Tuesday 6th June 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Cambridge FGRS exchange 

Eve Judah (Newnham, Cambridge): ‘“La Philosophie en effect”: An exchange of letters (Derrida-Nancy)’

The aim of this paper is to introduce the book series, ‘La Philosophie en effet’, which was launched in 1973 by Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and continued until 2023. If this series is best known for various major works published by Derrida and Nancy during the second half of its existence (Derrida’s Spectres de Marx, say, or Nancy’s Le Sens du monde), my research seeks to suspend exclusive attention to individually famous works and authors, to address more carefully the dynamics of intellectual production through which the series came into being and pursued its mission to interrogate the contemporary institutional conditions of philosophical work. Central to this project is the analysis of understudied archival material, notably that of the four-way correspondence around the series, as well as documents like group interviews, adverts in literary magazines and ‘manifestoes’... This paper will focus on an exchange which took place in 1979, between Derrida and Nancy, in which they discuss the immense difficulties they’ve had with editors, the possibility of closing down the series – or – if they were to keep it alive, the specific theoretical and political goals they would aim to pursue. As Nancy writes, “je serais capable de ponde un manuel de ‘la philo en en effet’”.

Samuel Buchoul (Hughes Hall, Cambridge): ‘A phenomenology of writing, after Sartre and Derrida’

How is writing different from all our other activities? This practice is central to virtually everyone — the student just like the engineer, the accountant, the scientist, the merchant, and of course, the novelist —, and yet everyone struggles to find features that would be strictly unique to it. Spontaneously, we think of writing as a sub-genre of communication, sharing some of the aspects of orality while excluding others. Derrida’s reconceptualisation of écriture explored this opposition with speaking, but he also contributed, through a reversal of the binary, to the difficulty of isolating this practice from others. Indeed, if everyday (‘restricted’) writing is only one form of a broader kind of inscription (‘generalised’ writing), then we must also consider painting or dancing as forms of this larger ‘writing’, and in fact, all cultural constructions in general if read as traces developing across time (politics, ideology) and natural phenomena alike (DNA). Why, then, calling all these things with the name of what is for most of us just one technological tradition amongst others?

In this paper, I will suggest that this tension invites us to go back to this practice of everyday writing, to unpack what happens to us as subjects, when we write, and see if it can be interpreted, indeed, as an operation without equal in our condition as humans. Derrida’s proposition that writing is always already editing, i.e., reconstructing meaning through a continuous engagement with the forms of language, evokes Sartre’s definition of freedom as a constant reinterpretation of our ‘situation’ through praxis. But the material we rework in writing isn’t just anything: when removing a subordinate clause or changing a prefix, we basically negotiate, bit by bit, the new value we feel justified attributing to the constitutive blocks of our inherited symbolic order: words. Writing, then, appears as the privileged terrain for every individual’s co-construction of the collective imaginary that is human culture.

Wilfred Skinner (Fitzwilliam, Cambridge): ‘Les dernières vagues de l’Atlantique’: Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec in New York

In the early 70s, Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec saw in New York new ways of making art and negotiating with the geography of the city. Returning a few years later, they both made films there. The paper looks at a figure common to these films: New York as seen from a boat. 

Akerman’s News from Home (1976) and Histoires d’Amérique : Food, Family and Philosophy (1988), and Perec’s and Robert Bober’s Récits d’Ellis Island (1980) foreground this iconic image to signal a departure, an arrival and a stopover-detainment. The water and shorelines here offer ways of thinking through these writer-filmmakers’ relationships to avant-garde artistic practices as well as their own pasts. 

Inserted within forms which are ripe for transmission and sharing – news, histoires, récits, this figure becomes much more than a simple establishing, or closing, shot. Filming from a boat creates a powerful echo with stories of emigration and immigration, as told by Kafka and Singer, among others. These are explored most frontally in Perec’s Ellis Island text and Akerman’s 1988 film. But the figure also allows Akerman and Perec to explore ruptures and potentialities, endings and beginnings which are creative and spatial in nature. 

