Maurice Pinguet La mort volontaire au Japon (Voluntary Death in Japan) (1984)

Abstract

Maurice Pinguet was born in Allier, France in 1929. In 1949, he entered the Grande École for training secondary school teachers (École normale supérieure, ENS) in Paris. At the same time, he studied Greek and Latin classical literature and French literature at the Sorbonne. In 1952, he received his college teaching credential in French literature and later taught at a local high school. From 1956 to 1958, he was a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS). It was around this time that he began his friendships with people like Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. In 1958, he came to Japan as a foreign lecturer at the University of Tokyo’s College of Liberal Arts, where he taught a wide range of courses, including French literature and French thought. From 1963, he served as the Director of the Franco-Japanese Institute in Tokyo. He returned to France in 1968 to teach French literature at the University of Paris III (Université Paris-III). For three years, from 1976, he taught a seminar on Japanese culture at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) at the invitation of Roland Barthes. In the first year, he explored “the main features of the discourse on Japan in Western writings,” and eventually hit upon the problematic area of “voluntary death.” Over the next two years, he explored this issue in collaboration with Professor Jacqueline Pigeot of the University of Paris VII (Université Paris-VII), who translated and provided a wide variety of textual material on " voluntary death” in Japanese literature. In 1979, he again came to Japan to teach students at the University of Tokyo’s College of Liberal Arts. During this period, he wrote this book over 40 months spanning the years from 1981 to 1984. (Maurice Pinguet, 1929-1991.).