L'obscenité et la pensée francaise xviie-xviiie siecles
Institution:
Paris 10Disciplines:
Directors:
Abstract EN:
Obscenity is not a notion whose evolution and polysemy could be traced; neither is it a feeling that would transpire through certain behaviours. From the end of the seventeeth century until the revolution, obscenity was merely a recurrent and ambivalent discursive motif which was used in order to brand such different things as unbecoming ways of speaking, scholarly jokes, or scientific research supposedly of minor importance. Its study lies within the scope of a history of discourses and intellectual habits rather than one of philosophical concepts. Considering the relations between the obscene and the french thought does not amount to seeing obscenity as the metonymy of all practices related to knowledge at the french age classique. This thesis argues that the controversies over a polite language or over so called "bad books", as well as certain surprising uses of the words obscene and obscenity, reveal some deep cultural evolutions, linked for example with the definition of universal moral standards, the relations between the realms of the public and the private, the aesthetic conceptions of the beautiful held in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The first part of this study proposes a historical picture of the main debates that gave rise to a reflexion about the obscene. The second and third sections deal with the relations between obscenity and knowledge as well as obscenity and aesthetics.
Abstract FR:
L'obscenite n'est ni une idee dont il serait possible de retracer l'evolution et la polysemie, ni un sentiment dont on pourrait decrire les manifestations, esquisser les contours. Plus simplement, l'obscenite est, de la fin du xviie siecle a la revolution un motif discursif recurrent et ambivalent, une categorie qui servit a rejeter des objets aussi heterogenes que, par exemple, des manieres de parler trop communes, des plaisanteries d'erudit ou des recherches scientifiques estimees sans interet. Son etude releve moins de l'histoire des idees que de celle des discours et des pratiques intellectuelles. Envisager les rapports de l'obscene a la pensee francaise ne revient pas a dire que son statut aurait ete a l'age classique la metonymie de l'ensemble des pratiques liees au savoir. Cette these pose plutot l'hypothese que les debats sur les bienseances langagieres et les mauvais livres, ou certaines utilisations plus inattendues des mots obscene et obscenite sont revelateurs d'evolutions culturelles plus larges concernant par exemple la definition de valeurs morales universelles, les rapports du public au prive ou les conceptions que les xviie et xviiie siecles proposerent du beau. Apres une premiere partie proposant un historique des principales querelles a l'occasion desquelles se trouva posee la question de l'obscene, deux parties sont consacrees aux rapports de l'obscenite avec l'episteme puis l'esthetique de l'age classique.