The concept of "western Mediterranean" is another makeshift solution summing up my idea of transcribing the notion of the "West" in Mediterranean, and no longer Atlantic terms.
My aim is to revisit both the past and the present, both the historical foundation of the Mediterranean unity and its actuality in the writings of the intellectuals that are currently filling this connective space with a content.
TESSERAE. IN SERACH OF SYNERGETIC FORMULA OF THE MEDITERRANEAN CULTURE
This is yet another book that testifies of my implication in the Islamic sphere and my laborious penetration into medieval and early modern area of studies. The main scope in this case is on the Mediterranean past and the precedents of transcultural condition that can be found, first of all, in the heritage of Al-Andalus and in those of Christian authors that attempted to establish a sphere of interaction with the Andalusian circle. This is thus a project that brings me back to Ibn Tufail and many other authors that may become reference in transcultural humanities.
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INTRUSIVE SPIRIT OF THE DESERT. ISLAMIC INTELLECTUALS AND EUROPE
The reflection on transcultural space taken at the highest pic of abstraction can be taken back to the current challenges of the European future. The emergent space of transdiscursivity has a very special value in the current situation, if we apply the concepts I try to define to the creation of new conditions for the intellectuals representing two different traditions, i.e. the European (post)modernity and the Islamic world.
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TURRIS EBURNEA
The figure of the intellectual occupies the front of the transcultural stage. This is why I'm planning yet another book, no longer concentrated on Islam or its relationships with Europe, to talk more generally about the intellectuals, their prerogatives, sources of their power and their mission in the contemporary world.
READ MORE >>>
My aim is to revisit both the past and the present, both the historical foundation of the Mediterranean unity and its actuality in the writings of the intellectuals that are currently filling this connective space with a content.
TESSERAE. IN SERACH OF SYNERGETIC FORMULA OF THE MEDITERRANEAN CULTURE
This is yet another book that testifies of my implication in the Islamic sphere and my laborious penetration into medieval and early modern area of studies. The main scope in this case is on the Mediterranean past and the precedents of transcultural condition that can be found, first of all, in the heritage of Al-Andalus and in those of Christian authors that attempted to establish a sphere of interaction with the Andalusian circle. This is thus a project that brings me back to Ibn Tufail and many other authors that may become reference in transcultural humanities.
READ MORE >>>
INTRUSIVE SPIRIT OF THE DESERT. ISLAMIC INTELLECTUALS AND EUROPE
The reflection on transcultural space taken at the highest pic of abstraction can be taken back to the current challenges of the European future. The emergent space of transdiscursivity has a very special value in the current situation, if we apply the concepts I try to define to the creation of new conditions for the intellectuals representing two different traditions, i.e. the European (post)modernity and the Islamic world.
READ MORE >>>
TURRIS EBURNEA
The figure of the intellectual occupies the front of the transcultural stage. This is why I'm planning yet another book, no longer concentrated on Islam or its relationships with Europe, to talk more generally about the intellectuals, their prerogatives, sources of their power and their mission in the contemporary world.
READ MORE >>>
POETICS OF THE VOID
I put this title as the first one by order of generality, yet this book will probably appear as the last one. I think about it as a summula of my reflection on absence and negativity. The key concept is the void as a specific esthetic quality that can be found both in poetry and in visual arts.
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EROTICISM OF TRACE
An application of the concept of the void to a particular domain: the eroticism. In search of its origins, I give special relevance to the Arabic tradition. The trace of Su'ad's foot in the sand opens a story that, everything taken into account, may tell us less about love and more about writing and reading. A tradition of conceptualizing love essentially as absence opens, long before Barthes and Bataille, the interstice of eroticism as a lapse of time between the desire and its fulfillment. Fulfillment that is not to come, because the temporal chiasm of "not yet" and "too late" abolishes the object. It opens a space of creation, a Desert - in the idiomatic meaning I give to this concept - where the creation, any creation may begin.
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THE DESERT. ESSAYS IN EMPTINESS
This book is a collection of several essays illustrating the metaphor of the Desert. There is a connection between this project and the experimental seminar "The Desert: space of encounter" realized in the Collage of Liberal Arts, Uniersity of Warsaw in 2013/2014.
