 again sorry yeah please go ahead okay so I'll start again so the lecture is actually part of something I'm doing in the ERC project where I'm focusing actually on the non-human in African language texts and one of the non-humans is the world so in a way I've been exploring representations of the world in several afrophone texts and I'm especially looking at the possibility of non-theoretical or if you like fictional texts to represent something like the world. I will be using the terminology of a Czech philosopher called Heidanec who speaks of non-objective realities but I will sort of develop on this theoretical aspect of it at the end of the lecture because first I would like to introduce you to the book itself that I'll be speaking about but I'm just prefacing this information in order to justify why I am actually speaking about literature in philosophy or what is the connection between literature and philosophy and why it is particularly pertinent I think for African philosophy. So the title of my presentation is Adina Non-Objective Representation of the World in Bubakar Boris Jobs, Dormigolo and this is roughly the outline of my lecture. You made such a beautiful poster that I had to stick it in my presentation just for the memory of it. So the outline first of all I would like to look at some very prominent metaphors in the novel, metaphors that have been identified as obsessive metaphors as one scholar Usman Gorm calls it, metaphors that really shape the novel and I would like to show why they are pertinent for the representation of the world but in order to do that we will have to first look at an issue with translation. The novel has been translated but there is something that went seriously well not wrong but lost in that translation and I don't want to come back to this cliche of lost in translation. So in a way I would like to look at what went lost in the translation and of course why and what happens with that loss. We will look at different philosophical understandings of this novel and we will see that precisely that which went lost that which got lost is in fact the key to distinguish these these understandings and to see you know which one is relevant in which context and why. And I will conclude first by saying some theoretical words about this representation of non-objective realities and the connection of that to literature and in more general I will say something about the texts of African philosophy so how is philosophy relating to its texts. So first of all let's look at the metaphors. Now the novel, Wubakar Boris Diop is a very prominent Senegalese author who somewhat followed the trajectory of Nubi Wathiyongo. In other words he has a very glamorous career of writing in French which was interrupted by a very strong experience for him the visit to Rwanda, the sites of the Rwandan genocide. So this this this period for him marks a kind of change in his career and he argues that because of the complicity of the French language in the Rwandan genocide as he argues because of that he decided to start writing in his mother tongue that is Wolof. Domigolo was the first of the novels that he wrote in Wolof there are currently two more that have followed. The original was published in 2003 and actually you know I collect all kinds of books in all kinds of languages and so quite by accident I got this book in Paris around that time. So that's that's how I became interested in it. Now it took quite a long time for the book to be translated in fact Wubakar Boris Diop was quite unwilling to have it translated or to translate it but in the end he did translate it and he published it as La Petite de la Geno in 2009. Now this book is I don't have it here with me but it's much thicker. It is a kind of expanded version of the novel it's not really a translation and there is a very interesting article actually a thesis and an article by Repinetz if you are interested. So in a way the translation was really a rendition an expanded version of the text. The titles of these two versions Domigolo. Domigolo means the children of a monkey and La Petite de la Geno means the children of Geno which is a special type of monkey. So in a way the French translates quite literally the the wall of title. Now the book was translated into English interestingly it was translated from the French not from the wall of in 2016 and there are also other translations into Spanish for instance there is a Czech translation underway but that is not yet out. Now if you look at the English title Domigolo the Hidden Notebooks you can see that the translators opted for the original title they took the wall off to in a way exoticize the translation but they also opted for a kind of explanation of what the text actually is. The text is a narrative in several notebooks written by the old Girán for his grandson Bado. So indeed there are several notebooks and then one of them is hidden secret we don't get to read it but we can make some conjectures about what that notebook contains. So these are the three key versions of the text. I'll be using the first and the last in my lecture and I also wanted to show you the cover because I think the cover actually communicates a lot but let's maybe look at the other covers as well. If you look at the Spanish translation left top you can see the monkey there sitting on a fence another version of it and by the way I have these covers most of them from the internet so I don't really know if they had actual editions but I assume they are actually covers of editions. I only have some of them. The other Spanish translation appears to have a huge tree so there is a bench so you can assume it's basically the old man narrating to his grandson. Then if you look at the one in the middle and the one top right they have the notebooks. You can see the notebooks that have been written by this old man and the one on the top right also has the monkey sort of at the background in the contours. The French edition and that's bottom right is very prosaic very blank. You only have the book with the title and there was also this kind of cover which is actually a strip of paper wrapped around the cover with the portrait of the author. Now the English I do have the English version here the English version has this kind of dry leaf whatever that is supposed to mean in this context. Now the original cover if you look at it I think is very the most explicative so to speak the richest all it has the mirror and you can see there is a man in the mirror who I think has sort of ape-like features who sees himself as a white man in the mirror so in a way the cover sort of betrays the content perhaps more than it should. At the same time the content is much more complicated than just this kind of satirical image of the African trying to become white or appear as white. But the mirror the mirror that we see there is significant. Now as I said Usman Ungom speaks of the mirror as an obsessive metaphor. In this wonderful article from 2013 he goes into the various meanings of the mirror and he shows why the novel in fact is sort of turning around the metaphor of the mirror as if around some kind of axis. I will be looking at this notion of the axis for the for the novel as I as I move on. Now he says the mirrors and the reflections or the reflection in the mirror are expressions of a certain exploration. He says that in wall of setu means to explore oneself to search oneself. Setu is the wall of word for mirror. So there is that kind of obvious link between the mirror and the search the the interrogation. He speaks of identitarian reflections. I think that's also significant. So all of these reflections concern the identity. They concern if you like identity politics as well. And one thing he doesn't say but I think needs to be mentioned especially in view of the title of the book and also of what is in the book is the connection between mirroring and aping. So while Ngom does not write about aping I think you cannot really deal with the mirror without dealing with the aping as well. So aping unlike the mirror. So the mirror has many functions and many roles. It can be distorted. It can be accurate. It can be menacing. It can be all kinds of things. It can be a sort of door into another world. On the other hand aping is always a kind of mockery of that reflection. I'm using the English word aping by the way but we could speak of monkey perhaps but I think aping has that meaning in English of imitation of mimicking. That's how I mean it. So the connection between monkey and mimicking or imitation. So aping is same but not quite and this expression as some of you will recognize is from Homi Baga whom I will quote in one next slide that's his explanation of mimicry. So in a way we can also consider next to mirroring aping reflection also this notion of mimicry. Now I would like to suggest that these metaphors of mirroring and aping can be read in two very different ways and these very different ways lead to two completely different philosophical readings of the novel. So if you allow me I would like to do that now. To do that I will first I will give you a kind of several examples of how these metaphors function in the text. I mean there are many many monkeys in the text and there are also many mirrors. I will not be able to exhaust all of them but I will look at some salient ones, salient examples and then I would like to evoke this notion of colonial mimicry which can be helpful to understand some of the meanings. First of all the instances of mirror mirroring and aping. I have selected three. One is the story of Yasin Ngyai who is a woman who comes from Europe back to her native village so to speak. So we have this kind of classical example of the Bintu who has been somehow westernised, Europeanised perhaps imbued with some kind of complex. Anyway Yasin Ngyai's greatest desire is to be white, to become a white woman. She has two children who are called Mbissin and Mbissan. Now if you look at the names, even the names look I would say something like Ablaut or Umlaut. You see I'm now in this German environment they really look like mirror reflections or distortions of one another and indeed the children are like that. They have a kind of collective identity in the novel but notice well this kind of Mbissin and Mbissan. We will see another