Hyam Yared
Research project
The question of hospitality
Project summary
Marseille alone could prove that diversity is not a killer. Beirut and the whole Mediterranean basin. If we are to imagine a future other than the one foretold by those pulling the strings of a world deliberately designed to be identitarian rather than humanistic, it is vital to break with the reflex of seeing our fellow man as opposed to ourselves, but rather as an extension of ourselves. To succeed in repairing our view of the world without pretending to change it. To want to protect it. To look at it with a lucid perception of a Self that, rebuilt by a culture of epidemic bonds, would finally lead us to apprehend what is foreign to us without fear. Not to despair of events, but “to hope like mad in the human condition”, as Camus puts it. A way, in short, of loving without return and being ready to sacrifice everything. That, too, is literature. An alternative voice in a desert of intelligence. Yes, desert. For without imagination, everything becomes imagination, and while it takes intelligence to “commit” a book, it also requires the feat that Camus attributed to art, “the renunciation of intelligence to reason the concrete.” It is in this respect that literature and the presence of a chair like the one Iméra offers to literature is essential. To invite an intuitive science to occupy a major place among other research disciplines is to open up the field of possibility and imagination to another conception of the world, and to allow “alter-thinkers” to meet in the world of research.
