Good evening and welcome to these seven of the seven. Seminar in our series on Contemporary Arab Studies. It's a great pleasure to see so many of you back. And given our speaker tonight and her subject, no surprise. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab currently holds the associate professorship of Philosophy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar. She's currently chair of the Philosophy Program.
Her research interests in modern and contemporary history of Earth and culture and her present work in progress is on Arab identity between philosophy and art writing a different contemporary Arab intellectual history. She's also the elected chair of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences Board of Trustees.
She has published the works of reference for many of those who would approach contemporary thought her 2010 book, Contemporary Arab Thought, Cultural Critique and Comparative Perspective and the 2019 Enlightenment.
On the Eve of Revolution, the Egyptian and Syrian Debates, both published by Columbia University University Press and of course, both translated into Arabic to ensure that she is addressing not just the English viewing audience, but critically, those most directly affected by questions of contemporary Arab thought. There is just great pleasure to have you with us and to be our second speaker from the Doha Institute in this terms, etc. on.
We are all very excited to hear exactly what you have to tell us about what the Arab uprisings have done to contemporary Arab. Please, a warm welcome. Welcome. Very much for the invitation. I'm very happy to be here and to share with you some thoughts on, uh, writing the history of contemporary art forms. So I wrote a book called Contemporary Art of Sorts, uh, some 13 years ago. It came out in 2000, nine, late 2000, nine, 2010, and Columbia University Press.
And I agreed to produce a second edition. And the agreement was that I write introduction and new introduction to it. And this is what I'm going to share with you, some reflections on having written that book and what came after that. So why did I write this book? I'm not a historian. I'm not a scholar of Middle East studies. I know nothing. I knew nothing about all of that.
I was trained in Western philosophy and as a good third world girl, I didn't want to know anything about anything Arabic, anything Muslim, anything Middle Eastern, anything that has to do with the Third World. I only want to know about successful, beautiful Europe and fascinated by Western philosophy. So I did that and wrote a dissertation on the theory of meaning in the social sciences. It seems like, you know, in a previous life.
And then I went back to teach at the American University of Beirut, and not much as I was interested in philosophy. I was interested in Europe. How come, you know, this smash thing happens? Democracy. Arts. Intelligent writings. Beautiful literature. And it was to realise that, especially in philosophy, you talking about discipline, where ideas are supposed to be detached from reality, write abstract quotations, and so you don't make.
It's not easy to make the connection between philosophy, writings and anything mundane, such as history or.
It took me a while. You know, the philosophers are the last ones to realise some basic things, that there was a connection between philosophical debates and historical realities, and that much of Western European philosophy was connected to European history, that some of the big dramas that had happened in Europe had produced or had been the occasion for reflections, philosophical reflections on a number of things which constitute then what we call modern Western philosophy.
And then I started becoming envious of sure, not for all the other reasons, but also that here people have the luxury of discussing things that happened to let you know you you go through a war and then you had writers and then you have even philosophers who tried to make sense of these problems or dramas that happened to people. What were who were the people who wrote about our problems?
I had no idea because our school system and even the university doesn't prepare, doesn't tell us anything in the sense that modern intellectual production is completely absent from our curricula. So I was a good girl and a good student, and I went to school in a good school and learned a lot of things, but nothing about the debates. So I reached a point, like many typical third world girls and boys. At some point I started becoming interested in, okay, so what are our debates?
Who writes about problems that are quite dramatic in our lives? Nobody knew. Nobody had to go around and beg people. Just what? Who would I beat? There was only one course I took at your B on my undergraduate, which was Olympics 245. I still remember the course number and types of it was basically, even though I taught it and it was basically on other tyrannies, the liberal thought that was the thread, the, the, the end of the thread.
I spent and I went around saying, okay, so, so who writes, What are the other books? And it took me a journey, some ten or 15 years to collect, to start reading, to discover names too. And this is how I produced my first. I wrote it for myself and for any other little girl who would one day perhaps be interested to find out who speaks about our own problems. And. I think it has to do, of course, with what is worth knowing, with what is worth teaching.
