“We will only find the will to live by renewing ties with the living.”

From the most politically oriented French science fiction authors, we know the strong imagination and sharp critique of addictive technologies and the control society. his latest work, Scarlett and Novak (Rageot, 64 pages, €4.90), challenges teens about the deadly dangers of smartphone addiction. Little do we know that Alain Damasio, a tireless surveyor of trees and mountains, is trying to identify, or rather, “was”, Red Kite Flight and Jean Le Blanc Ring.

author outdoor Area (CyLibris 1999; La Volte, 2007), de The crowd is getting ready (La Volt, 2004) and stealthily (2019) receives us in his apartment in Marseille, on the edge of the Calanques Park, the Mediterranean on the horizon. But his dreams are elsewhere, on a piece of mountain pasture where he is sponsoring a place-building project with others. “Where do we experience this world we would like to live in”.

For an author of dystopia often inspired by reality, there is no longer any doubt about it In a world of finite resources, the story of progress driven by technological innovation and economic growth is no longer a thing.

The writer, whose political conscience was shaped by reading Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Deleuze (1925-1995), now quotes with equal enthusiasm the works of political ecology by Bruno Latour, the Baptist natural philosopher. Morizot, or the work of attorney Sarah Vanksim on the concept of “common lands.”

A new story remains to be invented but which one? For Damasio, he outlines the art of living with a “user-friendly” and liberating technique, in which the patient re-weaves the bonds. “For oneself, for others, and for other species”, And defending the right to experiment inside “autonomous regions” (ZAG) and other social, political and environmental norms.

In May 2020, you signed a call to say “No to a return to normal”, which was published in Le Monde. What is your state of mind today as life begins to take its course?

For the past year and a half, we’ve been experiencing a lively and painful experience, which can be science fiction, at its core, the realization of what was initially just a concept, a possibility. With Covid-19, the abstract possibility of solitary confinement on the scale of four billion people became real: we found ourselves guinea pigs in a global anthropological lab!

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