Élisabeth de Fontenay


Élisabeth de Fontenay, is a French philosopher and essayist, and a recognized philosopher of the Jewish question and animal welfare. She is a laureate of the Prix Bordin, Prix Anna-de-Noailles, and the Prix Femina essai.

Early life

Élisabeth Bourdeau de Fontenay is the daughter of Henri Bourdeau de Fontenay, from a right-wing Catholic family, a lawyer who supported the Front Populaire and an early Resistance fighter, and Nessia Hornstein, a dentist of Jewish origin but converted to Catholicism, whose family had fled Odessa during the Odessa pogroms of 1905. A large part of Nessia's family was exterminated at Auschwitz.
Élisabeth was raised Catholic, baptized as a child, then enrolled at the age of five at the Collège Sainte-Marie in Neuilly-sur-Seine. At the age of 22, she abandoned Catholicism and turned to Judaism; she details her conversion in the book Actes de naissance, published in 2011.

Career and research

Fontenay is an Emeritus Senior lecturer in philosophy at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She had an early interest in Karl Marx, to whom she dedicated a work entitled Les figures juives de Marx: Marx dans l'idéologie allemande . In 1981, she published a landmark book on the materialism of Denis Diderot, Diderot ou le Matérialisme enchanté. She was a member of the board of directors of the journal Les Temps modernes, a position she relinquished in January 1983.
Among the authors who have influenced Fontenay's work are Vladimir Jankélévitch, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. After Jankélévitch's death in 1985, Fontenay founded the Association Vladimir Jankélévitch with Pierre Michel Klein and Béatrice Berlowitz.
Like her later works, this contribution examines the relationship between humans and animals in history. This reflection culminated in her magnum opus ''Le silence des bêtes, published by Fayard in 1998. This work once again raises the question of what is "proper to man", and challenges the idea of a fixed difference between man and animal. Focusing on the long term, Fontenay examines conceptions of the animal from the Pre-Socratic philosophy to the present day, via René Descartes and his animal machine hypothesis. Between 2007 and 2010, Fontenay chaired the "Commission Enseignement de la Shoah" of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah. Drawing on her position as President of the Commission, Fontenay, like Isaac Bashevis Singer, does not hesitate to draw a parallel between Nazi genocidal methods and the agri-food industry in the preface to Le silence des bêtes.
She was a signatory of La Paix maintenant. She is also a member of the Comité consultatif national d'éthique, alongside Henri Atlan. Concerned by the ethical issues surrounding the treatment of animals, she and Donald M. Broom published Le bien-être animal, which sets out the ethical issues raised by this subject, examining religious viewpoints and the positions of different countries.
From September 2010, Fontenay presented, with Fabienne Chauvière, a program dedicated to animals on France Inter: Vivre avec les bêtes. From the following season, she teamed up with Allain Bougrain-Dubourg to host the show, which ended in June 2014.
In 2018, she prefaced the book Le Nouvel Antisémitisme en France'', a collective of texts by Luc Ferry, Pascal Bruckner, Philippe Val, Boualem Sansal, Éric Marty, Georges Bensoussan, Jean-Pierre Winter, Daniel Sibony,, Monette Vacquin, Michel Gad Wolkowicz, Noémie Halioua, Jacques Tarnero, Caroline Valentin, and Lina Murr Nehmé.

Awards

Selected works

Les Figures juives de Marx : Marx dans l'idéologie allemande, Paris, Éditions Galilée, 1973, coll. « La Philosophie en effet » Diderot ou Le matérialisme enchanté, Paris, Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle|, 1981. Rééd. Paris, Librairie générale française, 1984, coll. « Le Livre de poche » ; Paris, Grasset, 2001
  • With Jacques Proust, Interpréter Diderot aujourd'hui, International Cultural Center of Cerisy-la-Salle, conference 11, Paris, Le Sycomore, 1984
  • "La raison du plus fort", preface to Trois traités pour les animaux of Plutarque, translated by Jacques Amyot, Paris, POL, 1992 Le Silence des bêtes : la philosophie à l'épreuve de l'animalité, Paris, Fayard, 1998
  • With Alain Finkielkraut, Des hommes et des bêtes, Geneva, S. Kaplun, Éditions du Tricorne, 2000, coll. « Répliques »
  • "Les bêtes dans la philosophie et la littérature", in Denis Müller & Hugues Poltier, La Dignité de l'animal : quel statut pour les animaux à l'heure des technosciences ?, Labor & Fides, Geneva, 2000, coll. "Le champ éthique", no. 36, pp. 37–68 Les Mille et une fêtes : pourquoi tant de religions ? Petite conférence sur les religions, Paris, Bayard, coll. "Les petites conférences", 2005 Quand un animal te regarde, with illustrations by Aurore Callias, Paris, Giboulées-Gallimard jeunesse, 2006, coll. "Chouette ! penser" Une tout autre histoire : questions à Jean-François Lyotard, Paris, Fayard, 2006, coll. "History of Thought". In the appendix "Europe, the Jews and the Book" by Jean-François Lyotard, article published in Libération, 15 May 1990Sans offenser le genre humain : réflexions sur la cause animale, Paris, Éditions Albin Michel|Albin Michel, 2008, coll. « Bibliothèque des idées »
  • With Marie-Claire Pasquier, Traduire le parler des bêtes, Paris, L'Herne, 2008, coll. "Carnets de l'Herne". Text of two conferences given at the Literary Translation Conference in Arles, 2006
  • "L'abstraction du monde" in Regards sur la crise : réflexions pour comprendre la crise… et en sortir, collective work directed by Antoine Mercier with Alain Badiou, Miguel Benasayag, Rémi Brague, Dany-Robert Dufour, Alain Finkielkraut…, Paris, Hermann éditions, 2010Actes de naissance, interviews with Stéphane Bou, Paris, Le Seuil, 2011La prière d'Esther, Éditions du Seuil, 2014En terrain miné, with Alain Finkielkraut, Stock, September 2017 Gaspard de la nuit. Autobiographie de mon frère, Stock, August 2018, La grâce et le progrès: Réflexions sur la Révolution française et la Vendée, 2020, ed. Stock,