We are delighted to announce the publication by Editions du Cerf of this book by Elisabeth (Clara) Vasseur. It is derived from the doctoral thesis in philosophy she defended in December 2019 at the Institut Catholique de Paris under the title “Marcel Jousse, philosophe, Dialogue avec Bergson.”

Here’s the translation of the presentation given on the publisher’s website:

“Jousse – he found a seam, as they say,” confides Bergson in an interview with Lydie Adolphe.
The relationship that Marcel Jousse, researcher, teacher and churchman, maintained with the philosopher Henri Bergson throughout his forty-odd years of teaching is paradoxical, to say the least. Between admiration and rejection, Jousse claimed “his” reading of Bergson. Free and inspiring, often critical, even verging on caricature, this invigorating reading acts in return on the reader, whether a connoisseur of Bergson’s work or not. According to Jousse, the bodily-manual gesture, the global gesture, lies at the heart of the philosopher’s thought. Bergson plays out his thoughts with his hands, with his whole body, before throwing them into his books. Knowledge of the anthropological laws of oral style formulated by Jousse enables us to better grasp the particularity of Bergson’s style, which is close to Péguy’s and resembles the oral style of rhythmo-mimeurs. Jousse and Bergson: two names that left their mark on their era. The strong bond that unites the two thinkers is at the heart of this investigation – which could also be described as a “quest” – that is both philosophical and historical. This book joins the long list of “Bergson readers”, whether or not they are Bergsonians.

Élisabeth Vasseur has a PhD in philosophy and lives in Germany. She has contributed to making Marcel Jousse’s work better known, particularly in Germany.

This publication is the culmination of a long period of work by the author, which began in 2016 with the establishment of a co-supervision for her thesis between the Institut Catholique de Paris and the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany. Her research work was supervised by Professors Emmanuel Falque and Walter Schweidler. She also helped develop a link between the Association Marcel Jousse and the Institut Catholique de Paris, culminating in the reception of the Jousse archives by this institution, and the publication on this occasion of a volume of the journal Transversalités entirely devoted to Marcel Jousse.

Her work received financial support from the Association Marcel Jousse. Through this research, we felt it was important to continue forging links between Marcel Jousse, perceived as an unclassifiable Jesuit researcher, and the intellectual history of the 20th century. If, a century later, his work seems more the fruit of an isolated trajectory, it is important to emphasize that Jousse maintained numerous dialogues during his lifetime, directly or indirectly, with leading French thinkers and researchers of his time.

Rémy Guérinel, for example, showed the importance of his links with his masters at the Collège de France, psychologist Pierre Janet and Abbé Rousselot, founder of experimental phonetics, two important but somewhat forgotten figures.
Clara-Élisabeth Vasseur has had the courage to tackle the philosophical and historical links between Jousse and Bergson, the most renowned French philosopher when Jousse began teaching in 1931. As she explained in a 2020 presentation (available on video for association members), she didn’t do “the thesis on Jousse and Bergson” but “a thesis” on the subject, hoping to arouse interest and be followed by others. With only 3 years to complete her project, she had to choose certain paths and discard others.

Yet her work is not lacking in ambition: the author draws on a sound knowledge of both Bergson’s and Jousse’s work; but she has not stopped at a comparative exegesis of the writings of these two thinkers. In an investigative approach, she has also sought to cross-reference and link what Jousse says about Bergson in his lectures, what Bergson’s collaborator Lydie Adolphe says about Jousse, and traces of this intellectual relationship preserved in the archives of both, published along with other unpublished material in the book’s appendix. The reader will find numerous extracts from lectures on Bergson given by Marcel Jousse at the Sorbonne. One of these lectures is entirely devoted to Bergsonian intuition.

It is to be hoped that this book will help to foster a dialogue between those interested in the work of the anthropologist of gesture and those interested in the work of the philosopher!

Thomas Marshall

Member of the Board of the Association Marcel Jousse

We are pleased to announce the news of the publication, in August 2022, of L’antropologia del gesto by Mimesis Edizioni, under the direction of Antonello Colimberti.

