Michel de Certeau

Michel de Certeau was a French Jesuit priest and scholar who combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences as well as hermeneutics, semiotics, ethnology, and religion in his work. 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. 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. He became a public intellectual in 1968, after the publication of his La prise de la parole, a book in which he applied his insights on the role of the mystics in the 16th and 17th centuries to the protesting students in the streets of Paris. From that moment onward he started to develop his theory of everyday life practices, resulting in a number of different books, of which L'invention du quotidien (1980) was the most elaborate. The book has often been characterized as the starting point of a new discipline, everyday life studies. He also continued working on his history of early modern mysticism, resulting in the first volume of La fable mystique (1982). Due to his early death in 1986 from cancer, the second volume could only be published in 2013, finished by his life-long collaborator Luce Giard. His work has been influential in various disciplines and fields of study, such as cultural studies, urban studies, sociology, anthropology, literature, theology, and spirituality.