The feeling of deja vu, which Remo Bodei describes manifestations and underlines the roughness, partly escapes rational analysis. But it is an essential element to understand the contemporary trauma generated by wars, genocides or forced migrations.
Remo Bodei is probably one of the current Italian authors who best manages to meet his gaze as a historian of philosophy with an inexhaustible curiosity for objects whose edges always bite more or less on the news. So it was already going with his voluminous test on the “ Geometry of passions “, Which was a big success in Italy and in which the author retraces, from the disembodied citadel of the ancients to the institutionalization of fear and hope by the French Jacobins, the long history of the ambivalent relationship that the individual maintains with his passions, his desires or his interests. In his latest book, Bodei confronts another kind of ambiguity: how to interpret the feeling that one does something or that one meets a person for the first time while being convinced, in their heart, that the scene has already taken place in strictly identical conditions ? When we dream, we certainly tend to translate hallucination into the language of reality. With the experience of “ already seen (An expression forged in 1876 by Émile Boirac), what happens is the opposite because it is the real which suddenly adopts the pace of an inverted dream. The already seen borrows some features from the myth of the eternal return and its many subjective variants. But the motive of the eternal return, that is to say the simple repetition of what has been, is not exactly of the same order as this completely particular feeling which arises and to which does not correspond a priori No effective memory of the past. The already seen is a strange phenomenon and this is its specific brand. He arouses a deep discomfort which leads the individual to imagine that an other than himself acts in himself. It obliges everyone to move the usual boundaries of mental standards and to immerse themselves in the troubled waters of the mind, where the individual is sometimes consumed in the regret or the fear of death. A sign of depersonalization for some, proof of metempsychosis for others, it is in this double title that the deja vu solicits the imagination of psychiatrists as much as that of poets. Bodei provides the most varied and tasty examples of the attention that was paid to this anomaly of intimate experience.
Convinced of having already experienced the tragic scene of the double burial of his wife and son, Doctor Arthur Ladbroke Wigan thus issues, in his work The Duality of Mind published in 1844, the hypothesis according to which the already seen, or “ feeling of pre-existence », Depends on a defect in synchronizing brain hemispheres. In some of his most beautiful poems, Giuseppe Ungaretti describes for his part the intermingling of the moments of life which return, during the war, on the surface of consciousness and which cross the eras of his ancestors. In 1908, Henri Bergson identified the mechanism of false gratitude from a state of contemporaneity of perception and memory, the effect of which in this case contradictory is to make believe in the vital consciousness which relaxes that it knows what it nevertheless knows how to ignore. Therefore appears the idea that such an experience in the end designates a compensation phenomenon, or even “ autoimmunization »With regard to a painful past or an uncontrollable present. Bodei repeatedly recalls that the deja vu is linked to the relaxation of attention, to a play of emotions which prove to be strong, even to historical conditions which jeopardize the ability of the individual to orient himself in his time. The already vu condenses in an instant fleeting the paradoxes of a strangeness to oneself which results from a time which has become absurdly reversible and a sudden acceleration of the course of life.
This book does not give itself as an exhaustive research on the theme of deja vu (even if the critical apparatus is thick) but rather as a free variation on a quirk of individual consciousness. His references are essentially literary, philosophical and medical. We could develop the analyzes and in particular apply its intuitions to a large part of the historical anthropology of violence in XXe century. Because the phenomenon of already seen is probably also one of the secret laws of contemporary trauma. It is at the heart of pathologies that affect survivors of the multiple perpetrated genocides and current wars that also strike civilians. He certainly governs the psychologies of populations victims of forced migration such as those of individuals subjected to conditions of extreme poverty in major world capitals. Without a doubt, the victimologists who are interested in Trauma Studies Would they have many things to say about the mental phenomena of unexpected repetition of violence which is made at a given moment and which then harasses any person who has resumed it with horrible and silent intimate images. Double-faced phenomenon at least, the deja vu designates the somewhat poetic nostalgia of a previous life which disorganizes the available plurality of personal worlds, but it also more tragically reveals the impossible negotiation with the inflicted pain which marks the erratic destiny of the survivor.
Go further:
– Interview with Remo Bodei, “ Fear binds us in the future », Interviews collected by I. Albaret, M.-O. Padis and O. Remaud, text first published in an supplement to the review Spirit from October 2002.
– For an autobiographical return on his intellectual career, see R. Bodei, “ Another like yourself “, Philosophy Archives56 (1993), p. 661-672.
– For an attempt to interpret certain aspects of the work of R. Bodei, see O. Remaud, “ Heart and standard “, Critical629 (1999), p. 828-836.
– On Trauma Studiessee for example the site of theInternational Trauma Studies Program.