The Necessity of the Humanities

 

February 9, 2016

 

Dear Consul of France,

Dear President Alexander,          

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me tell you first that I am profoundly moved by the “Palmes academiques” distinction, all the more so because it was for me a complete surprise that sprung out of a Fedex envelope one day last December. I am very, very honored by this award. I want also to heartily thank my colleague Adelaide Russo, who took upon herself the not so small task of organizing this evening.

For me, this esteemed gathering today is also the proper venue to express my deepest gratitude to the French cultural services in the United States, which, last July, granted the French department and the Center for French and Francophone studies the largest grant ever given to LSU and the its French department by the French government. This grant is shared with the Universite des Antilles, and it has already fostered a good number of collaborations between the two institutions: a colloquium, a graduate student exchange, a Writing workshop in Martinique, and two valuable collaborations between our respective faculties…and much more is to come.

After receiving the grant, I began to ponder why France is giving so much to culture, upwards to 8 billion a year, which must make it the country in the world that spends proportionately the most on its cultural inheritance.

Some reasons are obvious. Indeed you cannot let a civilizational legacy slip into oblivion, a legacy that has created so many treasures over the course of 11 centuries; to wit, the troubadours’ joyous and refined spirit, Marie de France’s unassuming and profound beauties, Michel de Montaigne’s tolerance and humanity, Jean Racine’s perfect and disorderly passion, Marcel Proust’s tormented psychological depth, or Édouard Glissant’s embrace of the Whole-World. Around these giants, we should not build mausoleums to preserve them in the formaldehyde of eternal conservation. We have to show, relentlessly, passionately, lovingly, that these great creators can speak, as living presences, to us, in our present. We have to affirm that they can transform us as well as we can transform them by rereading them in myriad different fashions. As Edouard Glissant says so well: “We should not view the past as determining present times, but as a vision that opens up to all possible presents.” 

These truths seem self-evident, but everybody knows that, today, they aren’t. Humanities are under siege from all angles, their legitimacy is radically contested, and it is to France’s great credit that she defends them as much as she can.

Allow me to offer you a rationale for their existence. Science and engineering produce useful marvels every day, and we understand the researcher’s pride and profound satisfaction when he or she discovers a new way to cure cancer, or when the engineer plans an immense bridge that will span tumultuous waters and better the life of millions. What science or technology doesn’t offer, though, is a meaning for human life. That is not their goal. Within science proper, the question of meaning doesn’t even make sense. For example, for the hydrologist, what is the meaning of the rainbow? Where will we turn, then, to seek answer to the moral and aesthetic questions that give veracity to our quest for the meaning of life?

Religions, here, obviously, offer a great number of answers that should not be neglected. But Humanities do too, in a less constraining way perhaps. Humanities are in fact the curators of meaning. If you lessen or suppress them, you will face a tremendously impoverished life. That is why we should value them and defend them. And not only defend them, but promote and impose their vital necessity. And who will defend the Humanities? Us, academics, because if we don’t delve into past and future meanings offered by art, nobody will do, and they will be lost. And for us, at LSU, in Louisiana, the only American state where French culture is organic, exceptional backing for French is an absolute imperative.

Let me finish by giving you an example.

It seems to me that we live now in a world where individuals, more and more, are atoms, but atoms that are isolated rather than linked, and when they link, they do so only with the atoms that think as they do or, worse, are like them. This is what Marcel Proust had to say about this state of profound loneliness and isolation:

“Only through art can we get out of ourselves, we can know what another individual sees in this universe that is not identical to ours, whose landscapes would have remained to us as alien as the ones on the Moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing only one world, ours, we see it multiply, and we have as many worlds at our reach as there are original artists, worlds that are more different from each other than the worlds that roll in the infinite.”

 A century later, under the pen of my much regretted friend Edouard Glissant, who often deplored the atomization of individuals closed upon themselves, we find an amplified echo of Proust’s affirmation of art’s vital necessity: “I write in presence of all the languages of the World.”

 “Poetry’s circulation and action don’t surmise the future of a given people, but the future of planet Earth. This is a commonplace that is worth repeating. All the expressions of humanity today open themselves, at the same time, to the world’s fluctuating complexity. Poetic thought preserves what is particular, since only the totality of the unspoiled particularities guarantees the energy of diversity. But, each time, any particularity puts itself in Relation, in an absolute manner, with the totality, accomplished at last, of possible particularities.”

And that will be my conclusion.

 

Monsieur le Consul de France,

Mesdames et Messieurs,

Vive Marcel Proust, Vive la France, Vive l’Amérique !