Translation in English, by Daniela Kern, of the presentation of the book collections "L’IMPENSÉ AU PRÉSENT" | "L’IMPENSABLE, LE POSSIBLE ET LE PROBABLE"
- Daniela Kern
- Jul 8
- 30 min read
Updated: Aug 5
Pr. Daniela KERN
University of Rio Grande do Sul, Institute of Arts, Faculty Member
Portuguese-English Translation: Daniela KERN
PRESENTATION
The presentation of the books published in the Hypothesis Collection, "THE UNTHOUGHT IN THE PRESENT", TRIALOGUE between Francis Fukuyama, Mohamed Zinelabidine, and Samuel Huntington, as well as "THE UNTHOUGHT, THE POSSIBLE, AND THE PROBABLE" with TRIALOGUE between André Malraux, Mohamed Zinelabidine, and Edward Said, offers a dense overview of the recent works of this multifaceted artist and intellectual. Mohamed Zinelabidine has a very rich academic background, notably with three doctorates, the first in "Aesthetic and Philosophical Theories of Arab-Muslim Music (7th-13th centuries)," defended at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1995, a second in "Political and Cultural Sociology," defended at the University of Sorbonne Paris V-Descartes in 1998, and a third in "Aesthetics and Geopolitics," defended at the University of Paris I- Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2004. He also obtained a Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) in "Aesthetics, Sciences and Art Theory" at Paris 8-Vincennes (2001). He is a renowned academic and was Minister of Cultural Affairs of Tunisia (2016-2020), in addition to his career as an artist and composer. Currently Director of Culture and Communication at ICESCO, his fruitful and diverse career has focused on his respect for cultural diversity, his efforts to build bridges between East and West, and his uncompromising defense of peace between peoples.
The following document can be read both as a catalogue raisonné of his recent publications and as a manifesto for his central intellectual project, which proposes rethinking cultural and civilizational relations. The narrative approach, informed by excerpts from prefaces written by eminent academics associated with prestigious academic institutions, highlights the richness and diversity of the subjects articulated around "the Unthought." It proposes a form of "intersubjectivity" by deploying an imagination and creativity that seek to promote a "plural being," far from barbarism and extremism, by valuing the "symbolic," the "emotional," the "imaginal," and the "affective." Mohamed Zinelabidine places art and culture at the heart of his project for social and political transformation. In this regard, Eliane Chiron emphasizes that, for him, "it is up to art to humanize politics and reconcile rather than seek to deepen differences and rekindle resentment." Indeed, rethinking the relationship between East and West through the prism of art, culture, and the defense of plural identities, and warning against dominant paradigms, particularly those popularized by figures such as Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, is highly relevant in the face of the multiple threats facing the contemporary world. This effort is part of a crucial dialogue on intercultural relations supported by criticism of Western hegemony and by a proposal to redefine identities in the age of globalization.
Ultimately, I see his work as a tribute to humanism, art, science, literature, and poetry, as well as to the spirit of "confluentia," the confluence of the Eastern and Western worlds through the arts and sciences. Mohamed Zinelabidine invites us to reflect continuously on our identity, our history, and our ability to build a more just and harmonious world. Ultimately, the synthesis of his multifaceted and visionary work invites us on a demanding but fascinating exploration of the depths of the human spirit and cultural dynamics, tirelessly reminding us of the power of art and thought to forge a renewed humanism capable of reconciling legacies and inventing a common future based on mutual understanding and unconditional respect for each individual's uniqueness.
CREDITS Author: Mohamed Zinelabidine Presentation: Sandra Rey
French-Portuguese Translation: Sandra Rey Portuguese-English Translation: Daniela Kern |
Daniela Pinheiro Machado Kern.
Daniela Pinheiro Machado Kern is an associate professor at the Visual Arts Department at the Art Institute of UFRGS, Porto Alegre, Brazil. She is the leader of the CNPq research group Arte e Historiografia, and the author of Tradition in Parallax: the Newest South-Brazilian Contemporary Art and "Old Technologies” (EdJuc, 2012). She has translated into Portuguese, among other works, E. H. Gombrich’s The Sense of Order (Bookman, 2012). Art History research interests: Art Historiography and Feminist Theory of Art.
Sandra Rey lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Sandra REY is a Brazilian academic and artist living in Porto Alegre. She holds a PhD in Arts and Art Sciences from Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne University and is a visiting professor in the Doctoral Program in Visual Arts at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. She holds the ICESCO-UFRGS Chair in Art and Nature, Hybrid Processes. She is a member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and ABCA (Brazilian Association of Art Critics). Rooted in the relationships between art, nature, and culture, Sandra Rey's artistic production encompasses a variety of technologies and media, producing large-scale works, drawings, videos, installations, and artist's books, as well as the performative dimension of writing, based on a critical analysis of her own creative process and that of other artists, while exploring the historical and ideological structures of the contemporary era. Since 2004, she has been developing her artistic research as a researcher at the CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) in Brazil. She has translated fron French to Portuguese, among other works, “La technologie dans L’arte De la Photographie à la réalité virtuelle” (COUCHOT, Ed. UFRGS 2001), and “La part de l’Ombre de la derenière œuvre de Marcel Duchamp” (LANCRI, Ed. UFRGS, 2013).