Mimesis Edizioni is part of the same group as Editions Mimesis in France and other companies publishing in Italian, English and German. Their works cover all fields of human and social sciences, arts, architecture, political essays…

This translation covers the first volume of Marcel Jousse’s posthumous work, entitled L’anthropologie du geste, which was originally published in French in 1969 by Editions Resma, before being reprinted by Gallimard in 1974. Gallimard’s 2008 paperback reprint brought together the original 3 volumes under the same title. The Italian translation of the other 2 volumes is also underway. Jousse’s collaborator, Gabrielle Baron, has brought together the beginning of a synthesis written by Jousse at the end of his life, as well as other short texts published during his lifetime, which he referred to as “memoirs”.

As Edgard Sienaert, who published an English translation of the same texts and shared some thoughts on the subject (Nunc magazine, 2011), knows from experience, this is a delicate undertaking. These texts fall outside our culture’s established canons of an intellectual work. For Jousse, the transition to the written word is in fact a second stage, from crystallization in algebraic formulas to a living teaching, in which he gives all of himself, in interaction with his audience. So there are 2 Jousse: in his texts and in his lectures. In the former, we have the advantage of conciseness, which can be an obstacle to his intelligibility; whereas in the latter (via their transcriptions available in digital format) we have the advantage of a mastered and richly illustrated oral improvisation, which represents a considerable corpus to peruse if we wish to have an overall vision (as Titus Jacquignon has done in recent years for his doctoral thesis, or Edgard Sienaert a few years ago with a collection of lecture extracts).

Ultimately, the challenge for the reader is to admit, as a consequence of the anthropology of mimism, that Jousse’s thought no longer exists, strictly speaking, since his death! He has passed on to us, through the subjective mirrors formed by his sentences (oral or written), the task of reflecting within ourselves, individually and through collaboration between us, our human condition: “the primordial, inexhaustible volume is within you, in the awareness of your deepest being.” (lecture at “École d’anthropologie”, 12/11/1951). Understanding the human condition, which is indissolubly universal in its potential and singular in its realization by each people and each individual, is a project that can be driven by a wide variety of objectives. All these trajectories have a single point of departure: the totality of what your experience has enabled you to “record” unconsciously.

That’s why Jousse talks so much about himself: he takes responsibility for a radically 1st-person point of view. If we understand this posture, then we can read his words as a double invitation:

• An invitation to make an effort of “intellectual sympathy” to try to perceive the world as he perceived it, through the struggles that were his, in his time. A sympathy that cannot aim at fusion, but at best at resonance (according to Natalie Depraz);
• An invitation, too, to detach ourselves from Jousse’s words and turn our attention to reality, in a new way, and if possible going beyond what he was able to say about it.

Thomas Marshall

Here are a few lines proposed by the publisher to introduce the issues at stake in this book (translation from Italian):

The figure of Marcel Jousse appears in our century as that of a true occult Master, whose influence has remained underground, but therefore deeper and more effective. Jousse is quite rightly the precursor of this turning point in the forms of representation of the human sciences, especially anthropology, which represents the most critical and creative achievement of our time. This turnaround represents a radical questioning of the traditional model of monological and authoritarian writing, centered on the notion of “author” and on frontal, flat, uniform, Euclidean representation, in favor of polyphonic and multi-perspectival models. The current conflict, both inside and outside cultural institutions, is played out on these profound, even political choices, where different ways of understanding “scientificity” are measured and confronted. The revival of interest in Marcel Jousse’s work, after the attack and momentary historical defeat it suffered at the hands of the academic institutions of the time, is linked precisely to this underlying theme: the inclusion of experimentation not only as an object but as a method and content of the human sciences.

Here is a translation into French by Régine Marie Porcher of some of the articles that were published to report on the book:

Article dans Lo Spettacoliere, 15/08/2022

Article dans L’Avvenire, 26/08/2022

Article dans La Difesa del Popolo, 20/09/2022

Article dans la revue Doppiozero, 11/11/2022

Find out more on the publisher’s website

Memory, Memorization and Memorizer. The Galilean Oral-Style Tradition and Its Traditionists

published by Cascade Books (Eugene, Oregon, USA) in the Biblical Performance Criticism Series.

It is a selection of Marcel Jousse’s conferences, composed, translated and commented by Edgard Sienaert.

The foreword is written by Werner H. Kelber, New Testament researcher, retired from Rice University (Texas, USA).