MEDIATION

1993 : Henry Mintzberg, at Insead, Fontainebleau

« Strategy doesn’t have to be thought about, it can also just arise, more or less, from a company’s actions. »

2004 : Kenzaburo Oé, at the Japanese house of culture, Paris

« For me, an intellectual is someone who can and should, outside their specialist field, speak as “an amateur”, to remind themselves that there are other ways to see and to conceive reality than those put across by the dominant discourse. »

1978 : Jean Giraud, alias Moebius, at the Mutualité room
« Reasoned mental thought, bringing education to the world, does not eliminate the festering life of chaos. Nietsche said that it’s still necessary to retain a modicum of chaos in ourselves if we want to be able to give birth to a dancing star. »

1995 : Eugen Drewermann, at home in Paderborn, Germany

« The less someone is honest with themselves, the more they want to escape. It’s always those who are internally most cut up and dissatisfied with themselves who complain about those around them, protest about their way of life and call for an “intolerable system” to be overturned. However, their complaints change absolutely nothing. It’s just like in a game of “beggar my neighbour”, in which the losing card is always replaced without ever being removed from the pack. Whoever really wants to change the world has to begin with themselves and seek out justice in their own heart, instead of expecting others to do it. Only those who have learned to create a bit of order in themselves will find the right words to bring about some good. To do that, it is necessary to accept solitude. Only in that way can one confront oneself without any distraction. If we are to discover the truth about our existence, we must silence extraneous voices. What’s important is not thoughts, advice, congratulations, or the blame of others, but what’s going on in the depths of our being. »

2009 : Chris Ware, at the Angoulême Festival

« After years of work, I eventually understood the true value of fiction: going beyond the details and doubts that have to do with real events and ‘bringing to life’ the essence of a being such as one remembers them. In a way, it’s more or less like the difference between playing a role and creating it; at a certain moment, one abandons oneself totally to what one believes the person to be (which is in fact an inexplicable sediment of memories or thoughts that one has of a person), just as an artist has to abandon themselves to art, without attempting to think or foresee anything beforehand, since art is in itself a completely unique way of thinking. »

1988 : Umberto Eco, at FNAC on boulevard Saint-Germain

« The amount of information in a message is also a function of my knowing how much I can trust the person from whom I’m inquiring: when I ask a realtor if the house he’s showing me is damp or not, I get very little information from his negative answer and am still just as uncertain about the truth of the matter. But if the realtor replies in the affirmative, against both my expectation and his own interest, I get a significant amount of information and really know something more about the subject that interests me.»

1988 : Jean Favier, at the National Archives
« Despite earthly colonization, empires are established at sea, from maritime routes and fortified ports. And, since an immaterial empire is far more significant than a material empire, there is no limit to ambition. »
 

1991 : Richard Saul Wurman, New York

« I would like to quote Carlos Fuentes : the greatest crisis facing modern civilization is going to be how to transforme information into structured knowledge »