BEIRUT, paradigm of a universally latent civil war International symposium 18 th and 19 th March 2011 - 10:00 > 18:00 Organised by Les Halles & in collaboration with the Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning (ASRO) of the K.U.Leuven, with the support of Media School RITS Brussels “…Why do you seek civil war?- …no, no. Me, I’m against civil wars. But I’m afraid. When I see what has happened in Lebanon, I have a curious presentiment that the ravage of war will spread to the whole world. I’m afraid that everything is going to collapse.” Elias Khoury, The little Mountain Introduction In November 2009, a small group of Brussels intellectuals, urban planners and architects consisting of Lieven De Cauter, Jean-Didier Bergilez, Iwan Strauwen and Nedjma Hadj, travelled with Fabienne Verstraeten to Beirut to question this city in a series of meetings with Beirut architects, urban planners and intellectuals. Based on this visit, philosopher Lieven De Cauter has produced a text Pour une phénoménologie de la guerre civile, Hobbes et Benjamin à Beyrouth (Towards a phenomenology of the civil war, Hobbes and Benjamin in Beirut). There he develops the idea that, in the aftermath of a divisive civil war from 1975 to 1990, the city remains the place of latent conflicts which could flare up at any time. This latent war affects language and memory, creating mental lines of demarcation. Artistic production also bears its traces, as does the physiognomy of the city itself, with the way it breaks up into various districts and the occupation of its public spaces. On 18 th and 19 th March, a two-day symposium entitled ‘Beirut, paradigm of a universally latent civil war’ invites a writer, architects and urban planners, as well as anthropologists and political scientists from Beirut to look more closely at these questions. Elias Khoury (writer), Jade Tabet (architect and urban planner), Jihane Sfeir (professor of political science), Ismaël Sheikh Hassan (architect and urban planner), Ghassan Hage (anthropologist) and Mona Fawaz (urban planner), along with philosophers Lieven de Cauter and Thomas Berns will set out the complexity of Beirut, as it exists in real life … and in people’s minds. About the symposium Beirut is a city torn apart by civil war. Not only the past civil war, a civil war that is ever present, lying latent and ready to erupt at any moment. In Lebanon they speak of the ‘great civil war’ which lasted for more than fifteen years, dating from 1975 to 1990. The ‘little civil war’ as it is known, officially lasted only for a few days in 2008. However, this latent possibility of civil war creates a constant tension which is physically and emotionally evident throughout the city; the tired worn-down war wounded streets and buildings, the demarcation lines, be them real, virtual, physical or political, the loss of memory and the massacre of history. There is a general distrust. A destructive distrust juxtaposed by a cultural effervescence of night clubs and non-stop dancing. But is this specific to Beirut? Does Beirut contain a lesson we need to expose and to learn from? Is Beirut a paradigm of a potential future for other cities? All over the world political identities are amalgamating, spiralling and confusion is growing. Theocracy is becoming virulent and the population is exploding. Migration, global warming and the war against terror are emerging and forming a dangerous and highly explosive cocktail of disaster. The hypothesis of a state of nature, once generalized in humanity’s primordial and prehistoric past (Hobbes’s famous hypothesis), could well come into being in post-modernity. A post-historical state of humanity. Beirut as a city could be everywhere, and everywhere could be like Beirut. Beirut might well be one of the paradigms of our possible future. Beirut is very much worth investigating. This international symposium will invite authors in order to discuss, question and voice their opinions on our hypothesis of Beirut as the paradigm of a possible future. The Commitee Drinking a cup of coffee in Beirut on a normal violent day , Jade Tabet There are the harmonious, orderly cities, where time passes smoothly, with no major upsets and where the profound boredom of everyday life is magnified, monumentalized and transformed into a ritual worthy of a stage show. Behind the reassuring illusion of a civilized world of peace and civil harmony lies a whole mythology that serves to sanctify the reign of banality: quiet afternoons in bourgeois apartments in which time stands still, the suffocating torpor of family lunches and inheritance disputes. But the imagination that produced the rational fantasies of modern urban life – pacified cities dispensing light, space and happiness for all – also produced concentration camps and the