BHL, FROM THE WAR IN PHILOSOPHY OR THE « NO PHILOSOPHICAL » : A RETURN TO THE MYTH
Patrick MENNETEAU is professor of literature and history of the ideas of the British century of the lights at the university of the South-Toulon-Var. Doctor in Scottish literature of the XVIIIe century, he published many articles on Robert Fergusson, James Hogg, William Blake, Charles Dickens, John Locke, David Hume and a work on William Blake at Champion editions, Paris in 1999. He also animates many seminars on the poetry of Blake and more generally on the methodology of literary criticism, the history of the ideas of the XVIIe century or the Jungian psychoanalysis. He devotes himself in this article to a double reading of the philosophical practice by the means of a singular implementation. That of the famous philosopher, novelist, essay-writer or leader-writer Bernard-Henri Levy known as BHL. It is a new kind of paper for PLASTIR which does not have habit to accommodate articles targeting a personality. However, our doubts were quickly dissipated, because the matter exceeds very polemical to set basic problems about the philosophical and mythical thought. Thus, Menneteau start distinguishing the BHL’s attitude from the crucial discussion in depth which animates it. I quote “Is it still possible to make philosophy today ”, “Does the philosopher still have established among? ” or, when it quotes BHL in connection with the decline of philosophy: “Commenting on Heidegger celebrates it joke with what was supposed to summarize the life of a philosopher […] : `he was born, he worked, he is dead’”. Debate registers far from the Lights and in a world where science dictates the laws of the universe, tends to dissolve the concept even of philosophy. The author will evoke then in turn the Botul affair and the sour criticism who followed himself from there in connection with Kant, the aversion for the art of the quotation or on the contrary the wild reading of the texts preached by BHL with the detriment of a deepening of the basic problems. A more positive brief reply appears nevertheless further in the text: “BHL delivers his conclusion to us: “How I philosophize? Like that. By burning the stages. By shorting-circuit the generations”. It is himself who says it. In front of such assertions, one can doubt to be still in the field of the philosophical exercise. Could one, in order to look further into criticism, to widen the prospect while taking as a starting point what proposes BHL himself ? If “a philosophy is always a confession”, isn’t one in right to resort to some elements of psychoanalysis ? …. ” Patrick Menneteau approves here the opening of BHL who wishes not to confine the field of philosophy to that of sciences and the literature, but to open with Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytical interpretations. In the same way, he puts in perspective the supra-materialist approach inherited Plato from the post-Lock point of view, approaching the field of the systems of political organization and approbating the interpretation of BHL considering that it is necessary to compare the genocides to philosophical objects. By doing this, that leads the author to raise this question: “Then do BHL philosophize ? He is not rather simply somebody who still tries to make philosophy… but which is in evil of recognition as a philosopher in a company which does not have anything any more to make philosophy, carried that it is by its tragic destiny… ”. Lastly, the field of the religion and in particular of the Christian myth will be approached with many biblical extracts under the angle of “the irruption of archetypal” the jungien at BHL and in particular discussed on the plan of the confessions, or of the points evoked by BHL with the approach of Thomas de Quincey or Hume. And Menetteau to return on Botul by establishing the link with Jung: “… where BHL retains from the greate Botul only the denunciation of the spiritistic roots of the concept of the noumenal world of Kant, Jung recognizes the character programming science of its first spiritistic experiments, integrates them in his approach, revises the definition in autonomous terms of complexes of psyche, and always recognizes of it their place in this world with which BHL claims to want to be in catch (whereas his rejection is a a-priori that he does not even consider it necessary to justify!) ”. To conclude, this article raises the question of the possibility of philosophy in the contemporary world, by recognizing the share, sometimes contestable, but relevant of BHL to the discussion in depth opposing materialists prejudged and supra-materialists perspective, in particular thanks to the widening of the philosophical field to the mythical aspect of the Jungian psychoanalysis.
MUSIC: RATIONAL OR IRRATIONAL, ART OR SCIENCE, EMOTION OR ANALYSIS ?
Nicolas BRUNELLE is polytechnician, specialized in quantum mechanics and molecular biophysics. He will decide to approach Cultural Management in 2004 by looking further into there the bond between Sciences and Music, in the continuity of the work of Xenakis. After having supported a report on this subject in 2005, he will deal with the round of the Choral society of the Yellow Note (orientalized Occitan songs) and will organize exhibitions of painting (Charlotte Welfling, Mireille Roll, Carla Robalino Aguirre). Musician since childhood, he plays guitar and piano in various rock’n’roll and jazz-rock’n’roll formation, then in the Christian de Chabot’s quartet of guitars until 1997 before launching out in the composition of electroacoustic music (1999 to 2002), then in the creation of partitions for guitar alone until 2007. He currently teaches the guitar while managing the Collective Rings release of the Sound and Image, in bond with the CCMIX and centers it composition Musicale Iannis Xenakis since 2008. Its current project relates to new electroacoustics compositions with the software Max by using his knowledge in physics and taking as a starting point his many trips in North, South America, Africa and Europe. He leads to this end theoretical research between science and music within the CSLI with Gerard Pape and this year at the IRCAM with Alain Bonardi. His reports entitled “Bond Science/Music: since antiquity until our days, alliances and ‘desalliances’ ” was recently published in the European database Leonardo/Olats. He summarizes his approach as follows: “The idea to me had just combined, all, initially, Science and the Music, with a turning of my life, where I noted that they was well the two constants of my life”, fully corresponding to non-fragmentation that we recommend within the PSA research group. His paper illustrates these remarks perfectly, whatever it concerns the parallel between quantum mechanics and music, the role of rational/Irrational dialectics in music or the art & science reports. Nicolas Brunelle asks us the question in these terms: “If the music, art and science suppose strong axioms always leaving place to a slight doubt, a philosophical aporia as does the coma pythagorician leave the place in the Universe of creation to any innovation, with all new artistic creations or scientific theories? ” And he gives possible answers: Apollonian science and Dionysian art, being and nothing, to connect the two poles, etc. As many openings bathed in the musicality of Iannis Xenakis than he quotes with accuracy as a conclusion: “The man is a continuous form in a discontinuous reality”.
