
From https://www.reclusiennes.com/
2025 call for papers
For this 14th edition of Les Reclusiennes, Bifurquer invites us to reflect on freedom and determinism, on the moral question of trajectories, on the role of the incalculable.
When economics only takes into account what is quantifiable, how can we value the contribution, the exchange... the human?
How is the choice made, forced and undergone or chosen and constructed?
The ambition of this reflection will be to start from the current situation to outline possible futures.
Take part in Reclusiennes 2025
Les Reclusiennes 2025 will focus on the theme BIFURQUER, which questions our views and practices on societal change. As every year, and without interruption since 2013, after the Vote, Water, Earth, Money, Bas les Masques, La Commune, Partager, and Cohabiter in 2024, we would like to invite you to let yourself be tempted by the idea of BIFURQUER.
Les Reclusiennes is a festival of thought that brings together residents, researchers, managers and community actors in a spirit of cultural animation, popular and artistic education. Its perspective is resolutely interdisciplinary and aims to bring into dialogue each year the different forms of knowledge around a common theme.
To facilitate exchange with the public, researchers are invited to innovate in their presentations by integrating art, sound, theater or other forms of expression...
The problem
"Change can only be accomplished by a sudden break, that is to say by a revolution" Élisée Reclus tells us. However, convinced of the need for a revolution, his thinking evolved over time, to the point of affirming that revolution cannot happen without prior evolution. Evolution and revolution are two words often associated in his brochures of reflection (Évolution et révolution, 1880; Évolution, révolution et l'idéal anarchique, 1898). He thus wrote, in 1898, "It is in the heads and in the hearts that transformations must be accomplished before tensing the muscles and changing into historical phenomena." For him, "the anarchist social revolution is perceived until the end as a reality in the process of being accomplished."
On the occasion of the 2022 edition of the Reclusiennes (Évadez-vous!), we welcomed young people who had made a name for themselves by calling themselves the "Désertheureux-ses" and who initiated the "Bifurqueurs" movement. They had collectively refused to receive their Agro-Paris-Tech graduation diploma to publicly express their desire to choose a different path than the one laid out for them by the institution. By "bifurcating", they claimed the possibility of exploring, researching, imagining, inventing a future that was theirs, far from the deadly and unimaginative dictates of "There is no alternative". Following them, the word bifurcate has become the emblem of a militant ecology that would not be satisfied with a vulgar greening of practices, as evidenced by the recent publication of several books on this subject.
But branching off as we wish to explore it will not be limited to the injunction of a choice that would not suffer from an alternative. Collective choice or individual choice, these decisions are not only of reason. Chance and destiny (" Never a throw of the dice will abolish chance ", Mallarmé), fatality and accident, sometimes the hand of the devil, since the fork from which the branch originates is the favorite instrument of the Evil One, are invited there. No doubt to teach us to doubt and pique our curiosity so as not to satisfy ourselves with ready-made thoughts.
For Ilya Prigogine, philosopher, physicist and chemist (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977) known for his work on complex systems, "Our universe has followed a path of successive bifurcations: it could have followed others. Perhaps we can say the same for the life of each of us." (Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainties). Faced with a situation, between conflict and bifurcation, there is a point of instability around which "an infinitesimal disturbance is enough to determine the macroscopic operating regime of the system ." This is where a certain degree of indeterminism creeps in, enough to make the ideas of choice and decision operational. Prigogine quotes Lucretius in this regard : "if the mind is not governed in all its acts by internal necessity , if it is not, like a vanquished man, reduced to passivity, it is the effect of the slight deviation of atoms in a place, in a time that nothing determines" (Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, II, 289-93).
True to the tradition of popular education in which they are part, Les Reclusiennes combine scholarly contributions and everyday experiences to encourage an always desired exchange between the different participants, public and speakers. Bifurquer invites us to philosophize on freedom and determinism, on the moral question of trajectories (in relation to gender, finance, etc.).
The call for papers
The guidance note and response procedures: https://www.reclusiennes.com/app/download/6583669059/Calenda+VF+-+Reclu…
Submission procedure
- Proposals for contributions (in the form of a summary of around twenty lines) must be sent by March 31, 2025 at the latest to the following address: conf@lesreclusiennes.fr
- The selection of communications will be established at the end of April 2025.
- The final texts are expected by the end of May 2025.
- The publication of certain texts is planned at the end of the conference.
Expected contributions
1. Defectors and deserters
How social constraints compel and enable dissent and/or desertion. Individual experiences and collective bifurcations in the professional world, in civic or military engagement.