And what I want to find out in my investigative exploration was not the ones who would immediately, you know, find. The unused school. I was not interested in ideology. I didn't want to know what the Arab ideologists were saying, nor what the Islamists were saying. I thought there must be some intelligent people around them, people who ask questions, who put in question some of the belief, some of these, you know, ideologies that were hammered around.
And so I wrote a book about critique in contemporary Arab thought, critique in religious thinking, in the cultural crisis, cultural critique. That was the main topic that interested me. Now, when I look back, the more I think about that book or the more I find it very frustrating and and limited. Because what I did sometimes when I get angry or what I get frustrated about myself and about this field, I say, What did I do? This guy said, This other guy said that. No, we needed to know.
You know who said what. It was useful. But one day I told I myself, It's been a few years. I tell myself, this cannot be the whole story. And you cannot claim that you have an understanding of modern and especially contemporary Arab thought without knowing something about who the publishers were, what were the journals, how were they functioning? Who was funding them? In other words, a social history of all the actors that eventually produced what we call contemporary Arab thought.
So please do social history. So there's no no thanks to you. There is work coming out and it's very exciting. About journals, about publishers, about personalities, about money, and who actually these institutions established, I think who is who was established thinker. How this how does this happen that suddenly one writer, all men in that period become these you know, the web this say will stay what it is and what the crisis is and what the important themes are.
So I think the social history is extremely important to remove a little bit the naturalness of this contemporary thought in the sense that it looks as if you have abs, then you definitely have these two things. No, maybe it was a constellation of circumstantial factors that led to certain themes being more prominent than others.
I'm not saying that it's all circumstantial. Some of the issues were historically there to be to be dealt with, but also to remove some of the determinism or the whether, you know, Arabs wouldn't want to talk about these things. Muslims had to raise these issues. I'm not sure. So this is why I was also very interested in the comparative approach.
So there was a section in my book where I compared it with these debates, especially issues of cultural critique, cultural crises, with debates going on in Africa and Latin America. I was very excited about that for sure, because I learned a lot by doing that, by seeing, I think for me, imagine me discovering suddenly that there are other people who are not Arabs, who are not Muslims, who are not wars, and it is questions about authenticity.
Who? So this means that it's not it's not us who are fatally connected or destined to raise these questions. It was quite an eye opener for that section of the book that attracted much attention. But I still think that comparison is useful. At some moments I got interested in what I call the post Ottoman competitive framework Greeks, Turks and others. We were all part of the Ottoman Empire and, you know, we ended very badly with a bad divorce.
So everybody went their way without wanting to know anything about the others, you know, language barriers, but also sort of, you know, the Greeks didn't want to do anything with the Turks. The Arabs were too busy and the Turks to be interested in. And I think that are such exciting comparisons that we've done the relation to the West, to modernity, to tradition.
I didn't have the chance to pursue that. But lately I've been trying to imagine a comparative study of contemporary thought between Iran, Turkey and then I think Doha that I am is well positioned to do that. And I just got the green light to go ahead with a first meeting in which I would be interested. We know nothing about contemporary debates in Turkey. What are the issues? How are they approached? What are the challenges in the writing?
That is to say about, you know, and we know nothing about. And yet I think it would be quite exciting to talk, to explore neighbouring challenges compared to others. No. It's not only that we don't have these competitive frameworks. It's not only that we don't have a social history. It's also that this field called intellectual history is quite isolated. You know, we we read books. We say, this guy said that better than that.
And yet there are fields next to us that are flourishing in a wonderful way. And it's not the same time if we take the first decades thinking of the two without the second billion of the fields of conscious studies with thought, it's somebody led to me and others exploring. Walter Armbruster, if you identify your set from this, four years of exciting work has been coming out. But the guys who work in indoor are more serious, right?
Don't don't know much about it. And the field that excites me a lot is artistry at a contemporary, modern and contemporary artist. That is fantastic work coming up. It's the work of another show, but you have a whole range of works that have emerged, and I think we would benefit a lot from looking at what they're doing. And most interesting particularly is to see how some against some some of the debates in contemporary schools are dealt with by the artists.
