Productions scientifiques

This article aims to weave the fields of performativity, sound and urban living through philosophical itineraries that follow two motifs: mourning and vulnerability. Through Bonnie Honig's rereading of Antigone, we will trace the characters of a performative Antigone, who hybridises the fields of phoné and logos in her lament. We will then consider the example of contemporary mourning as well as the problem of urban soundscape spread by an ubiquitous technophony. We will address the motif of vulnerability starting from the work and research of Brandon Labelle, who will accompany us on sound walks where listening will emerge as a performative practice. Listening to urban space confronts us with a global and generalised vulnerability. By combining mourning and vulnerability, we will finally express the need for a performativity of fragility in our global condition.

In his own De anima, Alexander of Aphrodisias famously identifies the "active" (poietikon) intellect with the prime mover in Metaphysics Λ. However, Alexander's claim raises an issue: why would this divine intellect come in the middle of a study of soul in general and of human intellection in particular? As Paul Moraux asks in his pioneering work on Alexander's conception of the intellect, is the active intellect a "useless addition"? In this paper, I try to answer this question by challenging a solution according to which the active intellect would intervene directly with the material intellect to trigger its ordinary working. I argue that the active intellect acts as a final cause, both for human intellect and for its ordinary objects of thought. The active intellect is twice "cause of the intellection", i.e. cause of the actualization of human thought: once (i) when it offers thought occasions for thinking through objects, and again (ii) when it actualizes mediately the human intellect itself in its development. This reading agrees with Alexander's usual position about the prime mover's causality. It accounts for the multiplicity of expressions with which Alexander describes the causality of the active intellect in his De anima. It also explains why the development of human intellect has been described without direct reference to active intellect, since substances do not aim directly at the First cause, but their aim at it is mediated by their desire for their own good.

This article provides a critical and genealogical analysis of the allostatic load research framework. AL research is used as a case study to analyse how the current biosocial context is articulated in the field of health inequalities research. Providing a contemporary analysis of AL studies with a genealogy of the AL concept, we show that the ambition to use biological tools to improve measurements, predictions, and ultimately public health action, is rooted in a history that predates current biosocial entanglements. We analyse the conceptual and methodological grounding of AL studies in relation to the ambitious propositions to address health inequalities they often convey. The difficulties in translating AL research findings into public health policies and the risks of biomedicalisation that could emerge through the use of AL are also addressed. While acknowledging these risks, however, we nuance the risk of depoliticisation associated with the biomedicalisation of social inequalities in health. In light of the historical analysis, we qualify the risks associated to a biologisation of social life that could emerge from AL research: it appears that these risks are more specifically rooted in methodological and epistemological problems that researchers would need to consider in the pursuit of AL research.