Sciences PoTalk31 August 2022
Listening to someone else’s playlist: the Sciences Po inaugural lecture
53 min
For the 2022 opening ceremony, Delphine Horvilleur begins the new students' year with an Uber anecdote: four songs before realizing she was listening to her own playlist while believing she had met her musical soulmate. The whole lecture unfolds from there: identity as the little tune that keeps us from hearing the other, the stories that make humanity, and a proposal for a secular holiday. In French.
“We constantly find ourselves listening only to our own playlists, not just musical ones, but sometimes philosophical, political, emotional ones, imagining they necessarily say something about the world around us, of which in fact we know very little.”
“Politics is always an attempt to reconcile worlds that, a priori, share very little: neither the same rhythms, nor the same sounds, nor the same landmarks.”
“Interfaith dialogue, and this is just as true of the dialogue of love, of political or social dialogue, begins when you perceive how much of a mystery the other is, and not at all when you perceive how familiar they are.”
“Our fanatics are our own. They are not born elsewhere. They always tell something about us, about possible readings of our texts […] perhaps readings we will fight, but possible readings, born of our religious histories.”
“I had proposed we create a secular holiday, a feast of the Not Only […] a day to remember that we are not only our birth, not only our religion, our origin, our ethnicity, our heritage, our DNA, our convictions.”
“Welcome aboard a vehicle on rue Saint-Guillaume. I hope you are comfortably seated. The ride should last three, four, five years, perhaps more. No matter […] as long as you make sure to listen to someone else’s playlist, just to see how much it might make you grow.”
The session
A lecture in three movements. First the founding anecdote: the Uber, the playlist mistaken for a soulmate, and what it says about our enclosures. Then the stories: the detour through Harari’s Sapiens (what is proper to man is believing the stories he tells himself) and her « fastest comparative-religion course in the world », the three monotheisms each summed up by a song: Queen for the Exodus, Elton John for forgiveness, Gloria Gaynor for survival in hostile terrain. Finally fanaticism: Amos Oz and his fanatic « who can only count to one », Salman Rushdie stabbed weeks before the lecture, and the power of narrative, which calls for readers rather than pyres. In conclusion, the feast of the « not only », and Sciences Po turned into an Uber whose ride lasts three to five years.