Please join us on
Saturday, May 6, 2023
At 6.00 pm sharp at ChertLüdde Bookstore
For the book presentation of:
Au bord des mondes
Vers une Anthropologie métaphysique
At the Edge of the Worlds
Towards a Metaphysical Anthropology
By Mohamed Amer Meziane
Édition Vues de l’esprit, Bruxelles
The introduction of the book in the presence of its author will be accompanied by a discussion between Mohamed Amer Meziane and curator Anissa Touati.
The book’s cover was specially conceived by Italian-Tunisian artist Monia Ben Hamouda, whose solo exhibition “About Telepathy and other Violences” is now on view at ChertLüdde.
The presentation will be held in English; the book is published in French.
At the Edge of the Worlds
Towards a Metaphysical Anthropology
It is not enough to attribute a soul to plants and animals to cure the ravages of extractivism. It is still necessary to widen the spectrum of the non-humans beyond the visible. Dragons and underground beings, places of dreams or ultimate realities hold a central place in the living traditions that inhabit this land. To really listen to them, it is time to break with a whole series of presuppositions in anthropology, starting with the idea that the "natives" would remain unconscious of the structures that govern their collective life. In order to implement a true "decolonization of knowledge", this book invites to assume the metaphysical part of thought and reality. Only a philosophical contact with the invisible, a thought of what is at the edge of the worlds will allow a double fruitful criticism of the limits of the modernity as well as of the traditionalisms exercising violence in the name of God. Should one visit Heaven again to reclaim the Earth? This essay proposes a new perspective that overturns the commonplaces of ecological thought and social sciences.
Mohamed Amer Meziane is a philosopher and performer. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Freie Universität in Berlin and an Assistant Professor at Brown University. He has been teaching for 4 years at Columbia University and serves as a board member of Multitudes. His first book, Des empires sous la terre (La Découverte, 2021, Verso Books, 2024) examines how disenchantment engenders climate change through the colonization of subterranean worlds since the 19th century. Questioning the assumptions of the turn to the non-humans in art and theory, his second book Au bord des mondes proposes to take invisible non-humans seriously in the context of a metaphysical anthropology.
Anissa Touati is an independent French curator, trained as an archaeologist. She is curator-at-large of Paris Internationale, guest curator of the MAH in Geneva, guest curator of the Thalie Foundation (Brussels) and artistic director of the Pavilion for a Mediterranean Nation of the Biennial of Lagos 2023 (Nigeria). She was artistic director of Contemporary Istanbul - a project for which she built a program of reflection around the question of Mediterraneanism - and associate director of the Chalet Society in Paris.
