Nayla Tamraz

Biography

Nayla Tamraz is Professor of Literature and Art History at the Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth, where she headed the Department of French Literature. In 2010, she created the “Art Criticism and Curatoriat” master’s program, which she currently directs. In 2014, she also organized the international symposium “Literature, art and the contemporary world: narratives, history, memory”. In parallel, she pursues a career as an art critic and curator for various events, including the exhibition Poetics, Politics, Places held at the Tucuman Museum of Fine Arts in Argentina as part of the International Biennial of South America (Bienal Sur). Her research focuses on a comparative theory and aesthetics of art and literature, as well as their historical context, which leads her to address issues of history, memory and narrative in post-war Lebanon.

Conference: Can Art define the contemporary?

“The contemporary is the inactual”. Roland Barthes summed up Nietzsche’s words in a note to his lectures at the Collège de France. In Qu’est-ce que le contemporain, Giorgio Agamben comments: “The one who truly belongs to his time, the true contemporary, is the one who neither coincides perfectly with it nor adheres to its pretensions, and defines himself, in this sense, as inactual; but precisely for this reason, precisely because of this gap and this anachronism, he is more apt than others to perceive and grasp his time. What then is this time to which philosophers invite us, and in which, they say, we would be better able to contemplate that from which we abstract ourselves? What then is this strange temporality that invites itself into our lives, and what posture does it commit us to?