CFP: The Group of the Rue Saint-Benoît: Rethinking Intellectual Practice – Paris, 9 January 2026

deadline for abstracts is 1 September 2025

9-11 Rue de Constantine Paris 7007

University of London Institute in Paris in collaboration with l’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) 

The “group of the rue Saint-Benoît” refers to a group of intellectuals that met regularly at Marguerite Duras’ apartment on the rue Saint-Benoît in Paris from the late nineteen forties until the nineteen sixties in search of a “communism of thought”. While they could only be understood as a ‘group’ in an informal sense, their diverse texts and interventions offer a set of propositions on intellectual practice whose implications have yet to be examined and unpacked. This interdisciplinary conference proposes to examine the significance of the group and demonstrate the implications of their work for contemporary intellectual practice.

The group emerged from the wartime experiences of Marguerite Duras, Robert Antelme and Dionys Mascolo and became a regular gathering of intellectuals and friends at Duras’ apartment. Edgar Morin, Claude Roy and Maurice Blanchot (who joined later in the nineteen fifties) were key members, and other visitors, with varying levels of implication, included Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille, Jean Schuster, Jean Duvignaud and Jean-Toussaint Desanti amongst others. Having broken with the PCF at the beginning of the fifties, the core members of the group remained dedicated to a “communism of thought” which found various forms of expression: anticolonial intellectual mobilisations in the nineteen fifties, such as the Comité d’action des intellectuels contre la poursuite de la guerre an Algérie, the development of a politics of refusal with le 14 Juillet (an anti-Gaullist revue published in 1958), the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the War in Algeria(their most famous intervention, better known as the Manifesto of the 121), as well as an unrealised project for an international journal and involvement in the events of 1968 in the form of Student-Writer Action Committee (Comité d’Action Écrivains-Étudiants)…

Full details here (English and French)