This experimental seminar, realized as a part of the project "Strategies of introducing and and evaluating transdisciplinary curricula and research projects in universities in context of the reform of higher education in Poland" (POKL.04.01.03-00-002/11), has been essentially composed by 13 sessions that took place at the College of Liberal Arts, University of Warsaw, between October 2013 and January 2014.
The notion of the Desert, obviously taken from the monotheistic tradition, is one of the crucial concepts structuring the European thought throughout the ages. The focus of this seminar accentuated the modern and post-modern perspective, with Flaubert, Nietzsche, Kafka, Deleuze. Nonetheless I tried to contextualize those modern visions of the Desert in a larger perspective, treating the notion as a constant recall of the origins, the auroral moments of Judaism, Christianity and Islam - the presence of beginnings constantly operating in our creative and intellectual becoming.
The Desert represents the void, the empty space that is the primary condition of any creative endeavor. As opposed to the city, Desert is free from human constructions; it opens thus the crucial opportunity of an encounter with what is radically non-human: with the divine - and all the monstrosity of the divine, revealed in the temptation of Saint Anthony.
The temptation of the Desert as a space of an anti-philosophical eroticism appears in Nietzsche. The opposition of the nomad and the city-dweller is productive in Kafka, and thus in Deleuze and Guattari.
For Agata Bielik-Robson, the suspended existence bemidbar, between Egypt and the Promised Land becomes a parable of our time. For myself, the forgotten modality of anachoresis, the crucial "exit" towards the Desert, becomes a warrant of originality, the ever-lasting promise of an absolute beginning.
The notion of the Desert, obviously taken from the monotheistic tradition, is one of the crucial concepts structuring the European thought throughout the ages. The focus of this seminar accentuated the modern and post-modern perspective, with Flaubert, Nietzsche, Kafka, Deleuze. Nonetheless I tried to contextualize those modern visions of the Desert in a larger perspective, treating the notion as a constant recall of the origins, the auroral moments of Judaism, Christianity and Islam - the presence of beginnings constantly operating in our creative and intellectual becoming.
The Desert represents the void, the empty space that is the primary condition of any creative endeavor. As opposed to the city, Desert is free from human constructions; it opens thus the crucial opportunity of an encounter with what is radically non-human: with the divine - and all the monstrosity of the divine, revealed in the temptation of Saint Anthony.
The temptation of the Desert as a space of an anti-philosophical eroticism appears in Nietzsche. The opposition of the nomad and the city-dweller is productive in Kafka, and thus in Deleuze and Guattari.
For Agata Bielik-Robson, the suspended existence bemidbar, between Egypt and the Promised Land becomes a parable of our time. For myself, the forgotten modality of anachoresis, the crucial "exit" towards the Desert, becomes a warrant of originality, the ever-lasting promise of an absolute beginning.