Cynthia Fleury, philosophe et psychanalyste | Les grands entretiens de Mazarine Pingeot

[Music] [Music] Cynthia Fleury hello hello you are a philosopher psychoanalyst and you implement an ethics and a policy of the CER through the chairs that you have created in particular the chair of philosophy which saw the light of day in 2016 at the hospital of ghu Paris psychiatry and neuroscientist and which has lots of little ones today and therefore you collectively put in place devices protocols at the crossroads of the philosophy of care of the phenomenology of the design of urban planning et cetera et cetera and finally of politics to take into account vulnerability and propose other types of relationships than that which rational and capitalist political modernity has produced, in other words you try to recreate ecosystems which are themselves creators with at their heart this notion of vulnerability which 'it is also human and natural since now you also take into account natural vulnerability so we will try today if you would like to show the link between uh this work and the question of democracy which deep down is at the heart of your research so it is both research but also practice that is what interests us so first of all you pay permanent attention to the articulation between what you call individuation and 'State uh then can you tell us what it is about by perhaps defining individualization in relation to individualism which is not at all the same thing and why this attention to the subject to the subject that we are is central for political reflection so on the question of then on the question of the rule of law eh and on the question of the link with the principle of individuation it is true that I preferred this term than we then know from Jung to Simondon so we are not going to redo a historiography of the concept but despite everything it is already positioned and it is true that I did not pose the term subjectivation which could be sincerely because it is a process of subjectification also of course the principle of individuation the principle of a construction of a freedom of an autonomy there are plenty of terms which could thus circumscribe what we call individuation but what I I found it interesting in the continuation between quotation marks of this story of the claim of the principle of individuation it was indeed to put an end to the notion of individualism which often completely overlaps with what an individual is or individualism also has its demons these demons it's I don't know about me its tendency to fragmentation its tendency to session and not simply to separation uh its tendency sometimes possibly to an illusion of all power finally everything to egoocracy finally to everything that 'we know and so the issue was to say be careful uh to be becoming an individual is not necessarily uh to switch into hypertrophy of oneself and miss out on the world and on the contrary become an individual in preservation of what it is to become an individual this principle of emancipation in fact there is an essential heart in the sense of principle to defend the notion of the rule of law because sincerely if you are not an individual in the humanist sense of the term well in fact the desire for the rule of law does not speak to you it does not make sense if you therefore want in fact the fact that what is a rule of law c that is to say, to protect at a given moment institutional tools upstream and downstream which accompany a process of subjectification which accompany a process of individuation because for me that is what the rule of law is. not simply the procedure the procedure the regime the vote of course but fundamentally this is what rolls this is what am marthassen this is what many authors have defined as the tools dedicated to the free exercise of rationality published basically that's it, that is to say basically fundamentally education culture what Freud could call the tools of sublimation of the drive instincts and so on so that's what the rule of law after the form a blow it's voting suddenly it's not voting uh tomorrow it's a Senate or it's representation it's something which will come to combine with participatory democracy all that's moving is plastic eh it is therefore it is absolutely necessary he it is absolutely necessary to find the right processes to bring about the quality of the democratic decision so but these processes are moving if you understand well that we cannot use quite the same institutional tools in the 18th to the 19th and 20th with how to say the systemic faults which are ours today the question of the enthroposcene the question of the digitalization of the world the question of the number we are soon we are 7 billion so obviously the tools are transformed but the spirit in quotation marks of democracy which is this spirit of saying hey uh the singularity of an individual can create a worthy collective and this worthy collective at the same time constitutes itself as a worthy collective as therefore power of transformation because alone we don't do much we are all interdependent but at the same time respect and consider that at the foundation of its collective is respect for human dignity and therefore for human singularity this very particular junction you see of the individual of the collective for my part in the theory of the lesser evil because I have no idealistic vision of democracy so in the theory of the lesser evil I have the feeling that the rule of law is perhaps the most normative framework the most operational the most efficient to attempt this articulation between the collective and the individual where everyone tries to go and make a pas de deux I will not go towards how to say an individualist delirium which moreover will die because it will not hold and I I will also not go into an ultra-communitarian totalitarian delirium which is the negation of the individual from what the individual suffers today. You who are a psychoanalyst because Queen in fact you are really there at the crossroads of two practices of of