Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. He is editor-in-chief of the political and parliamentary review. He notably published Le coup de com 'permanent (Cerf, 2018).
It is another subject which the health crisis brings up: that of the place of science in society. Confrontations around the usefulness of hydroxychloroquine have dramatically exfiltrated one of the characteristic properties of the functioning of the scientific world: the dispute, in the old sense of the term, disputatio , this dialectic between peers capable of proceeding to producing the truth.
Professor Raoult has made academic controversy a total fact of society in his own way.The pandemic, in what is new and extraordinary, has decompartmentalized the controversy outside the academic arena to make it the object of controversy within a public space that is hyper-publicized and in continuous flux. We are undoubtedly witnessing perhaps for the first time in scientific history, at least on the national scene of our "French passions", this phenomenon of collective appropriation, under the schematic fire of the media and the hysterical electricity of networks, of a scientific confrontation.
By not indexing his word on the only canons of scientific communication, that which goes hand in hand, Professor Raoult has made in his way of academic controversy a fact of total society which on the crest of the collective concerns of the moment polarizes media attention and more broadly collective. This intrinsically subversive act draws a hollow criticism of the institutional scene of research, the major players, including public bodies, appear to date themselves almost "confined" in a form of silence all caution, at the very moment when their word has never been so legitimate and necessary.
Professor Raoult aims at a conception of science approached by statistical technique.Professor Raoult, with his speed that is as scientific as it is communicative, challenges public opinion, decision-makers too, commentators while showing by contrast what ultimately risks being perceived as the limits of the technostructure of research. By asking, among other things, the question of the paradigm of large “randomized” trials, he aims at a certain conception of science arrested by statistical technique and administrative processes. The epistemological upheaval he claims and calls for implicitly questions a certain scientific academism, the blind spot of which would consist in having forgotten that "the spirit of finesse" is as essential to knowledge as "the spirit of geometry" . The coronavirus could have made another victim under these conditions: the guardians of a dogma which by methodological tension was braced on a managerial formalism and a quasi-bureaucratic conformism. Science is also a matter of intuition and creativity.
National unity was well worth a trip by the President of the Republic to Marseille.On his way to Marseille, the President of the Republic thus validates Professor Raoult's communication from public opinion. The presidential message is to show that it does not close any doors, to send a signal to those who among the elected officials have taken up the cause of the Marseille researcher. National unity was well worth the trip. It remains to be seen what will happen to the medical suite. In any case, the "next world" will not be able to save a reflection on the very functioning of its research which by "heavy weather" sometimes seemed to hamper the inspiration of its researchers in logics of device, at the very moment when the need for light and flexible units was more than ever felt. Faced with the pandemic test, the era required a science of movement.
