On Necessary Betrayal

Some believe the value of our work can be summed up in the rituals that define the public face of publishing: bookstore sales, book launches, the performance of authorship.

The real transformation, the one that turned the great printing enterprises of the late eighteenth century into publishing houses, came from recognizing that the publisher’s craft could not remain tied to book production itself. The value lay instead in becoming aggregators of ideas, in learning to be both center and periphery of intellectual production, in mastering the complex mediation between two dimensions that every book carries: on one hand, an object satisfying private needs, purchasable and therefore part of the economic system; on the other, a collective good capable of belonging to the public sphere and therefore resistant to consumption logic.

This transformation never ended. It continues today in each of your catalog choices, in every rights negotiation, in every decision not to publish something that might sell. It continues in the daily struggle to hold together what the world would separate: the necessity of profit and the demands of culture.

And it continues, above all, in the solitude of those who must decide which voices deserve to be heard.

FREEDOM WITHOUT GUARANTEES

You are the curators of this delicate balance, all of you who have chosen today to examine together the complexity of a profession too often reduced to empty rituals, fed by shortsighted, uncertain, inadequate public policies.

But to curate this balance means living within a form of freedom that is both privilege and burden. Privilege, because it allows you to determine which ideas enter public debate. Burden, because every choice exposes you to unpredictable consequences.

No manual teaches you to recognize the book that will shift an era’s perception. No algorithm calculates the cultural value of a difficult text. No guarantee ensures that the courageous choice won’t simply prove wrong.

Yet you decide. You decide every day. You decide when the market says one thing and your cultural instincts suggest another. You decide when the author you love doesn’t sell and the one you despise fills bookstores. You decide when critics stay silent and audiences don’t understand.

This is the publisher’s freedom: the freedom of those who cannot invoke higher authorities to justify their choices. The freedom of those who answer personally for the cultural consequences of their work.

The freedom of those who know that publishing always means, in some measure, betraying: betraying the author’s intentions, readers’ expectations, market logic, your own convictions.

THE SPACE OF NECESSARY BETRAYAL

When we speak of Mediterranean publishing, we speak of a space where this betrayal becomes even more complicated. Because the Mediterranean is no postcard of cultural harmony, but a theater of forced translations, often violent contaminations, contradictory memories.

Every Mediterranean language carries traces of overlapping dominations. The Arabic of Al-Andalus, the Greek of Byzantium, the Latin of commerce: not archaeological remnants but living stratifications that inform every contemporary text.

Those who publish Mediterranean literature know that every translation betrays not one language but an interweaving of languages. They know that every stylistic choice evokes not one tradition but a conflict between traditions. They know that every Mediterranean reader reads with ears accustomed to hearing multiple echoes, overlaps, dissonances.

The Mediterranean publisher necessarily works in the between-space, the intermediate zone where identities are hybrid rather than pure, where loyalty to one culture often means betrayal of another, where every act of mediation is also an act of symbolic violence.

This is not a limitation to overcome but a condition to inhabit. Mediterranean complexity should not be resolved but orchestrated. Not simplified but made productive.

A LABORATORY FOR COMPLEXITY

The Mediterranea Publishing Fellowship emerges from this conviction: that cultural complexity can only be addressed together, and together in a new way.

As a laboratory for experimenting with unprecedented forms of intellectual collaboration. As a space where the word “dialogue” recovers its strong meaning: confrontation that transforms participants, that questions certainties, that opens previously unthinkable possibilities.

As an experiment where “community” means a collective organism capable of thoughts that none of its members could produce alone.

As research where “innovation” means redefining relationships: between publisher and territory, between tradition and contemporaneity, between cultural specificity and universal communicability.

Cagliari becomes not simply the location of an event, but the material of the experiment itself. A city that in its architectural stratifications, its linguistic overlays, its geographical position as a margin that dialogues with all centers, materializes that Mediterranean complexity we want to learn to inhabit editorially.

THE PRACTICE OF RESISTANCE

What we seek together is a form of resistance to simplification. Resistance to speed that prevents depth. Resistance to competition that destroys authentic collaboration. Resistance to immediate-result logic that sacrifices the construction of possible futures.

Resistance to the idea that culture can be administered with economic or political tools. That books can be treated like any other commodity. That publishing can function according to purely industrial logic.

Resistance that means the capacity for subtraction: knowing how to say no to haste, to superficiality, to homogenization, to abandoning complexity.

Resistance as creating spaces where thinking otherwise becomes possible. Where imagining different forms of cultural production becomes necessary. Where experimenting with economic models that preserve cultural mission becomes urgent.

THE FUTURE AS RESPONSIBILITY

Every editorial choice is an act of responsibility toward the future. Toward the future of a society’s cultural possibilities, toward the languages available to successive generations, toward the images of the world that will circulate, toward the forms of sensibility that will develop.

Responsibility assumed personally, with all the risks involved. Responsibility exercised through patient construction of lasting networks of relationships. Networks that sustain innovative publishing practices, that enable resistance to homogenizing pressures, that create conditions for otherwise impossible cultural experiments.

Mediterranean editorial freedom is no abstract ideal but daily practice built through concrete choices, strategic alliances, long-term loyalties.

Built in the awareness that every catalog is a political act. Every translation a gesture of mediation between worlds. Every distribution decision about who will have voice in public space.

Built, finally, in the conviction that culture’s future is not predetermined but depends on the choices we make today, together, in this moment, in this place that hosts and questions us.