Presentation : Michel Magnen
My name is Michel Magnen and I was born on the 6th July 1948 near Ebolowa, in Cameroon. My parents sent me to school in France when I was 6 years old. Much later, in 1969, coming first in the entry exam, I was awarded a place at the Saint-Cloud ‘Ecole Normale Supérieure’ (an élite French higher education establishment). As a far-left activist, I spent 10 days on remand in the Santé Prison in Paris in 1971. Jean-Toussaint Desanti, the mathematical philosopher, and Jacques Butterlin, the geologist spoke in my favour at my trial. I then continued my studies to become a teacher of philosophy. In the 1990s, I began to formulate ideas that had been fermenting for a long time, setting them down a first time and later developing them in several stages. These texts were legally registered on the following dates: 6th December 1994; 25th February 2000; 10th May 2004; 23rd January 2006; 13th June 2007; 18th May 2009 and 31st August 2010. The underlying concept comes from the philosophical understanding of time, as a change perceived intuitively. Change takes place in an object, for example in the sky, when the sun appears or the amount of light alters. Impatience or boredom causes change to take place in thought. All this mixed together becomes an idea, object and subject, since it is a subject that sees an object, and, if we do not analyse it carefully, this leaves us with a disturbing impression. Yet one of the main modifications that may occur, when considering two objects or ideas, results from a climate of thought that is negligent, omissive and lacking in attention to them. When a link is made between two ideas, they are mentioned together. Conversely, when they are considered separately, the words used to designate them are allowed to be distant from each other, half forgetting the presence of one or the other. In one’s own text or that of someone else, this tendency to forget can be thwarted by providing or observing a reminder, such as "as seen above", or by repeating something, or through the use of rhyme, such as «piliers…familiers» (familiar…pillars) in "Correspondences". However, when there is no link of this kind, our train of thought leads us to forget or neglect the previous words, in spite of our closest attention. It follows from this that in an imaginative text with no clear reminders, it is highly unlikely that the author should have conceived a strong connection between the meaning of two words far distant from each other. Thus, from this philosophical observation we can draw the conclusion that measuring the distance between words in a work can show the lack of plausibility of certain interpretations of it that have been made. If the interpreter has supposed that there was a strong link in the mind of the author between words in the text that are far apart, the degree of plausibility of the meaning put forward will be very low. It is true that there are cases in which an author places two images far from each other for fear of censure, while hoping that the public will make the link themselves, but to take this as common practice would lead to many erroneous conclusions since in principle we speak of together ideas we want to see linked.