« THE UNTHINKABLE IN THE PRESENT »
_ Mohamed ZINELABIDINE
The last few years have been very fruitful in terms of scientific output for Mohamed ZINELABIDINE. After stepping down as Minister of Cultural Affairs of the Republic of Tunisia in 2016-2020, he first published a collection of seven books, "Trialogue Francis FUKUYAMA, Mohamed ZINELABIDINE and Samuel HUNTINGTON" (Sotumédias, 2000-2022), in which the author looks back on thirty years of intellectual, academic, artistic, and political life. He then published "Correspondances André MALRAUX/Mohamed ZINELABIDINE" (Sotumédias, 2023), a treatise on comparative cultural policies. His ninth book focuses on "La Tunisianité au pluriversel" (Tunisianity in the Multiverse) (Sotumédias, April 2024), while his tenth is "Correspondances Edward SAÏD et Mohamed ZINELABIDINE" (Correspondence between Edward SAÏD and Mohamed ZINELABIDINE) (Sotumédias, April 2025).
Collected texts, lectures, and creations, notably at the Sorbonne University, Paris Vincennes, the Arab World Institute in Paris, Haus der Kuturen der Welt in Berlin, York University (Toronto, Canada), Duke University (North Carolina, USA), Georgetown University (Washington, USA), Taipei University (Taiwan), and other universities and cultural institutions in Italy, Malta, Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, South Korea, China, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Senegal, and Ivory Coast. His works have been prefaced by eminent scientific figures such as Françoise BRUNEL, Fathi TRIKI, Eliane CHIRON, François DE BERNARD, Benjamin BROU, Sanae GHOUATI, Gérard PELE, Abderrahman TENKOUL, Bouaza BENACHIR, and Edith LECOURT. In it, he develops anachronistic journeys dating back to 1992 and takes a stance on what he considers to be "The Unthought" through sociological, political, philosophical, poietic, generative, and coenesthetic approaches. A "Trivium" connecting "Impensé," "Hypothesis," and "Epître" serves as bridges and levers for research and creation around knowledge and the arts between East and West. An (im)thinker and artist, he unleashes his imagination and creativity to encounter the "cultures" that inspire him, believing in the shared dream of a "plural being," far from barbarism, extremism, and obscurantism in all its forms. That is what he is trying to combat, through the prevalence of "symbolic", "the emotional," "the imaginative," and "the affective." He thus responds to theories about the end of humanity, the end of history, and the clash of civilizations with a form of intersubjectivity and the spirit of "the unthought." Putting things in parentheses and hypotheses (hypothesis in Latin, borrowed from the Greek hupothesis) to verify the emotional link to aesthetic communication, as a place of transversality and recurrence between cultural opposition and slippage. This "unthought," or pure impression, imperceptible and unthinkable, without being absurd, as a moment of perception, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A certain way of being "the Unthinker" that is confronted with, collides with the unacceptable, the unthinkable, according to André Gide. Another way of encountering Santiago Espinosa, between the unthought, being, and appearing, to integrate the irrational and the non-philosophical in favor of a different "Reasoning", in a different way. This journey led the author to various universities in the Sorbonne (Sorbonne University Paris IV, Paris Descartes University-Sorbonne Paris V, Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University, and Paris Vincennes University), where he completed his doctoral and postdoctoral research. Nourished by words, marked by pluriversality, diversality, plurality, and multidisciplinarity, he brings together the Eastern and Western worlds, allowing them to speak, correspond, and converge. He does not understand the reaction, or even the attitude, of certain Western intellectuals towards his culture of origin and what it is accused of. The "Hypothesis Collection," works and books on "the unthought," is intended as an argument for a more shared humanism. Excessive globalisation, homogenisation, modelling, and commodification have tarnished the world of all kinds of interests, the high ground of the duty of states, and the multinationals associated with them. This is not a question of rejecting globalisation entirely. On the contrary, with supporting arguments, it offers a relative interpretation, revealing a meaning that shapes and builds its commitment to a humanistic "Being-Together" that is less oppressive, less hegemonic, more understanding, less explanatory, and more supportive of the women and men of a world that is today bewildered because it is increasingly uncertain. It thus makes "knowledge" and "humanities" the driving forces behind a strong commitment to change. The "LE MANDEL'ART Foundation" and "Les Salons de la Sorbonne", which Mohamed ZINELABIDINE initiated in 2012, are part of this shared ambition with academics, artists, and researchers who are driven by the same passion. They bear witness to this here, in these excerpts from prefaces written for the "Hypothesis Collection" and its journal on "The Unthought".
In her preface to "L'Impensé politique" (The Unthought Political), Eliane CHIRON, Professor Emeritus and Director of the Visual Arts Research Center at Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne University, wrote: "That Mohamed ZINELABIDINE, recently appointed Minister of Cultural Affairs of Tunisia, praised by UNESCO for his achievements, and also an artist, composer, doctor of musicology, and doctor of sociology, should question 'the unthought in politics' is no ordinary matter. It may seem disconcerting. For without respite, without resting on his laurels despite his wide-ranging achievements, he continues to ask questions. In the same vein, his thinking distances itself from political action, splitting without breaking the link between the meditative breath of an artist and the concrete actions of a minister... But the artist-researcher Mohamed ZINELABIDINE cannot be satisfied with this gap, carried by Huntington raising the banner of the "clash of civilizations". Hence the urgency, in his view, of "trying to understand the plural dimension of the social by favouring these commons to the imagination, emotion, affect, and the senses, beyond conventional thinking and categorical sciences". For "it is the art of humanizing politics and reconciling rather than seeking to deepen differences and rekindle resentment".
