“Taking a subject, turning it around, questioning it in all ways, then saying to yourself at the end that we didn’t find an answer, before, it’s something that bothered me”, remembers Jean-Philippe Pleau, laughing at what, in contact with Serge Bouchard, has become for him a modus operandi, almost a way of life. In the time of hurried thoughthis first book, celebrates this “combat sport without winner or loser” that is thinking.
Intellectuals? There are still some on the public airwaves, let’s not exaggerate, although they seem increasingly confined to the role of specialists, called upon to comment on a specific situation. Quite the opposite of Serge Bouchard, who certainly had his hobbies but who, as a good all-terrain intellectual, always preferred the road to the destination.
It is to this tradition that Jean-Philippe Pleau honors in In the time of hurried thoughta collection of editorials with which he concludes think aloudthe issue having succeeded It’s crazy Sunday evenings on the airwaves of ICI Première, since the death of his friend in May 2021.
“To revolve around our subjects, to study them, to track them, and to end up letting them slip away, for fear of having found the truth”, he writes about the intellectual approach of the woolly mammoth, now his own.
“Serge used to say: ‘What I like is the immensity of the approximate’”, adds Jean-Philippe Pleau in an interview. A bias having nothing in the way of clearing the approximations of a confused thought, but rather of showing humility in the face of the big questions, from which one never draws all their sap, anyway. If some are proud to have arrived at the “terminus of thought” (an expression of Mathieu Bélisle which is dear to him), the animator prefers to make his engine purr somewhere on a crooked path.
This book, I see it as a way of following up on the conception of the world that Serge transmitted to me: each individual, each object has a story to tell, just take the necessary time.
Jean-Philippe Pleau
When inviting academics to his microphone, the master of ceremonies of these “thinking evening cabarets” often has to allay their fears of not offering a precise answer and of being pushed around by the clock. “If I ask someone the question of the week and they say, ‘I don’t know’, to me, that makes a great guest. There is an “I don’t know” which is full of curiosity and which then allows you to unfold your thought. But you have to have time to do it. »
Ashamed of having been ashamed
Whether he is sorry that his native Drummondville has been disfigured by the town planning of real estate developers or whether he sings of his affection for the reassuring voice of Jacques Fabi, Jean-Philippe Pleau, a sociologist by training, always considers the objects of his experiences of thought with wonder – often joyful, sometimes melancholy – for the illusions and dreams that humans drink.
But where the student has learned the best from his mentor is in his ability to make the small, sometimes almost insignificant fact say more than what the first glance reveals.
PHOTO OLIVIER JEAN, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Jean-Philippe Pleau and Serge Bouchard in May 2017
Even when he speaks of his own trajectory as a class defector, Jean-Philippe Pleau easily knows how to suggest the social dimension, and not purely intimate, of this shame of having arrived late in the life of ideas, which has long inhabited him. .
A shame fueled by the surprise too often apparent on the faces of guests or colleagues, unable to conceive that he is not the son of the writer Michel Pleau, but that of a man who has earned his living in shop and whose library contained catalogs as its only books.
And now I’m almost ashamed that I was ashamed. I understood that what I had been ashamed of is a strength, that perhaps I have a broader vision of the world, because I have a passport for these two worlds.
Jean-Philippe Pleau
The rooted mourning
Explicitly or implicitly, In the time of hurried thought is therefore intended as a tomb for Serge Bouchard, whose young comrade confides, smiling, not to have mourned. No more than that of his friend Charles Plourde, director at Radio-Canada who died of cancer in 2019 at the age of 36.
“These mournings will never be made, and I do not seek to succeed in them. Serge said it: our dead, we carry them within us, time roots mourning. And for me, there is something beautiful in that. »
From their first meeting, in 2010, it was as if he and Serge had always known each other. “It was not a meeting, it was a reunion. We had been preparing for this moment for a long time, without being aware of it. Coming out of this meeting, we knew we would be together until the end. And that’s what happened. »
In the time of hurried thought
Jean-Philippe Pleau
Lux
232 pages