Michel de Certeau

Michel Jean Emmanuel de La Barge de Certeau (French: [sɛʁto]; 17 May 1925 – 9 January 1986) was a French Jesuit Catholic priest and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences as well as hermeneutics, semiotics, ethnology, and religion. He was known as a philosopher of everyday life and was widely regarded as a historian with interests ranging from travelogues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in The Mystic Fable (1982) to contemporary urban life in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). He participated in major French intellectual movements including ressourcement theology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Greimasian semiotics, and nouvelle histoire. He first came to public prominence with contemporary articles on the French May 68 protests that were collected in The Capture of Speech (1968).

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