22/05/2024 08:30 - 10:45

HALL: FATESI - FAZELLO

Proponent: Battistel L.

Chair: Battistel L.

Speaker: Azambuja E.M., Battistel L., Bianco P., Zupancic M.

Especially during the 20th century, the role of ineffability in Western literature and philosophy shifted from a peril to discursive rationality to an act of resistance against metaphysical normativity,  totalitarianism and crystallization of cultural forms. This panel gathers four early-career religious and literary studies scholars to unveil how this "revolution of silence" is indebted to the non-canonical stances of Western apophaticism and the Eastern spirituality's nondualism. Firstly, a parallel reading (Pierangelo Bianco - Lucia Battistel) of theological passages by Karl Barth and poems by two Italian contemporary poets and literary critics (Mario Luzi and Piero Bigongiari) of Hermetic tradition will help to discover, through a two-way dialogue, the symmetries of the theological and poetic text and the construction of a common discourse around the insufficiency of the human attempt to talk about God within the Judeo-Christian tradition. The next conversation (Enaiê Mairê Azambuja - Matteo Zupancic) will explore the ineffable in Zen and Taoism, and its impact on American modernist poetics, focusing on the significance of negation and absence to environmental discourse. This will be paired with evaluating the political re-use of kenotic (Rhineland Mysticism, eastern Orthodoxy) and non-dualistic silence (Buddhism, Taoism) within German anarchist literature of the early 20th century.