par Debaise, Didier 
Référence The Bifurcation Operation : Forking Modernity (26/11/2025: Lüneburg)
Publication Non publié, 2025-11-26
Référence The Bifurcation Operation : Forking Modernity (26/11/2025: Lüneburg)
Publication Non publié, 2025-11-26
Communication à un colloque
| Résumé : | I would like to propose a precise definition of the Moderns: they are those who invent themselves through the gesture of bifurcation and who never cease to reproduce it. Rather than focusing on their mode of representation, their possible “worldview,” or their institutions,we should start from the gestures—their way of establishing an experience, of distinguishingorders of knowledge, of qualifying or disqualifying certain modes of experience, of establishing hierarchies, of characterizing their beings, of situating others. These gestures are, as I would like to show, directly at once ontological, epistemological, and political, without any realpossibility of distinguishing one from the other. Exploring these gestures, bringing them to light, understanding the underlying interests that animate them, and questioning their effects amounts to making a diagnosis of the constitution of the Moderns’ world. The central gesture, as A. N. Whitehead has shown, is that of the “bifurcation of nature,” around which all the frameworks of modern thought were constituted: the difference between the real and the apparent, between fact and value, between nature and the social. This gesture originates in the experimental sciences and first defines what nature is for the Moderns. To question the gesture of bifurcation is thus to question the genesis of the Moderns’ naturalism, their conception of nature, and consequently, of all that they exclude from it. |
