She welcomes us into her “HQ”, a colorful, friendly and fun bar in the heart of this bohemian bourgeois neighborhood in the 11th arrondissement of Paris which adopted it more than twenty years ago. She had her first studio there and later returned to settle there with her three children and their father, then with her second husband, in blended family mode with cat. A “hello Mazarine” warm welcomes her as soon as she walks through the door. Mazarine Pingeot orders a glass of white.
The image of the girl, a bit austere and distant, because she is a normalienne, a philosopher and daughter of former president François Mitterrand, disappears as soon as she smiles, and she is a beautiful woman with brown curls and lips highlighted with red. , sparkling and voluble, who settles down in front of us. The aperitif is his thing, we hit it off. “Since I work a lot, it’s a very important rite of passage for me, the moment when I stop working and move on to something else. » She grants herself this break whatever happens, alone or accompanied. “I love wine, especially red, she specifies. These are my khâgne friends Ali and Nicolas [les journalistes Ali Baddou et Nicolas Demorand] who taught me how to drink. » Since then, she no longer considers dining without a good glass of wine. She agreed to be president of a philosophy festival which is held in Saint-Emilion (Gironde) and does not hide that the location played a big part in her decision to accept.
Wrapped up in an elegant speckled gray turtleneck, jeans and ankle boots, she tries to explain her latest work to us, To live without (Flammarion-Climats, 272 pages, 21 euros), a very chunky philosophical treatise which, we might as well admit, we did not understand everything. She laughs: “It’s true that I enjoyed myself, my publishers were courageous to publish it at a time when philosophy has no right to be cited except as popularized tools for personal development. » And the author regrets the time when Michel Foucault was invited to prime time on television and when human sciences and philosophy books could pass the 10,000 copies sold mark.
“Object of fantasies and hatred”
Being the good teacher that she is – she teaches at Sciences Po Bordeaux – she patiently gives us the overview. At the start of his reflection, the observation of a fashion: the proliferation of “without” products, ” gluten free “, ” Sugar free “, ” without palm oil “, ” unleaded “etc. “How does lack become a “plus” which is the subject of commercial recovery and fuels the capitalist system? How to think about a lack not satisfied by consumption? »asks the one who believes that “if we didn’t lack, we wouldn’t fall in love, we wouldn’t commit, there would be no art”. What follows is an in-depth and substantiated questioning on the metaphysics of lack: “This is the moment I lose everyone!” »she admits, laughing.
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