Crisis in trust through the contemporary Lebanese novel

• Main Author: Naoum Abi-Rached
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) 2003-06-01
• Series: Revista CIDOB d'Afers Internacionals
• Online Access: http://www.cidob.org/es/content/download/3229/35298/file/61-62rached.pdf

Naoum Abi-Rached wonders what foundations are necessary for being able to establish a dialogue and establish trust, bearing in mind that the references and the experiences one has lived through are distinct. What supports do language and ways of speaking need inorder to overcome suspicion, establish trust and culminate in a dialogue that will not be a dialogue of the deaf? For Abi-Rached, trust does not have its own existence, and it is conceived only in the process of a relationship with others. This author prefers to define the I in interaction with the Other and not through the Other. But, who is this Other? Friend or foe? Through writing, an attempt is made at re-establishing the lost balance of a society threatened at its foundations. The violence that we find in these writings issometimes a cry of pain or an interrupted dialogue, but the novels are constructed to refind the lost trust or to illustrate a trust which is being lost.