Metaphysical Space Research Articles

The Epilogue of the Mefistofele Opera by Arrigo Boito – Sacred Connotations

The intrinsic spirituality of Arrigo Boito’s art in the opera Mefistofele results from the vibrant expressions of the sacred that directly accompany the tumultuous path of the Faustian quests. The present article highlights the way in which the composer penetrates through music and text into the metaphysical mysteries of the fight between good and evil, in the scene of Faust’s salvation – the Epilogue. The violent confrontation of the antagonistic forces of the universe takes place when Faust, at the end of his life, manages to free himself from Mefistofele. The musical, literary and scenic means of expression imposed by the composer – being the sole creator of the libretto, music and mise-en-scène – masterfully reproduce this confrontation. The fragment we analyzed emphasizes this by noting at the same time how metaphysical space can be rendered with the help of music. Placed at the end of the opera Mefistofele, through the dramatic unfolding rich in sacred symbols, the scene of salvation crowns the series of defining elements with which Boito contributes to the evolution of the Faustian myth. Keywords: Mefistofele, Epilogue, Boito, Faust, Sacred.

Limits and Thresholds

Abstract of Keynote Presentation: ‘Between Excess and Austerity’, IDEA Conference, Sydney, August 8–11, 2003. Abstract: Before we can approach the tension between austerity and excess – or any other productive tension in a design practice – we must first enter the metaphysical space of ‘interior’ itself. The notion of interior is always defined by at least three ‘working parts’: inside, outside, and (most important yet least noticed) the threshold setting one off from the other. Properly speaking, this threshold is neither outside nor inside; rather, in setting the limit between them, it partakes of both. Like the skin of a body or the cladding of a building, indeed like any surface, the threshold comes into contact with what lies on both sides of it, linking the two environments in the act of separating them. ‘A surface separates from out and belongs no less to one than to the other’ (Don DeLillo). The threshold is an ontological anomaly, a space outside of space, existing only in its vanishing. In theory, a threshold, as with any line in geometrical definition, has extension but no dimension. It is literally zero degrees thick. The function of the threshold, therefore, is not to be wide but to be crossed. Every limit is also its own negation. Drawing the limit-line is coeval with the possibility, the suggestion, we might even say the demand that the line be crossed. Once established, boundaries ‘ask for’ breaching – traditionally, a task for heroes. This crossing is no simple matter, though we may blithely perform it dozens or even hundreds of times a day. What is involved here? What relationships of time and space, of consciousness and identity, of necessity and freedom, are created by the move from outside to in, and back again? In this paper, I approach the thought of limits (and maybe the limits of thought) by takingthe interior back to its moment of geometric inception, its philosophical ground zero: the drawing of lines and circles. Once inside, but only then, we may begin to ask what it is we seek in this crossing over, this transgression, of the threshold. Is it comfort? Security? Control? Or perhaps something deeper, and more challenging: the act of thinking itself.

Overlapping spaces and identities in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful: a metatheatrical approach

This article discusses the overlapping relationship between setting diversification and character creation as experimented by Puerto Rican American playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes (1977–) in her metatheatrical drama Water by the Spoonful (2011). The play, which emerges in a second chronological order in Hudes’s so-called Elliot Trilogy, presents diasporic characters of different ethnicities and mixed cultural backgrounds as operating interactively within three different, though intersecting, realms or spaces: the real world, virtual cyberspace, and metaphysical space. The real world of the play features interacting Puerto Rican Americans, Japanese Americans, African Americans, and White Americans in a way that highlights their ethnocultural diversity in real American, Puerto Rican, and Japanese settings. Some of these binational, bilingual, and bicultural characters, who belong to different generations (20 s, 30 s, 40 s, 50 s), also occupy, and actually favor, the virtual realm or cyberspace of the internet where they assume unreal identities but negotiate real issues spurred by real life circumstances and reveal secrets about themselves and their families through online group therapy sessions. The metaphysical space is used as a magical realist element and is exclusively reserved by Hudes for exposing her Puerto Rican American characters’ restless spiritual and mental struggle with the obsessive feelings of nostalgia, homesickness, regret, and displacement. The three realms or spaces intersect and collide in a way that determines the social attitudes and psychological moods of diasporic characters.

