All seminars will take place on Microsoft Teams, 4-5.30pm UK time. All are welcome. To access the events please click on the Teams link for the relevant seminar, displayed below. We recommend you download the (free) Teams app for ease of access. Please email the convenor, Oliver Davis, at O dot Davis at warwick dot ac dot uk, with any questions. Recordings of selected papers from 2022-3 can be found here, those from 2021-2 can be accessed here and those from 2020-1 here.

Wednesday 8^th February: Jussi Palmusaari (Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston), ‘Althusser’s Place’

In this talk I will look at the methodological role of ‘place’ (lieu, place, topos) across different thematic contexts in the writings of Louis Althusser. These concern 1) discussions of Marx’s metaphor of capitalist society through an edifice – topique – containing the base and superstructure, and its comparison with Freud’s topographical description of the function of the unconscious; 2) topique and topology as what allows to capture and deconstruct the nature of Western philosophical practice; and 3) a rethinking of the relations between politics and philosophy, or theory, through a reading of Machiavelli. In the discussion of Machiavelli, in particular, the concept of place has an important role in thinking political agency. Looking at the concept of place, I want to understand the relation between theory and political practice, the spatio-temporal structures constituted through that relation and the questions concerning strategy implicated in it.

Jussi Palmusaari currently teaches at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, at Kingston University London, where he also holds a PhD. His book For Revolt: Rancière, Abstract Space and Emancipation is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.

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Wednesday 1^st March: Valérie Hayaert (Law, Warwick), ‘Éléments pour une typologie des images de justice en Europe (1450-1800)’

L'histoire du droit est principalement une histoire du texte. Le droit est un texte, c'est-à-dire une espèce de capital linguistique, soumis à des normes de conservation et à des règles procédurales de reproduction. Mais la dynamique du droit et de la justice ne se réduit pas à des codes écrits. Tout acte juridique, dans la mesure où il est performatif (serments, contrats, obligations), s'inscrit dans un champ de vision. Il est donc frappant de constater qu'il existe peu de travaux historiques, anthropologiques et sociologiques détaillés sur la centralité de ces phénomènes visuels en droit, sur leur émergence et leur déclin aujourd'hui. L'importance du corps dans la délivrance de la loi, bien qu'évidente, n'a en général suscité que peu d’études : selon les mots de Justinien glosés par Pierre Legendre (1993), "l'empereur porte toutes ses lois dans sa poitrine". Pendant des siècles, en Europe, le Christ a été l'incarnation vivante de la loi de Dieu. Robert Jacob (1994) a même proposé que la naissance du juge des débuts de l'ère moderne soit fondée sur l'acte même de tenir une image devant soi. Ce projet aborde cette lacune dans la recherche actuelle d'une manière innovante : les images de la justice doivent être considérées comme des éléments constitutifs de la naissance du jugement en Europe. Les résultats du projet seront importants pour tous les domaines d'études académiques dans lesquels les études visuelles ont récemment joué un rôle clé (histoire, anthropologie, sociologie). Mais nous obtiendrons également une nouvelle compréhension des raisons pour lesquelles un aniconisme croissant a envahi nos palais de justice contemporains (De Sutter, 2018), qui sont actuellement, dans leur grande majorité, symboliquement silencieux.

Lors de mon intervention, j’examinerai un vaste éventail d’images de Justice (France, Italie, Belgique, Royaume-Uni et Allemagne). Ces images ont des supports très variés (peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure, emblématique et numismatique) mais peuvent aussi être des artefacts (main de justice, bancs, sièges, trônes, vêtements, fragments de corps, peaux tatouées, doigt-reliques, poings de justice, épées d’exécuteur des basses œuvres, instruments coercitifs) ou bien des objets liés au rituel judiciaire (mitres d’infamie, ‘tavolette’ accompagnant le rituel d’exécution des criminels voués à l’échafaud, images de martyres, chemins de croix etc.).

Valérie Hayaert is a classicist, historian and humanist researcher of the early modern European tradition. Her particular interest lies in the mens emblematica, the humanist lawyers’ invention of woodcut depictions of legal and theological themes, in the tradition of playful seriousness or serio ludere. She received the EUI Alumni Prize for the best interdisciplinary thesis in 2006. Her book ‘Mens emblematica’ et humanisme juridique was published in 2008. Her subsequent work looked at the aesthetics of justice in courthouses of the early modern period until today. Valérie has taught in Cyprus, Tunisia, England and France and held various positions and fellowships. From 2014 to 2018, she served as co-editor for the Journal Emblematica. An interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies (AMS Press, New York then, Droz Geneva). She co-authored with the French judge Antoine Garapon Allégories de Justice : la grand’chambre du Parlement Flandre à Douai, and recently contributed to two exhibitions in Belgium on images of Justice : The Art of Law, Groeningen Museum, Bruges (2017) and Call for Justice, Hof Busleyden Museum, Mechelen (2018). Her forthcoming new book is entitled Lady Justice : An Anatomy of Allegory (Edinburgh University Press). Her current project is intended as a contribution to a survey about European legal symbolism over the course of the Early modern period.

