Plastir Number 40

VIRGINIA WOOLF : COMPLEXITY, PLASTICITY, IDENTITY

Adèle CASSIGNEUL teaches English at the university of Bordeaux. She defended a thesis on Virginia Woolf’s relationship with photography and cinema (Seeing, Observing and Thinking: Virginia Woolf and Photo-Cinematography) and has published several articles [lien] on the topic, paying a particular attention to literary intermediality. In her paper, she first analyses Woolf’s wish to “remodel the 19th-century literature she inherited  » and capture the ineffable complexity of the world through a language that borrows from both photography and cinema. Adèle Cassigneul then sees in what ways the Woolfian text is galvanized by an “intermedial process” she names “imageography”. Woolf created “a prose at once fed by images and creating images”, a porous and open language which calls for a reading which “reinvents the text“ to open up a “plastic place, interfacing the world, the text and being”. Reforming strategies of representation, Woolf called textual identity into question. Dissatisfied by the word “novel”, she invested hybrid literary forms which in turn challenge the identity of her characters – the mock-biography Orlando being a case in point here – and alters readerly expectations. In her last argument, Adèle Cassigneul ponders over this plastic shift and the creativity it calls for.

INTERNAL CONFLICT

Hubert REEVES was a scientific consultant to the NASA in the sixties. Astrophysicist of international fame and study leader at the CNRS (NATIONAL CENTER FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH), he was a professor associated at the Physics Department of the Montreal University and led researches on the origin of the universe, the chemical elements and the solar system in the service of astrophysics of Saclay (France). He is at present the president of the association Humanity and Biodiversity which advocates essential values bound to the protection of the ecosystem, the natural species, the heritage and the biodiversity by preparing the ecological transition. This ethical, philosophic and scientific commitment is totally coherent with the Hubert Reeves’s constant action in favour of the understanding of the intimate mechanisms governing the planet, the solar system, and beyond the universal cosmic field. But beyond his researches in astrophysics, we all know Hubert Reeves the storyteller and the extraordinary boatman of sciences audiovisual entertainments like “ The continuous-flow universe “ or “ Mal de Terre “, numerous TV programs (as “ The night of stars”, etc.). He is also the prolix writer, that it is about chronicles), of literary papers and famous books as “ Patience in the azur ” (Editions du Seuil, 1981), “ Dusts of stars “ (Le Seuil Ed. 1984), “ Malicorne ” and “ The hour to be amazed “ (Le Seuil Ed., 1986) and more recently: “ The universe explained to my grandchildren “ (Le Seuil Ed., 2011) and “Là ou croît le péril…croît aussi ce qui sauve (Le Seuil, 2013). What we chose to present you in PLASTIR is a more intimate side of Hubert Reeves’s, bound to his story, his internal conflicts and the origin of his passions. Confessions made during the publication of “ I shall not have time “ (Le Seuil, 2008), who he takes back here, with strength quotations illustrating sources – his childhood in Quebec, his first emotions and his love in front of the nature – and his profound questioning in the face of science, religion and the mystery which surrounds us.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PRESENT. THE PARTICIPATION IN THE SERVICE OF AN AESTHETICS OF THE CONTEMPORARY

Julien VERHAEGHE is teaching, an Art critic and PhD in aesthetics, sciences and technologies of the Arts. He leads researches in the field of the contemporary art and the aesthetics by questioning them, not on what connects them with the beautiful, but on “ what relates to any diet(regime) of interaction and visibility ”. He has notably published, besides numerous articles or critical studies (http://artetcaetera.net), “ Photography, media and capitalism ” (L’Harmattan Ed., 2009) in joint-management with François Soulages and “ Art and flow: an aesthetics of the contemporary ” (L’Harmattan Ed., on 2014) which questions the plasticity of the flow and the contemporary aesthetic act. In this article, he wonders about the practices of the contemporary art and the relationships, which the man maintains with technoculture and the new media. A relationship between the man, the technique and the arts which he qualifies of dematerialized, of adaptive and participative, but especially as defining “ an era devolved to a shape of “fluidity” or of flow in human relationships, underlining the unprecedented profusion of the information which pass in transit as well as counts it of involved protagonists ”. “ One of the consequences that supposes the participation in art “, he tells us then basically “ is that it is not any more a question of insisting on a bilateral interaction between a transmitter and his receiver, but on a participation of individuals’ community. In that respect, the aesthetics of the contemporary is upset there, because it adapted itself. ” Other modified relationship, that of the social networks, the techniques of communication as well as the reduction of scale (geographical as sociocultural) which “ suppose a complex and systematic aesthetics, an aesthetics fed by « confusions » as said Rancière because the components which establish it, besides being uncountable, being irreparably different some of the others. “ Julien Verhaeghe, the subject of study of which is the aesthetics of the contemporary, so describes the tangible consequences of this permanent interconnection, this massification of the consumption and the real time information exchange on the sociological art. A massification and a complexity of ground having two hillsides: the development of a advanced social individualism and in contrast that of a greater participation or “ of a playability “ promising according to Boissier with regard to this complexity or to this intelligence collective as new practices which they impose. To conclude, more free will, more reconfiguration, participation, increased reality, in brief more creativity as so many milestones of this new Sociological Art.

RENE THOM PHILOSOPHER

Abbdelkader BACHTA is an epistemologist and a professor at the University of Tunis (Tunisia). Among his recent works: « Thom and the scientific modelisation » (L’harmattan, 2013) and « The scientific modelisation and its foundations » published in arabic language (MtL Editions, 2015). In the lineage of his precedents works, all published in in PLASTIR (n°27 (06/2012), n°29 (12/2012, n°32 (09/2013), n°38(03/2015), analysing the modelling as well as the theoretical or epistemological positions of the mathematician René Thom with regard to other researchers as Lemoigne or Tarski, he delivers us here a unique portrait on thomist relationships with philosophy. These relationships are peculiar to the approach of the scholar who connects ceaselessly his mathematical speciality with the differential topology, with the epistemology and with the speculative analysis, contrary with Zeeman. Search for foundations (in topology and meaning), fundamental or phenomenological interrogation on the notions of space, universality, category, relationship between the mathematics and the reality. Reports always distanced from the classic philosophic approaches, that concerning the pre-Socratic Platon and Aristote, about the philosophy of the 18th of Kant or still about surrounding areas of Conte and of Heidegger. Outstrip that Abdelkader Bachta, following that of Paty about Einstein and of Brook about Alembert, assimilates to a downright refusal of “ the systemisation of the thought ” at characteristic Thom of the real “ creators of science “ just like Cantor or like Einstein. Essential refusal in the semantic thomian analysis which avoids the logical formalism bound to the “ contemporary semantic disciplines ” and calls it to the geometrical and in “ the intuition of the continuous to release the real meaning of the significant ”.

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