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CURRENT RESEARCH

Culture is usually studied as a phenomenon of continuity and transmission; rupture is rarely in the focus, unless as irreparable loss due to a catastrophe. Yet ruptures may 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 transcultural values varying from unexplored horizons of spirituality to aesthetic originality and novel epistemological outlook. The project's aim is to elaborate a broad picture of those attempts 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 search for locutio angelica (a form of ideal communication beyond the culturally defined languages and discourses) in the Middle Ages and early modernity, (2) unconventional scholarship transgressing the frontier dividing East and West in the 19th and 20th century, and (3) contemporary efforts at creating a fertile transcultural crossroad between Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The explored common denominator 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. 
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