What did New York offer to them that Paris or Brussels perhaps did not? In what ways can their experiences of this city illuminate how Akerman and Perec handle more generally space and memory in their work? Such explorations will also bring in Perec’s Espèces d’espaces, Un Homme qui dort and its Melville intertext, other films Akerman made in New York, and polaroids Perec took during a cargo-ship voyage there. 

 

 

 

Tuesday 20th May 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Masters showcase

Kathy Fan (New) - Mind the Movement: A Cognitive Reading of Imagery in Mallarmé 

Charlotte Morgan (Keble) - How does the depiction of class influence the formation and evolution of sisterhoods in the Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre and Fatou Diome’s Celles qui attendent? 

 

Millicent Dean-Lewis (St Anne’s) - A poetics of the autistic eye in Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Danielle Collobert 

 

Georgina Walker (Magdalen) - ‘Cooking the books’: Culinary Epistemologies in 17th-Century Short Prose Narratives

 

 

Tuesday 6th May 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Oriane Guiziou-Lamour (University of Virginia): ‘Sex Under the Guillotine: Women, Sexuality, Prison, and the French Revolution’

The literary genre of récits d’emprisonnements flourished in France during the Terror of 1793–1794, giving rise to a form of writing that, less than ten years after 1789, was already negotiating its relationship with the legacy of the French Revolution. Prisons during the Terror held particular appeal for writers of sentimental and erotico-sentimental fiction, as they offered a space to explore the intersections of imprisonment, community, and sexuality. This paper examines how the French Revolution shaped representations of imprisonment and women’s sexuality in works by Giroust de Morency, Choiseul-Meuse, and Guénard de Méré, published between 1797 and 1800: Coralie, ou le danger de se fier à soi-même (1797), Irma, ou les malheurs d’une jeune orpheline (1799), and Illyrine ou l’Écueil de l’inexpérience (1799–1800). The heroines’ experiences of sexuality amid the turmoil of the Terror differ markedly from the sexual norms of the ancien régime. While one might rightly assume that these upheavals led to increased sexual violence against women, these texts also—perhaps unexpectedly—present prison as a space where female desire can be expressed and liberated. The creation of utopian communities, sealed off from the chaos of revolutionary France, becomes a means not only of enacting the ideals of liberté and fraternité, but also of engaging in a collective reflection on time, trauma, and healing.

 

Stéphanie Arc (CY Cergy Paris Université): ‘Between ethics and poetics: the challenges of writing documentary fiction’

‘Documentary novels’ are narratives based upon an investigation (in Emmanuelle Pireyre’s case, on the Internet, in Olivia Rosenthal and Cloé Korman’s cases, in real life). They might be ‘non-fiction novels’ or ‘documentary fictions’. The latter (‘fiction documentaire’ as Pireyre named them after Jacques Rancière) is defined as a combination of fiction and non-fiction, creating a blurry mix where readers can not tell the difference between what is ‘true/factual’ and what has been invented by the author. Each kind of ‘documentary novel’ raises specific ethical questions throughout the creative process.

Having completed the practical part of my thesis in creative writing, a documentary fiction entitled ‘Paillages’ (‘Mulch’), I will propose some reflections towards an ethics of writing such a narrative, which I call an ‘approximative’ or ‘fuzzy ethics’. Based on my own experience of carrying out a series of interviews for my novel and fusing them with fictional events in the process of writing, as well as Olivia Rosenthal, Joy Sorman and Cloé Korman's accounts of their own research and writing process, I will define ‘approximative ethics’ as a third way between strict censorship (principles strictly defined and applied from a superior/external point of view) and the idea that fiction writers would be above all ethical considerations. An ethics led by tact (for Roland Barthes), aiming at ‘justesse’ (rather than ‘justice’, according to Arno Bertina), which requires ‘le sens des situations’ (as described by the French ethnologist Jeanne Favret-Saada, for example), would respect both the freedom that fiction writers need to create their work and the people whose lives and words they cite or rewrite.

