The Red House Centre for Culture and Debate "Andrey Nikolov" presents:
Celebrating diversity
public lecture by Ramin Jahanbegloo, the distinguished Iranian intellectual
Cultural diversity presupposes ways of living together and participating in the cultural life of one’s choice. The idea of cultural pluralism or interculturality is, therefore, linked to that of global differences. The concept of culture itself seems to have expanded to influence that of identity. As a result interculturality does not simply begin where a state’s frontier ends, and respect for cultural identity may entail rights for groups as well as for individuals. Today, a kaleidoscopic vision of the world has taken the place of a linear monolithic discourse, giving rise to perpetual changes in the relational thought that shapes our common cultural heritage. This common cultural heritage appears as a vast web of interconnections, all of which are linked in a event of co-being.
The mutuality of differences makes dialogue a necessity in our world, for it is present in exchanges at all levels of being: at a cultural level as multiculturalism, at an identity level as border identities, and at the level of knowledge as a spectrum of interpretations. If we agree that dialogue implies some kind of mutual exchange of views, we can probably concentrate our attention on the dialogical side of diversity. Diversity, of course, can never be celebrated without an ethical-hermeneutical dialogue where partners seek a cross-cultural learning. It is on this level that we need to free ourselves from misunderstandings emanating from prejudicial attitudes poisoned by a presumption of superiority. The question is neither to idealize nor to reject the ‘other’. We must overcome deformations that usually go under the name of ‘Orientalism’ or ‘Occidentalism’. Both Orientalism and Occidentalism are styles of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinctions made between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident’. Both Orientalism and Occidentalism go out of the borders of diversity, because they dehumanize the other, representing him as evil. Unlike these two situations, wherein the desire of revenge is accompanied by the attitude of returning injustice for injustice, within the diversified ethical-hermeneutical dialogue, confrontation and contestation are not ends in themselves, but are put in the service of ethical harmony and healing. Let me add here that the celebration of diversity is an antidote to terror wars and culture clashes. It is a global effort in a world threatened by a cultural divide. It is a challenge not only for international but also intra-national relations.
Ramin Jahanbegloo is one of Iran’s preeminent intellectual figures. Canadian by citizenship, he was born in Tehran, and received his PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne University. He has been a fellow at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, a Rajni Kothari Chair in Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi and presently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Central European University. He is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Toronto. He is the author of 20 books in English, French, Spanish and Persian, including Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (1991), Gandhi: aux sources de la non-violence (1998), Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity (ed.) (2004), The Clash of Intolerances (2007) and Elogio de la Diversidad (2007).As the director of Centre for Contemporary Studies at The Cultural Research Bureau in Tehran (2002-2006), he has been responsible for bringing scores of prominent Western intellectuals to Iran, including Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Toni Negri, Adam Michnik, Michael Ignatieff ,Agnes Heller and the late Paul Ricoeur acting as a kind of philosophical ambassador between Iran and the outside world. In April 2006 Ramin Jahanbegloo was arrested and detained for 125 days in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison on charges of spying and preparing a velvet revolution.
September 26 (Wednesday), 7.00 p.m.
Red hall
Tickets: 2/1 BGN
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