At 102, he could stay in bed all day, listening to music and birdsong. He chose the opposite. After the publication of his Memoirs (Lessons from a century of lifeDenoël) and a cry of alarm in the face of the upheavals of the world (Let’s wake up!Denoël), Edgar Morin took up writing again to warn against the spiraling war in Ukraine (From war to war. From 1941 to Ukraine, Aube editions). And as if that weren’t enough, he gratifies his 231,000 Twitter followers almost every week with his abstruse and luminous aphorisms.
Its engine? “The anguish of seeing the horrors and mistakes of which [il a] became aware since the First World War in an indirect way and in a direct way and experienced by the Second World War, the war in Algeria, the war in Yugoslavia”, he assures. Because wars, he will have known some over the Born Edgar Mahoum in Paris in 1921, this descendant of Jews from Salonika began to be an activist during the Spanish Civil War, during which he joined a libertarian organization, Solidarité internationale antifasciste. the Occupation, a member of the Communist Party since 1942, he became involved in the Resistance, joining the Resistance Movement of Prisoners of War and Deportees (MRPGD).It was there that he took the pseudonym of Morin, in homage to a character of The human condition (1933) by Malraux. Without forgetting the Cold War, and its break with Stalinism in 1951.
His pamphlet, From war to war, develops the analogy with these conflicts experienced in the front row or as a distressed spectator. “War hysteria manifests itself above all in the unleashing of hatred, which transforms the enemy into a criminal and advocates collective responsibility, that is to say collective criminality […]“, he writes. And to implore, by way of conclusion: “Let us avoid a world war. It would be worse than the previous one.”
An icon in the “battle of men”
With this plea for a peace that is all the more urgent because it is difficult, does Edgar Morin risk sinking into a final fight? Hailed as a “universal thinker” by President Macron on the occasion of his centenary, in 2021, doctor honoris causa from around forty universities around the world, particularly in Latin America, the former kid from Belleville is today an icon, especially for the left. After joining the CNRS in 1950, he multiplied journals and books, becoming a pioneer of the “sociology of the present”, being passionate about cinema, stars, rumor (The Rumor of Orleans, published in 1969, is a classic). More perhaps than his theoretical contribution, his intuitions marked the spirits: it was he who, in 1963, invented the term “yé-yé” to designate the generation of young people of the 1960s, fans of Johnny Hallyday. Recently, his Lessons from a century of life sold out (100,000 copies). From Peter Sloterdijk to François Hollande via Stéphane Hessel and Boris Cyrulnik, with whom did he not write a book of interviews? In a world in perpetual upheaval, this wise old man with narrowed eyes has become a point of reference, a reassuring grandpa whose oracles we tear ourselves away from. “At the moment, there is a curiosity for people who have a very long experience: Hessel, Trump, Biden”, notes sociologist Jean Viard, his editor at Aube editions.
But the promoter of “complex thinking” – his great conceptual contribution – does not balk at what François Mauriac called the “battle of men”. A column from 2002 in The world on the “cancer” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, co-signed with Sami Naïr and Danièle Sallenave, earned him a conviction on appeal for racial defamation before the Court of Cassation put an end to the proceedings, considering that the text was a matter of freedom of expression. Controversial, Edgar Morin? The person concerned replies: “My criticisms of Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people have aroused blind fury among fundamentalists who have falsely accused me of destroying Israel. I have never challenged Israel’s absolute right to freedom. existence, but you know the power of slander.”
His views on the war in Ukraine have also sparked controversy. In a vitriolic review, The world pinpointed the “factual errors” of his latest book, which “burden the analysis of the current conflict”: bad date of entry of the Baltic countries into NATO, silence on the role of the direct intervention of the army in the troubles in the Donbass… Above all, the journalist, Florent Georgesco, criticizes him for one of his proposals to put an end to the conflict: the end of Ukrainian sovereignty over the Donbass, “objective rapprochement with Russian propaganda”. Rudy Reichstadt, director of Conspiracy Watch, recalls from a tweet from September 2022 : “The war in Ukraine is not only one of Russian aggression and Ukrainian resistance, it is a war between two superpowers by Ukraine interposing and martyrdom.” And to alert: “Edgar Morin is in a form of relativism: are we sure we are on the right side? We blur the idea that, in this conflict, there is an aggressor and an attacked.” At the risk of fueling the anti-Americanism of part of the left and denying the Ukrainians any will of their own. In 2014, the intellectual called for his wishes, in a forum at the Worlda “federal Ukraine”, taking up a proposal by the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.
