Taste

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Weir ◽  
Jane Desmarais
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The French Revolution

This article examines the confluence of cuisine and the culture of decadence by first describing the difficulty of identifying any type of food as inherently “decadent” in physiological terms. After acknowledging that the meaning of “decadence” depends on moral, social, and aesthetic contexts, the article focuses on the dissemination of aristocratic tastes in food following the French Revolution, when chefs who had formerly cooked for nobility opened their own restaurants; on the development of the idea of the gourmand subsequent to the publication of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût (The Physiology of Taste, 1825); on Charles Baudelaire’s decadent response to Brillat-Savarin in Les Paradis Artificiels (Artificial Paradises, 1860); on the role of Roman history in the development of popular conceptions of decadent cuisine; and on J.-K. Huysmans’s surprisingly limited interest in “decadent dining” in À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), despite his use of elaborate food metaphors to describe the literature of decadence.

Private Crime, Public Madness

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Étienne Balibar
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Penal Code ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Recent Version ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter attempts to clarify the questions raised by the relations between madness and justice, with reference to the heritage of the French Revolution. It also assesses the distinction between crime and madness and their respective treatments in public and private spheres. Indeed, what prompts current discussions on the function of the psychiatrist in the courtroom or on the role of judgments of civil capacity in the treatment of mental illness, is yet again the perspective offered by the reframing of the Penal Code (including the famous Article 64, which makes “insanity”—or, in the more recent version, “psychic or neuro-psychic disturbance”—into the principal operator of the nullification of a crime or a delict, either in its juridical reality or in its penal consequences).

The Literature on War: Part II

1942 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-346
Author(s):  
William O. Shanahan
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
Present Survey ◽  
Military Literature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The French Revolution

“It is a great advantage to princes to have perused (military) histories in their youth, for in them they read at length of such assemblies and of the great frauds and deceptions and perjuries which some of the ancients have, practised on one another, and how they have taken and killed those who put their trust in such security. It is not to be said that all have used them, but the example of one is sufficient to make several wise and to cause them to wish to protect themselves.” For present-day democracies this advice of Philippe de Commynes, the fifteenth century French historian, has a pointed meaning. Only when the liberties of free peoples are threatened can their interest in war and armies be aroused. Tyrants and autocrats, on the other hand, never neglect the study of the role of war in statecraft. If we are to remain free the lessons of war must be studied continually. With this principle in mind the present survey of military literature is intended to suggest some of the important books that have been written since the French Revolution.

Political Ramifications of Formal Ugliness in Kant’s Aesthetics

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-209
Author(s):  
Christopher Buckman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Human Community ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
The French Revolution

Kant’s theory of taste supports his political theory by providing the judgment of beauty as a symbol of the good and example of teleological experience, allowing us to imagine the otherwise obscure movement of nature and history toward the ideal human community. If interpreters are correct in believing that Kant should make room for pure judgments of ugliness in his theory of taste, we will have to consider the implications of such judgments for Kant’s political theory. It is here proposed that pure, formal ugliness symbolizes regressive, counter-teleological trends in nature and history. Kant’s paradoxical stance on the right to rebellion, both condemning and supporting the French Revolution, is interpreted as failing to take into account negative social forces signified by ugliness, and therefore neglecting the role of moral agency in social change.

THE VALUE OF DISPOSSESSION: RETHINKING DISCOURSES OF SELFHOOD IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHARLY J. COLEMAN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Self ◽  
General Will ◽  
Christian Mysticism ◽  
Saint Martin ◽  
Love Of God ◽  
The French Revolution

In Enlightenment-era France, theologians, philosophers, and politicians contested the nature and prerogatives of human personhood with particular vehemence. Yet historians have tended to reduce these struggles to a narrative of ascendant individualism. This essay seeks to recover non-individualist formulations of the self in eighteenth-century France, and, in doing so, to offer a more nuanced account of subjectivity during the period. Out of debates over Christian mysticism, radical philosophy, and republican politics emerged two distinct and conflicting modes of formulating the self 's relationship to its ideas and actions. On one side, mainstream philosophes joined Descartes, Locke, and orthodox Catholic theologians in elaborating the individual's capacity to accumulate existential goods in terms of a discourse of self-ownership. Opposition to this view, in contrast, challenged such claims by employing a discourse of dispossession, which stressed the human person's resignation to, and ultimate identification with, a totalizing force outside the self. The essay traces a specific genealogy of this discourse in the writings of Fénelon, Rousseau, and the Illuminist theologian Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, in the context of intellectual polemics ranging from the role of self-love in Christian devotion to the virtues of self-sacrifice in a republican polity. If the Fénelonian doctrine of spiritual abandon called on believers to surrender their particular desires in the love of God, Rousseau likewise demanded that citizens place their property and their persons under the direction of the general will. Saint-Martin, for his part, applied Rousseau's politics of alienation to his vision of a theocratic republic in the wake of the French Revolution, thereby posing the mystic ideal of dispossession as a means of transforming the self and its world along communal, rather than individualist, lines.

scholarly journals National or people’s sovereignty?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 257-263
Author(s):  
Fazil Zeynalov
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The People ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
The French Revolution

In the article the author provides a comparative analysis of these two notions. He explains through the examples that owing to the historical context during the French Revolution, the gradual process of transforming the bearer of the sovereignty has started, and shift of power from the king to the collective unit has caused several disputes and discussions of theoretical nature. The collective unit, called the people or the nation, began to play the role of carrier of sovereignty, acting at the same time as the source of supreme power. Belonging of sovereignty to the people or the nation is manifested in the forms how the power presented to their representatives. Each of these forms has its own theoretical peculiarities. However, in the wake of historic developments the manifestation of one or another form of sovereignty practically loses its relevance. Regardless of the forms of expression of belonging of sovereignty to the people or the nation, sovereignty displays various and progressive elements of these concepts (renunciation of imperative mandate in favor of representative mandate, sovereignty is exercised through representatives rather than delegates)

Yellow fever: populist pangs in France

Soundings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (72) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Gabriel Bristow
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

A discussion of the recent gilets jaunes revolt in France, reflecting on the dynamics of contemporary populist social movements. Starting with the causes of the uprising - underlying and immediate - the article goes on to explore the democratic demands of the movement, the role of the historical imaginary of the French Revolution, the relationship between the gilets jaunes and France's banlieues, and the predominance of police violence.

Political Affects

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Luc Nancy
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The French Revolution

Nancy considers the necessary role that affects play for political cohesion or common belonging. Nancy discusses the role of love in the Christianity, Machiavelli, and the French Revolution, as well as in the work of Blanchot, Duras, and Bataille.

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