Islam and the West… for a better world @
is out to open space, and considers that in the ultimate instance it’s thanks to a few spatial works evolved across period and place that humanity keeps its head above nonentity. The ancient Chinese made a distinction between intellectuals of the market-place and intellectuals of the mountain. The intellectual nomad is of the mountain, and the desert – and of movement. He carries no flag, is the spokesman of no identity-group, incorporates no local socio-cultural context. He may be less conspicuous that way, he may even pass, in the contemporary context, unnoticed, but it is he who provides, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, breathing space and breadth of thought. That said, anarchistic individualist as he may be, the intellectual nomad is not averse to association. If I can allow myself in this preamble to be just a little more autobiographical, I have myself always been a founder of groups. In Glasgow, one of the hot spots of the Industrial Revolution, a city red and black, I founded, as a young writer and teacher, a group devoted to what I called ‘cultural revolution’ (no reference to Mao – I invented the term on my own basis and for my own purposes). In France, in 1967, just after my break with Britain, and in time for, in tune with the may ’68 revolt, the last time when real, radical issues were raised, if at times confusedly, in the public sphere, I founded another group, devoted to what I now called ‘culture-analysis’ (like psycho-analysis, but bringing in a wider field of reference). Later, in Paris, I founded yet another group, devoted now to what I thought of as ‘the great drift’ (post-modern, post-historical, post- humanist). And finally, in April 1989 (symbolically, in the opening month, two centuries after the breakout of the French Revolution), I made the biggest attempts of all in this sphere of founding and grounding by starting up the International Institute of Geopoetics. We shall come to the theory and practice of geopoetics later. After this little introduction, necessary for the opening of the field as I see and conceive it, what I want to do now is address the burning historical issue of our wide-ranging agenda : the relationship, involving, on the politico-
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