The thinker persists: “The bad review has never related to the fundamental thesis of my book: to recall all that wars bring as intellectual evils. We are at a time when war propaganda tries to silence certain things, like the banderist episode [NDLR : Stepan Bandera, 1909-1959, fut l’un des chefs de l’Organisation nationaliste ukrainienne]. A number of people agree with what I’m saying, but the mainstream doesn’t agree with that. In France, my book has received very little commentary. In Italy, the Corriere della Sera devoted two pages to it, there was also La Repubblica, Il Manifesto. The media are much more open to it.” His text has sold 8,000 copies in France, an honorable score but far from his greatest successes.
François L’Yvonnet, project manager of the Cahier de L’Herne (2016) to his glory, deciphers: “Edgar Morin refuses to equate Putin with Hitler. I’m not saying that he always shows absolute clairvoyance. But today, there is a kind of general propaganda for Zelensky. We make it a fight of good against evil. Edgar Morin is a free spirit, but he does not claim holiness or absolute truth. His inspiration is the Romain Rolland ofAbove the fight.”
Proximity to controversial figures
Will we one day salute his lucidity? In fact, from communism to Tariq Ramadan, with whom he signed two books of interviews (At the risk of ideas, Editions du Châtelet, 2014; Urgency and the essential, Don Quichotte editions, 2017), Edgar Morin was often mistaken about the true nature of the causes he was defending or of his interlocutors. From the Islamologist, he affirmed in 2017, in the columns of the World : “When we consider all the excerpts from all his papers at different times, I think he has evolved. The Tariq Ramadan who came to find me to debate with him is a Tariq Ramadan who expressed orally and in writing his idea of a European Islam accepting democracy, women’s freedom and even apostasy, that is to say the abandonment of one’s own religion.”
Without forgetting his closeness to controversial figures, such as the thinker Pierre Rabhi, or his praise addressed to the doctor Henri Joyeux, figurehead of antivax. “He’s been on a fairly deleterious path for years,” says Rudy Reichstadt, who sees in him “a form of histrionics. Age and work are titles of responsibility rather than a license to deal with made with freedom”.
The attacks on his age outraged his friends, starting with Jacques Attali, who hailed him as a “great intellectual” and a man “incredibly generous and kind, very indulgent towards others”. “This indulgence allowed Edgar Morin to go through a lot. He seeks to see the interaction between things. This leads him to a certain relativism, everything is in everything and vice versa.”
Its errors, its contradictions, this introspective has in any case ceased to analyze them with a kind of masochism,self-criticism (Threshold, 1959) at my demons (1994, Stock). “I consider myself an heir of Montaigne: by knowing oneself, one examines not only one’s singularity, but the human condition”, he explains. “He is lucid in his wanderings…”, smiles François L’Yvonnet.
At the time of the balance sheet
Beyond his claims to fame and his mistakes, isn’t Edgar Morin first of all an endearing character? Alert despite hearing difficulties, a scarf with flowery motifs around his neck, the intellectual responds kindly, in video, to requests from journalists. And triggers an immediate sympathy, barely cooled by the mistrust of his entourage, who asks to reread the entire article before publication…
The idol of a distraught left, eternal thinker of the future, would he benefit from being better known? Far from reserving only pure ideas, he has published moving pages on his dear Mediterranean, his taste for cinema which saved him when his mother died when he was 10 years old, or even the popular novel at the Paul Feval. And today cultivates the art of friendship beyond differences of opinion, as with Jean-Michel Blanquer. Together, the two men signed a book, What school do we want? The passion for knowledge (Odile Jacob and Human Sciences editions, 2020).
Despite his torments about the future of the world, Edgar Morin exudes an impression of serenity. Although he fiercely defends his positions, there is no appearance of bitterness or resentment in this man of insatiable vitality, who at 88 met his fourth wife, the sociologist Sabah Abouessalam. Of Emmanuel Macron, this president who honored him, he bluntly affirms: “I believe that he could and should evolve by distancing himself from economism and financial powers.” Of our time, he deplores the “very serious intellectual deficit and spiritual deficit”. But, he assures young people, the unexpected can change the course of history.
If he is still immersed in the fight, Edgar Morin knows that the time to take stock is approaching. Posterity ? “It contains oversights, negligence, I’m not sure it’s absolutely fair,” he dodges. But when you have so many books to her credit (more than 80!), it’s hard to believe that she isn’t an obsession. His pride: his resistance to the Nazi occupier, with a German anti-fascist as his assistant. The methoda sum in six volumes written between 1973 and 2004, where he deploys a “method of knowledge which translates the complexity of reality” – a “sounding” work according to the academic Jean Jacob, who devoted a book to him, Edgar Morin. The making of a thought and its influential networks (Golias editions, 2011). And, finally, “not to have hated or despised anyone”. From this charming and sinuous man, will we first retain the flashes or the wanderings?