types of questioning and types of discourse moreover the one which is intimate S and then a more more theoretical discourse we will say then I will talk about the individual that I know a little better and despite all that has its importance even if I do not only do the Franco-French clinic since the flesh in particular and if we just want to give a place which is not at all Franco-French in Congo at Denis Mukweg at the Panzi hospital in the context of hypertrauma with survivors who are victims of violence of gender of war who come to destroy the bodies of women eh so that's and there it's a question of knowing what an individual is in this context so but my clinic daily it is rather that of the supervision of caregiver and support of caregiver when I say caregiver it is not necessarily psychologists psychiatrists yes but it is also doctors nurses and so on how we support this etos of the caregiver who is despite everything in vocational crisis in professional burnout and so on so he suffers quite a bit from not being able to exercise his profession with dignity as he regularly says even though he has the conscience anchored to the body of this defense of human dignity and then otherwise the other clinic is well the patients of Western societies in quotation marks uh rather Young Actives I have a few few adolescents a few children but above all a lot of young active people and there they suffer of many things I would say first of all there is a big return of the politicization of anxiety that is to say that what I see over the space of 10 to 15 years like that of clinic we had a clinic finally we had, for example, professional burnout linked to the business world, which was extraordinarily present 10 to 15 years ago and which has exploded since then, I would say, it is now recognized by everyone but in a certain way is shifting since we are always at the forefront of what will actually happen in 5 years for everyone and there Frankly there is a porosity with the collapse of the world in any case with the feeling of a collapse of the world it is not simply the family novel nor the novel of my small business it is the novel of the world it is the novel of the world which is going s it is the great return of the possible collapse by nuclear power by war the situations which were considered a little distant like Ukraine of course there is the Israeli conflict in Palestine and so on but there is the question of global warming there is the question of the daily experience of the catastrophe that is to say the fear of this and that that's enough it creates fatigue it creates long-term exhaustion like that where the feeling of uncertainty takes over and you know that in psychiatry the way in which we tolerate uncertainty says something about our mental health that is to say that in fact there is a level of tolerance for uncertainty which is a marker of good mental health all those who are in psychorigidity and strong psychiatric disorders have a intolerance of uncertainty so that's clear but at the same time those who are in good health both have a tolerance for uncertainty but at the same time it metastabilizes because every day living on the daily side l 'uncertainty is not tenable so you see what I mean it also generates in them this metastability and this metastability how we generate it I don't know we generate it through links for example happy links with someone who 'we love it's metastability love we generate it through meaning we generate it through action through the feeling of being able to do things and so on so I'm a bit of a generator of metastability metastability then you decline this know yourself Delphic eh the Delphic injunction uh at different levels moreover well precisely at the level of undoubtedly analytical but also political so what are the forms today that what would this know yourself take precisely so the do you know yourself it's true that I had in my long-term work I had posed three possible figurations of know yourself there are others eh but each one has a given moment gives both its mathematical and poetic equations and so in this know yourself in all my work I'm going to say it in Latin because I have how to say posed use in quotation marks Latin expressions to say it it's imagination will see I'll come back to it Prum Doloris and viscomica imagination will see it's true imagination true imagination if you want it's quite simply it's a word from Paracels so we are we are upstream of the Renaissance but today we could speak of agentic imagination we can even find it in Kant with the transcendental imagination we can find it in more suffering authors who were well thought out who were well presented by Henry Corbin around the 'creative imagination noethical imagination et cetera what is it is quite simply to say that our relationship to reality is not the relationship to social reality social reality is a veil of reality it is a construction it' is one then which has its truth but which also has its ABS of truth we could say it is a cave if we wanted to go back to how to say the old Platonic adage and therefore not to make this difference between what is the real which is a phenomenological power you said earlier in the introduction which is a power of world and the social reality which is a world at an instant this this this possible escape is the agent imagination there is a deficit today if you want there is a deficit in the measure we are yes nevertheless we are very quickly trapped by the real finally by the reality here by the social reality and we are in the illusion of believing that this social reality makes world forever but it's interesting because he understood I TR in today's literary cinematographic production there is this effect of reality which is which is predominant including in relation to fiction in the literal sense of the term yes and we understands because everyone wants to be at the rendezvous of a so-called truth but precisely I think that it is very important and all the great great theorists of the agent noethical