Trial. “Marseille or the bad reputation”, by Olivier Boura
As in any great love, only a fine connoisseur of Marseille knows its true faults and miseries. Because the second city of France is not only a popular city, without monuments and dedicated to trade. Marseille is above all overwhelmed with clichés: pastis, pétanque and the singsong accent of the indolent heroes of Pagnol mingle there with incessant traffic, influence, women or drugs.
These shots, Olivier Boura chooses to include them in the history brushed in broad strokes of a city whose origins date back to the Phocaeans (from a Greek city in Asia Minor) but which is above all illustrated by its art. consumed from “poorly choosing a side”, opting in favor of Pompey once morest Caesar, of the Fronde once morest Louis XIV, then, during the Revolution, of the Gironde party once morest the Convention, ready to destroy the city… to end up throwing themselves into the arms of Bernard Tapie, a populist of the left buying OM in the hope of becoming mayor. The rise and then the fall of the businessman only confirmed this reputation for corruption and dirty tricks from which the city has still not rid itself, even though, notes Boura, that no Islamist attack has taken place. is produced there and that delinquency is proportionally less there than in Nice or Cannes.
Marseille or the bad reputation is it then only an exercise in self-flagellation? Rather a form of abandonment: by enumerating these stereotypes with humour, Olivier Boura puts them at a distance, aware that, under the effect of French centralization, the particularisms of Marseilles have turned into flaws and its local figures into symbols. of an alleged “Marseille mentality”, immediately naturalized by literature or cinema. This city is nevertheless one of the rare ones to have never been subservient to Paris, and to have always fed on what brought it the sea. This is more than enough for its prestige. J.-L.J.
“Marseille or the bad reputation”, by Olivier Boura, Arléa, “Pocket”, 222 p., 9 €.
Trial. “Alongside gender”, by Geneviève Fraisse
Bringing together two major books by Geneviève Fraisse, The difference between the sexes (1996) et The Gender Controversy (2001), supplemented by articles from the 2000s, Next to gender, published for the first time in this form in 2010, is an excellent gateway to the philosopher’s work, which is both complex and powerful. Everything that makes it unique is in fact concentrated in these investigations into the concept of gender and the way in which it “redistribute the cards of feminist thought”, and first of all in the art, underlined by the title, of initiating any work of thought by stepping aside. Fraisse gives no lessons – nor « pour » in ” versus “ gender – she observes what happens when ideas operate, in search of the only object that ultimately matters to her: concrete emancipation, which disrupts patterns and sets thought in motion. Fl. Go
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