Knowledge at the risk of culture

      The roots common to our cultures are not only a simple scar originating in the shifts in population. They continue to play an active part in human thought and action. By showing singular figures strongly acting in Western culture, I would like to create bridges in order to enrich a trans-cultural clinical thought.

 Beyond learning, knowledge also relates to the perception of impalpable reality and to the sensitive world before language. The experience of reality imprints its sensitive trace in us, from the voice to the smell and the taste of the mother, from the painful experience of the body to its sensual pleasure, from the perception of landscape to the anticipated death. This trace does not necessarily constitute an accessible knowledge but it puts on any learning a strictly individual mark. It is, without our knowing, in the heart of desire and action.       

Knowledge fruit of experience and thought organizes learning. The more rational and effective it is, as it is the case in our liberal and scientific culture, the less it takes into account this sensitive, physical, intuitive part, this pulsation of the human being. Some individuals, but also other cultures, will exacerbate this opening to oneself and to the world. They will make of this register known as irrational, the heart of thought and action.

“You can know!” The condition necessary to humanization goes through this offer, this visa opening to the world, existence and knowledge. This expression implicitly acts as an ability and an injunction in the form of an implementation of the symbolic and linguistic systems, and this, as soon as the child is spoken to and that one speaks to him.

But what can you know?  What is known, of course, that is to say, acquired established, authorized, necessary and shared knowledge. Nobody escapes it. You can also know what is unknown, from unvoiced things to secrecy passing through the family and beyond, the silent social space impressed with effective magic. Finally, you can know what goes through you and which, through various processes, of which psychoanalysis and some meditative and creative practices, reaches consciousness. 

This unknown is not limited to the Freudian repressed, but also relates to unorganized and thus inaccessible psychic representations. The inventor and the artist draw their matter from all this. This operation is essential to the humanization process because it allows a territory, an object, a representation, a concept to exist where nothingness generated a questioning and distressing emptiness. This laboratory of humanity is a major element of cultural progress. 

Between believing and knowing   

 Human knowledge, exceeding our individual capacities, makes it necessary to accept authorized ways but progress in learning imposes a questioning sometimes going as far as deconstruction and break-up of established knowledge in a field of research. It is a question of aptitude to discover rather than to support, to experiment rather than to learn, even if, for a time, supporting and learning remain essential for the access to knowledge and to initiation into practices. The imperialism of science resulted in stigmatizing cultures known as prescientific one’s, referring to spiritualistic models forced by their archaism to magic practices. The complex knowledge of these cultures is reduced to irrational and inept belief, in opposition to the truth of science. And thus the ancestral knowledge and the knowledge specific to these societies known as prescientific are rejected as a whole, regarded as non-valid because scientifically non-demonstrable. 

Social sciences and psychoanalysis do not escape this imperialist trap. The risk is a claim to analyze all human phenomena starting from scientifically agreed invariants which would go through cultures and human beings.

 Knowledge is built on a specific organization of psychic representations of the individual according to their culture. These individual constructions but of common culture, stamp the subjectivity and relativity of knowledge and practices. Singularity and community make these constructions of psychic representations effective, since they are suitable and valid in a given culture. This should not be forgotten to question the truth which is neither with a capital T, nor universal.

Taking into account these essential preliminary remarks, we will develop four examples of knowledge; paradigms incarnated by men, creators and inventors each one in their field:

• The practical philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre producing existential psychoanalysis and drawing his inspiration from the phenomenology movement as some psychiatrists have
• The founding artistic creation with Zao Wou-Ki and Alberto Giacometti.
• The invention of psychoanalysis through self-analysis with Sigmund Freud.

Insistently, these men created, disrupting knowledge starting from an inventive way basically reconstructing knowledge. They are not the only ones, of course, but the way they traced influenced and transformed our culture. These model figures throw bridges between themselves and other figures in other cultures, which enables a better understanding of humanity on the move.

