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The Emancipation of Thought: On the Work of Michel De Certeau

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Maria Letizia Cravetto
Maria Letizia Cravetto*
Affiliation:
EHESS, Paris
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Extract

Today it seems to be an urgent and necessary task to return to the texts by Michel de Certeau (1925-86). Not because Michel Foucault said of him that he was ‘the best, the brightest of [his] generation’, but for reasons to do with our present thinking.

Indeed, when we consider the social and political disarray of the moment, we are forced to recognize how hard it is, in periods of crisis, to clarify the changes taking place. That implies the emancipation of thought, a process that consists of an inventive interrogation of knowledge and a rigorous elaboration of understanding. This process is one that would not be subject to the dominant ideological models. In addition, thinking of the way clarification and emancipation are intertwined in the most successful intellectual constructions, some of us remember Certeau's work, whose central aim is to clarify the fundamental but stealthy transformations that abruptly emerge into the light of day and undermine the most tenacious assumptions.

Type
Comment
Information
Diogenes , Volume 50 , Issue 3: Identities, Beliefs, Images , August 2003 , pp. 115 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2003

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References

Notes

1. As recounted by Francine de Martinoir.

2. M. de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, translated by Michael B. Smith, Chicago, University of Chicago Press 2000, p. 1.

3. N. Wachtel, La Foi du souvenir, Paris, Seuil 2001, p. 33. See J. Revel, ‘Préntation’, in A. L., Jeux d’éhelles. La micro-analyse à l'expérience, ed. J. Revel, Paris, Gallimard-Seuil, 1996, p. 10.

4. Lacan's ‘Tiers’ has been translated as ‘Third Person’.

5. J. Revel, ‘Michel de Certeau historien: L'institution et son contraire’, in L. Giard, H. Martin and J. Revel, Histoire, mystique et politique de Michel de Certeau, Grenoble, Jérôme Million 1991, pp. 126-7.

6. Ibid., p. 126.

7. From 1967 to 1972 M. de Certeau was the editor of Etudes, the Jesuit journal.

8. M. de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, translated by Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997, p. 10.

9. L. Giard, ‘How Tomorrow Is Being Born’, introduction to The Capture of Speech, op.cit., p. viii.

10. M. de Certeau, La Prise de parole, op. cit., p. 29; The Capture of Speech, op. cit., p. 3.

11. In La Possession de Loudun Certeau mixed theology, anthropology, social history, history of medicine and witchcraft, and psychoanalysis, with which he was acquainted not only in theory, since he was a member of the Ecole Freudienne throughout its existence (1964-80).

12. See J. Revel, ‘Ressources narratives et connaissance historique’, in Enquête, Paris, Parenthèses, EHESS 1995, p. 44.

13. See R. Terdiman, ‘La marginalité de Michel de Certeau’, in Rue Descartes, 25, 1999, pp. 141-58; now in ‘The Marginality of Michel de Certeau’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 100(2), Spring 2001, pp. 399421.

14. Michel de Certeau, La Faiblesse de croire, Paris, Seuil 1987, pp. 183-226. Not yet translated into English

15. Ibid., p. 279.

16. Among the most remarkable of M. de Certeau's texts we should recall L'Invention du quotidien: I. Art de faire; II. Cuisiner et habiter (Paris), first published under the 10/18 imprint in 1980. M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by St Rendall, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1984. In the 1990 reissue the publisher explained its originality: ‘He replaced consumers’ supposed passivity with the (argued) conviction that ordinary people have a creativity. A creativity hidden in the intermingling of silent, subtle and effective ruses by which we all invent for ourselves our “own way” of making a route through the forest of products imposed on us’ (see note 64 of the 1990 version).

17. M. de Certeau, who never denied his membership of the Jesuits, was extremely reticent on his position as a believer, which is shown in his texts to be the right to go on being born from the spirit by performing the mourning over privileges (see below) that that implies. So that this faith, silent and secret, may be understood as the inability from which he tried to articulate his research.

18. L. Giard, ‘Cherchant Dieu’, in M. de Certeau, La Faiblesse, op. cit., p. IX.

19. In M. de Certeau's work the ‘hermeneutics of the present’ can be understood as ‘a politics far removed from the normal definitions given, and from the institutional space that is ordinarily assigned to it …’ - indeed as ‘the invention of a relationship with others and the world’ where ‘the project of … surprising the invention of society begins and takes shape’; J. Revel, Michel de Certeau historien, op. cit., pp. 126-7.

