Contenu du sommaire : Théorie du sujet et théorie sociale

François Dosse, The Captive Subject : Between Existentialism and Structuralism In the second half of the twentieth century the subject was caught between existentialism, a philosophy which has had the tendency to sanctify it, and structuralism, which involves a will to dissolve it. Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the two great thinkers of the period, represent these two opposing approachs to the study of humankind. What is at stake in this battle of ideas is the place of philosophy and its relations with the new human sciences. Lévi-Strauss, champion of a project encompassing all the social sciences, won the battle, up until the subject and history called everything into question in May 1968. Exploring the history of this debate implies the desire to escape the confines of a false dilemma.

Elisabeth G. Sledziewski : Subject and Identity Questioning identity is as legitimate a social question as it is a philosophical and anthropological question. Such interrogation can be approached in terms of the existential position of the individual or collective subject in search of identity, the philosophical dilemmas of identity discourse, and the formation of identity by the mediation of the reflexive discourse of the subject as the individual confronts the world.

Pierre Lantz, Subjectivity and Subject of Knowledge In constructing society as an object of knowledge, sociology attributes a constraining power to society that rules out understanding how the subject whether rational or sensual, can chose its own norms. This statement concerns holistic methodology as much as it does methodological individualism. Sociology has, thusly, accomplished the initial project of the nineteenth century of opposing Enlightenment philosophy with the fact-value dichotomy. This dissociation is incompatible with the only legitimacy which gives coherence to institutions and social practices in the societies where sociology was generated : the emancipation of the subjects and their alienation from traditional values. The categories and the symbols with which the subjects form themselves as actors must, therefore, be objects of sociological knowledge.

René Lourau, The Question of the Subject in the Work of Auguste Comte The question of the subject is far from absent in the work of Auguste Comte. It is present in his first doctrine where the subjective method is inseparable form the objective method. The research subject and the social subject in general play an important and even decisive role in the second doctrine, marked by the traumatic discovery of what came to be called the libido. That positive sociology was invented in the nineteenth century by a mathematician-philosophy afflicted early-on by mental troubles is perhaps less significant sociologically, than the deformation of his work by disciples concerned to institutionalize a myth of scientific objectivity in conformity with the social demands of the bourgeoisie following the repression of the February Revolution of 1848 and the Commune of 1871.

Fred E. Schrader, Modern Sociability and the Social Constitution of the Subject : An Historical Inquiry into the Sociology of Knowledge In 1910, Emile Durkheim opened a section of the Année sociologique called "The Sociological Condition of Knowledge". There, as in his Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, he developed the idea that individual knowledge is constituted and dominated by a "social intellectuality", a "system of social representations", a world of "notion-types" which transcends the individual person. In Germany, this problematic was developed twenty years later by Karl Mannheim. His cousin, Ernst Manheim, raised Durkheim's questioning while rendering it more concrete within the context of anthropological analysis having as its theme the constitution of the modern subject by socialization, even intellectual, through diverse forms of communication and especially of socialization from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.

Jean-François Narot-Narodetzki, The subject of misknowledge From Marx and the revolutionary tradition to Freud, the very same subjective paradigm entails, in a conversely symmetrical way, the twofold and indissociable misknowledge of the subject and of the historical social. On the one hand, the subject of history as an illusory subsumption of a plurality within a unity of both a being and a project shared in common. On the other hand, the reduction of collective endeavours to the scheme of a psychical personality thus consequently leading to that of the becoming towards repetition. Beyond such blind alleys and as far from psychologism as from "subjectlesses processes" and structural anhistoricity the concept of a subject form enables one to renew into the subject's identity his own historicity and understand the social reproduction.

Solange Barberousse, The Question of the Subject in Light of Political Interrogations For the humanists of the Enlightenment human liberty in society was possible by and for autonomous men in relation to forms of power that were cultural rather than or divine. The equation autonomy-liberty constitutes a tendency towards a subject relative to political rights. However, the French Revolution brought forth liberalism, the individual producer of norms and the object of rights. Today, in the Third World, the demand for democracy, human rights and individualization is linked to these three concerns. It is not an history of the philosophy of the subject that makes this demand conceivable ; it rather emerges out of political and social questions and from individuals confronted with the State. The question of the subject, as it is posed in the West today, contains the risk of creating a hierarchy oh humanity. What is necessary is to reposit the "uniduality" of human kind.

Bernard Lahire, Linguistics, Writing, Pedagogy : Pertinent Fields and Illegal Transferts For a long time, "writing" will be thought of by philosophers and linguists as being secondary in relation to "discourse". The paradox lies in the fact that the maligned "writing" is at the foundation of linguistic methods and theories. Saussurian linguistics, to take one of the most pure theories of language signs, always discusses a totality of written and graphic practices, and especially scholastic writing practices, without being aware of this fact Mikhaïl Bakhtine, who has developed the point rejects this theory too rapidly. If the pertinent field of Saussurian linguistics lies in the totality of scholastic writing practices, then this is not a false theory. Bakhtine is wrong to not see why Saussure is partially right. In this particular case, we can elucidate questions such as : what are we talking about ? what is its pertinent field ? does it not speak of a particular category of social phenomena while it claims to speak of social phenomena in general ?

Klaus Eder, Beyond the Historical Subject. Towards a Theoretical Construction of Collective Actors Instead of relying upon sweeping theoretical generalizations and functional explanations social theory should give a more sophisticated account of social action that produces and reproduces social reality. This above alla applies to macrotheoretical accounts of the role and function of social classes as collective historical actors. In order to avoid functionalist or philosophy of history types of explanations, a genuinely sociological analysis of social classes as collective actors can be applied using elements of social movements theory as it has evolved over the last decade. Collective action has to do with rational behavior as well as with the problem of communicating such rational behavior by ascribing good reasons to it