Baldine Saint Girons is a French philosopher, professor emeritus of 17th and 18th century philosophy at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, specialist in aesthetics and the philosophy of the sublime, in particular at Giambattista Vico and Edmund Burke. Remarkably, Saint Girons correlates the work of Jacques Lacan with the 18c. Neapolitan philosopher of culture, Giambattista Vico. This page presents a detailed summary of her comparison and links to supporting materials and general works in the field of art history and the landscape.
A graduate in philosophy (1968), a graduate in psychopathology (1969) and a DEUG in Chinese (1979), Baldine Saint Girons obtained her doctorate in philosophy in 1992 with a thesis entitled Fiat lux: a philosophy of the sublime. A member of the Center for Studies in the History of Modern Philosophy and the National Council of Universities, she is responsible for the Convention between the universities of Bologna and Paris, and a member of the French Society of Philosophy and the Società Italiana d’Estetica. She is a Knight of the Legion of Honor. See a full account of her work (in French).
Descriptions below are Google translations of French summaries.
selected works
Vers l’autonomisation des nuages : la voie picturale (2020)
There are few “formations” that, as much as clouds, give us the paradoxical feeling of the real and the absence of the real, of sensible presence and phantasmagoria. Few, except the ships and the shadow that Chateaubriand associates with them, drawing inspiration from the Book of Job[2]. Clouds metamorphose above us, leave a brief wake, cast a shadow over the earth.
On the one hand, a visible and observable physical existence, exceptional in at least three ways: impalpable, fluent, ephemeral. In other words, forbidden to physical touch, rebellious to formal stability, removed from duration. On the other hand, appearances that reveal themselves to the “spiritual senses,” going so far as to arouse the illusion of a possible touch and that resemble dreams, fantasies, ghosts without substance. There, what we could call “material universals”; here, “universals of imagination” which give to the “aerial nothing” forms resulting from our desires, from the desire to shape them, from a shareable culture.
L’Acte Esthetique (2008)
Distinct from the artistic, scientific and discursive act, the aesthetic act plays an essential role in creation but also in knowledge and dialogue. It poetizes the world, musicalizes it; gardens it, choreographs it – in short, reshapes it, by creating universals of imagination. We are all, to varying degrees, aesthetic actors who take the risk of losing ourselves in the otherness to which we expose ourselves and from which we construct new types of “reals”, imbued with sensitivity and knowledge. In the same movement, the aesthetic act safeguards the world, creates a substantial link between men and allows us to escape the double trap of narcissism and melancholy.
Paysage et ornement (2005)
Scholarly publications devoted to the landscape abound and deal with a thousand aspects that are recognized, but can we say fundamentally and certainly what it is about? In wishing to arrive at some certainty, we have linked here the understanding of the landscape to that of the “ornament”, understood in its ancient and architectural sense of order; because it appears to us that this virtue of ordination clarifies in an unprecedented and pertinent way the enigma of the landscape. Indeed, the ornament could well be confused with the wisdom that is added to the country, that which appears in the paintings of Poussin punctuated by the imitation of Palladio, or in the works of the Lorrainer which progress regularly in depth from the harmony of a monument, to the horizon bearing the weight of the sky as a column receives an architrave. The landscape would present itself as the place where architecture and painting pass into each other, where the cosmic architectural crisis of enlightenment presses and is accomplished; in such a way that, contrary to appearances, no image of nature would be in question: its very absence would become eloquent. Bringing together various studies of the theory of arts and letters united in this same object of thought, the present work comprises four distinct parts: a general definition of its subject, where landscape and ornament are evaluated separately and jointly; a reflection on architecture and disegno in their relationship to nature and space; an interrogation concerning the specificity of landscape painting, then on its varied forms and on Land Art; finally a study of specific literary landscapes: those of Hoffmann, Hugo and Pessoa.
Le Sublime, de l’Antiquite à nos Jours (2005)
The history of the sublime, almost as old as philosophy, concerns, nowadays, most of the disciplines that constitute it: aesthetics, politics, ethics, anthropology. Philosophers first thought of the sublime in the sphere of discourse. They then extended its domain to the different arts and to the great phenomena of nature, to study, finally, its appearance in various forms of human activity, such as science and technology. The sublime confronts philosophy with the limits of its power, with a view to thwarting it or allowing it to go further. It operates both as a principle of knowledge and as a principle of metamorphosis. On the one hand, it subverts the values of beauty, truth and goodness; on the other hand, it transcends or sublimates me, in the very general sense that sublimation is self-transcendence. This book aims to restore to the sublime the place it deserves in our educational system and in our lives: that of an initiatory test, capable of breathing life into knowledge that would otherwise remain formal and truncated. It also seeks to guide us towards a possible science of the subject that takes into account man’s vocation to transcend himself.
Video: Saint Giron on the topic of Kant’s sublime.
Writing as “Real Speech” in Lacan and Vico
Essaim 28, 2012, pp. 143–159. Why did Lacan stubbornly persist in studying different types of writing? In this way he shares, although implicitly, with the philosopher Giambattista Vico who, in the first half of the 18th century, criticized traditional phonocentrism: not only is “real speech” not exclusively verbal, but “silent” speech had the upper hand in the beginning of mankind and continues to show its impact. After making Euclid the “sanctuary of truth,” Vico found it more and more difficult to consider it the one and only model of truth. Whereas obviously the force of Euclid stems from its operational autonomy, what is gained in autonomy and auto-reference is lost in reality: “The point, if represented, is no longer a point and the unit, when multiplied, is no longer a unit.” There is therefore a risk in postulating that Euclid as homogeneous with nature ; the primacy given to reason at its highest development raises suspicion because it is necessarily our of touch with the world from which it is abstracted. In 1710 Vico set down the convertibility of the verum and the factum ; but the factum then undoubtedly appeared to him to be too equivocal. In any case he no longer mentioned it in The Scienza Nouva : combine the verum with something else, that is the question, but how to designate the something else ? Vico called it the certain, certum. To establish supposes an operation which consists in “certifying”, in ensuring, through a series of very precise operations which Vico joined together under the common denominator of “philology.” It is from the double angle of the certum and the verum that writing takes on an essential role as letter both purloining and purloined, both pursuing its trajectory and purloined. The characteristic of the letter in the end is not its “silence”: it is “real speech” which is not merely the concern of communication, but of transference.