Surprise success or expected hit, “Liberation” examines top sales in bookstores. This week, the album in which the author of comic strips makes Socrates salivate in front of a barbecue.
The comic strip is for Pascal Ory a “unnamed art”. For Catherine Meurisse, it is “an acrobat and a mountebank”. Clown certainly but patient because it is only in 2020 that the 9th art “settled” at 23, quai Conti. And, Meurisse at the same time. From the Decorative Arts at the former headquarters of Arnaud d’Hauterives to that of the brand new engraving-drawing section of the French Academy, it thus proves that illustration is not a minor art. And Human, too human by Catherine Meurisse, printed in 70,000 copies, will perhaps soon be on the baccalaureate philosophy program.
Is it didactic?
Gamine, she drew Little Nemo, now it’s the intellectuals she sketches: philosophers like Kant and Arendt via Barthes. The goal ? Popularize their writings through burlesque skits. These were first published in Philosophy Magazine at the price of a double sheet every month since September 2017. Catherine Meurisse has not changed anything in this comic. The mother of Saint Augustin, manager of a libertine club, wears a leather corset, she who embodies a model of faith and goodness in confessions. Socrates is meanwhile obsessed with the barbecue scheduled for tonight in Delphi. “What is the Good? / Oh! A prime rib like that, at least…” Without being the least bit silly, Meurisse proves that philosophy does not necessarily rhyme with rigidity and coldness.
Do you like art?
She admires Tomi Ungerer, Sempé and Quentin Blake. The line is rapid, the lines round and the humor biting. At home as at home, which here captures the essence of ancient and contemporary philosophers. Artistic beauty, already at the center of lightness, also premium in Human, too human – and that right from the cover. Here is Meurisse in red pants, looking proud, on top of a mountain – something to remind us of Caspar Friedrich’s painting that we find later in the book. He’s not the only subject she makes fun of. Contemporary art exhibitions as well. Hegel, who became a painter under his pen, produced and exhibited “crusts” because, according to him, “art manifests freedom of spirit”.
Where are the women ?
They are rather rare (we counted three) but it is not the fault of Catherine Meurisse. “The history of philosophy, like that of the arts, has been written in the masculineshe says. Like everywhere, women have been made invisible.” Not Simone de Beauvoir. Far from the image of the “second sex”, the writer smokes a pipe here, dedicates her work the Being and the gnan gnan and exclaims: “A hysterical” (reversing Charcot’s definition) seeing Sartre declaim “We are not born a man, we become one”. By reversing the roles and making fun of male philosophers with sometimes sexist thinking, Meurisse allows women to escape this eternal second place. Ultimate solution to achieve this: to stage. The one who studied at Charlie walks from box to box to decipher these theories through a feminist window.