Край света в центре Азии: Барнаул в романе Сергея Залыгина «После бури»

The city of Barnaul and the Ob River, on which it stands, appear in S. Zalygin’s last novel “After the Storm” (1982-1985) under two names at once: actually as “Barnaul” and “Ob”, but mainly as “Aul” and “River”. Replacing the real Barnaul with a fictional “Aul” is designed to emphasize the transition from geographical to metaphysical space. The novel takes place in an existential chronotope: the inhabitants of the city “Aul” live “on the border between being and not being.” Zalygin skillfully plays up facts from the real history of Barnaul, turning them into elements of a geopoetic myth. The peculiarity of the Zalyginsky “Aul” is that it is “Europe in Asia” and “Asia in Europe”. Here the twentieth century is adjacent to the Middle Ages. However, in 1917, rich in revolutionary upheavals, the fragile balance of power was disrupted. The hope for the feasibility of the Eurasian synthesis burned down in the fire of a catastrophic fire, which was caused in Barnaul-Aul by the chief city fire chief. It is noteworthy that “the only Horror Book in the world” is being created in the “Aul”. A city located on the “border of two worlds – the known and the unknown” turns out to be the most suitable place to store it.

Black Possibility: A Metaphysical Space of Power and Wild Imagination

Black Possibility: A Metaphysical Space of Power and Wild Imagination

“My Dead Seeing Eye”: Fantasy, Franchise, and the Image of the Voyeur in Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock

Wilson Harris’s 1960 novel Palace of the Peacock, the first in his Guyana Quartet that center on the history and society of Harris’s, presents a surreal and disorienting account of a doomed voyage up an unnamed jungle river, which culminates in a mystical, visionary experience of the palace of the title, seemingly a metaphysical space beyond death. Understanding the novel’s bizarre qualities requires grasping the way they relate to the development of the motif of voyeurism central to the novel. Specifically, they can be seen as frequently tied to the novel’s use of the image of the voyeur, the voyeur’s appearance to themselves as part of the scene which they are watching, which is employed in the text not only to create its surreal sensibility, but also to comment on the question of political franchise then current in Guyanese society. As the nation moved from British colony to independent state, there was much controversy over who would be allowed to vote in the new country, with many within elite circles holding that franchise should be restricted to the wealthy and well-educated. In its use of the image of the voyeur, Palace of the Peacock critiques these elitist notions by depicting people who were once passive observers of their own lives and desires becoming actively engaged in them, serving as a metaphor for a more egalitarian political future for the country.

Relocating a Sacred Space: From Mount Zion to the New Jerusalem in the Mystic Poetry of Rastafari

Biblical scriptures, holy chants and prayers, stories of conquest and destruction, pilgrimages and diaspora narratives have provided a range of perspectives related to the city of Jerusalem. Different cultures and faiths have interpreted its symbolic value and claimed belonging, conquest, ownership, and possession. Amongst these are the Rastafari, members of a spiritual movement that originated in Jamaica, who claim Davidic roots and aim for repatriation to their Promised Land, the New Jerusalem. In their vision, the sacred space of the city of Jerusalem has been relocated to Ethiopia, the land where the Ark of the Covenant has been supposedly moved to, along with the throne of Solomon. The scope of this article is to contextualise how the dynamics of Rastafari mystical poetry have redefined a physical and metaphysical space and the significance of this space as expressed through the biblical archetype of Zion/Jerusalem. The contribution focuses on the comparative textual analysis of multimedia repertoires related to the symbolic and geographical (re)location of the sacred space of Zion/Jerusalem, highlighting how the interpretation of sacred texts and historical events has impacted the spiritual geography and cross-cultural Rastafari iconography at a global level.