20. E. Maigret, ‘Michel de Certeau. Lectures et receptions d'une oeuvre’, Annales, n. 3. LV (2000), p. 511.

21. Ibid., p. 512.

22. M. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, translated by Michael B. Smith, Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1992, p. 98.

23. M. de Certeau taught at Paris VIII till 1971, Paris VII till 1978, the University of California (San Diego) from 1978 to 1984, then at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales until his death.

24. This I think was the phrase used by M. de Certeau, who kept coming back to the significance of the phenomenon.

25. M. de Certeau, ‘L'histoire, science et fiction’, in Le Genre humain, nos. 7-8 (1983), p. 160. It is also important to consider the analysis, suggested by S. G. Nichols, of rupture at work in M. de Certeau's historiography, ‘History: Science and Fiction’, in Heterologies, Discourse on the Other, translated by Brian Masumi, Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press 1986, pp. 199-221.

26. See P. Aulagnier, La Violence de l'interprétation. Du pictogramme à l’énoncé, Paris, PUF 1975, pp. 129213.

27. S. Le Poulichet, L'Art du danger, Paris, Anthropos 1996, p. 17, characterizes the generating flash by referring to the definition of the signifier given by J. Lacan; this definition states that the flash is constituted by the trace of a primal wound, by the erasure of the trace and the trace of the erasure.

28. M. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, op. cit., p. 3.

29. ‘Of these ancient and widely dispersed witnesses from whom would come the groups of “madmen of Christ” [yourodivyj] who circulated on the public squares of Moscow in the 14th to 16th centuries, I ask: What change in direction did they bring about?’, M. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, op. cit., p. 32.

30. Ibid., p. 42

31. Ibid., p. 44.

32. M. de Certeau: ‘All disguised, men or women, wise men or fools, masks and mockeries of identity, disappear into a public, common intermediary zone’, The Mystic Fable, op. cit., p. 44.

33. M. de Certeau, ‘L'institution de la pourriture: luder’ in Psychanalyse (Brussels), no. 2, Dec. 1984, p. 102; republished in Histoire et psychanalyse; entre science et fiction, Paris, Gallimard 1987, p. 167. For convenience I refer to this edition (‘The Institution of Rot’, in Heterologies, Discourse on the Other, op. cit., p. 46).

34. M. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, op. cit., p. 44. See note 32 (above).

35. A. Didier-Weill, Invocations. Dionysos, Moïse, Saint Paul et Freud, Paris, Calmann-Lévy 1998, p. 63.

36. M. de Certeau, The Writing of History, translated by Tom Conley, New York, Columbia University Press 1988, p. 305.

37. J. Revel, Michel de Certeau historien, op. cit., p. 126. It is surprising to note how far the reading of Certeau's strategy by J. Revel - beyond any psychoanalytical consideration - appears accurate and pertinent even within that perspective.

38. I use this word with a meaning that differs from the process at work in B. Brecht's writing, which might be summarized by referring to what the author wrote on 3 August 1938 about the ‘conventional form’ of the song. ‘I started from that in order subsequently to destroy it’, B. Brecht, Journal de travail, 1938-1955, Paris, L'Arche 1973, p. 17.

39. M. de Certeau, ‘L’énonciation mystique’ in Recherches de sciences religieuses, 64(2) April-June (1976), p. 199. (‘Mystic Speech’ in Heterologies, op. cit., pp. 80-100.)

40. M. de Certeau, The Writing of History, op. cit., p. 318.

41. M. de Certeau, ‘Mystic Speech’, op. cit.

42. M. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, op. cit., p. 1.

43. Ibid., p. 299 (original emphasis).

44. See M. Heidegger, Approche de Hölderlin, Paris, Gallimard 1973.

45. H. Martin, ‘Michel de Certeau et l'institution historique’, in L. Giard, H. Martin and J. Revel, Histoire mystique, op. cit., pp. 57 and 96.

46. M. de Certeau. ‘La folie de la vision’, Esprit, no. 66, June (1982), pp. 92-3.

47. While being indebted to A. Green's work, Le Travail du Négatif, Paris, Editions de Minuit 1993, p. 87, I have nevertheless altered the sense of some phrases.

48. See M. L. Cravetto, Fidélité à l'Après. A propos du suicide de Primo Levi et de l'intériorité du Mal, Paris, Kimé 2001, p. 71, where I tried to characterize the gulf of suffering that opens up in writing when the impulse to death manages to prevail.

49. ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.’, T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land.

50. See M. Deguy, ‘Paul Celan 1900’, in Les Temps modernes (1990), no. 529/530, p. 3.

51. I would like to thank J.-G. Bidima for drawing to my attention the fact that African philosophers have taken up M. de Certeau's work. See J.-G. Bidima, Théorie critique et modernité africaine, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne 1994; F. Eboussi-Boulaga, La Crise de Muntu, Authenticité africaine et philosophie, Paris, Présence Africaine 1977; V. Mudimbe, L'Odeur du Père, Essai sur les limites de la science et de la vie en Afrique noire, Paris, Présence Africaine 1992.

52. For a full list of these tributes see A. L., ‘Feux persistants. Entretien sur Michel de Certeau’, Esprit, no. 3 March (1996), p. 133.

53. See M. L. Cravetto, ‘Les functions du Je dans le langage hagiographique’, Littérature, no. 29 (1978), pp. 63-74; M. L. Cravetto, Fidélité à l'Après, op. cit., passim, where I explained at length my thinking on the social function of hagiography.

54. E. Maigret, Michel de Certeau, op. cit., pp. 511-49, which gives an account of the many commentaries and emphasizes how belated was the first research to mention Certeau.

55. See M. de Certeau, The Writing of History, op. cit., p. 318.

56. See M. de Certeau, ‘Lacan: An Ethics of Speech’, translated by Marie-Rose Logan in Heterologies, op. cit., note 22, p. 241.

57. ‘These “dear departed” had been tamed in our window displays and our thoughts, placed under glass, isolated, prettied up, and offered like this for edification or intended as exemplars’; M. de Certeau, L'Absent de l'histoire, Paris, Mame 1973, p. 15.

58. See especially E. Le Roy Ladurie, ‘Le diable archiviste’, Le Monde, 12 November 1971; E. Maigret, Michel de Certeau, op. cit., p. 515.

59. See P. Aulagnier, La Violence de l'interprétation, op. cit., p. 152.

60. See A. L., Feux persistants, op. cit., p. 137. See also H. Martin, Michel de Certeau et l'institution historique, op. cit., pp. 91-2, who, recounting Certeau's influence in various areas, writes: ‘Michel Morineau's J'accuse, published in all honesty by Annales ESC, remains in everyone's memory: I denounce the monstrous blindness of a coopted intelligentsia.’

61. S. Breton, ‘Le pélerin, le voyageur et marcheur’, in Le Voyage mystique, Michel de Certeau, Paris, Recherches de Science Religieuse, 1988, p. 22.

62. M. L. Cravetto, ‘Permanences: la frontière. En guise d'introduction’, in A partir de Michel de Certeau: des nouvelles frontières, in Rue Descartes, Collège International de Philosophie, no. 25 September (1999), pp. 9-19.

63. J. Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other, Cambridge, Polity Press 1995, and Feux persistants, op. cit., pp. 137-9.

64. M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, op. cit.

65. I was able to analyse that group during my stay in Berkeley in January 1998; then through a number of exchanges with researchers, among them Stefania Pandolfo in particular, who holds a chair in anthropology at Berkeley.

66. M. de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse of the Other, op. cit., p. 46.

67. Ibid., p. 46.

68. Ibid., p. 43.

69. See M. de Certeau, L'Absent, op. cit., passim.

70. In ‘Folies déliées’, op. cit., p. 37, M. de Certeau used a quotation from M. Duras - ‘ She asks for directions in order to get lost./ No one knows’ - that he later removed in the first chapter of The Mystic Fable, op. cit.

71. M. de Certeau and J.-M. Domenach, Le Christianisme éclaté, Paris, Seuil 1974, p. 88.

72. Ibid. M. de Certeau refers in a note to the Greek text from John 1, I ‘le Verbe est à lui et vers lui’ (the Word is his and towards him).

73. Ibid.

74. P. Guyomard, La Jouissance du tragique, Paris, Flammarion 1998, p. 52.

75. M. de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien, op. cit., p. 281 [The Practice of Everyday Life, op. cit., pp. 193-4].

76. M. de Certeau and J.-M. Domenach, Le Christianisme, op. cit., p. 92.

77. H. Arendt, ‘La brèche entre le passé et le futur’, in La Crise de la culture, Paris, Gallimard 1972.