In the tumult of epistemological developments that are sweeping through the contemporary university, certain approaches are profoundly shaking the foundations of what we still call science. A recent call for papers, distributed by colleagues from French universities, illustrates this drift. He proposes to explore “the voices of the dead, spirits and entities” by mobilizing tools of the imagination — arts, contemporary performance, psychogenealogy, literature and spiritualism — while anchoring them in a supposed scientific approach. This attempt at hybridization between the rationality of science and the emotion of fiction constitutes, in my eyes, a dangerous path that jeopardizes the very essence of academic knowledge.
A surprising call
Here is how the call is written:
Hear and make speak other voices (dead, ancestors, spirits, ghosts and other entities)) is part of an experiment called " exceptional » with multiple interpretations, at the center of varied scientific and artistic research, of the psychogenealogy to contemporary performance through the psychopathology clinic, literature and the study of spiritualism. These so-called phenomena abnormal yet reveal fundamental elements in the construction of our relationship to the world and to our dead, on an individual and collective dimension. If the actors Scientists agree on the prevalence of exceptional experiences, but they remain poorly understood by the general public and marginalized outside of psychopathological clinics. A better understanding of how they appear and function appears to be a contemporary challenge for which collaboration between the arts and sciences opens up new perspectives, particularly in terms of the representation and mediation of these experiences to the public.
If it were a program for the study of representations associated with communication with the dead, then it would have its place at the university, under the heading of literary analysis, anthropology of beliefs, sociology of representations: magic, as Techne is an object of study. But in no way a form of epistemology! We remember the affair of Elisabeth Teissier's thesis and the charlatanism trial that resulted from it. It is an understatement to say, reading this text, that it was premonitory of the evolution of our studies1.
The University is based on a tacit but solid contract: that of submitting reality to proven methodological frameworks, capable of distinguishing between a well-founded hypothesis and a belief. This does not mean that the human sciences, or even the so-called "hard" sciences, are exempt from imagination. Any scientific approach implies a part of intuition, projection, creativity. But these elements serve as a starting point for a critical and rational enterprise which, by its structure, neutralizes the irrational in order to approach the truth.
But what we see today is an attempt to tip this fragile balance. Approaches that emphasize mediumship, or what they modestly call "exceptional experiences," no longer use the tools of the imagination to fuel rational knowledge. On the contrary, they establish the imagination as an autonomous system, or even a new epistemological authority. In a strange reversal, what was once the domain of literature or artistic expression becomes a scientific fact, treated with the same seriousness as the analysis of quantitative or qualitative data.
Recall our role
In the face of this drift, it is crucial to recall the central role of literature in the analysis and interpretation of speeches attributed to the dead. As I wrote in a previous text, to be literary is to defend the absolute necessity of respecting uncertainty. The dead, by definition, are absent. They cannot intervene to clarify or settle the debates attributed to them. Their silence, if it encourages us to imagine or interpret, also imposes an ethic: that of admitting that any position we attribute to them is a construction, one possibility among others.
In this sense, the science of literature has a specific mission: it does not seek to hear the dead or to transcribe imaginary voices into factual truths, but to open up the range of possibilities, to explore the areas of uncertainty that are the very heart of human experience. To make the dead speak unequivocally is not only to cross the boundary between the rational and the irrational, but above all it is to betray the literary mission, which never claims to reduce silence to a truth but considers it as a space of interpretation.
However, to attribute a speech or an intention to the dead through pseudo-scientific practices is to usurp their silence in order to transform it into an argument. It is to freeze the imaginary into a dogma, whereas literature teaches us to accept that we do not know. It is also to risk confusing what is art - a possible staging of the past or the invisible - with what constitutes knowledge based on proven methods.
This confusion of genres opens the door to the irrational within the walls of the University. Worse still, it risks legitimizing practices that claim to be alternative knowledge. If we consider that "hearing voices" is a valid experience because it reveals "fundamental elements in our relationship to the world and to our dead", where do we stop? Will we soon recognize mediumship as a professional skill? Teach the interpretation of messages from entities as we teach cognitive psychology or critical sociology today? The idea seems laughable, but History is full of examples where epistemological relativism has opened the way to very real excesses.
In the face of this, we have a responsibility. We must reaffirm that science, in its many forms, is based on a critical tension that requires it to be accountable to reality. This does not mean the eradication of the imaginary, but its domestication by rational frameworks. We are the advocates of the dead, not because we hear their voices, but because we refuse to subject knowledge to seductive illusions. Science cannot be a field of “exceptional” experiments; it is, above all, a space of intellectual demand.
Perhaps it is time, beyond the monitoring work of our Observatory, for the CNU and the Institution to take hold of these excesses...
