intellectual itinerary and research philosophyAt a given stage of academic career, roughly when the full professorship is achieved, there are no further requirements to fulfil, no formal itinerary to follow. This is the moment when each of us must start building one's own ladder, if he or she wants to climb higher. Actually, few people do. A vast majority just content themselves with the position they achieved, publishing some things in the spirit of "business as usual". It was not like this in my life, to a degree also for reasons beyond my control, such as the decadence, not only political, but also social and cultural, of my country under the leadership of the "Law and Justice" party. This is why I resigned from my university position even before I could actually experience the soothing effect of my full professorship. I came on purpose from the Netherlands only to formally receive my nomination from the President of the Republic. I came to Warsaw on that day in fear that the gesture of not doing so might be treated as some sort of provocation, and left the feast in the Presidential palace as soon as it was polite to do so. I took my way back to Leiden, and it was at that moment that my predicament began, the predicament of an East-European scholar in the greater world of international scholarship. So fragile was the boat, so vast was the ocean.
Certainly, from then on, I have been building my own ladder to an academic stance that corresponds to no post and no degree whatsoever. My target is that of writing books that last, insightful essays, artfully composed from all those elements that I have gathered on the way. Paintings in rich and intense colours. I have been a careful reader of various and dissimilar authors, Eliade, Steiner, Safranski, Derrida, and specially Agamben to learn my art from them. I am still in the middle of the way, but this is where I try to climb with my ladder still under construction. This is a work that is constantly engaging the future tense. The fulfilment is only to be found in the last paragraph on the last page of the book to come. For people who think in standard academic categories, there is no point to develop this extensive drop-down menu that appears on this website under the heading "Research & Projects". Having ten or twelve fields of specialisation will not grant me any academic job, will not even cause admiration among my colleagues; rather, a dismissive reaction is to be expected. Jack of all trades, but master of none... Meanwhile, cultivating such a vast a garden makes sense for an intellectual. Each one of my little fields brings fruits and flowers that make colours for my art, give a handful of tesserae for my broad mosaic. Not that of an academic discipline, even as large in its definition as comparative literature, but something totally different, that takes its material shape in books that librarians, not knowing what to do with them, put in the general literature section. Books that bring about a deeper insight and a vaster, more encompassing understanding. I constantly meet people who think this is nothing but a megalomaniac dream. Daily, I pay the price of great discomforts that I could easily avoid, were I a simple university professor in Lusophone studies, somewhere in Poland. But there is certainly a prize to take, perhaps even the prize of non omnis moriar, and the truth is that I can simply permit myself to join such a venture, not for my talent, but for my patience, resilience, adaptability, readiness to live on the way and to accept those dismissive attitudes and contempt of my colleagues, so full of their academic prestige, position, importance that they appear to my eyes as giant toads of a nightmare lived in broad daylight. Certainly, it is also a beautiful life of sudden insights and moments of enlightenment. I do appreciate academic excellence when it comes with true erudition, because it fosters synergy, it helps to find the place for every piece of the puzzle in the vast outlook I search for. It leads to qualitative difference. On my way back from a lecture on Persian poetry in Leiden, I see Fernando Pessoa's Antinous under a novel light. Erudition is a synergistic mechanism put in motion as I circle between my various fields of research. What I have in mind is a model of scholarly creativity, in which novel views are issued from the exploration of non-obvious connections, intertwined in a way that is both inventive and particularly complex. To get this richness of tissue, a vast outlook is a prerequisite, contradicting the usual accent on specialisation in a well-defined discipline, sometimes even a single topic, that predominates in the academia. Certainly, I am in great need of being well-informed, since only a deep insight into the matter enables me to bring forth non-obvious source materials and develop them convincingly, giving a consistence to my endeavour. The novel insights I am searching for result essentially from an ingenious way of integrating those materials, but without a solid knowledge at the starting point, the outcome will be inconsistent. On various occasions, I have committed the error of relying on intuitions. Good university libraries help me to avoid this danger. Just like music, this kind of intellectual work I am doing is based on leitmotivs, certain ideas or unanswered questions that appear over and over again, on each occasion under a novel light. The human beyond the frontiers of the cultural. Man as the maker and transgressor of culture, striving to achieve the extracultural condition of absolute authenticity and absolute expression. The extracultural becoming as a liberation. The crushing burden of the extracultural insight. The emergence of a new level of complexity resulting from the superposition of various cultural codes under globalised conditions. The idea of multidimensional symbolic space. Silence, mystical enlightenment and pre-lapsarian language without culture. Those keywords may be idiolectal for now, but one day they will become parts of the standard language of the humanities, such as the idiolects of Deleuze, Derrida or Agamben became the language we speak today, often without a sounder understanding of what we are saying. This is the way how these things are done. |
