ABSTRACT
Despite – indeed because – they comprise just two of the sixty books Edgar Morin (originally Edgar Nahoum) has published since the Second World War, Cinema, or the Imaginary Man (2005a [1956]), and The Stars (2005b [1957]) command attention. As a quintessential French intellectual, Morin could feel authorized to hold forth on the most important cultural phenomena of the twentieth century, despite being neither a film scholar nor a trained philosopher. He had been an inveterate filmgoer all his life and he had read and studied philosophy far beyond the norm. Besides, as a young, vagrant sociologist taken into the prestigious CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) by his Marxist mentor, Georges Friedman, he was intent to blend the high and the low, as well as to mix disciplines. In her careful and sympathetic introduction to the English translation of Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, Lorraine Mortimer paints him as an omnivorous thinker, striving to face up to human reality as a whole. Abandoning the secure results that standard “disciplines” promise, thanks to their delimited scope and reductive methods, Morin early on maintained a comprehensive social-anthropological perspective inspired by Karl Marx (Morin 2005a: xvi). It's hard to argue with his goal: currently President of the Association pour la Pensée Complexe, he has always vowed to approach behavior in all its aspects, including the irrational, and to formulate the laws by which human beings, singly and collectively, process their experiences. He also prides himself on being vigilant to the diversity as well as to the commonality of individuals and groups. Although he hadn't yet come up with the term, “complexity” is exactly what the cinema provided him early in his career, serving as a full field of investigation where he tested presuppositions he would later elaborate in his six-volume La Méthode (2004 [1977, 1980, 1986, 1991, 2001]).
