Papers by Jack I Abecassis
Global Montaigne Mélanges en l'honneur de Philippe Desan, 2020
Pour Clément Rosset toute identité qui n'est pas sociale n'est qu'un fantasme. Il fait sienne la... more Pour Clément Rosset toute identité qui n'est pas sociale n'est qu'un fantasme. Il fait sienne la proposition radicale de Montaigne: "Notre fait, ce ne sont que pieces rapportées." Dans le sillon de cette perspective lucrétienne, nous analysons la métaphore baroque du theatrum mundi chez Montaigne depuis ses analyses dans "De l'inconstance de nos actions" jusqu'à son retour à une conception classique de a dialectique visage/masque dans "De messager sa volonté."
Modernos & Contemporâneos, 2020
L'essai « Des cannibales » prédomine depuis 40 ans la transmission des Essais. Le post colonialis... more L'essai « Des cannibales » prédomine depuis 40 ans la transmission des Essais. Le post colonialisme et le tournant éthique, alliés au consumérisme romantique de l'exotique y miroitent à merveille. Reste que Montaigne retrouve au Brésil l'idéal vaillant classique et non une hétéronomie quelconque. Politiquement l'essai est subversif et plein d'humour, mais il s'achève en postulant un abîme entre Amérindiens et Européens. Pour examiner son fonctionnement variable dans notre culture, nous revenons à l'anthropologie 'auto-iste' de Rousseau et son relais spirituel chez Lévi-Strauss. Nous proposons ensuite que, contrairement à Rousseau et Lévi-Strauss, Diderot, penseur de l'immanent et qui fut matérialiste, dialogique, et comique, présente au coeur du Supplément une analyse écologique précise, politiquement sophistiquée et exempte de fantasme ontologique. Au bout du compte, nous suggérons que Diderot fut le plus proche de Montaigne, et que tous deux proposent, en écho, un modèle pour une ethnographie matérialiste conséquente.
Modern Language Notes, 2017
Montaigne understood well the crucial link between narrative and randomness. The role of narrativ... more Montaigne understood well the crucial link between narrative and randomness. The role of narrative ("discours") is to string a causality chain where none actually exists. For Montaigne, most significant events in life are generated randomly by "fortune." Narrative's main function is to "story-fy" randomness, extracting coherence out of chaos, randomness, and contingency, making thus existence cognitively bearable but very prone to error, especially in modern, complex environments. Narrative is thus both a useful exercise in complexity reduction and a great generator of all manner of fallacies. This paper studies the connection between narrative and randomness from a contemporary cognitive perspective, with heavy emphasis on recent insights in behavioral economics, many of which were anticipated and even explicitly discussed by Montaigne already in 1580.
Modern Language Notes, 2014
Paul Auster, Montaigne, rhythmic writing, embodied rhythm and writing, dance and writing, writing... more Paul Auster, Montaigne, rhythmic writing, embodied rhythm and writing, dance and writing, writing as rhythmic dance, rhythmic poetics, embodiment and writing.