READ MORE >>>
I put this title as the first one by order of generality, yet this book will probably appear as the last one. I think about it as a summula of my reflection on absence and negativity. The key concept is the void as a specific esthetic quality that can be found both in poetry and in visual arts.
READ MORE >>>
EROTICISM OF TRACE
An application of the concept of the void to a particular domain: the eroticism. In search of its origins, I give special relevance to the Arabic tradition. The trace of Su'ad's foot in the sand opens a story that, everything taken into account, may tell us less about love and more about writing and reading. A tradition of conceptualizing love essentially as absence opens, long before Barthes and Bataille, the interstice of eroticism as a lapse of time between the desire and its fulfillment. Fulfillment that is not to come, because the temporal chiasm of "not yet" and "too late" abolishes the object. It opens a space of creation, a Desert - in the idiomatic meaning I give to this concept - where the creation, any creation may begin.
READ MORE >>>
THE DESERT. ESSAYS IN EMPTINESS
This book is a collection of several essays illustrating the metaphor of the Desert. There is a connection between this project and the experimental seminar "The Desert: space of encounter" realized in the Collage of Liberal Arts, Uniersity of Warsaw in 2013/2014.
READ MORE >>>
The project of Transcultural Humanities obviously implies writing books. Editorial activities, i.e. designing and publishing collective volumes, are scheduled among the prospective "work packs". At the same time, assuring cohesion of the whole collective effort seems to require form me more specificity in defining the basic concepts. Perhaps a book written especially for this project would bring a much desired conceptual clearness and indeed it is among my priorities before the hopeful launching of the program in 2017. A basic problem is connected to the very title. The adjective "transcultural" that has served as a makeshift key word till the present moment will probably become too frequent and vague to identify our endeavor. This is why alternative key words have been object of discussion already. Agata Bielik-Robson suggests the expression "new universalism". But that one has also the inconvenient of being taken by other authors (including Alain Badiou in St. Paul. The Foundation of Universalism). I believe that a new, idiomatic concept, with similar function as khora has in Derrida, would be required. This transcultural book-to-come would be a way of launching it.
CONDITION OF WORDLINESS. EMERGENT TOPOLOGIES OF ESTHETIC AND INTELLECTUAL SPACE
This book is also at the center of the whole project as it should expose the complete network of my concepts, such as topology, which is an attempt at an abstract conceptualization of spheres of potential discursivities, their productivity and conditions of continuity and rupture that defines them, or emergence, understood similarly to the way how natural sciences define it, i.e as the appearance of a new level of complexity on the basis of increased occurrence of the existing, less complex phenomena. In biology, emergence would occur at the moment when a large number of protists aggregate to form the first multicellular organism. In humanities, a similar phenomenon of emergence implicating new complexity levels is fostered by increased number of less complex interactions in the globalized conditions. The metaphor taken once again from mathematics makes me speak about a higher dimension built up in depth beyond the existing discursivities. A new sphere of communication appears as situated no longer inside a given culture, but - seemingly impossible! - beyond any singular, localized culture. The concept of worldliness that appears in the title is obviously taken from Edward Said.Yet my intention is to develop this concept, speaking about "being in the world" taking into account the higher dimension of transcultural communication. This would be thus a variation on the old conceptualization of the text, the world and the critic transposed into the new conditions.
READ MORE >>>
CONDITION OF WORDLINESS. EMERGENT TOPOLOGIES OF ESTHETIC AND INTELLECTUAL SPACE
This book is also at the center of the whole project as it should expose the complete network of my concepts, such as topology, which is an attempt at an abstract conceptualization of spheres of potential discursivities, their productivity and conditions of continuity and rupture that defines them, or emergence, understood similarly to the way how natural sciences define it, i.e as the appearance of a new level of complexity on the basis of increased occurrence of the existing, less complex phenomena. In biology, emergence would occur at the moment when a large number of protists aggregate to form the first multicellular organism. In humanities, a similar phenomenon of emergence implicating new complexity levels is fostered by increased number of less complex interactions in the globalized conditions. The metaphor taken once again from mathematics makes me speak about a higher dimension built up in depth beyond the existing discursivities. A new sphere of communication appears as situated no longer inside a given culture, but - seemingly impossible! - beyond any singular, localized culture. The concept of worldliness that appears in the title is obviously taken from Edward Said.Yet my intention is to develop this concept, speaking about "being in the world" taking into account the higher dimension of transcultural communication. This would be thus a variation on the old conceptualization of the text, the world and the critic transposed into the new conditions.
