The following interview first appeared in French in issue 42 of the journal Rebellion.
R / You were born in the South of France and grew up in the mining region of Graissessac (Hérault). What influence has this background had on your work and on your perception of academia?
MM — Indeed, my youth in the working-class village of Graissessac has certainly had an influence on my work, and on what we might call my perception of the world. As far as my work is concerned, I’ve talked about this in several of my books (see in particular the book of interviews with Christophe Bourseiller: Qui êtes vous Michel Maffesoli, Bourin Éditeur, 2010). The working-class milieu where I grew up taught me a sense of pride in one’s work — even a certain ‘addiction’ to it. It’s this, incidentally, that leads me to be so harsh in my judgment of those I call ‘pensioners of the Republic’, all these ineffective intellectuals and so-called researchers who never actually find anything.
At the same time, the atmosphere of the mining village gave me the sense of celebration and the ‘tragic’. So for example, the festival of Saint Barbara on December 4th was a paroxysmal moment, where effervescence in all its forms expressed itself with vigour over the course of an entire week. When I wrote L’ombre de Dionysos [The Shadow of Dionysus] (1982), I was trying to demonstrate the importance of passions and collective emotions in the organisation of the social bond. These festive phenomena, in every society, are corollaries of a sense of the tragic. It’s because of our ‘embedded knowledge’ that accident, death and finitude are always present that it’s possible in these moments to experience a heightening of the senses and a desire to fully enjoy the present. Continue reading
For forty years we have spoken of ‘postmodernity’. But who has really grasped the implications this holds for us as individuals? Who has equated it with the emergence of a fundamentally different human being? Relativising reason according to feeling and emotion, relinquishing his status as ‘individual’ to make way for a pluralistic nature, neglecting his civic duty to devote more time to his tribe, the postmodern man abandons almost everything his predecessor held dear.
Secessio 