Montaigne Studies, 2018
The debate among the partisans of Embodied Simulation and Theory of Mind in neuro-cognitive scien... more The debate among the partisans of Embodied Simulation and Theory of Mind in neuro-cognitive science might render intelligible certain aspects of Montaigne’s self-representation in the Essais that at first seem tragically disparate, if not and ethically irreconcilable. Montaigne’s selective inhibition of empathy, his “free won’t” as a form of free will, is coherent and cogent. Far from off putting, his endearing frankness about his constitutional hyper-empathy towards humans and animals as well as his brutal honesty about the need and the tactics of managing his (Free) Will by cultivating a diffused form of insensitivity, an erected wall between him and others that hinders as much as possible the contagion of viciousness and stupidity of the mob that always lurks as a danger in any complex social interaction, are precisely the reason why he is still so readable and relevant today. Montaigne represents complexity and nuance, and pointedly not flattened-out utopian schemes of unconditional hospitality and untethered openness to otherness (Lévinas, Derrida, Baron-Cohen, et alia). Once we begin to appreciate the basic architecture of empathy as being at once the active management of ongoing Embodied Simulation and a Machiavellian Theory of Mind, we might adapt a more nuanced (and forgiving) interpretation of elements in Montaigne’s statements regarding empathy and insensitivity that seem, from a folk psychology point of view, contradictory and dissonant, when in fact they are constitutive and representative of basic human affect and cognition, especially within the perspective of the emergence of a specifically modern liberal subjectivity during the Early Modern era. These “contradictions” may be “endemic of the human condition,” but increasingly they can be accounted for empirically and scientifically and integrated into a nuanced model of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and agency where utopian aspirations or self-deceptions are balanced by the Rules of the Game of our evolved sociality and biology. In this perspective, Montaigne’s vivid and unapologetic dramatization of the dissonance between subconscious Embodied Simulation and a conscious Machiavellian Theory of Mind should stand out as a paradigm of a coherent cognitive, affective, and behavioral model of agency in the historical world.
Montaigne's essay "Des Cannibales" is NOT simply an anti-colonial tract, as it is often portrayed... more Montaigne's essay "Des Cannibales" is NOT simply an anti-colonial tract, as it is often portrayed. This article explores the ways in which Montaigne undermines his own emphatic declarations by showing that it is impossible to think of "otherness" in terms other than one's identity, by analogies that eventually erase differences. The articles also focuses on the closing joke of the essay, contending that it actually contains an emphatic and highly ironic statement about the impossibility for us who wear breaches to seriously think about those "cannibales" except in very general and universal moralistic terms.
A study of the tension among private and public personae in Montaigne's Essais. This close readi... more A study of the tension among private and public personae in Montaigne's Essais. This close reading of "De mesnager sa volonté" argues that what lays at the heart of Montaigne's political anthropology is his recognition of the impossibility to cohere his ontological, epistemological, and political thought and actions. The recognition of these various dissonant attributes of of his person(s)/mask(s) lays at the heart of his realist, perhaps even "negative" in the technical sense, of his political anthropology, which has relevance to later liberal conception of politics.
Montaigne's major insight onto the role of imaginative categories and frameworks to the basic log... more Montaigne's major insight onto the role of imaginative categories and frameworks to the basic logic of action, especially acts in highly intersubjective contexts, with the prime example being sexual performance of newlywed husbands.
Modern Language Notes, 2008
Philosophe et amour et de la tyrannie; la philosophie et délire paranoïaque; philosophie et narci... more Philosophe et amour et de la tyrannie; la philosophie et délire paranoïaque; philosophie et narcissisme; philosophie et surinvestissement dans le language; Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault, philosophie et terreur, terrorisme, tyrannie, amour de la tyrannie.
Pourquoi le philosophe adore la tyrannie? La philosophie se prêterait-elle à un rapport délirant avec la réalité qui surgit d'un ressentiment profond envers le réel, aboutissant à un rapport caractérisé le plus souvent par la paranoïa et l'hypertrophie du pouvoir du langage? Telles sont les hypothèses que Christian Delacampagne propose dans son oeuvre et que j'analyse de près dans cet article. Notre analyse focalise sur le cas de Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Badiou, et Michel Foucault en tant que les représentants les plus flagrants de ces tendances inhérentes à l'entreprise philosophique. En particulier, c'est le rapport commun de ces philosophes à la notion de droit et à la légalité qui donne lieu à des "dérives" qui forment en fait non l'exception, non un "faux pas", mais l'essentiel des aspects politiques de leurs oeuvres.
Modern Language Notes, 1995
... The Fragility of Philosophy: Passions, Ancient and Modern. Review of Le Philosophe et les Pas... more ... The Fragility of Philosophy: Passions, Ancient and Modern. Review of Le Philosophe et les Passions, Esquisse d'une Histoire de la Nature Humaine, and The Therapy of Desire. Jack Abecassis. Michel Meyer, Le Philosophe et ...