example of it as we move on. So Mbissin and Mbissan and Yasin Ngyai, she really wants to be a white woman and she's willing to sacrifice almost anything for that. She goes to see a diviner who asks her for several objects. Most of them actually mean some kind of imitation chameleon and broken mirror and the feathers of a parrot, things like that. And then he does something and suddenly she sees several women in the mirror and the two initially women, the two women become one and then there is this scene which describes her transformation. So she sees basically she looks in the mirror and she says my god how beautiful you are my friend, how white your skin looks again that against that black dress, how I envy you your beautiful long blonde hair and the way it falls onto your shoulders. The strangest behind her gazing at her silently across the mirror. Now the diviner says diviner or witch doctor basically. He says you are she she is you. I still don't know what you are trying to say Kamara. You are beginning to irritate me Marie Gabrielle von Wolkowski, that's her new name. Who can she be if not you yourself? You are black she is white but you are one and the same person. So you can see the mirror is actually showing herself but not quite right it's showing the white person while she is black although she appears white. I order you one last one last time to look at yourself in the mirror. When she did look into the mirror the woman reappeared behind her. Yasin Jai slightly moved her left hand then lifted it up. The other one did the same. Now she had understood that the white woman standing behind her in the mirror was herself. Now this is the beginning of or rather well it's the beginning of the ending of Yasin Jai's story which does not end well but I will not spoil it for you. So we have this kind of transformation and we can see that looking in the mirror is actually the passage. It is how this transformation takes place. Another instance is now we are moving to the monkeys now to the aping but at the same time we can see that there is almost like a mirror story mirror image of Visin and Visan. There are the children of the monkey called Ninki and Manka. So we can see the same procedure of changing eye to A to distinguish two words. Now I have not a quotation from the book here I just have a little summary again it's a very long story but let me read this in Ninki Nanka it's actually a whole book within the book one of the notebooks. The eponymous she-ape the mirror image of Yasin Jai deposits her two young in the courtyard of Atusek Giran Faiz Doppelgänger. So we can see that Atusek is a kind of mirror image or if you're like Doppelgänger of the main character Giran Faiz and then we have also these kind of mirror images of other characters of Yasin Jai and then her children who now are real monkeys right. To complete the picture Yasin's children Visin and Visan are mirrored by the two little monkeys affectionately called Ninki and Manka by Atusek. To start with he thinks the monkey mother has brought back his grandchildren who together with the rest of his family have perished in the civil war but when they turn into his turn into his characters he discovers their sadistic tendencies they expel him from his house tie him up with a rope humiliate him and force him to start to starve it should be starve sorry while they are living like kings in essence they do to Atusek as the colonizer leads to Africans. So we have this very weird story of two little monkeys to monkey children starting to live in Atusek's abode in his house using his television using his food tying him up and abusing him beating him biting him so we have a very very very strange representation of domination and the very abusive relationship between the two monkeys and Atusek. Now the final image of a mirror and also in connection with monkeys this time it's two gorillas is in the final part of the novel or basically almost at the end where we have this image of two gorillas slaughtering one another because they have seen themselves in the mirror so there is that kind of conflation between self and other through the mirror and the gorillas become very aggressive because they see their own aggression in the mirror and then they end up both being dead so they actually kill themselves or kill one another I should say because of what they see in the mirrors. So we have these kind of three instances that significantly connect aping imitation actual monkeys or gorillas and mirrors and I would like to evoke one more concept for the analysis which is that of mimicry characterized as similarity in difference by Homi Baba he says colonial mimicry is the desire for a reform recognizable other as a subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite yeah this is significant he speaks of an ironic compromise and he also speaks of ambivalence mimicry must continually produce its slippage is its excess its difference so there is a lot of sort of non-identity in that attempted identity and what is also significant is that this kind of desire of a slippage actually comes from both sides it is imposed by the colonizer but it's somehow adopted and appropriated by the colonized so this is I think important now I'm coming to the translation and again I would like to say almost the same but not quite so what happened in the translation why are we even speaking about it I will start with this is how the novel starts with this short text that looks like a poem and that in fact evokes a poem or a song right and this is my translation of this short passage the world life death now if you look at the world the word for the world is adena obviously coming from arabic it's the same word in most languages or in many languages that have been influenced by islam in africa in swahili dunia so you have this kind of reference to the world right and then you have life death there is nothing else here vado this only go i'm coming as I said this then I understood that poet the world has no importance pity those who die lose their life pity and again there is something really I think interesting in this word bakkan bakkan means life but also knows so in a way it's a kind of oriented or sense of orientation I think so in a way you lose your orientation if you interpret it with that other meaning so we have this kind of I would say solemn very philosophical entree of the novel now in the french version which I will quote in the english translation so the english is actually like a verbatim translation of the french you have instead of these few lines you have this yeah you can see it's a very different text now I will not read it it describes the ritual of mourning for the dead but what I would like to point out is if you look at the very bottom someone is drawing there I think if you look at the very bottom you can see that you can see that the line from the poem or song it is actually characterised as a popular song here is not translated yeah you have adina there but you don't really have any explanation of what it means and Gérard Fley only says that a piece of music is rising up in my memory and in a way I would like to acknowledge a Swahili sorry a Swahili student who once commented on this passage that she thought it was written in a kind of almost flirtatious tone I mean Gérard then describes how he was chasing after women how he was well never shy for living life so it gave her the impression that this text was written by or was basically composed by an old man who sort of remembers his better days with a lot of frivolous sort of joy if you like I was quite surprised to hear that because for me this original entry in fact is very sad very deep and very philosophical it has nothing of that frivolous nature of the translation now Abu Bakar Boris Job has himself commented on the translation and he mentioned this very passage as something very difficult for him to translate this is what he said the best example of the difficulty of the task that I can give is the first three words of the novel what could be easier a priori than rendering these in French it would be hear the low live die it is easy to see that this does not mean anything it took me nearly two pages to render something acceptably somewhat acceptably these three words so charged with meaning and tenderness involved but completely fossilized and perfectly silly in French to communicate the difficulty to render effectively the opening lines of Domigolo I have to remember the sounds of my own childhood effectively every time there was a death among the close relatives my mother announced the news through these three simple words it is enough to pronounce them of any Senegalese person in front of any Senegalese person and he or she will understand like myself back then the silence that follows the sudden gravity of the atmosphere in this moment when everyone seems to be reminded even in spite of him or herself of the derisory precariousness of human existence so I sort of ironically called it lost for world because what we see is lost in the translation is the world yeah it is the reference to the world which is carried through this one word Adina and then we in the original we have this kind of double reference to it Adina Dundee and then Adina Amu Solo while in the French we have it in the textual form we had we have Adina here but we don't know what it means right we just read the English or the French and we just read it as some kind of exotic line from from a poem or a song what is lost here is the reference to world it is really the setting of the novel which is being changed or lost now what is your comments further sorry this is him being quoted by Natalica Ray he says if you translate from Italian to Spanish or from Bambara before you are in the same sound universe and the cultural codes echo one another harmoniously in this case I had to establish correspondences between two mental worlds that are radically different the worlds as portrayed by the Wolof and the French language so you can see that the language actually mirrors completely different worlds now are they really different that's the next question what does Adina really mean so I'm actually coming to the philosophical part of it if we look at the translated text I will follow mainly Gomm's analysis now Gomm was using the Wolof only he has