{"title":"The pursuit of luxury as an act of transgression: Bataille, sovereignty, desire","authors":"J. Armitage","doi":"10.1177/09571558221118244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221118244","url":null,"abstract":"Through concepts such as the act of transgression, the idea of the pursuit of luxury can be radically transformed by reconsidering the work of the French philosopher Georges Bataille on sovereignty and desire within contemporary culture. This article on the relations between transgression, luxury, sovereignty, and desire constitutes a reworking of Bataille's thought. Offering an exploration and development of the key notions which run through current work on luxury, from sumptuous living to human lives in search of lavishness, the article places these important concepts in their intellectual and historical contexts and goes on to trace their considerable possibilities for contemporary French thought. In this manner, the article not only makes the idea of the pursuit of luxury accessible, but also invites readers to make their own critical judgements of such a pursuit. The article concludes with an account of the pursuit of luxury and acts of transgression as a moral vision, and with the perpetual problems of luxury and necessity. The notion of the pursuit of luxury is now impossible to disregard for anybody who is serious-minded about contemporary acts of transgression, and this article affords the ideal companion to the wide-ranging diversity of Bataille's critical texts on sovereignty and desire.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"343 - 358"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41534795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Les musulmanes de Soumission face au marché cognitif","authors":"Sana Alaya Seghair","doi":"10.1177/09571558221078446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221078446","url":null,"abstract":"Presumably guilty of an “ increasing visibility”, the ostentatious presence of Muslim women in the streets of France participates, in Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission, in this fashionable jeremiad announcing the slow and painful decadence of France and the West. In burqa, veiled or naked, they are the actors of an insidious implementation of a new word in the old one which does not go without leaving scares. Arab women painted as both conquerors and submissive would be the translation of a French historical awareness marked by a surrender to a creeping islam. In the light of the sociological work of Gérald Bronner, this article proposes to think and evaluate the stereotypical representation of the Muslim woman as pernicious contribution to a cognitive market where the most risky beliefs are competing.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"242 - 256"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45072350","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking haute couture: Julien Fournié in the virtual worlds of the metaverse","authors":"J. Armitage","doi":"10.1177/09571558221109708","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221109708","url":null,"abstract":"This article deals with the concept and practice of haute couture, of the designing and making of high-quality fashion clothes, and haute couture's contemporary engagement with the virtual worlds of the ‘metaverse’, a shared virtual environment that features online gaming and augmented reality. The article is an encounter with these virtual worlds, particularly as they are manifested in the haute couture of the French haute couturier Julian Fournié. To understand Fournié's haute couture, and thus to build a foundation for an interpretation of his most important fashion ideas, it is argued that researchers need to explore Fournié's engagement with virtual worlds and augmented reality from the perspective of German philosopher Martin Heidegger's phenomenological explanation of thinking and rethinking, and then at how Fournié develops and revises the meaning of haute couture.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"129 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47753872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
French Cultural StudiesPub Date : 2022-06-01Epub Date: 2022-06-08DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2022.0139
Richard D Rabbitt
{"title":"Analysis of outer hair cell electromechanics reveals power delivery at the upper-frequency limits of hearing.","authors":"Richard D Rabbitt","doi":"10.1098/rsif.2022.0139","DOIUrl":"10.1098/rsif.2022.0139","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Outer hair cells are the cellular motors in the mammalian inner ear responsible for sensitive high-frequency hearing. Motor function over the frequency range of human hearing requires expression of the protein prestin in the OHC lateral membrane, which imparts piezoelectric properties to the cell membrane. In the present report, electrical power consumption and mechanical power output of the OHC membrane-motor complex are determined using previously published voltage-clamp data from isolated OHCs and membrane patches. Results reveal that power output peaks at a best frequency much higher than implied by the low-pass character of nonlinear capacitance, and much higher than the whole-cell resistive-capacitive corner frequency. High frequency power output is enabled by a -90° shift in the phase of electrical charge displacement in the membrane, manifested electrically as emergence of imaginary-valued nonlinear capacitance.</p>","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"20220139"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9174718/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87335841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"For a fluid approach to Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire","authors":"Michèle Bacholle","doi":"10.1177/09571558221099637","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221099637","url":null,"abstract":"This paper argues that Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) goes beyond the lesbian or queer categorization that critics have often hastily reduced it to. Set in pre-revolutionary France, Portrait is a film from 'the 2019th century' (Sciamma) that addresses contemporary issues (consent, patriarchal and heteronormative order, women's silencing, women's desire and sexuality). It offers a reflection on 'fluid' time and historicizes and archives both disappeared women artists and same-sex women's relations in French painting and cinema. Sciamma reeducates her spectators’ (male) gaze, precludes voyeurism and the objectification and fetishization of her heroines’ bodies, bestows agency upon them, and displays equality and respect in both form and content. Despite its Queer Palme award at Cannes, Portrait calls for a qualifier better suited to our changing times, as this fluid approach attempts to show.