The Raving Age. Histories and figures of youth

If youth is a classic object for anthropological, sociological, or historiographical studies, the contemporary grasp of its aesthetic and political contours has proven to be a much more difficult task. Indeed, it is seen as an ill-defined object, constantly shifting, difficult to dissociate from the historical background against which it arises – to such an extent that, by being so much a part of the present in its most atmospheric dimension, youth seems to become its image, its most exhaustive yet also most fleeting portrait, meant to be renewed at each moment of history. It is at this precise point that this research project seeks to grasp its logic, not only to describe youth, but to use it as its very method.

This project does not intend to reproduce the categories that sociological or anthropological studies of youth have constructed, nor to reiterate the clichés that cultural industries have projected onto it, but to make the inextricable nature of the aesthetic and political dimensions of youth perceptible and intelligible. By exploring the processes by which youth is constituted through its forms of representation, this project seeks to grasp it as an allegory that will help rethink the “contemporary” through its most lively milieu.