Adonis lecture - Beirut today: A veritable city or a mere historical name? Beirut, Lebanon, October 31, 2003
http://pad.ma/Vgd76grd/00:00:11.960About the lecture:
"Beirut today: a veritable city or a mere historical name?", The opening event/lecture for The Home Works II: A forum on cultural practices, by Adonis.
A Syrian poet and literary critic, Adonis Ali Ahmad Esber was born in Qassabin and studied philosophy at Damascus University andSaint Joseph University in Beirut. He established two groundbreaking literary journals, Shi’r and Mawaqif. Through his views on modernism and his radical vision of Arab culture,Adonis has strongly influenced both his contemporaries and subsequent generations of theorists and thinkers.
Bluntly speaking, both Beirut’s despairing history and current conditions dominated by the discourse of a reductive history have obstructed the development of critical public sphere, leaving no milieu for cross social communication or cooperation. With the post-war reconstruction steered by private interests andstate interests maintained by tenacious censorship controls, contemporary Beirut is mostly managed byrigid private, social domains, with no shared culture that could stimulate interactions between its citizens. As one locally based writer argued, a city is not a real city, unless human creativity, the material or immaterial signs of culture, dialogues with the overall space of the city6 — otherwise the city remains a bundle of nondialogical accumulations.
From "Constructing a Cultural Grammar in a Fragmented City"
by Wietske Maas
A Syrian poet and literary critic, Adonis Ali Ahmad Esber was born in Qassabin and studied philosophy at Damascus University and
Bluntly speaking, both Beirut’s despairing history and current conditions dominated by the discourse of a reductive history have obstructed the development of critical public sphere, leaving no milieu for cross social communication or cooperation. With the post-war reconstruction steered by private interests andstate interests maintained by tenacious censorship controls, contemporary Beirut is mostly managed byrigid private, social domains, with no shared culture that could stimulate interactions between its citizens. As one locally based writer argued, a city is not a real city, unless human creativity, the material or immaterial signs of culture, dialogues with the overall space of the city6 — otherwise the city remains a bundle of nondialogical accumulations.
From "Constructing a Cultural Grammar in a Fragmented City"
by Wietske Maas
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