Cette thèse s’attache à étudier la notion de dérive, à travers un corpus de récits français, hongrois et chinois écrits respectivement par Laurent Mauvignier, Imre Kertész et Lin Bai, et parus entre les années 1990 et 2014. Conçue par Guy Debord comme l’outil principal pour appréhender le relief psychogéographique de la ville, la dérive permet d’étudier, au sein des fictions contemporaines, l’importance de l’errance des personnages qui sont privés d’existence et donc de territoire : leur identité n’est plus fixée par un lieu, mais dissoute dans des lieux multiples ou des non-lieux. Nous nous attacherons donc à étudier en termes topographiques la brisure du lien entre le sujet et son territoire, comme premier symptôme d’une crise de l’identité. Cette perte du lieu invite ensuite à se pencher sur les manifestations de la disparition de soi, du malaise existentiel jusqu’aux formes de dissolution fantomatique du sujet. Enfin, la dérive pose la question éminente de la représentation car il s’agit de mettre des mots sur une identité flottante, qui a perdu le sens de l’existence comme de la parole : comment exprimer ce flottement, comment figurer la reconstruction du sujet contemporain ? Notre thèse s’appliquera à montrer en quoi la dérive constitue une véritable poétique, une vision aquatique du monde et de la littérature. / This thesis aims to study the concept of drift, through a corpus of French, Hungarian and Chinese texts written by Laurent Mauvignier, Imre Kertész and Lin Bai, and published between the 1990s and 2014. Described by Guy Debord as a key word to experience the psychogeographic dimension of the city, the drift enables to study, through contemporary fictions, the important wandering of characters because they are deprived of existence and thus of a territory : their identity is no more attached to a place, but dissolved in many places or what is called non-places. We will thus study a topography of the gap between the self and its territory, as a first signal of an identity crisis. Then, this loss of a location invites us to focus on all the symptoms of the disappearance of the self, from living distress to any kind of ghostly dissolution of the self. Finally, the concept of drift questions representation because the writers have to express a floating identity, which has lost the meaning of existence and the meaning of language : how express this movement, how figure out the reconstruction of a contemporary self? Our thesis will show how the drift is a real poetics, an aquatic vision of the world and of literature.

Discovering the city of Bruges through the lens of its Triennial is the starting point to research the potential for contemporary art to influence one’s way of experiencing the city. Taking the case study of a still not so renowned large-scale event like the Bruges Triennial, this thesis investigates the background of this recurring event, how it started, the evolution of its curatorial process and its socio-political challenges being set, every three years, in the context of a Unesco-protected site. After providing the historical background of the city of Bruges, it evidences the ways in which the Bruges Triennial gradually adopted a flâneuristic approach to curating art and in turn encourages flânerie. This sensible way of progressing in the city, mostly via walking and based on the bodily experience, is allowing the refining of a curatorial practice concerned with generating a sensorial reading of the city and results in a curatorial experiment entitled La Dérive.

This dissertation is an Investigation into the Tuareg involvement in violent conflict in the Sahara and the Sahel of North Africa from a sociological psychological perspective of unmet human needs. The research begins by establishing the structure and texture of the sociological, psychological, and emotional life patterns of their existence when not involved in violent conflict. This is followed by an examination of the pathology of Tuareg social structures that are engaged in intra and inter communal violence as perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. The first part of the research establishes normal conditions of the sociological life cycle and highlights natural areas of conflict that arise from exposure to rapid and/or external changes to their physical and social environment. The second part establishes parameters of expected damage from trauma, extended conflict, and failure to adapt to rapid environmental, social and political changes. The research methodology relies on a case study format that uses collaborative ethnography and phenomenological inquiry to answer the research questions and validate propositions made from existing literature and pre]existing research. The research questions focus on aspects of the sociological structure and failing psychological and emotional needs that are relevant to the subjectfs involvement in violent conflict. The research propositions are in part shaped from existing knowledge of tribal sociological structures that are related to the Tuareg by ethnicity, environment, and shared psycho]cultural attributes. The expected contribution of this research is the development of an alternative praxis for tribal engagement and village stability operations conducted by the United States Special Operations Command.

This dissertation adopts a fresh interdisciplinary perspective on reading the postwar urban poems of New York School poet Frank O’Hara. Through French Situationist philosophy, and particularly the writings of Guy Debord, the study explores the spatial and textual relations of O’Hara’s urban and cultural representations in postwar poetry. With the help of psychogeography and its “anti-techniques” of détournement and dérive, the research focuses on O’Hara’s uses of appropriation in constructing his urban assemblages. The dissertation considers postwar poems from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara and offers Situationist readings and understandings of O’Hara’s modernist (urban and cultural) space. The choice of specific poems highlights O’Hara’s unequivocal inspiration by French poetry and focuses on their urbane, experimental and erotic aspects. The first two chapters propose ways in decoding psychogeographical approaches in poetic (de)composition for reading O’Hara’s poems, while the third delves into O’Hara’s uses of camp in dialogue with Situationist politics that highlight not only the capitalist and the cultural, but also the erotic and the queer. / Cette thèse expose une nouvelle perspective interdisciplinaire quant à la lecture des poèmes d’après-guerre de le poète de New York School Frank O’Hara. Au travers de la philosophie de Situationiste Internationale, plus précisément des écrits de Guy Debord, cette étude explore les connections entre la poésie de Frank O’Hara et des propres représentation urbains et culturelles. Grace au notions de psychogeographie et ses « anti-technique » de détournement et dérive, cette recherche se concentre sur l’art d’appropriation qu’utilise O’Hara dans ses assemblages poétiques. L’emphase mise sur les poèmes d’après-guerre tirés de The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara illustre la vision de l’environnement moderniste de O’Hara. Les aspects urbains, expérimentaux, et érotiques inspirés de la poésie française sout mis en valeur par les poèmes choisir d’O’Hara. Les deux premier chapitres proposent une approche psychogeographique pour décomposer les images des poèmes de O’Hara tandis que le troisième chapitre examine l’utilization du « camp » en rapport avec la politique Situationiste qui souligne non seulement la capitalisme et la culture, mais aussi l’érotique et l’homosexualité.