Rewatch - Talk with Mohamed Amer Meziane

Introduction by Élodie Royer, curator of the exhibition “L’argument du rêve” , followed by a lecture by the philosopher Mohamed Amer Meziane.
 

In the exhibition “L’argument du rêve” (curated by Élodie Royer), an excerpt from the book Au bord des mondes. Vers une anthropologie métaphysique (2023, Vues de l’esprit) by Mohamed Amer Meziane is presented in the form of an edition conceived by graphic designer and artist Marie-Mam Sai Bellier. Each copy features a fragment of text on the cover, composed in a typeface specially designed for the occasion.

Mohamed Amer Meziane is a philosopher and historian of ideas. He is currently a lecturer in philosophy and Francophone studies at Brown University. His latest essay, which appears in the exhibition in fragmented form, proposes, from a decolonial perspective on knowledge, to broaden our conception of reality by reaffirming the central place of metaphysics and invisible entities, which are often excluded from the domain of knowledge in Western humanities.

In one of the chapters, “Barzakh or How Dreams Make Ontology Implode,” Amer Meziane mobilizes the dream through the notion of barzakh—an Arabic term meaning a boundary or isthmus—not as a merely psychological or symbolic object to be interpreted, but as an experience capable of challenging certain systems of thought or dichotomies inherited from Western modernity. Invoking dreams thus appears as a decolonial and resistant gesture, working through imaginaries and opening perspectives toward other cosmologies without reducing them to folkloric readings. By placing this chapter in dialogue with the works of Amie Barouh and Chloé Quenum, the aim is to emphasize the role of the invisible that they also engage in their practices, and the necessity of “thinking at the edge of worlds rather than only worlds or the world.”¹ As the philosopher reminds us, the crises we are going through are not only “that of capitalism but of our modes of existence and our ways of thinking.”²

¹ Mohamed Amer Meziane, Au bord des mondes. Vers une anthropologie métaphysique, Brussels, Vues de l’esprit, 2023, p. 166.
² Op. cit., p. 29.