Can you speak Chinese in your native language?

all this summer, Scientific conversation Explores different aspects of imagination: How do we think, how do we imagine, how do we dream?

Too often, fiction is given the status of a parasite, an exhausting saccharine that will sully the best of intentions. Moreover, the word “imaginary”, when taken as an adjective (delusional patient…), always refers to falsehood, unreality, delusion, delusions, in short, to all those things that science really claims to combat. Through the poetics, imaginary, as a noun this time, also has a negative connotation: its adjective explodes on him and he ends up throwing off the concept.

in Scientific conversation, we prefer to give a radioactive body to the treatise of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Gaston Bachelard, whose work is divided into two aspects: the cognitive one – he is concerned with the scientific mind, what fertilizes it and what changes it -; And the literary side – he is interested in poetic fiction. Intuition, inference, and imagination emerge as opposing dynamics: the scientist must resist the imaginative slope of language in order to develop his concepts accurately; The poet, for his part, must escape from the simple logical construction of language to produce previously unheard of metaphors. But in reality, Bachelard explains, the scientific mind and the poetic imagination always work together: they combine like the sail and the center of a boat: each, if carried out separately, hardly allows us to move forward, but working together, they mark progress.

Today, we will question what fantasy holds language, and languages, and in particular the Chinese language or languages, starting with this enigmatic sentence by Jacques Lacan: “Not everyone is pleased to speak Chinese in their own language, so that it becomes a dialect.”

a guest :

Romaine Grazianiphilosopher, sinologist and poet, professor at the ENS de Lyon and author “Laws and Numbers, An Essay on the Springs of Chinese Political Culture” (published by Gallimard).

From the same author:

The philosophical fantasies of Chuang-tzu (Infinity Collection, Gillimard, 2006);

The Use of the Void, An Essay on Business Intelligence, from Europe to China (group

Ideas library Gallimard, 2019); I love my girl (Jose Corti, 1998);

original sediment (Fata Morgana, 2002);

Corpses in ancient Taoism: the crippled, the formless, the infamous (Beautiful Letters, 2011);

A Voice to Escape: Tsi K’ang and the Letter of His Breakup (Fata Morgana, 2015);

The man who wanted to beget me (Fata Morgana, 2005);

Ôé legend (Fata Morgana, 2014)