Edgar Morin (1921–2026): A Complex Mind |
I learn of his death in my home, 3,500 miles away from Paris.
To speak about the French-Jewish Edgar Morin, it would be good to go a little back in time. The thread that began in Spain –the West…– of the 15th century, unwound and moved eastward, to the Ottoman Empire, to Salonica with its dominant Greek elements, where his father, Vidal Nahoum, was born in 1894, and from there the Sephardic immigrant’s thread traveled to Marseille –back to the West, that is…– during the years 1916–19, and thereafter to Paris, where Edgar Nahoum was born in 1921 (Nahoum, which during the Resistance he would change to Morin), –he lost his mother, Luna Beressi, at a young age…– and only now has this precious thread been cut. It broke.
This path of meaning, thought, life is not accidental. It contains what I would also call Jewish brilliance. Something I felt a few days ago when I was reading with great interest the interview of Ruth R. Wisse with Elliot Kaufman for the Wall Street Journal. Intelligence that leaps out of sentences as if steel is being forged, and is capable to distil books,........