never not once actually no not at all quoted the French version but so he has actually multiple meanings there but he also interprets the mirrors as what he calls mimetism servile servile mimetism swivism swivism swivism a verglum blind following or a kind of followingism right so he really is he sees the mirror as a way to critique the post-colonial society he says the mirror is placed in the story to explore and reflect the profound psychological and identity crisis of Africans so really a post-colonial setting he says the metaphor of the mirror is a reflection of the missing personality of the post-colonized he says the deceitful mirror of the european therefore serves to raise the aspiration of the post slash colonized to resemble his or her master the the english translator will feel lucky also reads the metaphors in the same way or in this predominantly in this way she says that the novel is a sharply critical commentary on colonization and the senseless civil wars that afflict african countries at regular intervals and she also reads a story which is actually absent from the wall of version of a baboon on the rock of gibraltar she says here the versatile monkey is not a generic representation of the colonizer but impersonates black africans so we can see that i don't want to go into these interpretations one by one but we can see that all of them actually involve colonization all of them involve post-colonial civil wars and they also involve the perception of the colonized vis-a-vis the colonizer now if we now look at what went lost if we took this word adina seriously and this is where gorm also has a very interesting insight we will actually arrive at a very different reading not exclusive with the post-colonial one but i think much deeper or rather differently oriented gorm says the entire philosophy of the novel is actually based on a duplicity that is difficult to reconcile because it is a unity of contradiction now duplicity i think in french even more than in english means faking it means pretending something so there is that kind of deception perhaps is the word treacherousness which is perhaps stronger in the french than in the english word but even the english word i think carries that meaning he speaks of the entire philosophy of the novel now actually all of this starts with that word adina the world because we need to consider what that word actually means in wall of language and especially wall of culture as i told you it is a word that comes from the arabic and wall of culture obviously has been deeply impacted by islam and particularly by or most of the poems most of the songs that we see quoted in the novel are actually by sufi poets or by singers using sufi poets so we have this very strong presence of sufi islam behind the novel as it were. Emiliano Minerva in a recent lecture that he gave on the sufi wall of poetry at bayreuth speaks of dichotomies or binaries he says reality is made of dichotomies and these binaries or dichotomies we have to bear in mind are always value laden they always weigh to one side right so one is better than the other day and night light and dark things like that now adina is the place of these dichotomies it is also one part of a dichotomy it is opposed to well we saw a translation of is here below so basically the beyond is the other of adina but it's actually difficult to say it's the other because it is the truth right it is the it is that which is only one that translates sorry transcends the dichotomies in the end now what does this mean for human action what does this mean for the story this is now Ngom who develops this theme of dualisms of the or equals duplicity duplicity he says the beginning of the novel sets the tone adina dundee in the same way it presents dick ten truth and lie and opposes dem octay yesterday and today in a perpetual battle but always favoring right favoring one of these binaries or one side of the binaries it also opposes the temporary and the spiritual incarnated respectively in dowry young and was that my law so the temporary and the spiritual again two sides of a binary and now in the novel and in history actually they are incarnated right they are present as characters or as actual historical figures now one significant binary i think maybe the most significant one is that between the external appearance and the inner truth now there are many readings of this binary of this dualism one looks at the external quality one looks at the interiority dahir and batin these words exist in wall of a sahir and batin they reappear again and again in in the poems in the sufi poems they also appear in swahiri as dahiri batini one really covers the appearance the phenomenal level of reality while the other looks at the inside and the inside is valued as as more true this is what canapod says about the poems this now concerns the swahiri culture but in fact the background is is the same the background philosophy batini means interior esoteric every word of the Quran and indeed every creation of god has a double significance one is its outer appearance dahiri the other is the interior or hidden meaning disclosed only to a few philosophers and mystics whose long hours of meditation have brought them closer to the secrets of the omniscient they are able to see every creature as an expression of divine beauty and goodness dahiri by contrast apparent the word dahiri denotes the opposite of batini dahiri is the exterior of things and people their outer form which is perishable and therefore deceptive so i think this is now the really critical difference the mirror exposes first and foremost the dahiri level of reality right and that's the level that is being aped or mimicked the mirror also suggests there is perhaps something else but you really need to want to discover that other reality behind the mirror now this duality between dahir and batin sahir batin dahiri batini is a key quality of adina of the world and it characterizes the world it gives its its key quality which is being deceptive deception we move always in the apparent and it takes effort to actually transcend the appearance so this kind of constant slippage of meaning is an inherent quality of the world now this of course also has many many possible interpretations many readings it gives rise to the way things signify something else we need to interpret indeed the whole world the whole phenomenal reality and then we come at a specific form of hermeneutics as an approach to the world now i'm putting this slide just i spoke of swahili a little bit as you know my background really is in swahili culture and there is an excellent poem in swahili that very clearly articulates this notion of the world differentiating between the phenomenal qualities of the world and the if you like metaphysical principle or the deep nature of the world and in in jest the world is worthless destructive impermanent and deceptive now if we look back at the novel we see that these qualities are actually reflected in in the novel they stand behind the plot of the novel especially the deceptive and impermanent side of it so mirroring indeed in the novel is a reflection of the apparent but it also is a means to its interrogation it is an access to the apparent to the ahir that gives you the opportunity to question it but once you slip to the same but not quite to the aping you reduce your action to the ahir to the apparent so um aping really is a kind of devalued way of mirroring we could say that even there that is that good between one good way of mirroring and one bad way now both of these however reflect a deeper metaphysical quality of the world world not just the effect of colonialism once you have this background of everything happening in adina in the world here below so colonial mimicry then is just an instance of this constitution of adina so what i mean to say is that if you stick to the colonial post-colonial reading of the novel you are really missing out on this deep metaphysical level which it actually touches in the way it structures the world and presents the world and this is i think a really critical point because then you you are in a way stuck with a very shallow history the history of colonialism you are stuck with um interpreting things events parts of the plot and so on and actually actual history as well as being assembled um around the axis metropolis colony so you really interpret almost everything with a very sort of geographically and um historically limited um the framework of interpretation now i think that once you actually take this adina seriously um and you must do it through the original there is no way to access that level through the translation uh you in fact have a very profound study of the metaphysical setup of the world in the novel history and politics stay on the level of the apparent they are a manifestation a mere manifestation of that deep nature of the universe people are embodiments of these um binary structures that actually derive from the metaphysical quality of the world so um my last point or my last um aspect of the analysis would be to look at how the novel actually signifies adina signifies the world um if we look at the text we can see that um the world appears on the textual level in the beginning in the opening message it appears um yeah it appears through the words it's actually described so you can say it's in focus it is the object of description but it continues uh being present throughout the novel as the setting and it also continues being present through structural reminders so for instance this kind of um falling apart of the novel into dualisms and it also continues being present through intertextual reminders there are a number of textual references to Sufi poets, philosophers, um singers, um writers, filmmakers and so on all of whom um I mean you need to really know the cultural level and you need to in some instances know also what of in order to actually decode these intertextual references so um in some we have the introduction of the world as an object and then it sort of becomes the setting of the plot and you are continually reminded of it through these various reminders and references but you must be sensitive to them you must actually know how to decode these references the world as I have argued constitutes what I would call