The author comments on the debate concerning the ideal model of life in the perspective of history and philosophy of religion. Taking as the starting point George Steiner's criticism of the “tyranny of the Absolute” introduced by the monotheistic idea, she sketches an outlook of the sources and character of the tension between religious requirements and the desire for secular life in Christianity and Islam. Already at its beginnings, Islam treated this tension in quite a different way than historical Christianity, stressing the necessity to achieve the ideal state in this world; quite to the contrary, such ideas were contested by early Christians, who claimed that the Kingdom of the Christ is not from this world. As suggested by Bernard Lewis, Muhammad took on the role of Constantine, establishing a different tradition of universal law in which the distinction between public and private affairs is blurred. The modern and postmodern debate on the frontiers of the sacred and the profane is thus treated as a consequence of the historical beginnings of Christianity and Islam, as well as the primary principles with which both religions confronted the Mediterranean world of late Antiquity. The conclusion accentuates both the agonistic and dialogic character of the disagreement concerning the sacred and the profane of Christianity and Islam, treated as essential answers to the same, still pertinent question asked at the end of pagan Antiquity.
The reflection presented in this article in three distinct “steps of inspiration” (Agamben, ethnology and art) interrelate apparently distant spheres of problems and cultural phenomena. The starting point is given by Agamben’s idea of the apocatastatic “opening of the community,” overcoming the human condition defined by exclusion. The second move will explore an ethnological inspiration. We will reflect upon the archaic search of transcendence through the animal and in the animal, corresponding to the stage of man before the “invention of monotheism” which introduced the concept of divinity defined by reduction and abstraction. As a working hypothesis, it is assumed that the monotheistic concept of God radically driven away from any biological analogy precedes and shapes the concept of humanity defined by exclusion from the universality of biological life
The essay is an attempt at capturing the secret of the symbiosis between the elitist humanities cultivated at the high-ranking universities and the academic outsiders. The problem at its core is the persistent lack of eminence of Polish humanities in the international context (that the author interweaves with her personal lack of eminence in the Polish context, creating a game of palindromes). Trying to indicate possible causes of this situation, the author comments on the marginalization (and self-marginalization) of the outsiders searching for new paths, the derived character of the approaches produced in Polish mainstream academia, as well as the narrowness of conservative corpus that Polish scholars work on; lacking originality is shown as a consequence of a relative poverty of new, unexplored materials. As an example of a dynamic, expanding corpus, studied in the leading academic contexts but not in Poland, the author brings about several examples of nomadic literature (the songs of Fulani shepherds, a novel by a Saudi writer, the modern poetry of Najd).
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