imagination have recalled that this is to be at the rendezvous of the truth is not being at the rendezvous of the visibility of this truth it is being at the rendezvous of its enigma of its mechanisms of emergence uh of invisibility we said it so that's all So it's true that you know it yourself it's already done that of course I read myself to the principle of reality so there is an imminent negotiation with the world it's metastability that's it but precisely to also produce metastability I am obliged to remember that reality is also something else and I do n't necessarily know what and it is the part of humility in us but it is also the part of creation see c 'is the part of the link with what we don't know et cetera et cetera so that's imagination will see true imagination the second point which is more complicated but which preium Doloris the price of pain well it's the principle of reality in the sense that well yes there is adversity there is proof uh there is what we talked about at the beginning the vulnerabilities which are either ontological or social cultural both being difficult not funny vulnerability of the illness of the life of death et cetera of the birth of the fragility of the birth of and then social vulnerabilities so how at the same time creating truth is necessarily uh becoming aware of this pain of this pain of the world and then at the same time making it something to create a possible transitivity of this pain is to do something with it eh so there is the whole question of ethics and responsibility and the risk of thinking because thinking is a risk it is not simply a how to say I don't know a cherry on the cake it's what makes the world tomorrow if we don't immediately manage to make the world through thought here today it doesn't matter we work to build the victories of this thought and this world for tomorrow and then the last point because it's so it's heavy imagination vera and presscium Doloris so screw comica comic force a little bit of a little humor and a little bit of summer go on humor of deconstruction of the fact that my God we're not just going to collapse in front of the absurd finally there it is and therefore viscomica is a way of doing spacetime when when everything is closed when everything is trapped when everything is impossible when the meaning is no longer so the vis comica is not simply laughter it is the smile in the sense of one of a possible yes while barbarism surrounds us good so that's it so I tried to create like that an ethics of irreplaceability in the sense that not we are indispensable et cetera but we are we must bring out this singularity in us to not only preserve our physical mental health and this and Cera but I think tomorrow preserve the states of law then you signed with Antoine Fenolio a tracte galimar entitled what cannot be stolen charter of ferchtolon I quite fascinating where you then deploy in particular methods of action such as proof of care so sorry for the accent pathetic but you will perhaps talk to us about it because there the idea is to still be in a pragmatic not only precisely in the theory of the philosopher he it is the philosopher who is in action uh you are talking to know experientially and uh and you decline the different goods that we cannot steal so I I give some like that because I find that they are quite wonderful so among these goods that we should not be able to steal but in reality we still manage to steal them there is for example silence here silence is a common good the horizon uh but we see how the horizon can still obstruct uh the care of the dead the freedom of use so here it's more literally the commons and we're going to say a word about it the quality of life physical and psychological health the long term uh the possibility of remaining and becoming uh that's it and then there are some there are some others and then you end uh on stealth so it's it's magnificent this word uh could you explain what it means finally that by the way ferchtolen in German it's furtive eh furtively it's for we named it like that and uh today we talk a lot about Alain Damazio who created a magnificent novel called Les Furtifs and it's a direct homage because there are a lot of how can I say an elder in quotation marks who is from the literary world or the human and social sciences in this in this ferstolun charter I just cite 3 there is Damasio uh there is the tower there is Bruno Latour who is who is very important there is Patrick Bouchin, great architect also essential and the charter of ferchtollen it was a charter in fact which refers to work over 5 years research seminar at the ghu Paris psychiatry neurosciences and at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts with Antoine Fenolio but with me more there must have been 50 speakers over 5 years well if even perhaps more and who worked on the new habitability of this world how tomorrow we create the common you said it how we recreate citizenship how we do of democracy of democratic health eh how we simply recreate confidence in the rule of law finally very very basic things and instead of saying hey they will read or they will follow the 5 years of the research seminar we maybe we'll create a charter, it's more effective, maybe we said to ourselves like that, maybe 10 non-negotiable points for inhabiting the world and when all of a sudden someone who makes public policies has to make a regulation a decree et cetera perhaps remember what we are trying to preserve afterward we will do all the procedures everything we want et cetera but remember if you want this this this this this valiant heart but also for example when you want to make stolen iron and I come back to stealth and you are a prison director you are interested for example to say B hey is that the right on the horizon when we run an establishment penitentiary is it worth anything is it interesting tomorrow to consider that it is part of the therapeutic support to recreate a right on the horizon for those who are prisoners that's a question that's it is that when I have