gulag. The land surveyor can never enter the gates of the Castle of the defended space, the ideal city. Revolt becomes therefore a desire to break out: what we love doing in cities is breaking open their smooth, hard, glossy shells, to plunge into the emptiness of their internal flesh, their cracks and fissures, their shadows and dark corners, their gaping holes. To tear away the veil of apparent urban coherence to discover the fault-lines that question a balance based on the exclusion of the foreigner. Then there is Beirut. Beirut for its part appears today as a city in permanent disequilibrium, a city in pieces. Fifteen years of civil war and two decades of reconstruction marked by latent tension have produced a fragmentation of urban space and a total lack of reference points. The different parts of the city present themselves as stories, broken and turned in on themselves; the past is there, but the key to reading it has been stolen; history, like a pile of novels waiting to be read, can be understood only through riddles. And yet, on this crumbling foundation, urban reality, in its extreme dislocation, persists and becomes denser. Social relations continue to complexify, multiply and intensify across the most painful contradictions. Life must go on in a city even when the return of violence is a constant threat. This city is a place of death, but also a place where one grows up, works, buys, sells, invents and creates. It feels like there is an acceleration of time brought about by this state of permanent imbalance and so perhaps, even more than elsewhere, we sense there is a creative restlessness from which arises a violent emotional charge. Who can forget the taste of the coffee we drank on the cornice between two bombardments in the worst moments of the civil war? The simplest moments of pleasure that we managed to wrest from the violence, seemed to us to increase in intensity. Living in a post-war undermined by systemic instability where nothing seems ever to be constant or consistent, one learns to play along with the unpredictable, to sharpen desire, and draw from it the promise of a life in multiple dimensions, a potential beyond any imprisonment. Rather than perceiving these diversions as accidental phenomena or as a sign of sickly degeneration, should we not rather view them as the manifestation of an instinctive dynamism? The driving force of life? And, instead of wallowing in the panic bought about by seeing Beirut as the universal paradigm of a return to a generalized ‘state of nature’, should we not see the city as the laboratory of an inevitable and yet bitter coexistence between clans, tribes and faiths? A world that becomes more divided, for better or for worse, the more it is globalized by high tech and finance? Confirmed authors Thomas Berns, Lieven De Cauter, Ghassan Hage, Elias Khoury, Jihane Sfeir, Jade Tabet, Mona Fawaz, Ismaël Sheikh Hassan, Jocelyne Saab, Eyal Weisman. The symposium is organized by Les Halles (Brussels) in cooperation with the The Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning (ASRO ) of the K.U.Leuven , with the support of Media School RITS Brussels. PROGRAM FRIDAY 18.03.11 / Beirut, imaginary city A.M 10.00 11.00 12.00 13.00 Lieven De Cauter Jade Tabet Thomas Berns Lunch Hobbes and Drinking a coffee in Hobbes, staging the Benjamin Beirut, against war in Beirut Hobbes 45’ / FR 45’/ ENG 45’ / FR P.M 14.00 15.00 16.00 18.00 20.00 Jihane Sfeir Elias Koury Lieven De Cauter Drink Film: The body as factory, Beirut, the noise of a Audience Talk Circle of Deceit the reinvention of the silent city 45’/ FR-ENG V. Schlöndorff self: practices, uses 45’ / FR or ENG 108’ and meaning of + Conversation aesthetic surgery in with Jocelyne Lebanon today Saab 30’ / FR Simultaneous translation FR/ENG SATURDAY 19.03.11 / Beirut, real city A.M 10.00 11.00 12.00 13.00 Jihane Sfeir Ismaël Sheikh Jade Tabet Lunch Mirror identity Hassan Audience talk constructions / Destruction and 45’ / ENG-FR marginal territorial reconstruction of constructions: camp Nahr el Bared Palestinians in the 45’ / ENG Lebanon, permanent exile and necessary presence 45’/ FR P.M 14.00 15.00 16.00 18.30 Ghassan Hage Mona Fawaz Lieven De Cauter Drink Beirut, negotiate the An alternative to Audience talk & ungovernable neoliberal urbanism? conclusions 45’ / FR or ENG Hezbollah's urban 45’ / FR-ENG planning in Beirut's suburbs 45’ / FR or ENG Simultaneous translation FR/ENG Authors • Thomas Berns is lecturer in political philosophy and ethics. As a member of the Perelman Center of Philosophy of Rights, specialist in the Renaissance and politic philosophy, he is working on conflict issues and the new rules. He wrote and published: Gouverner sans gouverner. Une archéologie politique de la statistique (PUF, 2009) et (comme co-auteur) Du courage.