Charles Péguy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
In keeping with the Edinburgh Philosophical Guides series aims, the central principle of this introduction is to provide the reader with the means and context necessary to develop an understanding of the key arguments of Deleuze’s most influential philosophical work, Difference and Repetition. The main hurdles new readers face when approaching Difference and Repetition are the wide range of philosophical sources Deleuze draws upon and the density of his philosophical prose. The book will present a novel interpretation of Deleuze’s philosophical project and situate Deleuze within the broader philosophical tradition, interweaving accounts of his interlocutors where they are absent from the text with clear reconstructions of his own arguments. While it is written in an accessible style for readers new to Deleuze, it will also be of interest to advanced scholars as the first sustained attempt to situate this major work within the wider philosophical community.
Charles Peguy: Space, Time and 'le Monde Moderne' (with Bruno Latour)
'New Literary History', Vol.46, No.1 (2015), 2015
Although rarely appreciated, the literary and philosophical influence of the poet, essayist. and editor Charles Péguy (1873-1914) on the work of Bruno Latour has been considerable. In this essay, originally published in French in 2014 on the occasion of the centenary of Péguy’s death in the initial phases of the First World War, and translated for the first time here, Latour offers a reevaluation of his significance. Having analyzed Péguy as a reader of his own historical situation, Latour challenges the contemporary reader to Péguyist forms of textual engagement in the face of the spatio-temporal deflations of 'le monde moderne'. The essay includes a Forward drawing out some of the implications of Péguy’s thought for Latour’s own intellectual project.
Modern Philology, 2017
Why have native-born French terrorists displayed a murderous hatred for France and the French? This enigma has sparked passionate debate on the nature and origins of modern French identity. Charles Péguy helped shape the identity of his entire French generation just before World War I when this young Socialist defender of Dreyfus, foe of anti-Semites and the Church, underwent a remarkable "conversion experience" (like his close friends Jacques Maritain and Ernst Psichari) and set out on foot from Paris across the rich wheat fields of la Beauce to pray to the Mother of God in the Cathedral of Notre Dame des Chartres. He composed a long ode to the hero of his native Orleans, Jeanne d'Arc; soon an observer remarked on his beginning to lace his characteristic vitriol with eau bénite. Péguy was a lieutenant in the reserves and already moved by intense religious and patriotic feelings when war was declared in August 1914, and he left off writing in midsentence to take up arms. Just at the outset of the first battle of the Marne, about twenty-five kilometers from Paris, he was shot in the forehead. "For God's sake, push ahead!" are said to have been his last words. He was forty-one. Since then French Catholic students have gone on pilgrimages to Chartres to honor his memory, but Charles Péguy remains one of those few giants of French culture who remains relatively unknown, untranslated, and unread in the English speaking world (not to mention in the terroristengendering Muslim enclaves in France or Belgium). A few contemporary apostles of modernity such as Bruno LaTour have described him as an important avant-gardist, but Roe's is the only recent monograph on Péguy in English. And Roe, like Péguy, repeats the same idea/inspiration over and Modern Philology, volume 114, number 3.
Etudes Irlandaises, 2019
This article analyses the connecting threads between the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze—as they appear in his 1968 text Difference and Repetition, which is one of Deleuze’s major solo works (along with The Logic of Sense) prior to his famous, anti-Oedipal collaborations with Felix Guattari—and the final novel written by John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002). It shall be argued that Deleuze’s conceptualisations of temporality and humanity’s relationship with its physical surroundings find their perfect literary realisations in the pages of McGahern’s That They May Face as he attempts to provide a vision of contemporary Ireland’s transcending of James Joyce’s nightmare of history and the deadening habit of what Samuel Beckett’s character Pozzo calls “accursed time”. Shakespeare, Proust, Joyce, and Beckett are the three literary authors who most unite Deleuze and McGahern in shared enthusiasm and they shall be considered as mediating presences between McGahern and Deleuze throughout the course of the article. It shall be argued that a Deleuzian vision lies at the heart of contemporary Irish literature and that That They May Face the Rising Sun represents a primary textual example of this literary strand. Key Words: Contemporary Irish Literature, Irish Studies, Continental Philosophy, Cultural Theory, Gilles Deleuze, John McGahern, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, Eco-Criticism.
Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 2019
This essay starts from a consideration of Deleuze's theory of time. It begins with the empty form of time. But the essay's aim is to understand Deleuze's reversal of Platonism in his 1968 Difference and Repetition. There is no question that the stakes of the reversal of Platonism are ontological. But I argue that what is really at stake is a movement of demoralisation. The essay proceeds in three steps. First, we determine what sufficient reason or grounding is, for Deleuze. Sufficient reason is struck with an irreducible ambiguity. It is this ambiguity in sufficient reason that allows it to be taken advantage of, to be used by representation and good sense for a moral purpose. The second part of the essay will therefore concern 'the moralisation of sufficient reason'. Its focus will be good sense. But then, third, we must understand Deleuze's 'demoralisation of sufficient reason', which necessarily passes through others. Like sufficient reason, others are ambiguous, at once lending themselves to what cancels differences, and opening the way towards difference and intensity. The third step focuses on what Deleuze calls 'the ethics of intensive quantities'. In the Conclusion, I examine Deleuze's famous, almost cliché, definition of ethics as not being unworthy of the event and, through the empty form of time, I connect it to Kant's formalistic ethics.
This paper traces the genealogies of discourses of dramatization and performativity in Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition by mapping how Deleuze engages with Kant and Husserl to provide sources for what I describe as a post-Butlerian immanent performativity. This onto-genetic performativity provides an articulated set of mutually generative pathways between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ that do not restrict – in the way that existing articulations of performativity drawing on the dogmatic image of thought Deleuze so vigorously worked to supersede tend to do – the various as yet un-actualized potentials and performances the world’s minds and bodies have yet to affirm.