Gaston Bachelard and the Hands of Albert Flocon, by Hans Jörg at Scas 2017 05 11

About Hans-Jörg Rheinberger Hans-Jörg Rheinberger holds an ma in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Biology from the Freie Universität Berlin. He was a scientific employee at the Max-Planck-Institut für molekulare Genetik in Berlin, Lecturer at the Universität zu Lübeck, Associate Professor at the Universität Salzburg, and from 1996 to 2014, Director of the Max-Planck- Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. He has held visiting posts at, among others, Stanford University, eth Zurich, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Hayama. He has been a Fellow at, among others, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich, and the ifk Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna. Among his books are Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (1997), An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth-Century Histories of Life (2010), On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay (2010), and A Cultural History of Heredity (2012, with Staffan Müller- Wille). Rheinberger holds a doctor honoris causa from eth Zurich. He is a Scientific Member of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft as well as an Ordinary Member of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and of the the Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften Leopoldina. At scas, Rheinberger will work on the epistemology of Ernst Cassirer during the years of his Swedish exile. Abstract Between the end of the 1940s and the late 1950s, a collaboration of a peculiar sort developed in Paris between the copper engraver of German origin Albert Flocon and Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher of science and poetologist of imagination. The outcome of this encounter is not very well known even by experts of either Bachelard’s oeuvre or of post-war art in France. Flocon and Bachelard together created a series of art books to which the former contributed the engravings and the latter enriched them with shorter or longer commentaries. These commentaries take the form of reflections about the hand of the engraver, the resistance that it experiences and the constructive forces that it sets free. The encounter will be described through the presentation of a number of selected examples that will give an impression of the whole oeuvre. It also will shed light on the connection between the poetological and the epistemological interests of Bachelard.