We must go slow like an old country train carrying peasant women dressed in black, like those who go on foot and see the world magically opening ahead, because going on foot is like leafing through a book, while running is like looking at its cover. We must go slow and love the pauses that enable us to see the road we have covered, feel the weariness conquer our limbs like melancholy, and envy the sweet anarchy of those who invent their journey at a moment’s notice.

We must learn to be on our own and wait in silence, happy,...

What do the sea and epistemology have in common? Is the relationship between land and sea purely accidental, or is it rather a determining and underrated factor for the birth of Greek culture? And, if this relationship exists, what is the meaning of the sea for Greece, for Greek philosophy and thus for philosophy in general? What are its effects on us today?

My hypothesis is that there exists a structural homology between the geographic configuration of Greece (and in particular the relationship between land and sea) and its culture. This is certainly not my discovery, nor an original statement....

“A small county is a country that was once great and remembers it,” said Georges Simenon in a short and wonderful story titledFrontiers.¹ It is on the frontier that one measures the full and terrible restlessness that runs through human history.

The word “frontier” derives from the Latinfrons, frontis, ‘front/forehead.’ Frontiers are the places where countries and the human beings who inhabit them meet andstay in front of each other.² Thisbeing in front of each othercan mean many things: first of all, looking at the other, learning about him, confronting and understanding what we...

The question is inevitable: When we talk about relationships “between” cultures, do we in fact place ourselves outside them, like an unconnected and impartial judge (as the word “between” would suggest), or do we play the old game where one of the sides disguises itself as the third? If I start off with this typically spiteful argument (used so often against relativism), I am not doing it to blackmail those who are trying to build bridges by accusing them of double-crossing; instead, I am attempting to unmoor the discussion about the relationship between different cultures from an understanding so banal...

God is not center stage, but it is not true that everything is allowed; on the contrary, the exact opposite is true: “If God does not exist, nothing is permitted.”¹ God is not present, but there is the sun (“At the center of my work there is an invincible sun”),² and nihilism does not win in any of its incarnations, whether it is the debilitated and tired one, or the cynical and imperious one. At the center of Camus’s thought, and even earlier at the center of his life, there exists a proud and responsible behavior where eclipsing God does...

There is still a large crowd milling around Pasolini, different people with different questions. My question is very simple: What allowed Pasolini’s prophetic vision? How is it possible that a poet (“I sense the problems of the moment; I am not a scientist who does research . . . I am a writer”)¹ could see much further than the politicians or the scholars trained in the analysis of society? I do not believe that there exists a privileged language to gain access to the world (such as science, the revolutionary point of view, or, as is fashionable today, poetry or...

It is not by chance that philosophy was born on the sea, when the word “being” came into existence, floating between being and nothingness; when “becoming” became a word charged with a cognitive sense, calling into question truths that had been so strong as to never have been doubted or discussed. Knowledge escaped its oracular and sacred form and became a matter of opinion, debatable, the opportunity for a challenge, rhetoric, the capacity to persuade and argue: It moved from the temple to the market.

As a result, humanity no longer awaits the verdict of the oracles: It becomes instead...

North:It rules from above. The place of cold and of the winter solstice, of industry that delays gratification because its flowers will blossom only with the heat. The place of austerity and of the ability to wait, of restraint and control over the world and oneself. It is discipline and planning; light that is scarce and precious; active and sturdy loneliness. Cold, duration, patience, industriousness, reason, rigor: a sea one can only hope to navigate, distant from sensual pleasure; revenge on the harshness of the environment; cold and everydayeposagainst rhetoric and demagoguery; the order and repetition that...

Italy becomes a unified State very late, in the second half of the nineteenth century (1859–60), and the problem of national unity monopolizes its political and cultural attention for a long time. Italy arrives to unity after an extremely long period of divisions, without an autonomous presence on the international scene, and very late with respect to the most powerful European countries, which, with the exception of Germany, have already spanned the previous centuries with the great ships of their national states, thus becoming colonial and imperial powers. This “delay” forces the attention of nineteenth-century Italian intellectuals—even the...

To think the Mediterranean today means, first of all, to deconstruct the perspective of a clash of civilizations and turn this struggle into the goal of a whole historical epoch. The adjectiveMediterraneancontains a cultural and political program, because it describes a sea that unites and divides, that liesbetweenlands without belonging exclusively to any of them, that is allergic to all fundamentalisms. In the course of the centuries, this sea has witnessed invasions, forced conversions, and abuses of power; but every time the claims of one land over others has worn itself out and has ebbed, just...