When Siri Hustvedt received Monaco’s Prix de la Principauté last year, the choice felt almost perfectly calibrated: a writer whose work moves between fiction, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, grief, gender, memory, and philosophy, honored by an organization devoted to bringing philosophy beyond its perceived elite gateways into public life.
In October 2025, Hustvedt gave the laureate lecture at Monaco’s Théâtre des Variétés titled “Betweens,”1 a powerful concept for the author of Ghost Stories, her much-discussed memoir of grief after the death of her beloved husband, Paul Auster. It is a simple and profoundly beautiful idea: the emotional territory between grief and what lingers in physical absence.. She cited numerous thinkers across disciplines in her lecture about that interesting state. My mind thinks simply of ice and water, and the melting that occurs between, something both before and after. Hustvedt lingered on the being that is drenched in placenta at birth and the umbilical cord between the mother and the baby.
Earlier this year, she sat down for an interview with Alexandra Hanover, aptly titled “Here and There.” In those pages, she spoke again about that curious place, The Between: between memory and imagination, between one book and the next, between the work already made and the work still forming. When she is between writing books, she says, she is careful about what she reads. If she is working on a novel, for instance, she avoids Henry James because, as she notes, “language is contagious.”2
That made me think of how A.I. is learning to write like us. The fusion creates “a plural being”3 to use Hustvedt’s words. She was talking about writing poems in grad school while also reading the great poets, but I can’t help thinking of the technological revolution we’re witnessing in real time. The interaction creates a compound. Something becomes another. Or an other.
This is Hustvedt’s natural territory: the borderland between things. Her doctorate in English from Columbia focused on Charles Dickens, but her intellectual life has never belonged exclusively to literature. She moves through philosophy, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, feminism, visual art, and fiction with the confidence of someone for whom the borders between fields are real but comfortable to navigate. Porous.
There is also Hustvedt’s own personal history: a woman who grew up between the United States and Norway, and who, as she told Hanover, learned an old-fashioned Norwegian at home in Minnesota, a dialect now extremely rare but preserved for her through literature, family, and memory. It was in circulation in another century, and it came again into the last one through her, existing now too, in a third. She became the passage by which a nearly vanished dialect entered a new expression.4
Such scholarship was once admired under older, imperfect names: Renaissance mind, polymath, generalist, jack of all trades. But those labels do not quite capture what Hustvedt represents. She is not dabbling. The overlap of the psychological, the chemical, the emotional, the physical: the big picture is not a luxury in her work. It is the work.
This is exactly the kind of far-reaching intelligence rewarded by Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco.
Monaco is itself a curious between-place. We associate it easily with France because of the predominance of the French language and culture in its borders. It shares history with France and yet it is not France. An almost but not quite. Another. Closer, perhaps, than my own home, Louisiana, and certainly less divided by geography. The original Monaco was just a Rock—hence, the Rock. It juts out into the sea, supporting its fortress and curving around an ancient port; today it stands between two ports, between old stone and glass towers, between nineteenth-century villas and modern hotels, between baroque terraces and the narrow passageways of Monaco-Ville.
Its superficial reputation is easy enough to understand. Monaco photographs well: sports cars, casinos, yachts, diamonds, glamor, and speed. That Monaco exists. But there is another Monaco, hidden or perhaps not hidden at all. Just quietly sitting off to the side of the Hill of Charles.5 A Monaco with enough self-assurance not to shout. It does not need attention. It gives attention. It listens. If you stand still and look closely, you’ll see it.
It is in that space that Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco operates.
Known informally as PhiloMonaco, the organization was founded in 2015 by Charlotte Casiraghi,6 along with the philosophers Robert Maggiori, Raphaël Zagury-Orly, and Joseph Cohen.7 The original quartet. Maggiori has said that the idea began modestly. At first, it was imagined as a prize. Then came ideas for events, conversations, public meetings organized on the calendar from April to October. One thing led to another.
Today, PhiloMonaco is a large-scale intellectual project: a year-round series of dialogues, workshops, and lectures on a single theme. Love (amour) was the theme for its first year; then, year after year: the body, violence, desire, time, justice, what it means to be human, and so on. Visiting scholars gather, often in the Théâtre Princesse Grace, to examine the chosen theme through multiple lenses. Then in the summer, during Semaine PhiloMonaco (PhiloMonaco Week) those conversations move outward.
The week becomes a kind of culmination, though also a midpoint—a between, if I may. Scholars meet not only with one another but with professionals in medicine, education, journalism, culture, and public life. They meet students, readers, teachers, and members of the general public. The round table steps outside to enter schools, libraries, museums, streets, and civic spaces in Monaco and Paris.
This is philosophy not as abstraction alone, but as public attention. A public forum.
And yet attention is complicated here. With Charlotte Casiraghi at the helm, PhiloMonaco was never likely to remain entirely hidden from the world of fast cars and luxury. Recall the year when PhiloMonaco’s theme was time and acceleration, and Casiraghi interviewed her fellow Monegasque, the F1 champion Charles Leclerc.)8
She carries a glamorous public visibility which she did not exactly choose. She reflects on it with some unease in the preamble to her recent book La Fêlure. But unwanted glamour is still glamour. It attracts the kind of press philosophy does not usually receive.
