Adrián Navigante

THE POIETIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LABYRINTH: NOTES ON THE SYMPTOMATOLOGY OF A DYING CULTURE

How does the gap produced by the Western ratio’s conquest of nature, the figure of the labyrinth as transcultural complex emerging from that gap, relate to poiesis as an act that discloses the challenge of alterity? Adrián Navigante attempts to answer this question throughout this essay, availing himself of the heritage of visionary and heterodox poets, from Friedrich Hölderlin’s madness to Paul Celan’s meridian, from André Breton’s and D. H. Lawrence’s encounter with North-American Indians to Artaud’s experience with the Tarahumaras and Alain Daniélou’s animistic re- enactment.

The essay is also a plaidoyer for the restitution of local values relating to forgotten or oppressed traditions in the context of a global uni-formation and shallowness.

THE HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE OF A CIVILIZATIONAL GAP

“The edifice of the universe appears to the human intellect as a labyrinth [aedificium universi intellectui humano contemplanti instar labyrinthi est]”¹, writes Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum (1620). This sentence seems to limit in a certain way the philosopher’s ambi- tious project, namely an emendation of human knowledge based on a systematic method for an adequate and complete understanding of nature. The limit is contained in the word instar. Bacon does not say that the universe is in itself a labyrinth. He says that it takes on that form when faced with the intellect’s proclivity to explore it – or rather exhaust it; as if an intrinsic resistance were enacted to protect the cosmos from the ‘human project’. Throughout the centu- ries it has been thought, or rather pre-supposed, that the form of knowledge purported by the Western ratio should be perfected to attain its highest goal: an unlimited expansion and conquest. Among its mainstream representatives, nobody paid attention to the intricacies of the labyrinth – for it is there that lies its significance and the very nature of the challenge that this universe presents to the human intellect. That is precisely what I intend to do in this essay: to focus on the significance of a figure that escapes the mainstream Western equation of knowledge and power, expansion and conquest, and – if taken seriously – might reshape the task of a culture. For that purpose, I have chosen to follow the footprints of poets rather than the landmarks of scientists or the innovations of technicians. I pursue no conquest. Mine is rather a pilgrimage or an idle wandering, since for me knowledge is mainly something that results from amazement, something that triggers creativity and enables relation. In that sense, I also intend to restitute a notion of Poiesis that has been deformed and obliterated by contem- porary Western culture – despite the need to implement it as one of the precious few antidotes against the destructive civilizational enterprise that is said to ‘unify’ the globe.

Exploration, if related exclusively to expansion, is an activity of conquest. It implies the occupation of a territory, a delimitation of trajectories, and a progressive articulation of paths leading to a thorough, solid, and self-contained world configuration. But if the very process of ‘disclosing a world’ – as far as conquering human spirits are concerned – reveals itself as fraught with “ambiguous paths [ambigua viarum], misleading similitudes [fallaces similitudines], spirals and nodes [spirae et nodi]”², a gap becomes ostensible between the knowing subject (of power) and the (subjugated) object of knowledge. Can the universe and its intricacies be reduced to the point of becoming a set of ‘objects’? The art of the conquering intellect is that of vivisection, and the gap that resists that operation projects an inverted mirror on which the shadow-side of the enterprise becomes visible. Modern rationality has chosen to repress the symptomatic character of that gap. On the level of cultural production, this project has been related to the universalist didactics of the West: the mode of being resulting from that rationality had to be exported to the rest of the globe. In the commodified world of global capitalism, the term ‘management’ epitomizes the highest acceleration and the lowest form of that expansive ratio: instrumental rationality and cultural industry³. In the public sphere, it implies the reduction of the social, political, historical, anthropological, religious, philosophical, and artistic dimensions of human existence (with its innumerable nuances) to a ‘mechanical functioning’⁴, where the gap of contradiction, paradox, singularity, difference, otherness, intensity, and mystery is concealed by a homogenized pattern of repetition. The figure of the labyrinth, on the contrary, displays a complex dynamics emerging from that gap and points to an architectural cartography that transforms the differential space from a mere quantité négligeable into a cultural and even ontological challenge. Its hidden dimension – that is, what escapes the expansion of modern rationality with its increasingly instrumental forms of conquest – compels its explorers to adopt another attitude. Openness to otherness and a new modality of relation. What kind of world can we con-figure if we constructively accept differences, ambivalences, detours, multiple paths and perspectives, as well as the possibility of being challenged by other (human and non-human) modes of existence? Surely not the world of mechanical rationality, dehumanized technocracy, and axiomatic commodification. Maybe a world of poietic dignity – although that is a risky bet and in no way an assurance of ‘salvation’. Our dying world needs the Poiesis of the labyrinth as a refuge and a possible life alternative in times of civilizational collapse.

Can the universe and its intricacies be reduced to the point of becoming a set of ‘objects’? The art of the conquering intellect is that of vivisection, and the gap that resists that operation projects an inverted mirror on which the shad- ow-side of the enterprise becomes visible

THE VICISSITUDES OF AN IMMANENT ‘OTHERNESS’

In his lecture of 1943 on Heraclitus’ doctrine of Logos, Martin Heidegger attempted to disentangle the notion of poiesis from the historical superimpositions of metaphysical and scientific thinking⁵. His remarks on the expression ἀληθέα λέγειν καὶ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν (literally “to say the truth and act according to [the] nature [of things]”) in the Heraclitan fragment 112 are worthy of consideration. According to Heidegger, aletheia is not to be understood as ‘truth’ in the sense of an adequation between language and reality, but as “that which is unconcealed” by “an initial force of nomination”⁶. The verb legein does not mean ‘speak’ or ‘say’ something, but ‘gather’ [sammeln] in the sense of ‘rendering consistent’ or ‘safe-keeping’ [verwahren] what is (being) unconcealed. As to poiein, the usual translation ‘to act’ in the sense of ‘doing’ or ‘making’ can never do justice to Heraclitus’ thinking. Heidegger opts for the verb ‘disclose’ in the sense of ‘bringing out of concealment’ [hervor-bringen]⁷. Poiesis would be a way of ‘holding to’ or ‘dwelling in’ the disclosure of being before any further determination leads that funda- mental experience toward clearly delimited subjective and objective grounds. Disclosure is the act [poiesis] of emerging out of a self-growing source which the Greeks named physis. This ‘act’ is not carried out by any human being, though; it is primarily an event. Some humans– so-called poets – can existentially articulate that radical opening and consciously participate in the eventful emergence of being that bears the name physis. This means, among other things, that the poet is not engulfed (like the rest of society) by the alluring and appalling tendency to mechanized life-rhythms, utilitarian mediation, superfluous wishes, collective manipulation, and truncated relations. Heidegger’s view on Poiesis constitutes a most significant immanent critique of the mainstream project in the West: the reductive progression from metaphysics to epistemology and the subjugation of epistemic thinking to modern technology for the sake of domination.

