vendredi 12/05/2017
de 15h00 à 18h00
Université Paris8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis
Salle B135
2, rue de la Liberté
93526 SAINT-DENIS
Animé par Éric Fassin (Paris-8 / LEGS)
En français / Ouvert à tou.te.s En français / Ouvert à tou.te.s
Le pouvoir ne fonctionne pas sur une séparation entre la rationalité revendiquée par l’État et l’irrationalité professée des sentiments. Symétriquement, le psychisme est traversé par l’histoire. Il importe de penser cette politique des affects pour appréhender l’histoire de la colonisation et de la décolonisation dans notre actualité postcoloniale. Les travaux historiques de trois collègues des États-Unis (présentés en français) permettront de discuter ces enjeux théoriques à partir de recherches empiriques.
1. Judith Surkis, historienne, Rutgers University, professeure invitée à Paris-8 (département d’études de genre) et au LEGS (CNRS/Paris-8/Paris-Ouest), a notamment publié Sexing the Citizen : Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920 (Cornell U.P., 2006) :
« La vie affective du droit colonial »
Abstract : My talk explores the “affective life of colonial law.” This focus on law allows me to draw specific connections between representations and practices. First, I show how, in colonial Algeria, Muslim law’s association with polygamy, forced marriage, and repudiation shaped colonial categories and policies in crucial ways : from legal definitions of personhood and property to policies of civil and land registry, punishment and political rights. Second, I argue that, in order to understand the efficacy of this deployment, we must also attend to its affective as well as materially and politically interested dimensions. The fact that colonial law and policy instrumentalized sex does not fully explain its efficacy as an instrument. Understanding the affective life of colonial law helps to explain how and why sexual politics were integral to French rule.
2. Camille Robcis, historienne des idées, Cornell University, a notamment publié La loi de la parenté : la famille, les experts et la République (Fahrenheit, 2016) :
« Fanon, les pathologies de la liberté, et la décolonisation du psychique »
Abstract : My paper explores the relationship between the political and the psychic in the work of Frantz Fanon. For Fanon, the effects of racism and colonialism were not simply political, economic, and social : both had profound psychic effects. Because alienation was always psychic and political at the same time, decolonization needed to involve the disalienation of minds. In order to explore this question, I put in conversation Fanon’s psychiatric texts (and especially his considerations on institutional psychotherapy) with his more political works.
3. Todd Shepard, historien, Johns Hopkins University, a notamment publié : Mâle Décolonisation l’ »homme arabe » et la France,de l’indépendance algérienne à la révolution iranienne (Payot, 2017) :
« La décolonisation et l’humiliation dans le discours affectif de l’extrême droite (et au-delà) en France »
Abstract : This talk will explore how far right voices both deployed and were consumed by claims that Algerian independence was a humiliation for French people. Failed masculinity and sexual violation were crucial references in this discourse. I will pay special attention to efforts by those writers who would later be associated with the Nouvelle droite. I will trace how their efforts to make political claims through reference to these themes were eventually taken up by thinkers beyond the far right, as well as bringing writers (notably Renaud Camus) from outside far right circles into their orbit.
