Les échappées belles : political adventure in the distance

Abstract

The space of the square (not just the public square, but the political location) is the place where we expose ourselves to visibility, to mixing, to a mixture that is not a mêlée. Drawing on theoretical reflections on dislocation in architecture (notably from the work of Benoît Goetz), the session proposes to think at the same time - and still based on medieval examples of the invention of communities - about the fact of dwelling with the potential for fiction. The example developed is that of the dispersive communities of Scandinavian expansion, and the political utopia of medieval Iceland (according to the work of Jesse Byock), where the economy of scarcity provokes a hunger for narratives. Hence a reflection on insularity and the political dream, based in particular on privateer utopias in the modern era, to think about " other spaces " between distance and recognition.

Contents

• From conflagrations to locations, a look back at previous sessions
• Uprising as the appearance of the survival of an origin (Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa dolorosa. Essai sur la mémoire d'un geste, Paris, 2019)
• The space of the square, as a place where we expose ourselves to visibility, to mixing, to a mixture that is not a melee
• " To give place to space is to cancel in one place the power of these identificatory narratives " (Benoît Goetz, La Dislocation. Architecture et philosophie, Lagrasse, 2018)
• Inhabiting the world, inventing fictions and going elsewhere : departure for Iceland (Jesse Byock, L'Islande des Vikings, 2007)
• Icelandic experimentation, or the historiographical ideal of the First New Society (Richard Tomasson)
• The dispersive community (Stéphane Dufoix, La dispersion. A history of the uses of the word diaspora, 2011)
• Three major types of political configuration (Pierre Bauduin)
• " Let us have one law and one faith. For if we cut the law in two, it will turn out that we will also cut the peace in two " (Le récitateur-de-la-loi et l'Althing, 1000)
• A society against the state ? Political revolutions, the great village and fragmented societies
• Why sagas ? Economy of scarcity and hunger for stories
• Iceland is an island, but not a utopia
• From Domenico Silvestri's De Insulis et earum proprietatibus to Cristoforo Buondelmonti's Liber insularum Archipelagi, the encyclopedic thrust of insularity
• " All Corsicans are free and live under their own laws " (Pietro Cirneo, De rebus corsicis, quoted by Antoine Franzini)
• From the island to the boats, " fragments detached from the earth " (Joseph Conrad)
• Raison, déraisons, shipwreck with spectators : the Nef des fous is not just a literary motif
• The Libertalia pirate utopia by Markus Rediker
• The communal impulse of pirates, " enemies of humankind "
• To spin a yard : working the ropes and telling sailors' tales, labor " discontinuous, both solitary and collective "
• Do travelers see the workers of the sea ? The case of Felix Fabri'sEvagatorium
• Anti-piracy, jurisdiction and sovereignty (Guillaume Calafat, Une mer jalousée. Contribution à l'histoire de la souveraineté, Paris, 2019)
• Distance and recognition : urban archipelagos in the late Middle Ages
• Encore " Des espaces autres " (Michel Foucault, 1967) : Utopias console, heterotopias worry