What
is Modernity? The Theory of Epistemological Cuts
The Maxwell
Cummings lecture at McGill University, Montreal, October 4, 2001:
Judaism separated itself from mythology when it began to destroy the mythological figures embedded in the religions that surrounded Israel. Christianity in its turn, through the dogma of the Incarnation, cut itself lose from its Jewish root (by giving a body to God) and from its pagan context (by affirming that God had a real body, as opposed to the feigned bodies of the Gods of Greek mythology). Seventeen centuries later, the cut of modern science happens, under Galileo’s impulsion.
Are these major epistemological cuts related? Is there a tool that enables us to determine if an epistemological cut is really a cut and has really happened?
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La question du "Tout" dans l'oeuvre d'Édouard Glissant
Conférence prononcée le 5 décembre 1998, en présence d'Édouard et Sylvie Glissant, au colloque international "Édouard Glissant: de la pensée archipélique au Tout-Monde", tenu au Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Le motif du tout, prévalent dans l'oeuvre d'Édouard Glissant, est aussi un mythe consolant de la pensée antique, récusé la modernité (que ce soit sous la forme de la science ou celle de la psychanalyse). Or, par bien des traits, le travail de Glissant se fait dans la modernité. Comment réconcilier cette apparente contradiction?
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"Homonymization and virtuous circle in the Song of Roland ", Department of Romance Languages, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
February 1998
An English summary of the new interpretation of the Song of Roland proposed in La Passion des idoles 1. The central question which is addressed here is how we may read a text that founds the French Nation-State.
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"Il
n'y a pas de rapport sexuel" dans le Roman de la Rose
Conférence prononcée au département de français
de l’université de Californie, Berkeley, avril 1996.
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“No hay relación sexual” en el "Roman de la Rose" (traduction espagnole)
"The Fantasy of Orality"
Colloquium "The Scholastic Roots of Medieval Culture"
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies - University of California at Los Angeles
We have to entirely reevaluate the notion of orality. The written document is the origin of a vocalization (a performance), not a transcription of an oral performance: orality is, first and foremost, a fiction produced by the written. Examples of the consequences of this approach are taken from the Strasbourg Oaths, The Song of Roland and Marie de France's Lais.
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