1984.
Hubert Reeves (qui, hélas, nous a quittés récemment) publie Patience dans l’azur, succès à 1 million d’exemplaires alliant la solidité scientifique à l’illustration la plus vivifiante.
Nous avons eu grâce à lui des débats passionnés, Françoise et moi (tout comme Françoise et Alain), qui le seraient tout autant autour de L’Autobiographie d’un poulpe de Vinciane Despret.

Author of some twenty books since 1996, psychologist and philosopher, more precisely a philosopher of science because of her passion for ethology, her rigor is matched by her boldness in her research work. Her beautiful pen gives her a rare ability to un(anthropo)center herself, with a strong sense of wonder when she evokes “the kinetic choral writing of Adélie penguins, the initiatory poetry of the firefly and the labyrinthine epic of the surmulot“.

The visionary Autobiography of an Octopus tells us what inter-species relations might be like in a world where non-human living beings ceased to be treated as generic conglomerates, their individuality finally recognized.

We know, thanks to the fabulous advances (rediscoveries?) of the last two decades, that other animals – since Sapiens is one too – are no more conditioned than we are solely by reflexes to obtain a functional advantage. Chimpanzees, butterflies, octopuses, finches, spiders… all have a personal life beyond the mechanical response: man’s distinctive feature is certainly this ability to believe that man has something of his own, which belongs to him alone. Here, the universal masculine takes on its full meaning, so much so that “man’s own thing” smacks of supremacist patriarchy.

Differences between all forms of being-in-the-world are a matter of degree, not essence. This has been laid down in our culture since Darwin at the very least, but it is in fact a knowledge in deed, forgotten, since the dawn of our species. Genesis tells us that we are made in God’s image, designed to dominate creation. The intellectual revolution of the Modern Era put the lid on this by denying that what is not human has the capacity to be anything other than a simple clockwork. The philosophy of the 18th century nailed the coffin shut, defining man as a moral being (Kant), on the understanding that he is the only one. At the same time, it rationalized progress and the takeover of “nature” as something external to us, destined to be exploited (or protected today, which is part of the same paradigm). This “nature”, conceived as an over-determinant that justifies domination, is today nothing but ignorance, narrow-mindedness, lazy thinking and conformism.

This is the subject of Autobiography of an Octopus, which reminds us that 80 primatologists published a joint declaration in 2016 to open up a new scientific field, primate archaeology. Since then, we’ve known that, among other things, chimpanzees assemble cairns, where they come to perform rituals. Since then, we’ve moved away from the exclusive, reductive function of spider webs as fly traps, to understand that they are also vibratory receptacles and supports for complex dances that are not justified by the movement towards the trapped insect. Examples could be multiplied ad libitum.

L‘Autobiographie d’un poulpe is first and foremost a treatise on literature, as the sign that living beings deliver to the world in their jubilation to exist. It is “therolinguistics:… specializing in the study of literary forms in animals and plants“. Because, no, we’re not the only ones who write. The day will come when “the passive poetry of the eggplant” and “the tropical novel of the sunflower” will finally be accessible to us, when we will have broken out of our too narrow categorizations to access “the translation of the traces of the non-visible and the non-audible“.

And it’s also a sequel to Françoise’s La Trilogie du Losange..
S its writing process (reports from scientific committees and official declarations from the near future, hailing “the Minister of Multispecific Culture“) alludes to the diary of the Ouranauts of the Satellite de l’Amande, reports made at the Collège d’Émeraude and press clippings from the Bibliothèque Mondiale des Bergères de l’Apocalypse. The sciences proposed by Vinciane Despret – geolinguistics, theolinguistics, theoarchitecture… – would all have their place in the world that Françoise brought into being.

These sciences can only fully unfold, and with them the imagined intercessory communities, when, as Françoise put it, “men and women, finally rid of their errors, stop looking for each other as opposites“, leaving them available to decentralize themselves from their species reality in a world where it wouldn’t be absurd to ask in an assembly, as the Wendats did, “who will speak for the wolf? “In the meantime, we can (re?) understand the full significance of the trails they have blazed, which Baptiste Morizot sees as a form of writing.

L’Autobiographie d’un poulpe is a profoundly ecofeminist book, and even more so a book whose future would be that time when ecofeminism would belong to the heritage of humanity, being a step taken that would have finally put us back on the path we would never have left if the social plague that has been raging for over 5000 years, which we call patriarchy/power, had been curbed.

From the vibratory metrics of pulsars to the “detective story of a poppy in the grip of pesticides“, it’s all about literature, dance and song: stardust.