To introduce "The Sociological Unthought," Françoise Brunel, historian of revolutions and Vice President of Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne University, wrote: "... In the wake of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, evoked in the Prelude, Professor Mohamed ZINELABIDINE, artist and researcher, academic-cultural mediator and prominent figure in the field of culture in the high office of minister of the Tunisian Republic, seeks to break away from the sometimes rigid models that threaten sociologists, anthropologists and historians, choosing Signs as a range of possibilities. The "unthinker" author refers, however, to the rationalism of the "Enlightenment" in the subtitle "On the spirit of law" and, through Montesquieu, who was nevertheless unaware of Ibn Khaldoun, rediscovers the spirit of encyclopedism that has been described as one of the torches of the "Enlightenment" of Islam: laws, says Montesquieu, "in the broadest sense, are the necessary relationships that derive from the nature of things" (De l'Esprit des lois, I, 1). While the nine Epistles in this work dedicated tto "the reform of the status of women in Tunisia in the 20th century" are addressed to Tunisian society, they cannot leave other Mediterranean societies indifferent, so close yet so distant, despite the significance of a long shared past, due to their socio-cultural structures.
Philosopher Fathi TRIKI, holder of the UNESCO Chair in Philosophy for the Arab World, sought to contextualize "The Imbroglio of Cultures" in these terms: "To acknowledge the relevance of Mohamed ZINELABIDINE's book, Imbroglio culturel et malentendu historique (Cultural Imbroglio and Historical Misunderstanding), and by way of a preface, I would like to contribute to this wonderful reflection on the misunderstanding of the 'transfer' of arts and letters to the West through Arab civilization, which some Western intellectuals and historians try, in vain, to deny. In fact, this question concerns all areas of intelligence, which led Mohamed ZINELABIDINE to say that his ultimate goal is to "rethink literature and the arts through 'philosophical and theoretical unthought,' approaching the Greco-Arab legacy and the impact it has had on history". By "unthought", he means a strong intuition to replace fixed identity with a more dynamic category that is conducive to change, adaptation, and creation. My contribution to this excellent analysis, to this "Hermeneutics," which is difficult and not always conclusive since the issue remains open, consists of clarifying three key points. The first and most important highlights the introduction of this unthought philosophical concept in the West, the second proposes a way of defining the notion of the West, and the third concerns the concept of interculturality.
Professor François de Bernard, writer, philosopher, and president of GERM (Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherche sur les Mondialisations), writes in his preface to L’Impensé poïétique: “Mohamed ZINELABIDINE presents us with a formidable challenge in his "Impensé poïétique"! That of thinking, despite everything (philosophical disputes, historical controversies, political contradictions, academic paradigms, economic and disciplinary barriers): the unthought of the relationship to the work of art, its blind spot or blind corner. A blinding light that threatens to abolish all differences, to erase all diversity, and singularly that cultural diversity which, after an interminable tunnel, a culpable oblivion, a pathetic reduction, an emblematic marginalization, has recently returned: the Objective once again widely shared by the international community, the acknowledged vehicle for lasting peace, so eminent that it has been solemnly reaffirmed as an irrefutable subject of an inalienable human right. It is also a formidable challenge to link the question of destiny to that of poetics at a time when the most confused administrative and political slogans urge us ever more to focus exclusively on cultural practices, their dissemination, and their "accessibility," to the detriment of any reflection on the meaning, the future, or even the very destiny of these practices! The new Janus bifrons can then assert with conviction and clarity: "The artist-thinker seems to me, in reality, to be a non-thinker who gives meaning and nonsense to emptiness, silence, solitude, projection, and expectation, which he tries to redeploy and whose paradigms and elements he manages to reconfigure, making absence a presence in metalanguage".
Professor Sanae GHOUATI, president of the Coordination of Researchers on Maghreb and Comparative Literatures, Ibn Tofayl University, will situate the book Socialité et Zeitgeist, la fin d'une épistémè (Sociality and Zeitgeist, the End of an Episteme) in this excerpt from the preface: "Mohamed ZINELABIDINE reexamines the major concepts of our modernity by capturing its blind spots and disrupting its obscure areas. It is an epistemological reflection on questions relating to the shift from sociology to sociality, from modernity to postmodernity; the end of an era, the changing perception of the meaning of history, and the dawn of a new anarchism where it is difficult to name things, where language disintegrates and becomes opaque because the very things it used to name no longer exist. Isn't it said that "to name things wrongly is to add to the misery of the world"? The absence of meaning marks this tremor within speech, which causes the symbolic institution to vibrate, bringing it into deep resonance with lived experience. Didn't Jean Baudrillard predict the liquidation of all reference points in his oh-so-topical book, Simulacra and Simulation? The unreasonable and immoderate progress of artificial intelligence, in all its forms, has displaced reality in favor of a virtual world where an imagined society replaces the real one, which is often too gloomy because it is too realistic. Against the backdrop of these disappearances and faced with the degeneration of a sterile system, Mohamed ZINELABIDINE nevertheless aestheticizes a moment that remains human; as long as there is a gaze to nourish it, a word to shake it up, and an imagination to reinvent the infinity of universes: art and culture remain the only form of survival and sociability open to possible innovations from elsewhere. For the rest, he advocates a way of thinking far removed from established conventional wisdom and modern ready-made ideas, in short, a way of thinking capable of generating the "unthought" and improving human life in a society that is not yet corrupt... I would say that Mohamed ZINELABIDINE, the researcher, renowned academic, "scholar" in Weberian terms, sociologist, teacher, musicologist, musician, painter... is just as relevant, luminous and illuminating, clear and radiant as the politician, minister, man of action and manager that he is!"
