2024-2025 SEASON - Monaco Philosophical Encounters.

In the same way that we speak and become subjects by receiving the language of other people, so what we are and what we think depends largely – at least to begin with – on what others think and think that I am. Show-offs and oddballs who profess to be completely immune to what others think of them would thus appear to lack credibility. We all know that a single word from a loved one – or even someone we don’t know – can as easily boost our courage and give us a new lease of life as it can mortally wound our soul. What people say (fari) or think (putare) about us gives rise either to fama (which, before being associated with "fame" or "celebrity", first meant a piece of news, often uncontrolled, which spreads quickly and widely), or to reputation, which is made up of opinions, judgements and the ways, positive or negative, we are thought of or regarded by others. It would be dangerous to believe that reputation is based less on who you are than on what you have done, publicly. Somewhat unresponsive to willpower, random and almost impossible to control, it cannot, however, be reduced to a simple "extension" of me, anymore than the cowl makes the monk. It is a form of the presence of others and society in me, from which I cannot (and often do not want) to walk away and which, a little like an accent when we speak, introduces me, precedes me (she arrived for a concert in Paris, preceded by an infamous reputation), foreshadows me, carries me... That is why, as was once the case with honour, an attack on reputation condemns not the appearance but the person themselves. Of course, it is possible to stay quiet, to live happily while remaining hidden, but if you have sought "visibility", fame or celebrity, and won them through your work, your talent, your achievements, your art, then, in the event that they diminish or disappear, this will be experienced as a form of mutilation, accompanied by the pain involved in "returning to anonymity". That used to be the case, in days gone by, for some sports personalities and entertainment figures, when no one remembered their names or even knew that they had once enjoyed huge popularity.The digital revolution, social media and instant, widespread communication have changed things. Reputation is no longer tied to fame acquired through one’s achievements (regardless of the form they take: in film, architecture, cooking, sport, art, literature, graphic design and so on), but can instead emerge in seconds as a result of a tweet, a story, an image or a video which "makes its way around the world". What is more, it is linked to the simple, often playful, "activity" that we all engage in on social media and which, nolens volens, creates an online reputation. This can be long-lasting, though is more often short-lived, but because complete strangers have helped to forge it, it is completely uncontrollable and at the mercy of anyone and everyone. In other words, each of us is now a "public figure", whose real, private personality may be a total mystery – what really count are our "profiles", "posts" and "activities". Clearly, this can earn a great online reputation, measured in likes and numbers of followers, but equally clearly it leaves us exposed – even if we do everything possible to carefully consider what we say in public, putting out nothing that might be misinterpreted – to all kinds of random opinions, malicious gossip, back-stabbing and bullying. It only takes one message, picked up and passed on with an incomprehensible and despicable voracity – a bit of spiteful gossip, a taunt, a slanderous remark, an unfounded allegation – to ruin a reputation or, rather, to turn it into a "bad reputation", an infamous seal branded not on the victim’s "cowl" but on their actual skin. What has happened in society to produce, on such a large scale, this desire to denigrate and defame? If "man to man is an arrant wolf", war, as we know, is each against all. But what happens if man transforms into an anonymous abuser, spending the night posting malicious messages on asocial media?Robert Maggiori © Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco (Monaco Philosophical Encounters)

Security lacks the lustre of liberty – or equality or fraternity/sorority. It feels like a virtue of withdrawal, of shelter, whereas the others are virtues of openness and momentum. When we talk about security, we may mean the condition that allows us to be or to feel protected from danger and risk, or perhaps which offers the opportunity to prevent, eliminate or reduce the severity of harm, difficulties and unpleasant, annoying, distressing or damaging events. In the Roman Empire, Securitas was the goddess who guaranteed public and private security. She was depicted on coins, surrounded by four attributes – the throne (hegemony of Rome), the lance (battling enemies), the cornucopia (prosperity) and the palm frond (a peace offering) – and leaning against a column, in a posture that was meant to symbolise calm and "quiet strength". But the very word securitas is a curious one: made up of sine ("without") and cura ("care"), it appears to refer to a meaning that contradicts that evoked by security, which is not generally understood as a lack of care, consideration or attention. So, as suggested by Tacitus in his Historiae, should we see something "inhuman" (inhumana securitas) in the sense that the absence of care or attention is, in reality, an absence of anxiety, a guilty indifference to the deployment of violence (the civil war in Rome in 69), even a degree of blindness in