Archaeology of collective errors

Between alternative facts and hyperbolic truths, the confusion of our times is once again raising the anxious question of political belief. The session is devoted to a comparative analysis of Marc Bloch's Les Rois thaumaturges (1924) and Ernst Kantorowicz's Frédéric II (1927), in the way they articulate medievalist knowledge and contemporary political hauntings. The latter stems in particular from the experience of the Great War, which led Marc Bloch to treat "the deceptive brilliance of kings" in the same way as one denounces the "bobards" of the trenches: "so it is difficult to see in faith in the royal miracle anything other than the result of a collective error". The notion of political fiction resolves the difficulty, and we follow Kantorowicz's critique of himself and the theological-political enthusiasms of his youth in Les Deux Corps du roi (1954). The conception that medieval jurists had of the operations of law creating a persona ficta ("fiction takes as true what is certainly contrary to the true" according to Cino da Pistoia) helps to give consistency to this theoretical position, while at the same time questioning the normative revolution of Christianity, which expresses itself through narrative rather than command.

Contents

• On the threshold of a history of truth effects
• ... And giving it back to you, the [American] people : fiction before proclamation
• "The cog of the grotesque in the mechanics of power" (Michel Foucault, Les anormaux)
• Alternative facts and hyperbolic truth: medieval readings of an American investiture ceremony
• A philosophical history of medieval skepticism
• Andar drieto... : translations and deviations
• "Il vaut mieux parler selon la vérité de la chose que selon ce que le vulgaire s'en imagine" (Nicolas Amelot de la Houssaye, 1683)
• We, the people of United States (1776): American civil religion after Robert Bellah and Emilio Gentile
• The origins of the saying Vox populi, vox dei (Alain Boureau)
• "And we must not listen to those who say 'Vox populi vox dei', for the noisy agitation of the vulgar is always close to madness" (Alcuin's letter to Charlemagne, 778)
• English tradition until the deposition of Edward II (1327)
• William of Malmesbury (1125) or the lifting of denial: "In our time, some use these miracles for a work of falsehood..."
• Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges (1924), at the crossroads of the birth of the social sciences (Thomas Hirsch, Le temps des sociétés, Paris, 2016)
• Comparatism, Durkheimian sociology and epistemological turmoil at a time of revolutions in physics (Otto Gerhard Oexle and Enrico Castelli-Gattinara)
• A double experience: the Dreyfus affair and the First World War
• Nicolas Mariot, Tous unis dans la tranchée?, Paris, 2013: Marc Bloch, Robert Hertz and Jean-Norton Cru
• Marc Bloch, "Réflexions d'un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre" (1921): "Thus, at the front, we saw the same man, alternately, accept with mouth agape the most fanciful accounts or reject with contempt the most solidly established truths."
• From the lies of the Great War to the "deceptive brilliance of kings
• "So it is difficult to see in the belief in the royal miracle anything other than the result of a collective error"
• Ernst Kantorowicz and Marc Bloch: reading to untie, learning to unbind
• From Frederick II (1927) to The King's Two Bodies (1954): breaking the spell of theological politics
• At the "wild foundation of politics" (Pierre Legendre): the Laudes regiae and power as an object of acclamation
• The double corporeality of kings: a fiction that turns against kingship
• Shakespeare's Richard II , or the "tragedy of the king's two bodies
• "You may deprive me of my glory and power, but not of my sorrows; I am still king of those" (IV, 1)
• The defeat of the body, or "the interminable ordeal of disincorporation" (Myriam Revault d'Allones, Le miroir et la scène. Ce que peut la représentation politique, Paris, 2016)
• Fictions négatives et fictions positives dans le droit romain (Yan Thomas, Les opérations du droit, Paris, 2008)
• Artifices, forgeries and simulacra: "fiction takes for true what is certainly contrary to the true" (Cino da Pistoia)
• What is a persona ficta? Universitas is but a collection of several separate bodies, to which the same name is applied" (Yan Thomas)
• Lucien de Samosate, Histoires vraies : "My readers must not believe a word I say" (Glen Bowersock, Le mentir-vrai dans l'Antiquité, Paris, 2007)
• Ancient parallel lives and the plural biography of the Christian individual
• Christianity's normative revolution (Emanuele Coccia): what is a norm expressed through narrative rather than command, and what is a narrative when it is captured by the normative order?