a kind of semiotic axis or uh orientation of the novel it makes things meaningful yeah one character being part of a binary has such and such qualities the other has other qualities they embody certain qualities of uh reality as we know it from the world um and of course there is a very clear orientation of the world as I showed you in that little reference to the swahili poem the world is actually connotative very negatively so you have to bear in mind that the world is full of deception everything can be deceptive everything has to be interrogated with suspicion because deception is an omnipresent quality of the world the world is destructive the world is impermanent and so on now if you read the novel in a european language I would argue you read something which has been dislocated culturally and philosophically and indeed you read it as I suggest as this kind of statement on postcolonial african society which is nevertheless of course very pertinent and a very interesting um I think it's a beautiful novel but you are in a way missing out on these deeper levels particularly for philosophers I think these deeper levels are the ones that that matter um now if we say the novel keeps or or puts the world in focus keeps it in focus for a while and then lets it sort of get lost as as as as as an object and maintains it in a different way as as a setting let's call it setting what is happening there I'm now coming to this theoretical part of my presentation which will really be the concluding one or the one before the concluding one um so what is the world as a reality um what is this notion of non-objective reality is why am I evoking it um I took the concept from Haydnick from a philosopher who was basically he was a kind of heir of phenomenology and of the Czech reception of phenomenology as well and he established that there are certain problems with the classical understanding of phenomenology and of the intention as objectifying things objectifying reality um this was particularly important I think for several reasons because in the time when Haydnick lived which was um so he was most active in the second half of the 20th century under the communist regime of course notions such as humanity, truth, freedom became really the key concepts of dissident thought so the kind of non-mainstream philosophical thought in in the eastern war countries now for Haydnick this notion of non-objective realities was a way to access these notions and to speak about them philosophically now he says that um they expose the limits of conceptual thought conceptual thought meaning the objectifying thought the thought that places things in focus he says not only traditional sciences but also traditional ways of philosophical thought are unable to deal with these themes with methodological rigor and consequently because they are hampered by the traditional conceptual repertoire or equipment which consists in a fixed and mutual link of each concept with its intentional object um sorry I think I did not yeah no sorry I read it wrong so because is a yeah so basically he um analyzes the way um the the concept which is the way you conceive of the object in your mind is linked to something outside um this kind of structure of perceiving and objectifying makes it impossible to relate to the realities that are listed above now he says further that for instance the world as a whole is not an object and any attempt to comprehend it as an object and that precisely means an attempt to model it in thought as an object of intention is false he also speaks of humanity he says an objectifying understanding of the human being as an object of sorts is dehumanizing anthropologically unacceptable and immoral in relationship ships between humans he also speaks of truth he says truth is not a thing among things it is not an object among other objects but pure non-objectivity which appears to objectifying thinking as nothing as nahil now of course these notions were politically extremely heavy for him and very important but I think what he says about the representation about the objectifying representation of these realities is now very pertinent to our topic so of course we have the world you can never see the world you can never have the world in front of you as an object so how do you relate to the world how do you study it philosophically how do you represent it in your limited means of representation that is language and text now I think it is literature that comes to help here in very significant ways and let me explain how I mean if we this is a kind of basic list of narrative techniques we see that literature uses setting plot point of view style theme character these are sort of factors or if you like vectors of the way literature shapes its message and of course they are quite different from the way non-fictional approach approaches things you can represent a lot of things in literature without really representing them so in that kind of indirect non-objectifying way so my concluding question or suggestion would be that literature in fact has quite a lot to say on philosophical topics and one such topic would be some of these non-objective realities truth humanity the world freedom and so on it does it in a different way than non-objective prose but I would say it's not less philosophical because of these specific qualities of literary genres now to conclude in the lecture I have tried to look at the philosophical concept of Adina as the world through a literary text so it is a representation of the world developed in a text which is a novel basically it is not a philosophical philosophical if you like treaties it is a text in Wolof with a lot of resonances in other languages other cultures other texts the text actually is placed within a number of intellectual continuities in Africa again these are continuities that may be quite difficult to establish for non-fictional writing of African philosophy as we see at these days the continuities are historical so you can see a historical connection through the influence of Islam we can speak of the connection between East African Islam present in Al-Inkishafi for instance the poem is from the year 1800 roughly there is a similar body of writing in West Africa as well a lot of poems a lot of ancient manuscripts some of them have now been like discovered or described in the so-called Timbuktu studies we see a lot of continuities also geographically so we see that kind of a long link between West African and East African intellectual traditions we can also see connections that are linguistic now I have pursued the connection between Wolof and English but I could equally say there is also that connection that goes to Arabic and that goes to Swahili and the number of other languages so the novel really opens these doors for exploration we need to question the way the specific way the novel deals with the philosophical topic of the world of course we need to account for the expressive repertoire of the genre of the novel and I mentioned some of them the narrative techniques we also need to interrogate the whole notion of fictionality yeah and finally I would suggest that literature can be literature I don't like the word literature that's why I put it in quotation marks because of course it's a very culturally loaded term sometimes it's better to say just texts but in this case I think it's clear we are what we are speaking about right literature in Wolof so literature in a way offers a possibility to explore the representation of these so-called non-objective realities that conceptual thought theoretical non-fictional thought basically or prose if you like struggles with and that's my conclusion thank you so much we have a like a blue crocodile I think someone has drawn a crocodile on the left bottom corner high crocodile very very interesting thank you so much yeah thank you so much it's interesting how a single novel will have so much topics packed within post-coloniality identity issues or authority issues mimicry difference ontology just basically reiterating how much philosophy depends on what in your in your texts not what literature text another day for discussing about which which is more better to use literature or text I will now hand over to Bjorn to lay the comment and question session thank you very much Elvis and I see there's already some excitement growing here that's very nice yes I would like you to unmute yourself if you feel that you can do that start your camera and ask your question thank you very much for the opportunity and time I'm giving very very interesting talk very interesting session I had the question I have of which when I read and when I listen to to this interesting talk I I'm I'm reminded of or I find a link with certain philosophers in the field from Martin Heidegger speaking about design in being in time and being in the world and moving to thinkers like Bruce Yance speaking about philosophy and place and all those thinkers whose priorities have been succeeded as the context so am I just connecting things that are not able to connect according to to to the speaker easy because you find the same connection with these thinkers because even speak about African philosophy African philosophy it's a philosophy that seeks to reflect the philosophy that is contextual that is not based on the very unobjective sense of the elites in the world there was miscalculated by thinkers like Beacot and some thinkers of the environment thank you very much I hope my question was clay thank you if I understand your question correctly you're asking if there is a connection between thinkers like Heidegger and and the novel is that is that so it's it's partly like that I think it's the way you understood it maybe I can replace it maybe you can compliment the question as I as I speak yes so I would say not in the novel I would say the novel the novel does not reference I'm trying to think I don't think it references any Western philosophers the novel itself the connection would be through my interpretation of the non-objective realities so Haydnick obviously was influenced by Husserl Husserl in a way started interrogating this kind of Lebensfeld as he called it the life world and then of course that that notion sort of trickled down into the work of several philosophers such as Jan Patochka