Contenu du sommaire : Revenances

This article reflects on the importance of funeral rites and burials as signs of the presence of the dead in living memory. It aims at showing how this necessity of burying the dead guides the poetic production since the Iliad and, analysing two recent texts written by Bernardo Kucinsky and situated between fiction and testimony, how it fails in the painful context of the disappeared from the military dictatorship in Brazil. The problem eventually arises of how is usually neglected to bury ritually poor people, putting them in common graves while they could be easily identifiable, and without telling their families who are still looking for their “disappeared” parents.

Unique in the history of police, the police officer Émile Tizané (1901-1982) was probably the greatest French expert of “haunted houses”. As a parapsychologist, he traveled the roads of french countryside for several decades to the needs of its informal inquiries dedicated to poltergeist phenomena. This article attempts to characterize its recently exhumed personal archives by proposing a reflection on what more generally connects the archive to the question of spectrality.

This article ventures to demonstrate that the beliefs in ghosts and the debates around their existence went along with the birth of anthropology, before the latter came to be recognised as a discipline in the 16th cent. More specifically, more remains to be done on the “spectral functionalities”, and namely the spectre's influence on the anthropological discourses. Ghost quickly turns out to be a very effective operator. It could be used as a demarcation line, between the Pagan and the Christian, the Protestant and the Catholic, the Civilised to the Barbarian, the literate and the vulgar, the sociologist, the anthropologist and the folklorist. The encounter between the ghost and the anthropologist could be seen as a primal scene in so far as it pointed out to the likely origin of the discipline of anthropology. But furthermore, in the 19th cent, when anthropology became an institutionalised discipline, it lends itself to be defined as a form “primitive” religion. In its psychoanalytical understanding, the primal scene also refers to an image of the taboo: a place which is hard to contemplate for the socio-anthropologist of the so called “modern” Western societies.

When we clear up rubbish, we clear up in a same movement their embedded memory. Focused on the “revenance” thematic, this article aims to discuss the hypothesis of our presence to rubbish as experience of confrontation with some ghosts of contemporary societies. If our objects were able to resist to their own disappearance, to these daily and repeated murder attempts, would they be able to echo this fallen memory? In other words, if discarded goods were returning, would they have something to tell us? Would we thus only able to listen to them? Based on the narrative of an encounter with a trash pile lost in the middle of the ocean, this article aim to demonstrate that it is possible to perceive them as fragments of the unconscious of time.

Edmond Goblot is often presented as a minor thinker, the author of an outdated logic whose chance was to announce, through isolated sociological excursus, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social distinction. Yet, there is an astonishing gap between the conceptual originality of Goblot's discoveries and the institutional recognition they received. For Goblot initiated a quite innovative social constructivism, he theorized the mystic of the judgements of value that we spontaneously produce in society. The “revenance” of such a logic of social paralogisms is important not only because it prepares Bourdieu's works, but also because it gives us the opportunity of thwarting, better than Bourdieu was able to, current individualistic doctrines of “prelogical mentality”.

Creatures from the past cut a path to the present through most trivial details or insignificant gestures; they are breaking in, rising back again all the way to the surface. In this way, their survival and their come back never end. Coming back like a ghost and surviving like a relic—Nachleben. Images, works, situations where the untimely can be caught, not only assert the heterogeneity of time and its anachronisms. Against the bare idea of transmission, of a natural cycle “life and death”, “rise and fall”, they show the persistence and the untimely character of survivals that literally come back to grab and disturb the present. Openings in time, dazzling speeds, these images are also time insights. This article proposes some visions like that.

Based on a participant observation study as a volunteer in preparing the Miss Le Havre (in 2011 and 2012) and Miss Rouen (in 2011 and 2012) pageants, this article analyses the forms of humour involving the pageant and the Misses themselves behind the scene of the pageant. I particularly focus on derision in connection with gender. What does the derision make to the gender of the Miss? Does it subvert or transgress the figure of the Miss and its stereotypes? Mocking the Miss affects her symbolic dimension and the social representations of her role. Four specific backstage situations were identified as forms of self-derision and parody: waving to the public, posing for the photographers, rehearsing the parade, and questions addressed to the participants.