Jean Piel

Jean - Baptist Piel (born on January 28th 1902 with Saint-Martin-with-Fresnay, Apple-brandy - deceased in Paris on January 1st, 1996) is a writer, editor, philosopher and critical French. To the College of the Harbor, it binds friendships with Jean Dubuffet, Georges Limbour, and Raymond Queneau.

He was married with Simone Maklès (sister of Rose, marries André Masson, and sister of Sylvia, marries Georges Bataille and of Jacques Lacan).

It was beside Georges Bataille for the creation of Critique in 1946.

After the war, during which it undergoes one year of captivity, it was named by Raymond Aubrac assistant general secretary for the economic affairs of the area of Marseilles, then, by Pierre Mendès-France, general secretary for the economic affairs of the Poitou-Charentes area, before becoming General inspector of the Nation's economy.

Director of the Critical review since the death of Battle in 1962, it was one of the large scouts of the French literature. In other it published: Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Yves Bonnefoy, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Deguy, Michel Foucault, Michel Leiris, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Greenhouses, and of tens of others.

Critique is a “general review of the French and foreign publications”. She proposes each year with her readers nine numbers, including three doubles. She remains faithful to the mission which Georges Bataille fixed to him: “Critique will publish studies on the books and the articles appearing in France and abroad. These studies exceed the importance of simple reports. Through them, Critique would like to give the outline, least incomplete which it could be, various activities of the human spirit in the fields of literary creation, philosophical research, of knowledge historical, scientific, political and economic. ” A review of reference. Escaping all at the same time the urgency inherent in cultural journalism and inevitable specialization from the erudite reviews, Critique is an instrument of information and a reflector space more essential than ever. The studies which it publishes attach to release, in the mass of the publications, the nine and essence. There the subjects scholars or specialized are covered in a form always accessible to the non-specialist.

In 1982, Fayard published its autobiography the Meeting and the Difference .

The files of Jean Piel were deposited with IMEC (Institute Reports of the Contemporary Edition).

Officer of the Legion of Honor, Former General inspector of the Nation's economy.

Homage to Jean Piel (1902-1996)

“Jean Piel is not any more. It was a man who lived so strong that it is difficult for all those which knew it to admit that it really left them. Its will, its energy, its curiosity, renewed year after year, month after month, with each Critical number of , seemed inexhaustible. The last months, when one visited him, it was still to speak about this review that it had directed for more than thirty years and to which it had been devoted for one half-century. Rare were such powerful, also long, also rich associations between an individual and a review.

Should it be pointed out? Critique was founded in 1946 by Georges Bataille, old friend of Jean Piel. This one, after a childhood Norman, studies of philosophy and political economy in Paris, journalism economic and financial in the Thirties, the war, a prison camp, had started with the Release a career of senior official to the nation's economy and town and country planning. All these episodes are evoked with reserve in a book of memories, the Meeting and the Difference (Beech, 1982). Piel, then in station in Poitiers, collaborated in Critique as of number 2 by regular reports of economic works. When the review, after being last Editions of the Oak to Calmann-Levy and being themselves stopped a few months, began again for good with the Editions of Midnight in October 1950, Piel, from now on based in Paris, became editor association associated near Bataille with Eric Weil. Critique would not have survived beyond the immediate one afterwards--war without the vigilance of Piel, whereas Bataille directed libraries of province, then that the disease undermined it. During all this Piel time divided itself between two trades, which impassioned it as much one that the other. As inspector of the nation's economy, it contributed to the installation of the Low-Rhone - Languedoc, in particular with great work of the wearing of Fos-sur-Mer, while auprès of Bataille, not only it made Cri-tique but inaugurated the collection “the use of the richnesses” to the Editions of Midnight, with American Fortune and its destiny (1948). The cursed Share was the second and last title of the collection.

