovery.

 THE LITERARY MOMENT AND THE CONDITION
OF BEING AN HOSTAGE : LEVINAS, PROUST
AND THE CORPORAL MEANING OF TIME

Danielle Cohen-Levinas

The Carnets de captivité reveal a fundamental kinship
with literature, particularly the works of Proust. Reading,
copying, writing : during the years when Levinas experienced
the “uncondition of being a hostage”, he drew on
the relationship between Proust’s narrator and Albertine
to question the incommensurable mystery of the other
that is the very basis of love itself. Marking a departure
from Heideggerian immanence, his thought – developed
in the evenings of dreadful days – distinguishes between
“transdescendance”, or falling below being, and “transascendance”,
or a metaphysical movement towards the
Other. This distinction, developed in Levinas’s notes and
feeding into the outlines for two novels, nourishes the
paradoxical thinking, ripe with future potentiality, that
led him to write, “The great experiences of our life have
never been lived, properly speaking.”

  THE MIRACULOUS “SURPLUS” : LEVINAS’S
NOTES ON METAPHOR

Marc de Launay

Marc de Launay draws on the 1960-62 notes “framing”
Totalité et infini (1961) to carry out a rigorous study of the
early signs heralding Levinas’s thinking on metaphor
and their later transformations. He draws on key philosophical
references, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant,
Humboldt, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger, as well
as the work of Levinas’s near contemporaries, Merleau-
Ponty, Derrida (particularly De la grammatologie, 1967),
and Ricoeur (particularly La Métaphore vive, 1975). This
enables him to explain the shift in Levinas’s work from
an understanding of metaphor as a “miraculous surplus”
(transductio rather than translatio) to that of the “trace” –
the immense distance of an immemorial past : a kind of
negative theology. As Catherine Chalier points out in
her edition, Levinas’s reading of metaphor and conceptualisation
leads him into an impasse and a recasting of
his thought, constantly under the threat of aporia. The
exclusive disjunction in the title of his major work, Totalité
[ou] infini, is a reflection of this.

  THE ECHO STAGE

Jérémie Majorel

Claire Nouvet returns to the fable of Narcissus, which Ovid
connects with Echo, the nymph condemned to pure repetition,
to explore an entire facet of contemporary European
culture, turning it to face itself as an Other, in images and
sounds that are structured yet out of joint. This paradox
echoes Narcissus : Ovid adumbrates and complicates the
“formative” stage described by both Wallon and Lacan
much later, opening up new perspectives for fundamental
issues in psychoanalysis, ethics, and phenomenology.

 PROUST’S RIBBON

Pierre Chartier

How did the insignificant Marcel become the great Proust,
author of In search of lost time ? This transformation did
not just begin with a dazzling inner revelation in 1909 that
threw him into thirteen years of constant writing ; it echoed
a deliberate plan – a rigorous, hidden, “implicitated”
demonstration. By opening up and over-determining
the uses of “I” in In search of lost time, and by inventing
a novelistic performativity that incorporates the work of
“intelligence” in the work of art, Marcel Proust, the man
with the genius “idea”, became as much a philosopher
as an author. This is what Thierry Marchaisse sets out to
demonstrate in his carefully developed argument. Proust’s
ribbon is, in the final analysis, the irresistible emblem of
this demonstration.

  UNIDENTIFIABLE : THE TASK OF THE POET AS
TRANSLATOR

Martin Rueff

Martin Rueff pays homage to Yves Di Manno and his Objets
d’Amérique – a highly individual yet dis-identified work
that is a magnificent montage by a poet and translator.
He also pays homage to multi-lingual poetry, if it is true
that the plurality of languages is not simply the fate of
mankind but also the point of origin for the poetic vocation.
The American objectivists that Di Manno translates
and assimilates (as shown in issue 18 of the journal Fusées)
do not represent a new formalism or a shift from subject
to object, but rather make one of the decisive moves of
modernity by transposing subjects into subjects, moving
them within language and languages to give rise to the
“shared song”, to the point of disappearance and silence.

  THE TRADITION OF HISTORY

Patrick Hochart

« Maybe I have said enough to give a measure of how
important it is to be on one’s guard against the twofold
illusory, fallacious pretension that consists in writing
history and lending it the implacable logic of a finalised
process, when men are indeed participants in history, but
by no means its authors, since history has neither author
nor end. To prepare the ground for the question, with
hammer blows but without Nietzsche’s genius, there are
doubtless no other resources in escaping this illusion and
despair than either to follow Leo Strauss in sacrificing
history, or to rethink it in line with Hannah Arendt, by
understanding it not from the end, but from its birth, as
the site of a constant opportunity for renewal, thereby
slipping from all conceptual grasp and hence inviting
infinite comprehension. »