EXPLORERS IN THE PHONOSPHERE
by Florence Dupont

What relationship did the Ancient Greeks and Romans
have with the world of sounds around them ? The difficulty
of answering this question is what makes it so interesting.
Contrary to traditional positivist history, which collects
the evidence available and reads it in ethnocentric terms,
the question requires the researcher to plunge into the
imaginary of the period by studying its language and
narratives. Maurizio Bettini set out to recreate a cultural
construction in which all sounds are potential vectors of
meaning. Since he includes animal cries and the speech
of the gods, his title, Voci – a translation of the Latin
uoces and the Greek phonai – aptly refers to the world of
sounds familiar to the ancients. Florence Dupont gives a
glimpse of the richness and originality of Bettini’s book
in her evocation of a grammar of animals, drawing on
Suetonius, which proves useful in establishing the notion
of the sound icon ; according to the ancients, language
represented objects based on their sound image.

 THE SURPRISES OF LOVE
by Laurie Laufer

Jean Allouch is holding a seminar. Its theme : love and
Lacan ; over the course of Jacques Lacan’s seminars, and
in line with its manifold hypostases, an experience (love)
nestled within an experience (analysis, transfer, or “translove”).
Jean Allouch is not rewriting Lacan or recycling
his well-known expressions ; rather, he is becoming attached,
in a manner of speaking, to the extreme variety of
his manners of truth – in other words, his “varity”, in its
variations. Contrary to the Lacanian vulgate, Allouch’s
precise discourse aims to reinvent the tone in psychoanalysis,
or a rythm of breathing, which is constant tuning, a
variable constant of adjustment, even a form of asceticism,
until the ironic loss of notes at the final session… The
surprises of love are infinite.

 CHESSEX’S LAST MONSTER
by Leila Sayeg-Chevalley

Sade’s life and works made him a monster – from the
Latin monstrum, that which falls outside the natural order.
Either one would have been enough to turn the man often
referred to as the “divine marquis” (need one remind
readers that monstrum was also used for supernatural
events ?) into the monstrous debauched libertine whose
image haunted imaginations even before his death. Yet
there was nothing in Donatien Alphonse François de
Sade’s early life to suggest that he was predestined for
such a fate, so gentle and wide-eyed (albeit perhaps a little
sulky) did he appear in the portrait painted by Carle Van
Loo in the 1760s, quite unlike the portrait by Man Ray two
centuries later, showing an ageing, fearsome, obese Sade
against the backdrop of a burning building. But of course,
Man Ray’s portrait was imaginary, while Van Loo’s was
from life. This can be read in symbolic terms, marking the
shift from Sade the man to Sade the myth. Leila Sayeg-
Chevalley studies this myth, pointing out its constant
features and how it has evolved over time. She presents
the key moments in the critical reception of Sade’s works
from their first publication to the present day.

 FROM JUSTICE TO LAW – AND BACK
II. THE CONDITIONS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
by Philippe Raynaud

Alain Supiot explores the question of the anthropological
basis of law in his book Homo Juridicus, reviewed by
Philippe Raynaud in Agenda 16. In his latest book, L’Esprit
de Philadelphie, he takes his considerations further and
alters his point of view to a certain extent in the light of
the global economic crisis of 2009. His criticism of ultraliberalism
leads him to call for a return to the inspiration
which enabled the post-war boom to create a balance
between the systems of social solidarity and economic
competition, while taking the new conditions of globalisation
into account.

 
IS CARE A POLITICAL CONCEPT ?
by Tiphaine Samoyault

Compassion, which seems to have become the central
concept in post-political thought, has taken on a specific
institutional form in what is now known as care. Care,
which has become a significant concept in the fields of
health, employment, gender, and a wide range of daily
experiences, is now a global political question. Should it
be left as an essentially female preoccupation, or should it
become a global ethic, redefining the spaces, disciplines,
and field of politics ? This article explores the semantic
links between compassion and care and discusses the
major theses on the topic over the last twenty years.

  A SERIOUS MAN : A QUANTUM READING
by Étienne Klein

Film critics generally agree in their praise of the Coen
brothers, whose talent has already won them a Palme d’Or
and an Oscar. Their films arouse considerable interest and
widespread debate. A Serious Man was no exception. Yet,
despite the numerous reviews, one significant aspect of
the film has escaped comment. It has taken a physicist to
point out that the film has a quantum dimension ! Étienne
Klein gives us the keys to a more thorough understanding
of the work.

  A SERIOUS MAN : PROLEGOMENA
TO THE QUANTUM THEORY
OF MENTAL STATES
by Jean-Loup Motchane

The present article should be read in conjunction with, and
as a commentary on, the preceding article. Like Étienne
Klein, Jean-Loup Motchane is a physicist. He sets out to
explain the quantum-psychological dimension of the Coen
brothers’ caustic film. He calls on the assistance of two
world-famous scholars – Jacq Nakal and Ron Bardhub.
Do the names ring a bell ? Careful now ! Anyone taking
the story of the cats too seriously is likely to be mystified,
but anyone who dismisses it as an example of schoolboy
humour is liable to find themselves on the losing end.
The formulae are by no means fantastical, and dybbuks
are everywhere.

 EVIDENCE AND RETREAT
by François Jullien

“The time has finally come to ask whether the idea of noncoincidence,
which allows us to think of life, is necessarily
an idea of contradiction, and is it such that it challenges
logic ? Or how we can find a bridge from one to the other,
thereby loosening the vice – a bridge that does not tip us
either into the abyss of mystery and conversion, or into a
return to the logic of “the particular”, once again betraying
life ? […] The point of returning to China, once again, is
to see the question from another viewpoint at long last –
discovering it in a new light, finally pulling it free from the
atavistic framework in which it is set in Europe, in which
its fate is, to a certain extent, sealed, however inventive the
strivings of philosophers to free themselves from it may
then be. For Chinese thought, as we see, not being focused
on the determination and definition of the particular as
was the case for the Greek logos, forming the basis for its
rigour, and having no knowledge of the religious staging
of a Grand Narrative and its dramatic plot build-up and
denouement, sees it as a delicate, “subtle” point, to be
tackled with “refined” understanding, taking the opposite
view to common knowledge. But does this mean that it
turns it into a problem or a challenge to reason ?”