The possibilities of politics

Abstract

To flee the community is not only to leave the living, but to leave the dead ; how then " faire mourir les morts ", to use Marcel Détienne's expression, if not by telling the story of origins ? Drawing on both Florence Dupont's analysis of theorigo of the Romans and Claudia Moatti's on their res publica as " social aptitude for political imagination, otherness and alteration ", the session takes up anew the classic question of the revival of the Trojan origins myth in the founding narratives of European peoples. Beyond the " myth of collective ennoblement " (Colette Beaune), this reference to Aeneas' adventure perhaps expresses the temptation of a heterochthonous model of power legitimization. This allows us to formulate a second general hypothesis relating to medieval societies : the system of powers holds together because it makes possible, or thinkable, the possibility of another political future, which it keeps at a distance but within sight, in faraway places, fictions, or heterotopic forms of community.

Contents

• " Faire mourir les morts " with Marcel Détienne : " experimenter, c'est se poser des questions et penser de manière dissonante "(Comment être autochtone. Du pur Athénien au Français raciné, Seuil, 2003)
• Le meurtre originel aux origines de Rome : une lecture machiavélienne et dissonante, au fur antérieur (Thomas Berns, Violence de la loi, 1998)
• Opening up time, telling the story of a city without origins : theorigo of the Romans
• " What the figure of Aeneas the Trojan brings is not an ethnic otherness, but a formal otherness ; what matters is not that he was Greek or Trojan, but that he never arrived in Rome " (Florence Dupont, Rome, la ville sans origine, Paris, 2011)
• The Trojan origins of the Frankish people in pseudo-Frédégaire and the Liber historiae Francorum, a political fiction
• Beyond the " myth of collective ennoblement " (Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France, Paris, 1985), what is the significance of the revival of this political fiction in the European legend of the peoples ?
• From the Daci to the Dani : lexical plasticity and literary invention
• Frankish expansion and the Turkish century : the inverse political model of heterochtony
• In communal Italy too, " the impossible serenity of cities faced with their origins " (Renaud Villard)
• The historian's discourse is situated on this fault line : are Commynes's Mémoires "Mémoires d'État " (Pierre Nora) ?
• Livre III, chapitre 11 : Envyron ce temps, je vins au service du Roy (et fut l'an mil CCCCLXXII) : joining the victor's camp, singing of Burgundy as a "Promised Land   "
• Traitor or defector ? " Commynes was not a man with deep roots in his own country. He left a first power to gain a second " (Joël Blanchard)
• Négocier les fidelités : Louis XI organise " un véritable mercato au royaume de France " (Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, Le royaume inachevé des ducs de Bourgogne (^XIVe-XVe siècles), Paris, 2016)
• " The incompleteness of the State " : teleological critiques of the Genesis of theModern State program
• Thinking the State since " the current framework of our civic existences " (Jean-Philippe Genet, preface to Joseph Strayer, Les Origines médiévales de l'État moderne)
• The political consistency of the " complexe bourguignon " (Wim Blockmans and Walter Prévenier)
• The library of the Dukes of Burgundy is " the historical archive of possible futures "(Zrinka Stahuljak: see her lecture at the Collège de France on "Les fixeurs au Moyen Âge")
• " I crossed his pastures, and no one knew anything about him " (Guillaume de Rubrouck) The Letter from the Priest John documents not so much an elsewhere as a possible
• After the fall of Saint-Jean d'Acre (1291), intense political inventiveness
• Pierre Dubois, la paix perpétuelle, l'armée européenne et le tribunal d'arbitrage des litiges internationaux(De la reconquête de la Terre sainte, ed. Marianne Sághy, Alexis Léonas, Pierre-Anne Forcadet, Paris, 2019)
• Second hypothesis relating to medieval societies : the system of powers holds together globally because it makes possible, or thinkable, the possibility of another political becoming, which it keeps at a distance but in sight, in the distant, fictions, or heterogeneous forms of communities
• From theorigo of the Romans to the " chose publique " of the Burgundians : political praise for the " signifiant flottant " (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
• La res publica avant la République : recognizing otherness, i.e. the social aptitude " for political imagination, for otherness as well as for alteration, for cleavages in conceptions and practices " (Claudia Moatti, Res publica. Histoire romaine de la chose publique, Paris, 2018)