Alternatives and Remedies
The capitalist organisation of human life and especially competition has progressively imposed a spiral of accumulation and acceleration which now threatens the survival of the species, ecologically, socially and psychologically. Based on this observation, established during the 43 sessions of the seminar held since 2015, how can we escape global acceleration and artificialisation of life?
It is important to reduce competition and advertising, which are major factors in this speeding-up and narrowing of our field of consciousness. In order to better accept our condition as fragile, mortal and dependent human beings, to abandon our fantasies of technical omnipotence, we must regain our bodies, our interior lives, and our sense of wonder. Faced with the computerization of society, which de-socializes adults, and threatens young people with "virtual autism" to the point of depriving some of them of sexual desire, we must learn to handle screens as tools and not as sacred objects. Finally, let us develop popular control over major investments, industrial production and management, as enterprises should no longer belong to the shareholders alone. More broadly, let us experiment with government by the people to fulfil the democratic promise that has not been kept, with France’s 1958 Constitution prohibiting voters from holding elected officials accountable.
Based on an interactive pedagogy, the seminar – free of charge and without registration – is open to all, and particularly to students and researchers in the humanities, law and philosophy.
Seminar sessions 2020:
- Democratising France with inspiration from the gilets jaunes
- Dethroning advertising through joie de vivre and the pleasure of play.
- Transforming violence by re-framing conflict and self-therapy
- Re-eroticizing the world by prioritizing desire ahead of the pleasures of consumption
- For the sake of our future, listening to the Aborigines, the oldest civilization
- Teaching without grades, reducing educational competition
- Reclaiming human freedom and vitality in the face of society's IT decadence
- In economic life, reducing competition and strengthening popular control
- Hearing and responding instead of owning and controlling -
- Scaling and slowing down to escape the mechanization of our existence.
Activities
Annulé | Décroître et ralentir pour échapper à la mécanisation de notre existence
Annulé | Entendre et répondre au lieu de posséder et contrôler
Annulé | Dans la vie économique, réduire la concurrence et renforcer le contrôle populaire