READ MORE >>>
ESSAYS IN TRANSCULTURAL HUMANITIES
BOOK PROJECTS 2018-2020
CYCLE OF THE VOID
POETICS OF THE VOID
Poetics of the Void Synopsis A summula of reflection on absence and negativity. The key concept is the void as a specific aesthetic quality that can be found both in poetry and in visual arts. ESSAYS IN EMPTINESS
The Desert. Essays in Emptiness Synopsis In this volume, the crucial metaphor of the Desert that I take as an axis of my reflection on negativity is referred to creative activity. The main question is how, under which conditions originality is possible. The metaphor of the Desert sums up the state of creative openness, the field of potentiality in which the creation may begin. The world we live in is overcrowded with the results of human works. The Desert if full, as much as the Desert of Flaubert's Anthony was full of material qualities, images, voices. The crucial question is thus the (re)creation of the Desert as emptiness. The gesture of Rauchenberg, a young artist coming into the world already saturated by an excess of art, is paradigmatic: he simply erased one of De Koonings' drawings. Not in order to fill the cleaned space with his own production, but in order to leave it in this state of potentiality, resuming all the possible drawings that might come to be. This book will contain essays on Flaubert's La Tentation de saint Antoine, Nietzsche's Unter Töchtern der Wüste, and others. |
EROTICISM OF TRACE
Eroticism of trace Synopsis An application of the concept of the void to a particular domain: the eroticism. In search of its origins, I give special relevance to the Arabic tradition. The trace of Su'ad's foot in the sand opens a story that, everything taken into account, may tell us less about love and more about writing and reading. A tradition of conceptualizing love essentially as absence opens, long before Barthes and Bataille, the interstice of eroticism as a lapse of time between the desire and its fulfillment. Fulfillment that is not to come, because the temporal chiasm of "not yet" and "too late" abolishes the object. It opens a space of creation, a Desert - in the idiomatic meaning I give to this concept - where the creation, any creation may begin. |
TRANSCULTURAL HUMANITIES
CONDITION OF WORDLINESS
Condition of Worldliness. Emergent topologies of aesthetic and intellectual space Synopsis This book is also at the center of the whole project as it should expose the complete network of my concepts, such as topology, which is an attempt at an abstract conceptualization of spheres of potential discursivities, their productivity and conditions of continuity and rupture that defines them, or emergence, understood similarly to the way how natural sciences define it, i.e as the appearance of a new level of complexity on the basis of increased occurrence of the existing, less complex phenomena. In biology, emergence would occur at the moment when a large number of protists aggregate to form the first multicellular organism. In humanities, a similar phenomenon of emergence implicating new complexity levels is fostered by increased number of less complex interactions in the globalized conditions. The metaphor taken once again from mathematics makes me speak about a higher dimension built up in depth beyond the existing discursivities. A new sphere of communication appears as situated no longer inside a given culture, but - seemingly impossible! - beyond any singular, localized culture. The concept of worldliness that appears in the title is obviously taken from Edward Said. Yet my intention is to develop this concept, speaking about "being in the world" taking into account the higher dimension of transcultural communication. This would be thus a variation on the old conceptualization of the text, the world and the critic transposed into the new conditions. FALCONRY
Falconry. Transcultural becoming of man and the bird of pray Summary The main idea of this book is to present falconry as a practice destined to transgress the cultural boundaries. Firstly, this passion cultivated across vast areas of the Old World used to be - and is today, if one considers the phenomenon of transnational falconry - a shared heritage in permanent circulation. Secondly, this particular companionship of man and bird implies an oscillation on the limit of the cultured condition of man, and of the non-cultured condition of bird. |
TURRIS NOVA