Benjamin BROU, professor at Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne University, wrote the preface to the work and book "Thébaïde": "The work Thébaïde is about travel, wandering, and the correspondence of ideas, letters, and the arts, in the unthought of experience and creativity. Thébaïde is a journey of the senses, the arts, and knowledge through the itinerancy of our lives, which are so short, so real, and so full. It allows us to reflect on being, its passages, its place, and its disposition as a device for creation. Thébaïde offers anchor points and reference points for African intellectual and poetic thought. It highlights the high points of the African presence in literary creation and the appropriation of its history. This work is not a collection of texts or thoughts strung together. Thébaïde is a complex thought that cannot be reduced to a science or a philosophy; it is articulated around a way of thinking that allows intercommunication by operating self-productive loops in the sense of Edgar Morin. Far from being a παράπονο, Mohamed ZINELABIDINE's Thébaïde is both an elegy and a song of hope for Africa. It is the cry of hope for the arts and culture of Africa from its northern reaches".
In "Coruscation de Goethe," a summary of his previous writings, Gérard PELE, professor emeritus at Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne University, states: "In summarizing his works on his "trialogue" with Francis FUKUYAMA and Samuel HUNTINGTON, Mohamed ZINELABIDINE offers us a book entitled "L'Impensé au présent" (The Unthought in the Present). It should be noted from the outset that he does not claim to deliver the unthought "of" the present as if he held the truth, but merely offers us a reading based on his experience, from his university studies to his current responsibilities at ICESCO, including teaching, university management, and his role as Minister of Cultural Affairs in Tunisia. This experience is marked by a "bright spark," fleeting but constantly renewed, consisting of the incandescence of his thinking when brought into contact with the cultures of the various countries with which he has collaborated extensively. It was this exposure to diverse cultures that led him to examine the theses of Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, whose apparent opposition should not obscure their profound agreement on the supposed perfection of "liberal democracy" in its Western version. Indeed, Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington both supported their nation's bellicose adventures and, as a result, each in his way, envisioned the utopia of "universal peace" that would result...
« THE UNTHINKABLE, THE POSSIBLE AND THE PROBABLE »
_ Mohamed ZINELABIDINE
This will be his eighth book, and to introduce "Correspondances André Malraux/Mohamed ZINELABIDINE," Professor Abderrahman TENKOUL, a distinguished Moroccan academic and president of universities, writes: "When reading Mohamed ZINELABIDINE's works, one cannot help but believe that he is undoubtedly establishing himself as one of the most important thinkers of our time. For several years now, he has been passionately involved in a project of in-depth re-reading, tracking down the unspoken aspects of Western thought, its unthoughts, its aporias, and its contradictions. The project is innovative and wide-ranging. It goes even further than what has been proposed by world-renowned Arab intellectuals such as Mohamed Arkoun, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Edward Saïd, and Abdelwahab Meddeb. On the one hand, it aims to highlight the limitations of many currents of thought and epistemologies that were considered (in light of certain totemic figures who embody them) to be indispensable to understanding the realities of our time. On the other hand, it sets out to mark the path towards a different horizon of thought — one that looks to the future and its glimmers of hope. It does so with rigor, erudition, and a poignant critical sense that rejects any allegiance to any doctrine or dogma. What he favors instead is the search for a fruitful synergy between philosophy, art, imagination, thought, and culture. Perhaps without realizing it, his work seems to us to be initiating an unprecedented change in the cognitive and heuristic mechanisms at work in the humanities and social sciences. Thanks to this broadening of the paradigms of knowledge analysis, we certainly owe him a greater awareness of the challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. But we also owe him a more subtle and relevant understanding of our responsibilities and the initiatives to be taken to establish new values that can generate many enriching contributions for men, women, societies in general, and their relationship with the world. The book Correspondances André MALRAUX/Mohamed ZINELABIDINE addresses issues surrounding culture and cultural policy, intending to interpret the forms of human and social subjectivisation and concretisation that can be verified in the field of reality and achievement. Experienced but rarely thought about, despite its strong presence, culture continues to raise many questions about its essential nature, its modalities, its recurrence, and the meanings and attributes to be assigned to it. This book therefore attempts to liberate, at the heart of "The State of Culture and the Culture of the State," the justifications for a decision, the motives for an action, to raise awareness of the issues at stake, with a dual holistic and inclusive dimension, but also based on theoretical and conceptual understandings of the cultural phenomenon and comparative intellectual, ideological, human, and political dimensions. And that is the whole point of the project: it attempts to reconcile, in order to better bring together, what is scholarly and what becomes practical, even analytical.
So why André Malraux?
Why these "Correspondances sur la culture" (Correspondence on Culture)? What prerogatives? What is the argument? What missions? What were his reasons? What are the implications? What actions? What is the "state of culture"? What is the "culture of the state"? What are the nuances between a man of vision and a man of action?
