Plastir Number 58

PROLOG TO THE QUEST

Ilke Angela MARECHAL is a poetess, translator and editor. Having learned with great sadness of his disappearance last February, I wanted to personally pay him a vibrant tribute in PLASTIR because we had strong friendships and we carried out several projects together. I chose to do it by publishing this prologue which she had written in exergue from her book « Sciences and Imaginary » (Albin Michel, 1994) which sums up her work as an enlightened ant and a good fairy for all scientists, philosophers and artists who crossed her quest. Because it is indeed a quest that it is about. A thirst for inextinguishable knowledge that goes to the root of knowledge, its narrative, poetic and polychrome modes of expression. A thirst that Ilke developed with Gérard Murail and Maurice Couquiaud for the Phréatique review, with  Michel Cazenave, who among his many prerogatives, including that of being an honorary member of PSA, was very known at France Culture and directed the collection « Sciences of today » at Albin Michel Ed., with scientists like Etienne Klein, Basarab Nicolescu, Francisco Varela or Jean-Pierre Luminet, artists like Anne-Marie Pochat or Frédéric Rossille, one of whose compositions formed the credits for the radio show named Epectase that the author produced and animated, and so many others that I cannot name. Ilke Angela Marechal never stopped questioning us, always trying to get to the bottom of things and feelings. As a poetess, she notably published the book « A l’écoute » (or  Listening) and is part of the cultural fund « Var and Poetry » of the University of the South / Toulon-Var, prose, essays in review and many interviews that she immortalized. Apart from these literary and translator activities, notably of the work of Marie-Louise Von Franz (Matière et Psyché, Bibliothèque Jungienne, Albin Michel, 2002) and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker that she edited at Anima Viva publishing house that she directed in the Principality of Andorra, she was a founding member of the association Andorra Compicitat between 2011 and 2013. She produced during this period three important meetings / debates at the Meritxell Sanctuary: the Dialogs of Meritxell or Diàlegs de Meritxell: Espiritualitat i interculturalitat in 2012 with Yamada Sôshô (Reverend superior of Shinjuan, Daitoku-ji, Kyoto, Japan, 27th successor of Ikkyû); Thinking between languages ​​(with philologist Heinz Wismann) in 2013 and Tagore, 100 years of the Nobel Prize, with a lecture-lecture by Professor Udaya Narayana Singh of Visva-Bharati University on the Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore (Nobel prize, 2014). She has also carried out or produced numerous interviews with researchers from all disciplines and papers, including two in PLASTIR: Plastir 5, 12/2006  and Plastir 11, 06/2008, as well as cultural events in the arts and science field. Among those: the program Epectase, les sciences au pastels that she produced and hosted on Aligre FM, Paris between 1994 and 2001 in which many of us had the chance to participate; The head in the Stars, meeting between astrophysicists and poets, in Nice in 1989 for the Phréatique review; round table around the science and imaginary interview book published at Albin Michel in 1994 at the City of Sciences and Industry: Between Art and Science, La Création I at the Dosne-Thiers Foundation, Institut de France 1996; under the patronage of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, Nobel Prize in Physics and Marcel Landowsky, composer and chancellor of the Institute, as a delegate of the association European Espace C.I.C. in cooperation with the association Medicis Art-Science. Also, Between Art and Science, Creation II (FlickRlink) at the Palais de la Découverte (Paris) in 1997 offering an exhibition of works of art from a dozen renowned scientists in dialogue with around thirty artists as well as a cycle of conferences, debates, round tables to which the Groupe des Plasticiens or GDP, preceding the creation of PSA contributed.