distinguishing right from wrong or a total lack of a sense of responsibility – factors which, combined, enable the flourishing of... insecurity and the risks of danger? With two sides, securitas both "lets it happen" and "takes care of it", in other words she seeks to neutralise both the elements of disorder, atrocities and conflicts, and the "irresponsibility" that makes them efficient. It is this latter sense which prevailed, and allowed securitas to meet libertas.Almost the entire history of philosophy, from Machiavelli to Hobbes, from Locke to Montesquieu, from Smith to Bentham, from Marx to Foucault, has attempted to conceptualise the link between security and liberty, stressing the need for balance between the two concepts. If security is too heavy, this risks a drop in liberty; extreme promotion of liberty risks blocking the functions of security – understood as an individual right, as social security (all activities associated with social policy: supervision of labour, income, health, environment, urban planning and construction, transport, communications, education, culture, free time, etc.) and as national safety or "security".The complex link between liberty and security is apparent in various forms throughout modern constitutionalism. The first North American Constitution (Virginia, 1776) guaranteed security for the purposes of something even more desirable than liberty: happiness. Meanwhile the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 proclaimed that the goal of any political association was the protection of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man: liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression. In contrast, the Thermidorian Declaration of 1795 appears more "left-wing", considering security to be "the result of everyone working together to secure everyone’s rights". In other words, ensuring security is not about harming liberty, but about making it possible, in a way that is certainly more difficult than an approach that allows insecurity to make it challenging. But what limits can be put in place between security and "total security", between legitimate protection and the panoptic obsession with control that takes over states when emergency situations, such as pandemics or terrorist attacks, occur?Robert Maggiori © Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco (Monaco Philosophical Encounters)

We would like to invite you to a philosophy workshop presented by Alicia Gaudel, who leads philosophy workshops for adults and children.

A passionate, intense and burning love, that grows with each passing day, a desire that is constantly renewed, receding for a while before coming back stronger, like a rising tide, a sexuality that is fulfilled, unbridled and without taboos, a never-ending source of unbelievable pleasure and enjoyment... Together, they would make everything else irrelevant, turning life into one long, joyous river. But are they ever truly experienced together? It is rare to find love without desire, but it can exist without sexuality, in the forms of philia, agape or caritas, and does not necessarily follow the path set out by eros. Desire – which, of course, has its roots in the meaning “to stop contemplating the stars”, in other words to take note of absence – drives love and sex, but also travel, work, sport, reading, good food and fine wine, and the urge to work or to do absolutely nothing. As for sexuality, it can exist without love and even, in a mechanical, routine, automatic form, without desire. But it is difficult to recognise this: “you don’t love me anymore” is said to express “you don’t want me any more” and vice versa, as if love, desire and pleasure were synonymous. Desire applies to so many objects – all missed, or desire would cease to desire – that it becomes tyrannical. Love takes so many forms that none are recognisable, apart from the one that underpins them all, unseen, and which undoubtedly pollutes them all: love of self, or philautia, or worse still, love not of another but of love itself. Sexuality is so deeply rooted in the inner workings of the body and the impenetrable areas of imagination and fantasy that it becomes “impossible to transmit”, not even capable of establishing a “sexual relationship”, which, as Lacan said, does not exist because humans remain, in terms of sexual pleasure, “in exile”, without producing sharing, without ever becoming One with the Other, the body only able to experience pleasure as One without Another, auto-erotically. Consequently, the wish to combine love, desire and sexuality stems from a dream, an attempt to build castles in the air with faulty bricks and crumble cement. A catastrophist vision, which is more or less shared by all. But that does not stop anyone from embarking on the adventure, from wanting to love (even though love cannot be willed but arrives without anyone having decided on it), from continuing to desire (even though no desire can ever be satisfied, or it would die) and from seeking pleasure (even though sexual please is the seal of impossibility of being “with” another).But however much we say that love tortures, that desire shackles, that sex divides, nothing changes: every woman and every man knows that the pain they cause produces the most beautiful songs, that without love, without desire, without pleasure, existence would be a dark tunnel from which no one would feel able to emerge – except for those who love in the right way, who are capable of moving mountains, digging the earth with their bare hands or flying like birds.Robert Maggiori © Monaco Philosophical Encounters.

