Notre thèse de maîtrise en histoire de la philosophie s’intéresse au débat esthétique, sociologique, politique et philosophique qu’a suscité l’apparition de la notion de « postmoderne ». Plus précisément, nous nous penchons sur l’intervention marxiste anglo-américaine dans ce débat au cours des années 1980 à travers l’examen de trois auteurs — Marshall Berman, Fredric Jameson et David Harvey — qui y ont contribué de manière significative. Afin de lever le voile de la confusion quant aux diverses significations attachées au champ lexical de « postmoderne », nous aurons recours au concept heuristique de la « question postmoderne » qui permet de distinguer trois niveaux de signification — culturel-esthétique, théorie du changement social, philosophico-historique —, mais aussi de les rassembler et de discuter du « postmoderne » dans sa généralité. La réponse marxiste à la question postmoderne fut hautement dépendante des interventions de Daniel Bell et Jean-François Lyotard et leur présence dans ce travail permettra de comprendre le contexte intellectuel et conceptuel avec, notamment, la nature de la transition entre le modernisme et le postmodernisme esthétiques, l’émergence d’une société postindustrielle et l’idée d’une postmodernité comme crise de légitimation des métarécits de la modernité. Nous examinons de quelle manière Berman, Jameson et Harvey ont traité de la question postmoderne dans leurs écrits s’étendant du début des années 1980 à la fin de cette décennie. L’on pourra voir que ce marxisme anglo-américain ne s’oppose pas de prime abord aux notions de « postmodernisme » ou de « postmodernité », bien qu’il craigne les illusions idéologiques qui accompagnent ces notions et tendent à obscurcir le rôle joué par le capitalisme dans les transformations sociales et culturelles.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the transformation of the concepts of religion and history between historians of religion Rafael Karsten, Nathan Söderblom, and Geo Widengren. Through the lens of Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis, as interpreted by Gilles Deleuze, Widengrens critique of the Karsten and Söderblom reveals an epistemological rupture between an evolutionist and a phenomenological discourse of religion. Karsten and Söderblom understand religion as following a linear path of development through fixed stages; Widengren instead study it as a transhistorical phenomenon. In line with historian François Hartog’s concept of regimes of historicity, I locate this epistemological rupture within a larger shift from a futurist to a presentist understanding of history. In futurism history is understood as oriented towards a future goal, while in presentism history is part of a broad present and of constant actuality.

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The following document is a meta-commentary on the article "Decanting the Rabelaisian Casks: Democratizing Neoplatonic Poetic Fury in Baudelaire's 'L’âme du vin'," co-authored by Dr. Robert J. Hudson and myself, which will soon be submitted for publication. It contains an annotated bibliography of all our primary and secondary sources and an account of the genesis of the argument and the writing of the article. Our article is based upon an analysis of "‘L’âme du vin," the threshold poem of "Le Vin," the central section of Charles Baudelaire's celebrated volume Les Fleurs du Mal. As we demonstrate, previous scholarship on this section is sparse and while certain poems within in have received attention from distinguished scholars, the integral part that it plays in the larger work has been downplayed, if not entirely neglected. Our reading of the poem allows for an explanation of the structure of the entire collection, illuminates Baudelaire's intended internal architecture, and elucidates his theory of poetic creation and aesthetic ideals more generally. As we demonstrate, the transition from the Parisian commoner in "Tableaux parisiens" to the transcendent poet in "Fleurs du mal" requires the transformation provided by the intoxication in "Le Vin" which lends itself to divine fury and attainment of transcendence in and ascension to the sonnets of the "Fleurs du mal." Our development of this conclusion comes through a study of Baudelaire's employment of Neoplatonic theories and images and adoption of Rabelais' Gallic codification of these Neoplatonic tropes. "‘L’âme du vin" illustrates the essence of Baudelaire's progressive populist thought previous to the Revolution of 1848, by rendering permanent the inversion of social order found in the Rabelaisian/Bakhtinian carnavalesque. The Neoplatonic ladder to transcendence, based on Plato's four stages of divine fury, and systemized by Renaissance thinkers Marsilio Ficino and Pontus de Tyard, is tipped, or thrown, on its side in Baudelaire's work, demonstrating not only the overthrow of the hierarchy of the Old Regime, but the solidification of the humanization of the common, working man, the premier venu or homme de la rue, and the ability of the least of society, rather than the members of the nobility or leisured class of centuries past, to access divine fury and poetic transcendence by imbibing, integrating, and appreciating the soul of wine.

How does the body manifest religious belief? What happens when that belief shatters? These questions were critical in sixteenth-century France when religious conflict rattled many individuals’ faith. A startling—and related—motif in the literature of the period features one part of the body overwhelming the world. These texts, this dissertation argues, manifest religious belief through this motif. While several scholars have examined the role of fragmentation in Renaissance culture, particularly how this fragmentation intersects with cartography and anatomy, the religious dimension of this phenomenon has not been emphasized enough. Through a method of close textual and visual analysis, this study argues that in an era when openly stating one’s personal religious beliefs could have fatal consequences, the digestive tract, heart, and other parts of the body sometimes took on the work of expressing religious belief. This process resembles synecdoche but differs in that, instead of the part representing the whole, the part swallows it. The word “swallows” is indeed appropriate: the mouth appears in several of these texts as the part that consumes, contains, or incorporates the entirety. In Chapter One, the Dutch cartographer Abraham Ortelius’s 1564 map of the world reveals the cartographer’s spiritual inclinations by portraying the world as a heart, or rather, a lung. In Chapter Two, the Huguenot Jean de Léry’s traumatic experiences during the Wars of Religion combine with his time spent among cannibal tribes to force a redefinition of humanness in his memoire, Histoire d’un voyage faicte en la terre de Bresil (1578). In Chapter Three, God’s sensing, digesting body in the Protestant poet Guillaume du Bartas’s hexameron, La Sepmaine (1578), functions as a declaration of Calvinist faith. In Chapter Four, Alcofrybas’s journey into Pantagruel’s mouth in Rabelais’s Pantagruel (1532) veils a distinctly Christian humanist message. In Chapter Five, the monster Quaresmeprenant in Rabelais’s Quart Livre (1552) translates a refusal, or perhaps failure, to reconcile religious differences with a refusal to reconcile the parts of Quaresmeprenant’s body.