Editorial

These and other visions of the world evoked many questions that Marcel Comby tackles, from ancient myths and Christian theology to the computerised imagination of our contemporaries, from religious beliefs to scientific findings. He rejects any binary vision that would obscure the inevitable contradictions that such diversity generates.

Alain Santacreu applies a contradictory logic to account for an ecosophical paradigm freed from a rationalist modernity and the dichotomies stemming from Western monotheism – body and mind, nature and culture, fiction and truth. This approach would mean abandoning the polarities inherited from the Enlightenment and constitutive of a homogeneous society, in order to revive a set of complex relationships.

The article by Rachad Antonius returns to the current debates on the polysemous notion of ‘identity’, linked to a few others such as species, ‘race’ and the forms of free or censored expression that are attached to it. These debates particularly involve academia, social issues, the media and political ideologies.

In the European context, it is the construction of a renewed society that Pierre Calame wants to consider, in the face of modern crises symbolised by the ‘Age of Enlightenment’. Adequate responses are needed, summarised in twelve proposals, to confront the current context while preserving the universalist vocation of the European project.

Eleonora Sparano and Ali Aït Abdelmalek deal with the singular topic of water, in particular water resources and their impact on economic, political and social life. With reference to the Italian case, even though water has gone from being a natural resource to an economic object, it seems possible to return to a patrimonial and community-based approach in order to get out of the current emergency situation.

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch addresses an essential issue in history, one that is, if not obscured, at least neglected, such as the reality of slave trade on various continents and at various times, here in the Indian Ocean. Although it dates back to the first millennium BC, it has developed strongly not only in the Muslim world over the centuries, but also concerns local slavery favoured by the slave plantations created by the Arabs and Swahili on African soil.

In the field of art, Bernard Lebleu revisits and rediscovers Quebec figurative art, represented by two painters who continue the great pictorial tradition of the 20th century. One of their objectives is to celebrate aesthetic beauty, too often neglected by a certain commodification of contemporary art.

Fulvio Caccia deals with parody and what it means in art. Parody presupposes a cultural framework and a given interpretation which, when confiscated by political power, loses its original significance, and reduces the distance that allegory presupposes when freely perceived by an autonomous individual.