Parure - Culture

As social animals, human beings are drawn to the latest fashionable trends on social media or in stores. As cultural beings, they dream of blending silently into the wild world. Welcome to adornment-culture!

• At the La Marseillaise newspaper’s headquarters, Les Rotatives 4:30 p.m. — 5:30 p.m. Fashion on the edge of the void. A cross-talk by two philosophers, Benjamin Simmenauer and Francesco Masci, followed by a discussion.

Benjamin Simmenauer: “How does fashion manage to make us ugly?”

Critics of fashion sometimes reproach it for forcing us to adopt unflattering, or even completely ridiculous, dress codes. Fashion shows are thus subject to parodic reinterpretations or “memes” on social media. In retrospect, we judge our ancestors’ stylistic wanderings harshly, whether they adopted the tight, colorful outfits of Tektonik, the beehive hairstyles of the 1980s, or the pagoda shoulders beloved by Pierre Cardin. Fashion seems capable of forcing us to have bad taste.

Explanations for this phenomenon vary widely. The simplest is to posit, like Roland Barthes, a kind of mysterious order, “Fashion,” which imposes choices on individuals that are not truly theirs. Barthes sees Fashion as a “system” that arbitrarily associates meaning with clothing and imposes its categories and distinctions on society. I do not believe in the existence of such a power and will try to show that the most absurd and least flattering fashions, while resulting from complex individual interactions, are nevertheless rationally explainable. I will focus in particular on the notions of costly signaling, conditional preferences and salience.

Francesco Masci: “Fashion and seduction, or the perfect oxymoron”

Fashion is blind to desire. The mechanics of seduction, this dialectical relationship of mutual transcendence through the exhaustion of sexual pleasure, is entirely unknown to it. Unless one naively confuses fashion with the art of clothing, it is impossible to attribute to it the fantasies triggered by the (un)veiling and fetishisms that fuel erotic desire. Its material is time, and its engine is a pure negation that anticipates no positive resolution. Anything that exceeds the recursive moment of the temporal erasure of what was already destined to disappear is no longer fashion. It belongs to advertising. Fashion derealizes bodies, which become machine-bodies incapable of arousing the slightest desire, except the perverse desire, because it is mimetic, provoked by an artifact. These are bodies forever detached from others, incapable of awakening any erotic aim, not because of a perfection that would make them unattainable, but because of their excessive availability. They potentially belong to everyone and no one. Fashion is the anti-utopia of a world without hope or disappointment, an etymologically cool, cold world, rid of the passions of seduction that only difference can excite. There is nothing to take, nothing to transcend. The other is nothing more than the mirror image of the self, and no pleasure, other than onanistic and narcissistic pleasure, can emerge.

• Natural History Museum 6 p.m. — 8 p.m. Into the Wild, really? A rich and hybrid panel hosted by philosophers Jeanne Etelain and Julie Beauté.

Marion Laval-Jeantet artist-researcher Salomé Ambert geographer Jeremie Brugidou artist-researcher Julie Beauté (moderator) philosopher and Pop Philo scientific coordinator Jeanne Etelain (moderator) philosopher

arion Laval-Jeantet: “From shamanic initiation to interspecific hybridization”

The nature of artistic and anthropological performative experiences is such that it is not merely a matter of fantasizing about hybridization with another animal or spirit, but of embodying it. The action then finds its meaning in the exemplary nature of reality, what theology historically called “efficacy,” an act of making evident that places everyone face to face with ontological questions: who are we to...? Do we have the right to...? Where do we stand in relation to these experiences of a mythological imagination transposed into reality?

What if these actions were precisely the rooting of the imagination? A bodily rooting that we have gradually neglected, buoyed by our new philosophical and scientific rationality? What if we agreed to understand how the “wild” body, pushed to its limits, reveals an embodiment of meaning capable of shifting, not to say expanding, the boundaries of our consciousness?

Salomé Ambert: “The call of the wild. Fantasizing about rewilding”

Once upon a time, European landscapes were populated by bison, wolves, beavers and even elephants. What if it were time today to consider their return?

Since the 1990s, rewilding—or réensauvagement—has encouraged the “return” of species or processes considered “natural,” whether they return spontaneously or are given a little help. The return of wolves, images of wastelands reclaiming territory, the reintroduction of ibex or vultures: these stories have something fascinating about them.

Indeed, behind rewilding lies an entire imaginary: that of a wild nature that would be there somewhere, ready to reclaim its rights as soon as we give it a little space. A teeming, powerful nature in its fullest expression, since it is freed—at least partly—from human control. Dreaming of the return of the wild means taking part in a collective fantasy.

But what does this fantasy tell us about our own way of imagining