Michel de Certeau

Michel Jean Emmanuel de La Barge de Certeau (; 17 May 1925 – 9 January 1986) was a French Jesuit Catholic priest and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences as well as hermeneutics, semiotics, ethnology, and religion. He was known as a philosopher of everyday life and was widely regarded as a historian with interests ranging from travelogues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in The Mystic Fable (1982) to contemporary urban life in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980).

He participated in major French intellectual movements including ressourcement theology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Greimasian semiotics, and nouvelle histoire. He first came to public prominence with contemporary articles on the French May 68 protests that were collected in The Capture of Speech (1968).

Early life and education

Michel Jean Emmanuel de La Barge de Certeau was born on 17 May 1925 in Chambéry, Savoie to a provincial aristocratic family. De Certeau's education was eclectic, following the medieval tradition of peregrinatio academica.

From fall 1944 to spring 1950, he pursued a bachelor's degree in classics and philosophy at the University of Grenoble, having also attended courses in Paris at the Collège de France. performance studies, and law. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. The book was the product of a long term research project running from 1974 to 1978.

According to de Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unselfconscious. De Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture”, nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, he attempts to outline the way individuals unselfconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts to futurology. The Practice of Everyday Life distinguishes strategy and tactics. De Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power who are the "producers", while individuals are "consumers" or "poachers," acting in accordance with, or against, environments defined by strategies by using "tactics". These particular themes of the book became especially influential in English-language reception of de Certeau, most notably through their influence on media scholars John Fiske and Henry Jenkins.

According to Andrew Blauvelt, who relies on the work of de Certeau in his essay on design and everyday life:

<blockquote>De Certeau's investigations into the realm of routine practices, or the "arts of doing" such as walking, talking, reading, dwelling, and cooking, were guided by his belief that despite repressive aspects of modern society, there exists an element of creative resistance to these structures enacted by ordinary people. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau outlines an important critical distinction between strategies and tactics in this battle of repression and expression. According to him, strategies are used by those within organizational power structures, whether small or large, such as the state or municipality, the corporation or the proprietor, a scientific enterprise or the scientist. Strategies are deployed against some external entity to institute a set of relations for official or proper ends, whether adversaries, competitors, clients, customers, or simply subjects. Tactics, on the other hand, are employed by those who are subjugated. By their very nature tactics are defensive and opportunistic, used in more limited ways and seized momentarily within spaces, both physical and psychological, produced and governed by more powerful strategic relations.</blockquote>

The Writing of History

De Certeau's work The Writing of History, first published in French as L'Écriture de l'histoire in 1975 and then translated into English and published in 1988 in English after his death, deals with the relationship between history and religion. He links the history of writing history to the legitimization of political power and asserts that "Western" traditions of history involve using the act of writing as a tool of colonialism, writing their own histories while un-writing the embodied traditions of native peoples. The book was written following travel and teaching in Jesuit university networks in Latin America beginning 1967.

Legacy

A multidisciplinarian, de Certeau wrote ground-breaking studies in fields as diverse as mysticism, the act of faith, cultural dynamics in contemporary society, and historiography as an intellectual practice. His impact continues unabated, with new volumes appearing regularly, and perhaps surprisingly his reputation is growing even more rapidly in English and German-speaking countries and the Mediterranean than in his native France. This strong and growing interest in academia is not matched in the public sphere, however, partly due to his being considered a "difficult" author because of his highly personal style which makes translation difficult, and partly due to the declining status of French in the world generally. Nevertheless, portions of his prolific output have been translated into a dozen languages.

Pope Francis, a fellow Jesuit, made reference to his works in the 2024 encyclical letter Dilexit nos. James C. Scott, an American political scientist and anthropologist known for his works on political anarchism and peasant resistance, has expressed debts to de Certeau in interviews and written works. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur was engaged in debate on the philosophy of time with de Certeau at the time of de Certeau's death in 1986, and he drew on that influence in his Time and Narrative (Vol 3, 1985) and later work.

Bibliography

In French

La prise de parole, pour une nouvelle culture. Desclée de Brouwer. 1968
La Possession de Loudun. Gallimard. 1970.
La Culture au Pluriel. Union Générale d'Editions, 1974.
L'Ecriture de l'Histoire. Editions Gallimard. 1975.
With Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel. Une Politique de la Langue : La Révolution Française et les Patois, l'enquête de Grégoire. Gallimard. 1975.
L'Invention du Quotidien. Vol. 1, Arts de Faire. Union générale d'éditions 10-18. 1980.
La Fable Mystique. vol. 1, XVIe-XVIIe Siècle. Editions Gallimard. 1982.
Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction. Editions Gallimard. 1987. (Rev.ed. 2002)
La Faiblesse de Croire. Edited by Luce Giard. Seuil. 1987.

In English

The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. University of California Press. 1984.
Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press. 1986.
The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. Columbia University Press. 1988.
The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated by Michael B. Smith. University of Chicago Press. 1995. .
With Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol. The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 2, Living and Cooking. Translated by Timothy J. Tomasik. University of Minnesota Press. 1998.
The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings. Translated by Tom Conley. University of Minnesota Press. 1997.
Culture in the Plural. Translated by Tom Conley. University of Minnesota Press. 1997.
The Certeau Reader. Edited by Graham Ward. Blackwell Publishers. 1999.
The Possession at Loudun. Translated by Michael B. Smith. University of Chicago Press. 2000. .
The Mystic Fable, Volume Two: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated by Michael B. Smith. University of Chicago Press. 2015. .

Michel de Certeau

Early life and education

The Writing of History

Legacy

Bibliography

See also

References

Sources

Further reading