Sciences PoDebate29 March 2024
Speaking of it differently: a dialogue with Kamel Daoud
Dialogue avec Kamel Daoud · 1h 42min
In the aftermath of October 7, a rabbi and an Algerian writer choose to talk, publicly, at Sciences Po. On the conditions of dialogue, its limits, the ghosts who speak too loudly, and what war does to words. In French.
“The condition of dialogue, if it had to be summed up in one sentence, is accepting that in the encounter with another, we will be altered in the etymological sense: to stop speaking in slogans and accepting that something in us alters, not damaged, but made other.”
“We cannot talk from the moment the other denies your right to exist. It is rather basic, you will agree, but I consider it a basis for discussion.”
“That “but”, so often used to contextualize, is in truth always a will to relativize empathy, as if we had evacuated the other conjunction, the only one in this debate that is not abject: the “and”.”
“History turns violent when the power of words is reduced. When suddenly a word can mean only one thing, when there is no room left for exegesis, for the other reading, then yes, we are in a violent society.”
“There is no particular merit in having been vulnerable, but there is a certain philosophical wisdom inherited from that condition. Whoever we are with regard to the Middle East, we must ask how we develop a critical empathy.”
“We must rethink what a positive messianism would be for our time. Not the kind that hastens the end of the world, but the kind that carried the greatest political hopes across the centuries.”
The session
March 2024, a lecture hall at Sciences Po. A few months after October 7, Delphine Horvilleur and Kamel Daoud agree to “speak of it differently”. She opens with a question inherited from May 68: where do you speak from? And states her condition for dialogue: accepting to be altered by the encounter. He answers with a praise of treason, the duty to think against one’s own. For forty-five minutes they exchange their ghosts: the Shoah, the Algerian war, the Middle East. She defends the “and” against the “but”, critical empathy, a laïcité that allows one to say I. He dismantles the imaginary Palestinian and facade solidarities. Then the audience takes the floor, sometimes adversarially, and the dialogue holds. That was perhaps the demonstration of the evening: we can still talk to each other.