Plastir Number 53

THE 4 PARTS OF HUMAN BEING – FOR A CRITICISM OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM

Michel BOCCARA is a researcher at the CNRS – LISST, University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès and research director at the School of Research in Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris 7. In 1976, he started a research on maize cultivation at the University of Paris with the Mayas of Yucatan, learns their language and builds there a house where he resides regularly. He is the author of many books on the Yucatec, in particular Les Labyrinthes sonores, Encyclopedia of Mayan Yucatec mythology (7 vols.), Mayan cuisine and The popular Religion of the Maya (2 vols.) and a set of films, Memoirs of the Mayans (42 films published). He also works with the Moose of Kiritenga (Burkina Faso) with whom he has directed a series of films and published a book (Myth and History of Moose Kirigtenga) and develops a teaching around the sources of expression and the concept of ‘gai savoir’. His article is immediately announced as a critique of anthropocentrism and a deep search for the parts that constitute the human being. Four in number, they upset the overly monolithic way we think of man and cerebralization and lead us to Maya wisdom. Michel Boccara summarizes his remarks as follows: « In order not to become a neocolonization, decolonization must have the fundamental objective of transforming social relations and valuing the contributions of the societies that preceded and exploited us. In most of these societies, man is not at the center of living beings but appears as the child of those who preceded him: animals, plants, stones and stars. From the Mayan notion of way, translated by co-essence, the author proposes a reflection, in the form of a research program, on the animal, plant, mineral and astral parts of the human being. »

THE WORK OF SCIENCE IN THE BEAUTIFUL FORM AND THE BEAUTIFUL SHAPE IN THE WORK OF SCIENCE

Christian RUBY is a philosopher, teacher at ESAD-Talm, site of Tours (France). He is a member of the ADHC (Association for the development of cultural history), the ATEP (Tunisian association of aesthetics and poetics), the collective ‘Entre-Deux’ (Nantes, whose vocation is the public art) and the Observatory of the Freedom of Creation. Among his latest books: ABC of Arts and Culture, Toulouse, L’Attribut Ed., 2015; and Become a spectator? Invention and mutation of the cultural public, Toulouse, L’Attribut Ed., 2017. This paper follows its introduction of the archipelago art-science published in the previous issue of Plastir (PLASTIR 52, 12/2018). It aims to deepen the notion of ‘exchange surface’, already proposed in order to think of a dynamic of the arts and sciences that is not content with a playful marriage between these domains under the guidance of a political instrumentalization: nights of arts and sciences, multidisciplinary gardens, etc. In our society (that is, advanced western society) we have lost even the pretense of a common culture. Even if the schism between the “two cultures” (arts and sciences) was necessary, clear boundaries exists between artistic and scientific thinking and creativity. The notion of exchange surface or “surface d’échange” should make possible to think of common objects built between both activities and to move the boundaries that serve us as usual cognitive frameworks. This school of thought is clearly operating in the Ile-de-France, Paris Saclay in particular, and on the national and European territory (TRAS) thanks to the investment of many structures that act in concert to recognize the actions of cultural and artistic education including this link art-science and spread the artists and scientists who play the game.

OF BEING – A SMALL STORY

David LEVRAT is a Fluid Mechanics Engineer. He is also a swimmer, diver and pisces. Student in Paris, then Toulouse (ENSEEIHT) and Montreal (McGill University), he began his volunteer career of international solidarity in Burma. Joining a consulting engineering firm, he studied and supervised the construction of numerous hydraulic and hydroelectric structures, mainly in Africa. Since 2014, he returned to Burma as Country Director of his company, but also adviser to foreign trade of France and President of the European Chamber of Commerce. In parallel with these activities, he has written an important research work (a notebook) on intuition including several aspects of being, equilibrium, equivalence and the state of which one of the approaches related to the nature of science was published in his previous contribution to Plastir (PLASTIR 31, 06/2103). He presents here the section dedicated to the being he approaches as a geopoetic surveyor, going up the course of elements and deep traces of the earth according to a path that can be described as topographical. Linked to places and essences and bodies, his journey in prose and poetry is in the form of monads or small stories that can be read independently, but that take their full meaning in the totality. Supported by cartographies related to its wanderings, this journey is conducted from earth to heaven where the astro- prefix gives the equivalent to -physics, -logy and -nomia, insinuated through cycles, measurements and terrestrial and cosmological journeys of the pilgrim who is the author in person. So many considerations in the concreteness, the food, the path that in science – via the observable and the reproducible – and the spirit. And it is through this spiritual quest that emerges, if not a presence, a meaning or a « neurosens », which gives the reader the feeling of penetrating a space to discover: the being that David Levrat approaches through this strange quaternity being-equilibrium-equivalence-state.

MINIMAL EPISTEMOLOGY

François VAUCLUSE works as a translator. Specialized in Italian literature of the Renaissance, he usually resides in Merano (Alto Adige). His favorite genres are the fragment and the poem. He recently published Endangered Worlds (The Free Rumor, 2018), Thierry Mézaille’s review and Samia Kassab-Charfi’s critical article in Waiting for Nadeau. Other publications: The Bandeau from Eros, Hapax, 2012, Psy, Hapax, 2009; The Friendship of Painters, Hapax, 2008, The Art of Translating, Hapax, 2008. It delivers us to Plastir a minimal epistemology in the form of a selective dictionary leading us to explore with humor and delight the language and its anfractuosities. So, concerning the World: « The world is not without laws, simply without causes: hence its moments of benevolent beauty« , Purity « It decides, deductively, assassinations. & We would have to admit the impurity of science. » or Poetry « Poetry is never true, because it is certain.« . Through the discovery of these definitions, the author asks us about crossed fields – historical, scientific or literary. Everyone has to find his way!

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