Pensando col Mediterraneo, ripensando la Modernità

Commencing from a series of critical considerations drawn from a reading of Francescomaria Tedesco’s recent book Mediterraneismo. Il pensiero antimeridiano (2017) this essay seeks to subtract Mediterranean studies from an exclusive European framing. Insisting on historical and cultural limits, attention is drawn beyond existing critical paradigms to what persists and resists in the Mediterranean archive. This excess does not represent something that historically has still to be registered in order to improve and correct our understanding but rather a deeper ethical and epistemological challenge to rethink the Mediterranean (and modernity) precisely in the light of what existing narratives have refused and repressed.