Abstract: Dany-Robert Dufour The article puts forward the idea that the philosophical theories elaborated in France around 1968 were received in the United States, then reconfigured under the name of French Theory before being used for the establishment of a neoliberal culture. In reviewing these theories, we can say that Derrida, who went to the depths of Western metaphysics, delegitimized the Law, all law, to substitute the principle of undecidability of norms, which corresponds perfectly to the neoliberal subject; that Deleuze, by opposing « patriarchal » capitalism, prepared the way for identity minorities of contemporary capitalism; that Foucault not only criticized all institutions at the same time as neoliberalism attacked the State, but even saw in neoliberalism a hope against the disciplinary society; and that Butler’s reflections go in the direction of the denial of reality combining the imaginary omnipotence and the blind belief in techno-sciences.
Abstract: Baptiste Rappin In this article, we show that the main aim of the deconstruction of metaphysics is the critic of analogies of being and of institutions, that is to say of all the forms of mediation. This project is based, on the one hand, on the strategy of inverting the polarities of metaphysics, and, on the other, on the displacement of the categories of metaphysics. From this point of view, the Neutral appears as the pivotal point that allows the philosophers of deconstruction to knock the Greek structure over; it also allows feminism to get an ontological dimension – here appear the gender studies.
Abstract: Maxime Ouellet This article intends to grasp the evolution of Cultural Studies in the context of the structural transformations that affect advanced capitalist societies in the framework of the transition from modernity to postmodernity. We will see that the initial intention of Cultural Studies was to lay the foundations of a sociological theory which found its political expression in democratic socialism. Opposing the economicism, positivism and utilitarianism that were shared as much by vulgar Marxism as by liberalism, the cultural materialism of Cultural Studies founders sought in popular culture a set of traditions that opposed the abstract universalist logic of industrial capitalism and which could establish the normative foundations for a future socialist society. Subsequently, by connecting Althusserian structuralist Marxism to French Theory, Cultural Studies theorists would become the main protagonists of the politics of identities and of the cultural war that raged in the United States as of the 1980s. We argue that postmodern cultural studies are part of a general crisis in the modes of reproduction of advanced capitalist societies that can be described as a crisis of reality. This crisis manifests itself in the conflict which opposes a post-modern right, the Alt-Right, to the Fake Left, a left of the simulation, which expresses itself in social media and on university campuses.
Abstract: Claude Leduc In response to the cartesian subject’s anthropocentrism emanating from modern epistemological dualism, Neo-Materialism demands that we forego epistemology in favour of a relational ontology characterized by the assemblage of affective objects (actants) in which mediation is no longer a meaningful aspect of Being but is rather smeared on the ensemble of objects that together produce a dynamic environment. Yet, a critical overview of this theoretical current demonstrates strong congruencies with system’s thought. First, Neo-Materialism delivers a critique of representation that echoes the ideological thrust behind information and communication technologies issuing from cybernetics. This alignment is reinforced by comparing the neo-materialist societal model with that of the neoliberal market, where the process of making commensurable all of its externalities harmonize with the “enchantment” invoked through a vitalist material perspective that evinces the commodifica- tion of everything. Using Michel Freitag as a point of reference, we finally see in Neo-Materialism the extension of the operational monism characterizing the technocratic management of the social into the humanities and social sciences, where the production of knowledge is reduced to the arbitrary effects generated within the system within a problem-solving perspective.
Abstract: Stéphane Vibert Actor Network Theory (ANT, or the sociology of translation) elaborated by Bruno Latour over the last thirty to forty years is without a doubt one of the most important theories of contemporary social sciences, carried by a strong notoriety both in the Anglo-Saxon and Francophone worlds. Certainly because it embodies through its own radicality – such is our hypothesis – the postmodern ontology par excellence, the latter being taken, as Latour himself did, in purely descriptive terms. Initially labeled a “strong programme” in the sociology of science and accused of defending a relativist constructionism against the pretentions of objective Reason, the Latourian approach has considerably enriched its objects of study through the years, successively turning to – aside from a continuous analysis of the sciences and technics – religion, anthropology, law, ecology, and politics. The thematic disparity need not mask some profound coherence or again some genuine unity of perspective. If it can be sociologically understood as an “inversion of durkheimism”, rejecting in one fell swoop the very existence of “society”, the objectivist method, and the symbolic origin of the social, it ultimately relies on a “flat ontology”, at once monist, actant, relational and processual, the tenants and results of which we must deploy in order to better grasp its complex nature and seductive power. This text intends to present the larger epistemological principles of Latourian sociology in order to highlight its ontological foundations, which possess an unparalleled penetrating view that is particularly adapted to “the world in the making”.
Abstract: Gilles Labelle Even a summary and partial investigation of the immense literature that has been devoted to Michel Foucault reveals that it is largely based on a decontextualization of his work. In order to contextualize it, I will defend three arguments: 1) the rejection of “dialectical thought”, of which phenomenology is the most recent case according to Foucault, must be considered as structuring all his work, from Madness and civilization to The History of sexuality and to the 1979 course devoted to liberalism and neoliberalism. 2) This posture constitutes a position taken with regard to the principles that structure modernity. To dialectical thought, Foucault first opposes what he designates as the “thought from the outside” (“pensée du dehors”), which corresponds to what Hegel designated as “mere understanding” (“pensée de l’entendement”) in that it posits the existence of irreducible and unsurpassable oppositions. The paradigmatic example of what Hegel also designates as the thought of “either/or” is given from the start of Foucault’s work: either unreason (of which madness is a case), or reason. What is therefore rejected is the possibility of a synthesis or a reconciliation between the contradictory elements which modernity inherits (for example between the idea of totality and that of freedom), which characterizes, according to Foucault, dialectical thought in its various versions, Hegelian, Marxian and phenomenological. 3) This stance on dialectical thought and modernity allows us to situate Foucault in the immediate context in which his work unfolded: firstly the critique of colonization, then “post ‘68 leftism”, and finally what we can designate as “post-leftism”. This contextualization sheds light at least in part on the reception to which it has been subjected.
