Zona Zaric

Paris

Here we discover the career of Zona Zarić, a researcher in moral and political philosophy at ENS Ulm...

Studies, readings, projects... Here's her account!

Can you introduce yourself? What are you currently doing?

I've been living in Paris for four years and I'm as in love with this city today as I was on day one. I come from Ex-Yugoslavia a country whose disintegration is fuelling my current research. Having lived through the Yugoslav wars and witnessed the process of dehumanising the Other, which was both the cause and the consequence, my project slowly matured. It culminates in the development of a political-philosophical framework that makes it possible to move beyond an abstract cosmopolitanism - affirming a common humanity, a shared destiny as well as the equal moral value of human beings, but which tragically more often than not fails to win support - and move towards a sensitive apprehension of these ethical and existential truths that is capable of being mobilised to effect societal change.

I am in the fourth - and hopefully final - year of my thesis in moral and political philosophy at the Philosophy Department of the ENS Ulm. I also co-lead the seminar Soin et Compassion : Le sujet, l'institution hospitalière et la Cité, within the Chair of Philosophy at Hôtel-Dieu in Paris.

What do you remember about your studies? Of your teachers?

During my career, a decisive encounter led me to be able to answer you today, from Paris, as a doctoral student. At a pivotal time, when the follow-up to my law studies was this natural transition to philosophy, I met Cynthia Fleury. I was then doing a Master's degree in international relations at the American University in Paris, and both her interest in my path and her confidence offered me and in fact opened up a path rich in many encounters, including that with the man who would become my thesis director, Marc Crépon.

I'll never forget the day I received his email announcing that my application to the Ecole Normale Supérieure on the rue d'Ulm had been approved. Since then, I've been living my dreams, thanks to this institution and all that being part of the ENS offers in the way of possibilities. What a richness! It helps me to move forward every day, both professionally and personally. I'm creating the most beautiful memories ever; they'll stay with me forever.

Which philosophy book have you been particularly passionate about? The author for whom you fell in love at first sight?

Without any hesitation, it was reading the works of Emmanuel Levinas and especially Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. It sums up so well what it is to be human, the status of subjectivity and the relationship to others! Subjectivity is one for the other and not for oneself. In this responsibility, which does not question reciprocity, I am a subject. In other words, it is when I feel close that I feel responsible. It is in ethics understood as responsibility that the very knot of the subjective is tied. Or as Dostoyevsky had said We are all responsible for everyone and everything, and I more than anyone else.

Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence is THE great book of subjectivity, but Levinas is obviously no Enlightenment philosopher. For him, individual autonomy is not the supreme value - the other, the face of the other, stops my freedom, inhibits it, and even alienates it, thus allowing a suspension of its natural attitude; for to think of the other is to remove oneself from oneself and from any cultural or historical context.

I believe that in the age of interchangeability and universal "replaceability", reading Levinas could be very useful and liberating.

What are your research projects or work?

I am seeking to extract the compassion from plural emotions of the furore of public debate, giving it a political content by virtue of the fact that it underpins moral reasoning and the sense of social responsibility that has the common good as its goal. By virtue of its ubiquity and immediacy - as a universal lived experience - compassion opens up a way out of Hobbes' logic of the struggle of all against all. It allows us to move towards the collective project of living with and for others.

My doctoral thesis is concerned with the way in which compassion might be mobilised to be both the basis of a collective societal design and of a solidarity-based living-together, nourished by the moral sensibilities of our cultures, while at the same time finding its source in a long-standing questioning of how to deal with and transcend division and the denial of a shared humanity, both phenomena engendered by the construction of otherness and essentialised identities.

I wish, however, to reflect on the possibilities of a discourse that allows compassion to become 'eloquent' and to unfold within social relations. In what way could compassion be a driving force behind a 'rehumanisation' of politics? Advances in robotics, particularly in artificial intelligence and transhumanism, are also forcing us to rethink the place of emotions in our society and the foundations of our humanity. Would compassion be the guarantor of our humanity, of our sociability?

Compassion generates exchanges, it is the foundation of the human "base". My job is to give it, or rather restore it, to its rightful place at the very heart of our society. I hope that my ambition and my energy will be equal to the urgency that I see in rediscovering the values of solidarity, and in the need to recognise our weaknesses and vulnerabilities. I'll only stop once at the Pantheon!

Thank you Zona, for this testimonial!

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