METAMORPHOSIS OF SUBJECTIVITIES: THE SUBJECT OF THE VIRTUAL
Elsa GODART is director of research in philosophy and psychoanalysis at Gustave Eiffel University (LIPHA EA-7373); scientific advisor at the AIDS and sexuality observatory (ULB). In 2020, she created the « Ethics & Digital » DU at the UPEC, which she directs and coordinates. She has been practicing psychoanalysis in her office since 2003. She is the author of more than twenty books including Je selfie donc je suis (Albin Michel, 2016), Métamorphose des subjectivités, vol. I,II & III (Hermann, 2020); En finir avec la culpabilisation sociale (Albin Michel, 2021). She is the recipient of the Prix des Savoirs 2020 for Éthique de la sincérité(Armand Colin, 2020). In this issue of PLASTIR, she shows us a world that seems to be undergoing a number of metamorphoses that are even questioning the very foundations of humanity in man. This world is that of hypermodernity and virtuality, producing a new ethos. Now, if the world is metamorphosing, and by metamorphosing produces new behaviours, what about the repercussions that this may have on the subject? What about the metamorphosis of the subject in the virtual age? This question leads us to analyse the very essence of these probable metamorphoses (we present several fundamental paradigm shifts): the relationship to time and space and the passage from a society dominated by reason (logos) to a society governed by the reign of image-ephemera (eidôlon); as well as the importance of the advent of a society of enjoyment to the detriment of a society of desire); and then in a second step, to reflect on the impact of these metamorphoses on subjectivity. Following this, we have brought to light the importance of this movement specific to metamorphosis in which the subject is inscribed: subjectivation/de-subjectivation/resubjectivation. This movement – these metamorphoses – which give rise to hybrid symptoms, between the normal and the pathological, what the author calls ‘malaises’ – result in an increased subjectivity.
Maud CAILLAT has a doctorate in musicology from the Université Lettres-Sorbonne. She is the author of a thesis written under the supervision of Michèle Alten and François Picard: Confrontation culturelle Est-Ouest pendant la Guerre froide par le biais du concours Marguerite Long (1947 à 1979). Specialised in the relationship between music and politics since her Master’s degree, she studied the influence of socialist realism on Prokofiev. A pianist-composer, she completed Mozart’s Fantasy in D minor K. 397 in 2013 and recently recorded a disc featuring Fanny Mendelssohn’s Sonata in G minor. She is currently continuing her research into Franco-Soviet cultural relations during the Cold War and is preparing a book on Stravinsky’s neo-classical period. In this paper, she shows us how Serge Rachmaninoff’s music, long used by Anglo-American film directors to illustrate romantic scenes, was imitated by a large number of film composers in the 1940s and 1950s, to the point where it became the emblem of Hollywood. However, this image is deeply at odds with the message contained in the work of one of the last representatives of the great Russian style according to the author. How can this shift in meaning be explained, given the paradigm shifts in the musical sphere and the North American cultural context in which Rachmaninoff found refuge after the 1917 Revolution? This is what we will discover in this brilliant historical journey.
THE BIO-SEMIOTICS OF THE POEM IN THE LIGHT OF A PLANT INTELLIGENCE
Bénédicte LETELLIER has been a lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of La Réunion since 2008. Her research is mainly devoted to the comparative study of Arabic, European, and more recently, Indian-mechanical literatures. Since 2018, she is vice-president of the CIRET. She has published her thesis Penser le fantastique en contexte arabe (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010) and a French translation of an essay, Soufisme et Surréalisme (Paris: Editions La Différence, 2016) and of the last poetic collection of the Arab poet Adonis, Adoniada (Paris, Le Seuil, 2021). According to Henri Meschonnic, « the poem is the maximum language form of life ». Reduced to an aesthetic object or to the duality of object and subject, the poem can only disappear. To avoid this pitfall, To avoid this pitfall, Bénédicte Letellier invites us to return to a conception of language in its propensity to work continuously between words, things and subjects. The material of the poem is a plastic interface through which the intelligence of the living is replayed and where the invention of a subject in a form and the transformation of a word and a rhythm in a subject are observed. In Marc Williams Debono’s collection, L’épissure des mots, the abstraction of words is hardly opposed to the concreteness of individual bodies or earthly places. Drawing on this collection as well as on Henri Meschonnic’s theory and Marc Williams Debono’s scientific thought, the author will try to understand how the poem, a sensitive echo of the world, reveals a « bio-semiotic » or even « intellectual symbolism » capable of reproducing the intelligence of plants. In other words, to what extent does the thought of the poem become the intuitive expression of plant intelligence? This reflection will constitute a poetic and transdisciplinary extension of Marc Williams Debono’s scientific thought, reviving all the interest in renewing the lost, but in the process of being reborn, links between poetry, and more generally, art and science.
Hubert LANDIER is a State Doctor in Economics, Professor Emeritus at the Academy of Labour and Social Relations of the Russian Federation (ALSR, Moscow), Vice-President of the International Institute of Social Audit (IAS), member of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and Management (IP&M, France), active member of CIRET (International Centre for Transdisciplinary Research and Studies) and member of the Academy of Ethics (France). His research focuses on the methodology of social auditing and social mediation and on the cultural and epistemological obstacles to an evolution of the thermo-industrial civilisation towards individual and collective behaviours compatible with its planetary environment. He is the author of numerous books and articles, mainly on labour relations in business and on the principle of social entrepreneurship. He is also the author of two dystopian novels: A travers le monde d’après (BoD, 2018) and Sous le grand ciel vert (BoD, 2019). As presented in the previous issue, Mar THIERIOT is a Franco-Brazilian philosopher, poet and painter who regularly publishes in PLASTIR (see the magazine’s summary) and who has been living in Quebec since 2008 and has approached from different angles the limits of consciousness and the unintentional as well as the emotions that run through us philosophically, educationally and artistically. She is a member of several transdisciplinary institutes : PSA, the CIRET and the CETRANS (Brazil). In 2016, she published Les Mutations Humaines Mutations with a preface by M-W Debono, the result of work carried out at the University of Laval, some of whose concepts were documented in Plastir n°48/2017. In this two-part article, she contributes a sometimes poetic, sometimes analytical look at this deep forest. More precisely, for Huber Landier, the village is the confinement in words, habitus and practices dictated to us by our surroundings and the society in which we live. The deep forest is the escape to life, the discovery of what is there, which calls for the invention of new words, which will be assembled into a new statement. Far from the communicative warmth of the village, the forest seems heavy with threats. One gets lost there, one is a bit alone. When certainties collapse on themselves and the threat of a total catastrophe hangs in the air, there is no other way to open a path to the future.