That could have easily distorted the project. Instead, it may be part of what enhances it by extending its reach. Without Casiraghi, Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco might have remained mainly in the sphere of philosophers in Paris, known certainly to the public in Monaco, to local teachers and students, and to the more rarefied circles of academic fellowship and graduate study around the world. Yet because of her, the field of awareness widens into the fashion and celebrity press. Readers who come for fashion, royalty, elegance, or curiosity may find themselves unexpectedly treated to insights from Boris Cyrulnik on childhood and violence,9 or to one of Maggiori’s lectures on Jacques Derrida.10
There is an irony in this, but also a grace. Casiraghi’s public image may be unwelcome to her in certain ways, but it also serves one of the organization’s central objectives: bringing philosophy beyond its usual rooms. In that sense, privilege works here in a strange direction—not away from egalitarian principles, but toward them.
Casiraghi was appointed in 2024 to Monaco’s Order of Cultural Merit, a modern order of distinction recognizing those—Monegasque citizens and foreigners alike—who have contributed meaningfully to the cultural life of the Principality. It is not merely a decoration for titled dignitaries or visiting monarchs. Among those recognized before her were Jean-Christophe Maillot, director of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, and Plácido Domingo.
I do not mean to dwell too long on Casiraghi. It is only that most pieces about her emphasize, above all else, the qualities that, though they are most exhaustively repeated across the media whenever she’s in the news, tend to be the ones that have less to do with her: the heritage, the glamour, the family tree. The royal mother, the Hollywood grandmother, the great-grandfather who knew Marcel Proust. All of it is interesting in its way, but it tells us very little about Casiraghi herself: the writer, the mother, the co-founder of Ever Manifesto,11 the co-author with Maggiori of the treatise Archipel des Passions,12 and finally the philosopher of the crack.13
It also misses the reality of the between in Casiraghi’s own work: the person thinking and writing somewhere between haute couture and ecological reality, between fantasy and emotional confusion; between public image and private inquiry, between inheritance and chosen intellectual labor. She holds a master’s degree in philosophy14 and now stands, in her own way, as a scholar of the fracture.
The fracture is what interests me. Not so much Casiraghi’s personal fragility, but the concept of it as it applies to myself and universally. What lies inside the valley of pain? Fragility, certainly. Sensitivity. The wound that reopens too easily. The part of us that is not broken exactly, but more exposed than the rest.
In La Fêlure, Casiraghi traces this idea across literature, philosophy, music, and psychoanalysis: from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Deleuze, from J.J. Cale to Sigmund Freud. The chapter “Magnolia,” named for the and the iconic Southern flower, is one of the book’s quietest and most beautiful passages. Cale is a legend of understatement, a musician who knew both influence and obscurity, flashes of success and long stretches of difficulty. His way of living through the fracture, as Casiraghi presents it, was not spectacle but endurance. He avoided the limelight. He worked. He made music. He lived without asking the world to look at him.
Like the magnolia, he was not untouched by weather. He endured it. Somewhere between presence and nostalgia.
Her analogy to New Orleans hit me hard: a city of tortured beauty and stubborn perseverance, where beauty does not arrive untouched by suffering, but passes through it and remains.
The “Magnolia” chapter in La Fêlure offers a smooth passage back to Siri Hustvedt, to “Betweens,” and to Ghost Stories. PhiloMonaco and Le Fondation Prince Pierre15 jointly presented Le Prix de la Principauté to Hustvedt. It’s a joint prize from two Monegasque organizations—one philosophical, one literary—to recognize a writer for an entire body of work.(13) In Hustvedt’s case, that body includes seven novels, eight works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, stories, and poems. As part of the laureate program, she delivered her “Betweens” lecture at the Théâtre des Variétés.
She began with a fragment from Heraclitus, moved through Martin Buber’s philosophy of relation and the possibility of a third form of being—Freud’s so-called “analytic third.”16 Through transference between analyst and patient, another space opens—a zone in which thinking can shift. Hustvedt moves from there through biology and physics.
Her lecture does not treat the between as an empty interval. It is not a waiting room between one settled condition and another. It is generative. The between is where birth happens, where language changes hands, where analysis alters both participants, where memory is shaped by imagination, and where grief becomes a continuing relation to the dead.
One of the first books I completed this year was Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, the story of his own cataclysmic between: the passage from the person he was before he was attacked and stabbed to the person he became through the long, circuitous process of recovery. The ordeal was filled with pain, but not only pain. It also brought reminders of love and a renewed appreciation for everything that attached him to life.17
We are other, no longer what we were
before the calamity of yesterday
—Samuel Beckett
Among the book’s pleasures is Rushdie’s affection for his longtime friend Paul Auster. Auster was still alive when Rushdie visited him at his Brooklyn home. Auster had recently endured the deaths of his son and infant granddaughter and was himself living with lung cancer.18 Rushdie found him capable of joking, still engaged with life despite everything. Dying, but still alive, as we all are. The cancer makes death less abstract, something anticipated, accelerated.
