Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem
Period: 2015-2016
Profession: Writer Born in 1973, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, writer and philosopher, grew up in France after a childhood in Tunisia. He began publishing relatively young, at the age of 21, with novels that quickly won critical acclaim, including
Cancer , his first novel,
Vies et Morts d’Irène Lepic , and
L’Antéforme . His first theoretical works,
Esthétique du Chaos and
Society , were published in the 2000s. In 2006, he met Gallimard, where he published La psychose française and a translation of Dante Alighieri’s first poem,
Vita Nova . His mature philosophical works, including
L’esprit du nihilisme, Être et sexuation, La Transgression et l’inexistant , have won him recognition from a wide range of audiences, from academics (including a symposium on his work at the École Normale Supérieure in 2013) to artists, writers and political activists. Discovered by Editions Tristram, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem has just published a book on Antonin Artaud, which has met with great acclaim. He is currently working on several projects, including a cyber-seminar, an essay on the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux and a novel. Mehdi Belhaj Kacem’s project at Villa Médicis will begin with the creation of a translation readable by modern audiences of
Les Triomphes , a didactic-dialectical poem by Petrarch, which he considers to be one of the five founding texts of Italian literature, along with those of Dante and Boccaccio. As the latest translations date from the 16th century, and the most recent from 1923 (almost impossible to find today), there is no text accessible to contemporary French readers. Mehdi Belhaj Kacem will also devote himself to writing a philosophical and aesthetic essay, in the continuation of several of his previous books, on the translated author and the great impact that Petrarchanism has had on Western art since the Middle Ages.