Turris Nova. Intellectuals as universalists Synopsis Starting with Ibn Bajja's Rule of the Solitary, this book speaks about the community of intellectuals as anchorets that withdraw from culture to inhabit the emergent dimension of Eremos. The utmost stake is nonetheless the salvation of the City. The tradition that is recuperated here looks back to Rudolf Otto, Titus Burckhardt and those perennialists (after Philosophia perennis of Aldous Huxley) who searched for a third path between East and West. The promise of the desert is treated here not as an encounter with the divine, but as an utmost encounter of man with his own humanity. The stake of askesis consists in the depletion of culture. The mystical encounter of the absolute is conditioned by the non-cultural becoming of man, the possibility of conceive other than the cultured God of institutional religions. ANTI-BABEL
Anti-Babel. In search of the universal language Synopsis This book collects several essays turning around the question of the universal language of the mankind. The first part is dedicated to the study of this idea in the early modernity, with special relevance given to the Portuguese idea of reconstruction of the pre-Babelian tongue as the result of the discoveries and maritime expansion. The main part, on the other hand, is dedicated to the Modernist translingualism - understood here as a search for the meanings emerging at the cross-section of different linguistic systems - in Joyce and Pessoa. Finally, the last part presents the formation of the complex idiom of transcultural humanities, enriched by the introduction of indigenous words and concepts, issued from the heritage of world's oral cultures and recent literacies. |
THE MEDITERRANEAN
INTRUSIVE SPIRIT OF THE DESERT
Intrusive Spirit of the Desert. Islamic intellectuals and Europe, (in preparation), 2018. Summary The reflection on transcultural space taken at the highest pic of abstraction can be taken back to the current challenges of the European future. The emergent space of transdiscursivity has a very special value in the current situation, if we apply the concepts I try to define to the creation of new conditions for the intellectuals representing two different traditions, i.e. the European (post)modernity and the Islamic world. ILLISIBILITY OF MOROCCO
Illisibility of Morocco, (in preparation), 2018. Summary The aim of this book is to pin down the complexity of the contemporary Moroccan literary space: its translingualism oscillating between Arabic, French and emergent Amazigh "neo-literature", its multiple embeddedness in the local and translocal conditions. An extensive foreword presents the cultural conditions all along the postcolonial period, yet the chapters focus on literature created already in the 21st century. In the first chapter I analyse the essential evolution leading from the discontinuous topology of the Mediterranean space in Un monde a cote by Driss Chraibi to the unified vision of the Afro-European world. The subsequent chapters present such problems as the emergence of the autonomous Amazigh literary project, the Moroccan feminism, and other aspects. |
TESSERAE
Tesserae. In search of a synergistic formula for the Mediterranean, (in preparation), 2019. Summary This is yet another book that testifies of my implication in the Islamic sphere and my laborious penetration into medieval and early modern area of studies. The main scope in this case is on the Mediterranean past and the precedents of transcultural condition that can be found, first of all, in the heritage of Al-Andalus and in those of Christian authors that attempted to establish a sphere of interaction with the Andalusian circle. This is thus a project that brings me back to Ibn Tufail and many other authors that may become reference in transcultural humanities. |
PORTUGUESE & LUSOPHONE STUDIES
FORTHCOMING
SEDUCTOR'S OLD AGE
Result of the research project supported by
the National Science Centre, Poland; DEC2012/05/B/HS2/03986 Seductor's Old Age. José Saramago at the end of life, Warszawa, DiG, 2018. ISBN 978-83-7181-967-4 Summary This book is a collection of essays presenting the late works, as well as the participation of José Saramago as an old man, distinguished with his Nobel prize, in the public sphere of discourse. The concept of intellectual, defined by Gramsci, Adorno and Said, is one of the crucial notions of this approach. The expression "end of life" that appears in the title should be taken not only as a reference to the writer's individual old age, but also in more general terms: the problem of being old, as well as the consciousness of the specific duties of the intellectual as an old man appear both in the literary and extra-literary interventions of Saramago. Nonetheless, I also speak about the "old age" of the civilization that Saramago leaves behind, situating our times "in the last chapter of the history of the world". |