Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Volume 17)

by Michel de Certeau, Brian Massumi (Translator)

A collection of numerous essays drawn from de Certeau’s writings, Heterologies illustrates the diverse concerns that inform his work. Each essay examines and questions the bases surrounding contemporary reorganization.

Genres: Philosophy, Sociology, Nonfiction, Cultural Studies, Theory

302 pages, Paperback

Published May 9, 1986

About the author

Michel de Certeau, historian, cultural theorist, psychoanalyst, and theologian was one of the most multifaceted French intellectuals and scholars of the late 20th century. His concept of everyday life practices was of signal importance for the development of cultural studies in the Anglo-Saxon world. His use of space as a key category in the history and analysis of cultural practices has also influenced the later “spatial turn” in history and art history. Finally, his works on early modern mysticism constitute ground-breaking research in religious studies and theology. Interestingly enough, these studies on mysticism were less influential in the Anglo-Saxon world than they were in France or Germany, whence the distinction between the “American” (of the cultural studies) and the “European” Certeau (the historian of mysticism). In spite of the diversity of his oeuvre, Certeau saw his scholarly work as one, integrated, intellectual enterprise. Asked about his scholarly profession, this French Jesuit used to answer that he understood himself in the first place as a historian of spirituality. Understanding the meaning of Christian mysticism in an era in which it started to lose its self-evidence required a broader focus, embracing the most divergent and complex cultural developments up to his own time. The gradual broadening of his interest field also required new methodological directions, which he found in Lacanian psychoanalysis and in semiotics, resulting in his own topographical way of thinking. He became a public intellectual in 1968, after the publication of his La prise de la parole, a book in which he applied his insights on the role of the mystics in the 16th and 17th centuries to the protesting students in the streets of Paris. From that moment onward he started to develop his theory of everyday life practices, resulting in a number of different books, of which L’invention du Quotidien 1980 was the most elaborate.

Reviews

[sologdin · Rating 1 out of 5]

not really working for me, this collection of essays. topics range across psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, historiography. some thoughtful comments on foucault, though it is more in the way of popularizing Foucault's more well known arguments than building on them, in my opinion.

[Alamgeer]

Certeau's writings Heterologies illustrates the diverse concerns that inform from the Freudian novel history and literature, psychoanalysis...

[Sylvia Flora · Rating 5 out of 5]

de Certeau is a fount of knowledge and takes his rhetorical method to ends I could never expect (his essay on Jules Verne and Maps was astoundingly brilliant). Not exactly Deleuzean, but close in some ways, I loved it.

[Cameron Kunzelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The two essays on Foucault in this book lay out Foucault's project better than any other short summary I have ever encountered. I highly recommend them. The rest of the book is also good but for different reasons.