This article underlines the need to call for a re-appropriation of history and the conflict dimension in
Lebanon as the basis for a new departure. This re-appropriation is twofold: one goes back to the
founding values, and one beyond the reassertion of such values, questioning the National Pact and
Constitution and seeking to reconsider nationhood from the perspective of a new living-together that is
meant to found a new history for the country and be the substratum for the emerging of new historical
“events”: such living together is to take on a local and thus specific secular formula. The latter must be
accompanied by a “productive conflict” acquiring a constant dialectic dimension. This in turn can be
seen on various levels, including the religious and socio-economic. Finally, the deconstruction and
reconstruction thus effected may only endure if they are accompanied by new shared conceptual
complexes that take their departure from reconsiderations of language and textuality pertaining to
complexes such as earth-land-homeland-space and the spiritual, all necessitating communicative
rationality, in Habermas’s sense.