This project seeks to develop a philosophical inquiry into the literary and artistic works that have emerged from the war in Syria, viewed through the prism of the body. It is structured around two complementary aims. The first is to examine these works in the face of the irreparable, approaching them as forms of agency. The aim is to explore their capacity to open up spaces for thought and survival where reality seems to have been definitively foreclosed by violence, with the work of art thereby becoming a laboratory for experimenting with what remains possible. The second is to develop a phenomenological account of the body grounded in the distinctive theoretical contributions of these works. In them, extreme violence subjects the body to radically extreme ordeals that classical phenomenological frameworks have sometimes left in the shadows. This gives rise to configurations that unsettle our ordinary modes of bodily apprehension, and that this project seeks to conceptualise through the notion of “tearing”.
DR. NIBRAS CHEHAYED
CURRICULUM VITAE
Initially trained as an architect at Damascus University, Nibras Chehayed later turned to philosophy, while also becoming involved in social and cultural projects. His work, situated at the intersection of theoretical reflection and lived experience, has centred on nihilism in both its political and existential forms, and on the ways it affects such fundamental realities as the world, time, death, and the body. His dissertation, defended at ENS-Ulm, examined the estrangement of the body through a reading of Nietzsche and Derrida. Since then, his research has become rooted in historical and geographical contexts shaped by oppression and war, bringing him into direct contact with extreme forms of violence: torture, enforced disappearance, dehumanisation, annihilation. This confrontation has given rise to an embodied philosophical approach that begins with the body in limit situations.