From the mainstream perspective of this ‘progression’, poetry belongs to the sphere of ‘fiction’ – as opposed to ‘factual reality’. Fiction is invented language, purposely rendered alien (i.e. inadequate) to reality because it stems from the subjective (or purely individual) field of experience. Heidegger challenges this view by showing that it is the outcome of an epochal crisis in which thinking is severed from life and life is confined to its purely biological stratum. If life is not confined to the logic of natural science, there is much more to consider in effective reality as what the Latin word res offers to thinking (and life in general)⁸. In this sense, the dichotomic pair ‘fact-fiction’ is untenable, since the articulation of effective reality encompasses and demands much more than what is rendered by its epistemic classification and technical manipulation. The world we have inherited is not reality at large, but one very limited version of it that prescribes its portion as the only adequate vision of the whole.

The place of Poiesis in modern Western thought cannot be other than marginal. Poetry, not as merely textual production but as a life-engagement codified in a singular form of aesthetic production, is the place of the immanent other: it embodies a reverse-side of main- stream discursive bodies (still visible and even prominent in social contexts of the past⁹) as well as a (non-)place of potential life alternatives to the dominant mode of existence – the little portion that claims to be the whole – in the present world-configuration. It is because this immanent ‘otherness’ could find no support in its own social body that some lucid or visionary poets have sought – well or badly – existential alternatives in cultures that are distant – whether geographically or historically. Prosaic judgements on those detours have always been hostile. They apply disqualifying commonplaces to the poetic enterprise, such as ‘exoticism’, ‘naïve identification’, ‘subjective projection’, or ‘sheer invention’. Almost all of them overlook the fact that Poiesis (as a space of singularity that resists homogenization and mechanical reproduc- tion) offers to those searchers an indefinable bond with the culture of the other(s). One of the keys to transcultural understanding lies in a consideration of those spaces of resonance, which cannot be determined, classified, or explained away with the ready-made tools of intellectual domination.

Those transcultural spaces are not so discontinuous and inchoative as Heidegger’s differ- ential Greco-German axis and its invisible thread from Heraclitus to Hölderlin. Heraclitus’ obscurity was the exercise of his style as the embodiment of insight; Hölderlin’s obscurity was the acceptance of madness as a refuge to retain the divine echoes in his own frequency field faced with the prospect of Europe as an imminent wasteland¹⁰. Part of the crisis of contempo- rary Western culture is due to the obstinacy of its cultural elites to retrieve discontinuous past values which can only be conjured theoretically and have no power of collective transforma- tion. The insistence of precious few thinkers like Heidegger on a radically differential space can be seen as the only remaining epochal scansion pointing to an alternative modality of being-in-the-world. But how can this modality be realized if the configuration is lacking, and no bridge can be built between the ontological difference (where every attempt at symboliza- tion fails) and the ontic field (where beings are symbolically distributed and interconnected)? On a socio-historical level, the differential space progressively loses its consistency as well as its heroic (or rather tragic) raison d’être, while the rest of society is engulfed in an unprecedented scientific, technical, and managerial ‘machination’¹¹. Paul Celan’s poetology is perhaps the most lucid elaboration of this situation, at the same time an epochal diagnosis and testimony of an inner struggle foredoomed to failure. In his acceptance speech for the Büchner Prize, Der Meridian, Celan refers to the obscurity and strangeness of poetry, paradoxically characterized as art-less and art-free. Poetry is a word against the grain, a breath-turn¹², and as such it is exemplarily actualized in free-death – where the breath-turn becomes a death-rattle, and the differential direction (or deviation, or radical subtraction) a pure expression of destiny. The movement announced by Celan’s poetology is stylistically realized in his poetry and dramat- ically accomplished with his suicide. It marks the destiny of the subtractive space in Western thought, the vicissitude of the counter-light that courageously flickered before the expanding shadow of the world-conquering logos and its atrocities.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE GAP: FIRST STEPS TOWARD THE LABYRINTH

Celan’s poetological detour in search of an encounter that might counteract the alienating effects of an artistic – and cultural – wasteland bears the sign of a utopia. But what does this term mean in the context of his essay? It has little to do with fantastic thinking, abstract ideals, or unrealistic wishes. It is rather the effort to preserve a radically differential character in the poet’s exercise of ‘world disclosure’. What does the poem ‘say’ if metaphors, tropes, and other figures of speech deemed necessary and functional in the classical conception of literature are led ad absurdum?¹³ What kind of world remains in that space (if any)? Celan’s poetic work deals with the primordially repressed in Western culture, ‘the other’ (in the form of the Jew)¹⁴ that must be annihilated to ensure the identitary consistency of a folk, a nation, a continent, or more heroically: a European destiny. Out of the subtractive space of the primordially repressed, the poet attempts to build another topography, and in that attempt, he finds “something immaterial but earthly, terrestrial”¹⁵, which acts as a connecting figure between the opposite poles of the absent homeland and the impossible return. The figure of the meridian is what consolidates the poet’s exile and at the same time consoles him in his journey along “this impossible path, this path of the impossible”¹⁶.

Celan’s meridian as a flickering line between two unreachable poles is the minimal amount of consistency that Poiesis can offer to render another world visible among the ruins of Western modernity. However, it is an enlightening indication, since the poet’s differential scansion leaves the door open to take another turn instead of accentuating his geo-dynamics of fading-out and effacement¹⁷. If we add an equator to the meridian, we gain symmetry and obtain the first sketchy cartography of the globe: a cross, through which different areas become perceptible. The intersecting lines of the meridian and the equator delineate the emergence of a world. Not the world conceived or measured by Europe, not the world as Europe’s expan- sion or contraction, unification or fragmentation, but an otherworld. A plurality of cultures, discourses, habits, and tendencies which cannot be predetermined or pigeonholed in the mechanical reproduction of the similar or the already-prescribed as ‘normal’ or ‘commonsen- sical’. An alternative to the widespread commonplaces.