fields of interest |
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THEORETICAL / EXPERIMENTAL
My main theoretical endeavour focus on the hypothesis of extracultural becoming of man. It implies a vast array of experiments, such as, among other, the reflection on the conditions of non-cultural poiesis, i.e. radically autonomous creativity, independent from culturally transmitted precedents or inspirations, but on the contrary, solidary with the non-human organic and inorganic world. I am also interested in cultural disruption, caused by great collective and individual catastrophes, as well as voluntary rupture, deliberately sought liberation from paradigmatic procedures. Both an apocalypse, that I define precisely as a disruption of culturally transmitted procedures of coping with the world, and a deliberate rupture opens space for post-cultural creativity, that may, or may not, enter the redesigned frontiers of the cultural. Concomitantly, I study the emergence of the new level of complexity at the intersection of a number of cultural systems under the globalised conditions. Their interference and overlapping may lead to a collapse under the overcharge of contradictory exigences that those interacting cultures impose upon the individual; on the other hand, their outcome may be positive, as they may lead, once again, to the post-cultural as a new range of phenomena characterised by greatness richness and plasticity than those of the cultural. In any case, extracultural creation, as I suppose, may bring about a potential of authenticity, leading to novel, liberating exploration of the uncharted zones of human experience. The research that accompanies this theoretical endeavour develops in several directions. In the first place, I search for a new theoretical idiom suiting what would be a description of vague, abstract or culturally inarticulate forms of human creativity. This is why I revisit postmodern authors, their experiments at the frontier of verbal, visual and diagrammatic. I also search for new sources of conceptual inspiration, such a contemporary mathematics and physics. ANALYTICAL My analytical practice and research obviously encompasses both the cultural and the extracultural. Any non-cultural glimpses of human creativity are available for analysis basically through their imperfect cultural translation. I am interested both in verbal and non-verbal modalities of creation, such as the art of Min Tanaka, Japanese dancer and performer. Traces of extracultural insight are partially present in the cultural transmission as underground currents, surfacing from time to time as texts, images, artworks, documented practices. Thus, my everyday work consists in exploring the marginal zones of cultures where some insight into the non-cultural may occasionally be found. Such a collected insight is to nourish the theoretical reflection on the symbolical matrix encompassing both the culturally actualized and the unexploited or potential areas of meaning. I have also been active in much more traditional genres of literary criticism. As a researcher in comparative literature, I am currently focusing on transcultural writing and the creation of a non-hegemonically universal system of literary communication. I understand World Literature as a creation of the writers appealing to non-local readership, dissolving the frontiers of literatures defined territorially (ex. as national or regional literatures) rather than diagramatically (as charts of connections). Those writers usually transgress the frontiers of languages (ex. through translingual strategies or incrustation of native tongues into the matrix of the dominating languages in transindigenous writing). In strictly academic terms, Portuguese and Lusophone studies used to be at the core of my specialization in Romance literatures. I also dedicate a great deal of attention to the Mediterranean as an area of circulation and interference between Western and Eastern literary, dogmatic and aesthetic systems. In this area of research, I conjugate literary criticism with history of ideas and comparative religious studies, giving special relevance to mysticism and non-orthodox religious thought. I have been working on the formation of a trans-religious postsecularism combining the spiritual inspirations liberated by the dissolution of confessional denominations. The outcomes of my dispersed research and criticism in World Literature are brought together by the idea of travel as a framing circumstance of reading, leading to a textual/visual conceptualization of meaningful landscapes. They are to be found on this website in the section "Travels & Literature" that I constantly enrich and develop. VISUAL I also engage into visual experimentation, exploring the connection between text and image, especially when it comes to the idea of insufficiency of language and the necessity of searching for more encompassing systems of communication (between such possibilities as the mystical search for the pre-lapsarian language of angels and contemporary mathematics as a way of dealing with contents and ideas that go beyond the culturally determined human experience). By which I understand using visual tools to create and convey my novel theoretical approach. I am also interested in the relations between the discourses of cultural theory and the visual arts. |
recent and currently developed projects |
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2020-2021: MediTransCulture: Mystical legacies and cultural transgression in the contemporary Euro-Mediterranean writing, CY Initiative for Excellence, CY Advanced Studies (Cergy-Paris University); duration: 10 months.
2017-2018: The search for the Adamic language and the emergence of transcultural aspiration in the aftermath of the European maritime discoveries, LE STUDIUM Loire Valley Institute for Advanced Studies, the SMART LOIRE VALLEY Programme's Fellowship; Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 665790; duration: 12 months. |
