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At Stanford, Jean-Pierre Dupuy thinks about future disasters on the planet in an enlightened way. These are also the anthropological foundations of Facebook, or the crisis of "yellow vests" that he specifies thanks to the theory of mimicry René Girard. Prophetic? Cruel because real? To read and listen to better understand the mechanics of desires and future crises.
Stanford University is empty, vacation and shutdown require. The 75-year-old philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who arrived by bicycle on campus, is sorry that he does not have access to " the university library which is huge and so well supplied. Not a book is missing, they have absolutely everything ! So it will be on a bench, illuminated by the soft, declining light of the Californian sun, that the thinker will tell us about his career as a polytechnician turned philosopher: " It's been 35 years since I teach philosophy part-time at the university from Stanford, California, and also at École Polytechnique. With two distinct and distant sectors, the philosophy of science and technology and on the other hand moral and political philosophy. I am a scientist, but going from mathematics to philosophy is not extraordinary. We work concepts also in philosophy. "
Jean-Pierre Dupuy has built his reflections around and from the work of thinkers as important and fundamental as René Girard or Ivan Illitch. From the early eighties to the end of his career, René Girard himself taught at Stanford: we can not ignore this French philosopher who continues to haunt the University of California: " Tell Rene Girard ? ! But it's a mountain that you ask me to climb in a few words! Around this thinker evolves the question of the sacred and its ambivalence; what we venerate and what frightens us ... We must stay away from the sacred because it is very dangerous but also not too far away because it protects us from danger. "
« René Girard can offer a reading grid for" yellow vests " »
Jean-Pierre Dupuy thinks in philosopher, juggles with the concepts in mathematician while maintaining very current concerns. So on this bench, in the light of the sun that still floods the campus, he mentions us very quickly the crisis of the yellow vests in France which calls out to him: " René Girard can offer a grid of reading of the" yellow vests ", a crisis deep that I take very seriously. What is striking is that there seems to be no object. When questioning the protesters individually, everyone has different demands: the question of transport [He has long and strongly worked on this issue since the 1970s with Ivan Illitch] at the origin of the movement, was quickly forgotten. Then he adds to explain the current confusion: " It's a very Girardian theme, men fight each other about objects because they want the same things - that's what we call mimicry : our Desires are in fact an imitation of those of others, the object of desire of others. Violence begins when desires converge on the same objects, but when the violence increases, the object tends to disappear. What counts is no longer to possess the object so that the other does not have it, but to have the upper hand over the other. The object then disappears. This is the impression given by the crisis of yellow vests. The object is so multiple, so indefinite, so vaporous, that there is no more. "
The words of Jean-Pierre Dupuy resonate with a particular echo on this sunny campus of Stanford University where the theory of Rene Girard, neglected in France (because too much of religion for some), seems to have been determining for the heads thinking of Silicon Valley. The courses of this rejected philosopher in France attracted future investors in new technologies including Peter Thiel. " This is one of the founders, and financial history of Facebook. He was one of René Girard's students and very consciously thought that this social network could be the embodiment of Girardian theory, of mimicry. At René Girard's funeral in November 2015, Peter Thiel turned millionaire, thanking him for changing his career (leaving law school) to become a Facebook investor. " Social media has become more important than it used to be, and it's intimately connected to our human nature, " said Peter Thiel. Our Facebook walls, a pure reflection of our narcissism, have become a collective portrait of humanity with the Facebook algorithm in mimetic desire accelerator.
" The link between Girardian theory and social networks today "
Jean-Pierre Dupuy would have a lot to say, he himself had Peter Thiel in his classes as well as Elon Musk and other actors in Silicon Valley ... Mimicry, pillar of the thought of René Girard, corresponds it really to lever social networks growth? Looking at Instagram and Facebook's likes more closely, one can only emphasize the evidence of the dynamics that rests on terribly human mimetic characteristics.
He smiles: " I do not make René Girard responsible for Facebook by his ideas. It has only proposed a theory of what has existed since the beginning of humanity, but it is interesting to see the link, the link between the Girardian theory and what are the social networks today. What's more meaningful than those likes that resemble the exacerbated desires of a crowd. " With social networks we have to deal with abstract crowds. And crowds without leaders! By listening to Jean-Pierre Dupuy, we realize how much these social networks play (without knowing it?) On ancestral springs but also deform or exacerbate and amplify them. Desire, jealousy, what could hardly be heard, muted, in a society without a click, is overexposed in a deafening way now. And when we know that the resolution of mimetic crises passes, according to the theory of Rene Girard, by the sacrifice of a scapegoat or lynching ... Social networks can only remain in the spotlight of the news: " Silicon Valley says that Mark Zuckerberg is just beginning to realize what he has created, "said Jean-Pierre Dupuy coldly.
