Walid Sadek and Nadia Bou Ali Discuss Survivors, Translation, and Post-War Lebanon

In a conversation published by ARTMargins Online on June 15, 2015, artist and writer Walid Sadek and intellectual historian Nadia Bou Ali explore themes of survival, translation, and the legacies of the Lebanese Civil War. Sadek, a faculty member at the American University of Beirut, introduces his concept of the "non-posthumous survivor," a figure distinct from post-traumatic subjects or human rights discourses. He critiques sectarianism as a symptom of capitalist modernity, linking it to guilt-saturated relations in Lebanese society. The dialogue references Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator," Jacques Derrida's theories on survival and spectrality, and Byzantine iconography, with Sadek arguing for a survivability that interacts with loss without being anchored in presence. Bou Ali draws parallels between translation and surviving, questioning the untranslatable and the political implications of rumors and formlessness. Sadek's earlier works, such as "Mourning in the Presence of the Corpse" and "The Impregnated Witness," are cited, alongside thinkers like Bruno Bettelheim, Slavoj Žižek, and Sami Khatib. The conversation, conducted in Beirut in February 2015, emphasizes soliloquy and the need for new socialities amid absence, without speculating on future outcomes.