French sociologist Edgar Morin passes away after a century of intellectual giving
Sociologist and philosopher Edgar Moran, one of France's most prominent contemporary intellectual and cultural figures, passed away on Friday, May 29, at the age of 104.
His wife confirmed the news of his departure to Agence France-Presse on Saturday morning, to lose the human thought with his departure, the pioneer of the theory of "complex thought" and a staunch defender of just humanitarian causes, foremost of which are Palestinian rights and the fight against intellectual and economic colonialism.
Bus march
Morin, whose real name is Edgar Nahum, born in Paris in 1921 of Greek and Italian descent, began his political career by joining the ranks of the French Communist Party in 1941.
After the war, he joined the French army in Germany as head of the military government's propaganda bureau in 1946, before declaring his final break with communist ideology in 1951, which he later documented in his famous book "Self-Criticism" published in 1959.
The late philosopher joined the French National Center for Scientific Research in 1950 and was promoted to director of his research in 1970.
Moran recorded historical milestones with his courageous stances such as his participation in the establishment of a movement opposing the Algerian war in the early 1950s, and his exciting meeting with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and Moran was known for his absolute bias towards the right of the Palestinians to establish their own independent state, a position that caused him to be prosecuted in French courts in 2004 following a bold article in which he denounced Israeli policies published in the newspaper "Le Monde", which in 2011 commented on the "Arab Spring", stressing that the Arab peoples are in the process of decolonizing their own ideas Political.
"Curriculum" and "Movie Stars" ... A legacy of knowledge that transcends
Throughout his long career, Moran has written dozens of classical works that have revolted against traditional sociology and critiqued classical knowledge based on simplification and reductionism, as his deconstruction and synthesis project was manifested in his monumental encyclopedia "The Method" (1977), his first book "The Year of Germany Zero" (1950), "European Culture and Barbarism" (2005), and his 2013 biographical memoir "Diaries".
His philosophical insight extended to film criticism through his groundbreaking book "Stars of Cinema", explaining the conditions for the creation of the stars of the seventh art from a psychological and sociological perspective that links the human presence on the screen to the processes of projection and psycho-emotional identification, and its relationship to the capitalist economy and the production system, considering the stars of the screen as beings that belong to the human and the divine at the same time and mimic the heroes of ancient myths.
Turning the page of the golden generation of structuralist philosophy
The passing of Edgar Morin marks the closing of the golden generation of French structuralist and post-structuralist philosophy that reshaped the humanities in the twentieth century. Morin was distinguished by his ability to integrate the natural sciences with the humanities to deconstruct contemporary dilemmas through his treatise La Pensée Complexe, which advocates understanding phenomena in their intertwined and changing context without isolating or simplifying them in a linear way.
Despite his Western philosophical background, his constant struggle and his keenness on the "human" dimension made him a unique global voice that is widely respected in the Arab world and the Global South, due to his outspoken opposition to Eurocentrism and colonial arrogance until his last breath.