WEDNESDAY 6 FEBRUARY: CLARISSE ZOULIM (WADHAM COLLEGE) AND ALICE HOLT (WADHAM COLLEGE)

JOINT SESSION

FITZJAMES II, MERTON
17:00 - 18:30
DRINKS AND NIBBLES PROVIDED

Clarisse Zoulim

The self and language : Ricoeur's narrative theory of the self vs. Stéphane Chauvier's linguistic account

Abstract

Paul Ricoeur'’s narrative theory of the self, developed in Soi-même comme un autre has attracted a lot of attention since its publication in the 1990s and is still considered by some as providing a solution to several questions concerning the true nature of the self. But, however appealing this theory might be, the highly metaphorical, and therefore not so explicit, dimension of its content, cannot be denied. For this reason, this paper’'s aim will be precisely to attempt to strip this theory of its metaphorical dimension in order to reveal its very theoretical core on the one hand, and, on the other, to propose a critique of this theoretical core  by setting up a fruitful confrontation with Stéphane Chauvier’'s linguistic theory of the nature of the self, set out in his 2001 seminal book Dire « je ».

Clarisse Zoulim is teaching French at Wadham. She is agrégée in philosophy as well as a student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and of the Sorbonne (Paris I), where she is undertaking a PhD in contemporary philosophy.

Alice Holt 

'Un temps habitable à l'homme': A comparison of Simone Weil and Walter Benjamin's Philosophies of Time and Industrial Modernity

Abstract

This paper will seek to offer a new perspective on French philosopher Simone Weil's (1909-1943) account of inter-war industrial work, suggesting that it can be read as more than a commonplace account of the dehumanisation inherent to modern industrial labour, but also as a distinct philosophy of time. Using her own experience as a factory worker as the basis from which to critique industrial practices, Weil sets out a vision of the inter-war factory worker as torn out of "habitable" time and hurled into the "tumulte glacé" of the mechanised production line with devastating psychological and physical consequences. This paper will show how Weil in her Cahiers, in her articles on industrial life and in L'Enracinement (1943), undertook to prove that industrial reformer F.W. Taylor and his disciples had confused the distinct temporal orders separating men and machines. With this in mind, she elaborated a conception of time, set out diffusely across a series of texts, which, this paper will argue, is related to Walter Benjamin's representation of time in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939), where mechanised factory work provoked a fragmented "isolated experience" of time (Erlebnis) that lacked embeddedness within tradition-bound long-experience (Erfahrung). These approaches unite a conception of time estranged from rational, modern and scientific 'clock time' and favour an understanding of time determined by memory, experience and imagination.

Alice Holt is a second year Dphil student at Wadham. She did her BA in French and German at Pembroke College, Cambridge and her masters in political science at the London School of Economics.