a migrant center the question of the silence of this of that the the the nerativity of the vulnerable I'm going to come back to it so basically today if you want we have several personalities who make ferchtolen personality institution there we set up for 3 years in saint-médar in JAL this ferchtolen with Stéphane delperra therefore the mayor of saint-méda ranjal but the metropolis and then all the stakeholders to try to invent another way with the citizens to live and create the first but we don't care about the first term the first forest city so you see so it's very urbanism it's another way of reconnecting to how to say the V articulation exactly it's a particular management of water therefore the water commons it is a particular work perhaps with finally not perhaps with the epades with the schools it is a particular work on the Natur spaces connected by silent frames so like the green and blue frames see so there you go then stealth it was interesting for two reasons because it allowed us I would say to first of all defend the freedom which is still in this society of ultra-surveillance control of rationalism manager of canti of Data today we are much more interested in making data speak than in listening to a human being h if you want to listen to a human being first he can say anything it's long it's not objective and cetera, let's prefer data, so the problem is that this world is a world of monitoring, it's a secure world, so stealth was already a claim in the truly amasio sense of the term, under the radar and not when we talk about freedom it is not traceability freedom is freedom that is to say of course in respect of the rule of law but I do not have to be geotizable at every moment every moment and cetera therefore this demand for stealth is one of an essential right second time stealth in the sense rather of how we weigh on nature the negative externalities therefore the stealth rather in the sense of sober the the stealth in the sense of calm a bit of these negative externalities of our production and consumption models which are terribly extractivist predatory et cetera and so on thinking about other ways of being in connection with our our ecosystem so that's it and then last point at the Europe you have all seen the European Commission talking about the New BAOS then and calling on everyone to do the New BAOS so for us it was a little hello saying here we are doing ferchtolen and and we are doing in quotes New BAOS and there you go and today we have he all those who may be interested there is a stealth lab which was set up by how to say a former of our of our students if you type on the net stealth lab fstolen and you will already see all those who do a bit of ferchtolen ah and so that we are really in the proof of care or exactly the proof of care that's it, to put it a bit in a perhaps too pompous way but it's about the generativity of the vulnerable, what does that mean quite simply that all our care protocols or how to say our devices is the theory of design from the point of view of the most vulnerable at ghu Paris psychiatry and neuroscience we have set up on demand eh since it is the work of the flesh one of the important projects of the flesh the sisuco B protocol I pass and which is in fact to create alternative protocols to mechanical and chemical restraint contains it yeah everything that comes in quotes contain but but in coerition everything not in comp in complication there the challenge is to do voluntary containment and therefore to produce protocols of voluntary containment therefore by example when we invent these protocols of voluntary containment we necessarily do it with patients schizophrenics autistic people those who are in hard refractory on the question of depression et cetera et cetera we do it with caregivers but we do not makes prototypes that we build with patients, families, caregivers, we start from there so that's the generativity of the vulnerable, it's to consider that vulnerability must be tomorrow our capacity approach and that's to consider that the patient has something something different to say about the disease is the hospitals patients finally everything that has been developed in particular AIDS finally it is there it is the big child of the AIDS clinic the chair of philosophy at the hospital is connected to the University of Patients of Sorbonne University which was created by Professor Touret Turgis which is a splendid University of Patients which is now going to pass these 10 years we are together precisely we are creating a scientific interest group which is called generativity vulnerabilities which is carried by Sorbonne University the ghu the CNAM et cetera and which is dedicated to that if you want to the fact that tomorrow yes those who go through the tests have something to tell us say about the epistemology on the diagnosis on tomorrow the protocols to be put in place for the question of resilience et cetera et cetera and all the more in a context of systemic flaw h because it is still a bit like that in front or and therefore to believe that if you want they are not pioneers in something it lacked a little bit of discernment but for that you have to put in place institutional links create ecosystems you have to create ecosystems in fact it's doing politics it's doing politics in the first sense of the term it's teaching training it's creating it's training us quite simply because once again it's a skill if you want it the right diagnosis of vulnerabilities it's is the first of the skills and then the vector of resilience of inventiveness it is the generativity of the vulnerable that is to say roughly what are we going to invent to precisely be there for the transformation sublimation overcoming this vulnerability because once again I am not at all in the essentialization of vulnerability I am not at all interested I am like everyone else I have no desire at all but I know on the other hand that the denial of vulnerabilities strengthens them thank you very much Cynthia fleur thank you to you [Music]