The cross is a figure that, long before adopting its Christian significance, served as the basis for a mysterious architecture, the labyrinth¹⁸, in which dancing patterns, ritual ceremonies, fertility cults, and other performative ways of dealing with the surrounding living reality¹⁹ imposed themselves upon humans, keeping them away from the logic of abstract thinking, instrumental development, and compulsive manipulation of objective reality. The architecture of the labyrinth is mysterious because, as Karl Kerényi points out, it cannot be unraveled or solved like a (scientific) problem; instead, it “demands to be experienced, worshipped, and incorporated in one’s own life”²⁰. Wouldn’t we gain a broader perspective on the labyrinth and come closer, in a way, to the mystery of its architecture, if we consider poets who venture a step toward radical alterity beyond the logic of differential immanence purported by authors like Hölderlin and Celan? For it is in those authors that a poietic specificity becomes significant.

A poet’s venturing into radical alterity has little to do with travel experiences serving literary – or worse: pseudo-ethnological – purposes. In 1945, André Breton visited the Hopi reservation in Arizona and kept a notebook on his experience. What transpires in those notes is for the most part disappointing. His record on the Snake-Antilope dance, a powerful sixteen-day ceremony of the Hopis in Arizona, misses the relevance that that encounter could have had as testimony of poietic disclosure going in the opposite direction to the abyss of Western civilization at the end of the Second World War. This is not typical of Breton, who was very attentive to non-European resonances with surrealism in Africa and the Caribbean fascinated by ‘primitive art’, and resistant to colonial exhibitions in France, and who would later declare that the dignity and the inalien- able genius of the Nord-American Indigenous populations stands in shocking contrast with the miserable conditions in which they lived²¹. The Snake-Antilope dance is a rhythmically embodied cartography of the labyrinth. This fact did not escape Breton, who succinctly points to the chthonic aspect of the dance (hitting the soil with the foot to mark the rhythm), the relationship of the four-time entrance and exit of the dancers with the cardinal points, and the density of the bi-directional spiral-like figure in the dancing pattern²². However, his explicit reference to the Labyrinth remains scanty. It does not take the intricacy and significance of the dance into account²³ but limits itself to a vague analogy of the entrance and exit of the dancers with “the Greek symbol, [the] Labyrinth […], which designates the Hopi village”²⁴. Instead of connecting his poetic insight with the amazing submission of the Indians to the non-human presences participating in the ritual in a humble attempt to grasp something of that challenging alterity, Breton takes his pad and starts writing down notes in a nonchalant gesture mindful of colonial ethnologists rather than of visionary poets. His pad is confiscated by one of the Hopis – a reac- tion fully understandable in that context. Breton’s remark completes the disheartening picture: “I don’t regret anything, […] much as I admire Hopi art, I do not feel myself obliged to respect their religion”²⁵.

Paul Celan’s notion of meridian as a flickering line between two unreachable poles is the minimal amount of consistency that Poiesis can offer to render another world visible among the ruins of Western modernity. The poet’s differential scansion leaves the door open to take another turn instead of accentuating his geo-dynamics of fading-out and effacement

Ethnocentric attitudes to alterity are not always so miserable. Some of them turn out to be inspiring and even capable of indirectly restituting part of the value buried by centuries of prejudices. D. H. Lawrence’s 1923 essay “Indians and an Englishman” is an example of this paradox. The author was fascinated with North America and the possibility of a world that might offer an alternative to the ravages of modern industrialism – which Lawrence, a work- ing-class author, had experienced in his own family –, but he was honest enough to thematize the clash of cultures and show that such contrast was not theory but a lived experience (clash of ideas, but also of habits, feelings, impressions, sensibilities): “I am no ethnologist. The point is, what is the feeling that passes from an Indian to me, when we meet. We are both men, but how do we feel together? I shall never forget that first evening when I first came into contact with Red Men, away in the Apache country. It was not what I had thought it would be. It was something of a shock”²⁶. Lawrence’s shock is a displaced one. It does not involve two contemporary cultures, but an opposition of past and present – an evolutionist prejudice typical of his time, which by the way affected not only artists but also ethnologists. Primitive cultures represent ‘the archaic instincts’, and modern culture ‘the progress of reason’. But since modern culture has produced industrialism, social alienation, and a pathological repression of instincts (the shining example of which was Victorian society)²⁷, the word ‘primitive’ means for Lawrence something at the same time unsettling and fascinating, the reverberation of a retrospectively dignified wildness: “I don’t want to live again the tribal mysteries my blood has lived long since. I don’t want to know as I have known, in the tribal exclusiveness. But every drop of me trembles still alive to the old sound, every thread in my body quivers to the frenzy of the old mystery […] I stand on the far edge of their fire light and am neither denied nor accepted”²⁸. This in-between place, or not-still place of the foreigner who dares to fill the void of the differential with an ambig- uous opening to a living cultural alterity, is a step forward in the construction of the labyrinth. Fantasy corrects the factual, and despite its attached prejudices, the isolated individuality is cast open and delineates further coordinates to articulate the gap. Suddenly, there is space for the – non objectifiable – externality of the other, and there is even a field of the other. Hence, another exploration is necessary, the starting point of which is situated outside all dominant parameters – including those of ‘ontological difference’ and ‘radical subtraction’ – to render the emerging relations as symmetric as possible.

For D. H. Lawrence, primitive cultures represent ‘the archaic instincts’, and modern culture ‘the progress of reason’. But since modern culture has produced industrialism, social alienation, and a pathological repression of instincts, the word ‘primitive’ means the reverberation of a retrospectively dignified wildness

THE DOUBLE-EDGED AXE: VISIONARY TURN AND ETHNOLOGICAL SUBVERSION

Antonin Artaud carried out what I would call ‘a visionary turn’, not only in the relation between the modern artist of the old continent (Europe) and the archaic wisdom of the new continent (America), but also by conceiving the poietic breath-turn not as a forgotten differ- ence in the European past but as a transcultural breakthrough at the antipodes of the colonial ideology of his time²⁹. Despite the proliferation of scholarly works on different aspects of his literary production, Artaud remains in the shadows, mainly because his ‘madness’ is empha- sized to the point of discrediting the value of his dazzling insights, reducing his extremely lucid cultural critique and his restitution of an art of transformation (in place of entertainment)³⁰ to the status of a personal struggle against his own demons. Ronald Laing summarizes this medi- calized obliteration of the poietic voice in our culture when he quotes Artaud’s conviction that “a sick society invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain vision- aries” and concludes: “this is psychosis. I had been trained to diagnose myself psychotic”³¹.