Become Critical director of with died of Battle in 1962, Piel launched the “Critical” collection, which holds one of most beautiful the catalogs of the French edition. It evoked with jubilation its double life of the years 1960, being devoted to the transfer of the Markets to Rungis in same time that it published the capital book of Jacques Derrida, Of the grammatology . By a masterly intuition, it could then be surrounded by all those which were going to become the Masters of my generation: Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Deguy, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Michel Greenhouses, to quote some of them. Each number of Critique was a festival for the intelligence: to re-examine their synopses makes turn the head. The publication of the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Felix Guattari - whose Piel had found the title - was another of its triumphs of editor. Then there were new collaborators, of Jacques Bouveresse with Hubert Damisch, of Clément Rosset with Vincent Descombes, of Luce Irigaray with François Roustang, all called by the prestige and the rigor of Critique , and the friendship of its director. Many are young people who made their training there: as much, I sent a manuscript; Piel called me; it was the first of many amusing lunches around some oysters. Certain old went up to the “sky”, as Piel called its committee of honor, and the editorial board changed. When I entered there, it met twice the year: it was the time of these special issues to which Piel had the leisure to be harnessed when it was released from different sound trade. “Vienna beginning one century”, “the psychoanalysis seen of the outside”, “the roof of the vacuum” - an assessment of the philosophy of the Seventies which made noise -, and others still had an important repercussion. It is impossible to enumerate all the collaborators who made the synopsis of these years, close relations still of Critique today, or more moved away, exhausted, generation after generation, by the mode that the director of Critique imposed to them, but I must quote Louis Marin, because it is disappeared too early and that Piel dedicated a true affection to him. Number after number, Piel found to be filled with enthusiasm, also to dispute. I imagine that we scrambled ourselves all several times with him - the last time that I saw it, we still disputed -, but never a long time nor for good: its generosity carried it. It characterized all its qualities of editor: its control of an old network of relations, its immense capacity of reader, his speed of man of action putting the intellectuals at work.

One day of last summer, we spoke about the separation of the Church and the State. Its first memories went up there. He told me this one: he had four or five years, he was perched on the shoulders of his grandfather, notary anticlerical, who was under discussion animated with the priest of the village. Its family was divided. He was sent to the college, but his/her sisters went to the private school. This Normandy of before 1914 had marked it much - it read again Balzac last summer - but more still its friendships of the college of Le Havre during the First War. The friends of Piel represented an admirable group. Battle in first, for which it had a veneration and with which it will remain always faithful, but also Jean Dubuffet, Georges Limbour, Raymond Queneau - the Native of Le Havre -, then Jacques Prévert, Michel Leiris, André Masson. The sea and painting were some of its passions. The summer, it took the road of Le Havre or the La Rochelle. It bathed there. Swimming relieved it a long time. Because Piel suffered, vituperating the doctors, since a badly neat fracture after a road accident, there is nearly fifty years. It mentions itself its cane in its book: nothing more than the will to daily overcome this accident which had left it “estropié with life” explains the firmness with which it carried out Critique during nearly one half-century, generally almost only, and its resolution to do one of the very first French reviews of them.

Simone Piel is extinct a few days after him. The two days before, trying to remember which it was necessary to prevent disappearance of her husband, it confused a little the alive ones and deaths, then was begun again: “Not, they died, they are all died: we were the last. ” She thought of her sisters, Sylvia, the woman of Bataille, then of Lacan, Rose, the woman of André Masson, with the most solid friends, oldest of Piel. Yes, they were almost the last. Their life covered the century. Critical, which reaches its fiftieth anniversary at the time when Jean Piel disappears, all owes him, and we cannot prevent us from thinking that he died prematurely”.

This text of Antoine Compagnon was published in the number of Critique from January-February 1996.

It is reproduced here with the authorization express and written of the author and the Review.

External bonds

Died of Jean Piel ('' Humanity '')
Editions of Midnight
'' Bataille and the world ''
the review '' Critique '' on the files of the IMEC

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