For instance, modernity. What should modernity look like? Oh, look, of writing in this series is kind of right. But I ought to start with this. Also this search for a thought on one's own philosophy of one's own. What is Arab philosophy? Well, I've discovered in doing I have been also wondering what is a part of both our own. Again, my sense is that artists were as interesting, as productive, as creative, if not more. I have a hypothesis, perhaps the bias.
My sense is that artists have been more intelligent, more more free from insight, more genuine. But these are my lapses in dealing with these. So I think we guys who do the serious people serious books. Hands there next to us, a fantastic field from which we can compare and see how these issues have been dealt with, not only because it's it could be something new, a wider kind of perspective, but also it would get us out of global centrism.
I think in contemporary thought there is this idea that your voice is important and that these men write these books and tell you what it is. It's a very, very male dominant field, a very masculine kind of enunciation of what is and what should be equality. When you look at autistic people, it's all women. A lot of women are more marginal when they go ahead and paint something. How not important next to. When I write a book about a I had a breezy day series and if you paint, so who cares?
So I think this is fantastic luck that our text is larger, that it's not, you know, easily taken forward and taken to be serious. It's such a fertile place and to put in quotes to provincialism logos. I think export would benefit a lot from that. To widen the scope, the definition of thought. Others also think, artists think, and it would give you another understanding of thought, which would be quite useful, I think. Oh, I come to the Arab people. It's. So this was what I called contemporary.
It is called contemporary out of sorts, say from frozen meat from the 50 mid 20th century to the eve of the divorce. Okay, so what, what are the other prominent topics? Um, a lot. This is what I have in my syllabus. I teach in. Uh, what is the is the philosophy like debates? What is the Latin American philosophy? What is African philosophy? So others also raise questions. What is specificity and universality in especially philosophical thinking?
Um, a lot written, a lot debated around modernity, authenticity, tradition. How do we modernise? Do we need to modernise modernity and the West's tradition and the past? All of this a lot of preoccupation, these topics religion, religious renewal, exegesis, sermonising, secularism, but a lot of debate on that critique, critique of Marxist critique of tradition.
We need very loud debates in the sense that a lot of right in terms of quantitative, the a lot of stuff produce a lot of articles and interviews and books and and and conferences and. And then come these massive reports. And none of this preoccupies people. I didn't see anybody go out in the streets of Cairo or or Beirut or and say, no, we need authenticity. This cannot go on like this. We absolutely need. I don't know what. None of that nobody cares about.
I think the big thing for me about the divorce is that you have all of this talk, intellectual talk in one place and people's preoccupation in a different place. So when one says contemporary Arab thought, who sports? Is it those few men who are, you know, filling the space with their voices in their writings? Is it the academics the most? Is it my students? I wake up and say, My God, what's happening to authenticity?
So this this very name of of adult sort who sought again, because we don't have social history, we because we don't have sociology of knowledge, we don't know. We know that there are these books and there are authors and. So the revolt against should or couldn't raise the question. So to what extent is there a connection between these intellectual debates and people and people's priorities, people's concerns? And there were some comments, some some pieces written on the disconnect.
And I think this is something that was revealed by the Eagles that is somewhere a disconnect between a lot of this intellectual production and the concerns of people. People talked about asked for dignity, for freedom, for social justice. Their concerns were political, not cultural, in that in the way it was treated in those political writings. The politics and culture in this. And when I look back at this modern intellectual history, it seems to me that there are two threads that compute.
Used to explain phenomena, the cultural threat and the political effects. I mean, by that. One approach that says, you know, things are not going well for us because we have a problem in our culture. And the other approach to say, no, our primary problem is put it. And it's interesting to see from the Times mid-19th century and today, when does the one take precedence over the other? When there is a political crisis, There's a lot of talk about culture.