 These figures concerning philosophy, art and psychoanalysis have in common:

• To discover and reveal, that is to say, to give form and consistency to psychic representations from their informal and unconscious outline. It is the genesis of action.
• To build and produce an object whatever it is, either material or conceptual. Acting may or may not have an impulsive, a sudden nature
• To invent and cut into the real allegedly inaccessible to language. It is intended to the sensitive world and the irreducible thing to make a palpable object of it, that is to say an object you can see, seize, hear, and taste. Through this work, the inventor will make visible and expressible in words and thus gain a new space in our civilization.
• Not to fear heterodoxy, ridicule or exclusion by opening an unusual and sometimes even prohibited way, not by provocation but by need. It is the case of Sigmund Freud towards the bourgeois Vienna, their somatic medical practice and their religious moral. It is the case of Jean-Paul Sartre towards traditional philosophy imprisoned in its orthodoxy and its rhetoric but also towards conservative and colonialist power. It is the case of Zao Wou-Ki towards his Chinese traditional culture, an extremely constraining yoke that he refuses, turning to Western modern painting. It is the case of Alberto Giacometti who cannot rely on the obviousness of perception and seeks the essence of it.
• Not to stick to the belief, by questioning it as far as not believing any more. It is a deconstruction operation which tends to find, in oneself and by oneself, without however denying the contribution of acquired techniques and of established knowledge.

 Invention and deconstruction

The process which leads to the invention and the creation of objects does not imply a disrupting deconstruction or a return to chaos. This research often comes up with a new construction of the components of culture by unfolding it from its originating inscription to archaic, present and future inscriptions.

 Cultural crossings take place which allow strange meetings through this reworking: for example, Alberto Giacometti and the community of his forms with the African world, also Zao Wou-Ki battling with his gesture, reinventing what he left to make a success of a fusion between his native culture and his Western impregnation, and present creators in increasing numbers who live cross-cultural mixing while going beyond their acting.

The spadework on the unexplored in oneself and in the world allows a ‘terra incognita' of humanity to appear. It is necessary to organize this apparent chaos by marking out one’s own way. It is not chaos but the acceptance to expose oneself to it which matters to create.

Believing and fearing

       To believe is necessary to be protected from distress: an existential fear of contingency faced with a senseless world, distress related to urges and incongruous phantasms, pangs of death, distress facing the incommensurable universe. Therefore, to dare not to believe or not to be able to believe anymore is extremely embarrassing. It is not a posture, it is not a choice. It is forced upon the individual through the questioning of his relation to the world and the other being.

It is dangerous to create. To take this way is to accept like the non-believer, to open wounds in oneself while being exposed to acting death. It is also to reveal the reality of the world while moving to make it more visible.

 It is thus necessary to protect oneself from all these dangers to find another form of belief. Blindness sometimes follows with strange convictions crossing the mind of the creator, his object and the theories which accompany it. The inventor and the creator then become the centre of a world. But this world, closing on its object, takes a delirious form, as Salvador Dali had expressed and orchestrated it with the staging of its creative ego in its paranoia-critical method:

“….The most rigorous systematization of the phenomena and the most delirious materials, in the intention to make tangibly creative my most obsessively dangerous ideas…. This method works providing that one has a soft engine of divine origin, a living nucleus, a Gala - and there is only one.”

It is also what others, less known, live through the gravity of their delirium, like this convincing patient who set out and published his theory of a uterine and cavernous original religion taking its origin in the labyrinth of Gortyne, Crete, a founding religion reactivating the myth of Atlantis.

Every psychiatrist has in mind these attractive and vertiginous theories that a patient or anyone poured on them without getting their breath back, because they had to win them over and make them share their unquestioning conviction. Self-begetting is its ultimate expression. The inventor too can believe in the superposition of the birth of his object and himself, thus finding, like a god, the possibility of existing without history. He is then taken into a spiral towards the absolute. It is not necessary to mention again that to invent, create or theorize exposes to the risk of delirium. The creator endangers himself. World and culture need this madness to move on!

Alberto Giacometti and Zao Wou-Ki: the obsessing creative search

Alberto Giacometti was crossed throughout his life, since his childhood with a creative father until the most painful events of his life, by this distressing question of what seeing means and the dilemma of having to represent it and to figure it. He ended by thinking that `The more it fails, the more it succeeds'. He did not hesitate to reduce and even to destroy his objects as soon as he created them.

     His creative crisis was induced by a crisis in perception and representation, a crisis which he knew was unfailingly related to his perplexed interrogation about existence, putting the question of limits, of space, of obviousness and likeness, of time marked by death and of the tremor of life which he hopelessly tried to seize in his model. 

      After an existential time marked by the experience of death, he related one of the events crystallizing his quest on its terrifying and catastrophic outcome.

