How do I introduce myself? Every work, academic or research-based, rests one way or another on a personal make-up. If I wasn’t who I am, or I didn’t … - Sophie Bessis

The Arab world doesn’t want to know it, and this comes out clearly today, when we see what’s happening in Libya with the return of the slave trade. This is the dark part of Arab history. Africans know it and remember it perfectly well.

Then history took its course, and the lives and fates of individuals were tied to the collective history, as is always the case in our countries, and the Jewish minority left the country, for numerous reasons.

As I see it, the universal is besieged by the hegemony of the commodity and that of the religious. Two faces of globalisation that have nothing to do with the universal, that is anti-universal, which is a thesis I worked on in my book La Double Impasse, in which there are extensive sections on the culturalist and the essentialist.