From droughts to floods, it is the imbalances caused in the water cycle that most clearly demonstrate the impact of climate change today: after facilitating access to the point of making it commonplace, could the global expansion of liberalism, through its collateral effects, be turning water, which has become both scarce and uncontrollable, into one of the vital issues of tomorrow's geopolitics? This prospect, which was improbable yesterday but is a little less so today, reminds us not only of the price of this common good, but also of the ambiguous powers of a resource that we thought had been tamed once and for all. The ancients were acutely aware of the value and power of water when, in their mythology, they made even the most modest spring into a god or nymph, and named Poseidon “the shaker of the earth and the sea.” Greek, then Jewish and Christian symbolism, which the current environmental crisis invites us to reconsider, and which literature and the visual arts have recycled through numerous stories. The course will invite us to remember these stories of water through a journey that is both sensitive and intelligible.
Along the way, we will ask ourselves how and what water has inspired people to think about at different times. At the same time, presentations will open up a dialogue with cultures around the world: what myths and ideas about water exist on other continents?
