<i>Le Relationnisme philosophique de Georg Simmel: une idée de la culture</i> . Par <scp>Matthieu Amat</scp> <i>Le Relationnisme philosophique de Georg Simmel: une idée de la culture</i> . Par AmatMatthieu. (Travaux de philosophie, 28.) Paris: Honoré Champion, 2018. 490 pp.

The hundredth anniversary in 2018 of Georg Simmel’s death saw new editions of quite a few of his works, while there were a significant number of new monographs published about the man and his œuvre. An unclassifiable scholar, born and raised in Prussia, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) lived in Strasbourg but was German-speaking. He was educated and saw himself firstly as a philosopher, but his works such as The Philosophy of Money undoubtedly influenced the social sciences; in Europe, Simmel is still considered as one of the founding fathers of German sociology, alongside Max Weber. Retrospectively, Simmel could be best described as a multidisciplinary thinker and eclectic academic. Matthieu Amat’s first book, adapted from his doctoral dissertation in philosophy, explores two specific themes in Simmel’s thought: culture (but also cultural criticism) and philosophical relationism. Simmel’s conception of ‘philosophical relationism’ should be understood as a theory of knowledge, a ‘principle of knowledge’, and ‘a worldview’ (p. 53), as distinct from relativism. As Amat reformulates it elsewhere, philosophical relationism is ‘a “good” relativism’ (p. 53), without the simplifications imposed by ‘truth, value, objectivity’ (p. 53). Amat adds: ‘Le “bon” relativisme — le relationnisme — ne saurait viser aucun absolu’ (p. 53). In Chapter 1, culture is characterized by the emergence of ‘des formes dotées de propriétés nouvelles […] d’une validité spécifique’ (p. 110). Later, Amat quotes another definition of culture according to Simmel’s, as a shift from subjectivity to personality (p. 332). Simmel’s conception of culture remains almost hermetic, and far from the practical approaches of sociology or even cultural studies. This book may, however, be valuable for several reasons. Firstly, it provides a rich analysis of Simmel’s articulations of culture’s infinite variations, which span a rather classical conception of culture (as opposed to ‘nature’) as well as a vision of ‘cultural worlds’ and a relationist idea of culture. Secondly, it situates Simmel in the line of thinkers and followers who wrote on culture, from Cassirer to Habermas and Bourdieu, but also Gadamer and even Heidegger (see note 46, p. 243). Because many of his early writings were published in theological journals after his second thesis, the last chapters are dedicated to Simmel’s view and doubts about the existence of God, arguing that there is ‘[p]as de culture sans Dieu’ (p. 423). Furthermore, Amat’s study often provides important quotations from rare works and especially from Simmel’s untranslated correspondence, hitherto only available to German-speaking readers. However, this sometimes challenging book, which still bears the hallmarks of a dissertation, is not for newcomers or undergraduates in philosophy or social sciences, and should not be considered as an introduction to Simmel’s thought. Students looking for a simple definition of culture should look elsewhere for clarity.

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