Artaud never denied his status of patiens, that is, somebody who suffers and needs healing. But healing was for him the contrary of cure in the sense of a re-adaptation to the social environment, since in his view there was a fundamental perversion in the ‘normality’ shaped by modern European culture³². Madness was for Artaud a sign of healthy resistance to that sick normality, but the individual paid a high price for carrying upon his shoulders the collective shadow of his time, giving it expression with a dissonant voice. The voice of art makes the artist a cultural scapegoat³³, but Artaud’s ultimate purpose was not to be crucified. If poetry is the ultimate expression of art, the poet is the sickest being, but that extreme dissonance appears in his view as the possibility of a trans-cultural breakthrough. The embodied core of his poietic vision is not to be found – as many readers think – in a retrieval of the ancient Gnosis, or an affinity with old Pagan mysteries, or a readaptation of medieval alchemy, but in a reversal of a whole world-configuration dictated by non-human agency. No diachronic exploration can achieve this reversal. The testimony of Artaud’s alchemical odyssey becomes exemplary in his poetically recorded experience with the Tarahumara people in Western Sierra Madre, Mexico.

The first indication of Artaud’s visionary spirit in the context of his experience in the new continent can be well expressed in Jungian terms: whereas his fellow artists valued the ‘spirit of the times’, he pointed to the ‘spirit of the depths’³⁴. His contemporaries (André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard) saw Marxism – and by extension the Mexican revolution – as a model of social change and universal hope. Artaud inverted the terms: “Where modern Mexico copies Europe, I contend that it is the European civilization that should benefit from Mexico’s secret. The rationalist culture of Europe has failed, and I have come to the land of Mexico seeking the basis of a magical culture that can still emerge from the forces of the Indigenous soil”³⁵. Artaud’s purpose of returning to the pre-Columbian tradition of Mexico was no metaphor or flight of fancy. Apart from the political lucidity contained in that program³⁶, an exis- tential equation had to be borne in mind. As a poet who inevitably had to suffer the ‘madness of difference’ in a society with a pathological form of normality, Artaud looked for healing through reinsertion in another context leading to a reeducation of perception and cognition. This is in the first place an individual task (the poet must be treated by Indigenous shamans, not by Western doctors³⁷); however, its consequences imply a gradual reconfigu- ration of his artistic and social environment, and a new vision of ‘the human’³⁸. Under the guidance of the Tarahumaras, Artaud was determined to experience a qualitative reversal of ontological and existential coordinates.

The embodied core of Artaud’s poietic vision is not to be found in a retrieval of the ancient Gnosis, or an affinity with old Pagan mysteries, or a readaptation of medi- eval alchemy, but in a reversal of a whole world-configuration dictated by non-human agency.

Breton selectively embraced the art of the Hopis but rejected their religion, keeping a safe distance from any deep existential challenge. Lawrence instinctively resonated with the ‘old tribal fire’ of the Pueblos and Apaches but declared the existence of an incommensurable consciousness gap between them and the white man³⁹. Artaud reverses both postures in his experience with the Tarahumaras. As opposed to Breton, he participates in “the rite of Ciguri [Peyote]”, detaching himself from the secular idea of art and embracing “the summit of the Tarahumara religion”⁴⁰. As opposed to Lawrence, he fully accepts the condition to bridge the gap between two incommensurable worlds, a “rite of annihilation”, in which “the old Mexican chief struck me [with his sword] in order to cast my consciousness open”⁴¹. At this point begins the poet’s ethnological subversion. Artaud was no professional ethnologist, and he didn’t want to be one. His gesture is ethno-logical in quite another sense than what is usually understood by that term. Artaud aims at an embodied reception of the ‘ethnic religion’ of the Tarahu- maras and – within that process – a transformation of his own inherited logos (which is that of mainstream Western culture). This would coincide with a renewal of his poietic vitality and a restitution of his physical and mental health. Professional ethnologists, as a rule, don’t explore the field like Artaud. They enter the ‘native space’ with a will-to-objectivity that withstands every cultural shock and enables them to describe, analyze, and judge all those processes and experiences in a functional way. Ultimately the supremacy of the Western logos in its modern epistemic emplacement remains intact⁴².

Artaud did not go to the Tarahumaras to describe their observable institutional behavior but to inscribe his gaze in the invisible sociality of their ritual performance and articulate the healing dislocation resulting from it. His writing follows the voices (used as testimonies) of the Ciguri priests as well as the movements and emotions that radiate from them, all of them stemming from the non-human intelligence with which they interact. The transmission of knowledge among the Tarahumaras is not intellectual and abstract but living and embodied: “they obey on the one hand a physical tradition, and on the other hand the secret commands dictated to them by the Peyote […]. I mean that they do what the plant tells them to do”⁴³. It is in the apparent immediacy and spontaneity of the Tarahumaras’ obedience to the plant that the richness and complexity of their ritual becomes visible. But in order to see that complexity, the participants must be granted the eyes of Ciguri – a total reversal which enables them to grasp the sense of postures, gestures, dance patterns and prayers in a much broader context of interconnection and embeddedness.

Artaud’s confrontation with alterity is not reduced to an encounter with an Indigenous tribe and the attempt to adhere to part of their living tradition. It consists in a vision whose first moment requires being spiritually torn and engulfed in agony, “after which one feels like turned around and reversed to the other side of things”⁴⁴. This may be called a mystical moment, but not in the sense in which one would usually characterize such experience⁴⁵. There is no apophatic or ineffable influx, but an ecstatic opening with a progressive articulation of the reverse-side: “Things which seem to have emerged from what was your spleen, your liver, your heart, or your lungs break away and burst in the atmosphere […] shaped like the letters of a very ancient and mysterious alphabet chewed by an enormous mouth, but terrifyingly repressed, proud, illegible, jealous of its invisibility”⁴⁶. This is Artaud’s entrance into the laby- rinth: a resolute katabasis⁴⁷. He deals with the repressed, conjures its power, and adopts the logic of the reverse side, in which a sort of imagination vera shapes the real: “this Fantastic is of noble quality, its disorder is only apparent. In fact, it obeys an order that is fashioned mysteri- ously and on a level which normal consciousness does not reach, but which Ciguri allows us to reach. This is the very mystery of all poetry”⁴⁸.

