Researcher trained in archeology and ancient history, as well as a philologist mastering ancient Greek, he was a pillar of the life of ideas. He died in Brussels, October 27, at the age of 76.
by
The writer-publisher Maurice Olender, born April 21, 1946 in Antwerp (Belgium), died, on October 27, at his home in Brussels, a pulmonary disease. He was 76 years old. With it disappears an exceptional figure in the European edition, one of the most active craftsmen in the life of the ideas of recent decades. By creating, more than thirty years ago, at the Seuil editions, “The Librairie du XXe siècle” (now “from the 20th century century”), he had not planned that she would understand a day more than two hundred titles, would deeply mark the intellectual landscape and bring together more than a hundred authors.
In this unparalleled place, historians (Arlette Farge, Michelle Perrot, Michel Pastoureau, Nathan Wachtel) rub shoulders with philosophers (Sylviane Agacinski, Jacques Rancière, Henri Atlan), anthropologists (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marc Augé, Charles Malamoud) neighbor with novelists (Alain Fleischer, Olivier Rolin, Michel Schneider, Antonio Tabucchi, Jean-Claude Grumberg), without forgetting great missing (Paul Cen, Georges Perec), whose works Olender published the works with so much care and care of love he lavished on the living.
Because the singularity of this editorial work is the particular genius of the one who aroused the works instead of receiving them, accompanied their genesis, watched over his authors, helped them to give birth, in a friendly, attentive, demanding Socrates. Friendship did not dissociate itself, for him, from the work of thought and writing. It is undoubtedly for this reason that most of the titles of this collection of tests, both learned and literary, have counted so much – for their respective fields of research, for the trajectories of the authors, and for the public.
above all a scholar
This editorial adventure was all the more brilliant since it was not led by an editor, at least in the current sense of the term. Maurice Olender was not a publishing professional, but first and foremost a scholar, a researcher trained in archeology and ancient history, a philologist mastering ancient Greek. After studying letters in Brussels, he had been a foreign resident at the École normale supérieure on rue d’Ulm, scholarship holder of the French School of Rome, associate researcher at the CNRS, before being elected lecture ‘School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences. It was first his colleagues, friends and accomplices of French Hellenism that he wanted to publish, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Marcel Detienne, Nicole Loraux, Pierre Vidal-Naquet.
You have 46.68% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.