Olivier Rey

Olivier Rey
File:Olivier Rey.jpg Olivier Rey (2011)
Born	1964 Nantes, France
Nationality	French
Occupation	philosopher

Olivier Rey (birth 1964 in Nantes), is a French philosopher, essayist and novelist. He is a critic of transhumanism.

Career overview

On leaving the École polytechnique in 1986, Olivier Rey was briefly a naval officer before entering the CNRS, in the mathematics section.

Alongside his work on nonlinear partial differential equations, he develops a critical reflection on the place of science in contemporary society.

Since 2009, he has belonged to the philosophy section of the CNRS and is currently a member of the Institute of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST). After having taught mathematics at the École Polytechnique, he now teaches philosophy in the master's degree in philosophy at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and at the Sorbonne Law School.

Olivier Rey was part of the editorial board of the review Conférence, in which he published numerous articles, in particular, in the field of painting, two studies devoted respectively to Edward Hopper and Claude Gellée. He is also a regular contributor to Limite magazine. He was on the editorial board of the first two issues of L'Incorrect magazine, and is listed as a curator.

Writings

In Itinerary of Loss: From the Role of Science in Contemporary Absurdity, Olivier Rey explores by what paths, and through what misunderstandings, modern science and technology have come to capture the essential spiritual and material forces of western culture.

The following work, A crazy solitude: the fantasy of the self-constructed man (or The Man without antecedents) starts from a concrete fact: the change in orientation of children in strollers, which took place at the course of the 1970s. Olivier Rey uses this symptom to analyze the propensity of modern societies to turn their backs on the legacies on which they are based. In doing so, they harm the individual freedom that they claim to promote, because access to autonomy is never direct, it supposes "a detour, each one having to "go through a phase where he receives from those who precede accumulated capital". It is not a question of attacking freedom, but of allowing it."

In A Question of Size, contemporary pathologies are examined from another angle: that of scale: "At the very time when numbers continued to gain in importance in the evolution of societies and the conduct of human affairs, questions of size, of scale, became a blind spot in modern and contemporary philosophical reflection."

However, according to him, the questions of size are among the most decisive if we intend to live in a "convivial" world, in the sense that Ivan Illich gave to this term, and not to allow a society to be constituted which crushes man, not to be proportionate to it. The work takes up a certain number of theses developed by Leopold Kohr in The Breakdown of Nations (1957), and differs from Ernst Friedrich Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful (1973) by insisting on the fact that it is not the small which is good, but the well-proportioned.

In When the world became a number, Rey examines the ways in which statistics have taken on such importance in our societies from the 19th century onwards. A central thesis of the book is that this empire of numbers finds its origin not in science, but in a certain way that human beings have of living with each other: "The key to our relationship to numbers is not to be found among them, but between us. This key is not mathematical, but historical and social. In other words, the ratio of men to numbers reflects the relationship of men to each other."

Melville's Testament explores ethical and aesthetic issues, through a study of Herman Melville's posthumous masterpiece, Billy Budd, Sailor. Melville recognizes both a natural disposition to good and the presence of an evil which, while being a minority, has formidable strategies to spread, even dominate. Beauty, in the person of Billy Budd, acts as a touchstone: it is in the way of receiving this beauty — to rejoice in its presence, or to be offended and scandalized by it — that souls are separated.

Olivier Rey has also tackled the question of transhumanism, of which he has developed an original critique based, among other things, on the science fiction novels of J. G. Ballard and the thought of Günther Anders. His views on the issue are set out in a three-part essay published in 2018, entitled Lure and misfortune of transhumanism, in which he explains, according to critic Frédéric Dieu, “the transhumanist program, discourse and, ultimately, the transhumanist lie”. Rey, who is an extension of Günther Anders, thus denounces a utilitarian science that permeates the whole of contemporary scientific approach: "“[this science] no longer consists in discovering the secret essence of the world or of things, or even the hidden laws which they obey, but in discovering the possible use that they conceal."

Novels

Olivier Rey has published two novels.

The first, Le Bleu du sang, takes up a legend from the twelfth century whose hero, Grégoire, born of an incest between a brother and a sister, and making himself guilty, without his knowledge, of an incest with his mother, does not end any less, after many adventures and expiations, on the throne of Saint Peter.

After the Fall (2014) is radically different: it transcribes, in the first person, the questions, the disarray, the adventures of a young woman, a history student, in whom gradually grows the impression of being embarked on an existence that is not the right one — "like a contract signed in a daze, at the bottom of a sheet, one evening of nouba" — and which sets off in search of the one with whom, finally, its life would have one direction.

After the Fall appears in "Michel's choice", where Michel Houellebecq collected for Les Inrockuptibles about twenty books which "appeared to him in one way or another beautiful, interesting, remarkable, but whose press does not [has] not been talked about enough at the time of their release."

Controversies

Charles Dantzig criticized Melville's Testament: Thinking Good and Evil with Billy Budd for obscuring what he believed to be the center of Billy Budd, namely "the first attempt at heroization of a gay character", and of not having taken sufficient interest in the opera that Benjamin Britten and his librettist Edward Morgan Forster drew from "a novel about quasi-homophobic hatred written by a more or less repressed homosexual". This criticism was taken up by Dominique Fernandez in Amants d'Apollon: L'homosexualité dans la culture. Gildas Le Dem, in the magazine Têtu, had spoken of a “superb essay” reconnecting “with the essential question posed by Melville: beauty as scandal”.

In a 2016 interview, Olivier Rey criticized the inconsiderate use of human rights which, from a guarantee against the abuse of power, have become grounds for endless claims.

He supports the idea that the people suffer from the absence of a genuine elite.

Works

Novels

• Le Bleu du sang (1994)
• Après la chute (2014)

Essays

• Itinéraire de l'égarement. Du rôle de la science dans l'absurdité contemporaine (2003)
• Une folle solitude. Le fantasme de l'homme auto-construit (2006)
• Le Testament de Melville: Penser le bien et le mal avec Billy Budd (2011)
• Une question de taille (2014)
• Quand le monde s'est fait nombre (2016)
• Leurre et malheur du transhumanisme (2018)
• L’Idolâtrie de la vie (2020)
• Gloire et misère de l'image après Jésus-Christ (2020)
• Réparer l'eau (2022)

Collaborations

• Jean-Pierre Dupuy, La Jalousie. Une géométrie du désir (2016; postface)
• Monette Vacquin, Frankenstein aujourd’hui. Égarements de la science moderne (2016; postface)
• Leopold Kohr, L'Effondrement des puissances (2018; preface)
• Pier Paolo Pasolini, Le Chaos (2022; preface)
• Erwan Barillot, Le Président liquide. Une genèse du macronisme (2022; preface)

External links

• Mathematics Genealogy Project