The author writes:
"I won't dwell too much here on the choice of André Malraux, author of La Voie royale in 1930 and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1933 for La Condition humaine, the incredible journey of this intellectual whose ideas and theories are explained in Le Musée imaginaire, Les Voix du silence in 1951. Prior to that, he had extensive experience as scientific director and literary director at Simon Kra in 1920. A friend of Jean Cocteau and Paul Morand, among others, he was the artistic director of Editions du Sagittaire. Malraux published the works of Charles Baudelaire, the great symbolist poet and author of "Les Fleurs du mal" (The Flowers of Evil), and was director of the editions of the works of François Mauriac and André Gide, himself the author of "La tentation de l'Occident" (The Temptation of the West), published by Grasset in 1926. He was a man of letters and the arts who rubbed shoulders with creators for many years in his role as artistic director at Gallimard, where he was responsible for publishing and exhibitions of Far Eastern and contemporary art. The creation of the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs with him... André Malraux, who was at the origin of a redefinition of French culture and cultural policy, calls on us, his way of marking a symbolic territory of the fields of possibility. My lecture will take a comparative approach, therefore necessarily intersecting between cultural theories and practices in the world of ideas and realities. On a more contextual level, this book also includes part of the "Course on Cultural Policies and Development Strategies" that I had the great pleasure of teaching at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Tunis (April 9) for students of the "Master's in Heritage Sciences" program from 2006 to 2016 with professors Radhi DAGHFOUS, Abdelhamid FNINA, Hassen Annabi, and Khemais Taamallah. The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Tunis (April 9) can be proud of its place among the most prestigious in its scientific category in the Arab and African world. Founded in 1958, it is the successor to the 1945 School of Higher Studies, and illustrious Tunisian professors continue to contribute to its glory, such as Frantz FANON, a Martinican thinker and one of the founders of the Third World and anti-colonialist movement, who taught there from 1959 to 1960, while Michel Foucault taught there from 1966 to 1968, and it was in Sidi Bou Said that he wrote his famous work "The Archaeology of Knowledge".
According to the author, this work calls for the reading and interpretation necessary for the changes and transformations that have taken place since then, having myself been closely involved since 1986 with the thought, literature, and arts that represent the culture of my country and elsewhere in the world. This is what will be discussed here at different levels of action and appropriation. Not without omitting some references to the subsequent cultural area, in the sense of the concept in cultural anthropology, regarding the geographical region and the temporal sequence, it being established that the rigor of history requires that we overlook none of the constituent and constitutive elements of an episteme whose realities and achievements are to be examined. However, this book does not claim to be a historical argument, but I do claim to offer my reflections and experience, which I believe are worthy of interest, at the crossroads of completely anachronistic national, social, and political paradigms. This gives it a certain acuity. Only a comparative approach to cultural policies, both public and private, will make it possible to better define the issues at stake today. In attempting to rethink the new roles of culture, we are moving away from defining it as a general statement of intent or claiming to take a confused or diffuse approach. Rather, we are setting ourselves the goal of verifying, through ideas, concepts, and strategies, in addition to figures and indicators, the results of a conscious exercise.
And to present the book "La Tunisianité au pluriversel" (Tunisianity in the Multiverse), Françoise Brunel, historian and vice-president of Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne University, wrote: "As an artist and intellectual, Mohamed Zinelabidine does not shy away from complex fields of reflection, nor does he fear acting for a Res Publica whose humanist values he holds in the highest regard". The philosopher Fathi Triki, holder of the UNESCO Chair in Philosophy, added: "Throughout this book, Mohamed Zinelabidine reflects on Tunisian identity. He forcefully denounces the reaction that sought to reduce this identity to a single fixed expression. For him, Tunisianity is the desire to transcend".
It is clear that Mohamed Zinelabidine has taken a firm stance in recent years and is intellectually committed, throughout the world, to advocating for a new understanding of culture, at the heart of a hermeneutic capable of rethinking the world. This includes a pluriversal Tunisian identity as opposed to abstract Western universalism, which is centered and discriminatory in terms of culture, origin, and gender, creating divisions and pitting the East against the West. For him, "pluriversal Tunisian identity" sums up the synthesis of a world that is not very similar but highly complementary because it is constantly evolving. The author, therefore, places a major responsibility on Tunisian researchers, intellectuals, and artists in such a project to build a world more open to mutual assimilation, without any hierarchy of values or exclusion. However, it will suffice to (re)read history and take note of it. He draws on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, which already raises the question of presence in the world. A world that has sufficient meaning for humans to make it their own determination, projection, and aspiration. He elaborates on this idea with the sentence, "Become what you are! Thus spoke Nietzsche". It is supposedly this conjunction of the Greek lyric poet Pindar addressing Hiero, confronted with the Socratic imperative "know thyself," that Mohamed Zinelabidine takes up, not without omitting "what one is" and "who one is", according to Hannah Arendt. But concerning particularism and singularity, historical and geographical trajectories will give meaning, reason, and originality to the spirit of the individual. A Tunisian identity that he sees as irreducible, non-simplistic, and non-fixed, in tune with a history that is both shared and recomposed, between East and West. The result is a Tunisian identity that is not circumscribed, constantly in motion, always regenerated by the power of creative imagination. Against the "sameness" of Paul Ricœur, he returns to a dynamic and plural Tunisian identity, made up of "convergences" and "ipsity." Unfortunately, when representing cultures other than its own, a certain part of the West tends to invoke the least representative aspects of those cultures, against a backdrop of unappealing clichés. And as a pretext, it uses its successive colonizations, al forms of religious and identity-based conservatism, in the face of separatism and decivilization, often coming to the rescue.