2. Bifurcations and historical events
How historical moments, or those identified as such, are or are not radical bifurcations of the world. How do "breaches in history" occur? Unpredictable eruption, or slow bubbling?
3. Chance and Fate
Encounters, coincidences, accidents and illnesses cause our individual paths, our lives, to branch off in one direction or another. The example of migratory paths.
4. Branch out to discover, invent
"If you want to invent, you have to get off the path, take a different path. Innovation is, above all, a change of direction," said Michel Serres. Heuristics, an example of a method used by science in the context of discovery when the boundary becomes blurred between the notions of discovery, invention and innovation.
5. Powers and currencies
Deliberative democracy and monetary exchanges, from monetary pluralism to social currencies. The power of money: transforming money to transform society.
6. My body, my choice
Mastery of sexuality, fertility, singularity and transhumanism. Reconstructing cells of life, changing sex and/or gender. Genetics does not explain everything. Influence of social behaviors on the evolution of species. Biology, its dictates, its mental and physical manipulations, assignment to the birth, its legacies and its bifurcations.
7. After ecology, mesology?
To reflect and change our world, environmental science, ecology, must evolve and take into account many other factors, including the place of human beings and the impact of capitalism. For Élisée Reclus, "the human being is part of nature, while surpassing it", to the point that he advocates a "mesology" or "science of environments".
8. The choice of technique
The planet's limited resources now make disruptive scenarios acceptable. Repeated crises create a major opportunity to identify the necessary disruptions and to mark out the paths to new development and technological models concerning biomass, energy, construction, industry, digital technology or transport.
9. Whistleblowers
Discursive technologies can instill doubt or discredit in any whistleblower or whistleblower, but the most subtle methods rely on the creation of regulatory or legislative counter-projects. This is the case of the "innovation principle" to counter the precautionary principle, or the law on "business secrets". The relationship between journalists and whistleblowers is essential to moderate these counter-fires and strengthen democracy.
Élisée Reclus
Jacques Élisée Reclus was born on March 15, 1830 in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande (Gironde) and grew up in Aquitaine where his father was a pastor. His siblings included fourteen surviving children, including Élie (1827-1904), an ethnologist and anarchist, to whom he would remain very close throughout his life. His father intended him to become a pastor and sent him to Prussia, to a college run by the Moravian brothers where he joined Élie. The two brothers fled in 1844. Élisée continued his studies at Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, then at the Protestant theological faculty of Montauban. But the two brothers ran away again and were expelled from the institution.
Élisée Reclus left for Berlin where he took classes from the German geographer Carl Ritter, one of the founders of modern geography, who had a profound influence on him. Returning to France in the autumn of 1851, he was forced, with Élie, due to their political positions, to leave the country after the coup d'état of 2 December 1851. Élisée Reclus travelled to London and then to Ireland, before arriving in Louisiana in 1853. He became a tutor in a family of planters of French origin, but could not stand slavery and returned to sea. He landed in New Grenada where he founded a farm.
Through writing, Élisée Reclus aims to be a geographer outside of state institutions , to address everyone through a common language capable of defending a libertarian vision of the world, of making the surface of the globe visible to the imagination and of suggesting its beauty through that of style. Being a writer is first and foremost for Élisée Reclus the means of living from geography on the fringes of the academic institutionalization of the discipline. For forty-five years, the majority of his income came from royalties paid by the Hachette publishing house. There he published travelogues (1860-1874) and tourist guides (1860-1870), contributed to dictionaries (1864-1905), and above all contributed his encyclopedic Nouvelle Géographie universelle which ensured him regular remuneration from 1872 to 1905. Reclus was not, however, a supporter of intellectual property rights: plagiarism, borrowings and wild translations of his work contributed to the circulation of knowledge, with his anarchist-communist approval. In L'Évolution, la révolution et l'idéal anarchique (1898), the geographer considered that "the scholar has his immense utility as a quarryman: he extracts the materials, but it is not he who uses them, it is up to the people, to all the associated men, to raise the edifice ".
He produced an abundant literary and scientific work, while continuing his political activities . His major works are Man and the Earth and Universal Geography. He is considered the greatest geographer of his time, and a precursor of ecology, of great modernity in his non-conformist way of life. Reclus believed in the possible existence of a universal, just society, where each individual would be respected and would know how to respect others once men had gotten rid of oppressors, hoarders, among others the State, source of power and powers, therefore of domination.
But what brings us closer to Élisée Reclus is the desire to decipher the world with honesty, not to hide, to the extent that we are aware of it, what we do not like.
Three videos to better understand Elisée Reclus, the walker, the anarchist, the geographer:
https://www.reclusiennes.com/2025-1/
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