The Collège de France, in partnership with Radio France Internationale, will again participate in 2021 in the Night of Ideas.

On 28 January, live from 8 to 11 pm in the Marguerite de Navarre amphitheatre, three round tables led by RFI journalists will explore the theme of the 2021 edition: Close, with the participation of two professors from the Collège de France and two guests.

From whom, what can we say "close" in this year in which the term "distance" has been imposed on everyone, on all continents? One thinks immediately of the urgency of rapprochement, of new solidarities to be re-established or created in the face of divisions of all kinds, and of the ideas and tools needed for this, in order to counterbalance the dissolution of ties and individualistic or nationalist withdrawal. But this demand must be accompanied by a reflection on the very idea of distance, on its perceptive, cognitive and mathematical foundations, on its extraordinary use, both theoretical and practical, in the multiplication of maps that cover our world, drawing boundaries and limits but also enabling us to model, understand and act on it. Finally, it remains to be seen whether there exists, in the relationship to oneself, to others, to objects and to the cultures of the world, a "good distance", a point of view that is neither too far away nor too close, and from which they could be better understood, appreciated, loved? This question also applies to researchers, journalists, culture brokers and all those whose work consists in creating mediations, building links for a common world where differences are more articulated than opposed.

To be followed live on air on RFI: https: //www.rfi.fr/fr/ and on RFI's YouTube channel.

Program :

1. Who's my next?

8:00pm-9:00pm

Journalist moderator: Assane Diop

Guests:

• Samantha Besson, jurist, specialist in public international law and European law, professor at the Collège de France on the "International Law of Institutions" chair
• François Héran, sociologist and demographer, professor at the Collège de France on the "Migration and Society" chair.
• Momar Nguer, Franco-Senegalese entrepreneur and President of the Africa Committee of Medef International.
• Nathalie Péré-Marzano, Executive Director of Emmaus International.

Fraternity, hospitality, solidarity: crises of all kinds weaken these ideals. The figure of our neighbour, to whom we owe mutual aid and assistance in the name of our common humanity, is blurred by new barriers: selfishness of individuals, questioning of family and intergenerational ties, difficulties in "making society", nationalist withdrawal, the crisis of multilateralism... Everyone prefers his or her "island in the street", in the words of the American sociologist Martin Sanchez-Jankowski. Faced with this apparent erosion of solidarity, what value does the notion of neighbour still have for us? In this age of globalization, are there any concrete ways for "islands" to become an archipelago? So that my neighbour is not only the one who more or less resembles me, but the one in whom I recognize the identity of our condition?

2. Which maps for which distances?

21h00-22h00

Journalist moderator: Caroline Lachowsky

Guests:

• Françoise Combes, astrophysicist, professor at the Collège de France on the chair "Galaxies and cosmology", researcher at the Observatoire de Paris.
• Christian Grataloup, geohistorian, professor emeritus of the University Paris Diderot.
• Sabrina Krief, veterinarian and ecologist, specialist in great apes, professor at the National Museum of Natural History.
• Stéphane Mallat, mathematician, professor at the Collège de France on the "Data Sciences" chair.

How to measure and represent distances? Their apprehension is first of all a perceptive and cognitive faculty that we share with other animals, whose extraordinary capacities of orientation form the biological basis of our ideas of territory or frontier. Beyond this, mathematics has made it possible to develop a thorough representation and understanding of space and flows, an increasingly precise geography and maps of reality, to the point of describing the structure of the universe. How do all these maps of different kinds fit together to open up the field of our knowledge? What do they say about us, our appetite for knowledge and the tools we have designed to understand the world, from the closest to the furthest away?

3. Is there a good distance?

22h00-23h00

Journalist moderator: Pascal Paradou

Guests:

• N'Goné Fall, curator and cultural engineering consultant, general curator of Africa 2020.
• William Marx, writer, essayist, critic and historian of literature, professor at the Collège de France on the "Comparative Literature" chair.
• Olivia Rosenthal, writer, playwright and performer, co-director of the master's degree in creative writing at the University of Paris 8.
• Hugues de Thé, doctor and biologist, professor at the Collège de France on the chair "Cellular and Molecular Oncology".

Moving away sometimes brings us closer together. In these times of pandemic and social distancing, the right distance is a metric, but also a scientific and critical issue. In the humanities as in the experimental sciences, the position of the observer implies detaching oneself, distancing oneself as one looks at a work of art, in order to have the overall view without losing the detail. To see well, to see better, distance is necessary and always paradoxical: distance from fiction in order to become a body, from the scientific researcher in order to better care, from history in order to apprehend the present and to better account for living things. The debate between cultural appropriation and crossbreeding also illustrates the Rimbaldian aphorism "I am another".