Counterpoints and métissages

Abstract

The article shows the path that led the author to organize the exhibition (21 June-21 July 2004 at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris) and the international symposium (30 June 2004) entitled: “De l’ethnographie du poisson a l’objet de luxe: un autre regard”/“From the Anthropology of Fish to the Luxury Item: Another Vision”. Intimate acquaintance with catastrophe, uprooting, trauma and exile can be transformed into a precarious but possible life if the subject acquires enough confidence to say “in another syntax” what reduced his or her being and speech to the disarray of an existential uncertainty. Therefore, in order to understand the crisis that gives rise to this new métissage, it is necessary to be capable of hearing the counterpoint score of the signs in which the real seems to take the place of the symbolic. The radical changes, the métissages, come about when the subjects have already been confronted with a de-subjectivized knowledge: a “deported or displaced knowledge”. Knowledge in effect loses its transmissible character when it is rooted in the crime of genealogy, succinctly captured by Shakespeare’s “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”.