Maxime Rovère is a philosopher and research associate at ENS Lyon, specializing in Spinoza, and an author of multiple best-selling essays. His latest, Parler avec sa mère ("Talking to one's mother"), offers an original reflection on the bond between mother and child. "I've often thought, studying works of ecology where lovers of the great outdoors and adventurous women set off to track down wolves, observe mushrooms, marvel at octopuses or challenge bears, that if they'd met my mother, they'd have had an equally fascinating creature before their eyes," he writes.

Rovère asks us to reconsider what is "wonderful" about the bond with mother or child, to free it from individual burdens, guilt, feelings of failure and frustration, resituating it in a broader perspective. Bypassing ecospiritual folklore, he speaks of the cosmos, species, regeneration and, as a precious gift to the reader, calls on us to see a visit to one's mother as a form of love both tiny and immense: a metaphysical gift.

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