Festival internazionale
di letteratura a Venezia
prossima edizione: 15 18 aprile 2026

Samah Karaki France Lebanon

Thursday April 16 - 8.00 pm

Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi

Samah Karaki

converses with Sara De Vido (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)

In collaboration with add editore, Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana, Festival dei matti

The conversation will be in French

Samah Karaki (1984, Beirut) is a biologist specialising in neuroscience. In 2014 she founded the Social Brain Institute, which draws on insights from the cognitive sciences to promote social and environmental justice. She has just published Contre les figures d’autorité (Rue de l’échiquier). With Lattès she previously published Le talent est une fiction. L'empathie est politique is her first book to be translated into Italian (L’empatia è politica, add 2026). With rigour and stimulating analysis, Karaki explores what drives us to recognise, understand and share others' emotions. Why do we vividly remember the fire at Notre-Dame yet scarcely recall the attacks in Sri Lanka that, on the same days, claimed 300 lives? Why do wars in Gaza or Syria fail to elicit lasting empathy? Neuroscience and sociology show how our personal and collective choices are also shaped by emotions moulded by cultural, political and media structures, revealing their selective nature and leading us to reserve our capacity for identification for what feels most familiar to us.