Marie-Hélène Gauthier
LilleMeet Marie-Hélène Gauthier, a lecturer in aesthetic philosophy at the Université de Picardie, and author of several books...
Studies, readings, projects... Here is what she has to say!
Could you introduce yourself? What are you currently doing?
I am a Maître de conférences Habilitée à Diriger des Recherches at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne, and for nearly four years I have been teaching specifically at the UFR des Arts, where I created, together with the head of the UFR de Lettres, Anne Duprat, Professor of Comparative Literature, a Master's degree in Comparative Aesthetics (Arts / Humanities / Philosophy) backed by the C.R.A.E. research team, the Centre de Recherches en Arts et en Esthétique — a first in the French university landscape, I believe.
I teach courses there dealing with literary aesthetics and the ontology of art, and seek to bring these into dialogue with the transformations or disintegration of the contemporary subject, and its unsupported fragility.
What memories do you have of your studies and your teachers?
I was fortunate enough to attend the Lycée international de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where I sat two baccalauréats, including the international baccalauréat with a section in comparative literature, before going on to preparatory classes at Henri IV.
During my khâgne year, I was taught by Pierre Jacerme, whose influence was absolutely decisive for me — I had long hesitated between the Letters and the Philosophy options. His rigour, but above all his power of questioning, his ability to put all the texts we studied scrupulously into perspective, within a constant renewal of conceptual articulations and a challenge to too hastily formulated assertions — all of this opened up something like a vocation in me.
Then there was Pierre Aubenque, also my thesis supervisor: his lectures, his books — so elegant, and which brought Aristotelian studies back into the foreground — and his cultivated, always alert presence. And Jean-Paul Dumont, whom I came to know when I had just been appointed as a normalienne assistant at the University of Lille 3, and with whom I maintained an all the more constant dialogue because we were neighbours. Both were models of intellectual probity and rigour, in a hermeneutical spirit that I subsequently tried to follow as best I could: not commentary as a mere philological exercise, but a necessary return to the construction of an interpretative horizon.
Finally, at the ENS, the courses of Pierre-François Moreau — his synthetically dazzling mind, his mastery of texts taken to their thematic and argumentative core — exerted an equally lasting influence.
Which philosophical book have you been particularly passionate about? Is there an author you fell in love with at first sight?
On the syllabus for the khâgne competitive examination was Book V on justice from the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle. A first reading, a first discovery, and a first sense of being in a kindred, familiar universe — to use the notion of oikeion, which runs through Aristotle's thought in such a fertile way.
Then, during my first year at the ENS and the degree courses at Paris IV, came La Métaphysique by the same philosopher, which I read for months, alongside the works of Pierre Aubenque and also Paul Ricoeur's course, later published by the Centre de Documentation Universitaire de la Sorbonne: Être, Essence et Substance chez Platon et Aristote. A revelation, if I may call it that — one which determined the whole of my academic trajectory, from master's thesis and DEA to doctoral thesis (L'âme dans la Métaphysique d'Aristote, éditions Kimé, 1996), and on to the Habilitation, which included an unpublished work on Philia in Aristotle's Ethics (also published by Kimé, 2014). Whether one calls it love at first sight or not, it was a happy, passionate immersion.
Have you ever tried your hand at writing? Could you tell us about your work?
I have recently completed a collection of texts — not philosophical, more literary — that fits neither the genre of a novel nor that of a short story collection. It is closer to a declension of inner states in the face of widespread incomprehension. I am still at the stage of reworking and revision. It is not my métier; I responded to an uncontrolled force, a compelling need — but I have no illusions. I am not a writer.
What are your projects and research interests?
My work underwent something of a shift at the time of my Habilitation. Starting from the importance of affectivity, of the faculty of sense perception and the diversity of reality in certain ancient philosophies — their expansive epistemology and their different ethics — I sought to explore what influence these ancient systems may have had on certain writers, great readers of philosophy: on the constitution of their inner world, their writing, and also on the possible renewal, through literary form, of what philosophy alone no longer addresses today, or not necessarily as well.
I have therefore written a book entitled La poéthique : Paul Gadenne, Henri Thomas, Georges Perros, published by Éditions du Sandre in 2010, and have continued this line of enquiry in occasional articles: the influence of a certain life ethic on writers, and the modulation of philosophical discourse by transposing it into literary creation, in particular bodies of work.
In the same spirit, I am currently preparing a comparative essay on Henri Thomas and Michel Lambert — a Belgian writer and short-story writer whom I consider of the utmost importance, both literary and for the theme I have chosen: a "poetics of untying", that déliaison which arises from the multiple fractures of the subject under the pressure of the contemporary world, as well as from the psychological, emotional, and mental constitution specific to the universes implied by these two authors — one of whom binds, and the other perhaps unties.
Thank you, Marie-Hélène, for sharing your story!
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