Auster and Hustvedt had taken part in the gathering on the steps of the New York Public Library after Rushdie’s stabbing, an event organized in solidarity with Rushdie and with writers who live under threats to freedom of expression.19 This was shortly before Auster’s cancer diagnosis in early 2023.
In May 2023, Hustvedt and Rushie’s wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, appeared together on the first episode of Les Rendez-vous littéraires rue Cambon to be recorded in the U.S.20
And almost a year after that, Paul died.
Hustvedt recounts his slow, torturous decline in Ghost Stories. She writes about the “important difference between optimism and hope.” Optimism cheers every piece of good news and predicts a favorable outcome, but it creates emotional swings that cannot be sustained. “Hope, on the other hand, is necessary for living on.”21
The optimist rises and falls and eventually burns out. Optimism is a blaze. Hope is an ember that can keep giving sparks.
The review of Ghost Stories in The New York Times—reserved in places, though appreciative overall—observes a book dwelling in some of our darkest and most universal experiences: near misses, devastating illness, death, and the anger and confusion that accompany events we cannot make comprehensible.
The value of philosophical thinking in navigating these territories is difficult to overstate. Philosophy is not essential to life in the way food, water, and oxygen are essential. We can live without consciously exercising that part of the mind. But philosophy can deepen a life. It gives us tools for approaching problems, for examining our assumptions, and for moving through the emotions—the “archipelago of passions” Maggiori and Casiraghi wrote about—without pretending that they are simple or easily resolved.
PhiloMonaco does not simplify philosophy. It makes philosophy inviting. It extends its reach, carrying it into schools, workplaces, theaters, libraries, and public spaces rather than confining it to elite institutions. In doing so, it demonstrates that philosophy does not necessarily require simplification. It requires attention. Attend closely enough and the questions begin to appear. Stay with them and, sometimes, answers follow—though answers have a habit of arriving with more questions. For those who enjoy that endless movement between the two, philosophy is already waiting.
FOOTNOTES
Philomonaco: Betweens // Conférence de Siri Hustvedt
”Here and There,” Interview between Alexandra Hanover and Siri Hustvedt. Passager, No.3, 2026. Printed in Paris for the bilingual revue Passager No. 3.
ibid.
ibid.
“Hill of Charles” is a playful literal rendering of Monte-Carlo—Italian for “Mount Charles.” The district, formerly known as Les Spélugues, was renamed in 1866 in honor of Prince Charles III, under whose reign the casino and surrounding resort district were developed. The development followed Monaco’s 1861 cession of Menton and Roquebrune to France, a territorial loss that intensified the principality’s search for a new economic foundation.
Charlotte Casiraghi is a Monegasque native and daughter of Princess Caroline and the late Stefano Casiraghi, who died at sea in 1990 after his catamaran capsized. It was a tragedy transmitted to the public via the evening news on the day it happened and following the next day by reports in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Stefano Casiraghi was the World Offshore Champion who died defending his title and whose death led to a revision of the safety regulations for offshore powerboat racing.
Joseph Cohen is today acknowledged on the PhiloMonaco website (www.philomonaco.com) as Membre fondateur honoraire (honorary founding member.) Sometime around 2023-2024, he began to scale back his direct involvement with PhiloMonaco to the advantage of other commitments, such as the University College Dublin, where he has an associate professorship since 2007. https://philomonaco.com/intervenant/joseph-cohen/.
Philomonaco: Charlotte Casiraghi rencontre Charles Leclerc
Philomonaco: Enfance et Violence // Boris Cyrulnik
Philomonaco: 📚 #Lectures Le parjure et le pardon de Jacques Derrida
Charlotte Casiraghi co-founded and co-edited Ever Manifesto, an irregularly published journal devoted to fashion and environmental sustainability, with Alexia Niedzielski and Elizabeth von Guttman in 2009.
Charlotte Casiraghi and Robert Maggiori, Archipel des passions (Paris: Seuil, 2018).
Casiraghi, Charlotte. La Fêlure. (Paris: Julliard, 2026).
Alain Elkann Interviews: Charlotte Casiraghi. 4 June 2023. https://www.alainelkanninterviews.com/charlotte-casiraghi/
The Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco, named for Casiraghi’s great-grandfather, awards prizes in literature, music, and contemporary art. Presided over by Princess Caroline, Casiraghi’s mother, it jointly presents the Prix de la Principauté with PhiloMonaco.
See footnote 1.
Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2025). The epigraph for this work is a quote from Samuel Beckett that beautifully supports the thesis here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/20/books/salman-rushdie-pen-.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Les Rendez-vous littéraires rue Cambon (the literary rendezvous podcast that Casiraghi helped organize with Chanel’s former design director, Virginie Viard. In the video of the meeting, which took place in New York City, Salman Rushdie was watching from the front row, there to support his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and his friend Siri Hustvedt.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/books/review/hustvedt-ghost-stories.html?smid=url-share