Even in its sounds, there is something light, childlike and comical about the word zizanie (meaning "discord") – not something that you would expect when considering the severity of the conflicts that are currently shaking our world, the crises, the violent confrontations, the deadly clan rivalries, the acts of barbarism, the terrorist attacks, the razing of cities, the bombings and trench warfare... Bisbille (quarrel), brouille (feud), querelle (dispute) – these are the words that more immediately spring to mind. Cereal farmers do not see it that way, since the name also applies to a plant – a type of grass from the genus lolium, "intoxicating" (Lolium temulentum) and invasive, like ryegrass – which can infest wheat fields and has been known to ruin harvests. It is essentially a devil, seeking to deprive good people of their bread. Farmers sow good seed in their fields, but during the night a devil, the farmer’s enemy, plants some zizanie. The seeds mature, but so does the weed: how do you uproot one without disturbing the other? There is no choice but to let them grow together: only at harvest time will it be possible to pull out the zizanie, bind it into sheaves, burn it and fill the granary with good wheat. It is this parable from the Gospel (Matthew 13, 24–30) that will make zizanie famous, so to speak, by making it the symbol of evil, so intertwined with good that it rends the latter difficult to understand and practice.Today, it is not in the wheat fields that zizanie is being sown, but – in the form of points of contention, axes to grind, tensions, conflicts, hateful rhetoric and more – within the fabric of society and in the minds of very many people. Consequently, it is not a question of analysing the causes and consequences of the armed conflicts that are bringing bloodshed to the world, and to Europe in particular, but rather of reflecting on this particular leprosy that has poisoned interpersonal relationships, made societies that were said to be "liquid" harder, more nervous, angrier, ready to explode, that has transformed social dialogue into non-stop noise, a cacophony where only the sharpest sounds can be heard, the clamour, the most radical and simplistic slogans, the most hateful appeals, the most absurd arguments, the strongest curses, expressions of the most implausible beliefs and opinions... Of course, we cannot name the "enemy" – of democratic societies – which has sown the roots of this weed, the fault lines of havoc, in the soil of society. And it would probably be too obvious to mention the role of social media, which appear to have undergone a terrifying (yet very profitable for the owners) involution: originally intended to promote free communication and "horizontal" dialogue in all directions, they have become steel ball factories, simply vertically assembling spheres in which all those who, depending on the type of bubble, share the same opinion, take comfort in their shared beliefs, however crazy they may be, without ever confronting the monads superimposed in a parallel column, and thus killing any opportunity for confrontation or the refining of conflicting ideas, which is the basis of all authentic dialogue. But the sowing of zizanie, or discord, must undoubtedly be sought upstream, in the dissemination of the idea that truth could be a simple "option" – like tinted windows in a car or a HEPA filter for a vacuum cleaner – that the "more or less true", the plausible, the "not entirely false" or the outright false have as much value and greater effectiveness. The wheat in the fields began to rot with the advent of the post-truth era, which opened up the floodgates of disinformation, fakes and conspiracy theories, and killed social dialogue itself. What is a dialogue, in fact, if not an attempt to push thought, by successive repetitions, to get as close as possible to reality, and thus to approach a truth through (dia) the reasoned, reasonable, rational confrontation of ideas or theories – and establish an agreement, a concord? Or, if truth is "optional", if sophistry is as good as truth, if error, fudge and blunder are the same thing, if false news is more effective and "impactful" than the actual news, then everything can be reduced to an "opinion", every science will be an opinion, every statistic a "set-up", every piece of reasoning a trick, every agreement a calculation, every consensus a trap. In short, it will not be possible to delegitimize anything, no propaganda, no pressure, no method of "influence", no sleight of hand, no mystification, no nonsense, no trickery - abuse of weakness, punches and baseball bats - no prevarication, no violence, no harassment. To the extent that no one knows "what to think" anymore, when no one dares to "intervene in the conversation", fearing the heaps of insults that will come their way no matter what is said, when they withdraw, silent, in a kind of disarray – the sickness that appears when we no longer know how to "be in society".Robert Maggiori © Monaco Philosophical Encounters.