But I think that holds true. One can find voices who consistently said, Look, our problem is primarily political. And I like to start always with Bob Dole, who, you know, the famous question of the month. Why did the others progress? Why do we lag behind? And what is the secret of progress or the well being? What makes the well-being of a society and how we are?
Chef in his mid twenties visiting Paris and in his famous text in his memoirs, he says, The passage that I quote with great pleasure the guy did said, You know, they are French, they are different Greece, they are Christian. No, he said, the reason why I'm not that's not a prediction. There is a passage I like to quote where he says the reason why they are doing better is that they have political justice and by political justice is holding rulers accountable. But a set of laws.
And I sort of recognise every now and then people who say what we lack installed rulers accountable, we lack democracy and this is our problem. Problem. And here I want to add, I was trying to be nasty about this Kentucky out of thought. They're not all of us. It's it's a it's a very it's a very odd landscape. It's a mistake to think that, you know, you take these big guys and this is a thought. I think there are different views that are minority reports, which have always interested me.
And I think when you pay attention to them, then there has always been and increasingly so when you reach the nineties, by the end of my book and my book was published 2010th December 2010 was the Tunisian Revolution. I didn't, of course, think at all that something like that was was in the making. But the moves, I mean, it was one of just the sense of helplessness and utter despair. That was on the eve of the revolts and the subject.
I mean, those minority reports were at times not that the only minority. The complaint was about the post-independence state, that the state was the major problem, that the reason why were such misery, economic control and everything. It's because of the failure of the state. And indeed, when people went out on the streets, it was the state and the failure of the state, the brutality of the state that was.
Attacked more than anything. It's. So I think one has to have I have to have a differentiated vision of this, what we call the the Arab intellectual scene, the trade news, very different views. And it's interesting to compare them again, as so many, you would do a great job of social historians. I studied lately as the intellect of the Enlightenment debates. My last book, and I want to take this as an example of the different medias. So they're off in the nineties for some reason.
There was a lot of talk about enlightenment. But two different in two different settings in the academic scholarly serious settings around much of it around this Centre for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut, big conferences, publications, German issues on enlightenment. And then you had the not scholarly set of debates by people commenting on what was happening in those times in the nineties, in Cairo and in Damascus. And it's interesting to compare these sets of debates in the scholarly one.
The issue is and it's predictable, it becomes for me, like pressing the button and saying enlightenment. But yes, we like to invent is a Western legacy and well, yes, it is. Western, not Western can be adopted like this. We have enlightenment in our own tradition. How can we go back to it? How does it compare? Yes, we are with the Enlightenment against the West, but all of that and it turns you. It's predictable. We started not to a country because it's so predictable.
On the other hand, you have a whole set of debates where if the West is completely absent, nobody talks about the West. There is no talk of the West. That idea is taken from the Enlightenment, taken for granted, public reason, freedom and the topic that people use. The term that we enlightened the topic of talk about, you know, state brutality, police brutality, corruption, moral corruption, serial lack of democracy, all of that.
So I tell myself how interesting in what case it's all centred on identity for us and them and the Enlightenment, the West and we and in the other set, there's not a lot more time. Who cares about the West? And you have you are in Syria. You are in Damascus. And when you speak about me, it's about reconstructing the human being. But reinstating freedom. The reason. The right to to to use reason publicly to address public affairs. So identity is not identity centred people.
There are not worries about identity, nor does the West come into the picture at all. And this. Takes me to the business of the century in history. I have been attending conferences, think decent room artistry, decent dream enlightenment. I was invited to a conference on that. It's nice. It's nice that the Western nerds now realise know the other people on the planet. So we can't write the history of enlightenment without thinking what happened in Japan.
Please come and tell us. And we are open and diverse. Nice. But I tell myself. Then they [INAUDIBLE] to be to that has taken place, at least in the case. My sense.
Is that the weight of problems is so big that you don't have time to worry about how a French guy is writing the history of enlightenment without including This is really not about violence and that you have such disasters on your hands that you are concerned with discussing dictatorship, torture, and of course you're thinking freedom, you're thinking of democracy, you're thinking reason. So the weight of problems does not allow you.