who was also a Czech philosopher friend of Haydnick's so in there is that line going from Husserl Heidegger and the other thinkers of the 20th century going to Haydnick and to that interpretation of the non-objective realities but as for the novel I think it is based on a completely different philosophical presuppositions altogether and if you like the philosophy it is built on is really largely derived from Sufism so it is really based on the Sufi notion of the world and of the human being as being in a way tempted by the world as having to go through the world to reach beyond the world so in a way this kind of understanding of the world in my in my reading of it actually is the axis around which the whole novel sort of moves or it makes sense around that axis by the way so as has a subscription to the novel it is on JSTOR or at least it was when I when I was at SOAS so I think you can all read it and I think it is really worthwhile it is worth reading it's one of the I think richest novels but it's not there are so many rich novels but I'm just currently finding it very very rich and multifaceted I'm not sure if I answered the question totally you also mentioned the kind of contextual philosophy or maybe you are referring to the kind of Ubuntu trend of philosophy I would say that is not present in the novel that is not it is not part not really not really I think okay so I misunderstood you then when I'm speaking about context I'm speaking about when you speak about this kind of mirroring or AP and APing it's a mimicry as you pointed out it's someone who's um reflecting a context it is not stationed in my view because when I mimic you that means I'm just suspending myself from where I'm stationed within myself and in relation and being cognizant of the context I'm in and jump and move to another context and take it as it is without being there and imbibing or making my own reality so that's what I was trying to to to point out in terms of context not that when I speak about African context there's Ubuntu I wouldn't say that because Ubuntu is also a contextual and a view or a mode of thought of a particular epoch of history and we are trying to make it viable in the here now in a new or in a contemporary context so that's what I was trying to to show but what's these thinkers and I'm speaking about like Martin Hedek and they say being there being in a place so mimicry emanating my understanding from the fact that someone is viewing the other and trying to be in the context of the other what is not there physically I don't know what I'm making so yes yes it's very interesting thanks for that I mean I I think you basically expressed it very well and definitely that would apply to this type of mimicry would apply to the novel because of course for instance Yasin Yae this character who wanted to become white yeah she basically experienced something in France then she came back to Senegal and she was unable to reintegrate herself in that context so in a way she sort of mimicked the way of being a white woman even through the name that she chose so definitely that would be that would be there and I think you know maybe maybe that will be a task for you to interpret the novel through Heidegger or put him and put Heidegger in connection with the novel I think that would again be very very interesting yeah thanks for that yeah thank you very much and the next question would be from Sean hi Elena I I'm just I don't even know where to begin because everything that you said was just like sparking so many ideas and so many kind of connections and I have quite quite a lot to say back to you but also just sort of I'm very curious about so much of what you said and of course as you will know as soon as you start talking about mirroring what do I think about I think about Lacan and I think about how he suggests that as we come into understanding that we are an autonomous person we see ourselves in a mirror image but what we see in the image is an other but we mistake the other for ourselves so we are always splits between an other who is not us and a kind of nothing that almost identifies with this other that seems coherent and clear in the image which then of course connects to mimicry in the context of the colonized subject and that kind of sense of duplicity is I think you brought out beautifully was that the anxiety of the colonizing subject is the duplicity of the mimic man as as as Baba turns out but of course what that doesn't really account for is the agony of the colonized subject who has no option in such a context but to perform that kind of mirroring image without any of the gratification that Lacan says one achieves in that that mirror state right so I think you know what you're showing is that it brings into relief the position of the colonized subject who and which again of course recalls Fanon right who is forced to encounter the gaze of the colonized colonizer at a point up until which he has identified himself entirely with the colonizer so he's shocked to hear himself referred to with the n-word on a train by this child who suddenly frightened of him and he has to sort of come to terms with his own hatred of his own body and that that image in the book cover the first the first one you know of the man sitting in front of the mirror seeing the ape and that kind of play on the sense of api is is like so so economically profound so I thought that you know that's wonderful and and so kind of what would I say transformative of my reading of Lacan however when it comes to this issue of a din a dina sorry and the don and d and then the connection to to Sufism my issue there is that Sufism is at least in the context that I'm most familiar with which is more the kind of Indian subcontinent Pakistan Sufism in that context is actually the preferred Islam right for the colonizing power and when it reads as as life and or live and die in Urdu I would read that as Dunya and Dean right so Dunya is just the kind of natural world whereas Dean is always gets translated in English as religion and yet the complete distortion of what is meant by that term which is that more kind of metaphysical life world but also one social obligations ones debts who one has kinship networks with it's the world of the social whereas Dunya is the kind of natural world and because Sufism is this kind of preferred Islamic other I wonder how that's playing out in you know it's it's the kind of good Islam right because it's this it's kind of mystical and it's not really kind of engaging in this worldly activities and I'm kind of wondering from your point of view whether it's the same I mean is it playing out in the same way is it this kind of colonizing force that makes Sufism this preferred other or is there a kind of deeper history there that's not in any way have tangled up with that colonizing impetus that says you're allowed to be religious as long as it's this other worldly thing that really has nothing to say about the world's politics or social relationships or or things like that sorry very long winded but just gosh I was just like writing away and thinking so so much as you weren't talking so thank you loved it thank you so much these are fascinating questions actually I you know curiously enough I never thought of like when I was preparing this paper and I just keep asking myself why I would say maybe um you know I think there are so many possibilities to actually read and reread the novel you know with Heidegger with Lacan perhaps what I was trying to do in the paper was to read the mirror from within that Sufi philosophy background yeah so in a way I think I it's sort of consciously shied away from European philosophers until that kind of non-objective concept which I borrowed from Heydanek but that said I think that there are so many ways to interpret it and I think what you said you know it would be a paper in itself a wonderful paper that would connect to that mimicry strength of of my talk now about the Sufi Islam as being the good Islam I must say from what I know this is not the case in Senegal there are four Sufi orders so in a way it is the it is a very prominent part of Islam as for East Africa I would say it is less prominent but very present especially in poetry but I would not necessarily see it as somehow preferred or backed up by colonialism I'm from what I know at least you know I'm not a kind of expert on the sociology of religion but the words that you mentioned from Urdu they of course also exist in in african languages in Swahili we have Duniya and Dine for the two for the two notions that you mentioned so I completely understand what you mean by by that dualism by that distinction so my answer would be I don't really see that kind of colonial push behind Sufism either in the novel or in Senegalese society as such from what I know at least and certainly not in the East African coast I think that's even there the Sufism is even less prominent as a religious option sort of speak can I just sort of back on that I think yeah I of course accept that I think you know what's interesting about what you're you're pointing to this is kind of a unifying notion of Adina you know as not actually having to separate those two things out so much as we would do in that kind of in colonial modernity right which is the foundation of the nation state where you know the the profane and the sacred so to speak right so that becomes the kind of organizing motif for for colonial modernity but I mean I think with respect to the issue of mirroring I think you know what what's very helpful about the novel and the novel as philosophical text and I as a disciple of Derrida obviously I think I think you know what's really helpful about what you're pointing out here is is the gift of the other to in giving the self it's self you know and and the self in it's very many different manifestations which I think your command happens in that particular novel even in the kind of clever mirroring of the various different characters you've got a sense that one is not a self unless the other gives this gift it might be a hostile gift but it's a gift nonetheless and I think that's what I take from Lacan but I think with what we find in Lacan is that Lacan never acknowledges his debts few of the others from whom he's taking these ideas which are largely