Abstract: David Auclair This article proposes a critical reading of Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Le maître ignorant). Faced with past and current educational inequalities, looms a question that we try to answer: should the processes of subjectification of children go through the constraints of adult authority' For Rancière, « the virtue of ignorance is first of all a virtue of dissociation », that is to say that intellectual emancipation requires a separation between mastery and knowledge. The ignorant master is not ignorant of everything, he is ignorant of the social reasons for inequality. This political posture is anti-institutional. Only the individual can emancipate himself and the school has never emancipated anyone, writes the philosopher. Therefore, what are the social conditions of autonomy' It is not without danger that adults in a position of authority disengage from their duties in the name of a laissez-faire approach that naturalizes relationships outside the institutions. We believe that Rancière does not escape the contradiction consisting of preventing emancipation in the name of equality. This does not detract from his ability to identify school problems that still seem unsolvable to this day.
Abstract: Rhéa Jean This article proposes to show the impasses of the ideology of gender identity. By drawing on the philosophy of language and Husserlian phenomenology, it is first a question of showing that this ideology creates confusion in relation to the way in which we intersubjectively designate the common world through the words we use. It is also to argue that by getting people to buy into their Newspeak, this ideology alters our common understanding of the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’ and undermines women’s sexo-specific rights. By referring, among others, to the philosophers Kathleen Stock and Sylviane Agacinski, the subject emphasizes the primacy of the body in relation to social norms. Finally, the article aims to make the reader aware of abuses such as medicalization (affecting minors) based on a subjective identity as well as an attack on the freedom of expression of people criticizing this ideology.
Abstract: Daniel Dagenais This article discusses Judith Butler’s work in order to clarify the sociological meaning of Gender Theory. The first part is devoted to presenting Butler’s network of concepts, and to make explicit their main articulations. Comes out of this explication the lack of any phenomenological and historical base of Butler’s approach, and its purely deconstructivist goal. In the second part, the idea of gender assumption, central in Butler, is discussed in order to show how she is oblivious to its very modernity. This is the occasion of more critical an appraisal of her categories, from an epistemological and socio-historical perspective. Moving away from the commentary of Butler’s work as such, the third part intends to show how the exhaustion of the modern process through which gender was made subjective provides gender theory with its very condition of possibility. In the end, gender theory appears as the unconscious and thoughtless pursuit of the modern abstraction process, its full convergence with the possible enframing (arraisonnement) of the living.
Abstract: Gilles Gagné For American management sciences, time has come for an assessment: what is the efficiency of the diversity, equity, inclusion program (DEI, formerly D&I) and of similar programs adopted, according to Leslie Sklair, by high-ranking global corporations since the 1990s' How can the « DEI industry » and the « new DEI professions » generalize the increased competitiveness of organizations that practice gender diversity (+21%) and gender and ethnic diversity (+33%), or the capacity of teams with age, gender and ethnic diversity to make better decisions (87% of the time), as reported by the Global Diversity Practice consultancy' How can the performances of the CDOs (chief diversity officers) be translated into society, when we know that 35% of the emotional investments ('!) of employees are associated with the feeling of being included, according to a 2020 study by Catalyst' It is on the backdrop of the multiplication of tutoring, mentoring and coaching consultancies that implement these managerial practices that this article examines the more general social and political transformations that made possible the convergence (and confusion) between a labor management program aimed at increasing yields and a moral quest which tends to legitimize a new (vertical) form of social democracy.
Abstract: Éric N. Duhaime Since the publication of Capital in 1867, the concept of value has caused a lot of ink to flow. Many different and opposite interpretations have been proposed to clarify the meaning of this concept central to Marx’s theory, some even arguing that value would take on two contradictory and irreconcilable meanings in his work, being presented sometimes as substance, sometimes as mediation. This article seeks to shed light on Marx concept of value, although tackling the question indirectly, that is to say from the ambiguous status that language takes on in his work. First, we will show that the way in which Marx conceives of the activity of production, as a social and historical activity, makes it possible to tie it to a more general theory which takes the symbolic into account. Then, by introducing some central theses of Michel Freitag’s theory of the symbolic, we will show that language makes it possible to elucidate a central point of the specificity of human activity as depicted by Marx. Finally, we will show that value is located at the crossroads of production and language, in that it constitutes for Marx both an abstract category and a concrete social mediation.
Abstract: Baptiste Rappin The French philosopher Jean Vioulac appears to be a meteorite in the space of contemporary thought. Not only because he writes from outside the university, but especially because he formulates a vertiginous theorization of our capitalist and industrial world, whose understanding is rooted in a stimulating interpretation of the history of Western civilization and even of mankind. The following article is meant to offer a first synthesis – necessarily incomplete – of this massive, deep and crucial work.
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