Entretiens et Textes inédits

Clifford Armion, Susan Neiman - publié le 20/01/2014

I think we’re very confused about the subject of heroism. I began to get interested in the subject when I realised that we are actually at a historical cesure since the end of the Second World War. It used to be the case although there were many different conceptions of heroism. It used to be unquestioned that everyone wanted to be a hero, and everybody wanted to be a better hero than the next person. What has happened in the last fifty years or so is that the notion of the hero has in many (...)

Clifford Armion, Barbie Zelizer - publié le 06/01/2014

Barbie Zelizer is a Professor of Communication, and holds the Raymond Williams Chair of Communication and is Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. A former journalist, Professor Zelizer's work focuses on the cultural dimensions of journalism, with a specific interest in journalistic authority, collective memory, and journalistic images in times of crisis and war. She also works on the impact of (...)

Ian Buruma - publié le 16/12/2013

"When I was at primary school in the Netherlands in the late 1950s and early 1960s, history was still taught as a story of great men, kings, generals, national heroes, and of course great villains, mostly foreigners. In our case, this meant a succession of Williams of Orange, Admiral Tromp, Philip II, the Duke of Alva, Napoleon, Hitler, and so on."

Clifford Armion, Doug Saunders - publié le 05/12/2013

Migration almost always follows the same pattern. It doesn’t go from one country to another country. It goes from a cluster of villages or a sub-rural region to specific urban neighbourhoods. Those urban neighbourhoods which are usually low-income, with low housing cost, serve as the bottom rung of the ladder for people arriving in a new country.

Siddhartha Deb - publié le 03/12/2013

One afternoon a few years ago, while on my way back from interviewing some factory workers, I was asked by a very neatly dressed young man if I had read the economist Amartya Sen’s work on famine. He’d first wanted to know if I could get him a job, then if I could help him immigrate to the United States, but when he realized that neither was a possibility, he began a discussion of Sen’s work. Democracies don’t have famines, Sen has written, whereas authoritarian regimes do; hence the (...)

David Vann - publié le 07/10/2013

" Of the twenty or so countries I’ve visited for book launches and interviews, France is the best home for a book, and the United States is one of the worst."

Goldie Goldbloom - publié le 27/09/2013

"Chekhov is well known for his impartial observations of his characters and for his grasp of “realism”. When I first read his description of the lady with the little dog, I discovered that she is “a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a beret.”"

Kate O'riordan - publié le 17/09/2013

A Londoner by adoption, Kate O’Riordan grew up in the small city of Bantry on the west coast of Ireland. With ((Le Garçon dans la lune)), published in 2008 and ((Pierres de mémoire)), in 2009, O’Riordan signed two new remarkable opuses in which she questions family relationships. A novelist and short-story writer, Kate O’Riordan also writes for the cinema and continues to confirm her legitimate place among Irish authors who count. She came to the Villa Gillet to take part in a discussion (...)

Keith Scribner - publié le 27/08/2013

"In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech William Faulkner famously said that all real meaning in fiction comes from the human heart in conflict with itself. As a novelist I’m compelled by the internal conflicts inherent in the stories we tell ourselves in order to live and how those stories come to define us, how they allow us to justify our actions and possibly delude ourselves about who we are."

Hugo Hamilton - publié le 24/06/2013

"We write in order to find out where we are and what our story is. It is clear to me as a writer that nothing is made up. There is no such thing really as fiction, only events that have already happened in one way or another happening again in more and more fantastic ways through the imagination."

Hugo Hamilton, Kouadio N'Duessan - publié le 10/06/2013

"Somebody mentioned the word confusion. That is probably the word that describes my childhood most clearly. It was a confusion of languages, confusion between the inside of the house and the outside of the house, confusion between my father’s idealism and my mother’s memories. There’s always been confusion in my life."

Clifford Armion, A.S. Byatt - publié le 03/06/2013

A.S. Byatt took part in the seventh edition of the Assises Internationales du Roman, organised by the Villa Gillet and Le Monde. She answered our questions on her latest novel, ((Ragnarok)).

Joan Tronto - publié le 15/03/2013

"In the United States, care became a focus of feminist research in the early 1980s. As “second wave” feminists realized that mere formal equality was insufficient, they began to think more deeply about what was required for the genuine inclusion of women."

Jeffrey Rosen - publié le 11/03/2013

"I was at a conference at Google not long ago, and the head of public policy, said he expected that before long, Google and Facebook will be asked to post online live feeds to all the public and private surveillance cameras in the world, including mobile cameras mounted on drones. Imagine that Facebook responds to public pressure and decides to post live feeds, so they can be searched online, as well as archiving the video in the digital cloud."