Pacific Coast Philology, 1989
In this essay I will explore Montaigne's discourse concerning the male-phallus in 'On Some Verses... more In this essay I will explore Montaigne's discourse concerning the male-phallus in 'On Some Verses of Virgil' (Book III, essay 5) and its pivotal relation to the Montaignian notion of complete self-portraiture. This study has its origin in a more global analysis of the role and function of sexuality in Montaigne's Essais in which I argue that Montaigne's discourse consists of three crucial articulations. First, Montaigne wonders about elaboration of a new "essayistic" a "serious and regular" discourse rather than the usual poetic, medical, ecclesiastic or moral types of discourses. Second, Montaigne develops a discourse on male performance anxiety, male phallicism and the possibility of portraying this essay his naked body, including portraying his genitals. Third, Montaigne focuses on the notion of seduction and aesthetic resolution that functions as the synthetic element in this essa (III, 5)y as well as a general strategy throughout the Essais, especially as it relates to the self-conscious and willful constitution of the modern subject.
Modern Language Notes, 2010
Modern Language Notes, 1997
The second half of L'tranger simply does not work. It is as if Camus were trying to fuse toge... more The second half of L'tranger simply does not work. It is as if Camus were trying to fuse together into a single novel two incongruous sorts of narratives. At the beginning the reader struggles with a minimalist description, dry and flat, of an existence devoid of sense, culture, history, and dominated by sun, heat, sweat. But in the second half the reader is plunged into the story of a trial, now recounted through a narrative voice overcome by incomprehension and resentment. Two stories, two modalities, one shaky articulation. But of course this is not how we, the "informed" readers-as opposed to our naive students-interpret the novel. In the "informed" reading (to use Girard's terminology), the trial figures prominently.' It be-comes the metaphor through which an ethical and moral interpretation becomes unavoidable. In the preface to the American edition, Camus certainly endorses this reading in summing up the novel with the now famous statement that "Dans notre soci6et tout
Revue Internationale De Philosophie, Dec 1, 2007
My intention in this article is to interpret Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla through the prism ... more My intention in this article is to interpret Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla through the prism of problematology. I do so because I would like to show how and why the thought of Michel Meyer urgently matters to literary criticism, how and why problematology could possibly offer a ...
On the role of skepticism in Augustin's conversion into Christianity. Study of the evolution of... more On the role of skepticism in Augustin's conversion into Christianity. Study of the evolution of Saint Augustin in his Confessions from classical Platonic position to Christianity via skepticism.
Fabula, La Recherche en Littérature, 2018
Français, followed by English abstract: Find paper here: https://www.fabula.org/colloques/docume... more Français, followed by English abstract: Find paper here: https://www.fabula.org/colloques/document5802.php
La comparaison de deux films tardifs de Buñuel, La Voie Lactée (1969) et Le Fantôme de la Liberté (1974), révèle un principe fondamental quant aux fonctionnements et dysfonctionnements narratifs: à savoir, dans la cognition des films c’est la compréhension des épisodes, mêmes décousus, qui prime sur l’entendement du sens global de l’œuvre. Picaresques et libres dans leurs formes narratives, le premier film fascine mais reste incompréhensible, tandis que le deuxième n’a cesse d’émerveiller, d’où l’intérêt théorique de la comparaison de deux films similaires tournés par le même metteur en scène. Notre étude propose donc une explication conceptuelle pour leur insuccès et succès respectifs. Ainsi, même si le schéma global de La Voie Lactée est-il des plus classiques (source, trajectoire, cible: « road/buddy movie »), le film reste incompréhensible puisque l’entendement de chaque épisode présuppose des savoirs ésotériques de l’histoire de l’Eglise, donc des schémas qui nous sont inaccessibles. En ceci, Buñuel viole une contrainte cognitive de la transaction narrative qu’il saura corriger dans Le Fantôme de la Liberté, un film qui reste globalement énigmatique sur tous les plans, mais les épisodes restent hautement lisibles parce que le spectateur comprend les schémas narratifs qui les constituent. En outre, nous proposons l’hypothèse que dans les échanges naturels de narrations spontanées (la conversation ordinaire) sauter librement de sujet en sujet est plutôt la règle que l’exception, propension communicative fondamentale qui rend Le Fantôme de la Liberté cognitivement facile à « computer », malgré les violences faites aux règles normatives toujours prises pour « naturelles ».
