Michel de Certeau and the construction of the Pierre Favre Memorial

Abstract

The article examines the way in which Michel de Certeau shaped his historiographical position through the French edition and introduction of the Mémorial of Pierre Favre (1960), derived from his thesis defended at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1959. The text seeks to understand how the philological attention De Certeau devoted to the manuscripts attributed to Favre anticipates his later conception of writing as a collective practice and as a place of experience.
His work is marked by a kind of alert generated by the influence of nominalism within the intellectual constellation of the time, a current highly critical of Thomism, that would inspire significant suspicions in the intellectual context of Michel de Certeau in the twentieth century. The Mémorial thus appears as a point of inflection: a work that both founds and destabilizes the ways of speaking and writing about mystical experience. This reading allows for a reinterpretation of De Certeau’s later abandonment of Favre, not as a rupture but as a methodological gesture that prefigures his way of “doing history” and of situating himself before the institution of which he remained a part until his death: the Society of Jesus.