Eric Klinenberg - publié le 19/02/2013

"About five years ago I started working on a book that I planned to call ALONE IN AMERICA. My original idea was to write a book that would sound an alarm about a disturbing trend: the unprecedented rise of living alone. I was motivated by my belief that the rise of living alone is a profound social change – the greatest change of the past 60 years that we have failed to name or identify."

Simon Critchley - publié le 15/02/2013

"What is it that makes human beings happy? In a word, ((bread)). And here we return to Jesus’ answers to the Devil’s desert temptations. In refusing to transform miraculously the stones into loaves, Jesus rejected bread for the sake of freedom, for the bread of heaven."

Wendy Brown - publié le 11/02/2013

Neoliberalism, of course, is not unified or constant but differs across its geographical instantiations and transmogrifies over time. In the Euro Atlantic world today, two different and quite contingent forces are giving neoliberalism a new shape: on the one hand, financialization is configuring states, firms, associations and subjects in terms of capital valuation or credit worthiness (as opposed to productivity, efficiency, cost-benefit or interest maximization), and on the other hand, (...)

Craig Calhoun - publié le 08/02/2013

"Secularism has long been seen as a solution to problems of religion. Yet today, secularism (laïcité) itself is a political problem alongside religion. In some versions, secularism has become an obstacle to political and social projects potentially shared among members of different religions and the non-religious."

Cécile Guilbert - publié le 22/01/2013

"To enter into an intensive care unit is, first of all, to be assailed, in every sense of the word, by a jumble of prosaic perceptions that distill the hospital’s quotidian reality: raw fluorescent lights, smells of disinfectant and coffee, the humming of electrical equipment, carts full of soiled linens, the waltz of nurses, etc. Then very quickly, the patient’s isolated room signals your entrance into another physical dimension—one that is troubling in three ways."

Pierre Zaoui - publié le 22/01/2013

"The idea that novels, theater, or poetry often help us live, that they help us feel cleansed or feel stronger, more energized, more alive, or that they at least help us survive by giving us the boost we need to hang on a little longer, is not simply a constant topos of literature, be it western, eastern, or universal."

Mathieu Potte-bonneville - publié le 21/01/2013

"First interpretation : « There is no power » can be understood as « there is no origin, or source, or substance, that one can reach or possess, in order to command the others and to be obeyed by them »."

Claude Arnaud - publié le 18/01/2013

"It is the topic par excellence, the enigma that is impossible to solve. This puppet that we call somewhat pompously “The Self,” what is it in the end? An actor who resigns himself, around the age of thirty, to play only one role, or a born clown who struggles to understand himself, having changed so often?"

Gwenaëlle Aubry - publié le 15/01/2013

"The writing project came as the answer to a question that can, in retrospect, be formulated as follows: How can we grieve for a melancholy person, a person who was grieving himself? How can we get to grips with the absence of someone who was never really present?"

Mira Bartók - publié le 15/01/2013

"Identity and family legacy are partially formed by the family “memory narrative”—a family member, usually our mother or father, tells us stories about what happened before we were born or when we were too young to remember momentous events. But what happens when that narrator in the family is mentally ill, or a compulsive liar?"

Thierry Hoquet - publié le 04/01/2013

"The human species is [...] therefore one that does not have an unambiguous definition. Just as its nature is not given once and for all, its definition is not easily embraced or summarized. Humans are always working, and we know that it is through this work that humanity realizes itself or loses itself. Whatever the case, for us, we need to live—that is, to face the perils of incarnation."

Chris Kraus - publié le 17/12/2012

What is particular about women’s depiction of sex and sexuality and why are these portrayals held to different social and aesthetic standards than those by men?

Wendy Delorme - publié le 11/12/2012

Impressions of women’s writing, women artists, and of all those who create with a vagina, without necessarily using it.

Lynne Tillman - publié le 11/12/2012

"The term “woman” is a construction. The French know well that Simone DeBeauvoir wrote, way back in the 1940s, in The Second Sex, “Woman is not born, she is made.”"

Caroline Heinrich - publié le 20/11/2012

"What do you think of when you bite into a hamburger? Mmm, how delicious? Oh boy, this is bad for me? Or: I hope I won’t make a mess. Or perhaps you don’t want to think about anything at all? Maybe you are just thinking, “What a crazy question!”? Or are you trying to figure out what this crazy question has to do with philosophy and, particularly, with Baudrillard’s thought?"

Nick Flynn - publié le 27/08/2012

"During the years he was homeless my father occupied the space of outcast, though he’d already been a misfit for years, simply by declaring himself a poet. He had also spent time in federal prison, for robbing banks — not like Bonnie and Clyde, he didn’t use a gun, he merely forged checks — a felony which limits your options even after you serve your time."