Exil et universalité

Abstract

Based on the trajectories, productions, and narratives of contemporary intellectuals in exile in France and Germany, this contribution seeks to understand the relationship between exile and universality. Edward Saïd, in his memoirs, has portrayed exile as a situation of marginality and decentering, favorable to the production of universalist thought that is critical of the hegemonic universalism of the West. Based on this assumption, this essay seeks to construct a sociological approach to the position of the “exiled intellectual” and the different types of world narratives that arise from the radical experiences of loss intimately linked to exile and migration. It shows that the positions of exiled intellectuals in the fields of cultural production oscillate between the construction of an exiled identity endowed with an “epistemological privilege” (Traverso 2004), and the rejection of the status of foreignness as a cultural producer, as well as between universalism and particularism. It also examines, by way of a discussion of two contemporary authors whose trajectories have been affected by forced migration, the social and biographical determinants relevant to understanding the nuances of their stances taken towards the idea of universality and Western universalism.