01/09/2023 - 31/08/2025
How can we explain that the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther triggered a wave of suicides among European readers, or that the release of The Birth of a Nation resurrected a dying Ku Klux Klan? If fiction influences reality, is it not because reality itself is, at least in part, fictional in nature? The central issue of this project is the performativity of illusory representations. On the one hand, it implies questioning the propensity of human beings to delude themselves and to make up fictions at the same time as they perceive and describe what they call « reality ». On the other hand, the omnipresence of these illusory representations implies that we also study their real effects on human thought and behaviour, based on the mere fact that they are believed and disseminated. In this way, I intend to develop a new philosophical anthropology, that of the homo fabulator.
I will focus specifically on the seeds of this philosophical anthropology of homo fabulator, during the second 19th century, which saw the emergence of a new representation of the world, of man and of his place in it, confirming the decline of metaphysics and the rise of the human sciences. The unifying philosophical theory that I propose, based on an interdisciplinary approach, will thus endeavour to offer the archaeology of an epistemological regime that is dominant today by situating it in the intellectual context of its emergence
Porteur du projet : David Simonin
Descriptif du projet sur le site de l’ANR
