The political art of spacing out time

Abstract

Comparing the dodged entrances of Louis XI (notably at Abbeville on September 27 1436, where transvestism provokes a deviation from the regimen) with the botched entrances of Charles the Bold (notably at Ghent on June 26 1467, where the people gather both to occupy space, expose their vulnerability and establish the political), we take up this political motif of reversal, which guides all the thinking in the  lecture: a theological reversal of glory, a political reversal of monastic experience, a humanist reversal that profanes the past to restore its legibility. But it's to suggest a turning point in the program we've set ourselves : it aims less at a phenomenology of conflagrations than at a theory of locations. The aim is to recapture recent research findings in medieval history on the spatialization of domination, communities and the act of dwelling, based on Foucauldi's notion of heterotopia, a realistic, or at any rate situated, utopia.

Contents

• Gathering, dispersal and effervescence : a politically risky moment
• Gilles Deleuze's civility, an " art of establishing just distances between men " which consists " in being neither too close nor too far away, to avoid giving or receiving blows "(Périclès et Verdi. La philosophie de François Châtelet, 1988)
• Back to Louis XI : " But he, after passing through the city gate... "
• Le roi chasseur, devoured by his private passion (Joël Blanchard, " Le corps du roi : mélancolie et "recreation" ", in Id., éd., Représentation, pouvoir et royauté à la fin du Moyen Âge. Actes du colloque organisé par l'Université du Maine les 25 et 26 mars 1994, Paris, Picard, 1995)
• Short coat and beaver hat, Christ-like humility and glorious garb
• The royal entry into Abbeville (September 27 1463), disguise and uprising
• " You're delirious !   : the deviation of the regimen
• Reign as a search for the right path
• Plutarch's Life of Pericles  : " He was only seen in one street in the city "
• Via, porta, platea : biblical memories and urban forms
• The political event as a missed ritual : Charles the Bold's failed entry into Ghent on June 28 1467
• A story of reconciliation, negotiation and voluntary oblivion (Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, La ville des cérémonies. Essai sur la communication politique dans les anciens Pays-Bas bourguignons, Turnhout, 2004)
• Un mystère bien étrange : le culte de saint Liévin et la commotion populaire (Peter Arnade, " Secular charisma, sacred power: rites of rebellion in the Ghent entry of 1467 ", Handelingen van de Maatschappij voor Gheschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, 1991)
• Commynes' account : " Saint Liévin passera, saint Liévin ne se détournera jamais de sa route "
• Occupying space, exposing vulnerability, instituting the political (Judith Butler, Gathering. Plurality, performativity and politics, Paris, 2016)
• La fête des fous and the ambivalence of parodic reversal
• The inversion of the polarities of time and space : a carnival gone wrong (Matthias Wirz,"Muerent les moignes !" La révolte de Payerne (1420), Lausanne, 1997)
• When the Prior's orchard becomes platea comunis : requalification of places, disqualification of acts
• Accusation of treachery, call to murder, judicial outcry
• Resumption of a political motif : theological-political reversal of the anatomy of glory, political reversal of monastic experiences, humanist reversal that profanes the past to restore its legibility
• Opening up the past, a critical hermeneutic gesture that reveals the power of texts to speak
• A precipitate : " Just by saying the word, we sense that it carries within it the paradox of a brief, critical or explosive time, occurring in the hollow of a long time, a time when memory deposits so that desire finally explodes " (Georges Didi-Huberman, Désirer désobéir. Ce qui nous soulève, 1, Paris, 2019)
• " An opening that would be a gathering " (Henri Michaux, Misérable miracle) : the explosiveness of great beginnings
• The program, now : from the phenomenology of conflagrations to a theory of locations
• Michel Foucault and modernity as an epoch of space : political struggles between " the pious descendants of time and the relentless inhabitants of space " (" Des espaces autres ", 1967)
• The spatialization of domination in the Middle Ages : communities and the social fact of dwelling
• The outside of heterotopia, " this space that gnaws at us and ravages us "
• We're no longer looking to the shady edges of the ruins of the future, but rather to the new locations of the political