ETHNO-POETIC RE-CONFIGURATION, THERAPEUTIC CONCRETION

When Paul Celan says that the poem leads all metaphors and tropes ad absurdum, he points to a significant breach in the world-prose of a unified ratio and its own instrumental (and totalizing) emplacement. Metaphors and tropes are part of the symbolic construction of the world. In Western culture, such instances of representation are at the same time a promise of restitution (after the separation of word and thing) and an irrevocable loss of presence (since the thing remains external to language). Can a poem show the world in its immediate presence? Celan draws a line and, along that line, displays a proliferation of fragments in an attempt to concoct a voice that might restitute a resonating presence. But the voice is that of the other side⁴⁹, the dark thread in the still darker pattern, the abyss from which the status of a ‘Thou’ can never result. His labyrinth, mindful of the Cretan one, is configured by a thread (the meridian) connecting fading-out poles (homeland and promised land) and delineating a trajectory that, after many detours, inevitably leads to the center (abyss, suicide)⁵⁰. Breton and Lawrence introduce the figure of the ‘primitive’ other, an alternative path to the dead end of conjuring an immediate presence from the gap of a civilizational underworld. They don’t follow a thread, but branch out possibilities (art detached from religion, instinct correcting consciousness, alignment of Western utopias and indigenism, etc.) to do justice to that alterity, but come back to their starting point: the ethnocentric world-disclosure that declares itself universal and taints the alternative space. Their labyrinth is the so-called Irrweg. Precisely upon the traces of their failure, the following question arises: are all tree branches of that labyrinth blind alleys? The answer is negative. If all the branches of the Irrweg were unrolled, one of them would not lead astray but to the center⁵¹. But in that alley, death appears as the place of ultimate alchemical transformation: a world re-configured from the space of the other. That was Artaud’s poietic attempt to attain an individual and collective apokatastasis under the guidance of the Tarahumaras.

French anthropologist Francis Affergan speaks about a common purpose of poetry and ethnology “to show the worlds in their own presence”⁵². This statement may surprise the reader. What does an art like poetry with its supposedly subjective, emotional, and fanta- sy-laden universe have to do with ethnology, a knowledge discipline in which objectivity, rational description and analytic thinking are said to have absolute primacy? The frame- work of Affergan’s reflection is “the collapse of the symbolic system”⁵³, a system that “consists entirely of representations”⁵⁴, thus unfolding the world in a logic of (prescriptive) duplicity and (failed) correspondence. In the form of metaphors or images (including those of modern science and its etiological explanation of the world), the Western regime of representation intended to constitute an objective (or re-presented) world, that is, a world in which meaning as an open system of values susceptible of being reconsidered and modified becomes self-con- tained – stable, consistent, convincing enough – at the price of being saturated by semantic constraints of signification⁵⁵. Poetry and ethnology point to the fact that the world exceeds the symbolic constraints and that which escapes the symbolic network is not pathological or unintelligible but, rather, a challenge to an established form of intelligibility. In other words: the infinite semiosis required to preserve meaning (as the creative dimension of human life) and minimize reified signification can never be contained – or rather locked up – in one single culture that declares it possesses universal values.

Umberto Eco articulates the conflict between signification and meaning with another opposition internal to the history of Western literacy and scholarship: the dictionary and the encyclopedia as intelligibility models. In their pure forms, the dictionary contains “only those properties which are necessary and sufficient to distinguish the concept being defined from any other”, whereas the encyclopedia extends “the knowledge of a language” contained in the analytical definition of terms to “a certain knowledge of the world”⁵⁶. A language open to the world is no longer stable, self-contained, and well-delimited. The signification of dogs analytically articulated in terms of ‘animals’ and ‘mammals’ differs from an encyclopedic approach including physical properties like ‘barking’ and ‘growling’, as well as psychological and even mythological properties like ‘emphatic capacity’, ‘symbol of transgression (in Greek philosophy)’ or ‘guardians of the underworld (in Norse, Welsh, and Egyptian mythology)’. For Umberto Eco, the tree-branch logic of the dictionary is transgressed in the encyclopedia, since the latter’s opening to infinite semiosis (including the factual, the possible, the fantastic, the supernatural, etc.) introduces another type of logos, closer to mystery than to logic: “the encyclopedia presents itself rather as a map of different territories with jagged and imprecise borders. This gives the impression of moving through it as if walking in a labyrinth”⁵⁷. The mystery of the labyrinth is an open gate to alterity, and crossing that gate is a significant task of transcultural implications today.

For Francis Affergan, both poetry and ethnology pick up the challenge of alterity with full consciousness of the situation with which Western culture is confronted in the XXI century: the collapse of its own – hegemonic and ethnocentric – world-configuration. That is the reason why poetry does not appear as an art belonging to the sphere of subjectivity and emotions as opposed to ethnology as a science seeking objectivity and facts. Poetry appears on the contrary as an effort to work on the differential interstices emerging from the ruins of a unified world-reference and achieve the external side of the inherited (and conditioned) symbolism. In this sense, it is no surprise that Affergan deals with figures like Rimbaud, Valéry, Mallarmé and Celan, for it is in those authors that the significance of Poiesis as an access to the labyrinth of meaning and alterity becomes ostensible. As to ethnography, it could be seen as the art of dealing with the “abyssal chasm [gouffre abyssal]”⁵⁸ separating exotic societies from our own. The chasm becomes an abyss at the moment when the anthropologist realizes that doing justice to those modes of being implies a critical scrutiny of taken-for-granted convic- tions, even that of the “universal question of human knowledge”⁵⁹. This means, among other things, re-thinking (and maybe re-visioning) relations, for they are the constitutive factor in the process of world-configuration. It is in the transcultural assemblage of relations that we can see the invalidity of automatically applying hegemonic schemes anchored in the particularity of a hegemonic culture. “The presence”, writes Affergan, “is always pierced by a crisis whose func- tion is to put that presence in danger”⁶⁰. It is easier to repress (or to oppress) what we cannot grasp than to put ourselves at the risk of coming to terms with it by taking intellectual, exis- tential, and cultural detours. In this sense, an ethnology conscious of the present situation and willing to face the challenge of alterity should come closer to poetry, and poetry should work on the interstices of different world-configurations to rescue a glimmer of that alterity piercing (and dramatically re-configuring) any instance of self-presence. Ethnology and poetry should nurture the poietic significance of the passage from the encyclopedia of classical humanism and its expanding universe to the labyrinth of transcultural challenges with all its ontological twists and turns. This passage would be, among other things, a therapeutic concretion within a compulsory civilizational turning point.