Light and Experience of Space - Construction of Metaphysical Space

The main goal of this research is to perceive the influence of light on the brightness of the architectural space through the different positions of the Sun and its varying intensity at different periods throughout the year. Through a historical review of architectural styles and architectural elements, the influence of daylight on the shaping of the architectural space is presented. When we talk about architecture, we talk about light, first of all daylight. It is not just physical, its enabling perception of the exterior and the interior, it also provides energetic component to architecture, duality of matter and energy thus generating aesthetic sensation among users.

REVISITING WILLIAM PALEY

AbstractEvaluations of William Paley'sNatural Theology(1802) routinely refer to its philosophical and theological shortcomings, especially its vulnerability to Charles Darwin's scientific naturalism. Nevertheless, Paley still repays a visit as a subject who transcends common stereotypes, four of which invite correction: that Paley wrote in culpable neglect of David Hume; that he pretended to give a deductive demonstration of God's existence; that by making hisNatural Theologya stand‐alone book, his apologetic framework was neglectful of revelation and therefore inconsequential for Christian theology; and that, preoccupied with the minutiae of anatomical specificity, he was blind to laws connecting natural phenomena. Nuances in Paley's thinking, particularly his allowance for the extension of scientific naturalism, help to explain the sympathetic recognition he still enjoyed among scientific figures until the end of the nineteenth century. For Thomas Huxley, he had even created a metaphysical space that allowed for a science of evolution.

That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing by Julia S. Charles

Reviewed by: That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing by Julia S. Charles Tyler Sperrazza That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing. By Julia S. Charles. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 224. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5957-2; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5956-5.) The past decade has seen a tremendous growth in scholarly inquiry around the subject of racial passing. The context of the current historical moment coupled with viral discussions of cultural appropriation and "blackfishing" brings a sense of urgency to understanding the long history of passing and its function in the U.S. context. Julia S. Charles's That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing offers a perspective on this phenomenon that places performance at the heart of the racial passing experience. Charles calls for a rejection of previous scholarly treatments of passing that foreground experiences of loss among those who pass and instead argues for a focus on the opportunities that performing race offered to certain mixed-race African American citizens. Charles presents a book of theory and philosophy on racial passing meant to inform the ways scholars of African American literature and media studies can make sense of mixed-race and passing characters throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. The title of Charles's book also serves as its main theoretical construction. "That Middle World" is a location that Charles defines as an interstitial and metaphysical space occupied by mixed-race characters that becomes the "location of culture and identity for so-called mulattoes in African American fiction" (p. 22). This space both creates and destroys boundaries between Black and white and offers a means of interpreting passing African Americans' experiences as a constant process of both making and crossing borders in a liminal space free of the "inadequate Black-white racial binary" (p. 40). Throughout the central chapters of the book, Charles adroitly moves between the historical lives and contexts of African American authors and the worlds their characters inhabit. Many of her subjects—Charles W. Chesnutt being central—were themselves mixed-race and able to navigate the boundaries of That Middle World in their everyday lives. Charles's interweaving of the historical and the literary is a welcome addition to this growing field of passing studies. The subjects of Charles's chapters will be familiar to readers with interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literature. However, she effectively breathes new critical life into texts that are often central to analyses of racial passing, such as Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). Charles analyzes these texts with an eye on both the written words and their authors in a way that combines the best tools of historiography, literary criticism, and performance theory. She also seeks to [End Page 164] add to the growing movement of scholars to recalibrate our view of African American literary production between the 1860s and 1930s toward regions beyond Harlem. Charles offers the conveniently termed "New Negro Renaissance" as a way of highlighting this important temporal shift, and readers who study this particular era could be well served in adding that phrase to their lexicon (p. 16). Charles has presented a fascinating new take on the phenomenon of racial passing during a particular moment in U.S. history. She makes connections between the contexts of historical authors and their writings, and how the lessons gleaned from her theoretical construction of That Middle World can have real interpretive power in our present moment. The book's epilogue, "That Rachel Dolezal," does just that by placing the theory of That Middle World into our contemporary moment and offering new perspectives on the ways racial performance continues to function in our world. This book is a must-read for anyone studying the politics of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tyler Sperrazza University of New Haven Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Islamic theism as a response to White Supremacy: The case of Shaikh Amadu Bamba Mbacké


