Contenu du sommaire : Le temps et la mémoire aujourd'hui

Gérard Namer, The Affectivity and Temporality of Memory The author attempts to distinguish the affective dimension from the temporal dimension of the collective memory. When time is a social category of memory, it is given as something intensively lived. Halbwachs distinguishes family time, a special realm where ruptures are healed, the religious memory with conflictual temporal affectivity and the time of class memory with legitimizing temporal affectivity.

Pierre Ansart, The Plurality of Time in Socialist Thought (1820- 1870) The first socialist theorists shared the idea of a rupture in historical continuity, of a revolution announcing the beginning of a new world rich in new temporal rhythms. But their conceptions of this new social time diverge in major ways. Saint-Simon, Eugène Buret, and Constantin Pecqueur see time broken by succeeding social systems and they analyze the temporality created by the development of the industrial economy. Fourier rejects this conception as suspect, because it preserves the notion of continuity between the old world and the new. In this debate, Marx's position is similar to that of the saint-simonians, but he refines considerably the analysis of temporalities proper to capitalism, the working class and, especially, of revolutions, in which he distinguishes multiple and conflictual rhythms. Proudhon turns the discussion in a mutualist and federalist direction, seeing a plurality of times and warning of the risk of reducing practice to a single temporal hegemony.

Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, Forms and Uses of Family Histories The memory of « family histories » and the narrative from that the expression of this memory takes depends of social background and the way in which the members of the family evaluate his social background. Itself, the family constitutes a realm of memory, a source of practical knowledge about the social world. Awareness of past social histories within a particular family contributes to the perception of future possibilities. Studying particular family histories, the author delineates four forms of the memory of family histories : the short memory, the long memory, the genealogical memory and the myth. These four forms of the memory of family history are the expressions of particular narrators in both the space of the family and in that of the society as a whole.

Claudine Attias-Donfut, The Notion of Generation — Sociological Concept and Social Uses This article is an analysis of the notion of generation and an exploration of how it can contribute to a sociology of time ; A critical look at the social sciences reveals the diversity of its meanings, the links to the theoretical projects of which it is a part, and the historical tradition which marks its present uses. The author analyses the social definitions of generation with special reference to their symbolic dimension as elements in a social construction of time between memory and history. Generation is thus interpreted in terms of the processes of continual redefinition which form it in relation to other generations ; this produces generational consciousness and is the basis of historicity. From this perspective, the formation of generations, life phases and the process of ageing are aspects of the same process.

Emmanuel Garrigues, The Time of the Field and Time as a Field Sociology lacks an adequate theoretical approach to the techniques and the practice of the field of sociology and even a definition of what this field is. Most sociological studies are more punctual studies (static analyses) than studies of process in time. Rarely do they include duration in the study of the evolution of the field. The author is preparing, with Jean Duvignaud, a study of groups of twenty-years-old with special focus upon what has come to be known as the generation of May 1968. The main hypothesis is that anomic groups are research laboratories in which social behavior is created. This article is a first attempt to verify this hypothesis by elaborating the technique of the « life history ».

Maria Rosa de Madariaga, The image and the Return of the Moor in the Collective Memory of the Spanish People and in the Civil War In Spain after the Reconquista, the presence of an Islamic population, the Moriscos, the attacks on the Spanish coasts by the barbary pirates and Spain's occupation of strategic points in Morrocco are all factors which contributed to the creation of an image of the Moor in the collective memory of the Spanish people. Comparing the movements of popular animosity towards the Moriscos and towards the Jews who had converted to Christianity, the author explores the existence of a preracism in Spain which was founded upon the idea of « purity of blood ». In the Nineteenth Century a romantic image of the Moor appeared which complicated the earlier image and which was an outgrowth of colonial conquest. The return of the Moor in Franco's Spain crystalized past images. Today, the question of racism in Spain remains open.

Alain Manville and Ulysses Santamaria, Time, History and Revolution The historical vision of the philosophical tradition has always been constructed on a metaphysical and representative concept of time. Marxism is no exception to this abstract representation. However in Marx we find a new understanding of time, a materialised concept of time which restores to it its true historical dimension, without which the whole project of world transformation is doomed to failure. It is this revolutionary concept of time which refers to the concrete activity of men in which Marx see the principium of all reality which this text attempts to reveal in the most authentic thought of Marx.

Jean Chesneaux, The Time of Modernity Modernity changes our relationship to time in every way. It modifies our contact with the historical past, rendering it simultaneously a fetishized gadget and a nauseating slogan. It breaks down duration and compresses it into ephemeral moments. This kind of time feeds the false computer memory ; and it cannot be understood by the non-western cultures which must experience this duration. These are the upsetting rhythms and cadences which produce human stress today. The over time will necessarily become a political issue.