You don't have the luxury you want the the so it's in my said there is a disempowering that has de facto taking place in this intellectual history. And now it gets stronger and stronger and I'm coming close to the end, the volts. Okay, so big disconnect. And I think the big worry I am sure the people are interested in that is a call to really connect ideas with know this blah blah about a reason and. It's no longer really. That ludi has time for that.
That's just my age and not the social studies who should really believe what I'm saying. But these are my impressions. So the disconnect? That's one issue. The other one is really this business of Western, not Western descent to not be centric and focus, not what we have in front of us is a disaster area. We, the inhabitants of the region.
So imagine you're sitting on a drone or watching a drone film, taking you from Beirut to Damascus to other people to Mosul, to Baghdad, to to some, to Sudan, to Egypt, to Libya, to this is the reality. We this is our area. It's a disaster area in the most non metaphorical sense of the term. And the question is then how do you how do you make sense of this?
Yeah. And if if making sense is an activity of thinking is thinking is producing meaning and making sense in the face of so much destruction and unspeakable pain, what sort what are you going to say? What do you write? What concepts will help you make sense of Syria? I think a lot of thought is gone from people who are inclined to think to to use concepts and to write. Are faced with this. It's quite something. How do you make sense of the atrocities, this utter destruction?
And what what would thinking look like? And you all know this famous. Every time human beings had reached such situations, they have wondered, are there words to explain what's happened or to express what's happened? I don't know. And I think that's what is on the menu nowadays. And what would a critique look like today? In the disaster area is, I think, the primary cost. At the meeting of the Arab Social Council for the Social Sciences. We had the bi annual meeting in May.
And we suggested. I suggest that we host yes in her stylish. A Syrian survivor. 16 years of war out of jail. Is refugee now in Berlin? His wife was kidnapped by the Islamists in winter. No news about her. His brother in a. Kidnapped by the Islamists. Local news of up to this man continues producing and trying to make sense of what has happened to him and to the people around him. And like the last year or the 21, I think he published a book called The Horrible.
And it's a representation and it's an exercise in trying to make sense and reflect on what any composing the human would. Looks like. And so we invited them to speak about it. And he gave us a brilliant piece. Uh, which we published. A longer version will be published next year and briefly is ideal is the following that normally up to now when you send critique. You meant how to how to not get into of illusions.
Right. That critique is how to discern between the false and the true, between illusions and reality. And he said, Nowadays my job critique aims and makes you believe that even because it has become so surreal or unreal or beyond human understanding that the job of critique today is to make us believe what happens. I think that's quite an interesting turn. End to end. The spy is still more than chapters. Not even to the region. Gaza.
I still cannot make much sense of this, but I will just report that among colleagues, among friends, when we talk about Gaza nowadays, many of us say this is it. Something has ended of that our. Now what is it that counts? And we try I mean, trying to speak with with friends and colleagues about what is it that took us. Only We always knew that the West had double standards, and we always knew that our lives didn't matter, that the West has dropped them, killed many for centuries.
So what is the what is new about that? But for some reason that I still cannot understand that and the last week, because I think we haven't really comprehended it yet, then it's something that that needed this time that is very different from all other types that really are the realisation that dreams don't matter. That we're not people. And the Swiss we knew is this and that. The Palestinian governance was, of course, something. But there is something about this chapter that made it.
Final. It's the final collapse, I think, of twisting more of an intellectual credibility and legitimacy. We will see our was friends, you know, we will see what the consequences this will be for us. I worry only about myself and my people. Of course, the universal ideas or the much of the cultural production and that we stay but something. Social forum of the West that is unprecedented in our perception. Of course, the West has done much. A lot of horrible chapters can be recalled.
But today and now in Gaza, something. Qualitative. Very negative. We need our lives. We can be killed. It's quite a realisation and I think I look forward to an have to do with that. Probably artists will do a better job. But so. This isn't. Thank you. Elizabeth, thank you for sharing your reflections of how you have come to approach a subject that you didn't begin with and where it's taken you. And I have to confess that I did not see the darkness to which it would lead.
