Fethi Meskini

Fathi Meskini (Arabic: فتحي المسكيني; sometimes latizined as Fethi Meskini or Fathi Al Maskini, born 24 August 1961) is a Tunisian poet, philosopher and translator. He studied philosophy in Tunisia and received his PhD in philosophy in 2003 with a thesis on Heidegger. He is currently a professor of philosophy at Tunis El Manar University
. Meskini specialises in modern German philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Habermas), but his areas of research interest span Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, French Theory, cultural Theory, Translation, Philosophy of religion|Philosophy of Religion, and Islamic Philosophy|Arabic philosophy . 
His rise to prominence was through the publishing a number of significant essays and books in Arabic since the 90s - such as his book "The Philosophy of Weeds (فلسفه النوابت) - and thanks to paramount translations of works by Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Habermas into Arabic. His ground-breaking translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time|Sien and Ziet (2012) won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award (Translation Category) in 2013, an annual award honouring authors and publishers for their contributions to Arabic Culture.
Meskini works on a broad definition of philosophy, which includes both reception and creative work , translating of definitive texts of thought as well as creating new concepts that make possible the poetic care of the sources of the self. The central point in Meskini's academic work is the transformative appropriation of Heidegger's thought, precisely for the needs of an Abrahamic, monotheistic, but in a non-European tradition. The question for him is: How do we reinvent a decontextualized Heidegger, not only in an Arab context, but precisely for the needs of thinking in an "islamicate" world ?
== Academic Life ==
Meskini’s academic interest in German philosophy began as early as his master’s thesis, which was titled "The Notion of Subject and the Work of the Negative in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit" (1987). In 1997 Meskini published a hermeneutical interpretation of the Science of Hegelian Logic titled "Hegel and the End of Metaphysics", the focus of which is to learn to free oneself from Hegel by thinking with him and against him at the same time. Heidegger was the unseen but inevitable inspiration for this approach.
In his PhD Thesis (Thèse d’Etat), written over more than 1400 pages in three volumes, Meskini worked on "Temporality and Rationality, or the Heideggerian Debate with Hegel" (in Arabic), the first part of which was later turned into a book that was published in 2005, Critique of Hermeneutical Reason, or the Philosophy of the Last God (Arabic : نقد العقل التأويلي، أو فلسسفة الإله الأخير). 
In 2008, he published his essay "Arabité et Philosophie" in France in the magazine 'Rue Descartes' , Meskini draws attention to the fact that his generation, having studied philosophy in French in post-colonial Tunisia, has undertaken the arduous task of doing philosophy in Arabic, in both writing and pedagogy, which explains the shift from French in his MA thesis into Arabic in his PhD
. He viewed that the revival of philosophizing in Arabic is a precursor to establish the laws of freedom in post-Islamic societies.
== Major Philosophical Concerns ==
Meskini works on a broad definition of philosophy, which includes both reception and creative work, translating of definitive texts of thought as well as creating new concepts that make possible the poetic care of the sources of the self. The central point in Meskini's academic work is the transformative appropriation of Heidegger's thought. How do we reinvent a decontextualized Heidegger, not only in an Arab context, but precisely for the needs of thinking in an "Islamicate world"?
Meskini’s philosophical project, since its early beginnings, has always sought to interrogate and rethink certain givens and concepts – including, inter alia, identity, time, freedom, religion, translation, modernity, tradition, faith, belonging …etc. – and create the possibility of a thinking that lies beyond pre-determined horizons of expectation, whether local or global. What is fundamental in his work, however, is one major concern: how to philosophise today – that is to say, after metaphysics, after colonialism – in Arabic, in a philosophical horizon – (post)modernity – which has not been inaugurated by the Arabs, but to which they nonetheless inescapably belong. This concern is driven by the historical necessity of contributing to global philosophy, insofar as it wrestles with issues that concern human life as such, from an Arabic, de-colonised vantage point: a universal thinking in Arabic.
Without a doubt, the "guiding" question of Meskini's academic work remains overwhelmingly this: How to reinvent a decontextualized Heidegger, not only in an Arab context, but precisely for the needs of thought in an Islamicized world?
