Michel de Certeau

More than two decades have passed since Chicago published the first volume of this groundbreaking work in the Religion and Postmodernism series. It quickly became influential across a wide range of disciplines and helped to make the tools of poststructuralist thought available to religious studies and theology, especially in the areas of late medieval and early modern mysticism. Though the second volume remained in fragments at the time of his death, Michel de Certeau had the foresight to leave his literary executor detailed instructions for its completion, which formed the basis for the present work. Together, both volumes solidify Certeau's place as a touchstone of twentieth-century literature and philosophy, and continue his exploration of the paradoxes of historiography; the construction of social reality through practice, testimony, and belief; the theorization of speech in angelology and glossolalia; and the interplay of prose and poetry in discourses of the ineffable. This book will be of vital interest to scholars in religious studies, theology, philosophy, history, and literature.

Ranskalaistutkijoiden klassikko, jossa yhden korttelin kuvaus ja tavallisten naisten haastattelut kasvavat panoraamaksi länsimaisen ihmisen arjesta. Kulutusyhteiskunnan tasapäistävyyden lyö laudalta ainoastaan tavallisen ihmisen neuvokkuus. Michel de Certeaun työtoverien Luce Giardin ja Pierre Mayolin empiirisiin tutkimuksiin perustuva Arkipäivän kekseliäisyys 2 kartoittaa ihmisten tapoja ottaa asuinalueensa, asuntonsa ja ruuanlaittotapansa omikseen. Yksilöllä on aina voima uudistaa tavanmukaisimpiakin eleitä. Perinpohjaista haastatteluaineistoa hyödyntävä Arkipäivän kekseliäisyys 2 kertoo, miten monisyinen kulttuuri arkisimpiinkin toimiin piiloutuu. Se selostaa, millaisin konstein ihmiset asettuvat taloksi ympäröivään yhteiskuntaan, millaisin teoin he massakulttuurilta saamansa luomukset yksilöllistävät. Se osoittaa, että ihmiset ovat oman elämänsä parhaita asiantuntijoita.

Televisiota katseleva ja marketissa maleksiva kansalainen ei ole mikään passiivinen kuluttaja vaan kulttuurin luoja, osoittaa Michel de Certeau. Ihmiselämä ei ole pelkkä markkinoinnin, populismin ja teknokratian temmellyskenttä, eivätkä ihmiset ole sen paremmin ehdollistettuja kuluttajia kuin tottelevaista laumaakaan. He ottavat haltuun, ymmärtävät väärin ja panevat risaiseksi täysin tahallaan. Massoittamisen takaa paljastuu kokonainen omaehtoisten kulttuurimuotojen kirjo. Kulttuurikonservatiivin katsannossa kansa näyttää laumalta höynäytettäviä hölmöjä. Se ei ymmärrä omaa etuaan, se äänestää väärin ja se pysyy rauhassa leivällä ja sirkushuveilla. Maailmanparantajan katsannossa kansa näyttää joukolta paarustavia uhreja. Sitä käytetään hyväksi, sen tietoisuus hämärretään ja se pamputetaan tottelevaiseksi. Yhteistä näkemyksille on kansan mieltäminen tahdottomaksi massaksi, jota poliitikot, teknokraatit ja markkinamiehet vetävät ja vedättävät. Mutta arkipäivän tutkimuksen klassikoksi noussut Arkipäivän kekseliäisyys osoittaa, että tavallisella ihmisellä on konstinsa pärjätä. Kadunmies tai -nainen ottaa televisio-ohjelmat ja käyttäytymiskoodit vastaan, mutta käyttää niitä omiin tarkoituksiinsa.

In this incisive book, Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

It is August 18, 1634. Father Urbain Grandier, convicted of sorcery that led to the demonic possession of the Ursuline nuns of provincial Loudun in France, confesses his sins on the porch of the church of Saint-Pierre, then perishes in flames lit by his own exorcists. A dramatic tale that has inspired many artistic retellings, including a novel by Aldous Huxley and in incendiary film by Ken Russell, the story of the possession at Loudun here receives a compelling analysis from the renowned Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau. Interweaving substantial excerpts from primary historical documents with fascinating commentary, de Certeau shows how the plague of sorceries and possessions in France that climaxed in the events at Loudun both revealed the deepest fears of a society in traumatic flux and accelerated its transformation. In this tour de force of psychological history, de Certeau brings to vivid life a people torn between the decline of centralized religious authority and the rise of science and reason, wracked by violent anxiety over what or whom to believe.

It is August 18, 1634. Father Urbain Grandier, convicted of sorcery that led to the demonic possession of the Ursuline nuns of provincial Loudun in France, confesses his sins on the porch of the church of Saint-Pierre, then perishes in flames lit by his own exorcists. A dramatic tale that has inspired many artistic retellings, including a novel by Aldous Huxley and in incendiary film by Ken Russell, the story of the possession at Loudun here receives a compelling analysis from the renowned Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau. Interweaving substantial excerpts from primary historical documents with fascinating commentary, de Certeau shows how the plague of sorceries and possessions in France that climaxed in the events at Loudun both revealed the deepest fears of a society in traumatic flux and accelerated its transformation. In this tour de force of psychological history, de Certeau brings to vivid life a people torn between the decline of centralized religious authority and the rise of science and reason, wracked by violent anxiety over what or whom to believe.

To remain unconsumed by consumer society—this was the goal, pursued through a world of subtle and practical means, that beckoned throughout the first volume of The Practice of Everyday Life. The second volume of the work delves even deeper than did the first into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make living a subversive art. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol develop a social history of "making do" based on microhistories that move from the private sphere (of dwelling, cooking, and homemaking) to the public (the experience of living in a neighborhood). A series of interviews—mostly with women—allows us to follow the subjects' individual routines, composed of the habits, constraints, and inventive strategies by which the speakers negotiate daily life. Through these accounts the speakers, "ordinary" people all, are revealed to be anything but passive consumers. Amid these experiences and voices, the ephemeral inventions of the "obscure heroes" of the everyday, we watch the art of making do become the art of living. This long-awaited second volume of de Certeau's masterwork, updated and revised in this first English edition, completes the picture begun in volume 1, drawing to the last detail the collective practices that define the texture, substance, and importance of the everyday. Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) wrote numerous books that have been translated into English, including Heterologies (1986), The Capture of Speech (1998), and Culture in the Plural (1998), all published by Minnesota. Luce Giard is senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and is affiliated with the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She is visiting professor of history and history of science at the University of California, San Diego. Pierre Mayol is a researcher in the French Ministry of Culture in Paris. Timothy J. Tomasik is a freelance translator pursuing a Ph. D. in French literature at Harvard University.

Since his death in 1986, Michel de Certeau has come to be seen as a founding figure in cultural studies. In this translation of "La Culture au Pluriel", de Certeau anticipates current debates surrounding multiculturalism and social diversity, providing a critique of identity politics.

The culmination of de Certeau's lifelong engagement with the human sciences, this volume is both an analysis of Christian mysticism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and an application of this influential scholar's transdisciplinary historiography.

A leading intellectual member of France's Freudian school, Michel de Certeau combined principles from the disciplines of religion, history, and psychoanalysis in order to redefine historiography and rethink the categories of history. In The Writing of History, de Certeau examines the West's changing conceptions of the very role and nature of history itself, from the seventeenth-century attempts to formulate a "history of man" to Freud's Moses and Monotheism with which de Certeau interprets historical practice as a function of mankind's feelings of loss, mourning, and absence. Exhaustively researched and stunningly innovative, The Writing of History is a crucial introduction to de Certeau's work and is destined to become a classic of modern thought.