By the time you reflect on the meaning of Gaza and you are the first person from the Arab world to come to speak to our audience about the meaning of Gaza, for those in the region and how it counts to the region. And I'm sure that there's going to be questions that will come from the audience. They will ask you to elaborate on the points that you made.
In closing, I'm going to start somewhere else and take you back to your work on contemporary Arab thought, because as you were speaking, the thing that struck me is you invoked Albert Ronay hollowed in these holes and the exercise of Arabic thought in the liberal age. Has been influential is building a canon of thinkers. And when everyone talks about reassessing. Thought for any community, it doesn't feel very far from the project of establishing a canon.
And yet in your talk you mentioned very few names. And so I'd like to ask as a first question, as you look at both what you wrote in contemporary Arab thought and then as you think about the challenge of contemporary Arab thought after 2011, in light of the disconnect that you've identified between the issues that motivate people to action and the debates that thinkers were having, that disconnect,
you clearly were saying, was shaping contemporary Arab thought or challenging Arab thought in ways that were different before and after 2011. So could you perhaps give us a sense of are there key thinkers before 2011 and and how that canon might have changed as a result? Or are you going to eschew the canon as an approach altogether the way you did in your lecture tonight? I was never interested in one person, and I never really worked on one particular thinker.
I'm much more actually. What I wanted is a sense of a sense of what is thought and written. And I want eavesdrop. I wanted to hear what these people around me were talking about. So for me, it was the topics that were raised, how they were raised, how they were approached, who how they answered one another. That was, for me, a very interesting and I still, you know, try to pay attention and see how you're making in what is at the end of the day, what is intellectual history for me.
I mean, what is interesting for me in it is how people are making sense of what is happening to them. And sometimes I feel there are aberrations. You know, they go on on on on issues that perhaps isn't true. And here, you know, as social historian, I would like so much to and to shed light on who becomes an important thinker. And of course, one of the guys I dislike profoundly is Zebedee.
So let me take him to the Centre for Unity Studies used to boast that, you know, they sell 30% or I know how many percent of their sales come from this selling books and any book that he would produce, you know, every six months or something would sell wonderfully. And I used to religiously buy all these books. Good. So my question is, somebody living in this society in which library is a prominent figure, I want to know.
Prominent in what sense is is what he the thought that is producing is my thought in the sense that these are really the issues that concern me. So in other words, because these names had become such prominent names which imposed themselves as the Arab thinkers, I feel like saying you, Habib, who who may who in what sense are you the Arab thinker or and to look at the at the backstage and to look at the fabrication of power and intellectual power and intellectual authority?
How does that work? I would be fascinating to. But I'm not answering your question. Well, you kind of are. It's you're reinforcing the point that you are resisting the idea of creating canonical thinkers. And you certainly do want to take male canonical thinkers who have a big idea about logos to share with you. Then we guys do that. So I know you're rejecting that, but they clearly look very pretty this way.
If you wish to approach thought, it's textual. Yeah, I mean, thought may be exchanged in words, but it can't be shared too widely that way. Mean broadcast media will allow you to ephemeral share thought. But if you want to share enduring thought, it's textual. Does a painter think? Yes. Yes. Hold on. I'm the one asking the questions. Right. You're the one who gave the talk. I ask the questions. We have a social contract. Yes. Pages Think we have. Natasha, I'm going to call it.
You know what things I want. So here we will accept that painters think and. Okay, we can say then that the sculpture, the canvas is a text. But I'm going to keep pressing you here until I get a sense of the ways in which Arab thought is something that can be examined between different people in a critical way and they can dispute their understandings. I'm going to privilege the textual and you're going to extend it to the artistic. Yes, I accept that. But where do we go with that?
But wait a minute. You said Canonising Albert Hourani for me, painted a landscape, he said. These are the debates going on. And there were these people writing these books and these were the ideas. This guy said that he offered me a sense of what was being debated. It can be, I am sure it was revised and fine, but that I don't look at Albert Hourani as somebody who canonised figures. He did that. Dr. Boustany hated De la Verney.
