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baker16's review
4.0
I won this book for free through Goodreads First Reads. Wim Wenders speaks with so much passion and conviction in his book, Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception. I am convinced that this is the kind of book with the potential to make a difference in the world.
neilrcoulter's review
4.0
Inventing Peace is a dialogue between philosopher Mary Zournazi and filmmaker Wim Wenders, taking place in letters, conversations, and journaling. It began as a response to the second Gulf War and Bush’s “War on Terrorism” generally. The question they start with: Is “peace” something more than just “the opposite of war”? What would a peaceful society look like besides the lull between violent conflict? It sounds like the kind of conversation a couple of ivory-tower intellectuals would have while sitting in a cozy living room, drinking good coffee. (The book’s pretentious title doesn’t help, either.) And sometimes the book is like that, even though Wenders protests that “I'm not a philosopher, not even an intellectual, and I'm certainly not trying to sound like either” (8). But often there are interesting, insightful trains of thought, particularly from Wenders, whose skill in seeing proves extremely valuable in the observations he makes on the topic.
Zournazi’s contributions are fairly standard philosophy-professor stuff—Buber, Bachelard, Barthes, Bergson, and other usual suspects whose names don’t start with B. I was surprised that neither Zournazi nor Wenders ever brings in the Jewish concept of shalom, which would seem to be very relevant to the discussion. At one point in the book, Zournazi and Wenders discuss the possibility that “peace” might include conflict, but not in the “war-vs.-peace” imagery that we typically employ. “Peace is much broader than that,” Zournazi writes. “It has within it love and violence. It is not one thing or another, but perhaps contains all of them within itself. I think we are only led to believe that peace is the other side of war, because that’s all we know.” Wenders replies, “THAT is a great notion of ‘peace’: that it incorporates conflict! . . . We want peace to exclude violence, to be just ‘peaceful,’ cool, calm and collected. But what about letting it INCLUDE discord, tension, controversy, etc. if only and as long as ‘peace’ remains as the common denominator?” (38). This would be a great moment to consider Jesus, who taught what “peace,” or “the good life,” means, but in a way that was extraordinarily controversial and welcoming of conflict. But Zournazi and Wenders don’t ever look much beyond the usual philosophers and a few film directors and artists (Ozu, Bresson, Wyeth, Kurosawa). Their discussion is good but could have been a lot fuller.
The flow of conversation leads Zournazi and Wenders to consider that a significant aspect of peace is community and togetherness, which has become more difficult to achieve in daily life. It’s not only because of our dependence on gadgets and screens (which has only grown in the years since this book was published), but also because of the images that we’re constantly surrounded by. Wenders has some intriguing thoughts about the way images allow us to freeze time, preserve memory, control our perception and life, in ways that are counter to actually being in a place, with other people. “In a culture that is more and more image driven,” Wenders writes, “where ‘the word’ loses its grip on all levels, it is no wonder that ‘the truth’ gets so fuzzy” (38). He continues in a later section,
Zournazi’s contributions are fairly standard philosophy-professor stuff—Buber, Bachelard, Barthes, Bergson, and other usual suspects whose names don’t start with B. I was surprised that neither Zournazi nor Wenders ever brings in the Jewish concept of shalom, which would seem to be very relevant to the discussion. At one point in the book, Zournazi and Wenders discuss the possibility that “peace” might include conflict, but not in the “war-vs.-peace” imagery that we typically employ. “Peace is much broader than that,” Zournazi writes. “It has within it love and violence. It is not one thing or another, but perhaps contains all of them within itself. I think we are only led to believe that peace is the other side of war, because that’s all we know.” Wenders replies, “THAT is a great notion of ‘peace’: that it incorporates conflict! . . . We want peace to exclude violence, to be just ‘peaceful,’ cool, calm and collected. But what about letting it INCLUDE discord, tension, controversy, etc. if only and as long as ‘peace’ remains as the common denominator?” (38). This would be a great moment to consider Jesus, who taught what “peace,” or “the good life,” means, but in a way that was extraordinarily controversial and welcoming of conflict. But Zournazi and Wenders don’t ever look much beyond the usual philosophers and a few film directors and artists (Ozu, Bresson, Wyeth, Kurosawa). Their discussion is good but could have been a lot fuller.
The flow of conversation leads Zournazi and Wenders to consider that a significant aspect of peace is community and togetherness, which has become more difficult to achieve in daily life. It’s not only because of our dependence on gadgets and screens (which has only grown in the years since this book was published), but also because of the images that we’re constantly surrounded by. Wenders has some intriguing thoughts about the way images allow us to freeze time, preserve memory, control our perception and life, in ways that are counter to actually being in a place, with other people. “In a culture that is more and more image driven,” Wenders writes, “where ‘the word’ loses its grip on all levels, it is no wonder that ‘the truth’ gets so fuzzy” (38). He continues in a later section,
For a moment, I imagine the world without the invention of photography.Inventing Peace offers much food for thought on the “metaphors we live by,” and how the images and words we surround ourselves with are capable of imprisoning us within a certain kind of world. In these discussions, and in Wenders and Zournazi’s analyses of a selection of classic films, I hear a challenge to be more focused, intentional, thoughtful, and careful about what I read, watch, and listen to. This book is far from the final word on “inventing peace” (or, better, “envisioning” or “living”), but it suggests a number of excellent ways to keep the conversation going.
(And then film in its wake.)
What a difference that makes!
Things are only there if we are there!
If we want to see people, we have to actually go and see them. . . .
An impossible (and useless?) idea in our age, for sure,
since our world has long turned into (and finally become)
the BIG PICTURE OF THE WORLD.
There's no way to reverse that any more.
We have to accept to live with all these images, more so:
we have to learn to live more with the images of people and things
than with people and things themselves. (63)
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