Abstract (Anglais):
Find paper here: https://www.fabula.org/colloques/document5802.php
The comparison of two late Buñuel films, The Milky Way (1969) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974), reveals a fundamental principle with regard to narrative function and dysfunction: namely, in the audience’s cognitive processing the of films, it is the comprehension of episodes, even if they are disjointed, that has primacy over the understanding of a given film as a whole. Picaresque and free in their narrative forms, the first film is fascinating but remains incomprehensible, while the second film delights us evermore, and thus the theoretical relevance of comparing the two Buñuel films. Our study proposes therefore a conceptual, cognitive explanation of the first film’s failure and the second film’s success. Thus, even if the global schema of The Milky is classical (source, trajectory, target: a road and buddy movie), the film remains incomprehensible since the understanding of each episode presupposes esoteric knowledge of church history, schemas that are inaccessible to us. Buñuel has therefore violated in The Milky a cognitive constraint of all narration, a mistake he will soon correct in The Phantom, a film that remains enigmatic as a whole, but highly watchable and enjoyable because, at the episodic level, the spectator understands the narrative schemas. In addition, we advance the hypothesis that the episodic nature of The Phantom mimics ordinary conversation, jumping freely from topic to topic. This topical meandering is the rule rather than the exception in speech, a fundamental cognitive propensity which makes the viewing of The Phantom cognitively easy to “compute,” despite the violence it commits against formal, normative rules of narrative mistaken still today for “natural.”
Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2019
Peak End Rule (Kahneman, 1993; 2011) suggests that the average of the peak and end moments of an ... more Peak End Rule (Kahneman, 1993; 2011) suggests that the average of the peak and end moments of an event disproportionately affect memory and thus perception of the experience. We investigate PER's application to the experience of reading fiction. Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (2012) is an ideal case study because it is commercially popular but, unlike most popular novels, has a distinctly amoral ending. We hypothesize that humans expect moral payoffs at the end of narrative fiction, and that when these expectations are not met (i.e., pain at the end of the experience), as in the case of Gone Girl, readers' perceptions of the story will be influenced by this pain and manifest as disappointment and dislike. We reference existing models in evolutionary psychology, which seek to explain human altruism, and models in cognitive science, which seek to explain patterns in memory and assessment. To quantify disappointment and dislike, we conduct a programmatic corpus linguistic analysis of 40,000 web-scraped Amazon product reviews of Gone Girl, comparing them to reviews of eight other similarly popular novels from the same year. Results show that reader sentiments about Gone Girl, both the overall review ratings and analysis on a sentence-by-sentence basis, are more positive than for the comparison novels. When only reviews mentioning "end" are analyzed, however, the effect reverses, with a similar finding at the more granular level of sentences mentioning "end." These findings support our hypothesis that moral endings, or lack thereof, significantly shape reader perceptions of a novel.
A close reading of Maupassant's Le Horla within the framework of Michel Meyer's Problematology.
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Papers by Jack I Abecassis
Pourquoi le philosophe adore la tyrannie? La philosophie se prêterait-elle à un rapport délirant avec la réalité qui surgit d'un ressentiment profond envers le réel, aboutissant à un rapport caractérisé le plus souvent par la paranoïa et l'hypertrophie du pouvoir du langage? Telles sont les hypothèses que Christian Delacampagne propose dans son oeuvre et que j'analyse de près dans cet article. Notre analyse focalise sur le cas de Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Badiou, et Michel Foucault en tant que les représentants les plus flagrants de ces tendances inhérentes à l'entreprise philosophique. En particulier, c'est le rapport commun de ces philosophes à la notion de droit et à la légalité qui donne lieu à des "dérives" qui forment en fait non l'exception, non un "faux pas", mais l'essentiel des aspects politiques de leurs oeuvres.
