Presentation
Although France is an exception among European countries in the absence of an individual genius to represent it on a national scale - Shakespeare for England, Dante for Italy or Goethe for Germany - the question of genius is nonetheless a recurrent and major preoccupation in its cultural history. It's a subject that, for a variety of reasons that I propose to explore in these lectures, attracts a huge variety of philosophical, literary, medical and other commentaries.
Most of the vicissitudes referred to in my title derive from these commentaries, with genius serving as a subject for commentary rather than as an established reality whose objective characteristics we could eventually pin down ever more clearly. Not that definitions are lacking. But the question of genius is regularly marked by the contradictions and complications it tends to provoke. Whether approached from a positive or negative perspective, genius regularly finds itself involved, even entangled, in phenomena that at first glance appear to be opposed to it, but which end up problematizing its conception, namely: the other on whom it depends for its recognition, pathology, and imposture. The analysis will be organized around these three "vicissitudes", which will have the advantage of linking together discussions of genius which, coming mostly from different disciplines in the French tradition, are generally commented on in an ad hoc and separate manner.