Poetry and ethnology point to the fact that the world exceeds the symbolic constraints and that which escapes the symbolic network is not pathological or unin- telligible but, rather, a challenge to an established form of intelligibility

HOLDING THE THREAD OF THE TWISTED PATH

It is not enough to speak of the labyrinth as a complex network of passages, a place where one can get lost, an architectural puzzle, or a maze. The trajectory of the labyrinth is demarcated by an entrance and a center. Due to their symbolic pregnancy, they are not ‘fixed’ as is usually thought, since the entrance is also the exit, the center is already in each one of the passages, and they can adopt a surprising variety of shapes: natural arrangements, majestic buildings, stone carvings, coin stamps, animal or human bowels, other-than-human moods, and cosmic designs. Such dynamic demarcation and shape-shifting qualities makes the figure both self-contained and open-ended. Already in its unicursal variant, the single path is curved and coiled out of recognition, complexified and turned into a pattern, but it is still a thread⁶¹ we can hold to retrace our steps and regain orientation. The explorer of the labyrinth has always a direction, even if the scope of the movement may not be clear. With each step, something is fulfilled that goes beyond the immediate uncertainty, as if the explorer were the living trace, the organic and conscious realization of a much bigger planimetric configuration. Within a labyrinth, there are basically two ways of getting lost. The most common is when one focuses excessively on the individual dimension of the exploration and disconnects oneself from one’s own concrete embeddedness. Its diametrical opposite is also an aberration: to focus exclusively on the center to the point of not being able to perceive one’s own steps and the multiplicity of the paths. Taken as cultural traits, both extremes are solidary forms of isolation nurtured by the same will-to-dominance. The first one can be found in the philosophy of modernity with its insistence on an empirical and individually centered basis, producing a world of individualist monads disconnected from each other. The second is the model of classical metaphysics with its (potential or actual) denial of multiplicity for the sake of a transcendent unity⁶² – the hegemony of which does not benefit anyone in the living world of human and non-human beings.

There is also an epochal inflexion point in the logic of the labyrinth, which is the rhizome. Considered by some authors as “the labyrinth of the contemporary times”⁶³, the rhizome has significant characteristics which differ from those of the labyrinth: there is no center in it, and no difference between outside and inside (hence no entrance or exit). The primacy of the line (as errant track) over the point (as orientation focus) erases the existential anchoring of the explorer as ‘individual’. The contingent proliferation of unfolding and refolding layers, deviating and self-relocating lines, and half-twisted and non-orientable surfaces renders the idea of a ‘self-contained whole’ literally impossible. The rhizome is the utmost realization of the labyrinth as ‘maze’, the transformation of a structure (however dynamic) into an assemblage, a mutation out of shape of the labyrinth topography, in which its poietic significance becomes non-territorial expenditure⁶⁴.

Non-territoriality is no substantial aspect of the rhizome – since there is nothing substan- tial in that radical figure of becoming and heterogeneity. It is rather the moment in which the flux of released, enhanced, or subverted desire breaks out of the coding system and becomes able to re-shape the territory from an alternative though only virtually retrievable frame- work. Is such re-shaping and re-territorialization qualitatively different from all other forms of configuring a territory? Society consists, without any exception, in a permanent coding of fluxes⁶⁵. The relevant question is: which modality should be implemented and what would its implications be for human subjects and their set of human and non-human relations? What I termed ‘auto-poietic expenditure’ contained in the figure of the rhizome rejects any coding system that aims at a self-contained whole, however plural and dynamic, however hostile it may be in the face of quantification and mechanization. The coding strategies of so-called ‘archaic societies’ (masks, rituals, taboos, etc.) are, from the perspective of the rhizome, collec- tively efficient but ultimately oppressive in their ways of channeling desire⁶⁶. In the same way the adherence of certain individuals to a lineage or a tradition is regarded as a submission of subjective freedom to a vertical (and therefore tyrannic) authority⁶⁷. Capitalism, not only as a specific mode of production but also as a model for the functioning of society, appears as the substitution of vertically coded fluxes by a horizontal display of abstract quantities: there is no authority, no synthesis, no self-contained logic, no qualities rooted in blood, race, land, or even culture of origin – since there is ultimately no retrievable origin. Abstract qualities lead to collective alienation, whereas machinic fluxes (born from the former) embody a qualitative turn toward a construction of singularities. Paradoxically enough, both sets are reciprocally intertwined like a Möbius strip.

The rhizome’s ambiguous power of world-(re-)configuration is dramatically exempli- fied in the situation of Indigenous – that is, non-modern and non-capitalist – cultures today⁶⁸, cultures which on the one hand resist the destructive power of a globalized multifunctional network, and on the other hand cannot avoid being sucked up into the latter’s vortex of semi- otic reproduction. Nowadays, there is an undeniable global circulation of Indigenous cultures (through spiritual tourism, social media, and virtual networks), the main struggle of which is carried out in the name of local pockets of resistance (all of them rooted in pre-modern or anti-modern modes of existence). Any revivification of local languages, traditions, histories, or community concerns is inevitably re-appropriated by a global-capitalist logic not only alien but also hostile to the original geopolitical aims of those populations⁶⁹. Are Indigenous cultures to be exclusively understood as part of the rhizomatic transformation of the labyrinth?

The fact that these cultures have been absorbed in the infinite proliferation of global semiosis – with its broad spectrum from profit-oriented exploitation of Indigenous art and customs to shamanic-based spiritual wellness courses – does not mean that the poietic signif- icance must necessarily be articulated within the immanence of that logic. Micropolitical torsions or (trans-)cultural re-valuations of alterity are not compelled to adopt what the main- stream discourse of the post-modern West – from cross-border management to university debates – usually presents as the only option holding many alternatives within it: the question- able association of globalized economy, increasing undifferentiation of cultural specificities, and democratic progress. Is there any thread in those ‘alternatives’ that can be held to gain orientation? If rescuing local values susceptible of introducing an alternative world-configu- ration is one of the infinite reterritorialization options within the rhizome, that goal can also be achieved through the attempt at qualitative delimitation, an unexpected retracing of steps which reintroduces the figure of the labyrinth. Without that retroaction, the poietic significance of human thoughts and actions gets lost in the proliferation of saturated signification – to the detriment of its differential meaning.