colonized subject we have to think of France's relationship to Algeria but we also know that Lacan's very interested in Sanskrit thought and the kind of non-dualism that you find there and and so on so I think you know there's no need to reference Lacan but actually there's a work to do there which is to track the genealogy whereby he is almost appropriating the ideas of the other in order to create a philosophy which suggests that the other gives us who we are oh the irony I'll leave it there but thank you for fantastic paper fascinating thank you yeah thank you for that rich discussion and then I would like to invite Leah to ask the next question thank you very much very very interesting I have a couple of one question and a comment I agree with the the person who said something about Heidegger because Heidegger I think also does not see truth as representation but as disclosure and as hermeneutics as seeing that not exactly what is there but you have to dig beyond it and all that so I think that's already there and that's interesting the way he does it I just wondered about this esoteric and exoteric are you looking at a metaphor as a symbol because you know in Henri Corben who is who did a lot of stuff on Persian Sufism ibn Arabi mostly for him symbol is the outside is very much attached you know that he's a fight with Heidegger the phenomena you cannot drop the phenomena and extract something from it you know that's like philosophy or whatever and the novel fits very well against it I think nicely because once you extract you know you you leave the phenomena completely and you are in the world of concept and whatever which you're not covered what we really want to cover so the phenomena holds it but it's not them it's not something distorted it's not the exoteric is not false it's not like the something is false about it it hides the esoteric and it's works kind of together and I wonder if with regard to the novel isn't there a problem like in art generally that they that is maybe I don't know maybe it's different than philosophy that the form is part of the content that you cannot really take you know that the novel itself as it is you know it's like Borges the the guy who wanted to rewrite Don Quixote and the only way to rewrite Don Quixote was to rewrite Don Quixote you can't write it differently because the novel by itself is what it is the minute we try to extract from it that's how we get into philosophy it's something different I just wondered about it sorry hello can you I'm sorry yeah there was a little hiccup but we can see you know why I did not hear the rest of the question I heard you said something about a symbol and no I said that the novel um because it's art I think that the difference between art maybe in philosophy the form itself like the novel is also part of the content if you start you know a dissecting it you know and saying what it says and what it means and whatever you get into philosophy but you you you lose the whole content and it's a problem with language I think anyhow you cannot you cannot do esoteric in language because it's so singular as esoteric it's you can only do exoteric kind of so how do you deal with it when you do novel versus philosophy or you do how do you get to the esoteric how do you say the unsayable that's all thank you thank you thank you that that's very very rich um a lot a lot of things to think about well I I don't do I don't say the unsayable you know I I see again I see it as a thing as a as an issue of genre in a way the novel is a genre my paper is a different genre so I use a different way of speaking about reality and of course I cannot just read the novel to you I would not give you anything I need to in a way destroy its novelness I need to yeah I analyze it which means I also give something of my own ideas I put put it in different contexts so it's a pity but unfortunately to get the novel you need to read it that's all I can all I can say about that but you said something about the difference between symbol and metaphor and I think I got lost in that moment my connection was disrupted no it's between symbol and and allegory and I don't know what metaphor where metaphor falls it according to Henry Corbyn allegory you can have lots of allegories to the same thing the symbol is the something which attached so to speak the symbol is the exoteric with attached to the meaning of it and you cannot really separate it so in a way the the you don't want to break it and that's where you have the esoteric and the exoteric attached and I know I didn't expect you to not to to reread the novel or whatever but I think the meaning that you start explaining a novel you are getting to philosophy rather into the novel rather into literature and I think that's where the borderline I mean our experience of literature is so unique and so ours and it's really a phenomenology of I mean the experience that we go through and that's really the esoteric I think and that's what the amazing things that you can do there but the minute I think you start explaining what it is you know and you are getting to philosophy so I think there is some line maybe that you between philosophy and the novel I'm not sure hmm yeah again that that is I think a broader question I think the line is not as strict as as that I think I would say even the novel is philosophy even the novel expresses something it uses different ways to do it and even my speech or my article or something theoretical actually is very much loaded with images and with all kind of if you like the unsayable so there is an aspect of that as well so I think it's maybe a question of spectrum or really yeah I would say genre is basically using different but thanks for that I think the distinction between symbol allegory metaphor I think that that's something that again is a very rich angle to look at the novel yeah thank you Alina and Leah Sean would like to add something to this quickly just messaging if you want to say could I please intervene on this just with regard to metaphor and I'm sure Andrew who's actually a massive expert on this is going to have things to say about this but um I think you know when it comes to to doing philosophy in a way that isn't philosophy um metaphor is absolutely hugely important when you look at the etymology of metaphor it's metaphor in it means to transgress to carry across um Darida talks about philosophy is in fact actually driven with metaphor in fact he says that it's a metaphor all the way down that all of the kind of core philosophical concepts that we think of are in fact metaphor it's just that philosophy denies that fact um to itself and so I think you know when we're trying to engage traditions then they're not going to claim this again quite fictional genealogy to the corpus and then we have to recognize that the novel isn't absolutely valuable and um insightful text for doing philosophy otherwise of doing that work of transgression of moving across those boundaries that are so kind of disciplinarily policed but need not to be because philosophy is in denial of its own history and its own reliance on those literary traditions that it wishes to distance itself from because it says that those muddy the waters that that makes things ambiguous that that the truth can't really be conceived that fiction doesn't carry truth we can see from the novel that you presented today that the truth runs through it like an everlasting river right it it's this beautiful kind of message of truth that's running the way through it expressing itself in the way that truth can only ever be expressed which is always in many many different ways in a multiplicity of ways there's no one truth there's these many ways to join and and if we don't have a metaphor then then the truth cannot be expressed thank you thank you that's beautiful I think you expressed it very beautifully I will only add to that that the traditions of thought in other genres what we call literature for instance of poetry they are even more prominent in other cultures than european ones and once you start what you call this policing the the the boundaries and you start approaching these non-european cultures with with that idea of philosophy in mind you may easily end up with some deeply I would say racist colonial perceptions of other cultures as not having philosophy as being collectively whatever so I mean we've seen it all in african philosophy so I think that in the case of non-western philosophies in particular non-european philosophies in particular the the interrogation of the literary texts or the fictional poetic non-theoretical texts is perhaps even more relevant than in the case of european cultures where nobody actually doubts the existence of philosophical ideas so I think that's that sort of what drives my my search or my my my set basically this this wall of word this search for texts and interrogation of texts that are in other genres than non-fictional prose yes thank you very much on it on this I want to quickly make sure Andrew since this is also your area do you want to comment on that quickly I think Sean said it better than I could I'll just put the Elvis and yeah go in a minute all right thank you yeah I mean I think as philosophers we basically now have that ethical duties to break these binaries about philosophy and literature philosophy and music philosophy and symbols and so on and and we need to keep doing that and it's beautiful how you've done that with this novel so I'm basically dragging you back and Elena to this issue of translation so you can really run from it and if the if the if the only way to get access to the situatedness of that text the the metaphysical realities of that first the ontological commitments of the novel is through the original text what happens if I cannot read the original text how then do I really get access to the rich you know metaphysical contents of ontological ontological commitments in the text and this is a huge frustration for me as an African who would for example want to translate a particular concept in my language and write it in an article or in a book in English and and it's a huge struggle because there are these as you show in the novel there are these colonial translations already existing for example the word the word in my language that has been translated