La comparaison de deux films tardifs de Buñuel, La Voie Lactée (1969) et Le Fantôme de la Liberté (1974), révèle un principe fondamental quant aux fonctionnements et dysfonctionnements narratifs: à savoir, dans la cognition des films c’est la compréhension des épisodes, mêmes décousus, qui prime sur l’entendement du sens global de l’œuvre. Picaresques et libres dans leurs formes narratives, le premier film fascine mais reste incompréhensible, tandis que le deuxième n’a cesse d’émerveiller, d’où l’intérêt théorique de la comparaison de deux films similaires tournés par le même metteur en scène. Notre étude propose donc une explication conceptuelle pour leur insuccès et succès respectifs. Ainsi, même si le schéma global de La Voie Lactée est-il des plus classiques (source, trajectoire, cible: « road/buddy movie »), le film reste incompréhensible puisque l’entendement de chaque épisode présuppose des savoirs ésotériques de l’histoire de l’Eglise, donc des schémas qui nous sont inaccessibles. En ceci, Buñuel viole une contrainte cognitive de la transaction narrative qu’il saura corriger dans Le Fantôme de la Liberté, un film qui reste globalement énigmatique sur tous les plans, mais les épisodes restent hautement lisibles parce que le spectateur comprend les schémas narratifs qui les constituent. En outre, nous proposons l’hypothèse que dans les échanges naturels de narrations spontanées (la conversation ordinaire) sauter librement de sujet en sujet est plutôt la règle que l’exception, propension communicative fondamentale qui rend Le Fantôme de la Liberté cognitivement facile à « computer », malgré les violences faites aux règles normatives toujours prises pour « naturelles ».
Abstract (Anglais):
Find paper here: https://www.fabula.org/colloques/document5802.php
The comparison of two late Buñuel films, The Milky Way (1969) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974), reveals a fundamental principle with regard to narrative function and dysfunction: namely, in the audience’s cognitive processing the of films, it is the comprehension of episodes, even if they are disjointed, that has primacy over the understanding of a given film as a whole. Picaresque and free in their narrative forms, the first film is fascinating but remains incomprehensible, while the second film delights us evermore, and thus the theoretical relevance of comparing the two Buñuel films. Our study proposes therefore a conceptual, cognitive explanation of the first film’s failure and the second film’s success. Thus, even if the global schema of The Milky is classical (source, trajectory, target: a road and buddy movie), the film remains incomprehensible since the understanding of each episode presupposes esoteric knowledge of church history, schemas that are inaccessible to us. Buñuel has therefore violated in The Milky a cognitive constraint of all narration, a mistake he will soon correct in The Phantom, a film that remains enigmatic as a whole, but highly watchable and enjoyable because, at the episodic level, the spectator understands the narrative schemas. In addition, we advance the hypothesis that the episodic nature of The Phantom mimics ordinary conversation, jumping freely from topic to topic. This topical meandering is the rule rather than the exception in speech, a fundamental cognitive propensity which makes the viewing of The Phantom cognitively easy to “compute,” despite the violence it commits against formal, normative rules of narrative mistaken still today for “natural.”
Pourquoi le philosophe adore la tyrannie? La philosophie se prêterait-elle à un rapport délirant avec la réalité qui surgit d'un ressentiment profond envers le réel, aboutissant à un rapport caractérisé le plus souvent par la paranoïa et l'hypertrophie du pouvoir du langage? Telles sont les hypothèses que Christian Delacampagne propose dans son oeuvre et que j'analyse de près dans cet article. Notre analyse focalise sur le cas de Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Badiou, et Michel Foucault en tant que les représentants les plus flagrants de ces tendances inhérentes à l'entreprise philosophique. En particulier, c'est le rapport commun de ces philosophes à la notion de droit et à la légalité qui donne lieu à des "dérives" qui forment en fait non l'exception, non un "faux pas", mais l'essentiel des aspects politiques de leurs oeuvres.
