Abstract
As peace talks for Ukraine get underway, the lecture begins with a reminder of the demand for truth. We might ask whether such a requirement is relevant to literary reading, which is undoubtedly more of an art than a science. If there is a science of reading, it consists in knowing how to discriminate between probable meanings and improbable, even impossible meanings. A historical event does not present itself as a work to be interpreted, especially since, as Valéry insisted, it is arbitrarily carved out of the mass of facts. Certain events seem to lend themselves more to interpretation when they are specific, locatable and linked to a particular intention: a terrorist act, for example. This confusion is only possible because, since Dada, some art has adopted the codes of terrorism. Conversely, spectacularization and even a certain artification are indispensable to modern terrorism. However, we can identify two principles that distinguish the work of art from terrorist action and the purely historical event.
First principle: although a work of art may wish to shock, it does not wish to physically injure observers. It creates a space and a time of freedom for them, whereas the historical event constrains us and imposes itself without any possibility of evasion. In the Western definition of art, the autonomy of the spectator-reader historically and axiologically precedes that of the artist: we come to the work of art freely, without being forced, and we leave it in the same way. The main counter-examples are linked to education: if the constraint of school contradicts the autonomy of the reader, it's because the pupil is a minor and his autonomy is not complete. Another exception is the public monument, which is there for all to see. This is why architecture is the preferred art of totalitarian regimes. In all other cases, when the autonomy of the spectator-reader is lost, there is no art but religious worship or political propaganda, even if aesthetic elements are part of the experience.
The second principle of the work of art: it carries one or more meanings that develop over time. The work aims beyond the present. Its event-driven dimension does not exhaust its meaning. The attacks, on the other hand, are a one-off indictment of a reality experienced as a global nonsense. These two principles are linked: meaning can only develop when the work respects the reader's autonomy. It is the reader's free collaboration with the work, this freely chosen symbiosis, this spontaneous and voluntary election of a home for the imaginary, that is productive and fruitful.
This is one of the lessons taught by Poussin's Les Bergers d'Arcadie: without anyone forcing us to go to this painting, it has been attracting generations of viewers and interpreters for almost four centuries, producing a remarkable flowering of meaning in the process. But there's no need to choose between them: ambivalence and amphibology are the hallmarks of this work. The work of the highest art is a machine for blocking definitive interpretation or, what amounts to the same thing, for multiplying provisional interpretations. Poussin's painting is a machine for creating meaning according to the observer. Its undecidability is deliberate: the Christian deciphers it as a prefiguration of Salvation; the Stoic reads Montaigne's message in it: "That to philosophize is to learn to die"; the Epicurean and the libertine see it as a representation of carpe diem and ataraxia founded on philia and friendship, which in no way can be disturbed by the thought of death - since Et in Arcadia ego also means: "Where I, Death, am, is still Arcadia. "