Far from it, Mohamed Zinelabidine denounces both this euphemism and the reductive view it represents. He defends a historical spirit capable of rebounding against cultural subordination, but at the same time calls on Tunisian intellectuals to bow their heads and give voice to a more open and uninhibited Tunisian identity that is more audible and intelligible. For academic and professor Bouazza Benachir, Doctor of Letters and Human Sciences at Paris-1-Panthéon-Sorbonne University: "Reading this opus by Tunisian writer and thinker Mohamed Zinelabidine presupposes, through his Ante-scriptum, his seven Epistles, and his Post-scriptum, the dismantling of the leaden weight that weighs on the humanities and social sciences, and to break down the prejudices peddled by this weight in order to access the "unthought" or the indivisible, particularly in these sciences in their Maghreb or Arab-Muslim versions, by talking about them in different ways. This book hammers away philosophically, aesthetically, and socio-politically, in a broader way than is currently being done, because it opens up to and toward epistemic practices rooted in a creative geopolitics of knowledge, unburdened by the weight of blocked or imported heuristic horizons. One of Zinelabidine's ways of talking about this is the pluralization of Tunisia, thought of and experienced as "spirit," "Zeitgeist" (the spirit of the times), "presence in the world", etc., to be (re)thought. This "pluriversal" aspect, or this "spirit," or even this Tunisianity as a "presence in the world" does not seem to us to be addressed, on the level of ideas, by sub-Mediterranean intellectuality, for example, which is interested in philosophical anthropology, "decolonial" epistemology, aesthetics, and ethical politics, as perceived and mobilized by Mohamed Zinelabidine from a holistic, acentric perspective.
These works have been presented, analyzed, and praised at numerous universities around the world for their boldness, truthfulness, and unique resonance. They do not shy away from expressing complex, even labyrinthine, sometimes confusing, daedalic, muddled, tangled, and intertwined thoughts, shaped by the culture at their core, to provide a hermeneutic and maieutic analysis of the adjacent geopolitical, sociological, poetic, coenesthetic, generative, and philosophical contexts. For the author, the West must never forget that Tunisianity has left its mark on universal history, from the Carthages it gave to the world. One need only look at a map or appreciate "Dido and Aeneas," a masterpiece of Baroque music that bears indelible testimony to this. But before Carthage, thousands of years ago, there were the Aterians of Nefta, with 100,000 years of history, the Mousterian people and the Hermaion of El Guettar, dating back 40,000 years and currently on display at the Bardo National Museum, as well as the Capsians, leading up to Qart-Hadasht, the "New "New City" in Phoenician, whose name and ramifications are still present on many continents around the world.
As for the last book in the two collections, Correspondances Edward Saïd et Mohamed Zinelabidine, it concludes a scholarly endeavor that straddles genres, spanning more than thirty years of art, higher education, and research. Two book collections, Hypothesis, punctuated by Trialogue Francis Fukuyama/Mohamed Zinelabidine/Samuel Huntington", which, according to the author, already anticipates the future and, in the seven works featured, deals with an "unthought" concept explored in philosophical, sociological, poietic, political, generative, and coenesthetic terms to question what is misunderstood in Western-Arab relations and, more generally, the Western-Eastern relationship, both historical and civilizational. How can a convincing bridge be built when there are convictions that cannot be ignored? This book, the third in a series on the theme of "Trialogue André Malraux/Mohamed Zinelabidine/Edward Said," is a contribution to this debate. The author dedicates it to Geneviève Clancy and Manfred Kelkel.
French philosopher and poet Geneviève Clancy was a disciple of Gilles Deleuze. "I had the pleasure of knowing her," admits Mohamed Zinelabidine, "and of appreciating her works, which reveal her outstanding erudition and shining humanism. I also corresponded with Manfred Kelkel on the subject of mediation, on the bridge between the world of ideas and that of sensibilities. Manfred Kelkel was a student of Darius Milhaud, an admirer of Berlioz, passionate about Eastern civilizations and Arab culture, a renowned German music historian and composer, and author of reference works on Scriabin and esotericism, and he greatly helped to nurture a generation of Oriental scholars and researchers, supervising their theses at the Sorbonne. Geneviève Clancy, for her part, was the impartial president of a "Center for Research on Islamic Arts" at the University of Paris-Vincennes. Both simply embodied openness, intelligence, kindness, and curiosity about world cultures, without prejudice or presumption. They remind me of writers, artists, academics, and intellectuals who have done much to promote a peaceful, uninhibited East and West, respectful of each other, admirably constructive, remarkably peaceful, with nuanced and colorful qualities. I would mention René Passeron, Evelyne Andréani, Eliane Chiron, Costin Miereanu, Jacques Chailley, Edith Lecourt, Caroline Moricot, Françoise Brunel, François de Bernard, Gérard Pelé, Richard Conte, Jean-Paul Olive, Jean-Yves Bosseur, Jean-Marc Chouvel, Yvonne Flour, Serge Gut, Edith Wéber, Danièle Pistone, Nicolas Méeus, Louis Jambou, Joël Heuillon, Sylvie Bouissou, Jean Digne, Ludivine Allègue, Jean-Paul Minvielle, Jean-Claude Chabrier, Jean-Jacques Velly, Xavier Hasher, and many others I have forgotten... This book is a tribute to their scholarship, humility, and friendship over all these decades, during which we were bound by a genuine friendship and, even more, by a shared destiny in art, science, and the humanities. In doing so, this book undoubtedly recognizes their commitment to a world of plural imagination and recomposed unthought. Their ability to listen, to work together, and their attention to detail often captivated me and reminded me of the edifying work of many other serious Orientalists who have left their mark on Orientalism itself with their scholarship, from the works of Alexandre Christianowitsch, Jules Rouanet, Gaëtan Delphin, and Guin... This book, therefore, takes up hypotheses that I am keen to (re)examine, and which have already focused on philosophy, sociology, sociality, poetics, geopolitics...But for this work, it is the aesthetic imaginal that inhabits me and that I would so much like to draw upon, in the utterances of homophonic voices and poetic times, all components combined, in search of a latent, buried, and exalted and sublimating Orient".
