Pierre Cassou-Noguès

• Region — Western philosophy • Era — Contemporary philosophy • Name — Pierre Cassou-Noguès • Born — 1971 • Birthplace — Tunis, Tunisia • Alma Mater — École Normale Supérieure • Institutions — University of Paris VIII Pierre Cassou-Noguès (born 1971) is a French philosopher and writer.

He was admitted at the École Normale Supérieure in 1991. He obtained the agrégation in mathematics in 1995 and wrote his PhD in philosophy under the supervision of Jean-Michel Salanskis in 1999. From 2001 to 2011, he was a research fellow at the CNRS. Since 2011, he has been Full Professor at the University of Paris VIII. He is also co-editor of the journal SubStance.

His work is based on a theoretical use of fiction. Pierre Cassou-Nogues uses fiction as a method for exploring the possible and its limits. In this way, he intends to give to philosophy both a speculative scope and a critical impact: fiction enables the philosopher to consider the real in the light of the possible. In his most recent work, he applies this philosophy-fiction to explore the forms of life and modes of subjectivation induced by contemporary technology. More broadly, his research focusses on four areas. 1. His early research concerns the role of the imaginary (dreams, fictions) in the work of scientists: Kurt Gödel, Norbert Wiener, or brain reading in neuroscience. He relies on the archives of scientists to look for fictions, personal dreams, superstitions sometimes, which interplay with their more serious work/ 2. He has also investigated the relationship between imagination and science as it is questioned in French philosophy, as well as the question of the self at the intersection between reason and imagination. His work here concerns the historical epistemology of Brunschvicg, Cavaillès, Albert Lautman, Bachelard and its inheritance in contemporary philosophy. 3. In a series of works halfway between theory and literature, Pierre Cassou-Nogues uses fiction order to describe and conceptualize fields that philosophers tend to ignore, or repress: wasted time, phobias, seashores... Fields that philosophers most often avoid, preferring to talk about work rather than laziness, preferring the noble Angst to this absurd fear that is phobia, or preferring to set foot on firm land, where the tree of science is rooted, rather than exploring uncertain and moving shores. 4. His more recent work explores the contemporary relationship between technology and fiction. In 2019, he published a collection of short stories in which he investigates new forms of life and modes of subjectivation correlated with various technological apparatus. He has co-authored on a web documentary, Welcome to Erewhon, which is an adaptation of the novel Erewhon published by Samuel Butler in 1871. With Paul Harris, and the journal SubStance, he also has contributed to launching a collection of born digital theoretical works

• Logique, fictions et folie, entretien avec A. Wald Lasowski, in Pensées pour le nouveau siècle, Fayard, 2008