Ernst Cassirer

Jean Starobinski

Le problème Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Cette suite de "L'oeil vivant" est centrée sur la critique. Jean Starobinski veut établir les principes d'une critique de la relation, qui puisse coordonner les méthodes de la stylistique, de la sociologie et de la psychanalyse.

La relation critique

European Clothing, 1715-1815

Revolution in Fashion

Özgürlüğün İcadı 1700-1789 ve Aklın Amblemleri

Professor Jean Starobinski

It is the task of art, he contends, to make the most of these conventions, to use the very disguises of civilization to counter the barbarism they mask. Tracing this idea through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature, Starobinski charts the historical and intellectual limits of criticism itself.".

Blessings in Disguise, Or, The Morality of Evil

What do biologists mean when they say that to live is to react? Why was the termabreaction invented and later abandoned by the first generation of psychoanalysts? What is meant byreactionary politics? These are but a few of the questions the internationally renowned scholar JeanStarobinski answers in his conceptual history of the word pair, action and reaction.Not simply ahistory of ideas, Action and Reaction is also a semantic and philological history, a literaryhistory, a history of medicine, and a history of the biological sciences. By concentrating on themoment when scientific language and ordinary language diverge, Starobinski uncovers a genealogy ofthe human and natural sciences through their usage of action and reaction as metaphors. Newton's law-- to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction -- becomes a point of departure for anexploration of the lexical and metaphorical traces left in its wake. Starobinski analyzes thescientific, literary, and political effects of the use of the terms action and reaction to describeand explain the material universe, the living body, historical events, and psychological behavior.In what he calls a "polyphonic score" -- a kind of mosaic -- he uses his subject to offer newinsights into the work of philosophers (Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Nietzsche, Jaspers), scientists(Newton, Bichat, Bernard, Bernheim, Freud), and writers (Diderot, Constant, Balzac, Poe, Valry).Ultimately, the book explores the power and danger of metaphorical language and questions theconvergence and collapse of scientific and moral explanations of the universe.

The Life and Adventures of a Couple

Action and Reaction

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Ces textes poétiques, religieux ou philosophiques et ces dessins, gravures, peintures, photographies et images de film montrent comment poètes et artistes ont représenté les diverses formes du dons (figures de la Fortune, histoire de la charité, oeuvres de miséricorde...) et comment eux-mêmes ont accédé au geste donateur, par ce qu'ils donnent à voir du monde ou par ce qu'ils ajoutent au monde.

Largesse

In 1990 the Department of Graphic Arts at the Louvre made their holdings available to guest curators for a program called Parti Pris, or "Taking Sides". In this program, major cultural figures outside of the discipline of art history organized exhibitions based on the department's collection. Within its first several years, this novel collaboration produced exhibitions curated by philosopher Jacques Derrida and filmmaker Peter Greenaway. Jean Starobinski, noted literary critic and intellectual historian from the University of Geneva, was selected as the third curator in the program. In his exhibition and accompanying essay, Starobinski explores the theme of largesse in its broadest sense. Arguing that gift giving and receiving are fundamental human gestures, he examines graphic and textual representations from the offering of the apple to Eve to Salome's gift of the head of John the Baptist, from the giving of laws to the gift of death. Charity, the poetic gift, and the benefits of Fortune all play a role in Starobinski's extended meditation on the act of donation. Lavishly illustrated and dazzling in its scope and imagination, Largesse is an exemplar of the rich intellectual work that can result from crossing disciplinary boundaries and considering history as a dense network of themes and allusions.

Italo Calvino

Romanzi e racconti

Educated in the humanities and trained in psychiatry, Jean Starobinski is a central figure in the Geneva School of criticism. For twenty-five years his work has had considerable influence on postmodern European critics (notably Derrida), scholars of French literature, and intellectual historians. Montaigne in Motion is his subtly conceived and elegantly written study of the Essais of Montaigne, whose deceptively plainspoken meditations have entranced readers and stimulated philosophers since their first publication in 1580 and 1595. -- Publisher's description.

