Conférence inaugurale du symposium Crises

In use at least since Greek antiquity, the notion of crisis has passed through various meanings, probably first borrowing from phenomena more or less related to the relationship of man with nature (disease, agriculture ...), to gain the sphere of scholarly knowledge adjoining both the natural sciences and those of man and society. This has not prevented the tendency to make it a "catch-all" notion, a "word-value" in the sense of Deleuze.

Beyond the polysemous use that may have marked it, sometimes bringing it closer to a terminology that refers to "anomie" (Émile Durkheim), to "conflict" (Julien Freund), to "catastrophe" (in the wake of the work of mathematician René Thom) or even to the Freudian "complex", its emergence in natural or social processes must be approached with the SHS as a revelation of new possibilities.

The disturbances in the type of regulation of a given system, which can go as far as blockage and reconfiguration, as much as the prodromes and then the outburst of the crisis, can in fact open the way to new types of functioning, mutations (not to be confused with simple summations) carrying possibilities of adaptation to new conjunctures and contexts of endogenous or exogenous origins, and thus to more performance. There may then be the emergence of new physical, biological (Darwinian evolutionism) or social bodies, the latter being the domain on which our discussion will focus.

The moment of crisis can indeed help us to better define the passage formalized by Durkheim from mechanical solidarities to organic solidarities, or by Ferdinand Tönnies in the sense of a possible transition from community to society, or by Max Weber from one ideal type to another and why not Ibn Khaldun with his approach on the extinction and renewal of the Asabiyya.

In fact, the HSS cannot do without this notion of "crisis" that we find used in disciplines at the same time as close (by their object) and as far from each other (by their approaches and methods), as psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, economy, history and some others. This is to the point where, in order to approach it in all its "complexity" (in the sense of Edgar Morin), transdisciplinarity is more than recommended, including by calling upon the natural sciences.

In fact, with the conceptual notion of "crisis", we find ourselves at the very heart of the mechanisms at work in the processes of continuity and social change that disciplines with competing unifying ambitions such as anthropology and history each attempt to address in their own way. This is done by confronting "event" (in the "short" and "medium" term) and "structure" in an attempt to reach a common understanding through the "long term" approach and, with historical anthropology, to reach a possible junction between the two disciplines. The analysis of crises can contribute to shed light on the nature of the hiatus between continuity and rupture of socio-historical processes, with what this implies in terms of dialectical interactions between short and long durations, actors and systems, or even between nature and culture (and thus civilizations when we refer to Arnold Toynbee), between subjectivity and objectivity or consciousness, identity and alienation, or more precisely, with Marx and his followers, between infrastructure and superstructure, between antagonistic classes and more prosaically between politics, revolution and history.

This is an opportunity not to be missed to illustrate the whole through the visit of some socio-historical sequences with universal scope and drawn from processes that took place in the Arab-Islamic sphere and elsewhere in the world.

The Law in state of crisis
The theme of crisis refers in law to two main regimes: the emergency and the state of exception. Particularly studied in Western countries (Agamben, Troper, Goupy, etc.), the theme remains little explored in the Arab and Maghreb countries, even though their history as well as their legal and political current events (particularly that of Tunisia since July 25, 2021) lead us to question the two sides of the problem: "the law of crisis" and "the law in crisis". This problem is the capacity of the law in times of crisis to regulate the crisis that imposes the emergency and the exception. What are these emergencies and exceptions? What regimes do they impose? Do they tend to return to a state of "legal normality" or on the contrary to "normalize the exception"?