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Wednesday 3^rd May: Elizabeth Benjamin (Coventry), ‘Lieux oubliés et pas perdus: mapping the monuments of Paris that never were’

This paper will present new archival research at the collections and archives of the Musée Carnavalet, targeting documentation of monuments, memorials and museums that never came to be, for example the failed proposal to construct a memorial museum of the French Revolution at the 1889 centenary. The paper will explore the politics of the planning, commissioning and financing of a selection of the city’s monuments from the Revolution to the present, mapping an ephemeral network of lost and fading interactions with French history. The paper will discuss the historical planning of monuments, and the present development of cultural policies and politiques de mémoire. The evolution of the monumental landscape will be analysed to assess whether the development of these landmarks has become less elitist or simply inclusion-washed in new narratives that come with no concrete improvements for concerned communities. The work feeds into my new project ‘Mediating Memory through the Monuments of Paris’, which will address issues in accessibility and representation in monuments and memorials. The project will propose increased and improved cultural policies and practices surrounding the construction and maintenance of urban sites of collective memory.

Elizabeth Benjamin is Lecturer in French at Coventry University, UK. Her research is in the field of French and Francophone memory studies, with particular interest in monuments. Her current work looks at Paris and its problematic dominance over the Francophone memoryscape, through monuments, literature, and politics.

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Wednesday 17^th May: Jeremy Lane (Nottingham), ‘From Bourdieu to Piketty: tracing the emergence of a “nouveau capitalisme patrimonial”’

In a paper published in the British Journal of Sociology, the French economist Thomas Piketty claims that his work on inequality should be located in a tradition of social scientific thought personified by Pierre Bourdieu. This claim has not convinced a number of those in France who claim allegiance to Bourdieu. Indeed, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Didier Eribon, and Frédéric Lordon have all denounced Piketty’s work, claiming it manifests an adherence to ideas of meritocracy and economic liberalism characteristic of the failings of the French ‘second left’. Having clarified the reasons for this hostility to the ‘second left’ in Bourdieusian circles, this paper offers a reading of Piketty’s Le Capital au XXIe siècle (2013) and Capital et idéologie (2019) alongside Bourdieu’s earlier La Distinction (1979) and La Noblesse d’État (1989). The paper argues that Bourdieu and Piketty’s work can indeed be seen as complementary. In short, Bourdieu plots shifts in the form and structure of capital possessed by the dominant fraction of the dominant class at a moment when France found itself on the cusp of its transition from post-war Fordism to financialised globalisation. Bourdieu’s analysis of these shifts anticipates Piketty’s account of the increases in socio-economic inequality characteristic of a period of full-blown financialisation, when ‘r’ is once again greater than ‘g’, to use his celebrated formula. The paper shows that these developments have led Piketty to renounce the faith in meritocracy and liberal economics that was indeed once the hallmark of those ‘second left’ circles from which he has emerged. The paper concludes by pondering the political significance of Piketty’s status as a disillusioned meritocrat.

Jeremy Lane is Professor of French and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, on the reception of jazz in interwar France, and on representations of the post-fordist workplace in contemporary France. He is currently pursuing two projects, the first on Jacques Rancière and the social sciences and the second on the ways in which responses to Covid may have exacerbated existing tendencies to precarity, surveillance, control, and socio-economic inequality.

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Wednesday 31^st May: Stuart Elden (Warwick, PAIS), ‘Indo-European Thought in Post-War France’

This talk will report on preliminary work on a new research project on Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France. It will particularly focus on the post-war period when Georges Dumézil was elected to the Collège de France, Émile Benveniste regained his chair there after his war-time exile in Switzerland, and Mircea Eliade held visiting positions when unable to return to Romania.

This was a period when Dumézil completed his Jupiter Mars Quirinus and Les Mythes Romains series, and published a revision of his book Mitra-Varuna; Benveniste wrote a comparative study of Indo-European nouns; and Eliade started to publish his first books in French, including Traité d'histoire des religions.

Using published texts, reports of teaching, memoirs, and some archival sources, the talk will try to situate the intellectual relations between these and other figures, especially in light of a post-war reckoning about political positions.

Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick. He has recently completed a four-part intellectual history of Foucault’s entire career. He is currently funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship on Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France.

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