Seminar Inquiétude(s): Trouble in the Humanities

Day 3

June 14, 2023

Inquiries (3) : Sense of worry, epistemological worries

" What to do ? " This is the question at the heart of an essay by Jean-Luc Nancy, which applies to any field of thought that is not governed by the immediate laws of profitability or (necessary) scientific progress. But it is first and foremost a questioning, which takes its value from the movement that drives it, rather than from the answers to which it may give rise. The Humanities are undoubtedly founded on the decision to ask questions (Socrates is a major figure in this respect). We propose here to reflect on an ethics and aesthetics of the human sciences, seeking to think this place of questioning, which comes from a refusal of reality as it is[1]. While the very value of the applied sciences lies in the answers they provide to a problem, that of the human sciences, in part, runs counter to it: it never ceases to take up its history and to think itself thinking an object (which poses the connaturality between questioning and long time, between interrogation and patience, concern for truth and anxiety in the face of a truth always maintained in remoteness). In this way, the human sciences find themselves squarely within a complex way of thinking (Corbin), in which reason and logic are aided by the sensible, in which the fragility of the human being is maintained as a flaw and as a dynamic principle

From this point of view, the absence of immediate finality that partially defines the human sciences, posits both anxiety as the driving force of its reason (positive force) and as impotence in the face of forms of profitability to which it cannot respond, knowing that it must not conclude (negative force). Here, we can reflect on the posture of writers, artists, philosophers and scientists who question the meaning of their practices. Disquiet as the motor of reflexivity, so to speak.

Program :

10 a.m. - Opening, by Stéphane Lambrecht, Amos Fergombé and Vincent Vivès

10:30 am - " La paradiastole, figure de l'inquiétude morale ", by Blandine Perona

11:10am - " Debussy and the poets, "l'éternel suspens" ", by Michela Landi

Pause

12pm - " De l'inquiétude à la méfiance : le questionnement métaphysique de Jean Tardieu ", by Jérôme Hennebert

Lunch

2:15pm - " Worry and exasperation with forms at the sources of Tuscan mannerism. The case of Jacopo Pontormo ", by Ludovic Nys

3pm - " Provisional Reflections on the Philosophical Anthropology of Günther Anders ", by Stephanie Baumann

3:40pm-"Worry(s) and the Question of Number ", by Véronique Lagae

16:10- Discussions and preparation for upcoming study days