Daniel DANETIS is artist and professor emeritus at the department Visual arts of the university PARIS VIII. He centres his research on the plastic creative processes and their interactive practical application. The artistic mediation belongs to its attributes, in particular when it aims to the participative setting of plastic creations in the public places. Daniel Danetis carried out within this framework several programmes of plastic interventions in France [murals or installations landscape for various local government agencies of the Paris region, work making take part his students: Work-delivers… its secrecies, ICOM, La Villette; Rush towards art (Museum of Modern art of the Town of Paris); Homage to Gatti (Paris VIII); The Mikado of the human rights – commemoration of the bicentenary of the Revolution to the Large Palate, Writings vague – realization of a wave of graffiti within the district of Pierre Punt of Bagneux-; Homage of images to artists of the XXe Century – mural art to the Hospital of Argenteuil; Graffi you M – giant mural puzzle in the city of the Small Paradises of Fontenay aux Roses; Roots and us, Sculptures in the park of Montreuil; Flexible sculptures for the itinerant spectacle words under silence last spring of the poets; “Jazziographies” series of panels carried out on improvisations during several demonstrations of jazz (Banlieue Bleue, Jazz with Cross-Valmer Jazz in La Villette, What Seals, etc.] and abroad [transitory architectures with world congress I.N.S.E.A of Zagreb, Kunstruction to the symposium of contemporary art of Burggarten at Vienna in Austria, collective creation within the Museum of modern art of Vienna, Glares of art, giant puzzle to the international exhibition of Zurich]. He took part in the animation of various work groups on the training of the teachers concerning artistic education (commissions of reflexion for the report De Peretti, the Bancel report and the Carraz report) and as soon as the installation of the IUFM was achieved, has created, then directed until in 1998, the University Service of Search for Training of the Trainers and Teachers of the University Paris VIII. He directed several conferences: Creative education and the time of the leisures (World congress I.N.S.E.A.); Youth and urban space; Objet d’art, objet d’art; Creative process and work of group; Museums which make school; Critical and teaching of the visual arts: speeches with the practices (conferences organized within the framework of the artistic days of studies of the International Center of Teaching Studies of the Sevres vase). He also published articles in various collective works: stakes of artistic education (Report of mission R. Carraz); Plastic interventions and tallies of life (conference on the color and nature in the city); Critical distances or the time of a space between dream and reality (Research in aesthetics); Can the word of the ‘plasticians’ continue without words to say? (Critical and artistic teaching, Harmattan); “The drunk one of images” or the teaching of the visual arts at the era of multimediatisation (Practices and visual arts, Summer school of Rennes II); Hybrid the work of art to unsling the reading of it (Research in aesthetics); Art in questions: thirty answers (Editions of the Lintel); “(All) the current art is null?” (Favre Edition). He also published “Practical artistic, practices of research” at L’Harmattan Editions in 2007. In this article on the statute of the critical thought of the artistic creation which will be published in two parts in PLASTIR, Daniel Danetis puts us vis-à-vis the drastic choice that must make any artist, any man in front of the process of invention and creativity. Does he has to keep control absolutely or to release taken? Can he links his contradictory “divergent exploration and convergent evaluation” in the same approach or is this to make insult to creative imagination? The author finely analyzes this dynamics, his critical support in space and time before reporting them to the approach of the artist or the inventor. In turn, release work from transposition of any major metaphorical activity, and its limits, the birth of the invention and inevitable epistemic caesuras occurring starting from these internal conflicts of the thought. It emerges from this an unceasingly renewed creative plasticity… The first part of this paper presents the concept of creativity and “the two psychic postures concerned in creative dynamics. ” The second part will treat psychological and intimate mechanisms governing this dynamics.
ON THE TRACES OF PATANJALI – A SECOND READING OF THE « YOGAS SUTRA » I TO VIII OF PATANJALI
Mariana THIERIOT LOISEL is PhD in philosophy of education at Unicamp Brazil and post doctor at the faculty of philosophy of the Laval University in Canada. She wrotes many articles in PLASTIR where the readers will be able to refer. She tackles here a different subject doing a second reading from certain” yoga sutra” through a grid of reading centred on the female condition in the East, her own practice of yoga as spiritual exercise and the lesson of Patanjali. The author thus in particular wishes “to contribute to the appeasing of the spirit of the ground” in order to better determine the relations between the woman and the crowned values and to fight the cruelty and the law of the strongest. Thus begin an analysis of Sutra I to VIII which distils the state of consciousnesses, the meditation, the life of the yogi, and gives us the councils of Patanjali. Thus one learns “how to thwart the social trap being-appearing, with the concept of Avasthanam” which can answer the concerns of the author on the subject “of the reflection returned by the evaluation, always contextualized”. The sutra IV says that failing to thwart the trap of the mirror “… the conscience fluctuates according to the agitation of thoughts”. It is thus a question of including/understanding “the plasticity of the surface-depth ratio”, tells the author with accuracy, before quoting us will the sutra 7 on the interpenetration of the fields of the knowledge which “comes from the direct experiment, the reasoning or the writings” and one of the most famous according to B.K.S Iyengar: “yoga is the discontinuance of mental activity” (Sutra II).