On the Inconvenience of Metaphysical Absolutes: Representations of Sacred Violence in Literature

Dear Colleagues,

In 1973, the Romanian essayist Emil Cioran published On the Inconvenience of Being Born, in which he lamented that “throughout the centuries, man has struggled to believe; he has moved from dogma to dogma, from illusion to illusion, and has devoted very little time to doubt.” He argued that such doubts were merely “brief intervals between periods of blindness, which, in truth, were not doubts but pauses, moments of rest following the fatigues of faith—of any faith.”

Half a century has passed since these words were written, yet these fatigues of faith have not diminished. On the contrary, they have been dangerously sublimated into a horizon of absolutist temptations that seek to elevate to the status of universal, eternal, and unquestionable truths those problems that have accompanied humanity throughout history. In doing so, they threaten an idea of humanity that can never be closed or conceived in fixed terms. These temptations arise not only from political power but also from ethical or esthetic conceptions that aim to discipline behavior and cloak themselves in symbolic authority, often threatening the legacy of an Enlightenment rationality that is, by nature, skeptical and critical.

The classic dilemma between ideas and beliefs, to which the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset urged us to attend, may never be fully resolved. Nevertheless, it stands as a serious warning against allowing reason to be seduced by the baroque imagery of metaphysical absolutes. In the sphere of power, history has shown where utopias can lead when they are invested—perhaps inevitably—with sacred authority. If Enlightenment rationality is cast aside, the state and the sacrificial altar may seal a dangerous alliance. Such deficits of rationality have shaped a sacrificial figure that has found expression in different literary genres and other artistic forms. A survey of both Western and Eastern cultural history reveals archetypes of what the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben has called “bare life,” in which individuals can be executed with impunity within an order that admits no appeal.

Literary texts have indeed been among the most significant vehicles for expressing the ideology and metaphysical imagery of sacrality, whether through complicity or resistance to it. The Greek sophist Gorgias acknowledged this in his Defense of Helen, when he spoke of the danger inherent in the poet’s or narrator’s word: “If it was speech that persuaded and deceived her mind, it is not difficult to offer a defense on that account. (…) Speech is a powerful ruler which, though it has the smallest and most invisible body, accomplishes the most divine works.” From Greek tragedies and early literary utopias to the novels of Albert Camus, Yukio Mishima, and Milan Kundera; from Franz Kafka’s infernal worlds to the essays of María Zambrano, the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, and Kazimir Malevich’s radical painting, literature and the arts have served as privileged means of representing the conflict between the individual, power and the sacred.

This dilemma becomes visible not only in formal experimentation or in the selection and organization of sources and materials, but also in the treatment of ideas themselves, which are reformulated within fiction or artistic creation to serve particular purposes. Idea and symbol converge in the literary or artistic oeuvre, producing a distinctive mode of representation and internalization of this conflict—whether to yield to it or to resist it.

We therefore propose to explore the relationship between violence, sacrality, and power through their various manifestations and modes of expression in literary texts, as well as in philosophical works with a literary or esthetic dimension, from Antiquity to the twenty-first century. We also advocate for a perspective that extends beyond the Western or European canon to include Eastern or Asian traditions, as well as other non-European cultural contexts.

Possible areas of research include (but are not limited to):

1. Philosophical-literary representations of sacrality and power;
2. Experiences of the absolute in literature;
3. Esthetic and literary interactions between ideas and symbols;
4. The sociology and anthropology of literature (as treated in works such as Arnold Hauser´s Social History of Art, Georges Dumeizil´s Myth and Epic, Theodor Adorno´s Aesthetic Theory or Walter Benjamin´s The Origin of German Tragic Drama).

Dr. Daniel Ortiz Pereira
Prof. Dr. Luis Llera Cantero
Guest Editors

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• political theology
• aesthetics of power
• sacrality
• utopianism
• thanatopolitics