to truth does not in any way would have truth as a concept the actual literal translation will be the substance of a talk the substance of a talk and that brings in a lot of picture you know so how do I really then reach the true content the metaphysical commitments of these texts if I can't read the language yeah I don't expect you have a like a solid answer for it but at least give it an attempt thank you so I studied philosophy in the Czech Republic in the 1990s and actually hey Dan it was one of my teachers but not the main one but when we started studying philosophy we were told as as philosophers you must always go to the originals you always must work with the originals and as a so you have to understand the era right it was an era just after the revolution so the overcoming of communism it was an era when these philosophers who were then dissident and mostly worked as night porters or they worked in breweries as porters whatever so they now have the opportunity to go and teach so these philosophers came with what they had been doing their whole life which is reading texts in languages they did not know or did not speak too well sort of struggling with originals and I remember we were doing well we had to do two foreign languages foreign meaning english french and like world languages and then two languages which were latin and ancient greek and with a few lessons of ancient greek we were sat in a class and the the teacher started reading Aristotle with us in greek so you know my experience and my take on it is always learn the language now of course and why am I saying this is a specific here I mean at that time people still had that kind of mentality and the time to learn languages and to actually go to the originals but these days if you have a BA degree where you need to teach students philosophy quickly quickly in three years four years obviously you have no choice but work with translations people also are in a different situation and there are also different ways to access originals the result of machine translators and so on which all can help and generally there is a whole discipline of translation studies which gives you the various possibilities how to translate how to work with translation of course translations always depend on the target audience and they depend on your ideology they depend on many things so if you want to read for pleasure you know you can be a bit free perhaps if you want to read for the philosophical content then the best you can do is always have a lot of footnotes and some kind of interpretive repertoire sorry interpretive inventory so to speak that goes with the translation it's not an kind of easy or straightforward answer and I don't think there is a real solution to african two to three thousand languages right you will never learn 3000 languages so in at some point you always hit the wall but I still think that maybe the the the task is not as as as huge as it appears because you people normally select certain texts that they work with certain traditions but I think there is no way to run away from the original basically that's the bottom line whether through machine translations through people who help you with it through annotations and footnotes I think that would be my suggestion really but I appreciate totally the difficulty to translate for example what you say about truth I think the only thing you can do is basically explain it yeah basically do a footnote or write an article about it as what I do has done for so many concepts which I think is actually a fascinating topic in itself how these concepts are translated there is a dictionary of the the untranslatables by Barbara Cassin it has also been translated into or rather untranslated into English by Emily after and it precisely is based on the fact that a theory especially theory cannot be translated you just have concepts that have their histories and that have their genealogies they exist they impact deeply what we are doing and they cannot be translated and even better they become metaphorical and then then we are lost completely thank you thank you very much and yeah I'm going to take Benedetta because her hand was up earlier than you Andrew and then down not but now back up again so Benedetta feel free to ask your question thank you thank you so much for sorry Andrew I'll be quick no I just I popped up again with this question of translation this is just a comment perhaps some things are lived before they're even translated so I think to focus so much also on the verbal because these experiences somehow we we do live that we live theories of other parts of the world perhaps before we even grasp them theoretically but my question to your presentation and I don't know this is just something that interests me very much because I was so interested in that debate in African philosophy about dualism being a kind of western kind of a western philosophical product right this there's such a strong it's of course a debate in African philosophy it's not agreed by all scholars but there's a very prominent orientation in the field that really insists on this fact and of course your presentation kind of really challenges this we see a very important dualism arising I don't know if you care to classify this necessarily as African philosophy if this is a label that's so important but for me it does kind of really have a voice in this debate of course you linked it to this kind of non-objective representation of course it's a different kind of dualism than the one that's being critiqued but still I wonder yes if there's if you would yeah if you would cast this as challenging also this binary reading of philosophical traditions actually I asked the very same question to Emiliano and there was another student in the in the class back then who asked Emiliano Emiliano is a colleague from our team who gave a lecture on precisely on wall of poetry basically Sufi wall of poetry and the dualism present in in that poetry and he was asked by one of the students and I followed up basically exactly the same question you know so if Sufi thought as present in poetry and he quoted a lot of examples starting actually from the Quran and then in wall of poetry um it is very prominently structured in these dualities dualisms binaries however you called it or dichotomies he called it dichotomies and I think that I would actually say yes to your question I think it does challenge the challenge to dualism that has been posed by certain thinkers in African philosophy um you can always of course say this is one particular tradition this is the Islamic tradition which is present in certain areas not in others so we can always say perhaps there is a prevalence over I don't know three-way logic in other areas there is a presence of um some kind of merging of opposites or however it is called or contextual reading of of logic and of realities but I do think that in a way it it it does present a certain challenge to that thinking so definitely and it's also my my sort of interrogation of how far this kind of binary thinking and and of course you know if we speak of dualism in western philosophy there is a very specific dualism of the body and the soul if you like the kind of Cartesian dualism so perhaps we need to leave that aside for the time being but um I do think that this kind of binary thinking of dividing things on two sides is something that appears very um very common if not universal even in you know even in the way we structure language even in the way we use concepts there is always that kind of you have something and then you make two out of it which are more or less opposite or different I don't know if it answers your question but I'm also very struck by it actually thank you yeah I can understand that you are getting asked very interesting but also pretty pretty intense questions so I think you're holding up very nice all right let's see what Elvis what Andrew has to offer now I'll be brief thank you so much Elena for your talk the novel is a new novel to me so it's very interesting and I'm looking forward to reading it now on summer holidays um super quickly so I one of the ways I understand metaphor is it can at times be a vicious circle and I really saw that in the how you were explaining it and I was actually really struck by the idea of Mirrian versus Apien there were moments when you were the examples you were giving about Mirrian it's something that happens to us and then Apien is something we do and that's the vicious circle of metaphor right we were born into speaking metaphors before we even understand their metaphors and yet we use them in the same way the gorillas begin to viciously use them so there's this vicious circle of something happening to us and then doing it to others and um you know that that's what Al-Farabi does when he translates Aristotle's poetics into Arabic he says Aristotle has this idea of of a metaphor being you borrow something to give something a new meaning but Al-Farabi says he doesn't go far enough he doesn't realize that it's an endless cycle of borrowing is what metaphor is and I tend to agree with Al-Farabi about that so the point of my question Elena is does the novel give an exit strategy to this endless loop that we might have question one question two can metaphor always work in the same way in this because because as Bennett that has just pointed out we have different experiences and so can we talk about how metaphor always works with our cognition but what about you know the lived reality of colonial experience for example does metaphor work in a different way in that circumstance than it might and say my experience of metaphor who's never had a colonial experience those are my two questions wow big questions um I got a little bit distracted while I was speaking by the chat so the vicious circle that you are speaking about um if I first of all I wanted to say something about the mirroring in the novel it's not something that happens to us it is something that we active I think you cut out again Alina can you still hear us let's give it a moment this is such a good and I actually have to look in the video and even the etymology of the word there you are Alina Alina it's quite iconic it's a it's a good good shot in midst of thinking yes let's just give her a moment yeah now she saw