Just like some bottles of chemicals, the word "Identity" has a sticker attached to it: "Danger: Handle with care". Never has there been another concept so likely to suddenly fan the flames and provoke not just arguments but full-on confrontations. And yet it does not, at first glance, appear toxic. Identity is everything that makes an entity definable and recognisable, in that it has a set of qualities or characteristics that distinguish it from other entities. In other words, identity is what makes two things one single thing – "identical" – or, conversely, makes them different. In social and ethno-anthropological sciences, the concept of identity is associated, first, with the way in which an individual sees themselves and moulds themselves as a member of a particular social group, nation, class, religion, ethnic group, gender, profession and so on, and second, with the way in which the norms that govern these groups allow the individual to think about themselves, situate themselves and relate to others, to the groups to which they belong and, by means which are sometimes more tortuous, to "external" groups, perceived as others. So why is it so noxious? Well, because it is understood according to different political formulas, different ideologies or "world views". Through a right-wing, conservative, populist or sovereigntist lens, identity will be defined as a coherent and cohesive set of shared norms that can be "objectively" determined and are rooted in longstanding tradition. A left-wing, more progressive approach, on the other hand, will offer a pluralist, fragmented concept of objective references which are used to differentiate individuals or sub-groups, and which must be valued and respected in an inclusive way: here, identities stem from the recognition of the unique features claimed by each individual or the emergence of shifting characteristics that play a prevailing role at any given time – profession or gender, religion or axiology, sports or ethnic group. Far from being singular and cemented in tradition as in the first case, in the second case identity will be variable: sometimes I’m a teacher, sometimes a person of mixed race, sometimes a footballer, sometimes a protestant, sometimes a shy person, sometimes a film buff, and so on.That said, there are many other ways of defining identity, depending on the field in question. In algebra, for example, it will be the equality between two expressions that is valid regardless of the values of the variables therein, for example: (x+y)2=x2+y2+2xy. In psychology, identity is one of the formal characteristics of the self, which feels its own sameness and continuity over time as the centre of its field of consciousness, in other words, the sense and awareness of one’s self as a separate and continuous entity (something that may be lost with some psychiatric disorders). And so on and so forth... Identity became a hot topic when the social sciences started to talk about collective identity as a response to, among other things, the re-emergence of ethnic conflict in many Western societies in the 1960s and 1970s, and the development, in the social arena, of movements based less on social class, as advocated by Marxism, but rather on, for example, differences between the generations or between the sexes. These demanded different approaches both to rationale behind common action and to new senses of belonging. It was then that opposition first emerged: in one camp, collective identity was understood as something immutable, "natural", eternal, that could be solidified by constructing myths and shared symbols, celebratory rituals and commemorations; in the other, it was seen as a cultural development, something contingent, a historical construction subject to change and "reformulation". Yet if identity refers to a "completeness", an internal "purity", it will imply withdrawal, protection, mistrust, borders and walls, the dismissal and sidelining of any otherness, any difference, the celebration of the self and the vilification of all others, the "enemies", experienced as a fatal threat, whose integration would break up the community of identicals. But if identity is neither "natural" nor substantial, but relational, if it has a non-native matrix, if it is made up of contributions, integrations, inclusions, often unpredictable inputs and hybridisations, then it will leave the group, community and society always open and welcoming, energised by the presence of all sides, no matter how different they may be.Robert Maggiori © Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco (Monaco Philosophical Encounters)