Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco

The keynote lecture by Siri Hustvedt, delivered as part of the Principality Prize awarded jointly by the Prince Pierre Foundation and the Monaco Philosophical Encounters.The lecture took place on 17 October 2025 at the Théâtre des Variétés, Monaco.// About Siri Hustvedt – Siri Hustvedt is the author of a poetry collection, six essay collections and seven novels, including The Blazing World, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction. Her work spans literature, philosophy, neuroscience and psychoanalysis, earning her prestigious distinctions including the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities, the European Essay Prize from the Charles Veillon Foundation, the Literature Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Princess of Asturias Prize in Spain. Born in Minnesota and based in Brooklyn, New York, Siri Hustvedt stands as a major voice in the international intellectual landscape.// The Principality Prize – The Prince Pierre Foundation of Monaco and the founding members of the Monaco Philosophical Encounters are jointly committed to awarding the Principality Prize each year to an author for the body of their philosophical work, honouring a lifetime of writing in philosophy—a singular œuvre that has opened new paths in the field of philosophy and engaged innovative approaches to science, politics, theology, history, anthropology, ethics and psychoanalysis. The Principality Prize laureate is invited to deliver a lecture following the prize ceremony. Awarded jointly by the Monaco Philosophical Encounters and the Prince Pierre Foundation of Monaco, the 2025 Principality Prize was awarded to Siri Hustvedt on Tuesday 14 October 2025 in Monaco.// Lecture with French supertitles. Text translated from English by Cécile Dutheil de la Rochère.

Presented by Raphael Zagury‑Orly (philosopher and founding member), with Christine Détrez (sociologist and professor), Alice Ferney (writer), Laurence Hansen‑Løve (philosopher). Sometimes it is of the dog.

Words have been lost. Hence we love our husband as we love crisps or our dog, we love cinema as we love our sister, we love a friend as we love a lover. The Greeks, as we know, had some ten terms to distinguish the various forms of love and attachment, and employed storgē—not eros, philia or agapē—to qualify the parental bond, the love of parents for their children, and, by extension, the love between brothers and sisters (and even between childhood friends, as if part of the family). Yet this tells us little, or scarcely anything—there would be no eros in storgē, but philia could certainly associate with it—about the nature, form, intensity, quality of the bond that attaches brothers and sisters. This bond is an indefectible given, because it is one of blood and because it cannot be suppressed by any institution, even divine, even if brothers and sisters were to have no further actual relationship, and moreover possesses a maximum extension, able on one side to touch love properly so called, then incestuous, and on the other, total indifference, even enmity or hatred. We observe that it is these extreme forms that are predominantly represented in sacred texts, myths, tragedies, novels, art, cinema... In the Old Testament, Cain, the first son of Adam and Eve, kills his brother Abel; in Greek mythology, fratricides and sororicides are as frequent as patricides, uxoricides or filicides; in Roman mythology, the founding of Rome is sealed by the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus... At the other extreme, that of love, Zeus, king of the gods, marries Hera, his sister; Osiris and Isis, two of the major deities of ancient Egypt, are brother and sister, but also husband and wife. In reality, however, from which neither passionate incestuous love relations nor the fiercest hatreds that undermine and shatter fraternity and sorority—in a single word: adelphie—are excluded, what is the nature of the fraternal and sororal bond? What in fact is fraternity/sorority? Is it nourished only by tender and indelible affection, mutual support, equity, loyalty, mutuality? What potentialities are inherent to this blood relationship, what fissures can it reveal, owing to inappropriate contexts, intra-familial difficulties, deficiency of mutual trust, separations or distance, the suffocation of being forever together in the same place—which over time can transform into suffering, into pathologies of jealousy and rivalry, into wounds that nothing can ever heal? Why has fraternity become a moral value, completing equality and freedom, while "sorority", outside feminist circles, has remained an almost unused term?– Robert Maggiori