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"147 - 160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44289081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Notre Chine’ : China’s shifting position within Marguerite Duras’s Cycle indochinois","authors":"Paul McElhinny","doi":"10.1177/09571558221098003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221098003","url":null,"abstract":"This essay takes Marguerite Duras’s presentation of Sino-French relations as a case study to re-examine and call into question postcolonial theorizations of China’s shifting position vis-à-vis the West. I use two understudied essays by Duras, which describe her childhood travels to Yunnan, a Chinese province that borders Indochina, and her views on the Tiananmen Square protests. In each iteration of Duras’s Cycle indochinois, spanning almost four decades, she significantly alters her depictions of Chinese characters and settings – namely that of the Chinese lover and Cholon. I explore how Duras utilizes her memories of China as a thread to connect and re-interpret different parts of her personal life while also reflecting the regional interplay between China and France in continental Southeast Asia, as well as China’s growing power within the world economic system. I contend that the personal anxiety Duras projects towards China’s so-called ‘rise’ in her late-career signals a contemporary re-balancing of Franco-Chinese cross-cultural representations as the author’s engagement with the country shifts from that of a mythical, timeless civilization to a geopolitical and historical reality.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"175 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44638587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Orthographe et éducation des citoyens dans les dictées françaises de Gouzien","authors":"Katharina Vajta","doi":"10.1177/09571558221092954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221092954","url":null,"abstract":"Orthography and education of the citizens in texts for dictation by Gouzien. During the 19th century, dictation was probably the most current exercise in French schools and therefore the content of the texts dictated must not be neglected. Hence, we here intend to examine how they can contribute to constructing France, building national identity and forming citizenship during the first years of the French Third République. The first part of the study will give a historical background to the teaching of spelling. Then, we will present the theoretical and methodological frame of the study, before examining the double aim of dictation (to instruct and to educate) and the themes contributing to the discursive construction of the nation and the pupil’s education to citizenship, i.e. History, Homeland and National imaginary.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"376 - 389"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48286760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fires of resistance in Algerian discourse: A genealogy of a trope","authors":"G. Austin, Gemma McKinnie","doi":"10.1177/09571558221092963","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221092963","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes as its starting point the use of fire as a political metaphor by Algerians who participated in the Screening Violence research project; it emerged in these discussions as a trope of struggle and conflict in Algeria. In part, this political imaginary has been influenced by France, where fire has historically represented freedom and resistance to unjust powers. However, this inheritance has not been received passively in Algeria, and its irony in a colonial context contributes to a complex relationship with tropes of resistance in Algerian cultural and social discourse. We therefore trace a genealogy of the trope of fire which acknowledges the inevitable and significant contribution of the French political imaginary to the Algerian, but which also recognises the distinct cultural modes of resistance taken up by Algerian artists and political activists themselves, from the Algerian Revolution of 1954 to the Hirak protests of 2019.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"315 - 327"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45045793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Framing community in motion in the transregional Mediterranean: Madeleine Leroyer’s #387 disparu en Méditerranée and Merzak Allouache’s Normal!","authors":"B. Guenther","doi":"10.1177/09571558221078449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221078449","url":null,"abstract":"Leroyer’s documentary, #387 disparu en Méditerranée (2019), tracks the attempt to reconstruct the identity of migrants lost off the coast of Libya whereas Allouache’s metatextual Normal! (2011) captures elliptically the effects of the Arab Spring in Alger. Through the lens of both films, the relevance of adopting a transregional approach in order to analyze communities in motion becomes apparent: Leroyer’s documentary shifts both in its geographical coordinates around the Mediterranean and in its inclusion of individuals working together across different languages whereas Allouache’s film explores the “connected differences” (Audre Lorde) of individuals associated with Algeria, sub-Saharan Africa and France and caught in the thrall of the Arab spring. Allouache’s and Leroyer’s films, screened at Montpellier’s annual Cinémed, clearly do contribute to the transregional network of Mediterranean cinema. The juxtaposition of the two films, which track migration at different points along the spectrum, brings to light the potential for community solidarity and resistance beyond a national scale without glossing over the shadow sides of transregionalism. Drawing on recent geo-political assessments of transregionalism (for instance, James W. Scott and Hans-Joachim Bürkner), this article investigates how the potential and the limits of transregional solidarity are imagined in Leroyer’s documentary, #387 disparu en Méditerranée, and Allouache’s docudrama, Normal!.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"210 - 226"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45633284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Defining a sustainable French architecture: France's national pavilion at the 2004 Venice Biennale","authors":"A. Vincent","doi":"10.1177/09571558221085425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221085425","url":null,"abstract":"The French pavilion at the 2004 Venice Biennale of Architecture took up the theme of sustainable design through a “prospective game” that challenged participating architects to imagine an urban neighborhood's transformation in response to economic, social, and environmental constraints over the following 30 years. The exhibition paradoxically appeared to proclaim French sustainable know-how at a time when French architects viewed the profession as lagging behind their European neighbors in terms of ecological approaches. By framing sustainability as avant-garde, experimental design, the pavilion reconciled “French” and “sustainable” architecture. Examining this exhibit and its impact contributes to an understanding of French self-fashioning of national identity around culture. Moreover, this case demonstrates how cultural elements of identity influence responses to global challenges such as climate change.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"345 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46731460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}