User:Cohn-jesse/Daniel Colson

Daniel Colson
Born	1944 Aubusson
Nationality	French
Occupation(s)	Sociologist, philosopher, professor, activist

Daniel Colson, born in 1943 in Aubusson, is a French sociologist teaching at the Université de Saint-Étienne. He was a member of MoDyS (MOndes et DYnamiques des Sociétés, or Societal Worlds and Dynamics), now known as the Centre Max Weber, a research unit associated with the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, or National Center for Scientific Research), and is a longtime activist with the La Gryffe anarchist bookstore in Lyon. He is also a philosopher and historian of anarchism.

Biography

Daniel Colson studied at Clermont-Ferrand before entering the sociology program at the Université de Lyon in 1966, where he discovered Marxism, and then, via Michel Marsella (1946-1982), anarchism. With other students, he organized against the Vietnam War, and after the May 1968 events, founded the Comité du Vieux-Lyon, aimed at creating an autonomous city, which in 1972 gave rise to a journal, IRL (Informations Rassemblées à Lyon, later retitled Informations et Réflexions Libertaires), the product of a self-managed printing press.

After abandoning an early project of academic research on the Asiatic mode of production (1975), he wrote a doctoral thesis on the Forézien labor movement, defending it in 1983.

Philosophy

Colson can be considered a postanarchist thinker, as he rereads the anarchist tradition via the poststructuralist theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. He is particularly inspired by Deleuze's interpretation of the rationalist philosophers Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz as thinkers of radical "immanence":

Anarchism is an absolute immanentism. For libertarian thought, everything that takes place is internal to things, beings, and their encounters with one another. Nothing comes from an external source (God, State, Laws, Ideas, Constitutions); everything comes from within, from an interior unlimited in its possibilities, which Bakunin calls Nature...

Political views

El Khomri law

In March 2016, as part of the protests against the "El Khomri law," Daniel Colson signed an opinion piece, along with others including Pierre Alféri, Jerome Baschet, Serge Quadruppani and Eric Hazan, supporting the Nuit debout occupation and protest movement:

[...] the next dates are the 24th and especially the 31st of March, with the proposal, that day, to stay on the street and occupy public places. But we have learned in recent years that occupations of public places alone are not enough to block the functioning of institutions. They risk becoming satisfied to merely exist, awaiting their evacuation or exhaustion. In our opinion, therefore, they should rather serve as a base from which to seize the places from which the "representatives of the people" assert their right to govern it, and on occasion to club it. Town halls, various councils, so-called regional or national assemblies, all deserve to be invaded, reclaimed, besieged, or blocaded. We must aim for the organized blocking of political power. At this time, therefore, it is crucial that the action in the street is publicly defended. [...]

Publications

In English

Books

• A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze. Trans. Jesse Cohn. New York: Minor Compositions, 2018. ISBN 978-1-57027-341-4.

Articles

• "Proudhon, Lacan, and the Quilting Points." Trans. Jesse Cohn. Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 1 (2018).[1]
• "Belief, Anarchism and Modernity." Anarchist Studies 15.1 (2007): 55–65.
• "Anarchist Readings of Spinoza." Trans. Nathan Jun and Jesse Cohn. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 17.2 (2007): 90-129.[2]
• "Nietzsche and the Libertarian Workers' Movement." I Am Not a Man, I Am Dynamite! Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition. Ed. John Moore and Spencer Sunshine. New York: Autonomedia, 2004. 12-28.

In French

Books

• L'Anarchisme de Malatesta, éd. Atelier de création libertaire, 2010
• Trois essais de philosophie anarchiste : Islam, histoire, monadologie, éd Léo Scheer. Broché, 2004
• Petit lexique philosophique de l'anarchisme de Proudhon à Deleuze, Le Livre de poche, 2001, ISBN 978-2-253-94315-0.
• La compagnie des fonderies forges et aciéries de Saint-Étienne (1865-1914) , autonomie et subjectivité techniques, 1998
• Anarcho-Syndicalisme et Communisme. Saint-Etienne 1920-1925, préface de Pierre Ansart, éd. Centre d'Etudes Foréziennes/Atelier de Création Libertaire, 1986

Prefaces

• Olivier Nguema Akwe, Arts martiaux et sorcellerie en Afrique : anthropologie des sports de combat, éd. L'Harmattan, 2011
• André Peyrache, Chair à Charbon. Fragments de discours sur les mondes miniers dans le bassin de La Loire, éd. Site Couriot Musée de La Mine. Saint-Etienne, 2010
• David Rappe, La bourse du travail de Lyon, éd. Atelier de Création Libertaire, 2005

Contributions to collections

• Collectif (2017). Rêves et passions d'un chercheur militant: Mélanges offerts à Ronald Creagh. Lyon: Atelier de création libertaire. ISBN 978-2-35104-096-6..

Articles

• "La liberté, l’anarchisme et Spinoza," Réfractions 27 (Fall 2011), pp 65-76 [3]
• "O Anarquismo hoje," Politica & Trabaho, Revista de Ciências Sociais, 36 (April 2012), pp. 75-90

Notes and references

[[Category:French anarchists]] [[Category:Historians of anarchism]] [[Category:1944 births]] [[Category:Sociology educators]]