STILL ON THE (HILL-)SIDE OF THE LABYRINTH

Alain Daniélou was no poet, but one could say that he lived as one. What difference does that make? He sensed the hidden place from which a poietic significance can emerge in a (Westernized) world of conflicts and social disintegration. In the light of history, many limi- tations become visible in his life and work, but this is no particularity, since the dynamics of history reveals such limitations in every – individual or collective – human endeavor. Poetry, instead, cuts across such deficiencies and illuminates portions of embodied destiny. There are people who call themselves ‘poets’ because they write or sing about their feelings. Such narcis- sistic turmoil is as ridiculous as the attitude of unemotional rationalists who write against poets in the name of ‘science’, as if epistemic rigor could ever correct – or cure – literary flights of fancy. There is a curious mixture of the two former cases: scholars (I take old school philolo- gists for the occasion, following Nietzsche’s traces) who produce, in what for colleagues would be “a fit of madness”, an psychologically interesting parody of Goethe’s Gelegenheitsgedichte⁷⁰. The motivation is, without exception, the irruption of ‘the erotic polarity’ in their lives. They feel abandoned to their own fate. Their old manuscripts, scrolls, papyri, and critical editions no longer have any apotropaic function. They end up wielding their pen (in an unparalleled masturbatory urge) and writing for the ‘beloved object of desire’, not only a poem, but mostly a legion of poems. Could that be an unconscious attempt to scare the lover away, or an exhibition of their own frailty to retain – and thus absorb – the living presence of somebody that turns out to be insistently much more than an object? Most surely both. But there is no poietic signifi- cance in the interstice between them, because nothing changes with that gesture. If the lover (usually a woman, since I am talking about patriarchs) persists and penetrates their lives, a transformation may ensue. They could open themselves to the mystery of a kind of alterity (the transfigured Minotaur in the shape of a virgin goddess?)⁷¹ and catch a glimpse of an unknown cartography. It is precisely there that the paths to knowledge deviate from the symbolic barri- cade of their positivist textures and are battered and turned upside down by erotic bodies, sexual fluids, and the spine-chilling passage from anxiety (or neurotic compulsion) to dread (or soul abduction)⁷². In such cases, the poietic significance flittingly pierces the veil of textual mediation and printed obsessions, and life shines forth.

In what sense did Alain Daniélou live as a poet? The labyrinth was for him not only the symbolic representation and ritual realization of an experience⁷³, but also a concrete place. Even more: a refuge, a source, a destination. He lived in a labyrinth that he himself created the elements of which revolved around erotic rapture, ecstatic cults, daimonic inspiration, sacralized Nature, ambivalent creation, and subjective exploration⁷⁴. But that labyrinth was at the same time given to him – as existential framework, life-long learning process, and auspi- cious place in a land of exile⁷⁵. Can anybody create what is given to him? This can only occur when each step in the process is taken with full affirmation of a mysterious itinerary – as if one were following traces left on one’s path. Such traces are not visible until one’s own steps imprint their own traces, by means of which an ordained co-incidence is unconcealed. The environment resonates with the steps and guides them, a living field of forces layered through different subjective instances, totally inaccessible to the modern eye, progressively repressed by the industrial and financial hubris of the last centuries. It is in those instances that alterity opens itself to encounters in which totalizing schemes of domination (from slavery to genocide) have no place, for they deny the constitutive character of the non-objectifiable multiplicity that composes a world on a pre-instrumental level of relation. In that world, fiction is reality, gods appear as concrete beings, and time becomes achronic or dislocated.
The ‘animistic setting’ alluded to above has been repressed throughout history, firstly with monotheism and its evacuation of the sacred from the sphere of natural forces for the sake of a higher transcendent instance, and secondly with secularism and its elimination of every transcendent meaning in the name of an ego-centered and atomized will to self-deter- mination. It didn’t take long for the crisis to show concrete signs: monotheism turned into an abstract doctrine devoid of transformative power or sought a regressive and obscure form of renovation in religious fanaticism. Secularism, for its part, gave way to atomization, skepticism and increasing disorientation, the corollary of which is contemporary nihilism. With the rise of new technologies and virtual reality, a new sensitivity for interconnectedness and relation have become prominent, but not precisely as a retrieval of existential singularity against quan- tified abstraction. Rather the contrary: in the global appropriation of local cultures, Indigenous world-configurations are cunningly instrumentalized to justify not only their atomization and distorted re-composition in the successful amalgam of the exotic and the spiritual⁷⁶, but also their alienating parody under the heading ‘techno-animism’⁷⁷. Any other attempt at internal delimitation of the commodified ‘rhizomatic flux’ is considered the result of an imaginary projection of primitivity in an inexistent ‘outside’, and thus disqualified as such.

In the light of the rhizomatic turn, Daniélou’s defense of traditional societies and their protectionist bent, his insistence on a socio-cosmic and even magico-religious amplification of intellectual research, and his tendency to equate the value of science and mythology, fact and fiction, eroticism and mysticism, appear outmoded – to say the least. Traditions change permanently and maintain no intrinsic consistency beyond that dynamic; magic and religion are powerful narratives but, strictly speaking, not intellectual research; and the sole mean- ingful convergence of eroticism and mysticism can only be vertical (either a primacy of erot- icism over mysticism, as in psychoanalysis, or a theological neutralization of the erotic as the lowest stratum of spiritual awakening). Even post-modern anthropologists who defy neo-co- lonial standards of research do not generally venture into the reverse-side in the way that Artaud declared so important in order to grasp the living and challenging presence of the other(s)⁷⁸. What would happen if that poietic criterion of transformation – both of experience and discourse – were fulfilled?

The main aspect of Daniélou’s work lies in the alchemy he exercised on his own corpus, the passage from the textual and speculative (in his writings) to the local and embodied (in the place where he lived). The Labyrinth⁷⁹ is the concretion of his own philosophy of life, and the realization of his Shaivite-Dionysian project. It is a delimitation of an animistic space open to the presence and influence of non-human agency, where human beings are de-centered, Nature is perceived in its full ambiguity and power, and each corner of the land harbors some mysterious aspect defying rational control. Some of these ‘local’ aspects are contained in the short stories he wrote toward the end of his life, Les contes du labyrinthe (1991); they concen- trate the lived configuration he left behind as the differential trace and token of his way of dealing with alterity.

The Italian hillside at Zagarolo, called Colle Labirinto, can be seen as a retroactive folding in the rhizome where the figure of the labyrinth appears once again as a regained poietic space at the interstices of a naturalized and all-encompassing global narrative. Daniélou’s Labyrinth is not more and not less than a model – one of many, the articulation of which opens new direc- tions and shows other lines along which humans could re-configure a world. Local traditions have a value independently of every appropriation that might take place on a global scale; intellectual history is not only made by Western scholars but also by non-Western teachers, masters and thinkers, in another style and with another vocabulary; any instance of forward- looking thinking that rejects the past and judges cultural alterity according to selective stand- ards of (Western) progress is a contribution to cultural regression. The ‘salvation’ of Europe – and the West – is not in the business of war, but in the art – and the effort – of learning.