But these "needs of thought" cannot be separated from a highly signed form of life, namely that of the contemporary Arab, abandoned by his history at the doors of the West. And this is where the "fundamental" question lies. Two hermeneutical decisions come into play: 1. to reconstruct the workshop of Arab philosophy from Kindi to Ibn Khaldun in the light of a post-metaphysical ethical attitude; 2. To enter into a radical dialogue with the breakthrough already achieved by the twentieth-century Arab poets, notably Khali Gibran, in order to establish a post-secular perspective capable of re-enchanting the sources of the self, no longer as a cursed heritage but rather as a poem to be written beyond our ancient theological-political meta-narratives, with the aim of a "migration to humanity" as a promise of free existence not yet fulfilled. ‘Migration (Hegira) to Humanity' is the title of one of Meskini's recent books published in 2016, written in the form of philosophical aphorisms, whose common thread is this ethical manifesto: the 'Hegira to God' is over; from now on, it is the 'Hegira to Humanity'.
=== Philosophy as a Translational Hospitality ===
The translation was not for Meskini a simple technical device but a deliberately philosophical choice. He practices translation as "thinking differently". Translation is for him an "alternative new version of oneself" . It is in this nuanced sense that he accepts that translation becomes a superior type of hospitality: hospitality of universal "meanings" within a particular language. Hospitality is a kind of re-signification of our language, a way to inherit intrinsically a concept born in the foreign language.
Meskini is the author of the first full-scale translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) into Arabic. This work was awarded the Sheikh-Zayed Prize in 2013, and Meskini has now gained fame in the Arab world as one of the key figures in contemporary Arab thought. Meskini’s reputation is connected to his approach to Western philosophy in a way he calls "dialogical translation" .
This research concern in German philosophy is not merely academic. In the climate of contemporary Arab thought, which is overwhelmed by debates revolving around the "translational" relationship between tradition and modernity, Islam and the West, sometimes in an intercultural perspective, sometimes by taking a decolonial option, Meskini turned to German philosophy because it enabled him to think in Arabic, to philosophize in Arabic, through and beyond these issues, with the hermeneutical toolkit that German philosophers, being those who inaugurated "the age of hermeneutical reason", furnished him with. This is because the relationship with tradition, or what he calls, a la Charles Taylor, "the sources of the self", is first and foremost interpretative, in that it must be, inescapable as tradition, locally reclaimed beyond traditionalism and universally reinvented beyond itself. This is where translation plays the role of a paradigm of unconstrained universality. In his article "Rainer Maria Rilke in arabischer Übersetzungen", author Ammar Alshuqairi wrote "Tunisian translator Fathi Meskini writes in the preface to his translation of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, "What has been translated is what has been found as a linguistic and conceptual equivalent in another language".
Thinking with Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Habermas, for Meskini, entails that the philosopher is simultaneously a radical translator. Translation, therefore, becomes a space of hospitality, where universal concepts travel from one language and another, transformed by and transforming, in the act of hosting, language (Arabic) itself, which possesses its own philosophical history. Indeed, Meskini argues that the Arab philosopher, insofar as s/he is a translator, should put in use the huge conceptual repository and terminology of classical Arabic philosophy and theology in translating and accommodating modern western philosophy . 
Translation, thus, becomes a creative act of transferring but also of transforming concepts, hence his contention that philosophical translation is liberating in a double sense: from the monopoly of traditionalist thought on the one hand, and from the epistemological and cultural domination of “the West,” on the other, which is overcome through and thanks to, not despite, translation. The latter, in this sense, becomes a mode of doing philosophy (no wonder that Meskini translates from German, English, and French into Arabic). This methodological orientation finds precedent in the huge movement of translating and domesticating ancient Greek philosophy in classical Arabic Falsafa or philosophy (especially in the Abbasid period). 
It should also be noted here that Meskini's translations from German to Arabic have attracted the attention of Iranian translators and researchers working on the same texts, on Kant and Heidegger for example, such as Siavash Jamadi. For this reason, some of his texts have begun to be translated into Farsi , and some of his works have been studied by Iranian scholars. 
Meskini’s translations into Arabic include:
* Hans Jörg Sandkühler (Editor), Handbuch Deutscher Idealismus (Handbook of German Idealism) , (with other translators), Beirut, Arab Network for Research and Publishing, (Beirut, 2012).
* Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift On the Genealogy of Morality (Arabic: في جينيالوجيا الأخلاق) published in Tunis by the National Centre for Translation (Tunis, 2010). 
* Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason (in Arabic; الدين في مجرد حدود العقل), published in Beirut by Jadawel (Beirut, 2012) . 
* Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit Being and Time (Arabic: الكينونة و الزمان), published in Beirut by Dar al Kitab al Jadeed (Beirut, 2012). 
* Jurgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Band 1. Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung. Band 2. Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft The Theory of Communicative Action (Arabic: نظرية الفعل التواصلي. المجلد 1- عقلانية الفعل والعقلنة الاجتماعية؛ المجلد 2- في نقد العقل الوظيفي), published in Beirut by the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies, (Beirut, 2020).
* Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in press by the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies,(Beirut, 2021).
=== Post-Historical revival of Medieval Arabic Philosophers ===
To this end, he has begun a series of hermeneutical investigations that attempt to put the thought experiences from al-Farabi to Ibn Khaldun in a new light. The novelty consists in rereading their texts as free fragments of an 'other' history of thought that has never been written, but needs to be written, a history told by the 'interested' and no longer by the sovereign Western Same according to its needs of cultural domination. 
According to Meskini, philosophizing has always been a concept signed, not by a people or a race, but by a language. "Arabness" is, like "Greekness", "Latinness" or "Germanness", a simple linguistic signature among others. According to Kata Moser, "He describes the Arabness of Arab philosophy as a particular hermeneutic situation.(...) Fathi Meskini speaks of a particular hermeneutic situation of Arabic philosophy, but without denying the philosophy itself its universal validity." 
He has published a set of interesting hermeneutical grafts on the great figures of medieval Arab philosophy, such as Al-Farabi, Ibn Bajja, Averroes |Ibn Rushd, Ibn Khaldun, interpreted not as mere "great commentators" of the original Greeks, but as "Nawabit", as free plants of thought in the land of the Abrahamic community, contingently signed by "the Muslims", where the confrontation between pagan Logos and biblical Revelation was still a matter of life and death, a declared war between "us" and the "others", between the private everyday life and the "We" of the public sphere. The modern return to Ibn Rushd is mainly due, according to Meskini, to his way of embodying the typical relationship between the philosopher and the multitude within a theological-political community or "Milla".
According to Meskini, "wonder" - in Greek θαυμάζειν ("thaumazein") - baptized by Plato as the origin of the love of wisdom, has known with the irruption of the "Nawabits" in the horizon of the Abrahamic community a curious and dangerous change : its object has changed. It is no longer the "cosmos" that amazes but the phenomenon of "revelation". The philosopher is no longer a "citizen" ("politès" in Greek means one who benefits from the right of the "Polis" - the city), he becomes a "Nabitat" (a weed to be isolated or uprooted). "Nawabits" is a plant metaphor to underline the contingent, curious and perhaps poisoned birth on inappropriate soil.
It is not a simple recurrent reading of texts from the past, but precisely a kind of free post-metaphysical encounter with these free thinkers in the land of Islam, an encounter that was made possible by the unexpected, surprising and violent advent of the foreign shadow of 'modernity'. The astonishment of modernity remains, according to Meskini, the most important spiritual event in the contemporary history of the Arabs. A conceptless event that has not been properly, i.e. intrinsically interrogated by them, by its own means and for its own ends, until now.
According to Tahar Ben Ghaiza, Tunisian professor, one of the main guiding questions of Meskini's work on Arab philosophers is : "In what sense could we take up the philosophical research inaugurated by our ancestors, but especially and radically in the problematic horizon of contemporary philosophy as a new inevitable destiny for us latecomers?" 
For Meskini, "Arab philosophy" has long suffered from a double misunderstanding : either to treat it as a dead heritage, a mere epistemological "thing" for historians, the local pupils of Western orientalists ; or to read it as a medieval theological quarrel in which one must take a stand in favor of one's spiritual roots for fear of being accused of identitarian betrayal. Meskini severely criticizes both epistemological and theological approaches.
