Issue 43, Spring 2024
Guest-edited by Michèle Garneau et Barbara Le Maître
This issue aims to consider the act of fabulation by questioning anew, in today’s media space, its presence and action, its reasons and powers. Taking an expansive approach to the fable (with its diverse meanings and its multiple powers, its modes of insertion, and the hermeneutic challenges posed by its veiling and unveiling); to the act of fabulating (its anthropological, philosophical, poetic, or scientific grounds; and those who revel in it from within different transdisciplinary and (inter)medial contexts); and to the function of fabulation(the various political contexts where it is deployed and upon which it wants to act creatively), this issue proposes to focus on the need to fabulate that emerges throughout history. The aim of this thematic issue is to question the instigating experience of fables, those primordial and oblique representations, insofar as such an experience engages with: 1) the plasticity of forms: the fable is a matter of dissimulation, of unveiling, of metamorphosis, in short, of the elaboration of figures and the modulation of time; 2) the construction and value of nuanced knowledges—with its “veiled teaching” (Gaillard), the fable always carries a lesson—and, consequently, an epistemological register; 3) the critical potential of a discourse which, while playing on differentials, while masking or “projecting” its views, nonetheless aims at the real and its historical complexities. This issue focus on the many poetics of fabulation as well as on the modalities of inscription of the fabular within a larger narrative—of which the fable constitutes only a moment, a fragment.