James Sacré, a writing of life gesture

In French contemporary poetry, some poets have wished to return to —and so to increase the value of— the enunciation of the poetic subject. In such poetic scenario, the poet James Sacré exemplifies a new approach that tries to re-establish contact with the expression of the poetic subject, albeit always avoiding the pitfalls of excessive ornamentation and poetic effusiveness. Based on the use of simple language, this approach attaches value to legibility and does not hesitate to tap into the most banal or dullest aspects of reality. This article studies one of the procedures used by the poet to reestablish the expression of the poetic subject. This procedure seeks to rewrite life gestures—a technique that evinces an unavoidable relationship between life and poetic words in the work of James Sacré.

‘Close as a kiss’: Gyn/Affection in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

Margaret Atwood’s novella The Penelopiad (2005) seemingly celebrates Penelope’s agency in opposition to Homer’s myth in The Odyssey. However, the twelve murdered maids steal the book to suggest the possibility of what Janice Raymond calls gyn/affection, a female bonding based on the logic of emotion that, in Atwood’s revision, verges on Kristevan abjection, the sinister and the fantastic, and serves a cathartic effect not only in the maids but also in the reader. This essay aims to question the generally accepted empowerment of Atwood’s Penelope and celebrates the murdered maids as the locus of emotion, where marginal aspects of gender and class merge to weave a powerful metaphorical tapestry of popular and traditionally feminized literary genres that, in plunging into and embracing the semiotic realm, ultimately solidify into an eclectic but compact alternative tradition of women’s writing and myth-making.

Hybrid philosophy and rational vitalism in Canguilhem and Ortega y Gasset

This paper explores the problem of the synthesis between vitalism and rationalism, in contemporary philosophy. With this aim, we compare the intellectual careers of Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) and José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). We contrast their conceptions of philosophy as “hybrid” knowledge, closely related to science, as well as their points of view on Vitalism, anthropology, the technique and the perspectivism. To avoid that comparison is purely abstract and ahistorical, we use the method of the sociology of philosophy. This forces us to locate both paths in their respective philosophical fields and generational units, also according to his social background and professional career.