According to the author: "From the outset, it seems inevitable that the transdisciplinary approach will prevail in intend for such as written, in their hermeneutic and paradigmatic transformations, for which it will forge the instrument, guide the meaning, and develop the symbol. But by revisiting this recurring question: "Who am I?", it was no longer futile to revisit these few citadels of the past, differently, through artistic and literary knowledge, that of an inextricable Orient, even if this approach had to suffer from the inevitable gap between the historical contexts and the vehicular elements of their respective languages. "So, who am I and what defines me?" Or should I define myself, I who have learned to combine extremes, to give coherence to the improbable, and to find meaning in confusion? As a Tunisian, my ancestors were Carthaginians, part of the Roman Africa of a Mare Nostrum at war. Archaeological remains bear witness to this great city, which, in the 7th century, became Kairouan, the capital of the Muslim West, then Mahdia, capital of the Fatimids in the 10th century, and Tunis, capital of the Hafsids from the 13th century onwards, not to mention all the influences, both Eastern and Western, that this land has undergone since the 16th century until the French protectorate in 1881. Starting from this constant question that preoccupies me, what defines an identity, or even a cultural personality, for an individual and a country, if not the use of history to define them? Arabness, for some, Islam, for others, the historical and pluralistic East, are themselves relative realities, so full of nuance and difference. What is striking about their questioning is, moreover, the course of a history that has revealed and concealed them, carried them and abandoned them, in addition to the underlying issue of transformative identity, which makes their reference to languages or religions of removable, constantly changing personalities rather than unshakeable, even fixed identities. These are questions that arise and impose themselves on the vagaries of historical times, between evolution, revolution, and involution. Arabness, Islam, and the plurality of the East in the face of Westernism are paradigms that exist, indeed, in the eyes of those who represent them in this way, in their own way, at the risk of a real or supposed misunderstanding of the metalanguage, with its ambiguous and misguided meanings, who would like to attach names, emblems, exaggerations, or acts of violence around all kinds of obscurantism, extremism, fatalism, fanaticism, and backwardness, unable to embrace, even by trial or determination, an evolving Western world of a certain rationality, modernity, postmodernity, or hypermodernity, in an irreversible, irreducible, and unsinkable way. I do not intend here to obscure these realities, which are sometimes verifiable or deliberately exaggerated, in the course of a history in reverse, but even if they are justifiable, relatively or partially, is it conceivable that we should treat them as certainties and assertions? This book is intended to look elsewhere, to allow encyclopedic knowledge of the East and Orientalism to resonate, not without causing a stir, at the source of the confluence and interaction between Orientalism and Westernism, despite a certain quid pro quo that has often characterized the understanding of these worlds under the yoke of geopolitics. At the same time, what an inextricable and perilous challenge it is to try to untangle them, as they are often in conflict, and to choose, to do so, to embark on a journey through Eastern literature and arts from an Orientalist perspective to find meaning in existence and interpretation! This book, which deals with Orientalism and the Orient in a more general historical context, chooses to go to the crossroads of a silence buried in the characters of an analytical philosophy enamored with the unthinkable. And as a benchmark, a plural East-West, under its imaginative and symbolic banner, ever since. However, this book is no less an attempt to answer these questions, through historical facts, including the views of Orientalists, to counteract unfair discrepancies of conservatism and hermeticism, on all sides, regarding the practice of the arts and the preponderance of their theoretical and conceptual foundations in societies that have obscured or disregarded them. And however tempting it may be to lose one's way, it seems inevitable that we should take up the extraordinary challenge of discovering, in this ancient culture, what some try to describe as retrograde, when studies and research have approached it, at the sources of an interdisciplinary encyclopedism of rare substance and beauty, in its psychological and philosophical textual essence, and its intertwined historical labyrinths, interferences, and convergences".
This Greek concept of μουσική [mousikē] can be linked to λογoς, logos, reason, knowledge, before the ancient world and Pythagoras, from hedonism to educational ideals, the myths surrounding the lyre and the flute, and even, in part, certain elements of an approach to an imaginal and orientalist Orient. The author returns here to memory to assert the following: "It is necessary to affirm, on this subject, the contradiction of the historical facts reported to us, and that is the whole point of venturing into it. How could this art form have managed to take hold in a few citadels, one of which would largely determine the conquest of the others, through the Pythagoreans and harmony, Damon of Athens and ethics, Plato, his quadrivium, and his philosophy? This is a way of urging us to reflect on medieval Christianity and Neoplatonism, Saint Augustine and "la scientia bene modulandi", "la musica mundana", then the theorists of the Carolingian Renaissance, the development of pedagogy, without omitting theory and polyphony. His philosophy raises a real paradox, no doubt about it, and the debate on new approaches to secular theory. Especially since this evolution of forms did not spare this art any more than its corollary expressions. We will find this again later, in the Renaissance, with humanism and the first struggles against polyphony. The reformer, from his earliest incarnations, was to be the catalyst for an artistic and conceptual divide, as we can also see in Zarlino and the new language, a different rationality of the work, and its relationship with speech. Galilei and the theory of the passions led to the Baroque and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Cartesian rationalism represented by Leibniz, reconciling sensitivity and reason, the rationalist understanding of Jean-Philippe Rameau, and the sentimentality of the heart in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in addition to Diderot and the animal cry. Comparatively speaking, if we were to ask what paradigm contributed to the origins of Romanticism and its romantic poets, would we arrive at Hegel and the identity between subject and object, Schopenhauer, the unconscious, and sound art as a certain image of the world, leading to tragedy in the inverted interface between Wagner and Nietzsche? Later, in the analysis of the Positivism era, Hanslick defined beauty, leading to the aesthetic rupture and the crisis of language in the 20th century, Schönberg and dodecaphonism, avant-garde poetics, and irrationalism, in the approach understood by Enrico Fubini. However tempting it may be to explain these major artistic, philosophical, and aesthetic trends, they are in reality only the driving ideas behind a much longer and more labyrinthine journey, as rich as it is hypothetical...