=== Arabic version of "Active Nihilism" ===
Meskini's article on Gibran, titled "Gibran before Nietzsche or the Arab Version of Nihilism" (1991) has had a rather remarkable echo among Arab scholars. It represents one of the few Arab essays to have radicalized the question of the nature of 'contemporaneity' between Arab and Western thought: by moving from the mere reception of the 'copy' to the assumption of a metaphysical dialogue with the 'origin'. Such a dialogue seems to proceed from an intrinsic sharing of the same epochal time between two different nihilisms but largely related by the history of metaphysics which stumbles, beyond its Cartesian procession, on the Christian element. Gibran and Nietzsche are two angry Christian thinkers nevertheless separated by the rules of modernity. There is even the one that has tried to read this article as a contribution in the context of Spinoza's contemporary Arab reception.
It is that philosophy, for Meskini, is not only an academic specialty; it is as much a practice of liberation of new spaces of thought and new forms of life, a post-metaphysical exercise inaugurated by Nietzsche but especially developed and radicalized by Heidegger. It is within this specific horizon that Meskini has undertaken an assiduous and renovating reading of the work of Khalil Gibran, interpreted as the most prominent instigator of an Arabic version of the active nihilism promised by Nietzsche, under the figure of a post-religious prophet. The new stake of this alter-modern figure, or otherwise modern, is to promote an ``alterance taking place beyond the procedural and strategic forms of "alterity".
== Bibliography ==
=== Books In Arabic ===
- Hegel and the End of Metaphysics: Hermeneutical Reading of the Science of Logic (Tunis: Sud Editions, 1997)
هيغل ونهاية الميتافيزيقا. قراءة تأويلية لكتاب علم المنطق (تونس: دار الجنوب، 1997)
- Philosophy of the Weeds (Beirut, Lebanon, 1997)
فلسفة النوابت (بيروت، دار الطليعة، 1997)
- Identity and Time: Phenomenological Interpretations of the Question of the ‘’We” (Beirut, 2001)
الهوية والزمان. تأويلات فينومينولوجية لمسألة النحن (بيروت، دار الطليعة، 2001)
- Critique of Hermeneutical Reason, or the Philosophy of the Last God: Heidegger from Fundamental Ontology to the History of Being (Beirut, 2005)
نقد العقل التأويلي أو فلسفة الإله الأخير. هيدغر من الأنطولوجيا الأساسية إلى تاريخ الوجود (بيروت: دار الإنماء القومي، 2005)
-The Philosopher and the Empire: On the Enlightenment of the Last Man (Beirut, 2006)
الفيلسوف والإمبراطوية. في تنوير الإنسان الأخير (بيروت: المركز الثقافي العربي، 2006)
- Identity and Freedom: Towards a New Enlightenment (Beirut, 2011)
الهوية والحرية. نحو أنوار جديدة (بيروت: دار جداول، 2011)
The Wounded Cogito: Questions of Identity in Contemporary Philosophy (Beirut, 2013)
- الكوجيطو المجروح. أسئلة الهوية في الفلسفة المعاصرة (بيروت: منشورات ضفاف، 2013)
- Migration to Humanity (2016)
الهجرة إلى الإنسانية (بيروت: منشورات ضفاف، 2016)
- Free Faith or Post-Millah: Essays in Philosophy of Religion (Beirut, 2018)
الإيمان الحرّ أو ما بعد الملّة. مباحث في فلسفة الدين (بيروت: مؤمنون بلا حدود، 2018)
=== Books Translated into German ===
- Der andere Islam. Kultur, Identität und Demokratie Aus dem Französischen übersetzt und eingeleitet von Hans Jörg Sandkühler (Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften; 1 Edition March 16, 2015)
=== Articles: ===
==== Written in French ====
a) « Discussion herméneutique d’une traduction arabe récente du "cogito ergo sum" cartésien», in : Revue Tunisienne des Études Philosophiques, N° 20/21 (1998) pp. 117-125.
b) « Lumières et Sécularisation », in : Revue Tunisienne des Études Philosophiques, N° 22/23 (1999) pp. 79-85 .