 
 
 This article examines Shaikh Amadu Bamba Mbacké and his theology as a cogent response to White Supremacy as expressed in French Colonization of Africa. White Supremacy has as its primary goal, the recreation of the whole world in the image of Whiteness upon the premise that the possession of White skin makes one inherently superior. Theism counters this ontological assault with an unabashed turn to a believer's God. Shaikh Amadu Bamba Mbacké's insistence on Islam counters White Supremacy thereby providing an ideological and metaphysical space for the non-whites of Senegal to exist without succumbing to the temptation to aspire to a Euro-centric ideal.
 
 

Cube Fest 2022

Cube Fest 2022

The Millennial Antinostalgic: Yoav in Nadav Lapid’s Synonymes

In contemporary, transnational exilic cinema exile an artist is made in an exilic journey. The 21st century journey departs from entirely opposite premises than those of the ancient journey, namely with the desire to escape one’s birthplace. The aim of the exile has also transformed: from a necessary step to secure one’s livelihood or even life, it has become one of exploration. Rather than the desire to settle elsewhere or to eventually return home, the exile sets on an open-ended, exploratory journey the premise of which is finding oneself. In this, the physical journey has come to resemble the metaphysical one of the artist. The exile departs from a physical place and journeys into a metaphysical space, geography becoming secondary while still being necessary. This journey is best recounted in the film Synonymes (2019) by Israeli director Nadav Lapid, an autobiographical tale that chronicles the director’s own exile from Israel to Paris and captures his journey toward becoming an artist. The paper references two prominently antinostalgic authors: 20th century Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz and Polsih-Jewish writer Henryk Grynberg.

Rotational-monad metaphysics

The article presents a metaphysical concept, in the main tesa of which the simplest discrete element of physical reality is constituted — designated as a protomonad — which forms the basis of spatial forms of materiality, including space itself as such. The genesis of the protomonad is clarified by a certain way interpreted rotation of the spiritual essence, which in itself does not have an extension, and both the indicated essence and its rotation have a metaphysical order, and the dimension of physical space finds a rational interpretation through the characteristics of metaphysical rotation. The semantic aspects of complex mathematical constructs are considered that convey the semantics of rotations, and quite reasonably proposed by some mathematicians as the unified foundations of mathematics and physics, where the properties of constructs act as a mathematically strict co-proof of the validity of the concept. The meaning of number is explained as a method of restriction on infinite pre-physical multiplicity, and finite natural multiplicities are the result of such restrictions; the most important special case is the three-dimensional spatial metric given in the experiment, which appears as a restriction of an infinite-dimensional metaphysical space. The so-called principle of genetic inheritance is formulated, which makes it possible to remove the dialectical opposition between the one and the multiple and illustrates the categories of time and space as dialectical oppositions.

Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium

Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium

The Metaphysical Landscape of Siberia. For the Anniversary of the Writer Anatoly Omelchuk

The article is devoted to the study of the creative work of the Russian writer Anatoly Konstantinovich Omelchuk and his place in Russian literature. Through the prism of the analysis, the author discusses such fundamental topics as: what it means to be Russian; what it means to feel at home; what art and literature are; what the meaning of modern literature crisis is; what the relation between content and form in art is. The article examines the ideas of A.K. Omelchuk regarding Siberia as metaphysical space that makes Russia Russia; about Siberia as the last territory of humanity, which today is threatened with extinction in the post-human future; about literature as kind of service to the Motherland. The author comes to the conclusion that the work of A.K. Omelchuk is located in the horizon of the tradition of Russian literature, set by F.M. Dostoevsky.