" September 11, 2001 was a shock ! "
The dizziness barely cashed, it is another Jean-Pierre Dupuy who details the logic of the catastrophe that he studies as a scientist. " It's an event that brought me out of my dogmatic slumber, as we have said since Kant. This event is September 11, 2001. It was a shock, I had to think about what had happened. It happened at a time when I was working on a whole other subject, the climate change issue. Between climate change and the terrorist act we do not see the report a priori ... I had practically finished writing this book, but I took three more months to expand my remarks and propose a general theory of disasters, also natural, moral, technological ... that's what I called "enlightened catastrophism", an attitude towards these events whatever its origin ... It came from far, it allowed me to return to my studies of the 70s with this great criticism of the industrial societies that was Ivan Illitch. "
[Sound: Jean-Pierre Dupuy introduces himself, talks about disasters and nuclear war]
The sun begins to decline, Jean-Pierre Dupuy remains luminous and pedagogue: " When I forged this notion of enlightened catastrophism, the important word for me was this adjective, in the sense of the Enlightenment of the 18th century and not the catastrophe. A rational catastrophism, because it can be rational to be catastrophist, it is not to take pleasure in the thought of the evil, but on the contrary to give a chance to escape the catastrophe. My origins are the rationalism with which one is formed or distorted. Since then, the conclusions of Jean-Pierre Dupuy have been widely adopted by the thinkers of the collapse or collapseology. It is with a smile mixed with annoyance and humor that he explains: " I see books written by young authors who quote me or do not quote me, but who have been visibly influenced by my writings, but I really do not care. I write above all to clarify my ideas. "
" The subject is simple : the coming nuclear war "
To better open our eyes to the subject, he explains his way of thinking about the notion of time. " The true object of this philosophy, this metaphysics, is the question of time. Time, not as a resource, but time separating us from catastrophes. Because many disasters are announced but we do not know when they will occur ! "Time is a notion that it twists in its own way, especially in its economic texts to highlight the paradoxes it contains. Vertigo again, the softness of the setting sun becomes clear twilight when in another smile he describes his last subject of study: " The subject is very simple, it is about the nuclear war to come. Nobody takes this subject seriously. This book is called: The war that can not take place. The awakening of the nuclear tiger.
" I think it will take place, but it can not in the moral sense, because it would be absolute horror. But he confesses: " The moment when in 2018 Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump have been insulted, with the prospect of a nuclear war, has been troubling-I must add that I myself have to force myself little to say there is really there a risk that is more than a possibility-. "
Then, he takes over the proofs of his book to read us a quote under the little light that we have left, we are surrounded by a building on the campus of Stanford whose contours darken: " This quote is highlighted in my book: "I have always thought a lot about the issue of nuclear war. This is a subject that matters a lot in the way I think, it's the ultimate, extreme disaster. The world does not have a bigger challenge, and yet no one analyzes the mechanisms that lead to it (it's a bit like sickness, no one thinks it'll get sick until it happens) . Nobody wants to talk about it, I think there is nothing more stupid than to believe that it will never happen, just because everyone knows that nuclear weapons have an immense power of destruction and that so beware of using them, what bullshit! "(what a bullshit!) Do you know who wrote this? Perplexity in us. " Well, it's Donald Trump! It's unimaginable ! This is his famous interview of the magazine Playboy of March 1, 1990. He was able to say that! But I could have done it too ! The dizziness continues, the night will prevail. The philosopher will soon get back on his bike.
" This film opened me to metaphysics. Really! "
Jean-Pierre Dupuy is the author of The Mark of the Sacred , Small metaphysics of tsunamis , The future of the economy ... His limpid thinking is linked like mathematical equations that come to highlight our ways of thinking, our ways of living. He plays like a child player with almost taboo concepts like war, jealousy, desire ... His approach to the economy is radical and innovative, no wonder that Silicon Valley appreciates it. He also likes to draw his inspiration from the artistic world and in particular the cinema, he explains to us when he leaves us: " Art has always touched me a lot. In The Mark of the Sacred, I end with a chapter to which the whole book goes. This is a reading of Hitchcock's masterpiece: Vertigo . This film opened me to metaphysics. Really! I do not want to talk too much about not revealing everything, but it is a passionate and sickly love for a being who does not exist. The characters in the novels or movies do not exist, but there are beings in novels or in films that do not exist inside the novel or film itself. These are appearances. And that is for me the very form of desire in what is most extraordinary, most terrible, including the element of jealousy, but which can give the most extraordinary works of art. "Night falls, Jean-Pierre Dupuy escapes, but it is not itself an appearance, his thought allows us to move slowly into the darkness of ideas ...