In this chapter on Tunisia, I show how the dynamic between stability and instability, which encourages a more nuanced understanding of the revolution, is produced through ‘contingent encounters of resistance’. Contingency, I argue, comes to be associated with resistance through its convergence with icons. In the first part, I analyse works that incorporate contingent processes and materials (from bread to jasmine) in installations by Aïcha Filali, Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Lara Favaretto and in photographic series by Hela Lamine and Meriem Bouderbala. In the second part, I examine video work produced in the peripatetic mode: Mouna Karray’s Live (2012) projects static images of Ben Ali together with the unedited soundtrack of a conversation between a taxi driver and a passenger who comment freely on the transitional government as they journey through Tunis. I examine a precedent in Ismaïl Bahri’s Orientations (2010), which focuses on the evolving reflections in a cup of ink held by the artist as he walks within the streets of the capital. I consider how this work anticipates the more extreme limitations placed on vision in Bahri’s later videos. Comparative reference is made to works such as Azza Hamwi’s tour around Damascus in A Day and a Button.

This chapter offers an overview of the reception of Aristotle’s biology in antiquity and beyond. It argues that Aristotle’s biology remained largely at the margins of the philosophical tradition even after the so-called return to Aristotle in the first century BC. The relative lack of engagement with Aristotle’s biological works reflects a change in the philosophical agenda. While Aristotle placed great emphasis on the philosophical dimension of his biology, his immediate successors considered biology an expendable part of their agenda. For a full appreciation of what Aristotle achieved in the field of biology, we have to go beyond antiquity. The reappropriation of Aristotle’s biological writings was a gradual process that began in the Arabic world and continued in the Latin world.