How can we explain that the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther triggered a wave of suicides among European readers, or that the release of The Birth of a Nation resurrected a dying Ku Klux Klan? If fiction sometimes influences reality, is it not because reality itself is, at least in part, fictional in nature? The central issue of this project is the performativity of illusory representations. On the one hand, it implies questioning the propensity of human beings to delude themselves and to tell (themselves) stories, that is to say, to make up fictions at the same time as they perceive and describe what they call "reality". On the other hand, the omnipresence of these illusory representations implies that we also study their real effects on human thought and behaviour, based on the mere fact that they are believed and disseminated. In this way, I intend to develop a new philosophical anthropology, that of the homo fabulator. I will focus specifically on the seeds of this philosophical anthropology of homo fabulator, during the second nineteenth century, which saw the emergence of a new representation of the world, of man and of his place in it, confirming the decline of metaphysics and the rise of the human sciences. These disciplines, which intersect and whose representatives dialogue and debate, quote and translate each others, thus contribute to highlighting the place of fabulation in the functioning of the psyche and of human societies. At the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM), I will use genetic criticism, which is implemented in an interdisciplinary manner, to study the phenomena of the circulation of ideas and the translation of texts (central to the University Research School Translitterae, of which ITEM is a part) that preside over the development of a rich intellectual and philosophical debate in late 19th century Europe. The digital humanities will complete this approach and will allow me to master and unify a vast corpus in order to show the profound coherence of this pivotal moment in the history of ideas. The originality of my approach lies in a triple reversal. 1) Historical, through the attention I give to the second nineteenth century. This attention is opposed to both the overly exacerbated focus on hyper actuality, which blinds us to the processes that made it possible, and to the overwhelming weight of German idealism of the early 19th century in the history of philosophy, which obscures the decisive importance of the following decades. 2) Disciplinary, through the interdisciplinary approach I propose to adopt in studying the many academic fields claiming the status of human sciences. The pronounced empirical orientation of these disciplines contributes to forging a completely new image of human nature and its faculties of knowledge, which accompanies and ratifies the decline of the illusory representations previously conveyed by religion and metaphysics. 3) Philosophical, insofar as the upheaval which, in the wake of the Kantian revolution, crystallised in the second half of the 19th century, saw the radical questioning of what had been the object of the whole history of philosophy: the quest for truth, in favour of an investigation into the conditions of possibility of illusion, henceforth conceived as primary. The unifying philosophical theory that I propose, based on an interdisciplinary approach, will thus endeavour to offer the archaeology of an epistemological regime that is dominant today by situating it in the intellectual context of its emergence. The proper understanding of our modernity in crisis and of the relationship that human beings have with the world around them is at stake.

Within life-writing studies, the majority of scholars approaches diaries as linear, monological, and spontaneous objects. Such an understanding usually leads to chronological, monographical and truth-seeker interpretation of diary as a genre. On the contrary, varying the scale of observation and the focus allow to appreciate the way diaries are essentially co-written and cross-generated objects. 2PLUMES project will investigate these cross-genesis (genèse croisée) and co-writing (co-écriture) practices as they are carried out in 20th century female diaries read and commented by male readers. By combining approaches drawn from textual genetics, gender studies, and digital humanities, the project will delve into archival research in order to reconceptualize diaries as a “gendered-genre”. The project will take on three co-written diaries (Catherine Pozzi and Paul Valéry; Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir; Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet), which will firstly lay the groundwork for an extensive study and the development of a general analysis and editing method. 2PLUMES will be structured around three main goals. Firstly, by combining archival studies and digital humanities, it will analyze the ways in which co-writing and cross-genesis practices are carried out in diary genre; genetic analysis and critical transcription of the corpus’ manuscripts, most of which are held Bibliothèque National de France’s archives, will be at the heart of this goal, and will involve the gradual enrichment of the digitalized archives co-hosted by ITEM. Secondly, by combining textual genetics and literary theory, it will shed light on the processes involved in the textual and conceptual production of female diaries, while tackling head-on the epistemological and gender issues raised by co-writing practices. Finally, drawing on history of the book and every day life studies, the project will extend its field of investigation and explore both the role and the evolution of women’s diaries from 19th century to the contemporary, while opening the corpus to other European traditions.

The project “Gustave Flaubert and the power of images” is the development of a first research process (“Fractal”: “Flaubert: Religions, Antiquity, Creation”) that addressed the implication of religions, mythography and Antiquity in the writing processes. The aim is to define both the visual paradigm that rules Flaubert’s work and the new dialectical status that Flaubert establishes between text and image in terms of reciprocal tension and autonomy. Flaubert’s poetics will be thoroughly reconsidered from this angle: how does iconographic knowledge inform the text and its genesis, how does writing capture the image’s specificity to establish a new understanding of the visible and create a new status of the written image? What new theory of the image will arise from this twofold epistemological initiative? Three series of questions will allow us to organize our investigation in dialogic terms: the dialectics of transcendence (believing and knowing) opposing the ontology of the image and a kind of desecration of the imagery and the cliché; the dialectics of vision (seeing and imagining), where the visual as a sign of reality is opposed to the dream or hallucination; the dialectics of representation (writing with and against the image), where writing vies with painting, photography and illustration, redefining the image as document, structure and figure. An intranet working platform will optimize synergies between the German and French researchers for the exchange and sharing of their studies and later, for the circulation of the data and results. ITEM will create a new digital image library: a data base, structured and annotated, making available the principal visual resources related to Gustave Flaubert’s works and life. Both teams will synthesize their results in a dictionary titled “Gustave Flaubert. An Image Index” grouping the lexical contributions of all the researchers involved in this project: a thematic dictionary that will renew the terminology and our knowledge of this research field so as to make it intelligible in all its complexity.

The present project deals with the exploitation and valorization of the archives of the group of mathematicians known under the pseudonym "Nicolas Bourbaki", these archives having been little studied for the period 1953-1970. The first objective of the project, at the crossroads of archival science and digital humanities, consists in analyzing the ways in which the Bourbaki group contributed to the patrimonialization of its archives and in facilitating the exploration and exploitation of the digitized archives of the group. A second objective, articulating history and philosophy of mathematics, aims to mobilize and develop methods of genetic criticism that allow us to unfold the processes of textual and conceptual fabrication of the Elements of Mathematics – an ambitious editorial enterprise initiated by Bourbaki at the end of the 1930s -, while examining the historiographical and epistemological questions raised by Bourbaki's collective writing practices. A third objective, at the interface between history and sociology of science, is to continue the work of re-evaluating Bourbaki's position within the field of mathematical sciences until the end of the 1960s. To this end, we will carry out a prosopographical study that will allow us to isolate the possible effects that belonging to Bourbaki had on the trajectories of its members. We will also show how the activities of the group contributed to the disciplinaryization of certain branches of modern mathematics, notably in university-level teaching. Finally, we will pay attention to the scholarly and academic uses that were made of the Elements of Mathematics.