NEUROSCIENCE AND CRIMINAL LAW FOR MINORS

Peggy LARRIEU is a lecturer in private law and criminal sciences at the University of Aix-Marseille, her research is part of a transdisciplinary perspective. After a thesis on Political life captured by private law, she became interested in the links between law and neuroscience but also and, in counterpoint, in the links between law and the imaginary (myths, literary stories). She is notably the author of a book: Neurosciences and criminal law, The brain in the courtroom, published by L’Harmattan in 2015, and of several articles on the same subject. Peggy Larrieu presents us here a delicate subject in juvenile criminal law taking advantage of the lessons brought by medicine and neuroscience, which supports, and we are convinced witnesses, on the inestimable value of brain plasticity in all our actions and behaviours. She summarizes her approach as follows: “ For several years, the orientations of penal policy have led to increasingly systematic responses to juvenile delinquency. Security now tends to prevail over the educational objective, which translates a paradigm shift and a « rampant despecialization » of juvenile criminal justice. Such an evolution is however contrary to advances in neuroscience, which rather reinforce the autonomy of juvenile criminal law. But, if neuroscience data can guide the legislator in the development of general rules, we must be very careful when it comes to specific cases. The rates of growth and decline, the rates of maturation and degeneration vary from person to person. Nothing is ever frozen in the brain. Let’s not forget that a child is perpetually becoming; To enclose him in a definition, whether formulated in school, by science or by justice, is betraying his freedom to become who he chooses to be. »

ANATOMY OF A DISASTER

Hubert LANDIER is an economist, sociologist and active member of the CIRET (International Center for Transdisciplinary Research and Studies). He has devoted his professional career to observing and analyzing work relationships in the enterprises, both as an academic and as a consultant. Today, he is thinking, with a prospective perspective, of the relationships between humanity and its environment. After about twenty books devoted to the human management of companies, he is the author of two uchronies, « Across the world of tomorrow« , and « Under the big green sky« , as well as a collection of apophtegmes, « The words of the gardener« . This fine anatomy of disasters, whether it affects the collapse of societies, global warming or the capitalocene, Hubert Landier situates it in the context of confinement and the post-anthropocene. The world, after the coronavirus pandemic, will never be the same again, he tells us. It will be somewhere between the status quo ante that some hope and the collapse that others expect. The unexpected, surprising us, forced us to reflect on our relationship to the world and the principles that inspire us. Our devotion to the utilitarian and economic paradigm, our faith in the arrow of time and in progress, this being reduced to technological progress, our disdain for our terrestrial environment, reduced to being nothing more than a career and a recycling center. So many certainties representative of taxonomy and axiology which animate us in spite of us, preventing us from conceiving what could be the world of tomorrow. No forecast possible that does not bring us back to the past. No other recourse than imagination and poetry.

MYTHO-LOGIC OR MESO-LOGIC? A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE BARTHES’ MYTHOLOGY AND THE BERQUE’S MESOLOGY

Xiaoling FANG is a landscape architect, Doctor of Philosophy and Social Sciences-Architecture/Landscape from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. Teacher at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris la Villette -HESAM University, member of the “Architecture, Milieu, Landscape” Research Unit, ENSAPLV/HESAM/MC, founder and president of the LABCF association (Laboratory of Art de Bâtir France/China). Her research themes mainly concern action theories in the perspective of Mesology: creativity, creative process, body experiences, actions concerning the architecture, the urban planning, and the landscape.This study aims to analyze certain analogies between the Berque’s mesology and the Barthes’ mythology. Some similarities can first of all be observed through their meaning systems: the trajective chains and the mythological chains. Their representative patterns are not mere formal demonstrations of a meaning system, as the elements are alternated through a complex but analogous mechanism – a never-ending dynamic flow within the process. On the other hand, it is important to make the distinction between these two models, since one is not quite the equivalent of another, and moreover they are not of the same quality. Barthes takes an extremely critical stance specifically towards the contemporary bourgeois class, while Berque chooses a broader vision intended to show the world’s deployment and thus to question the modern Western paradigm’s foundations. In order to understand the mythological form’s limits, and its main differences with the mesology, this analysis takes place from four angles: the trajectory chains and the mythological chains, the hypostasis from S/P to S’ and the mythical naturalization, the meaning cycle, the system inflation and the mytho-logic’s limits. The study presents above all the reflections based on readings of the writings of two philosophers, Augustin Berque and Roland Barthes. Its goal is not to provide definitive answers, but most of all to raise questions, and specially to offer different perspectives on two extremely rich thoughts.

 

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