Wednesday, October 16 , 2024, 7 pm Palestine time
Prof. Marwan Rashed (Paris-Sorbonne University)
Title: Universalism vs. Orientalism. Some Thoughts about, and in the wake of, Edward Said
Abstract: My contribution will focus on the complex relationship between the current eradication of Palestine and the state of Arab studies in Western universities. Of course, the perpetrators of genocide do not need a sophisticated intellectual substructure to carry out their crimes. All it takes is a few supremacist declarations and international complicity. However, by stressing certain fundamental aspects of Arab and Hebrew science and philosophy in their relationship to the Latin world, I shall explore what appears to be, by contrast, a diffuse relationship between the current drama and an evolution in academic knowledge and practice over the last few decades. This will involve a reflection both on the role that academic ideology has played in the dehumanization of the Palestinian people (and Arab peoples in general), and on the way in which, in return, the current genocide is transforming the meaning and mission of the university in liberal democracies.
Bio: Marwan Rashed, born in 1971, is an alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. After completing a PhD in classical philology at the University of Hamburg, he returned to France, where he was successively research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, ordinary professor of classical philology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and finally, since 2013, professor of the history of Greek and Arabic philosophy at the Sorbonne. He has published extensively on all periods of Greek philosophy, from the Presocratics to Byzantium, via Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers, many of whose texts he has rediscovered in the original Greek or in Arabic translation, as well as on many philosophers of classical Islam. His research has also shed light on certain little-known aspects of the transfer of Byzantine and Arab knowledge to the Latin West in the Middle Ages and during early modernity. He is currently working on a new critical edition of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.