I would abdulrasheed Derrida the how said history calls his chapters out to these people. I mean, he does. Yes, he canonised. And I sense you're going to subvert that, which is cool. But I want to know how one goes about it. But you wrote a book on this. I mean, do we have key thinkers whose texts are going to be instrumental in understanding contemporary a topic for 2011? Let me just start that sound like Jalal, for instance. Does he feature? Yes, all of these guys are part of that book Age.
So many. Okay. So you guys do have women in here? Very few. Why? I have to look for them and invent them. And because all these men take all the place and they are the ones who say, What is your idea of national unity? Be like? What is a represent mafia? D. E. F. E. E. Yes. So this is one way of in the contemporary age, really, I have difficulties finding women because they may be too smart to enter these though. Well, Saadawi. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I can see you're pulling names out of the hat, but I'm not going. I wanted to. The ones that you would light up and then have something to say about because I'm getting monosyllabic. Is are you? At this point I'm failing utterly at the questioning people like suddenly once this is a genius, this is lucidity. People who, in the midst of defeat and anger and repression, were capable to just think straight, to say honestly and painfully what?
How they saw things not in ideological camouflage. Really? That. This is a hero for me. This. This is. This is. And my book, for myself, was really a homage to these people who, under the worst conditions, remained intellectually honest and morally kept their integrity. And I like that younger Arabs learn know about them.
This is our hope that there are amongst us people who remained honest, who didn't give in to ideological fury, who did not get co-opted, to who had the courage, my gut courage to say what they said under those circumstances. Chapo Chapo, an artist. Since we want to extend the scope. Thank you, Jeff Bridges, if we could go overseas, you should be thinking about your work.
Yes. So, I mean, are we talking about a group of artists that we should be examining in the same way we would look at philosophers and social critics? My sense but this is my bias. Again, this is my project, by the way. This is what I'm working on now. I want to see how the artists dealt with defeat and and modernity and liberation during the same period in the in the same society. My sense is that artists have to be more genuine. You can't cater to a constructed identity.
It's more difficult for an artist, and I'm sure they do. Yes, there is the market and everything, and I'm very new in the field, but my sense is that an artist can mean because they have the luck of being marginal. When you're not important, you don't need to fake, you don't need to to, to, to, to lie, to serve ideology. You can be yourself. Maybe I'm. But I'm naive. Hopefully there's nothing to recommend being sophisticated.
Okay, so I'm going to come back to one last and then I'm going to open up to you guys, I promise. But I'm very curious about what your suggestions are for addressing the disconnect you identified around 2011. You know that there were things that people were talking about around and weird, which were not the issues that were driving people to action. And so you're creating an open space here for a turning point in contemporary Arab thought. After 2011, I've taken that drone ride.
I know what you're looking down on. So is there thought engaging with this zone of destruction? That is the challenge that those in the Arab world of the 2020s might hope to address for the benefit of those of the Arab world of the 2040s? Look, not much time has passed and I'm trying to follow and I'm trying to pay attention to read as much as I can what is coming out now. But there are some some names that stand out, for instance, Yasin Saleh and others.
And I think what they are writing is this post revolution writing. And at least those Jedi like kind of writing, you know, the tough. Let's let's discuss heritage and and and identity issues. I think nobody has time for them. Neither writers nor readers. I think it's too early to to to draw a map also. I mean, if you take 2011 until today, so much has happened, so, so many disasters and so so it has been such a cataclysmic time that it's impossible for anybody to wrap their heads around it.
And it's a short time. It's only ten years. And look, I mean, we were discussing Sudan and suddenly this happens and and the explosion of Beirut and I don't. Yeah. Which which human mind can really pretend to grasp any of this. It's too early, I think. And but then now your question. When do I do I see efforts of stopping doing that disconnect. Attempts at connecting. Yes, I think there are new types of writings. What is happening in journals? Some journals like Maria, Mademoiselle.
That kind of writing is now much more attentive and there's less time for this bombastic identity writings. But here you have people who know much more than.