in search of the extra-cultural

Vertical Divider

Poetics of the Void is a long-term, encompassing research perspective that I have been developing since 2012. It implies an interrogation on the relationship between such terms as "human" and "cultural". The assumption that both terms do not entirely coincide leads me to explore the rare glimpses of what might be considered extra-cultural transgression and extra-cultural becoming of man. There are various fields in which man may search for something beyond his own cultured condition. He or she may stand close to the animal, trying to understand the inaccessible mystery of other forms of being. Even more tempting is the perspective of standing close to some super-human reality, approaching the divine in the mystical experience that breaks the cultural norms and boundaries. Such a stage may also be conceived as a retrospective, as man looks back to the paradisaical origins of the humanity, and strives to recuperate the pre-cultural Eden.
Meanwhile, whatever is outside culture, remains inexpressible, unspeakable, inarticulate. It lays beyond the frontiers of the language, necessarily shaped by culture. Such an experience is subjective, individualistic, anarchic, it has no way of transmission and no permanence. Nonetheless, the sum of cultural transgressions constantly reshapes culture, its codes and normativities. There is a constant interplay of the cultural and the extra-cultural.
The attempts at capturing the extra-cultural experience, those fleeting moments of transgression and penetration into the uncharted domains require constant use of metaphors. Incidentally, I would claim that the essence of literature is precisely this constant attack on the frontiers of the culturally codified speech, this constant attempt at occupying, or at least signalling the presence of the unspeakable. This is why I chose the expression "Poetics of the Void" to resume my endeavour. It is an umbrella term to bring together several research projects I have been realising. A very important one is the interrogation about the pre-modern and early-modern conceptualisation of the Adamic language, and together with it, the entire strand of notions associated with the pre-lapsarian condition of man, that I read in the light of or at the cross-section with my own, postmodern, post-Agambenian interrogation concerning the human without culture. ​
On the other hand, I explore the mystical legacies of the Mediterranean, in the complex, ambivalent, often misleading assertions of the term. Be that as it may, Sufism, as well as unorthodox religious standpoints in a broader sense, are for me a permanent legitimising source of various endeavours at transgression of cultural normativities. Even if the contemporary Sufis in different parts of the Islamic and non-Islamic world may be more or less embedded in something that is strongly codified, completely intra-cultural and implies hardly any transgression at all, the memory of the original challenge remains. It may prove productive in the contemporary Mediterranean and Euro-Mediterranean writing that does imply and foster a cultural transgression. This is what I will be studying in the framework of my current financed project, "Mystical legacies and cultural transgression in the Mediterranean and Euro-Mediterranean writing", as a fellow-in-residence in Cergy-Pontoise. Further elements of this strand of research deal with the European intellectual reception of Sufism in early-20th century, as well as the thing-in-itself, the proper historical mysticism in al-Andalus, other parts of the Mediterranean, and beyond.
On the other hand, the Poetics of the Void imply research on topics unrelated with Islam. Since 2012, I have been thinking a lot about art and the subtle presence and meanings of the emptiness, from such painters as Caspar David Friedrich to the modern and postmodern currents such as minimalism or conceptual art.
​This is how my umbrella is destined to open up in the future, orientating my diverse experiments in literary criticism, research in history of ideas, Oriental fascinations and ambition of writing on art. At the same time, it is supposed to bring those things together into a personal, original, consistent and recognisable contribution to contemporary humanities. 

mystical insight and cultural transgression

Vertical Divider

Culture is usually studied as a phenomenon of continuity and transmission; rupture is rarely in the focus. Yet transgressions accompany and even condition creativity. Both in remote times and nowadays, highly motivated, maverick individuals try to disrupt either the partitions between distinct streams of tradition or the dominant cultural patterns inside their own historical and geographical context in search of extra-cultural values varying from unorthodox horizons of spirituality to radical aesthetic originality and novel epistemological outlook. The project's aim is to explore the potential of extra-cultural becoming of man through tracing the transgressions of the cultural frontiers in the Mediterranean world understood as a crossroad of traditions connected to major monotheistic religions. Inside extensive chronological framework, three exemplary, interconnected phenomena of spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic heterodoxy will be studied: (1) the mystical search for community with God beyond the culturally defined frontiers of the ritual, (2) unconventional scholarship transgressing the frontier dividing East and West in the 19th and 20th century, and (3) contemporary exploration of the fertile crossroad between Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in literature and intellectual intervention in search of a creative liberation from oppressive and limiting cultural heritages. The common denominator explored in the project is the interest in mystical quest as an alternative, transgressive “counter-tradition” opposed to established theologies, synecdoche of dominant cultural orders. The metaphor of the poetics of the void resumes those attempts at resolving the aporia of inhabiting and structuring the fields of symbolic (i.e. spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic) activity of man concomitantly with a permanent, deliberately procured collapse of inherited cultural patterns. ​

The aim of this project is to explore the potential of extra-cultural becoming of man through tracing the transgressions of the cultural frontiers in the Mediterranean world understood as a crossroad of traditions connected to major monotheistic religions. Connecting the historical precedents and the contemporary search for the liberation from oppressive cultural legacies, I pretend to put in the limelight the continuity of the individual struggle against the limitations of the cultural condition of man understood as a being that moves inside the boundaries established by whatever is taught or socially imposed to him or her: ready-made patterns of thinking, rituals, aesthetic models, etc.
Musing on the hypothesis of trans-cultural and extra-cultural aspirations of human individual since 2012, I have been searching for a suitable material documenting and exemplifying such transgressive endeavours. Such documents are obviously rare, since the predominant part of human symbolic activity is undoubtedly performed inside the cultural boundaries and implies culturally defined and transmitted codes. My research project developed in the framework of Marie Curie Action in 2017/2018, dealing with the search for Adamic language (a hypothetical, pre-lapsarian form of communication) in the Middle Ages and the early-modern period led me, for the first time, toward the exploration of the type of intellectual and aesthetic endeavours that may be seen as the result of the human aspiration of transgressing the boundaries of the culturally defined ways of perception and expression. Continuing my search for textual materials that might be treated as testimonies of cultural transgression, I was captivated by the mystical tradition as a possible field in which extra-cultural aspirations might be reflected. This is how I came to formulate the working hypothesis of the current project: that the search for the mystical insight in the medieval Spain (al-Andalus) established a sort of “counter-tradition” directed against the established monotheistic orthodoxies and so to say splitting the cultural divides in the society marked by the cohabitation of diverse ethnic and religious communities. This “legacy of transgression” proved to be highly captivating for particularly non-conformist scholars in the late 19th and early 20th century. On the other hand, it can be seen as an important source of inspiration for intellectuals and writers in the contemporary Euro-Mediterranean world, still trying to disrupt the transmission of oppressive and limiting cultural patterns in view of a greater creative freedom of the human individual. Last but not least, the exploration of those historical and contemporary materials is supposed to lead toward an innovative conceptualization and redefinition of human symbolic activity that would accentuate the coexistence of cultures inside a wider perspective, also implying the recognition of spheres of human experience and creativity that are uncharted by historical cultures and may be seen as the space of extra-cultural expansion of man.