This article offers a new chapter in the history of the Severan Miaphysite church, the ancestor-institution of the modern-day Syriac Orthodox. It employs the consecration lists in Michael the Syrian’s 12th-century chronicle to investigate changing patterns of authority, and relationships between monasteries and episcopal sees, in a period poorly served by narrative sources. The home monastery of the Miaphysite patriarchs corresponds to shifts in political authority from Abbasid Raqqa, to Hamdanid Aleppo, to Byzantine Melitene, but this did not preclude the survival of local patterns of patronage. Clusters of patronage, identified using historical network analysis, are not geographically segregated, and this helps to explain the relative stability of the network, which did not see major attempts at secession in this period. The patterns in these lists help us to establish the places where narrative sources highlight unusual phenomena, and where the phenomena they report are typical features of the relationships between bishops and monasteries.

Ce texte propose une analyse du succès éditorial et intellectuel des récits contemporains du vivant. En s’appuyant sur les figures de Vinciane Despret et de Baptiste Morizot, il interroge les conditions sociales, historiques et épistémologiques d’une littérature qui prétend dépasser le dualisme nature/culture et établir un « vivre-ensemble inter-espèces » à l’ère de l’Anthropocène. Un retour sur les traditions critiques de l’exceptionnalisme humain montre que ces récits, bien qu’animés par une volonté de reconnexion sensible au vivant, tendent à reproduire des formes d’anthropomorphisme et à universaliser des dispositions socialement situées, propres aux groupes dotés d’un fort capital culturel. L’ontologie des sensibilités qu’ils tentent de développer contribue paradoxalement à légitimer certains usages marchands et institutionnels de l’écologie contemporaine.

The automotive lobby’s voluntary commitment to reducing CO2 emissions in 1998 was widely perceived as evidence of the influence of multinationals on European decision-making. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) denounced the lack of transparency. Interviewing negotiators or quoting published reports, scholars focused on the disappointing effects of this agreement. Pending the opening of the public archives, this study is based on primary industry archives, which shed light on the highly confidential negotiation phase. Exchanges within the industry and meetings with the European Commission reveal the limits of the automotive lobby’s power, which had to face internal divisions and seemed to suffer more than choose the agreement. It was the result of Directorate-General (DG) III’s maneuvering. The companies “voluntarily” accepted it as the lesser evil, as it was more advantageous than a directive. The idea of standards being co-constructed by public and private stakeholders needs to be qualified: the balance of power was unbalanced. With these soft regulations, it was above all the Commission that strengthened its position in the decision-making process, to the detriment of other stakeholders such as the European Parliament.