Alexandre Jollien, the Art of Resilience and Practical Philosophy. Credits: Ludovic45SBN / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0 (image retouched by AI).
How do you turn hardship into a source of vitality? Alexandre Jollien, Swiss philosopher and writer, has embodied that question for more than twenty-five years. Born with cerebral palsy, he spent seventeen years in a specialized institution. He has become one of the most widely listened-to voices in practical philosophy in the French-speaking world. His books are passed from hand to hand, and his lectures draw packed audiences. The film Presque, co-directed with Bernard Campan, even brought his way of life to the big screen. Portrait of a man who made fragility his life’s work.
Updated August 15, 2026. In Praise of Weakness was reissued in May 2025 by Éditions du Cerf (Lexio collection) with a new preface by the author; the sections devoted to his work, private life, and current projects have been expanded.
Who Is Alexandre Jollien? A Philosopher Shaped by Hardship
Alexandre Jollien was born on November 26, 1975, in Sierre, Switzerland. At birth, strangulation by the umbilical cord deprived him of oxygen. He was left with athetosis, a form of cerebral palsy that permanently affects his movements and speech. That answers a question many still ask: Alexandre Jollien’s illness is not a progressive disease, but a birth disability he has lived with all his life.
From age three to twenty, he grew up in a specialized institution in Valais. There he discovered loneliness and other people’s gaze, but also solidarity among residents. He would later describe it as his first school of wisdom. Destined to roll cigars in a sheltered workshop, he took a different path: high school in Sion, then a degree in literature at the University of Fribourg and a study stay in Ancient Greek at Trinity College Dublin. Alexandre Jollien’s biography is defined entirely by this reversal, recounted from his first book, In Praise of Weakness: what the world called weakness became a starting point.
Philosophy As A Path To Liberation
“Philosophy saved my life,” he likes to say. That sentence, probably his best-known quote, is no slogan for him: it speaks to a vital relationship with knowledge, where wisdom is not an intellectual luxury but a matter of survival. A passionate reader of Socrates, the Stoics, and Epicurus, Alexandre Jollien practices philosophy as a discipline of every moment rather than an academic field of study. Accept what is not up to you, face adversity with courage, tame your emotions: the spiritual exercises of antiquity become, in his hands, very concrete survival tools.
To this Greek compass he later added Zen meditation, discovered through a Korean master, which led him to speak of “practice” the way others speak of training. This blend of philosophical rigor and embodied spirituality probably explains why his texts resonate far beyond academic circles: they speak to the person who suffers, not to the one who dissects.
His Books, A Body Of Work About Learning To Live
It all begins in 1999 with In Praise of Weakness, published by Éditions du Cerf. This imaginary dialogue with Socrates, written at twenty-three, made an immediate impact: awarded the Mottart Prize and then the Montyon Prize from the Académie française, it established itself as a classic of embraced vulnerability. Translated into several languages, the text was also adapted for the stage, where it is regularly revived. A sign of its vitality, the book was reissued in May 2025 in Cerf’s Lexio collection, with a new preface by the author.
Next came Le Métier d’homme (“The Craft of Being Human,” Seuil, 2002), with a preface by Michel Onfray, followed by La Construction de soi (2006) and Le Philosophe nu (2010), none of them translated into English yet. Petit traité de l’abandon (2012) explores the same path: how to stay upright, day after day, when the body resists. With Vivre sans pourquoi (2015), an account of his spiritual journey in South Korea, he broadened his readership even further. Then came the bestseller In Search of Wisdom (L’Iconoclaste / Allary Éditions, 2016; English edition by Sounds True, 2018). There he converses with psychiatrist Christophe André and Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, reaching a wide audience. The trio repeated the formula in 2019 with Freedom for All of Us (English edition, 2020), before La Sagesse espiègle (Gallimard, 2018) and the Cahiers d’insouciance (Gallimard, 2022) added a lighter, almost mischievous joy to the edifice. Among Alexandre Jollien’s books, every reader can find an entry point: the story, the exercise, the conversation, or the notebook.
Presque: Friendship With Bernard Campan Brought To The Screen
He met Bernard Campan, a former member of Les Inconnus, in 2007. From this unlikely friendship came Presque, a dramedy co-written and co-directed by the two men, released in theaters in January 2022 and distributed in English as Beautiful Minds. The film has been regularly rebroadcast on television since, including on France 2 in February 2025. Louis, a melancholy undertaker, takes Igor, a vegetable deliveryman with a disability and an amateur philosopher, in a hearse headed south. The poster subtitle, “You’re not born a man, you become one,” borrowed from Erasmus, sums up the premise: a road trip about difference, otherness, and rebirth, with Tiphaine Daviot rounding out the cast alongside the duo.
Of all the films featuring Alexandre Jollien, Presque remains one of a kind: the philosopher does not play a constructed role here; he lends the character Igor his way of moving, his humor, and his freedom of tone. Critics praised the Campan-Jollien chemistry, and audiences responded: the film became one of the surprise hits of 2022 in France.
Private Life: His Wife, His Three Children, And The Korean Interlude
Behind the public speaker stands a family. Alexandre Jollien and his wife Corinne met while he was still a student. Their life together has survived tours, books, and the inner storms the philosopher never hides. The couple has three children, whom Alexandre Jollien speaks about with discretion but consistency: they teach him, he says, the art of being fully present, a lesson no treatise can replace.
In 2013, the whole family moved to Seoul, South Korea, for three years. Alexandre Jollien deepened Zen meditation there with a Jesuit father and Zen master, an experience recounted in Vivre sans pourquoi. Back in Switzerland, Alexandre Jollien’s private life remains true to that line: a simple existence, between Valais and lectures, where spirituality is lived day to day rather than put on display.
What Is Alexandre Jollien Doing In 2026?
At fifty, the philosopher has lost none of his momentum. On his official website, he regularly publishes his “pharmacopoeias,” short columns in which he shares exercises and readings for getting through difficult days. His online communities are among the most loyal in the world of ideas: more than 280,000 people follow him on Facebook and more than 126,000 on Instagram, where his short videos blend humor and applied philosophy. Radio France’s stations also continue to devote interviews and podcasts to him, as the lover of wisdom he has never stopped being.
The fall of 2025 saw him multiply interviews in the Swiss press, where he defended a simple conviction: “What makes us strong is solidarity.” In September 2026, he will lead a trip in India, with psychology researcher Ilios Kotsou, devoted to serenity. A sign that transmission now passes as much through shared experience as through books. No entirely new book has been published since the Cahiers d’insouciance. But the expanded reissue of In Praise of Weakness confirms it: his first text is still finding new readers.
What Alexandre Jollien Teaches Us
Twenty-five years after his first book, Alexandre Jollien’s lesson remains strikingly relevant in a world obsessed with performance. The resilience he embodies is neither a self-help slogan nor an injunction to be well: it is patient craftsmanship, made of acceptance, humor, and fruitful friendships, from Socrates to Bernard Campan. Dare to be vulnerable, he reminds us, and you open the door to joy. His journey is living proof.