Filippo Domenicali

Étienne Souriau was a refined and demanding thinker, with an aristocratic demeanour, far removed from the currents of ideas dominant in his time. A difficult and erudite author, out of tune with the times he lived in, he would seem the least likely candidate to appeal to a hurried and globalised public like that of the twenty-first century. A sophisticated representative of a rationalist positivism, no stranger to the Husserlian canon and not even insensitive to the motivations dear to the gnoseological debate of Cartesian and Kantian matrix (as well as to the major themes of classical metaphysics), Souriau pursues the ideal of a constructive philosophy, capable of understanding – and at the same time favouring – the advancement of the creative process conceived as a set of poetic acts and progressive dynamic operations. In his texts, Souriau is attentive to grasping the correspondences, exchanges and reciprocal transitions between one mode of existence and another, as well as the resonances between the various art forms in the different fields of knowledge, testing an original method that is epistemologically very fruitful. The aim of this monographic issue of Aisthesis dedicated to Étienne Souriau is to explore his thought in its multiple aspects, in order to measure its topicality in relation to the themes and problems that characterise contemporary philosophical debate, with particular reference to aesthetics and ontology as well as to the dense network of connections between the two fields. One of the most interesting characteristics of Souriau’s thought that has stood the test of time would appear to be its multifacetedness: the quality of lending itself to being applied even to spheres that are apparently very distant from reflection on art, such as cultural anthropology, political philosophy or morality. It seemed to us that it largely owes its relevance precisely to the intersections between one field of knowledge and another. The issue contains twelve contributions on Souriau that explore his main aspects in depth. They range from analyses devoted to the architecture of Souriau’s thought (his general philosophy) in the essays by Dominique Chateau and Filippo Domenicali, which can furnish a useful overall picture of the man, to essays that attempt to focus on the more properly ontological core of this thought, such as those devoted to the arabesque motif (Luigi Azzariti-Fumaroli), the theory of the soul (Sjoerd Van Tuinen) or the multiplicity of worlds (Noëlie Plé). Interspersed between these are contributions that focus more on the comparison between Étienne Souriau’s thought and the philosophers of his time, such as Dufrenne (Maryvonne Saison), or with well-known later philosophers who explicitly referred to him, prolonging his creative impetus, such as Gilles Deleuze (Casey Boyle) and Bruno Latour (Aline Wiame), the true architect of the current Souriau “comeback”. Finally, in addition to essays of a more theoretical nature, there are contributions that attempt to re-evaluate certain aspects of Souriau’s aesthetics, such as the fruitfulness of the cues that can come from his thought for the debate on animal aesthetics (Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis and Andrea Scanziani), or the possible topicality of his theory of forms (Isabelle Rieusset-Lemarie). In the “Miscellaneous” section, this issue hosts a number of studies that aim to explore the aesthetic implications of new technologies, the themes of ecological aesthetics, as well as to offer an unusual profile of Baumgarten.

During the darkest years of the SecondWorldWar, the French esthetician Étienne Souriau developed an original pluralist ontology based on the notion of “mode of existence”. Unlike the better-known Jamesian pluralism, Souriau’s perspective is characterized by the fact of being an “existential” pluralism, namely a pluralism of the “modes” of existence. How many modes are there? In his original inquiry into being, Souriau introduces two different existential “cycles”: within the former, which aims at investigating the “ontic realm” starting from the phenomenon’s mode of being, he distinguishes three modes of existence “in aseity” and “in abaliety”.

In a lecture course on Foucault, Deleuze said that he would like, one day, to teach a course on Tarde. As we now know, he did not give such a course. Yet across Deleuze’s books is a fragmentary interpretation of Tarde. Would it be possible to reassemble and identify the guidelines, in retrospect, of what such a course could have been? In our opinion, yes. It could have been developed along three main axes: 1) Tarde as precursor to a philosophy of difference and repetition; 2) Tarde as inventor of microsociology; 3) Tarde as founder of an Echology intended to take the place of more traditional Ontology. In this article I propose to deepen, through a direct encounter with the texts, the relevance of these three lines of interpretation.

Étienne Souriau (1892-1979) demeure un philosophe et esthécien français du xx e siècle encore largement méconnu. Cette première biographie coécrite par Filippo Domenicali et Fabien Le Tinnier – regroupant leurs recherches respectives sur l’œuvre d’Étienne Souriau, pour l’un sur ses années lyonnaises, l’autre sur ses années parisiennes –, cherche à restaurer la place qu’occupait l’œuvre du philosophe au sein de l’histoire de la philosophie française contemporaine. Fondée sur l’étude de nombreuses archives pour la première fois mises au jour, cette biographie retrace le cursus honorem du professeur Souriau durant plus soixante ans. En resituant ainsi la trajectoire intellectuelle de Souriau, l’évolution de sa carrière, la toile de ses amitiés philosophes ainsi que ses réseaux collégiaux parmi les lieux qu’il a fréquenté, cette biographie vise encore à éclairer son travail à la lumière des livres, idées et événements qui ont chacun participé à façonner son abondante œuvre philosophique que depuis quelques années de nombreux chercheurs et universitaires français, belges et italiens redécouvrent. Depuis ses années parisiennes de formation passées à l’École Normale Supérieure jusqu’au faste de ces années passée à l’université de Paris occupant la chaire d’esthétique à partir de juillet 1946, Souriau fait rayonner la philosophie française par-delà les frontières françaises comme en témoignent ses nombreuses publications étrangères et déplacements professionnels. Figure majeure de la philosophie universitaire, Souriau et son œuvre parcourent ainsi le monde philosophique du milieu du xx e siècle.

Étienne Souriau a développé une philosophie originale de l’Instauration enracinée dans une nouvelle anthropologie de la création : l’homme est conçu comme l’ animal instaurateur. Il a développé systématiquement cette intuition fondatrice en explorant ses enjeux à l’intérieur de trois domaines principaux : l’instauration artistique (l’art étant le genre le plus pur de l’instauration, il constitue le modèle pour les autres), l’instauration philosophique, et enfin ce qu’il a appelé « l’instauration de soi ». Ce dernier domaine instauratif a été thématisé dans un cours public que Souriau a donné à Lyon en 1929-1930, qui s’intitulait justement L’esthétique et l’art de vivre. La vie constitue donc une matière à partir de laquelle on peut donner une forme (forme-de-vie) et qui peut devenir ainsi, en elle-même, œuvre. Mais – on pourrait se demander – de quelle forme s’agit-il? Souriau répond que la vie peut être matière, tour à tour prenant des formes pythagoriques, dynamiques, skeuologiques et psycho-esthétiques. Il faudrait aussi considérer la notion d’ œuvre. L’œuvre d’art, précise Souriau, doit être considérée, en elle-même à l’instar d’une personne – c’est-à-dire comme un être plurimodal, qui rassemble en soi et synthétise plusieurs niveaux existentiels à la fois. Selon l’ontologie développée dans Les Différents Modes d’existence enfin, le plus haut but de l’existence doit être celui d’un devenir sur-existentiel, visant à se dépasser en transcendance, la vie devenant ainsi vie sublime. On pourrait donc soutenir que, selon Souriau, la vie peut devenir une œuvre d’art, et l’œuvre d’art est une forme-de-vie.