 

Tuesday 25th February 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Holly Rowe (Lincoln) - Baron d’Holbach and the essai form as political satire 

Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach (1723-1789) was a German-born, French-naturalised philosopher, salon host, and prolific writer of materialist, political, and antitheological treatises. The majority of his works were published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the limits of his vast literary output therefore remain indistinct.  

D’Holbach is now recognised as the author of five facéties philosophiques, or short, comic anti-religious and polemical writings. These include the sardonic Essai sur l’art de ramper, à l’usage des courtisans (1790), which caricatures the figure of the courtier and satirises the moral and physical qualities required to advance at court. The Essai appeared posthumously in the Correspondance littéraire, a confidential manuscript newsletter circulated among secret subscribers who included European heads of state. However, there is no record of whether d’Holbach saw the Essai as a finished piece of writing or whether it was prepared – or even intended – for publication during his lifetime. 

D'Holbach’s Essai criticises a self-serving system of court politics that lacks any regulatory influence on the exercise of monarchical power. Yet it was circulating among European royal courts at a divisive moment in French revolutionary politics. This paper considers the apparent disconnect between d’Holbach’s envisaged audience and the Essai’s actual readers. It examines what this suggests about the way the Essai was understood and organised for publication by d'Holbach’s editors, and considers how this can inform our understanding of the essai’s function as a form of writing in eighteenth-century France. 

Sasho Pshenko (Magdalen) - ‘Moving Constellations: Gilles Deleuze's Conceptual Transition’

At the start of the 1970s, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze underwent a transition, under the influence of the social theorist and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. He substituted a more classical approach to writing with a more experimental one; he substituted a philosophy which seeks to combine immanence and transcendence with a purely immanent theory. 

This transition, perhaps, is most clearly to be seen in the way in which Deleuze reshuffled a constellation of several conceptual components. At first, these components were organised into two distinct groups, two constellations: on the one hand, the binary pairing Sadistic institution-Masochistic contract, and on the other hand, the concept of the differenciator. After the transition, these two constellations were dissolved and regrouped into two new concepts: on the one hand, the concept of the signifying State, and on the other hand the concept of desire. 

The new concept of the signifying State was comprised of several elements which previously were associated with the Sadistic institution, as well as others which were associated with the differenciator. The remaining elements of the differenciator went on to form the other new concept, that of desire. In my presentation, I aim to demonstrate, in detail, the particular ways in which this deconstruction and reconstruction of concepts occurred. Through this, I aim to show how exactly this transition signified the advent of a new direction in Deleuze's thought and why it was necessary to take place. 

Tuesday 11th February 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Nicolas Duriau (Wolfson) - ‘(Un)Voicing Male Prostitution during the First Empire and the Bourbon Restoration: “Riéniste[s]”, “parasite[s]" and “nulliste[s]” characters in Cuisin’s work’ 

According to the conclusions of my doctoral dissertation, which dealt with long-19^th-century French literature (1783-1922), there is a significant decline in the number of novels depicting male prostitution from 1800 to 1830. It seems that the then ‘prostitué’ appeared under the guise of less conspicuous figures, such as the ‘greluchon’, the ‘sigisbée’, or the ‘parvenu’ – who would implicitly engage in sexual activity with women, either for money, or for social prestige – to evade the First Empire’s and the Bourbon Restoration’s censorship. By considering little-known novels by J. P. R. Cuisin, a now forgotten writer of the early 19^th century, I intend to better understand how the representations of male prostitution evolved from the libertine fiction of the late 18^th century to the realist novel of the 1830s. As Andrew Counter (The Amorous Restoration. Love, Sex, and Politics in Early-Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford University Press, 2016) and Alain Viala (La Galanterie. Une mythologie française, Seuil, 2019) suggest, extramarital and commercial sex remained ubiquitous in the 1800-1830 literary production, but aligned with a poetics of ‘silence’, or ‘refoulement’. My aim is to demonstrate that the ‘Riéniste[s]’, ‘parasite[s] et ‘nulliste[s]’ who merge into Cuisin’s novels not only embodied the Empire/Restoration style ‘prostitué’, but also allegorised an ideological context in which ‘sexual deviances’ appear through text blanks, or figures of avoidance.  