La comparaison de deux films tardifs de Buñuel, La Voie Lactée (1969) et Le Fantôme de la Liberté (1974), révèle un principe fondamental quant aux fonctionnements et dysfonctionnements narratifs: à savoir, dans la cognition des films c’est la compréhension des épisodes, mêmes décousus, qui prime sur l’entendement du sens global de l’œuvre. Picaresques et libres dans leurs formes narratives, le premier film fascine mais reste incompréhensible, tandis que le deuxième n’a cesse d’émerveiller, d’où l’intérêt théorique de la comparaison de deux films similaires tournés par le même metteur en scène. Notre étude propose donc une explication conceptuelle pour leur insuccès et succès respectifs. Ainsi, même si le schéma global de La Voie Lactée est-il des plus classiques (source, trajectoire, cible: « road/buddy movie »), le film reste incompréhensible puisque l’entendement de chaque épisode présuppose des savoirs ésotériques de l’histoire de l’Eglise, donc des schémas qui nous sont inaccessibles. En ceci, Buñuel viole une contrainte cognitive de la transaction narrative qu’il saura corriger dans Le Fantôme de la Liberté, un film qui reste globalement énigmatique sur tous les plans, mais les épisodes restent hautement lisibles parce que le spectateur comprend les schémas narratifs qui les constituent. En outre, nous proposons l’hypothèse que dans les échanges naturels de narrations spontanées (la conversation ordinaire) sauter librement de sujet en sujet est plutôt la règle que l’exception, propension communicative fondamentale qui rend Le Fantôme de la Liberté cognitivement facile à « computer », malgré les violences faites aux règles normatives toujours prises pour « naturelles ».
Abstract (Anglais):
Find paper here: https://www.fabula.org/colloques/document5802.php
The comparison of two late Buñuel films, The Milky Way (1969) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974), reveals a fundamental principle with regard to narrative function and dysfunction: namely, in the audience’s cognitive processing the of films, it is the comprehension of episodes, even if they are disjointed, that has primacy over the understanding of a given film as a whole. Picaresque and free in their narrative forms, the first film is fascinating but remains incomprehensible, while the second film delights us evermore, and thus the theoretical relevance of comparing the two Buñuel films. Our study proposes therefore a conceptual, cognitive explanation of the first film’s failure and the second film’s success. Thus, even if the global schema of The Milky is classical (source, trajectory, target: a road and buddy movie), the film remains incomprehensible since the understanding of each episode presupposes esoteric knowledge of church history, schemas that are inaccessible to us. Buñuel has therefore violated in The Milky a cognitive constraint of all narration, a mistake he will soon correct in The Phantom, a film that remains enigmatic as a whole, but highly watchable and enjoyable because, at the episodic level, the spectator understands the narrative schemas. In addition, we advance the hypothesis that the episodic nature of The Phantom mimics ordinary conversation, jumping freely from topic to topic. This topical meandering is the rule rather than the exception in speech, a fundamental cognitive propensity which makes the viewing of The Phantom cognitively easy to “compute,” despite the violence it commits against formal, normative rules of narrative mistaken still today for “natural.”
