April 2003 - n° 11 / 12

On the 17th february 1600, Catholic Inquisition leads Bruno to torture. When a hand showed him the cross, among flames he turned his head to infinite firmament. Through this gesture, he refused oppressive finitude of its effigy, inviting at a new figure of man and world. Bruno, before Galileo and Descartes, more radically, draws cosmology and philosophy consequences from copernician discoveries. By that way, he dynamites all the physical, metaphysical and political scolastic order and conceives the whole original and limitless universe, full with a dynamic, operative and protean power, calling to assert life forms and excellency of human knowledge and works. " Dare know ", this Kant's requirement, rare are those who led it as high as Giordano Bruno did. Fulfilled with presocratic profoundness and roman physicalism, linked with neoplatonician imaginal, integrating an non--finite catholicism, overpassing Renaissance and pregnant with coming modern science, Bruno's thought precedes centuries and still makes signs to us. Considering philosophical, hermeneutical, political and technological stakes, the volcanic and penetrating genius of this artist-thinker, injustly set aside in France, more than ever helps us to understand our present and catch world occurrence.