c) « Qui est l’homme ? ou l’autre comme soi-même. Essai de géophilosophie », in : Unité de l’homme, Diversité de l’humain. Actes de la septième Rencontre Internationale de Carthage (10-14 mars 2003). Académie tunisienne des sciences, des lettres et des arts Beït al-Hikma, Carthage 2004, pp. 253-265.
d) « Imagination et éternité. Al-Farabi revisité au temps de l’empire », in : Le réel et l’imaginaire dans la politique, l’art et la science. Actes de la huitième rencontre internationale de Carthage (8-13 mars 2004). Académie tunisienne des sciences, des lettres et des arts Beït al-Hikma, 2005, pp. 245-266.
e) « Kant et le droit de résistance », in : Revue Tunisienne des Études Philosophiques, n° 38/39 (2004/2005) :54-62.
f) « Résistance et responsabilité. Essai phénoménologique sur le martyr », in : Jacques Poulain, Hans-Jörg Sandkühler, Fathi Triki (Ed.), L’agir philosophique dans le dialogue transculturel, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2006, pp. 129-143.
g) « Le savoir de l’autre au temps de l’empire. Essai sur Edward Said », in : L’agir philosophique dans le dialogue transculturel. Jacques Poulain, Hans-Jörg Sandkühler et Fathi Triki (Ed.), Paris, L’Harmattan, 2006, pp. 241-260.
h) « Arabité et Philosophie », in : Revue Rue Descartes 2008/ 3 (n°61), pp. 116-122.
i) « Qui est l’individu en Islam ? Individualité et transcendance. Essai sur l’individuation musulmane », in : Pour une démocratie transculturelle. Sous la direction de Jacques Poulain, Hans-Jörg Sandkühler (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2010), pp. 281-296.
==== Translated into German ====
1) « Die Gestalten der Menschheit », aus dem Französischen übersetzt von Hans Jörg Sandkühler, in: Jacques Poulain, Hans-Jörg Sandkühler, Fathi Triki (Ed.), Menschheit- Humanität – Menschlischkeit , Frankfurt am Main- Berlin- New York-Oxford, Peter Lang , 2009, pp. 15-17.
2) -« Ist die Menschheit universell ? Oder- Universal und universell : Was ist oder wer ist der Mensch ? », aus dem Französischen übersetzt von Caroline Surmann, in: Jacques Poulain, Hans-Jörg Sandkühler, Fathi Triki (Ed.), Menschheit- Humanität – Menschlischkeit , Frankfurt am Main- Berlin- New York-Oxford, Peter Lang , 2009, pp. 69-80.
3) "Zur Identität der Revolution," in: Polylog. Zeitschrift Für Interkulturelles Philosophieren. 28 (2012), S. 5-25.
4) "Sind unsere ›Brüder‹ Demokraten? Oder: Demokratie und theologisch-politisches Paradigma der Brüderlichkeit," in: Sarhan Dhouib, Demokratie, Pluralismus und Menschenrechte. Transkulturelle Perspektiven (Velbrück Wissenschaft, Weilerwist 2014), S. 62-72.
5) "Entschuldigung, Verzeihen und Rechtfertigung oder Monotheistische Politiken," in: J. POULAIN, H.J. SANDKUHLER, F. TRIKI (Hg.), Gerechtigkeit, Recht und Rechtfertigung in transkultureller Perspektive (P. Lang, Frankfurt a.M.-Bern -Bruxelles 2010), S. 138 e segg.
6) "Der letzte Kommunitarier oder: Nach der Identität," in: Kultur, Identität und Menschenrechte Transkulturelle Perspektiven. Herausgegeben von Sarhan Dhouib (Velbrück Wissenschaft, Weilerswist 2012), S. 115-133.
==== Tranlated into English ====
- "Nietzsche and the Last Pope: Changing the Paradigm, or the End of al-Millah (the Theologico-political Community)," trans. Ghazouane Arslane, in Philosophy East and West: A Quartery of Comparative Philosophy (September 2020) .
== Awards ==
- 1988 : President of the Republic Award for Science Day (Agrégation of Philosophy)
- 2013: Sheikh Zayed Book Award- Translation Category ( Arabic first integral translation of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit) - An annual award honoring authors & publishers for their contributions to Arabic Culture- Abu Dhabi.
Category:Tunisian people
Category:1961 births
Category:Tunisian philosophers