Michel de Certeau

Michel de Certeau SJ (French: [sɛʁto]; 17 May 1925 – 9 January 1986) was a French Jesuit 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 widely regarded as a historian who had interests ranging from travelogues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to contemporary urban life.
Michel Jean Emmanuel de La Barge de Certeau was born in 1925 in Chambéry, Savoie. De Certeau's education was eclectic, following the medieval tradition of peregrinatio academica. After obtaining degrees in classics and philosophy at the universities of Grenoble and Lyon, he studied the works of Pierre Favre (1506–1546) at the École pratique des hautes études (Paris) with Jean Orcibal. He undertook religious training at a seminary in Lyon, where he entered the Jesuit order (Society of Jesus) in 1950 and was ordained in 1956. De Certeau entered the Society of Jesus hoping to do missionary work in China. In the year of his ordination, de Certeau became one of the founders of the journal Christus, with which he would actively be involved for much of his life. In 1960 he earned his doctorate ("thèse de 3e Cycle") at the Sorbonne with a study of co-founder of the Society of Jesus Pierre Favre before embarking on his celebrated study of Jean-Joseph Surin.
De Certeau was greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud and was, along with Jacques Lacan, one of the founding members of École Freudienne de Paris, an informal group which served as a focal point for French scholars interested in psychoanalysis. He came to public attention after publishing an article dealing with the May 1968 events in France. He also took part in Robert Jaulin's department of ethnology at the University of Paris-VII after May 68.
De Certeau went on to teach at several universities in locations as diverse as Geneva, San Diego, and Paris. Through the 1970s and 1980s he produced a string of works that demonstrated his interest in mysticism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis.
De Certeau's most well-known and influential work in the United States has been The Practice of Everyday Life, cited in fields such as rhetoric, performance studies, and law. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. According to de Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. De Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture”, nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, he attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts.
The Practice of Everyday Life distinguishes between the concepts of strategy and tactics. De Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power who are the "producers", while individuals are "consumers" or "poachers," acting in accordance with, or against, environments defined by strategies by using "tactics". In the chapter "Walking in the City", de Certeau asserts that "the city" is generated by the strategies of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole. De Certeau uses the vantage from the World Trade Center in New York to illustrate the idea of a synoptic, unified view. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts in spite of the strategic grid of the streets. De Certeau's argument is that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products.
According to Andrew Blauvelt, who relies on the work of de Certeau in his essay on design and everyday life:
His work The Writing of History, translated into English after his death, deals with the relationship between history and religion. De Certeau makes a point in linking the history of writing history to the legitimization of political power and that "Western" traditions of history involve using the act of writing as a tool of colonialism; writing their own histories while un-writing the embodied traditions of native peoples.
He died in Paris in 1986, aged 60, from pancreatic cancer.
A multidisciplinarian, he wrote ground-breaking studies in fields as diverse as mysticism, the act of faith, cultural dynamics in contemporary society, and historiography as an intellectual practice. His impact continues unabated, with new volumes appearing regularly, and perhaps surprisingly his reputation is growing even more rapidly in English and German-speaking countries and the Mediterranean than in his native France. This strong and growing interest in academia is not matched in the public sphere; however, partly due to his being considered a "difficult" author because of his highly personal style which makes translation difficult, and partly due to the declining status of French in the world generally. Nevertheless, portions of his prolific output have been translated into a dozen languages.
His fellow-Jesuit, Pope Francis, makes reference to his works in his 2024 encyclical letter Dilexit nos.
In French
In English