Lectio Magistralis
Don Quixote in Gaza
The Remedy of Madness
Todor P. Todorov
Don Quixote in Gaza approaches the Knight of the Mournful Countenance as a figure of sacred madness — a rebellion against cruelty, the banality of violence, and the reduction of life to survival, profit, and war. Drawing on Nabokov, Arendt, Habermas, and Le Guin, the lecture exposes how modern reason, in the guise of science, technology, and the all-permeating logic of the market, has colonised life, normalising war, exploitation, and mass killings as if they were necessary and justifiable. Don Quixote’s madness becomes the antidote, indeed the remedy — a yearning for transcendence, an imagination incarnate. Madness becomes a mode of truth.
Science and technology reduce life to numbers, machines, and control. Cruelty and war embody the logical outcome of such reduction. Don Quixote’s “madness” is, paradoxically, the last stronghold of Reason. We inhabit an environment that stimulates simple, one-dimensional responses. It reinforces the brute logic of always already being at war.
It is Alonso Quijano who died, feeble and old, in his bed. While Don Quixote went on his journey — beyond Spain, beyond Europe, and beyond all the comforts of hearth and home. Don Quixote died in Gaza. He was shot, starved, shelled, and burned. He was defeated by rockets and mortars. The windmills of progress, those terrifying giants, killed him after all.
What is opposite to war is not peace but home. War is homelessness, exile. Peace, by contrast, means coming home, building a home. True community relies on imagination and the imaginary. Deprived of it, we are always alone, even next to each other. We are poetic beings, madmen, bound by narratives, by stories and languages. We feed on the imaginary — just like Don Quixote. Without recognising that poetry, of which our existence is woven, we become our own nightmare. Home is not a place or a time, but an intangible togetherness. It is being where you belong, being at peace.
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You may also like the following events from The Malta Festival of Ideas:
- Next month, 6th October, 05:00 pm, FORUM 1 High Waves: Security, Dialogue, and Opportunities for the Mediterranean. in Valletta
- Next month, 7th October, 05:00 pm, FORUM 2: The Revolution will not be televised: Art, Activism, and Social Change in Valletta
Also check out other
Arts events in Valletta,
Fine Arts events in Valletta,
Literary Art events in Valletta.
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