Lou Khalfaoui (Leeds) - ‘Franco-Algerian relations: hopes for “reconciliation” in the face of memories of colonialism in official discourses (1999-2005)’ 

In this paper, I aim to explore a period of hope for reconciliation between France and Algerian, which have long been studies as an example of dissonant colonial memories plaguing modern state and cultural relations. In the aftermath of the Algerian civil War and Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s ascension to power in April 1999, French and Algerian officials made clear attempts to redefine bilateral relations through greater cooperation. However, as is well established, relations took a turn for the worse in 2005 when France passed the controversial Repatriates’ law, which included an article about French colonialism’s “positive legacy”. I argue that not only did the incident involving local, national and transnational actors precipitate a significant cool down in diplomatic relations, it fundamentally changed the discursive construction of colonial violence in both French and Algerian official narratives. From 2005, impassioned engagement with colonial violence featured growinly in official Algerian discourse, especially around the Massacres of Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata, whose anniversary became the National Memory Day in 2020. This both had concrete implications for whom and how episodes of colonial violence were remembered, given growing state control over commemorations, as well as their broader national and international audiencing. On the French side, colonial violence in Algeria was was most frankly alluded to in the direct aftermath of the law with Hubert Colin de Verdière, the French ambassador, describing the repression of May 8th, 1945 as an “inexcusable tragedy”, just as the event was becoming the embodiment of colonial violence in Algerian discourse. I hope to show how discourses about the past have an impact on the viability of memory policies, which profess to help appease and reconcile. 

Tuesday 28th January 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Jodie Miller (UCLA) - ‘A Fox and a Jackal at Court: The Trickster’s Trial in the Roman de Renart and Kalila and Dimna’

The Old French literary cycle, the Roman de Renart, and the Kalila and Dimna fables of the Arabic and Persian literary traditions both tell the tale of a small canine-like trickster who is put on trial for the crime of trickery at the lion king’s court. The Roman de Renart is composed between the late-twelfth century and the mid-thirteenth, whereas Kalila and Dimna stems back to antiquity with the Panchatantra (c. 200 BCE). Although no direct contact is attested between these traditions until at least a century after the composition of the first Renardian branches, both feature a trickster’s trial scene with striking similarities. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the fox and jackal’s trials to better understand the convergences between the Roman de Renart and the Kalila and Dimna fables. In what ways do these trial scenes stem from a global circulation of similar ideals dealing with justice and ethics? 

The analysis of this paper focuses on the following aspects of the trial scene: the depiction of the crime of trickery, the juridical structure of the trials, and the trials’ verdicts. Both texts portray trickery through the subversion of ethical ideals leading to social chaos. Renart is gluttonous and lustful, unable to stop himself from tricking to find a meal or from satisfying himself sexually. Dimna, on the other hand, is greedy and prideful in search for political prestige. Both Renart and Dimna advocate for themselves at trial and manipulate a weak king, albeit within different juridical structures. Kalila and Dimna features a disputational defense-and-response structure, whereas Renart’s trial is based on customary law and the medieval “ordeal.” Various forms of evidence are brought forth during the investigation of their crimes (i.e., physiognomic proof and testimony), however only Dimna is found guilty and punished. Renart escapes at the end of his trial. 

 

Adam Husain (Christ Church) -  Le Temps retrouvé : An Apology for Lost Time?

