Levantinism, Against All Odds

At the Miss Read book fair at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, from September 22-24, BAK distributed a printed brochure with Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf’s essay on Jacqueline Kahanoff’s notion of Levantinism, which I commissioned for my “ExitStateCraft” series on BAK’s prospections platform. The text is here.

It’s funny that the text was thus circulated in the HKW; in 2020, Eran, Eva and I proposed a project on Levantinism to the then-curator of the HKW, but we never heard back. Now it turns out there’s an office space dedicated to Kahanoff at the institution—which is something, I suppose.

Under the dismal circumstances of the present, it is as crucial as ever to sound out the anachronistic potential of Kahanoff’s Levantinism. As Alexander Kluge once put it: “The potential and the historical roots and the detours of possibilities also belong to reality. The realistic result, the actual result, is only an abstraction that has murdered all other possibilities for the moment. But these possibilities will recur.”