INTERVIEW – The staging of daily life, the abundance of notifications, the bargaining of networks
Social media, hopping culture… How?
resist this virtual leakage that paradoxically creates an impression of emptiness?
Philosopher Elsa Godart’s answers.
Emptiness is a theme that fascinates, ambiguous, paradoxical, because it struggles in our minds, even in our imaginations, between the emptiness, the fear of nothingness, in short, the vertigo of anxiety; and longing for “cleansing,” a liberated place, a joyous flight into the unknown. If the writer Nicolas Bouvier inscribed this dialectic of emptiness and fullness (even completeness) in a subtle description of his travels in Japan between 1964 and 1970. (Empty and full), it was the philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky who caused a sensation by publishing his first book in 1983. The Age of Emptiness. With a terrifyingly original eye, he x-rayed “the appearance of unprecedented individualism in our democratic countries”, the hypertrophy of the ego, which was already saturated with information; Narcissism is the victim of a diffuse malaise, Lipovetsky said, where we have “ceased to recognize ourselves in the obligation to live for something other than ourselves.” That was forty years ago… long before the advent of the widespread Internet…
Source: Le Figaro