`At this time, I started to see the heads in the void, in the space which surrounds them. When for the first time I clearly saw the head I was looking at, freeze, stand still there and then, permanently, I trembled with terror like I had never before in my life and a cold sweat ran down my back. It was no longer a living head, but an object I was looking at, like any other object, but no, differently, not like any object, but like something alive and dead at the same time. I cried out in terror as if I had just passed a threshold, as if I was entering a world I had never seen before. All the living had died, and this vision was often repeated, in the subway, in the street, the restaurant, in front of my friends… But at the same time as men, objects underwent changes, tables, chairs, suits, from streets to trees and landscapes.’

Distress that makes the world and the being unreal in this moment of catastrophe does not justify placing Alberto Giacometti’s quest in a psychotic dimension. He was, more than any others, aware and mindful of this human experience because it had a terrifying echo linked to his questioning on representation. He dared to express it, to use it and even to maintain it in his creative quest rather than to reject it. He had to carry out up to its ultimate point what to see implies, to the point of blindness

He raised essential questions in his sculptures, his drawings and his writings, that could be expressed as follows:

§  How can pictograms, already stamped with affect, be connected in an attempt to express a resembling reality?

§  How to get out of one’s mind a knowledge which imprints the vision in the perception process and inevitably modify representation?  

 What appeared to him was immediately struck by an effect of disappearance, acknowledgement of the impossibility of a pure eye, but he tried the figure to an extreme degree. This obsessive quest went as far as exhaustion, madness in the eyes of some.

 Alberto Giacometti could always try to move his figures away up to the point of making tiny sculptures, he could lengthen them and make them slender to disappearance; a representative dead end always forced itself upon him. The unconscious basis of this quest raises the question of the mechanics of perception and reveals the difficulty of linking up affects to unstable and fragmentary representations before language

 In a discussion with Andre Parinaud in 1962, Alberto Giacometti explained:

`I do not create to make beautiful paintings or beautiful sculptures. Art is only a way of seeing. Whatever I look at is beyond my comprehension and astonishes me, and I do not know exactly what I see. It is too complex. Then, it is necessary to try just to copy, to be slightly aware of what one sees. It is as if reality were continuously behind the curtains that you tear off… There is still one more… always another one. But I have the feeling, or the illusion, that I make progress every day. It makes me act, as if we were indeed to manage to understand the core of life. And we go on, aware that, the nearer we get to the «thing”, the further it moves away. It is a never ending quest’

Alberto Giacometti tried an increasingly objective perception, refusing adjustments, these interpretative reflexes of active perception. He had doubts as to his progress and knew that his efforts could prove to be vain.

Was this quest a promise of cultural bridge?             

The painter Zao Wou-Ki also persists in this quest. He could get over a huge gap between a strictly codified Chinese pictorial culture, deeply rooted in him through his traditional education and a French artistic culture undergoing a radical transformation. In a first stage, he violently rejected all that was Chinese to carry out this change and to enter the mystery of Western contemporary creation. By dint of hard and painful work, he found an unclassifiable style which remains unique and in between regarding his native culture and his culture of adoption.  His rhythm, his discovery of French painters impresses, remains rooted in a Chinese culture that his body and his gesture cannot deny in spite of the efforts he made. It has to be read in its relation to space, time and silence.

      This rhythm is not accessible to a Western artist, unless, like the painter Paul Cézanne, they try a revolution that clings absolutely to the apprehension of space, rhythm and form.      One day Zao Wou-Ki took up with Indian ink again and finally accepted his native culture. He was encouraged and supported by his friend Henri Michaux’s inspiring eye. He finally became aware of his cross-cultural treasures and could then carry out this spellbinding fusion in his accomplished style. At the age of sixty, completely transformed, he could really enjoy the pleasure of painting, allowing a fluid creation to flow. He finally freed himself from the ongoing struggle he was overcome with before in his work.  

 Zao Wou-Ki’s work testifies to his determination in a demanding work of radical transformation and in an attempt at self-begetting, giving birth to another one of himself. But the artist as well as the man cannot really abstract himself from his native cultural print.       

This complex “in between”, starting from a painful exile off himself towards reappropriation had the power of stimulating his creative process while allowing its living source to come to the surface This source frees a powerful flow of designs, pictograms, ideograms and scattered fragments of phantasms going from China to Europe, so foreign to each others. His work is for us an expressive bridge, an “in between” pictorial language which enables him to make himself heard from the two continents yet so different.

 Is artistic creation able to transpose what is not seen, making it visible, and thus open a cross way trying a form of universality?

The formal pressure of a cultural community with no possible escape kills invention. This dilemma nourished and even tortured Alberto Giacometti and Zao Wou-Ki who refused to simply apply the rigid demands of the form and codes of traditional art. 

