Encounter with Mohamed Amer Meziane as part of the exhibition “The Dream Argument”
Conversation between philosoper Mohamed Amer Meziane and Élodie Royer, curator of the show "The Dream Argument".
In the exhibition "The Dream Argument" (cur. Élodie Royer), an excerpt from Au bord des mondes. Vers une anthropologie métaphysique (2023) by Mohamed Amer Meziane is made available in the form of a publication conceived by graphic designer and artist Marie-Mam Sai Bellier. Each copyfeatures on its cover a fragment of text, set in a typeface specifically 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 a fragmented form, invites readers—through a perspective of decolonizing knowledge—to expand their conception of reality by reaffirming the central place of metaphysics and invisible entities, often relegated outside the field of knowledge within Western human sciences.
In one of the chapters, “Barzakh, or How Dreams Make Ontology Implode,” Amer Meziane approaches dreams through the concept of barzakh—meaning frontier or isthmus in Arabic—not as a mere psychological or symbolic object to be interpreted, but as an experience capable of destabilizing certain systems of thought and dichotomies inherited from Western modernity. Mobilizing the dream thus appears as a decolonial and resistant gesture, activating imaginaries and opening perspectives toward other cosmologies, without ever reducing them to a folkloric reading. By placing this chapter in dialogue with the works of Amie Barouh and Chloé Quenum, the exhibition foregrounds the place of invisible entities that their practices also embrace and underscores the necessity of “thinking at the edge of worlds rather than merely about worlds or the world.”1. As the philosopher reminds us, the crises we are currently experiencing are not only “those of capitalism, but crises of our modes of existence and our ways of thinking.”2
1. Mohamed Amer Meziane, Au bord des mondes. Vers une anthropologie métaphysique (in French), Brussels, Vues de l’esprit, 2023, p. 166.
2. Op. cit., p. 29
