22-23 and 24 june 2022
Colloquium organized face-to-face in the respect of barrier gestures and conditions of the sanitary pass.
What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to anyone who asks me, I don’t know anymore», Saint Augustine asked in his Confessions. In many respects, it is friendship as well as time: everyone seems to know more or less what it means, in order to make it and to have experienced it first-hand, but it is difficult to define it, so much appears porous the borders with other types of human relations (starting with love and camaraderie) and thorny questions that it raises: what is one looking for in the friend/e, a mirror of oneself or another than oneself? Friendship, which is often presented as the elective encounter between two beings (“Because it was him, because it was me…” To use Montaigne’s famous quote) is necessarily exclusive and, conversely, the multiplication of friends is-it necessarily to understand as a hunger for the friendly bond? Why, moreover, seek and cultivate friendship: to spread out, to extend beyond oneself, or on the contrary to find the one who will understand you, in a logic of withdrawal and separation from the world? Does it aim to satisfy some of our desires or needs or, on the contrary, can we apprehend it, like Aristotle, as a virtue fundamentally altruistic, turned towards the good of the friend/e?
These questions, which have not only been known for a long time – just think of the long philosophical tradition of Greek philia and Latin amitia – could be multiplied to the envy, but which have been the subject of renewed interest for some 20 years, and especially in the field of human and social sciences: philosophers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, historians, anthropologists, seek to define the contours of a notion which is at once a philosophical concept, a feeling, a value, but also a social practice, whose importance for the psychological construction and social integration of the individual is increasingly studied.
Taking part in this renewed interest in the theme of friendship, this colloquium invites us more precisely to pay attention to a certain type of friendship which, although it is limited to a specific age of life, is not all the more easily identifiable: childhood and youth friendships. It also invites us to approach this notion from a given field, which is that of art, and more particularly literature and cinema. One cannot ignore the fact that friendship, and perhaps even more so friendships of childhood and youth, are a theme, literary and cinematographic, often explored, handled and reworked to the point of becoming, perhaps also, a topos: how many books and films for young people or for young people are they entitled to the name of the friend of the protagonists, a couple or a group of friends (My friend Frédéric by Hans Peter Richter; Ernest et Célestine, by Gabrielle Vincent, adapted for cinema, the famous Club des Cinq by Enid Blyton or, in another register, Les révoltés de Sándor Márai?). It will therefore be a question of exploring the way in which childhood and youth friendships are, from the 19th century to the present day, represented in literature and cinema, to examine what issues and values they are, or are supposed to be, carriers.
Particular attention will be given to understanding how these artistic representations can contribute, on the one hand, to illuminating the contours of this complex notion of friendship and, on the other hand, to identifying whether childhood and youth friendships have something of their own, that distinguishes them from friendship. What does childhood do, but also adolescence, friendship? Are there, in these relations formed at the so-called tender age, but which can prove particularly trying and hurtful, singular elements of the nature to make of it a type of interpersonal relationship in its own right?
Loading... 