Montaigne in Motion

Philippe Jaccottet

Point de vue de l'éditeurPour Jaccottet, il s'agit moins de cerner un sens - comment le pourrait-on ? - que d'adopter une posture existentielle, celle du poète ignorant. « Tel est le monde. / Nous ne le voyons pas très longtemps : juste assez / pour en garder ce qui scintille et va s'éteindre, / pour appeler encore et encore, et trembler / de ne plus voir. Ainsi s'applique l'appauvri, / comme un homme à genoux qu'on verrait s'efforcer / contre le vent de rassembler son maigre feu... » À l'encontre d'une autre modernité, plus portée par le pouvoir créateur du langage, la poésie de Jaccottet s'abîme dans une recherche désespérée du sens : « je ne peindrai qu'un arbre qui retient dans son feuillage / le murmure doré d'une lumière de passage » En bon traducteur, le poète s'efface derrière ce langage dépouillé (« L'effacement soit ma façon de resplendir »), derrière un « je », qui est un « lui », mais aussi tous les humains.

Poésie, 1946-1967

In this classic text on the 18th century and neoclassicism, Jean Starobinski pursues a subtle and brilliant meditation on the connections between art and revolution, comparing the style of the French Revolution as a political event to style in the contemporary visual arts. Rather than seeking a set of causal links between history and art, Starobinski finds ways to read the messages of both. Moving with graceful erudition over painting, architecture, music, philosophy, and political history, he enables us to see the art of David, Fuseli, Goya, Mozart, Boullee, Ledoux, and a host of others in a new perspective, as integral part of the events that changed the course of modern history. Jean Starobinski is a Professor Honoraire at the University of Geneva.

1789, the Emblems of Reason

"This book examines some figures of seduction as they have appeared over the course of opera's history." --introd.

The Seductress in Opera

Enchantment

This volume is a translation of selections of L'Oeil vivant (1961 and 70). Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

The Living Eye

Hans Robert Jauss

Trop souvent l'esthétique marxiste ne veut voir dans la littérature qu'un épiphénomène, un " reflet " de la réalité sociale : le formalisme, au contraire, la considère comme un absolu, un système clos, coupé de cette réalité. L'esthétique de la réception, qui s'est amplement développée en Allemagne depuis une vingtaine d'années, tente de dépasser cette opposition figée de deux approches également partielles. Activité de communication, la littérature n'est pas un simple produit mais aussi un facteur de production de la société. Elle véhicule des valeurs esthétiques, éthiques, sociales qui peuvent contribuer aussi bien à transformer la société qu'à la perpétuer telle qu'elle est. Ainsi l'esthétique de la réception rend à la littérature, à l'art, l'importance et la dignité qui leur ont été si souvent contestées.

Pour une esthétique de la réception

Depuis le romantisme le bouffon, le saltimbanque et le clown, ont été les images hyperboliques et volontairement déformantes que les artistes se sont plu à donner d'eux-mêmes et de la condition même de l'art. Il s'agit là d'un autoportrait travesti, dont la portée ne se limite pas à la caricature sarcastique ou douloureuse. Une attitude si constamment répétée, si obstinément réinventée à travers trois ou quatre générations requiert l'attention. Le jeu ironique a la valeur d'une interprétation de soi par soi°: c'est une épiphanie dérisoire de l'art et de l'artiste. La critique de l'honorabilité bourgeoise s'y double d'une autocritique dirigée contre la vocation "°esthétique°" elle-même. Nous devons y reconnaître une des composantes caractéristiques de la "°modernité)", depuis un peu plus d'une centaine d'années. Jean Starobinski

Portrait de l'artiste en saltimbanque

eine Welt von Widerständen

Rousseau

Educated in the humanities and trained in psychiatry, Jean Starobinski is a central figure in the Geneva School of criticism. For twenty-five years his work has had considerable influence on postmodern European critics (notably Derrida), scholars of French literature, and intellectual historians. Montaigne in Motion is his subtly conceived and elegantly written study of the Essais of Montaigne, whose deceptively plainspoken meditations have entranced readers and stimulated philosophers since their first publication in 1580 and 1595. Starobinski here offers a decidedly postmodern reading of Montaigne. In chapters dealing with the themes of public and private life, friendship, death, the body, and love, Starobinski interprets Montaigne's writings as a constant "working through" that leads Montaigne from a situation of unreasoned dependence to a revolt affirming his independence and self-sufficiency, and finally toward an acceptance and mastery of necessary relations. Placing this ternary movement at the very heart of the Montaignian enterprise, Starobinski reveals much that will remind us that Montaigne's thought is as apropos to our time as it was to his own.

Jean Starobinski

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