Abstract:
This paper explores the surprising convergence between Blaise Pascal's philosophical anthropology and Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, which is at heart much more Pascalian than neo-Marxist. A secondary argument here, using Bourdieu's Pascalian description of our core intellectual ethos, also addresses the reasons for the marginalization of Pascal with in the academic study of the French Classical period. Pascal posited an anti-humanism, exemplified in the abyssal discontinuity among the three orders (body, mind, charity), and, above all, by the humiliating limitations he places on human rational agency. Pascal thus collapses the mind/body distinction and replaces it with a far more subtle and dynamic notion of La Machine and L'AUTOMATE, the socialized body of the Common Man as a site of truth in a fallen world. Like Bourdieu late in the twentieth century, Pascal also operates a rehabilitation of the world of appearances, the world of Das Man. Pascal and Bourdieu both attack the MO of the Intellectual Stance: the notion that the intellectual can construct himself or herself as a transcendental subject whose thoughts and discourses hold sway and are transitive with the social and historical world on the basis of pure thought. Bourdieu's analysis of the intellectual overinvestment in the power of reason and the magical power of discourse, the perennial intellectual fantasy of la superbe philosophique, also explains better than any other factor why Pascal's thought is quarantined and largely disregarded in the study of the French 17th Century as well as why it cannot but be this way.
La comparaison de deux films tardifs de Buñuel, La Voie Lactée (1969) et Le Fantôme de la Liberté (1974), révèle un principe fondamental quant aux fonctionnements et dysfonctionnements narratifs: à savoir, dans la cognition des films c’est la compréhension des épisodes, mêmes décousus, qui prime sur l’entendement du sens global de l’œuvre. Picaresques et libres dans leurs formes narratives, le premier film fascine mais reste incompréhensible, tandis que le deuxième n’a cesse d’émerveiller, d’où l’intérêt théorique de la comparaison de deux films similaires tournés par le même metteur en scène. Notre étude propose donc une explication conceptuelle pour leur insuccès et succès respectifs. Ainsi, même si le schéma global de La Voie Lactée est-il des plus classiques (source, trajectoire, cible: « road/buddy movie »), le film reste incompréhensible puisque l’entendement de chaque épisode présuppose des savoirs ésotériques de l’histoire de l’Eglise, donc des schémas qui nous sont inaccessibles. En ceci, Buñuel viole une contrainte cognitive de la transaction narrative qu’il saura corriger dans Le Fantôme de la Liberté, un film qui reste globalement énigmatique sur tous les plans, mais les épisodes restent hautement lisibles parce que le spectateur comprend les schémas narratifs qui les constituent. En outre, nous proposons l’hypothèse que dans les échanges naturels de narrations spontanées (la conversation ordinaire) sauter librement de sujet en sujet est plutôt la règle que l’exception, propension communicative fondamentale qui rend Le Fantôme de la Liberté cognitivement facile à « computer », malgré les violences faites aux règles normatives toujours prises pour « naturelles ».
Abstract (Anglais):
The comparison of two late Buñuel films, The Milky Way (1969) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974), reveals a fundamental principle with regard to narrative function and dysfunction: namely, in the audience’s cognitive processing the of films, it is the comprehension of episodes, even if they are disjointed, that has primacy over the understanding of a given film as a whole. Picaresque and free in their narrative forms, the first film is fascinating but remains incomprehensible, while the second film delights us evermore, and thus the theoretical relevance of comparing the two Buñuel films. Our study proposes therefore a conceptual, cognitive explanation of the first film’s failure and the second film’s success. Thus, even if the global schema of The Milky is classical (source, trajectory, target: a road and buddy movie), the film remains incomprehensible since the understanding of each episode presupposes esoteric knowledge of church history, schemas that are inaccessible to us. Buñuel has therefore violated in The Milky a cognitive constraint of all narration, a mistake he will soon correct in The Phantom, a film that remains enigmatic as a whole, but highly watchable and enjoyable because, at the episodic level, the spectator understands the narrative schemas. In addition, we advance the hypothesis that the episodic nature of The Phantom mimics ordinary conversation, jumping freely from topic to topic. This topical meandering is the rule rather than the exception in speech, a fundamental cognitive propensity which makes the viewing of The Phantom cognitively easy to “compute,” despite the violence it commits against formal, normative rules of narrative mistaken still today for “natural.”
Mots Clés:
Buñuel, Fantôme de la Liberté, La Voie Lactée, narratologie cognitive du cinéma, schémas narratifs, cinéma surréaliste, représentation du hasard, narration et identification, picaresque espagnole et cinéma, conversational topic selection.