Cyril de Commarque, Les Larmes de Peter Pan.
“Peter Pan is the eternal inhabitant of a mysterious island where children rule: Neverland. If you have ever watched children play, you get the idea that Neverland is by no means paradise. It is just a place where a “higher-order” has no say. Where there are no limits to playful, impulsive action and childish egoism. Like any utopia since Thomas Morus or even Platon’s Atlantis, it can be a scary place. The absence of adult life leads to totalitarian order and reflects a rule that philosophers like Augustinus and then later Husserl have denied in terms of their consideration of
‘time’: That closed systems must ultimately lead to an infinite regress. The “endless regression” that Peter Pan stands for is a symbol for that process.
Cyril de Commarque’s latest works stand in line with these observations: by designing an “Ever-Neverland”, where ultimately children become aggressive against themselves and destroy what they really love, he draws an eerie picture – not of a gloomy future, but in fact of our present societies. Once you think of it, it is so obvious: the growing dependency on technical devices, which govern our daily life, become our instructors, masters, controllers increasingly hold us in a state of immaturity. Has anyone thought of Larry Page as Captain Cook?
For the last five years, I have made it an exercise to reread Kant’s famous answer to the question of “What is
Enlightenment?” twice a year, which he wrote in 1784, exactly 230 years ago: Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude!”
