Julie Cheminaud

Julie Cheminaud
Period: 2015-2016
Profession: Philosopher Julie Cheminaud was born in 1982. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, she holds an agrégation and a doctorate in philosophy. After working as a lecturer at the University of Paris Sorbonne, first as an allocataire monitrice and then as an attaché temporaire d’enseignement et de recherche (ATER), she now teaches in secondary schools in the Paris region. Her philosophy of art thesis, to be published by Vrin under the title
Les évadés de la médecine , focused on the medical figure of the artist in France in the second half of the 19th century. By unravelling the links between discourse and practice, she showed how, depending on the value placed on pathology by different forms of positivism, writers and painters were sometimes praised (when excess proved fertile), sometimes condemned (when abnormality was described as sickly). In this sense, the physiological figure of the artist was a variation on traditional melancholy, allowing us to understand the works of modernity in a new light. During her stay at Villa Medici, Julie Cheminaud devoted herself to an essay on the Stendhal syndrome. The expression refers to the state of crisis that some tourists experience when confronted with works of the Italian Renaissance. It refers to the phenomenon whereby contemporary viewers are plagued by delusions or hallucinations, undergoing an extreme aesthetic experience that has been described as deviant. The aim of this research is to reassess the meaning of these symptoms, and to go beyond a purely psychoanalytical reading to test a hypothesis: that the shock experienced originates in the works themselves. Stendhal’s syndrome could thus reveal the power of the artistic experience.