Explorée par la science fiction depuis de nombreuses années, la question du dépassement de l’humanité semble plus que jamais d’actualité, au prétexte que l’avancement technologique moderne nous rapprocherait dramatiquement de la singularité, ce moment où l’humanité telle que nous la connaissons disparaît pour basculer vers un au-delà constitué, au mieux, de la fusion de l’homme et du robot, au pire, de l’exploitation du premier par le second.
Du cœur même de la machine techno-scientifique, des voix s’élèvent pour dénoncer les dangers qui nous menacent : Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk ou Bill Gates rejouent sur l’intelligence artificielle le thème de l’apprenti sorcier, autour d’une technique à laquelle ils sont intimement (et même physiquement pour Stephen Hawking) liés.
Ces peurs nous sont familières. L’affrontement entre l’humanité et la technologie, et plus largement, entre la créature et son créateur, hante notre culture depuis des milliers d’années. Mais si l’être humain rêve d’être écrasé par ce qu’il a créé à son image, faut-il vraiment voir le danger dans le reflet ?
Is posthumanism a myth? A master narrative of transformation? The latest avatar in man’s Promethean dream of stealing the fire from the gods?
From God, certainly.
Samuel Beckett : “If you don’t love me, I shall not be loved”
Israel Horovitz’s film is based on his own play. There IS a theatrical dimension to the movie, in particular beautiful and powerful dialogues. And a “huis clos” mood until a cathartic exit opens up. The movie rehearses a couple of enjoyable interfilmic references (the mirror scene of Taxi Driver; the two-fold ending of Deliverance); it stages the Parisian street and a reluctant “Flaneur”. At first, Mathias Gold (known in New York City as “Jim”) fits the cliché of the expatriate who has shed his American identity with the hope that France will adopt him: a man of two cities, he soon becomes a man of two countries. Displaced, Mathias ultimately comes to terms with space and—perhaps more importantly—with time. His search for a new future indeed brings him face to face with his past as he revisits his roots and identity by retrieving the lost link with his father. In the process, he moves from being a passive observer to being a participant in city life, as illustrated in his encounters with the opera singer, for example: the first time he sees her, he just overhears her singing; the second time he meets her, he gives her the cue and they sing together in a “Paris is a Moveable Feast” moment. Gradually, Mathias exorcises his demons, regaining agency over his life. His journey leads him to pay tribute to his dead father, coming to terms with a mysterious quote by Samuel Beckett he can now appropriate for himself.
The thematic explorations revolve around family and storytelling. Love/passion versus family commitment/social status. Loneliness and aging. Remembering and forgetting. Nemesis and haunting. Illusions and delusions. Curses and sudden reconciliations. Imagined hurts and real wounds. The master narrative is the family story patiently reconstructed from pictures, artifacts, memories offered or extorted, words uttered amidst screams and tears. And silences.
The other ingredients of the film include a gallery of interesting characters such as a real estate agent who lives on a barge on “the blood of Paris”—a tramp of some sort who, like Mathias, might be in search of meaning and truth. The playful linguistic dimension—the “franglais” and the recycling/recontextualizing of selected colorful expressions (“petit bouquet” and fellow travelers)—illustrates what Rosi Braidotti describes as “words not standing still”, and “following their own ways” (Nomadic Subjects 29). As she adds, “There are no mother tongues, just linguistic sites from which one takes her starting point” (NS 40). From her/his old lady to her/his new one, there is a will. And a way.
The sky is at war. One breakthrough lets an unruly beam of light peer out through the aerial wall. Clouds hide the mountains, they have stolen the high daunting ridges away. You are walking, suspended between earth and sky. Thoughts poised between physical and spiritual longings. Clouds hanging over you like cruel gods. Like cruel thoughts in the mental landscaped that will not go away. Relentless, stubborn, indomitable. Thoughts that will continue to conceal the beauty beyond. Invisible but present, if you could only see it! But happy are those who can believe without seeing.
It seems like you are sitting above the clouds. Striding right into them. Yet distracted by a pale pinkish slip in the far away distance, harbinger of hope and truth, reminder of the all-powerful presence of the sun. Of God. You looked up just on time to see it.
Remembering A Voice for Earth: American Writers Respond to the Earth Charter (2008).
“April is the cruelest month” T.S. Eliot
Recent natural catastrophes might come as a cruel nemesis about the urgent call to (re)consider ecology. Not just in April, on Earth Day. But every day.
De tous les incipit théâtraux, celui du Roi Lear (Shakespeare, 1606) présente vraisemblablement la dramaturgie la plus resserrée. En une centaine de vers et quelques minutes, Lear divise le royaume de Grande-Bretagne, marie ses deux filles ainées aux ducs d’Albany et de Cornouailles et maudit sa cadette, Cordélia, coupable de n’avoir pas su démontrer par les mots la force de son amour filial. Bien que courtisée par le roi de France et le duc Bourgogne, elle est violemment répudiée par son père et doit fuir la cour avec France.
Rares sont les chutes d’une ampleur et d’une intensité de celle subie par Cordélia en quelques instants. Vers 86, elle est encore « notre joie, bien que notre cadette et la plus petite, toi dont les vins de France et le lait de Bourgogne se disputent le jeune amour », avant que la malédiction de Lear ne l’évacue bien au-delà du cercle de l’humanité : « le Scythe barbare, ou celui qui fait cuire ses enfants pour assouvir sa faim, trouveront en moi autant de sympathie, de pitié ou d’accueil que toi, qui fus ma fille » (124).
Entre la princesse et l’exilée, l’amour et la damnation, la raison ou la folie, le génie de Shakespeare nous démontre qu’il n’y a que le langage pour frontière, et qu’un sort suffit pour rompre toute barrière.
The gothic model reflects on the present by conjuring up a dead past—often through the figure of the ghost. The Road begets a number of ghosts—dead or alive. McCarthy revisits some national obsessions and “curses” to use William Faulkner’s image, in particular abuses connected to the occupation of the territory and slavery. At one point, the father and the son come across a camping scene: some people have left in a hurry, abandoning the food they were getting ready to eat: “They had taken everything with them except whatever black thing was skewered over the coals. He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him … What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit” (The Road 198).
Wim Wenders’s movies bespeak his fascination for the American Wilderness. In such films as Paris, Texas and Don’t Come Knocking, however, the Western hero is prevented from walking away into the sunshine: he is trapped in a past that just will not go away.
Une révolution est en marche, à grand renfort de marketing et de publicité, à notre poignet gauche, dans nos salons, nos cuisines et nos buanderies. De nombreux objets, jusque là tout à fait muets, suivent la voie qu’ont ouverte devant eux les terminaux de communication (téléphone, ordinateur, smartphones) en accédant (le plus souvent par wi-fi) à internet. Ces objets connectés, dont on prédit qu’ils vont rapidement envahir notre environnement, redéfinissent à la fois leur fonction, les relations que nous pouvons établir avec eux, le monde et notre intimité. Ils ouvrent la voie à la dématérialisation de tout ce qui rend nos logements familiers. Dix mille ans après le début de la sédentarisation de l’humanité, les objets connectés font basculer notre habitat dans l’ère du nomadisme « in the cloud ».