However, when comparing these movements of the Western mind and genius, it must be admitted that the same cannot be said for the Arab and Muslim world since the 15th century and the fall of Granada in 1492, even though it represented a cultural revolution in its glorious age, its golden age, from the 8th to the 15th centuries. This is enough to make me resolve to accept that this work truly vacillates between genres, to the point of resorting, at the same time, to what has always haunted me: the succession and rupture of history, progress and regret, evolution and involution, mutations and changes, both cultural and artistic. Beyond the problem of language lies the question of its scientific scope, its recognition, and its status. It seems inevitable, until now, and we are forced to believe that despite its analytical, historical, humanistic, systemic, organological, philosophical, and linguistic aspects, Arab culture, like Western culture, cannot escape the observation made by Régine Pietra: "...Music has been understood sometimes as a science related to mathematics, numbers, combinatorics, and therefore the intelligible, and sometimes as an art, a means of expressing the senses. These two major themes run through the entire history of music, and we see one or the other predominate without, however, being mutually exclusive. In other words, music is sometimes conceived as a formal art, an arrangement that appeals to the intellect, whether it reproduces a mathematical order that is that of the cosmos — as in ancient philosophy and Pythagoras in particular, the first philosopher to speak of music — or in harmony with a Nature that is mathematical harmony, as in the case of a theoretical musician such as Rameau in the 18th century, Jean-Philippe Rameau, or finally that it obeys strict rules of formal construction, as in the case of Édouard Hanslick. At other times, on the contrary, it is conceived as an expressive art, which refers to feelings, at the same time capable of arousing violent passions, or calm them, lead to intoxication or soften morals: music is first and foremost something that touches the heart, and melody then prevails over harmony: echoes of this position can be found in Plato, but above all in Rousseau, Rameau's declared opponent; in Nietzsche too, according to her. She thus concurs with Enrico Fubini in his book Les philosophes et la musique:
"Of all the arts, it is also the one that contains the most diverse aspects, that raises the most questions, presenting itself somewhat like a prism where the forms glimpsed differ radically depending on one's position. In fact, over the course of time, philosophers have not been the only ones to succumb to its attraction. Since ancient Greece, all categories of intellectuals have shown an interest in the musical universe. Politicians, philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, writers, poets, playwrights, mystics, and educators have left us their reflections on this art of sound, precisely because they found in it a complex set of diverse elements whose point of unity and convergence, according to them, lay in the world of sound."
Thus, among the moments that have marked history, and despite different historical and geographical contexts, Mohamed Zinelabidine continues, Arabic music and its musicology will invariably draw on the history of civilizational confluences, including Greek mythology, which celebrated Orpheus and his lyre, inspirers of works by Monteverdi, Rossi, Gluck, Darius Milhaud, Stravinsky, not to mention Amphion. A strong influence from these ancient ideas permeated Arabic philosophical writings, helping to regenerate the meaning of the arts, literature, and thought around music".
And this brings me to Edward Said, writes the author, his philosophical exclamations, his critiques of Orientalism, and his fervor for music, since the idea running through my hypotheses is to question this Greek legacy, its similarities and differences, its convergences and divergences, its influences and confluences, in light of the Eastern culture inspired by Arabism and Islamic civilization since the 7th century. This is true of this book, even if it raises some paradoxes, as a manifesto for a common understanding, attempting to find in the history of humanity and communities reconstituted links rather than proven ruptures. I would like it to become a eulogia, from the Greek, a eulogy to humanism, art, science, literature, and sound poetry, as sublimated by music and musicians. I would like this work to bring together meanings born of philosophical expressions, chance, and will, and to pay eulogia to the spirit of confluentia, in Latin, an ancient confluence for this plural Orient, as it was from the 13th century onwards. A eulogia that has made "Being" a philosophical letter, from the ancient Greek φιλοσοφία, meaning φιλεῖν and to love, sophia σοφία, meaning wisdom and knowledge. A philosophy not without its aesthetic letter, from the Greek αίσθησιs, aisthesis, which means beauty and sensation. And a poetics, ποίησις poíēsis, genesis and creation. All these ports were brought together and expressed through the Eastern and Western worlds, united since then in the arts, the Greco-Arabic sciences, and Peripateticism. This work must have a single soul to move towards this great goal, which is the recognition of what binds and unites human beings, starting from their uniqueness, whether linguistic, religious, or cultural. A single soul to move towards this great goal, which is the denunciation of all cultural discrimination and the abusive and deliberate omission of unique histories, he insists.