that but that happened a second before so she will be back in a second um in the meantime though I mean um Andrew why don't you tell her ah here she is okay there you are I don't know what is happening there must be some kind of evil demon playing with my connection I normally have a very stable connection here in this location my apologies for that don't worry we unfortunately lost you pretty much at the beginning of your answer so if you you're kind to to repeat that thank you oh I've been talking for five minutes no um thanks for the two questions I think they are really very rich um and I think I started by saying that even the mirroring is an active um is an active act in the novel because uh you need to look in the mirror I think I was lost again for a second we got to hear you we hear you now maybe turn off the camera Alina okay so the last thing we heard was when you said that it is looking in the mirror as an active action by ourselves yes I think the connection is back now let me try with the camera as well yeah so um yeah so um in a way um I keep in a way I keep thinking myself whether there is this kind of categorical difference between mirroring and aping mirroring seems to be much more complex in the novel there are many more and less easily interpretable instances of it now can you please remind me of the question you spoke of the circle of the vicious circle I think you've actually clarified for me that I was misunderstanding the nature of mirroring I was just saying that metaphors can be tricky because we're born into them we find ourselves speaking them and yet we do speak them and carry out violence with them and so I was just that was the vicious circle of we find ourselves speaking them and yet we also have intentionality when we speak them yes yes I think we are looked into metaphors and there is very little we can do about it as the cognitive linguists have said and the second question sorry I'm a bit no it's okay I think the second question is more pertinent which is we've discussed metaphor in a very abstract way which I really like but I'm wondering is it the case that we can just say metaphor happens in the same way in all experiences or does metaphor happen differently based on experiences such as colonial violence yeah that's an excellent question and I don't think I have an answer to that because I only have one side of the experience right I can only speak of my own experience of metaphors perhaps I can say a few things about the cultural traditions in which these metaphors are used so for instance there is a very explicit talking about the Swahili tradition which is actually linked to Islam as well to the Sufi traditional thought there is a way of seeing poetry as speaking in metaphors good poetry speaks in metaphors and it's it should not express too much what they mean it should simply use the metaphors and then there is the activity of the listener to unravel the metaphors again if I reference Emiliano Minerva on the wall of poetry he mentioned several instances where the poetry actually first introduced the metaphor and then explained it so there is also like the poem itself actually gives you the metaphor and then sort of expands on it I'm not sure if it answers your question I think not but perhaps I'll think more about it and come back to it at a later point but I think it's a very deep question very good thank you so much for the answer I think it's really good actually more profound than you realize because I think it hints at the fact that we might have to look at specific instances to even begin to answer that question and so thank you for that yeah but maybe I can add one more thing I think what for me is actually the starting point for this analysis of the novel is the perception that the world is if you like fake right it's deceptive so the world itself prompts our interpretation the world is a like a network of signs that mean something so there is like a semiotics basically embedded in existence itself and perhaps that could be and the entry point into understanding metaphor so metaphor always is a kind of transfer of meaning to something else another the signified has another the signified becomes another signifier of another signified so I think this kind of transfer of meaning perhaps is particularly prominent in cultures that depart from this understanding of the world as being being out there to interpret being being assigned being something to read thank you very much let me put you see the yeah oh Helen had just took a to go already so that would mean yeah sure one very sort of quick point on this question of metaphor and I've been putting something in the chat but actually metaphor etymologically is associated with matter with the the transfer of matter from one place to the other or the transformation of matter from one thing to another and I think that you know when we get caught up in language which of course is always already metaphorical it's always standing in for the things themselves we need to recall that connection to perhaps not the world but the world and I think that's why I appreciated Leah's intervention is you know there is a kind of a high DeGarion sense here that that we are worlded in particular ways and we have things to hand and we do what we can with them to shape them into some kind of truth but that truth itself is a very kind of tenuous sometimes deceptive sometimes kind of on the mark never a final moment and I think that's why the focus on literature is actually so valuable because we get moments of newness in a novelty and I'm getting increasingly interested in how novelty connected to the novel arises in the way that we think especially when we're looking at the kind of colonial, post-colonial, decolonial movement this is how do we think in new ways how do we allow newness to arrive in the way that you know Fanon also tries to encourage us the kind of decolonial moment of you know breaking with that past and I think literature is one of those remarkable moments where newness arrives but so is the kind of craft of the hand with the matter that we have to hand and I think as philosophers we too often forget again sorry to reference that but you know the hands that we have in front of us and the things that our hands can do or the things that our eyes see or touch or so on and so forth so I'm not quite sure where I was going with that but I just kind of wanted to reinforce the idea that metaphor is always connected to matter to materiality to the to the world deceptive, undeceptive, new, not new things that we can make of it and that there's the kind of hope I think in that. Thanks. All right, Andrew you want to follow up on that? I'm sorry we probably should all go I do apologize just as a final comment to Sean's point though I think it's interesting I completely agree that there's a lot of etymological connection to matter however that's also linked to the fact that Ferrera Sottle and particularly with the translation into Latin with Cicero the the measure of a good metaphor and political rhetoric becomes that which accurately represents matter and so I think there can be a dark side to that too that is often seen in the history of the rhetorical schools that that get embedded into kind of European aristocratic culture after the fall of the Roman Empire so it's just also a reminder of the dark side of metaphor connecting to matter you know it needs to be truthful and truthful is measured against you know the world that's it thank you. All right thank you very much yeah it is indeed a very strange thing with the metaphors that we on the one hand use them a lot and on the other hand at least within Western thought there seems to be an overall mistrust towards metaphors and there seems to be an overall desire of always translating into what they actually mean instead of accepting them that their actual meaning is probably the expression of our existential situation as living beings who make use of metaphorical language not as a device of language on a secondary on a degenerate version of language but as an original way to express ourselves and I think it's very interesting what Schoen brought up with the newness because there's a there's quite a deep distrust towards newness within Western thought I think probably coming mainly from Augustine's fight against curiosity which was interestingly enough massively attacked by one of the main proponents of the philosophy of metaphor which is Hans Bloomberg and he he massively tried to fight this this hatred of Augustine towards curiosity task so that that's a very interesting twist sorry for abusing the privilege of moderating to force that in so I'm giving it back to Elvis thank you very much Elena and Elvis please say your final words thank you that was a great discussion thank you so much I have a lot to think of I have to say I tend to think slowly it will sort of go around in my head and perhaps there'll be next lecture at some point about metaphors culturally specific uses of metaphors thanks thank you so much Elena you sort of moved us to think a lot during the talk if this was a writing retreat perhaps we'll come out with some very interesting articles and the questions we're obviously not ending so which means that we've thoroughly enjoyed your your lecture and we are grateful for it and we are happy that we'll be able to have it to to watch after now and then reflect more on it and be able to tie to a lot of issues you know we talk about truth I'm currently doing a paper on cognition and how slippery it can be where you talk about it from an individual perspective and then yeah there's a lot of synergies here so thank you so very much for the talk and you're always part of us and we look forward to yet another time where we can have you perhaps maybe in person in the future so thank you all for attending as well and have a lovely weekend everyone thank you so much I've seen you've just shared the link to my next lecture which is in the gazelle shaft intercooled philosophy I'll be speaking about language as well about being to be or not to be about apology without being if it's possible so it will also somehow come back to the world but I will not spoil the lecture for you by giving it to you right now thank you so much thank you Elena as I do thanks to all the students yeah