Éropolitiques - Semaine de la Pop Philosophie

Laélia Véron, linguist Myriam Bahaffou, philosopher Juliette Roguet, socio-anthropologist Raísa Inocêncio, philosopher philosophical stand-up performances VJing evening

Juliette Roguet

Desiring equality, taking pleasure in inequality?

We never desire in a vacuum. Our desires take shape in a deeply unequal world. Power relations run through our emotions, and those emotions give society the force of self-evidence. Intimacy is where the social order becomes naturalized, right down to our entrails. It is difficult to recognize history at work in the intimacy of seduction.

For eight years, I investigated the bricheros, the tourist seducers of Peru, and the gringas, the Western women they seduce. These stories, shaped by profound inequalities, offer a laboratory for observing how gender, class and race relations intertwine and reinforce one another within heterosexuality. From the first stirrings of romance to disputes over the mental load.

Because seducing, forming a couple and having children are not merely private matters. This is also where social relations become flesh. Where the social order reproduces itself and perhaps conceals itself best.

So, if our most intimate relationships contribute to reproducing inequalities, how can we desire and take pleasure in equality?

Raísa Inocêncio

Ode to love, ode to celebration: a tribute to my country, Brazil

Drawing on my lived experience in Brazil, I will speak about desire, the carnival celebration, and how my grandmother taught me to be a philosopher. Beyond good and evil, this is a country that has experienced slavery and colonial domination, and once a year democracy opens up precisely in carnival as a shared celebration. A moment when everyone can seduce, when everyone can dream, whatever their social position. My question therefore concerns less seduction itself than desire: as the inevitable stage where choice is played out, and as the primary source of every action that builds a space for oneself, a space that accommodates fantasies/imagination and reflection on whether or not seduction, desire and life choices are fulfilled. It should be specified that I start from seduction and fantasy, which in Portuguese are similar and distinct words: when one hears fantasia, one tends to think of a ghost, but when connected to desire it is translated as fantasia (fantasy as something imaginary and linked to desire, but also a carnival costume). In the end, I will thank my ancestors with a love story...