In Germany, the Kunstfest Weimar festival explores a world populated by contemporary Fausts

Germany and Goethe will oversee a Faustian-inspired French theatrical season. A prospect that bodes well on an artistic level, but which is symptomatic of the anxiety of artists and programmers who are rightly concerned about the state of the world. Rightly mobilized. Rightly attentive to the redoubled relevance of Faust , a play dating back to the 19th ^century .

Under the playwright's inspired pen, which blends prospective, imaginary, philosophical, metaphysical, epic, and intimate, Doctor Faust sells his soul to the devil to obtain, in exchange, a renewed youth, desire, power, and vitality. He is the being of insatiable desire. The man for whom reality is not enough and who is ready for anything, even the sacrifice of his beloved, Marguerite, to intensify the contours of his life.

Published in two parts ( Faust I in 1808, then Faust II in 1832), the plays were at the time akin to fantastical science fiction. Two centuries later, they have left dystopia to tackle the immediate present of societies in which self-proclaimed demiurges thrive. So many Faustian megalomaniacs who conceal the amorality of their ambitions under fallacious progressive alibis. The devil is no longer called Mephistopheles. He now calls himself greed, careerism, colonialism, or delusions of grandeur. He signs contracts with disciples who dream of new men, enslaved lands, artificial intelligence, or intergalactic conquests.

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