Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
Decidedly, each generation goes through difficult times. Today, global warming darkens our horizon. There is urgency, but the ancestral dream of living in harmony with nature cannot guide human conduct. Karl Marx had been clear: “Neither nature in the objective sense nor nature in the subjective sense exists immediately in a way adequate to the human being. »
The warning applies to spiritualist or materialist ecologists. To make matters worse, a virus proliferates and mutates. There, it is the turn of the scientistic dream, typically modern, to collapse. For two reasons. The natural sciences cannot anticipate all the outbursts of life, and the organization of human life is first and foremost a matter of politics. As for the dream of contemporaries of communication without constraint, the rarefied air of the summits is too frightening. We prefer to stay in the base camp. We think we’re clever by deciphering each other’s interests, but we remain useless in the search for a shared truth. We become pessimistic or intransigent, navigating at best to feelings, at worst to resentment. In short, we are living through yet another crisis of the future.
To glimpse a renewal beyond the distressing civilizational malaise that has always undermined solidarity between humans, I think of rereading the writings of the independence activist and writer Andrée Ferretti. Born in 1935, she will celebrate her 87th birthday on February 6. I like to read and hear Andrée Ferretti. Like so many others, I admire his freedom of speech, his way of responding to our national inconsistency and, perhaps even more, what I would like to emphasize here, his way of overcoming the universal difficulty of being, in his words.
Although she grew up in times of war and under the yoke of an alienating political regime, Andrée Ferretti has always lived as a free woman. Of course, she was not the only one to achieve this. However, in an exemplary way, she was able to highlight the experience of liberating experiences: that which makes one discover the joy of existing. Orally and in writing, his speech is a breath of life and his vocabulary is a constant tribute to the ardent human desire: to love, to marvel, to enjoy, to please, to rejoice. She persists and signs. Knowing there are no absolutes, but carry on To fight. She fears no one. Born never assume the posture of a victim. She knows where she is going. Knowing the vanity of the human adventure, but wanting to change life better than ever. How to explain such a quality of presence and openness to the world?
The turn of the 1960s
During the 1960s, Quebec society was in full bloom. As in many other regions of the world, youth is emancipating. Andrée Ferretti then followed the conferences of the historian Maurice Séguin, worked with the poet Gaston Miron, frequented the writer Hubert Aquin, campaigned with Guy Sanche and Pierre Bourgault, took part in a great social movement, the Rally for National Independence ( RIN). Imagine, she wants Quebec to become an independent country!
We know what happened next: nationalists feared his radicalism; federalists will sign his arbitrary arrest in October 1970 and socialists will feel overwhelmed on their left (because it is not so much a question of seizing power as of freeing themselves from it).
In the kingdom of wrens, Ferretti upsets because she expresses herself in complete frankness. Hélène Pedneault understood this well: “Ferretti’s game is always open, she acts in full light and everyone knows what she is thinking” (L’Aut’Journal, November 15, 2001).
Spinoza’s philosophy
Like many women of her generation, Andrée Ferretti left school very early. She therefore often presented herself as an autodidact. This is half true, since we find her as a philosophy student at the University of Quebec in Montreal in the mid-1970s. It was there that she was touched by Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), this philosopher who maintained that nature and life develop without a final cause, without an external finality. Being perseveres in its being.
All being is matter, wrote Ferretti to sum up Spinoza’s thought, the human spirit as well as the water of the seas and it obeys in all its components the laws specific to each. Thus, in humans, the soul and the body are inseparable and the first cannot exist outside the second, it is immanent to it.
And immediately add: For me, Spinoza defines the spirit as consciousness that the human has of his own body, associated with that which the mind has of itself and which forces it to make an effort to maintain itself in its existence (Overpower, PUL, 2016). It is therefore a question of embrace life.
An anthropological look
In 1983, the fighting intellectual published an exceptional text, flesh and language. At first, Ferretti goes back to the time when men and women discovered love, the feeling that could unify the prodigality of life and human conduct based on reason. Love indeed has this power to defeat, without bullying them, the delusional forces of the instinctual body on the one hand and, on the other, to welcome, without transforming them into an instrument of domination, the constraints of the rational body. (review Possible, 1983, included in Overpower, PUL, 2016).
But, in a second time, Ferretti shows that, troubled by their own emotions and by the excesses of life, our ancestors will seek to control everything. To the fundamental prohibitions will be added a useless repression and an unhealthy desire for domination.
What are you so afraid of, my love, to give in to such a desire for power? The question resounds in the immense glade that is civilization. Life is overflowing, so our fear of losing control distances us from each other and leads us, despite ourselves, into relationships of submission and domination.
Let’s be clear. Our ingratitude towards the spasm of living is the main source of our defensive positions, our jealousy and our obsession with controlling everything. Would life be too hard to bear? While women will be confined to the sphere of reproduction, men will use their ingenuity to erect barricades and systems of domination.
That said, the feminist who had proclaimed, in 1966 in a famous speech, that The Quebecer now wants to be the equal of a free man don’t be fooled. She did not make the mistake, in 1983, of opposing to the technical world erected by men a alleged enjoyment [féminine] who would be closer with nature. No overbidding. With Ferretti, the war of the sexes will not take place.
Literary life and joy of existing
Ferretti goes even further in the clear awareness of the human phenomenon. Instead of concluding that our species is cursed, it will rather show that there is nothing more liberating than the pleasure of existing. Such is, it seems to me, the common thread of his life as of his writings.
While reading Andrée Ferretti’s first novel, Revival in Pagania (L’Hexagone, 1987), particular attention must be paid to Isis. The character seems secondary in the storyline, but Isis nonetheless embodies the subversive force of happiness in life. In our torn world, she had the audacity to be happy and show it.
In The Summer of Compassion (VLB, 2003), Isis will reappear under the first name of Béatrice, fell into the pot of joy when she was three years old.
It is still her, the narrator, who philosophizes in My dog, the sun and me : I am not in the world an existence like the others […]. I am present in the world, because being able to say it, I can apprehend it and understand it, act on it (Editions Trois-Pistoles, 2006). Yes, our vital energy resides in our body, but our life choices come from a word, lively, invigorating, made for livable life. Let’s forget about vitalism and primitivism, let’s develop our sensitivity instead.
Exactly, in Bénédicte under investigation (VLB, 2008), the young heroine marvels as she strolls through the public markets: I let myself be intoxicated by the powerful or delicate smells of these fruits bursting with sugar. She wants to understand why this simple sensory experience is so exhilarating. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza returns among us! The fullness I experienced as a child in these places teeming with life, necessity and consequent truth is one of the cornerstones of my own system which demonstrates that the universe is immanent in itself, Nature being both creative of itself and of all that necessarily results from it.
Later, always inhabited by an unshakeable joy, despite collective tragedies and private dramas, this Bénédicte returns under the blooming figure of Fleur des prés (Unauthorized novel, The Hexagon, 2011). She still dreams of the day when humanity will enjoy the happiness of being what it is: inseparably and harmoniously body and soul, flesh and language.
Also, the biggest mistake would be to believe that the heroine of Andrée Ferretti’s stories is a nationalist romantic. Because beyond its contestation of the system of domination, the rebel was looking to to remove from his sight what thus prevented him from enjoying the pleasure of living (partisan life, The Hexagon, 1990).
In short: what if the joy of existing was the most tangible proof of our consent to the presence, not guilty, of oneself and of the other on this earth? The only way to keep the horizon open despite pitfalls and obstacles?
Suggestions ? Write to Robert Dutrisac: [email protected].