Danser par la voix de l’écriture. À propos des chamanes scripteurs des Yi-Sani (Chine)

Among the Yi-Sani of southwest China, mastery of a peculiar script is a condition for local shamanic practices. In mythology, the texts of bimo religious specialists are associated with the sounds of drunkenness and a form of asceticism. For the voicing of these versified writings in rituals, which are perceived not as written words but as graphic chants linked to the body substances of the officiants, it supposes a change of state pertaining to ecstasy and trance perceptible only by the spirits. In order to discuss Roberte Hamayon’s works, the question of feeling and the idea of the shaman as a “seized-being” in the sense of Erwin Straus is introduced with references to movement and music, notably through Anne Boissière. Finally, the article proposes to perceive chanting (graphic or verbal) and movement (internalized as well as externalized) as fundamental modes of shamanic interaction from which an opening to the world is created, and a connection is made between different entities located in the acoustic and metaphysical space elaborated by the shaman who animates it through the trepidations of his body.

КОРОЛЬ В ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОМ УНИВЕРСУМЕ ШЕКСПИРА: МЕТАФИЗИЧЕСКИЙ АСПЕКТ

The article shows the place of the sovereign's image in Shakespeare's artistic universe. The aim of this study is to analyse the place and role of the monarch in Shakespeare's artistic universe in the metaphysical context of the Renaissance worldview. The study is based on the texts of Shakespeare' s tragedies, comedies and «romantic» plays. The paper regards the figure of the ruler in comparison with his marginal antagonist, the fool, in terms of antinomianism of Christian culture. The narrative and motif-based analysis establishes the places of the sovereign and the fool (and his invariants) in the metaphysical space of Shakespeare's 'theatre of the world' and reveals the set of their specific external and internal characteristics. Cultural studies of Shakespeare's representations of this antinomian couple reveals the tragic guilt of the ruler who gives in to passions (ambition, lust, anger), as a result of which the monarch's ability to maintain order is lost. The disruption of world harmony in the space of Shakespeare's plays is considered in three aspects: spatial, family and existential. This, in turn, is reflected at the metaphysical level, causing natural anomalies and cataclysms. In accordance with this, the article highlights the specificity of the motifs related to this antinomic pair: harmony, sanity, honour (the king); disharmony, madness, sensuality and death (the fool). The authors identify how the king and the fool interact in the context of marginalisation of the ruler's persona. The metaphysical chaos of existence, the result of the power crisis, leads to the fact that the fool and the king swap places in Shakespeare's artistic universe following the game of elements, the game of costumes, the game of words. The paper concludes that the image of the king, occupies one of the key places in Shakespeare's artistic universe. In the gallery of sovereigns created by Shakespeare, the Renaissance image of the ideal ruler is presented in the context of the tendencies of the next historical and cultural epoch – the Baroque.

Afterlives: Testimonies of Irish Catholic Mothers on Infant Death and the Fate of the Unbaptized

Older Irish Catholics remember a metaphysical space or place called Limbo. This was the destination of unbaptized infants. They could never enter Heaven because the stain of original sin had not been removed. In addition, they were denied burial in consecrated ground. Fear of such eventualities drove parents to baptize as soon as possible. Nor was this a purely Irish phenomenon. In emergency cases, even baptism in utero was permitted in some parts of Catholic Europe. The centerpiece of this study is the testimonies of Irish mothers and their remembrances of the perils of Limbo, the disposal of infant corpses (in cillíní), and “churching.” Why belief in Limbo has become almost extinct in recent decades is explored, drawing on both demand and supply side explanations. More generally, considerations of Limbo, the unbaptized, and the afterlife give rise to challenging questions as to secularization and even the definition of childhood.

On Necessary Gratuitous Evils

The standard position on moral perfection and gratuitous evil makes the prevention of gratuitous evil a necessary condition on moral perfection. I argue that, on any analysis of gratuitous evil we choose, the standard position on moral perfection and gratuitous evil is false. It is metaphysically impossible to prevent every gratuitously evil state of affairs in every possible world. No matter what God does—no matter how many gratuitously evil states of affairs God prevents—it is necessarily true that God coexists with gratuitous evil in some world or other. Since gratuitous evil cannot be eliminated from metaphysical space, the existence of gratuitous evil presents no objection to essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient, essentially morally perfect, and necessarily existing beings.