Des féeries informatiques depuis la nuit des temps
Conferences directed by Jérôme Mauche
This event in the « Poetry Platform » series brings together two rather different experiences in writing—one scientific and historical, the other literary. Still, each in its own way, they offer suggestive, sometimes surprising methods to understand, name, re-categorize and thus invent the real—with a light touch as well as some inventiveness and rigor. Anthropologist Clarisse Herrenschmidt and writer Emmanuelle Pireyre interpret and organize with much precision myths and mythologies, whether ancient or hyper-contemporary, sometimes making the real sound more fictional than our fictions. What is more, their respective efforts are characterized by the kind—and rare—concern for the inscription of our lives in conscious continuities, informed breaks, better perhaps than what we know.
BIOGRAPHIES
Clarisse Herrenschmidt is a philologist and linguist. She is an expert on Persian and Elamite Iran. An emeritus research director, she is attached to the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale at the Collège de France. She works on an anthropology of writings and signs which, starting from the oldest civilizations, questions contemporary societies. Her major work, Les Trois Écritures. Langue, nombre, code (Paris, Gallimard, 2007), is an erudite and amazing narrative that links the invention of writing and languages in Iraq and Iran to that of currency and mathematical figures stricken on coins in Ionia around 600 BC, and to the advent of computing and telecomputing in the twentieth century. In each of these developments, Herrenschmidt sees the externalization of a human organ needed for these signs to operate: the mouth (writing), the eye (currency), the brain (the internet).
Emmanuelle Pireyre is a writer. The forms of her books combine narrative, reflexion, real or fictitious statistical data, and poetic structures. After two books with Maurice Nadeau, Congélations et décongélations et autres traitements appliqués aux circonstances (2000) and Mes vêtements ne sont pas des draps de lit (2001), she published Comment faire disparaître la terre ? (Paris, Seuil, 2006), Féerie générale (Paris, L’Olivier, 2012), for which she was awarded the Prix Médicis, and Foire internationale (Paris, Les Petits Matins, 2012). Myriam Marzouki recently adapted some of her texts for the stage in Laissez-nous juste le temps de vous détruire. Emmanuelle Pireyre gives lectures-performances that bring together text, video and Powerpoint presentations. She is the author of radio dramas and texts on contemporary literature.
