Denis Duclos

His main research field has been the phenomenon of societal "great fears" for both scapegoat characters (like "serial killers") and collective actions viewed as generating disasters.

He interprets these fears as "symptomatic" positions, that is to say, which are formed in place of explicit political positions, when reasonable conversation is impossible on crucial issues. The subjects of fear rarely relate directly to a real problem at stake. For example, the serial killer, as a myth, represented, in the United States, the difficulty of finding a balance between legal system and individual freedom: both having the potential of turning into monstrosity. Another example: the fear of "mad cow" disease (due to industrial feeding of cattle) seemed to represent a more fundamental issue: artificiality of our lifestyles and our interventions on life forms and their natural intermingling. The fear of climate change reflects the broader problem of the difficulty to pass from a world composed of human entities in conflict to a world where humanity acts "as one man." The most blatant and more constant symptomatic transfer is the hatred/fear of the "Jewish conspirator" who appears to embody a rejection on the others of the guilt associated in Christian society, to the act of making God equal to Man (and therefore to symbolically "kill" God or the Father). Indeed, no one can explain the recurrence of this hatred/fear without analysing the regular trait it represents within Western civilization, as if "mechanically".

In the background of these phenomena, which can rightly be named "pathologies", Denis Duclos (who worked with the British anthropologist Mary Douglas) built a theory of cultural fields, of their conversational structure (counterpoint to the tendency to domination observed by Pierre Bourdieu). He considers in particular the emergence of "positional" clusters which tend to directly organize themselves into a global conversation, gradually moving away from their traditional shells: religious, national, international and civilizational fields. For example, it appears (supported by surveys) that the European field is largely centered by the question of law (as an eventually quantifiable system of relations): The Anglo-Saxon position tends to equate law and society, while the "latin" response anchors the law in civic local conditions, whereas another position (German) is based on the necessary correspondence between law and a wide community spirit. This conversation is a special case of a pluralization of positions to be found at other levels, but also, ultimately, in the basic attitudes of all cultures (as shown by P. Descola according to Claude Lévi-Strauss.) On the assumption that, in a sense (related to the fact that homo sapiens is speaking) there has potentially only ever been one human cultural field, Denis Duclos questions History as a confluence of separating and unifying trends. He raises the problem of the pluralistic frame which, in a “society-world”, will necessarily supersede existing intermediate forms, too deeply embedded into outdated and self-centered organizations.

Duclos has also published in the Revue de Mauss, a French anti-utilitarian journal.