Can Innovating Refrain from Transgressing?
Seance of wednesday 08 september 2021 (Séance en hommage à Jean-Michel DUBERNARD)
Abstract
Innovating is always a problem − in surgery as elsewhere − and never fails to arouse legitimate resistance. Because to innovate is to transgress. If only prejudices and reassuring habits. But above all, it is to transgress customs. Why would we forbid ourselves? Out of respect for conservative standards, knowledge and powers that deny us possibilities other than those that fate and uses reserve for us? To innovate is above all to recognize the insufficiency of existing solutions and not to be satisfied with them. It means inventing, trying, bringing to light new possibilities and therefore transgressing the practices and institutions that have been built in disciplines around insufficient solutions.
To innovate and transgress, this is what philosophy − like surgery, the sciences or art − is bound to do − always exposed to locking itself into what it says and thus putting itself in contradiction with its original project: to think, to free. Can we take the names, concepts and theories that we forge tell us what is, how to be and how to live? We would like to be able to think, be and live in a way that does not settle us into a fixed solution before we even do anything. Should we not go back on our methods? Excise necrotic names, revive fibrotic sentences, free stiffened texts, suture disjointed thoughts, revascularize uninhabited ideas. In short, to act, to put our hands in the language to restore thought to its functions, its mobility: to be, to live and to think in action.
To innovate and transgress, this is what philosophy − like surgery, the sciences or art − is bound to do − always exposed to locking itself into what it says and thus putting itself in contradiction with its original project: to think, to free. Can we take the names, concepts and theories that we forge tell us what is, how to be and how to live? We would like to be able to think, be and live in a way that does not settle us into a fixed solution before we even do anything. Should we not go back on our methods? Excise necrotic names, revive fibrotic sentences, free stiffened texts, suture disjointed thoughts, revascularize uninhabited ideas. In short, to act, to put our hands in the language to restore thought to its functions, its mobility: to be, to live and to think in action.