Call for Papers 

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Fifth issue

The Revue d’histoire culturelle (XVIIIe-XXIe siècles) is pleased to launch a call for papers for its fifth issue. The editors of this issue devoted to “psychoanalysis and cultural history: exchanges and confrontation” are Paul-Laurent Assoun (psychoanalyst and philosopher), Evelyne Cohen (Professor emeritus at the ENSSIB-University of Lyon) and Pascale Goetschel (Professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). The Revue d’histoire culturelle (XVIIIe-XXIe siècles) publishes articles in French and English.

This dossier of the Revue d’histoire culturelle (XVIIIe-XXIe siècles) aims to present in the most explicit and concrete way possible the bridges between human and social sciences, cultural history and psychoanalysis. It relies on a preliminary conception: the recourse to the hypothesis of the unconscious does not consist in psychologizing social and cultural facts but in releasing the unconscious side of collective facts. Beyond that, the relations between subject, symbols and representations represent a real challenge for human and social sciences.

The dossier seeks to question the possible links between cultural history understood as social history of representations and psychoanalytical knowledge insofar as it theorizes unconscious processes. How can historians use the psychoanalytical theoretical apparatus as a tool? To what extent does history, in particular history of cultural objects, represents a material for psychoanalysts?

The dossier will follow a double perspective: on the one hand, it aims to confront concepts and notions shared (or not) by cultural history and psychoanalysis; on the other hand, it seeks analyses based on concrete cases, whether they are objects, practices or situations. It will address three main issues.

I/ EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CROSSINGS

  1. Cultural history, social sciences and psychoanalysis

-Cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis versus “psychohistory”, the Frankfurt School, Freudomarxism, etc.

-History of actors and successful or aborted encounters between psychoanalysis and cultural history

-The notion of individual and collective unconscious

  1. Psychoanalysis and cultural history 

-Freud, social sciences and culture [Psychoanalysis and Kulturgeschichte. The discomfort of the culture to the test of psychoanalysis].

-Psychoanalysis as a theory of history.

-The reception of human and social sciences by psychoanalysts.

-What place for a social, collective, historical construction of the unconscious/subjectivities?

  1. The construction of common objects

-Comparative and crossed methodology of historical sciences, cultural history and psychoanalysis [emotions, dreams as shared objects of knowledge...]. 

-Disciplinary languages, knowledge and practices: psychotherapy as a clinical and cultural act; culture, symptom and representations; use of social sciences and history in clinical practice; adoption by historians of specific psychoanalytic concepts such as failed act, drive, acting out, return of the repressed, superego, taboo or trauma; psychoanalysts’ perception of the profession of historian, or of notions specific to the historical discipline (event, anachronism, past...).

-Conceptions of time in history and psychoanalysis (use of the concept of repression, image of resurgence in history etc.)

II/ OBJECTS/EXAMPLES OF THE INTERACTION BETWEEN CULTURAL HISTORY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

The dossier seeks papers based on crossed approaches, both historical and psychoanalytical. Examples may be chosen from different spheres of political, social and media life. Among them, we can cite:

  1. Political events (the French Revolution, 1968, 2001...)

  2. Situations, categories, social groups (e.g. from the “passion for equality” to totalitarianism); the technologization of the social (the augmented human)

  3. Globalization, massification and culture: the processes of “deculturalization” 

  4. Issues of transmission: from fathers to sons, from mothers to daughters 

  5. Men and women, unconscious and sexual condition

  6. Barbarity and civilization, process of de-civilization (Elias)

III/ ISSUES RELATED TO THE RELATION AND CONFRONTATION BETWEEN HISTORY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

  1. Structure and history. On the historical mutation of cultural models and their psychoanalytical interpretation

  2. Psychoanalysis, psychoanalysts as objects of history and history, historians as objects of psychoanalysis

  3. Receptions of psychoanalysis in different historical and socio-cultural contexts

Timeline:

Submission of an abstract (200-250 words) and a bio-bibliographical note by January 31, 2022

Notification to selected authors: February 10, 2022

Submission of complete articles (6000-9000 words): April 30, 2022

Final submission (after taking into account expert opinions): June 30, 2022

Publication: September 30, 2022

Abstracts should be sent to:

revuedeladhc@gmail.com, evelyne.cohen@wanadoo.fr, pascale.goetschel@gmail.com, paullaurent.assoun@gmail.com

Big data, digital resources and cultural history

Call for papers for the section Epistémologie en débats

RHC n° 5 (2022-2)

The digital resources available to cultural historians has profoundly changed since the beginning of the century. Techniques for inventorying, cataloguing, digitizing or preserving digital data have been transformed. They have been applied to increasingly diverse sources such as archives, prints, images and sounds. As a result, the volume of accessible data has increased considerably, as have the means of processing it, to the point of having a significant impact on the ways of doing cultural history.

Therefore, we are witnessing the emergence of the notion of big data in fields of research where it was hitherto ignored, with the exception of the major quantitative history projects of the 1960s and 1970s. Digital resource platforms, or the catalogs of major libraries, have become essential tools for research, capable of providing not only access to documents but also secondary sources that can be used in their own right. Search engines allow collecting data in a much more systematic way and on a larger scale than was previously possible, and especially including more qualitative information within serial data. What is perhaps most new is that visual history today benefits from huge online collections and search engines capable of compiling results from specific entries. These new possibilities are based in parallel on collection circuits, on decisions to digitize or preserve, on accessibility to archives that now rely on the articulation between paper documents and digital resources, or on cataloguing systems and search engines that should be highlighted.

The forthcoming issue of the "Épistemologie en Debat" section of the RHC intends to examine the implications of these transformations for the historiography or epistemology of 18th- and 21st-century cultural history. It will welcome contributions on the following questions:

1/ The first question concerns the state of the art and the challenges of digital resources, digitized corpora or esources born digital (dematerialized archives, legal deposit of the web, social networks, etc.), their production and conservation, the possibilities for their exploitation through digital technologies. Contributions may focus on particularly emblematic collections, the choices made according to the types of sources, the institutions involved, the implied changes in archival practices (transition from a logic of stock to a logic of flow), the training needs of personnel, the heritage and legal issues, etc. The history of these digital implementations, the geography of these resources which increased accessibility, the target audience, for example in the context of open data, could also be discussed.

2/ A second area of reflection concerns the consequences of these technical transformations on the ways of making cultural history. These transformations, which replace the archive with constantly produced images, lead historians to a new relationship with sources, to a transformation of the terrains of history, undoubtedly to the benefit of global, transnational, and connected histories, and to the emergence of new objects, programs, or fields of research, such as digital humanities. It is possible here to develop the study of specific cases of works that have involved these new technologies in a particularly innovative way.

If the expected articles can and should deal with specific examples, we wish to avoid monographic texts dealing with a single case, in order to favour a problematic and transversal approach of these questions.

Proposals, 200 - 250 words/2000 signs, accompanied by a bio-bibliographical note, must be sent before December 25, 2021

Timetable:

  • 31 March 2022: submission of complete articles (6000 - 9000 words/40 000-50 000 signs)

  • Mach - June 2022: expertise and exchanges with authors

  • 30 June 2022: finalized article

  • 30 September 2022: publication

  • Contacts: Laurence.Guignard@u-pec.fr, revuedeladhc@gmail.com, jean-francois.bonhoure@laposte.net