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Rome and the Present In 1553, Joachim du Bellay sets out for Rome on a diplomatic and poetic mission: he is secretary to his older relative Cardinal Jean du Bellay, and he is in search of the ancient models that will provide the source of a new French poetry, the task of the latter laid out four years earlier in his Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse. The Antiquitez de Rome are, of course, an expression of the poet's (1) profound disappointment at what he sees before him, in which he finds neither the greatness nor the durability that he hoped to bring back in order to promote both poetic and political grandeur for the future of France. Precisely what du Bellay finds in Rome and what he tries to bring of it to French poetry have been widely debated in criticism, which only recently has begun to yield on the position that the Regrets constitute an obviously superior work. (2) In spite of the regret also expressed in the Antiquitez, on the title page they are termed "une generale description de [la] grandeur" of Rome. (3) That is, there is still a greatness available in Rome, which in the sonnets is most frequently identified with Roman writing. I would like to propose that the absence of the "original" Rome in which these writings were produced is not simply lamented in the Antiquitez; rather, their current lack of groundedness allows them to be taken up and reworked by the French Renaissance poet, who thereby produces the space in which a properly French poetry will take place. That is, the Antiquitez are not primarily an expression of lamenting nostalgia, but instead a production of a poetry in the present and for the future. Du Bellay is pursuing, in rigorous fashion, the notion of imitation that he put forth in the Deffence. Although it would be tempting to view the Antiquitez as an instance of practice in relation to the theorization elaborated in the Deffence, I would rather view the Antiquitez as also continuing that theorization--the Deffence itself is not only theory but Illustration or practice. (4) I would like to show here that du Bellay extends the notion of imitation to the Roman ruins themselves: just as Roman writing is composed of signs now severed from their original context, or signifiers bearing an indefinite relationship to what they signify, the ruined monuments that the poet views also no longer signify the greatness that they did when they were first built. Du Bellay imitates this capacity of the signs constituted by the monuments: he represents them as continually moving away from what they first represented, and in so doing he borrows from the motion of signs in order to rearrange them in a new configuratio n that will constitute the new French poetry. This poetry is thereby composed of signs whose mobility is valorized; it may hence offer models for future imitations, one of the principal goals for the new poetry that du Bellay states in the Deffence. (5) In the Antiquitez, the mobility of signs is characterized as a temporality, such that the present may be viewed as the future of ancient Rome, and the ruining of the latter in time as the very process by which poetry arises in the present. Indeed, as I hope to show, du Bellay goes so far as to demonstrate that the difference between the ruin of modem Rome and the glory of ancient Rome occurs on a continuum in which each configuration of signs constituting Rome is a repetition, though altered, of the previous one. In lamenting the ruins of Rome, then, du Bellay is able to form the tie with Rome's greatness that is necessary to the production of French greatness in the present and for the future. In antithesis to the "generale description de [la] grandeur" of Rome, the title page further qualifies the Antiquitez as "une deploration de sa Ruine" (269)--although, as I will show, this lamentation is staged so as to be overcome by the production of poetry in the present. The ensuing sonnets point to the emptiness of the ruins they describe: they suggest and demarcate the void faced by the poet who has come to Rome. …

This examination of Joachim Du Bellay's Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse (1549) begins with a summary of the text's paradoxical thematic, namely, that its problem is not a problem: there is no need to defend French as a literary language against Latin, many have said, as there is already in the sixteenth century a thriving vernacular literature. However, there are some who insist on Latin's superiority: Du Bellay answers them, but also exaggerates their position in order to stage a defense that has legal and military overtones. He does so in order to bring French into a dialogical relationship with Latin, as well as with other European literary languages. Although some critics have pointed out that this procedure is but one of several put forth by Du Bellay, this reading of the Deffence shows that the author valorizes it over the others by engaging in it: Du Bellay incorporates into the Deffence a number of antecedent texts in order to respond to the conditions he faces. He situates France and the French language in relation to antiquity; the relation is sketched out as a spatial one, the space being that in which the shape of modernity is emerging.

Dans cet article, l’auteur se propose d’interpréter le Songe de Joachim Du Bellay comme travail du rêve, au sens psychanalytique. Cette série de poèmes a souvent été critiquée pour son obscurité; mais c’est en fonction de cette obscurité qu’elle révèle son sens, qui porte sur le flux constant du sens des signes poétiques. La disposition des signes du Songe met l’accent sur la distance entre signifiant et signifié, notamment en ce qui concerne le signifiant «Rome»: la construction onirique de Rome accomplit la destruction de la Rome antique, pour que la nouvelle poésie française se forme. Comme texte de rêve dont les signes indiquent des sens inattendus, le Songe présente allégoriquement une théorie de la signification poétique, celle-ci impliquant l’allégorie, ou la capacité des signes de transformer leur propre sens.

Cet article est un compte-rendu du livre : Sébastien Prat, Constance et inconstance chez Montaigne, Paris : Classiques Garnier, coll. « Essais philosophiques sur Montaigne et son temps », 2011, 502 p., EAN 9782812403620.

In his theory of Brownian motion, Einstein has made a monumental contribution to thermodynamics. Specifically, he has accounted in his theory for the time‐rate of change of the particle momentum, associated with thermal motion, to study the diffusion of dilute particles in the liquid, but excluding its surface. This paper shows first that Einstein’s unique approach to Brownian motion is justified, not only for the problem treated by the distinguished author, but for thermodynamic systems generally, including interfacial systems. The qualitative procedure is based on the principle of detailed balancing, which matured about two decades after Einstein’s original work on Brownian motion. Quantitative justification for the inclusion of the particle thermal momentum in thermodynamics will further be shown for a specific general system on the basis of the first two laws and the quantum theory. The paper then reviews a generalization of Einstein’s transport theory that accounts for both the particle kinetic energy and momentum and is further applicable to interfacial systems. To be briefly described are numerous, new, interdisciplinary consequences of the generalized theory, which have been corroborated by extensive experiments.