Inventing in the ruins of the past

Abstract

How can a Christian political society be founded when the wood of the cross is, in the words of Jacques Dalarun, " the framework and thorn in the side of medieval societies " ? The lecture poses this question, taking as its starting point the testing of Christianity by Jesuit missionaries in ^17th-centuryJapan ^{. Above all, however, the aim is to propose, based on Grandmont's political experience, a grammar of political experimentation that can be broken down into eight basic rules. All political experimentation is an existential experience (1), and the link it establishes is one of repetition, not foundation (2). To sharpen the sense of community (3), consensus is built by isolating the} pars minor (4) : this is the bond of division (5) that characterizes medieval experimentation. But for institutions to last (6), we need to take into account both the reversibility of political experiments (7) and their ability to change scale in order to constitute a plausible utopia (8). It is on this notion of scalability, thought from Anna Tsing's proposals, that the lecture provisionally ends, displacing the anthropologist's interrogation of the contemporary on the " bushy edges of the ruins of capitalism " to the medieval dilemma faced with the ruins of the Roman Empire.

Contents

• The frame and the splinter : a look back at the Japanese astonishment at the Jesuit missionaries
• " They also say that he died nailed by evil officials to a scaffold in the shape of character ten. How can one call a tortured barbarian master of Heaven ? "(Proclamation following the arrest of the heterodox association, 1616 quoted by Jacques Gernet, Chine et christianisme. La première confrontation, Paris, 1982)
• Sumitada's successful gamble and the political experimentation of the kirishitan daimyô
• " The paradox of medieval Christianity as an ideology is that it both secretes deviation and allows for the resorption of deviation in a renewed norm [...] This game secretes doubt, dissatisfaction and innovation " (Jacques Dalarun, Gouverner c'est servir. Essai de démocratie médiévale, Paris, 2012)
• L'histoire des sociétés urbaines de l'Italie communale comme " l'histoire d'une capacité de création, d'une possibilité d'altérité " (Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Enfers et paradis. L'Italie de Dante et de Giotto, Paris, 2001)
• Difference, repetition and the aestheticization of power
• From " images-limits " (Jérôme Baschet) to " situations-limits 
• " Le champ des énoncés n'est pas un ensemble de plages inertes scandé par des moments féconds ; c'est un domaine qui est de bout en bout actif " (Michel Foucault, L'Archéologie du savoir, Paris, 1969)
• From Grandmont's rule to the eight rules of a grammar of political experimentation
• Aspiring to the rule of life : all political experimentation is an existential experience (1)
• When there's nothing and no one to commemorate : a bond of repetition, not foundation (2)
• Sharpening the sense of community (3)
• Building consensus and isolating the pars minor (4)
• " States will never order themselves without danger " (Machiavelli, Discourse on the First Decade of Titus Livius) : the bond of division (5)
• From break-in to wear and tear : how institutions last (6)
• The reversibility of political experiments (7) : Rancé's reform, pushed to the limit of monastic observance
• " It is not the radicality of the break that utopia establishes with the world that, as such, gives the measure of its protest significance ; it is the capacity that it retains to offer at the same time to the society that surrounds it the anticipatory testimony of a plausible alternative " (Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Le Temps des moines. Clôture et hospitalité, Paris, 2017)
• A plausible utopia is likely to change scale (8)
• The notion of scalability (Anna Tsing, Le Champignon de la fin du monde. On the possibility of living in the ruins of capitalism, trans. fr., Paris, 2017)
• On the ability to make no fuss : matsutake mushrooms nest in the ruins of a dream
• " The medieval West was born on the ruins of the Roman world. It found both support and handicap there. Rome was both its nourishment and its paralysis " (Jacques Le Goff, La Civilisation de l'Occident médiéval, Paris, 1964)
• Time stood still : " The whole world has been transformed by you Romans into a pleasure garden " (Ælius Aristides)
• Why didn't things turn out the way the Roman orator thought they would ?
• The Middle Ages began anew : " History begins again from the beginning, but it does not reproduce itself " (Aldo Schiavone, L'Histoire brisée. Ancient Rome and the Modern West, Paris, 2003)
• Milan, 1117 : " the archbishop and consuls had two theatrainstalled   " (Landulf the Younger, quoted in Chris Wickham, Sleepwalking into a New World. The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century, Princeton, 2015)
• Rome, 1162 : renovation of the Senate and preservation of the Trajan column " as long as the world lasts "
• Rome, 1431 : theUrbs fracta " like an immense decomposed corpse " (Le Pogge)
• Smell the " bushy edges " of the ruins of the past, where the ability of the living to make things with each other is also invented (Anna Tsing)
• " My dear friends. We are being called, shouted at, from a very old age, to tell us not to lose hope altogether " (Michel Butor, Ruines d'avenir, Arles, 2016)