Abstract
The session begins with a recapitulation of the proposals and ambitions of last year's lecture, based on the notion of a generative grammar of the possibilities of politics in the Middle Ages. We hypothesized that its rules of transformation were only conceivable from a single focus of production that lay outside the field of the political, since the paradox of medieval Christianity is that it confers authority on those who admit the unworthiness of power. Two equally counter-intuitive propositions can be drawn from this : the first is that medieval societies lived under the sign ofexceptio, and that the relative robustness of domination is explained less by the constricting compactness of man's framework than by his ability to extricate himself from it. The second is that the system of powers holds together because it makes possible, or thinkable, the possibility of another political becoming, which it keeps at a distance but within sight, in distant, heteroptic forms of community, or fictions. Through the question of political fictions, then, we return to the problem of the articulation between narration and experience. We propose to introduce the main issues at stake, based on an exercise in historical micro-reading : an extract from Guillaume de Saint-Pathus's Vie de Saint Louis , in which we hear the outburst of a woman named Sarrete, dissatisfied with royal policy.