À la recherche du temps perdu finishes with a very long rant. The narrator, buoyed up by a fresh injection of epiphany, rattles off a whole new philosophy, which is centred around the odd claim that, as Empson once put it: “sometimes when you are living in one place you are reminded of living in another place, and [thus] you are outside time”. Is there any way of making such an idea believable or interesting? Should we instead treat the narrator as “mad”?  In this talk, I outline a new way of reading the closing pages of the Recherche as the culmination of a contradiction developed throughout the novel, and a true apology for lost time.   

Tuesday 19th November 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Caitlin Sturrock (Bristol): The Sourde-Muette and the Good Mother in Pauliska, ou la perversité moderne (1797-1798)

 

Deafness in eighteenth-century France was a growing fascination; the 1770s marked a period of shifting societal perceptions of the sourd-muet. The Abbé de l’Épée published his treatises on the education of the sourds-muets, institutionalising his methods from the school he opened the decade before, and Pierre Desloges published his influential Observations d’un Sourd et Muet, sur un cours élémentaire d’éducation des sourds et muets in 1779, which marked one of the first interventions of a sourd-muet into these debates. Under the Revolution, the sourd-muet became a figure to imitate during the growing paranoia that spoken language caused the violent excesses of the Terror. This is what underpins the case study of this paper.  

Published over two volumes in An VI (1797-1798), Jacques-Antoine de Révéroni Saint-Cyr’s Pauliska, ou la perversité moderne follows the virtuous comtesse as she moves across borders – from Poland to Italy – in search of safety for herself, her lover – Ernest – and her son – Edvinski. Facing the Baron d’Olnitz, the counterfeiters under the Danube, and Salviati’s group of mesmerists, Pauliska oscillates between imprisonment and freedom to finally end reunited with Ernest and Edvinski. In examining deafness and irrational hearing, this paper will argue that the eponymous Pauliska is virtuous and rational precisely because she is a sourde-muette. When this disability is also central to ideals of femininity – modesty and virtue – this novel further evokes Revolutionary ideas on motherhood. Here, the ideal of women’s enlightenment and the remedy to the irrationality of the Revolution lie in the sourde-muette.  

 

Elliot Koubis (St John’s): ‘Being an “ethical” queer subject: Édouard Louis in Greece’

 

This paper explores what is means to be an ‘ethical’ queer subject in a time where queer movements have largely receded from view or have won mainstream acceptance in certain contexts. It will also explore whether the imagined LGBTQ+ ‘community’ in this climate imposes norms on queer bodies and expression. Louis’s Changer: Méthode (2021) will be read alongside a recent poetry collection in Greek by Spyros Chairetis, Ο Γοργόνος και άλλα πλάσματα (The Merman and Other Creatures, 2023) to examine whether there exists an anxiety for queer subjects across borders to be radical political actors. 

The paper will draw upon approaches to homonormativity to show how norms shape attitudes toward the queer body and political solidarity towards marginalized groups, as well as expressions of queer shame and regret. By reading Louis’s work through the lens of Chairetis’s poems, the paper will highlight how both authors use apologetic forms of writing to establish a more ethical relationship with queer subjects and collectives. This comparison will highlight how recent queer writing has impacted our understanding of queer sexuality as a political, anti-normative demand and underline the existence of an anti-normative ‘politics of respectability’ in queer cultures. What is more, this paper will stress the need to place literature from the ‘European South’ on the same level as that from the ‘European North’ and it will demonstrate how such comparisons can yield fruitful results.  

  

 

Tuesday 5th November 2024, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Sabrina Hogan (Christ Church): States of attention in Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine and Scève’s Délie

 

