4 December 2025

2:20 PM – 3:05 PM

Salle Proudhon

Benjamin Efrati

Benjamin Efrati is a multimedia artist, composer, and film score writer. Currently a doctoral student at EHESS, where he is working on representations of Prehistory in video games, his research focuses on the revaluation of popular cultures, combining issues specific to contemporary creation and digital archiving with a view to critically deconstructing heritage valorization practices. As a performer, videographer, and illustrator, his approach aims to forge links between contemporary art, popular culture, and philosophy. He studied philosophy of science at Lyon 3 University and graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Does Prehistory set the limits of speculative storytelling?

Although the two terms “Prehistory” and “science fiction” refer to two seemingly radically different subjects, their similarity becomes apparent upon closer examination. On the one hand, from a scientific point of view: prehistorians use speculation to propose their hypotheses for interpreting material evidence (material/archaeological records, comparisons with ethnographic records, interpretation of paleogenetic studies, etc.), on the other hand, from the point of view of fiction, it is clear that science fiction emerged at the same time as prehistoric fiction, shortly after the beginnings of prehistoric archaeology, and many authors versed in speculation about the past have also turned their attention to speculation about the future. We will study a varied corpus covering the fields of literature (Rosny, Aîné, H.G. Wells, Barjavel, Boulle, etc.), cinema (Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Roland Emmerich, Harold Ramis, etc.), and video games (companies such as Data East, Maxis Software, Pangea Software, Microids, Ubisoft, etc.). A symbolic and semantic proximity that gradually manifests itself in a form of capillarity, revealing variations in the collapsological sensibility of our civilization between the modern and contemporary periods.