They ploughed and explored the furrow of a perceptible abstraction in a creative space, always pushing their limits further. They succeeded in establishing a rhythm of dilation and contraction expressing and sublimating the subject in a space that makes the hollow and the solid the silence and the power of a precarious, enigmatic and all the more human presence re-echo/reverberate,. This space crosses cultures and can constitute the crucible of a communication. They were in search of an essential and universal expression. They tried to express the essence, the thing itself and the rhythm of the world, to allow these impalpable elements which nevertheless condition our being in the world to be seen and represented

It makes it possible to raise these questions:      

`What are painting, music and poetry, in their uselessness so essential to existence, even when art loses its religious and sacred roots?’

   `While crossing cultures can art claim to create bridges transcending community differences to get nearer to a universality of the being?’

The success of their ethical and aesthetic search enables the artist, who finds an echo of the same kind in the recipient of his work to justify this so essential uselessness and try this universality. Their self-begetting takes place there, through the created object.

There is always something sacred in art, but it can lose its identity signature and succeed in appealing to a lot of us, beyond cultural boundary. This alchemy may be related to an insistent peculiar thinking of the artist. This thought crosses his gesture impregnated with knowledge and produces his action. This intuitive and perceptive thought plays a part in action before being introspective when it tries to conceptualize. This thought is always tuned into the sensitive world and the artist’s psychic representations. Theorization plays a secondary part there, generally in deferred action. 

Jean-Paul Sartre and the attempt at self-begetting

      Sartre’s life started with the enigma of the dead father and paradoxically, in spite of his demand for realism, the philosopher showed a shameless bad faith all his life, dealing with this unknown part of his being in a casual manner. He wanted to deny its impact while focusing his philosophy on the absence of the father: “I am surprised to know so little about him. Nobody could make me take an interest in this man.”   

     However, this father, an ex-student of the Ecole Polytechnique had faced his middle-class references. He could thus have had the makings of a hero or at least of a model in the eyes of his son, but Sartre was not made aware of this by his maternal family, and did not want it. He could not give this father a place when he made up his philosophical corpus about the factitiousness of being and freedom conquered through thinking. However, he had his father’s name, a name he had to adopt, whether he liked it or not.

     In his book “les Mots”, Sartre describes what was made of him; or rather he rebuilds it in an autobiographical fiction aiming at destroying his own myth to reach freedom.  I.e., as he formulated it: `what I do of what was made of me'.

Sartre wants a revolution in the being, which with an uncommon existential demand, fights any elitism and conservatism. He will stand for this all his life, not without contradictions, through a philosophy of action founded on this challenge:           

 Trying to be alike, giving the one like you all the value of being.

       He kept ploughing this furrow since “the Nausée” his famous novel dealing with existential contingency as a painful way towards freedom and human reality. 

Until the age of ten, he had lived the intensely close life of a king-child with a mother at the same time a sister, an accomplice and a secret love under his maternal grandfather’s indulgent eye. He was kept away from any child and thus from any initiation experience. This king-child is the character, what was made of him. In this loneliness, advanced for his age he writes, and maintains the myth a heroic child. Sartre admits that his life is founded on the void/gaping of the father: “The death of Jean-Baptiste (his father) was the great matter of my life. » A paradox hard to link up with his denial of the place of the father! This place, which can be considered as full of his void makes it possible for him to attack on all fronts the destiny of the middle-class man and the man in general with his constraints, his cowardice, his bad faith, his beliefs, his serious mind and his cynical position of `bastard'. As for the paternal function in a society where it is still fixed on the head of the family before Jacques Lacan specifies all the symbolic import of it, he says: 

      “There is not one good father, it is the rule; it should not be held against men but against paternity ties which are rotten.”

For him the father refers to disintegration, to a phantasm of fall and destruction. For a very good reason ,considering this so full and indissoluble relation to his mother, then all his life with women, of which Simone de Beauvoir who was his support, his ear and sometimes his go-between. His attempt at self-begetting, in a phantasmal confusion, under the seal of incestuous relationship to the mother but also to the maternal grandfather, patriarch dedicated to his cause.

This self-begetting enabled him to remain in the illusion of an idealized freedom and in a fraternal world where `any man is the entire man' and where man creates his law.  

