‘What Forced Men to Kill Their Own Kind in Religious Ceremonies’? Anthropology and Metaphysics of Sacrifice in the Work of Georges Bataille and René Girard

Traditionally used to designate bloody rituals practiced in so-called ‘primitive societies’, the notion of sacrifice is commonly understood as a strategic investment in which the renunciation of something valuable is compensated by a more advantageous return. Sharing such a functionalist perspective, social theorists describe sacrifice as a means to renewing social and/or religious bonds through the transgression of social and/or religious boundaries. However, social theorists do not explain why men need to renew such bonds – i.e. what lies behind the human desire to unite with the divine and why violence exists in the first place – and ultimately leave unresolved the question of sacrifice’s deep origins. This article examines how two French theorists, namely Georges Bataille and René Girard, attempt to overcome the theoretical constraints faced by their predecessors and offer an innovative answer to the question of sacrifice’s deep origins, providing Western functionalist sacrifice theories with an unprecedented depth

Gynaecological uses of a new class of steroids: the selective progesterone receptor modulators

Selective progesterone receptor modulators (SPRM) represent a new class of synthetic steroids, which can interact with the progesterone receptor (PR) and can exert agonist, antagonist or mixed effects on various progesterone target tissues in vivo. This review evaluates the actual and potential usefulness of SPRMs in gynaecolog

Bios2mds: an R package for comparing orthologous protein families by metric multidimensional scaling

BACKGROUND: The distance matrix computed from multiple alignments of homologous sequences is widely used by distance-based phylogenetic methods to provide information on the evolution of protein families. This matrix can also be visualized in a low dimensional space by metric multidimensional scaling (MDS). Applied to protein families, MDS provides information complementary to the information derived from tree-based methods. Moreover, MDS gives a unique opportunity to compare orthologous sequence sets because it can add supplementary elements to a reference space. RESULTS: The R package bios2mds (from BIOlogical Sequences to MultiDimensional Scaling) has been designed to analyze multiple sequence alignments by MDS. Bios2mds starts with a sequence alignment, builds a matrix of distances between the aligned sequences, and represents this matrix by MDS to visualize a sequence space. This package also offers the possibility of performing K-means clustering in the MDS derived sequence space. Most importantly, bios2mds includes a function that projects supplementary elements (a.k.a. "out of sample" elements) onto the space defined by reference or "active" elements. Orthologous sequence sets can thus be compared in a straightforward way. The data analysis and visualization tools have been specifically designed for an easy monitoring of the evolutionary drift of protein sub-families. CONCLUSIONS: The bios2mds package provides the tools for a complete integrated pipeline aimed at the MDS analysis of multiple sets of orthologous sequences in the R statistical environment. In addition, as the analysis can be carried out from user provided matrices, the projection function can be widely used on any kind of data

Allemands et Polonais dans Le Moulin à Lévine de Johannes Bobrowski

In diesem Roman, dessen Handlung 1874 in den Territorien des geteilten Polen spielt, wo eine aktive Germanisierungspolitik durchgeführt wird, zeigt uns Bobrowski aufgrund historischer Ereignisse, wie die Koexistenz von Bevölkerungsgruppen mit unterschiedlichen ethnischen und kulturellen Eigenarten zur Verachtung bzw. zum Missbrauch des Rechts und zur Pervertierung der Aufgaben des Staats führen kann. Die Beziehungen zwischen Deutschen, Polen und Juden kennzeichnen sich durch herabsetzende Stereotype und diskriminierende Praktiken. Jedoch relativiert der Autor die Rechtfertigung dieser Stereotype und Praktiken durch ethnische oder kulturelle Argumente: es handelt sich in seiner Perspektive eigendich um eine ideologische Verklärung ökonomischer und sozialer Gegensätze.Dans ce roman dont l’action se situe en 1874 dans les territoires de la Pologne partagée où se pratique une politique de germanisation active, Bobrowski nous montre, sur la base de faits historiques, comment la coexistence de populations d’ethnie et de culture différentes peut aboutir au mépris du droit et à la perversion de la mission de l’État. Stéréotypes dévalorisants et pratiques discriminatoires caractérisent les rapports entre Allemands, Polonais et juifs. Mais l’auteur relativise la justification par l’ethnie ou la culture de ces stéréotypes ou pratiques : il s’agit en fait du travestissement idéalisé de conflits économiques et sociaux.The events narrated in this novel took place in 1874 in partitioned Poland, at a time of vigorous attempts at germanization. Bobrowski shows the reader how, on the basis of historical facts, the coexistence of ethnically and culturally différent populations can lead to a perversion of the role of the state and to the negation of individual rights. Derogatory stereotypes and discriminating behaviour being the typical of the relationships between Germans, Poles, and Jews. However, the author puts forward the idea that such behaviour is not ethnically or culturally grounded, but is a réfection of social and economic conflicts

Weighted-covariance factor fuzzy C-means clustering

In this paper, we propose a factor weighted fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm. Based on the inverse of a covariance factor, which assesses the collinearity between the centers and samples, this factor takes also into account the compactness of the samples within clusters. The proposed clustering algorithm allows to classify spherical and non-spherical structural clusters, contrary to classical fuzzy c-means algorithm that is only adapted for spherical structural clusters. Compared with other algorithms designed for non-spherical structural clusters, such as Gustafson-Kessel, Gath-Geva or adaptive Mahalanobis distance-based fuzzy c-means clustering algorithms, the proposed algorithm gives better numerical results on artificial and real well known data sets. Moreover, this algorithm can be used for high dimensional data, contrary to other algorithms that require the computation of determinants of large matrices. Application on Mid-Infrared spectra acquired on maize root and aerial parts of Miscanthus for the classification of vegetal biomass shows that this algorithm can successfully be applied on high dimensional data

Structural evolution of G-protein-coupled receptors: a sequence space approach

Class A G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) provide a fascinating example of evolutionary success. In this review, we discuss how metric multidimensional scaling (MDS), a multivariate analysis method, complements traditional tree-based phylogenetic methods and helps decipher the mechanisms that drove the evolution of class A GPCRs. MDS provides low-dimensional representations of a distance matrix. Applied to a multiple sequence alignment, MDS represents the sequences in a Euclidean space as points whose interdistances are as close as possible to the distances in the alignment (the so-called sequence space). We detail how to perform the MDS analysis of a multiple sequence alignment and how to analyze and interpret the resulting sequence space. We also show that the projection of supplementary data (a property of the MDS method) can be used to straightforwardly monitor the evolutionary drift of specific subfamilies. The sequence space of class A GPCRs reveals the key role of mutations at the level of the TM2 and TM5 proline residues in the evolution of class A GPCRs

La peinture monumentale en Occitanie ; bilan et perspectives

Depuis plus de trente ans le service de l’inventaire de la Région Occitanie œuvre à la constitution d’un corpus régional des peintures monumentales du Moyen Âge à nos jours (peintures murales et plafonds peints). La connaissance de cette thématique s’est assurément améliorée mais la conservation et la restauration de ce patrimoine fragile posent encore des questionnements ainsi que sa valorisation qui est trop souvent peu prise en compte.For more than thirty years, the inventory service of the Occitanie Region has been working on establishing a regional corpus of monumental paintings dating from the Middle Ages to the present day (wall paintings and painted ceilings). Knowledge of this theme has certainly improved, but the preservation and restoration of this fragile heritage still raises questions, as does its promotion, which is too often not taken into account