FMR is a bi-monthly magazine published simultaneously in English, French, Italian and Spanish.

 

To preserve the magazine in your library, FMR offers its subscribers an elegant library case for the 6 annual issues.

 

Editorial for Issue 20

For some issues now, the heading “Fil Rouge” has been proceeding in a new direction: it takes the form of a discussion through the medium of images, focussing on a specific theme, accompanied by texts which, having been freed of the need to present and defend a thesis, feed further intellectual reflection in their turn. In this issue Nancy Honicker casts light on a topic which has stirred up considerable cultural foreboding, but which also has more wide-ranging ramifications, deeply affecting our whole way of being. Millions of words – many of them superfluous – have been written on the veil and its potential as a flashpoint for cultural and even institutional invective; but the underlying reason has been left unspoken. Nancy Honicker now lets this voice be heard. Discussion of Phryne, of the Gorgon, and now of the veil, may seem to smack of erudition and intellectual virtuosity. Not so, in fact. We write on such matters in order to establish that our way of seeing – restive and distracted as it is by nature – may also be one of the ways by which a “first-hand” culture debates matters which are far less removed from real life than they might immediately seem. Rather than “primum vivere deinde philosophari”, we live while philosophising, that is, posing ourselves genuine questions and sowing equally genuine doubts. FMR often talks of its civic commitment; it claims to “make itself a vehicle for a culture whose products are not objects, but ideas and the values which generate them, bring them to life and cause them to circulate”; it talks of the “centrality of art, meaning beauty as a civic value, as the birthright of the community which has experienced it; of art as identity.” It talks of images which, ideally, will once again be raised to their status as icons, rather than Chinese shadows. As we all know, claiming is the easy part. Delivery is part of politics – in the best sense of the word.

Flaminio Gualdoni