  If we seek a weak link in the philosophy of Sartre, it is placed in the heart of this denial of the paternal function founded on the dead father, so present in his absence. Sartre’s bad faith is all the more obvious as he can’t but know the importance of his father, but he would retract if he took him into account. He writes: 

“I never stop creating myself; I am the giver and the donation. If my father lived, I would know my rights and my duties; he died and I am unaware of them… Rather than the son of a dead man, I was made to hear that I was the child of a miracle. My incredible lightness undoubtedly comes from there.”

 Thus, without illusion and by assessing the factitiousness of his life Sartre can hold out an implacable and dismal mirror to his fellow creatures in his novel” Nausea”. His melancholy has its origin in the traumatic loss of the cause to exist   

     So that Sartre produces his demanding philosophy of contingency, he had to suffer this unique history, these traumas, these lies and this despairing disillusion He also had to treat this disillusion in his own way, in the imaginary refuge of a painful conscience and through life saving writing accept his contingency and make a linchpin of his thought: I.e. to agree to be placed there, gratuitously, with no other option than a freedom of loneliness to found the basis of his existence.   

 Sartre’s thought does not stop there. In “Nausea”, it is about human reality `which is what it is not and is not what it is'.

Sartre, in being born to himself, is done with the illusion of being what one is, as a whole, or at least, he senses of the inanity of it. In Sartre existentialist approach, there is no nature, and existence precedes essence. ”man is only what he does of himself”.

His philosophy precedes post modernity and can only be apprehended if it is accepted that `god is dead'. Sartre, therefore, isn’t very popular abroad!   

     He frees his existential approach from any idealism, from any determinism as well as from any belief This distressing freedom thus allows all deconstructions, aiming at a basal humanity. At this point, he offers a bridge, but so demanding in the renouncement of the beliefs that it cannot be easily practicable.

    The `original choice', by the very fact of existing makes us responsible for what we are. This proposal was often interpreted as a voluntarist posture of Sartre whereas ` man is only what he has done of himself 'means that he is the project, a project ahead of himself. In all this he creates himself as a being, in an irreducible subjectivity.   

     Existential psychoanalysis such as he defines and applies it to himself in `the Words' appears at the same time without concession while maintaining a utilitarian bad faith. In the construction of his `true fable', self-analysis which took him twelve years to write, one appreciates the force and contradictions of this thinker marked by his history, his factitiousness and the historical need for self-begetting. It is a conquest over oneself. There, his refusal of any determinism including Freudian determinism can be understood because Sartre needs the myth of a being in action towards freedom. But, like Sigmund Freud in this approach of self-analysis, he cannot cut himself off from illusion of thought as a construction of the being.

    Freud and Sartre’s theories are not so antagonistic. They meet, for example, on the common ground of factitiousness and bad faith and of cultural malaise.  If we linger over this, we can understand that Sartre freedom is not only a naive negation of the unconscious and of the pressure of milieu and matter: man is condemned to be free through his existential contingency, opening on the senseless without resorting to anything but belief, factitiousness and bad faith.

    Man is factitious because he is placed in a situation he did not choose, and for him, it is a matter of doing something of what was done of him. For him, `Violence results from the tragic disproportion between nature and man.’

Sartre raises the question of confrontation between urges and effort to exist. He concedes that the human being can only stumble over what he names the practical- inert, i.e. the alienating relation of man to matter and all forms of institutions. Bad faith thus should not be banished, because it is a necessary human recourse. Illusion, beliefs, bad faith even and especially in all good faith, unauthenticity are the bastions installed by man not to be confronted with the distress of his condition. Thus already, living is quite difficult: failures confront with distress and can precipitate towards existential catastrophe and madness. Fortunately, delirium, a construction of bad faith in the conviction of its truth, allows a filling-in, often by generating a whole being, sometimes self begotten in his madness. This one is shared by cultures, producing its gods and its sacrificial victims. 

Sigmund Freud, from self-analysis to interpretation       

  I will just tell you a few words about the existential position which allowed Freud the invention of psychoanalysis. Rewording his expression “The artist succeeds where the neurotic being fails.” one could tell about him: “The first psychoanalyst succeeded where his neurosis got him in failure”.  Freud faced the middle-class science he was formed of and accepted his loneliness in his act of creation in spite of the reprobation of his fellow-members. Full of paradox, he knew how to make good use of his contradictions by putting them to the test of his self-psychoanalysis.  He did not spare the risk to be exposed to the incongruity of his revelation. He didn’t spare both people and society which he only heard too much well in the muffled space of his office. He overcame intellectualist temptation however strong it was in him, seeking to avoid obviousness, alleged objectivity and the fake science of established knowledge. He offered this special and questionable context to those who are now called psychoanalysing people.

