SYRBODY combined fieldwork, conducted in Lebanon (Partner Organization: Ifpo), and theoretical work developed at the Université de Paris (CERiLAC). The first months of the outgoing phase were dedicated to identifying testimonial literature, fictions and artworks for the research, and to conceiving the initial fieldwork. During that period, SYRBODY has also identified partners, artists and writers interested in participating in this research. As of the fourth month, the analysis phase started, during which a large number of texts, videos and images were studied, addressing the question of the body and its destruction. In parallel, discussions were carried out with the authors, and three seminars were co-organized to create a common and interdisciplinary dynamic of reflection, while taking into consideration the complex crisis in Lebanon
1- Seminar “Body: Words and Images of Flesh and Blood”, in cooperation with Ifpo and ANR “Shakk”. This seminar studied the conceptual mutations emphasized by the new narratives and images in the Syrian context, and the resulting bodily perspectives that accompany them. The theoretical starting point was as follows: the body cannot be a pure material presence, it is always conditioned by images and words that constitute the medium of its modes of phenomenalization. The seminar’s aim was to study how the changes that are provoked by revolution and war, which affect our language and our images awareness, initiate new perspectives on corporality.
2- Seminar “Create - Destroy - Disappear”: SYRBODY has contributed towards the creation of a “Philosophy” pole at Ifpo and organized this second seminar, which has studied, in dialog with art, literature and psychoanalysis, several manifestations of destruction that we can observe in the Syrian and Lebanese contexts, focusing on the representations of the destroying/destroyed body.
3- Meetings around cultural production in Syria: SYRBODY has participated in the organization of a cycle of meetings and dialogues around the new Syrian cultural production.
The second year of the project was dedicated to deepen these analyses by writing and editing 6 books, in dialogue with more than 70 authors and artists. At the same time, SYRBODY has actively participated, during that incoming phase, in several seminars and events, in particular at EHESS, University of Paris and Ifpo, taking into consideration the restrictions related to the pandemic, which limited movements and favored intensive writing work.
During the two years of research, all these publications, seminars and interventions have dealt, first of all, with nihilism as a deep awareness of the loss of the world: the deep consciousness of a naked and meaningless existence. The world is lost, because when we are faced with the detainees and victims’ narratives, it is not evident to believe in that world anymore. More specifically, the world is lost, because the human being, as a being-in-the-world, is reduced to a subjugated and devastated body. From this point of view, the project has developed a concept of nihilism which is not limited to an intellectual perspective, but which implements above all a corporal approach, through which one feels the loss of the world through smelling, tasting, touching, watching and hearing. These publications, seminars and interventions then raise the following question: how can we create new body perspectives from the wreckage of the world? This question is an existential commitment that SYRBODY has tried to think about in a plural perspective, through the multiple narratives, artworks and literary texts, each of which offers a particular response.
