Conference by Abdelwahab Meddeb, writer, poet and essayist, Paris.
From Istanbul to Venice, from the Orient to the Western world, beyond the authentic shock which has always existed (refer back to ‘The Persians’), the stop in Athens will set the tone. That of the buffering of the shock through the use of logos as a shared historical reference (in which you can hear the voices of Dante and Ibn Arabi crossing over one another, from one end of the Mediterranean to the other). Do we need to restore a shared logos (as suggested by Benedict the XVIth in Ratisbon) or reinvent a universal reason which in its constantly differed occurrence, would draw from all intellectual exercises, even ‘savage thinking’?
Born in Tunis in 1946, Meddeb has lived in Paris since 1968. He is a poet, novelist, translator and essayist who has written 20 books. In 2005, he curated the ‘West by East’ exhibition for the Centre of Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, bringing together ancient and contemporary artworks relating to Western society from the Arab world. Meddeb is also the editor of ‘Dédale’ magazine and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Paris X-Nanterre.