If a framework allows it, the interpretation, speaking-word of the psychoanalyst, becomes the essential act which reveals, builds and conceptualizes. This interpretation, giving a big weight to the words, cannot limit itself to the revelation of explanatory speech. It is an offered bridge, invented through words with its entire echo, to half-open the door to phantasm and trauma.                                                  

       The realization of a limit of language constraining culture and being, forces the psychoanalyst to use tools at his disposal to invent others, like a handyman of the unconscious. The psychoanalyst’s factory, like the artist’s, produces better being, a conquest of symbolic system as well as a new space of developed humanity. The invention of each psychoanalyst, individual and not prescribed, is above all his interpretation. The rest is the necessary framework but just to allow work to take place. Therefore, interpretation cannot be satisfied with being a recitation, an application or a theorization, or else it produces the worst alienation, a psychological formatting, or else it is simply useless and then, the patient wastes his time, his money and his hope.      

      Interpretation must be poetic: not lyric, versified, declaiming, but poetic, because it remains on the edge of language, being and reality. Interpretation tries to offer an imaginary exit to chaos. It penetrates and develops the waste, mined and hostile land of the being, producing symptoms and distress. Interpretation creates meaning. Thus it may hope to echo with the inexpressible meanings of someone who struggles on the couch.        

      The psychoanalyst, like the poet, is a collector of shade. He opens to light, not the blinding one of authorized knowledge in the coldness of its objective statement, but that of a gleam, offering light and shade which brings out the object of desire, and thus the one who gets close.      

       Precarious, thus could these figures be considered to tell about the risky position of the artist, the phenomenologist and the psychoanalyst through their act. Precarious also, the patient who dares his unheard speech and tries with us what he hopes to be a rebirth. To accept this precariousness already produces substance of being. 

      On the contrary, one can note but the precariousness of the man who doesn’t think, such as seemingly strong monolith in his convictions, but extremely precarious. This man lives in the turmoil of the manipulation he is the characterless object of, praying or consuming. He is a man without creative act, without political act, hollowed out of his desiring search. This man only expresses, in his urges turned into a zapping of non-being, a destructive power acting in his unconscious urges. There, he reveals his deadlocked condition.

Ways of knowledge and bridges        

These four emblematic creators disrupt knowledge in Western culture. They allow the proposal of bridges through cultures which offer to everybody of every culture, an ability to migration and differentiation in his culture, but on certain conditions: It is unlikely that an ultimate and universal truth will be reached. To refuse fundamental symbolic frames of reference cannot be decided. These references are engraved in flesh. So it is a matter of, and it is quite something, a testing of the capacity of these references to be malleable and alive.

These bridges close when the truth becomes dogmatic or militant, regarding any dispute of this allowed truth as a terrorist act. About this question of the truth, certain ways towards knowledge let major differences appear:

• To think with or without god, with or without determinism,
• To explore the large field of an anticipated representation of the world or to agree to put learning to the test to reach knowledge,
• To be convinced of a total being, living in a universe full of myths or imagine one’s own division, the human being himself full of demons…       

 These opposite ways make people’s meeting really difficult. Violence is imminent, unless finding oneself in the unclear space of meditation or an oceanic feeling while dreaming of a total being, between mystic and wisdom.       

      Phenomenological experience, through an attention opened to the world, tries to put in brackets the established knowledge. This method makes it possible to reveal the unfamiliar fact in phenomenon and event which then keeps its potentialities of signification. This method takes into account the subjectivity of the researcher or the therapist to nourish the understanding. Through this requirement, it can make bridges between cultures easier by clearing axes which have a common meaning. Phenomenology may even not rule out a conflicting dialogue by appreciating its validity in its existential roots, but provided that protagonists try to set back their conceptual obviousness.

       Can we even expect better from mixing cultures with accelerated migrations and communication through Internet to throw bridges and, perhaps, to understand each others finally? 

    For example, it is a matter of communication in real time between people, debate about active and fundamental information between cultures or intellectual talking through crosscultural groups.     

    Mixing, yes, but provided that it is not completely taken in the snares of globalisation. Then, this mixing can allow a cultural move combining comprehension and change between peoples and between human beings. Thus some people cross over borders and high walls that men perfectly know how to build, for the purpose of being protected from the others as well as from themselves. 

© Thierry Delcourt