My work concerns two levels of analysis: a philosophical-conceptual level, and a social-critical one. Staying inside the gap between the universality of philosophical concepts and the analysis of contingent and empirical situations, I made one dimension act on the other.
During my stay at UCSC, I developed the first level proposing a new configuration of the relation between delay and anticipation, through Sartre’s notion of "hysteresis" and Bloch’s concept of "non-synchronicity". On the second level, I mapped the anthropological analyses that deal with reconfigurations of temporality. I focused on the relation to temporality from the Anthropocene’s point of view and in the light of the environmental crisis. I examined anthropological studies on experiences that have turned their back on progress, depending upon fragile collaborations between humans and the devastated world surrounding them, crossing the margins of the capitalist way of life. In these contexts, temporality needs to be understood not only as a human or subjective experience but as a bigger and more complex process that involves humans as well as other-than-humans-beings.
During my Secondment at the EHESS, I focused on how social sciences make temporal experiences visible, working with a research group of sociologists in order to understand how some subjects or social groups (e.g. the homeless or the unemployed people) produce reflexivity with respect to their experience of time; this reflexivity can shift the temporal gaps into resistance or a critical alternative to the logic of capitalist economy of time. Furthermore, I studied the way in which legal disciplines analyse the problem of the legal definition of growing social claims related to the “commons”. Working with some researchers in law oriented by the analyses of Yan Thomas, I studied the role of law as a tool for the duration-institution of the social and political movements, but also as a vehicle to rethinking the relation between the past and the present, the multiplicity of social practices and the autonomy of legal concepts.
Once I returned to the University of Liège, I shared and discuss these scientific acquisitions with the members of the Centre de recherche sur les Matérialités de la Politique (MAP). I took a proactive role in the MAP and in the Groupe d’études sartriennes (GES), coordinating and directing collective research work on several occasions, for example:
1) I organized and directed the annual seminar of Political and Social Philosophy, choosing the topic "Revolutions" and inviting scholars of international renown such as M. Tomba (UCSC) and E. Traverso (University of Cornell, Ithaca).
2) As a member of the GES, I actively participate in the organization of its annual conferences, and in activities related to the edition of yet unpublished Sartrean manuscripts.
The exploitation of the project’s results took place through the publication of 2 monographs; a collective volume under my direction, 4 chapters in collective books, 3 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Also, through participation in international conferences (7) and organization of scientific events such as Workshops, Conferences, and research seminars (9). Non-academic dissemination took place through collaboration with no-profit associations anchored in the Wallonie-Bruxelles Federation. In the form of ateliers or podcasts intended for wide dissemination, I contributed to the debate with society by discussing the following topics: the relation to the past and tradition as a tool of political struggle; the forms of labour in contemporary society and its relationship to individual and collective experiences of the time; the relationship between philosophical concept and political practices.
