الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

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Pathways to an Open World

applicable to, the present situation. But a return to the general, the generic, is necessary for any radical and long-term transformation. And the relationship of the human being to the Earth does not go ‘without saying’. It may in fact be what has been least thought of. The human being has, with exceptions, lived very little in a full relationship with the Earth. The tendency was to live with the eyes fixed vertically on some transcendence, or, as in modern times, fixed horizontally on some historical future. The suggestion here is that life could be lived, not according to a vertical fixation, nor in a blind rush to a hypothetical future, but in concentric circles from the point at which one finds oneself on the planet. To do a little more radicalizing of vocabulary : if the word ‘world’, in Anglo-Saxon, means simply an ‘age of man’ ( wer alt ), in other languages the word for world has aesthetic connotations ( kosmos, mundus ). It’s considerations like these that justify and explain the presence of the part geo in the word geopoetics , that I was going to employ so as to designate the general field I saw opening after long years of intellectual nomadism. As to poetics , poetic language is certainly not one of the dominant languages today, and is hardly public language at all. But if poetics has been relegated, largely, to the personal and the private (with some general rhetoric interspersed here and there), again, I go back to generic : to the nous poietikos (poetic intelligence) of Aristotle. The poetics of geopoetics is not the poetry of the subjective self nor does it belong to rhetoric. It is the language of an open self in an open context. What I am presenting here is of course only the briefest outline of geopoetics. I have developed the theory-practice in other texts and notably in the ‘Introduction to geopoetics’, Le Plateau de l’albatros (Grasset, Paris, 1994).

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