This paper will consider the themes of attention and distraction in Guillaume Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine (1578) and Maurice Scève’s Délie (1544), two texts which form part of the corpus in my wider poetic project on states of attention in sixteenth-century French poetry. The theme of attention in its various forms permeates a wide spectrum of poetic genres of period, notably devotional poetry, love poetry and creation poetry. A sustained form of attentiveness, vigilance, has a special place in the sixteenth century, a time of poetic vigils and devotional culture privileging the contemplative life, and an age when apocalyptic and prophetic discourses acquired renewed vigour amid the Wars of Religion. I will consider how in his epic creation poem, La Sepmaine (1578), Du Bartas reflects upon the reach and limitations of his ability to recreate the wonder of divine creation revealed in Genesis 1-2. The poet’s depiction of his own attentive state as writer probes the rhetorical figure of copia – popularised in the sixteenth century, notably by Erasmus’ De copia (1512). Scève’s Délie is hailed as the first French canzoniere, displaying the impact of Petrarch's Rime in France in a series of 449 love poems (dizains) addressed to the poet's mysterious object of desire, Délie. States of attentiveness and wakefulness are central to exploring Scève’s evocative sensorial depictions and the staging of the poet’s innamoramento. 

 

Beverly Adrian (Wadham): Charles Nodier and the eternal recurrence of the merveilleux

 

This paper explores how Charles Nodier’s 1830 essay ‘Du fantastique en littérature’ makes the case for a renewed interest in supernatural fiction in the early half of the nineteenth century. Nodier’s essay will be examined in light of Louis de Bonald’s remarks in ‘Du Style et de la littérature’ (1806), in which the latter suggests that ‘la littérature est l’expression de la société’, establishing a hierarchy of literary forms, and traces the development and perceived decadence of French letters up until the revolution, when literature took a philosophical turn. Almost twenty-five years after Bonald, Nodier observes that the merveilleux or rather its offshoot, the fantastique, fulfills society’s aching need for transcendence in a decadent age of scepticism and positivism. Nodier suggests that emphasis on imagination in storytelling should supplant literary classicism, in order to rejuvenate the human spirit, thereby paving the way for a newfound age of innocence which favors illusion over doubt. My paper will consider the tensions between the merveilleux and the fantastique, as envisaged by Nodier, alongside questions of genre and canonicity. I will highlight the ways in which Nodier’s propositions correspond with an upsurge in ideas of spiritual regeneration in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

  

Tuesday 22nd October 2024, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Carrie Heusinkveld (St John’s, Cambridge): ‘“Avez-vous dans les airs entendu quelque bruit?” Sound and Air in Racine’s Theatre’

Jean Racine has often been regarded as the great psychological dramatist of the seventeenth-century. With their emphasis on emotional interiority and spatial and narrative simplicity, his plays have been said to take place primarily in the characters' minds, while the observable action is limited to a single, nondescript chamber from which the wider world is largely excluded. While significant critical stress has been placed on their psychological and emotional complexity, little attention has been paid to the wider material and environmental contexts of his tragedies. This reception is perhaps reflective of a widespread and longstanding strand of critical thought, which has perceived the seventeenth century – a period frequently associated with the consolidation of a modern scientific mentality - as the mainspring of an increasing alienation of the natural from the human. Early modern French theatre, widely regarded as one of the critical paradigms of knowledge during this period, has been interpreted as a crystallisation of this apparent human-nonhuman binary, modelling a wider impulse to separate the material world from the thinking mind. However, ecocritical theory and environmental history have recently started to reframe early modern conceptions of nature-human relationships as more complex and entangled than previously recognised. I will give further impetus to this reappraisal by extending this line of inquiry to early modern theatre. In examining representations of sound and air in Racine’s theatre, I will show that it is possible to discern in seventeenth-century tragedy an awareness of the imbrication of the human with the nonhuman. 

Lynn Ngyugen (St John’s): ‘Migrations in language’

What does it mean to choose another language to be your own? Can it ever be your own? This talk explores several Francophone writers’ relationships to French, a language that they have adopted and/or one that they have actively chosen over their langue maternelle to write their literary works. Reading selections from texts by Nancy Huston, Assia Djebar, Anna Moï, and Alice Kaplan, among others, I will consider what significance French specifically holds for these writers as a language of literary self-fashioning, as well as examine the complex experience of inhabiting the language more broadly—either as a total outsider or from a postcolonial influence—and of grappling with the contradictions of identity that the language might bring.