Dare to cry. What do our tears reveal about us?

Madame Figaro. – It is the state you are going through that gives rise to the urge or need to write. “I, at my cost, have become a tearful person,” you note on the first page. In other words.
William Le Blanc. – This text was imposed on me, in my body. I started it when my mom died, four years ago, over the summer notebooks, and continued through a romantic breakup. Therefore, the origin of crying is twofold. I found myself a man in chronic tears, tears that grab you at unexpected moments, from a memory that invades, gestures, smells… All this is an involuntary memory familiar to Proust that I felt in my body. Now, in philosophy, part of my job is always to come back to our own embodiment or inclusion of things. I am wary of abstract, office philosophy, I need to re-engage it in our ordinary life so that philosophy becomes an experience.

It’s an approach we find among philosophers of your generation, from Claire Marin to Frederic Worms, Elsa Godard to Alexandre Lacroix…
It’s just! With the decline of the great, very theoretical teachings, where it was mainly to pursue a career in the history of philosophy, a space opened up to try to establish the relationship between philosophy and life in a different way; and seek to formulate a diagnosis of the present with one’s own existence. For our generation, you are right, it was a risk worth taking. Now fleeting tears, which often disappear from memory when we have “wept” them, are said like this: This is why the person who sees you crying goes through a phase of surprise, emotion, even confusion. No one can cry for you, even if there is a contagion or communion of tears. Your tears always bring back to you what is irreplaceable in you. What do we do with these tears next? How can we accept that we are defeated by them? What do they suggest about our attachment to life? This is what I was looking for…

We need our tears to keep our eyes healthy. Pathologists explain * that they produce less than half a teaspoon of tears a day, but if we cry out of grief, the eye can produce more than a full glass in a few minutes.
This physiological mechanism is vital. It helps to lubricate, clean the eyes and make them blink. But when it comes to grief, we see a kind of balance. if sadness overwhelms me to the point of crying, then these tears are also a plastic way of coping with the tragic event. To bring relief. So there is a journey in tears, and I see three origins. There are what I call tears of evil: physical or psychological pain, then tears of disappearance: of a being, of a basic human quality, of one’s health, and finally tears of rupture in every sense of the word. . There is already an attempt to recover from the incident through the act of crying. Crying is not just about breaking down. it is also a release from control, a return to sentient life, and the first experience of liberation. Look at the future from the past.

You still have to… dare to cry, says your title.
There is audacity in crying because socially, even if we are progressing, it is still associated with a fragility that must be silenced. Now, to allow the tears to come is to agree to reveal one’s fragility, to somehow walk the path of this richness that is created through the tears, because it is also about accepting this promise to begin again. Crying may have its future not in despair – I cry endlessly – but in supplication – I ask with tears, says the etymology. Then there is a demand for justice and reparation. An existential plea expressed through the body of a weeper.

Philosophy was above all else.” learn to die, not to cry “, remember…
The entire history of Western philosophy is in fact crisscrossed with the ideal of self-control. With Plato we must go to the side of impermanence, the world of ideas; and, at the same time, learning to die to one’s body, which is considered too sensitive or mobile. Plato puts this claim in the mouth of Socrates when he is accused by the city of Athens of corrupting the youth by introducing new gods. Socrates will agree to drink hemlock, go to death, unstable. Only his wife cries. I wanted to challenge this opening scene in some way. And in this book imagine the philosophy of Socrates’ wife, right. Explore how a newly embodied philosophy can cry.

Tears don’t heal, they lead to reinvention

William LeBlanc

You talk about the “vital intensity” of tears. How to describe it?
Tears, I see them as living things that permeate our normal mechanisms. They are the sign, the revealer of the intensity that overwhelms us, stops us in the beginning. Then, this intensity also puts us on the path to new momentum. They don’t repair, they go for reinvention.

Judith Godrech, speaking at the Césars and then the Senate in late February, holds back her tears behind a disarming smile that heightens her or our grief. How did you perceive this smile?
The tear does not invade, this does not mean that it is not there. She is expected to cry, and her smile is truly a victory over possible tears. There is a restructuring of power to exist.

Let’s talk about the tears of politicians. You notice that Obama mentions the killing of children at Sandy Hook school in 2016, the murders of Greta Thunberg in 2019 at the United Nations…
Obama’s tears in his speech on regulating access to firearms are tears of mourning. It is quite different from Greta Thunberg, who mourns the ongoing process of the global warming extinction of the animal and plant species we live in today. What future can we imagine for these tears, we who are their witnesses? How can tears become a weapon for people who have none, that is really the question.

* Source: : The conversation , Michelle Moskova, Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Sydney (Australia), 2024.