The recluse's gaze

Abstract

In the previous session, discussion of the very concept of the Renaissance led to the emergence of the figure, or rather prefiguration, of Petrarch. Following in the footsteps of the man who, in La Vie solitaire (The Solitary Life) scornfully criticizes the affairs of the occupati, we try to understand the political abuses that the hatred of the city by those in positions of intellectual power can lead to. Petrarch's hatred of the city is coupled with his contempt for scholasticism and his detestation of women. When men flee, women shut themselves away : with the institution of the recluse, medieval societies found a way to thematize their fear of urbanity and femininity. We propose to look at urban life through the eyes of the voluntarily confined women of Italy, through theusceto of Clare of Rimini. This is where we perceive the background noise of society, what we might call with Georges Perec the infra-ordinary, " what happens when nothing happens ", and experience with him the impossibility of totalizing a truth of place. For place is, in the words of Étienne Helmer, " a plural surface of events ".

Contents

• Petrarch and vacancy: the aristocracy of idleness
• Following the slope of a glance: hatred of intellectuals
• "They are the ones who carry their cultured foolishness around town like an old trinket for sale"(La Vie solitaire)
• Gilles Deleuze and the "new philosophers": "Nothing living passes through them, but they will have accomplished their function if they hold the stage long enough to mortify something"
• Petrarchan agitation: those "who spread out in the streets, in the galleries, to count the towers, the horses, the quadrigas: who measure the squares and the walls, and are speechless before the whole apparatus of feminine seduction, the height of ephemerality and vanity"
• Mute before theornatus of women: a reading essay
• Quand les hommes fuient, les femmes s'enferment : histoire des recluses dans l'Europe urbaine (Paulette L'hermite-Leclercq)
• "Make sure your wives have no dealings with her": theusceto of Clare of Rimini
• Denique nisi de homine vir esse didicerit : un vir viril?
• The age of things: counting, measuring and the spirit of calculation
• Straight paths and broken lines: biblical tradition, pictorial experience
• From Petrarch to Alberti: Michael Baxandall, compositio and experience
• "All language - and not just humanist Latin - is a conjuration against experience, a collective enterprise of simplification and arrangement aimed at transforming experience into manipulable elements"(Giotto and the orators)
• Locus, space and habitation
• Surgit occupatus : Georges Pérec place Saint-Sulpice
• Seizing the infra-ordinary, "what happens when nothing happens, except time, people, cars and clouds"(Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien)
• There is no genius of place: plural truth and non-totalizable experience
• How can we grasp the background noise of society? The example of deep-rooted linguistic structures
• Varying distance: Cil and cist in medieval French (Christiane Marchello-Nizia)
• Place is "a plural surface of events" (Étienne Helmer, Ici et là. Une philosophie des lieux, 2019)
• Relocate, dislocate, relativize: Diogenes' utopia
• Adopting the recluse's gaze and disassembling the civic square