Writing and metaphysics. From mineral to invisible. Orality of the living

Abstract

Trance, madness, insanity, angels, intangibility, the shattering of reality, like a fly stubbornly clinging to the invisible pane of metaphysics. The act of leaning towards the vertigo of irrationality as the primary foundation of the shadows that inhabit every act of creation. By going back to the sources of Eastern spirituality, to clear out writing to see what, in its gesture, comes from this continuous oscillation between esotericism and exotericism, the translation of which is the contradiction that exists between creation and communication. To see it also as a collapse of orality. When the story was told through the ancient voice of the sorcerer.

Abstract from Éric Phalippou's talk

Writing caught between Europe and the imagination

The rising sun may be its matrix, but Europe has long been striving to emancipate itself from it, like the earth striving to be autonomous from the sky. The Greeks knew Dionysus, the god who rode in on a camel from Nysa in Afghanistan, but terrified by his ecstatic power, they confined him to the stage. In the crib, the Magi, Gaspard/Gizbâr (the treasure-bearer), also from Afghanistan, also came on camelback, but they made him an extra, albeit guided by a star. Similarly, European culture readily reduces the East to the spectacle of whirling dervishes, while blurring the metaphysical cosmology that permeates it, also the fruit of a man from Balkh in Afghanistan. Rumi took this name because he settled in the lands of the new Rome, Byzantium. What is the origin of this fear of Europe, born of a fascination ? From the image of the sun, a pure star like gold before it was monetized, as Europe's merchants did ? Or from the prospect of a black sun, the image of Non-Being ?

Éric Phalippou

• Orientalist & ethnologist
• Professor of Iranian languages and cultures (ULB, 2005-2010)
• Habilitation to direct research (Sorbonne nouvelle, 2004)
• Doctorate in Anthropology of Religions (EPHE, 1999)