This link has been bookmarked by 13 people . It was first bookmarked on 14 May 2008, by Nathan Rein.
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09 Apr 10
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In contrast to those who described societies by evoking what he called their homogeneities and hegemonies—what unified and controlled them—Certeau wanted to identify the creative and disruptive presence of "the other"—the outsider, the stranger, the alien, the subversive, the radically different—in systems of power and thought.
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Power was the key concept in Foucault's understanding of social relations and communication; power inhered in central authorities—monarchs, medical experts, priests—and it reproduced its message in the individual mind and conscience. The process was unrelenting, enhancing discipline, control, and punishment, and meeting little resistance over time.
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In Certeau's conception, God's presence could only be "imperfect and ephemeral"—but it could be recognized if one understood how human feelings shifted from minute to minute and human beings had to struggle for words to capture experience fully. Further, all religious experience, no matter how solitary, is suffused with the presence of others, whether in the history one has absorbed or in the language in which one thinks and prays.
Certeau found that this quest was lived out in the spiritual diary of the early Jesuit Pierre Favre, written as he traveled around Europe preaching in the 1540s and seeking signs of God's love within himself.
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Translated from Latin and Spanish into French and edited by Certeau for his doctoral dissertation, Favre's interior pilgrimage exemplified for Certeau "the feeling of mystery which emerges in experience."[4] But the mystery did not go far enough for Certeau. He was drawn to the "wild mystics," the mystiques sauvages, of the seventeenth century, especially the Jesuit Jean-Joseph Surin, who became, said Certeau, his "companion," "the ghost who haunted his life."
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For almost twenty years, he suffered and remained silent in a Jesuit sickroom. In 1654 he emerged and became an impassioned writer on the mystic quest: "I would like the voice of a trumpet, a pen of bronze,"
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His L'Invention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life) of 1980 applied this questioning to the world beyond the Church, writing of the ways that ordinary human behavior resisted institutional control. Here he was taking issue with Michel Foucault.
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But Certeau commented:
If it is true that the grid of "discipline" is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures...manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them.
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People walk their own way through the grid of city streets, zigzagging, slowing down, preferring streets with certain names, making turns and detours, their own "walking rhetoric." People read in ways that escape the social hierarchy and "imposed system" of written texts: they read in all kinds of places from libraries to toilets. They read with their own rhythms and interruptions, thinking or daydreaming; they read making gestures and sounds, stretching, "a wild orchestration of the body," and end up with their own ideas about the book. "These procedures and ruses...compose the network of an antidiscipline."
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14 Jul 09
Andrew LogemannNatalie Zemon Davis's article in The New York Review of Books, 5/18/2008
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30 May 09
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20 May 08
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14 May 08
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08 May 08
Peter Hanley"when Certeau was gaining prominence…he was original in the multiple ways he conceived figures of the "other" and how they functioned in many settings. He coined the term "heterologies" to describe disciplines in which we examine ourselves in relation t
deCerteau Jenkins identity philosophy mla-Fandom Kulturcide language otherness semiotics critique cr sociology radicalGeography
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06 May 08
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25 Apr 08
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