Judith Revel

Hugo Dumoulin

Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod

Parfois déconsidérée, au cours du XXe siècle, parce que pensée comme la simple écume de processus historiques et sociaux plus profonds, la notion d'événement semble avoir, depuis, bénéficié d'un évident retour en grâce au sein des sciences humaines et sociales – en histoire et en philosophie au premier chef, mais aussi en sociologie, en anthropologie, en linguistique ou en psychanalyse. La référence à l'événement, très utilisée aujourd'hui, donne cependant lieu à des investissements multiples, suppose différentes manières d'articuler le temps et l'histoire, met en jeu des conceptions non équivalentes de la subjectivité, et sous-tend des compréhensions de la rationalité très diverses. Mobilisant tour à tour les analyses de Fernand Braudel et de Reinhart Koselleck, de Jacques Rancière et de Michel Foucault, d'Henri Bergson et de Gilles Deleuze, de Walter Benjamin et d'Hannah Arendt, de Sigmund Freud et de Claude Lévi-Strauss, les essais qui composent ce volume explorent la cartographie complexe et variée des questionnements que la notion contribue à faire émerger et à nourrir.

Penser l'événement

Claude Lefort

Claude Lefort, one of the most prominent political philosophers of the twentieth century, reads Dante’s Monarchia and demonstrates the surprising relevance of this radical fourteenth-century treatise defending the necessity of a universal monarchy independent from the Church. Written to accompany a new French translation of Dante’s treatise in 1993 and appearing here for the first time in English, Lefort’s essay exemplifies his signature method of taking political philosophy in new directions by reframing key works from the history of political thought. Dante’s Monarchia was attacked early on by the Church, burned as heretical in 1329, and remained on the Vatican’s index of prohibited works until 1881. With trenchant insight and his characteristic attention to detail, Lefort pursues the often hidden influence of Dante’s long suppressed treatise on the politics and political thought of subsequent centuries. He also challenges us to explore its still unrealized potential by disentangling Dante’s notion of universal sovereignty from its historical links to imperialism and nationalism. Drawing out the provocation of Dante’s treatise for contemporary debates, Lefort’s essay presents readers of Dante with a remarkably fresh account of an oft-neglected yet crucial part of the author’s oeuvre. In her extensive interpretive essay, Judith Revel submits Lefort’s encounter with Dante to a transformative mis/reading and shows the importance of Dante’s text for Lefort’s conception of political philosophy. She carefully reconstructs its radical legacy, all too frequently reduced to a postmarxist turn or even mistaken for an affirmation of liberal democracy. The two essays are accompanied by a note from their translator, Jennifer Rushworth, and a preface by Christiane Frey.

Judith Revel

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