IMAGINAIRES DE LA CRISE DANS LA MER DE JULES MICHELET
CRISIS IMAGINARY IN JULES MICHELET’S LA MER

Summary/Abstract: This paper, based on the third naturalist opus of Jules Michelet, is about declining the concept of crisis. A source of extreme tension, the crisis can be transposed on several levels : ontological, epistemological and ethical. In La Mer, the crisis first takes on an accidental character that affects the surface of the sea (waves, storms, whirlpools). In addition to these manifestations of “violent water”, the crisis appears, as far as sea creatures are concerned, as a corollary of evolution. Then, it is by identifying the sea with a female being that Michelet extends the menstrual crisis on a large scale. In addition to these inflections linked to meteors, to marine bestiary and to the very nature of the aquatic element, the crisis, by its etymological meaning, refers to discriminatory reasoning and turns out to be a separating device, capable of rethinking the scale of values as well as the commonly accepted categories.

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