1. Francis Bacon: Novum Organum (ed. by Thomas Fowler), Praefatio, Oxford 1889, p. 165.
2. Francis Bacon: Ibidem.
3. I am not postulating a direct continuity of universalism and globalization, since the universalist project implied notions of humanism, freedom and justice that have been to a great extent abandoned with the consol- idation of economy as an all-encompassing ‘science’ ruling over private and public affairs. However, both the philosophy of liberalism and the principles of modern economy – conflated in the work of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith – participate in the type of rationality that characterizes modern Western thought and share its expansionist tendency. It is true that the instrumental character of that rationality has been many times depicted as an opposite pole to the real desideratum of universalization, ‘critical thinking’, but even that opposition is not radical at all, since critical and instrumental rationality are two sides of the complex phenom- enon of ‘Western progress’ – its ideological presentation as a ‘worldwide civilizational phenomenon’ shared by instrumental as well as by critical rationalists.
4. That this ‘functioning’ is perfectible does not mean that its intrinsically mechanical character can ever reach a form of creativity free from quantification and interchangeability. In other words: no technical revolu- tion, neither the worldwide web nor artificial intelligence, can compensate for the symbolic impoverishment of human life that this modality of instrumental rationality implies, which is concretized in the grammar of industrial technology reaching the affective and aesthetic layers of individual existence (Cf. Bernard Stiegler: De la misère symbolique, Paris 2013, pp. 13-20). Since this is the undeniably dominant tendency on a global level, the alternative spaces will always be framed in this panoptic design, even if their counter-configuration is inspired by a cultural architecture challenging our dominant ratio.
5. The metaphysical interpretation of the arts is clearly summarized in Heidegger’s lecture on Hölder- lin’s Hymn “Der Ister” (1942), where he critically points to the division between perceptible natural events [wahrnehmbare Vorkomnisse der Natur] and the non-sensible or abstract meaning [nichtsinnliche Bedeutung] of poetic images [dichterische Bilder] (cf. Martin Heidegger: Hölderlin’s Hymne “Der Ister” (GA 53), Frankfurt 1993, p. 17). This division between sensible, sensory or perceptible nature and abstract, suprasensory or idealized spirit is at the root of literary devices and procedures such as allegory, symbol and metaphor. It is supported by the metaphysical gesture of a division between aesthesis and noesis, which for Heidegger begins with Plato and characterizes “every conception and interpretation of the world in the West [alle abendländische Weltauffassung und Weltauslegung]” (Martin Heidegger: Ibidem, p. 19), including the notion of art as techne and therefore the inability of grasping the living reality of poetic works. Heidegger’s critique of the historico-literary approach to poetry [literarhistorische Erforschung der Dichtung] in the human sciences follows the same logic. In his lecture on Hölderlin’s Hymn “Andenken” (1941/1942), he criticizes the ambition of historical objectivity as an abstract separation of what is constituted as aesthetic object from the living reality of the work (cf. Martin Heidegger: Hölderlin’s Hymne “Andenken” (GA 52), Frankfurt 1992, pp. 2-5).
6. Das Wort […] ἀληθέα bedeutet wörtlich und meint im Wesen das Unverborgene […]. Wir müssen […] darauf achten, daß der Spruch in der Zeit des vormetaphysischen Denkens gesprochen, zu einer Zeit, da auch die Worte, und zumal die Grundworte, ihre ursprüngliche Nennkraft entfalteten“ (Martin Heidegger: Heraklit. Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens, Logik: Heraklits Lehre vom Logos (GA 55), Frankfurt 1994, p. 361, my emphasis).
7. Heidegger: Ibidem, p. 367.
8. The German distinction between ‘effective reality’ [Wirklichkeit] and reality as a result of its objective determination [Realität], is in this sense very enlightening. Effective reality implies a constitutive and dynamic relation between the historical (and therefore never fully objectifiable) aspect of reality and the temporal consciousness intertwined with its texture in a continuous and far-reaching process of understanding. This is clearly expressed by Gadamer in his critique of historical objectivity: “Whoever is certain of a total absence of prejudices guaranteed by the objective character of his procedure denies his own historical conditionality and turns out to be violently subjected to an uncontrolled dominance of such prejudices” (cf. Hand-Georg Gadamer: Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Werke 1), Tübingen 1990, p. 366.
9. If we think of the cohesive social role of poetry in Homeric society (with the foundational epics The Iliad and The Odyssey), classical Greek and Latin culture (from Aeschylean tragedy to Virgil’s poetry), the Middle Ages (Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca) and early modernity (William Shakespeare and John Milton), the role of ‘outsider’ ascribed to the poet from the Romantic period (from William Wordsworth’s denunciation of society as artificial – as opposed to the ‘nature’ of poetry – to Lord Byron’s propensity to scandal as a ‘scansion of otherness’ – whether in libertine sex or in independence wars) to contemporary society (from Antonin Artaud’s madness to Paul Celan’s suicide) presents a dramatic contrast. It also shows that the received and established opinion about poetry – and arts in general – today as activities with no social function apart from aesthetic delight or moral degeneration is, upon historical and transcultural scrutiny, an anomaly rather than a universal rule. It suffices to consider any other part of the world in which the process of ‘Westernization’ did not ravage local traditions and their modes of living away from the alienation of absolute quantification, reproduction of profit, and increasing emotional, intellectual, and spiritual shallowness.
10. Cf. Giorgio Agamben: “his [Hölderlin’s] conception of madness had nothing to do with our idea of a mental disease. It was rather a possible or maybe necessary dwelling-place [qualcosa che si poteva o si doveva abitare]” (La follia di Hölderlin: Cronaca di una vita abitante 1806-1843, Torino 2021, p. 21).
11. For the notion of machination [Machenschaft] as a process in which beings are integrated in a “rela- tion of non-relationality”, cf. Martin Heidegger: Beiträge zur Philosophie. Vom Ereignis (GA 65), Frankfurt 2003, pp. 131-134.
12. Cf. Paul Celan: Der Meridian (Tübinger Ausgabe, ed. by Jürgen Wertheimer), Frankfurt 1999, p. 7.
13. Cf. Paul Celan: Der Meridian, p. 10. The expression ad absurdum, used in Der Meridian when Celan refers to the topography of the poem (“Der Ort, wo alle Tropen und Metaphern ad absurdum geführt warden wollen”), should be understood in the etymological sense of the Latin term absurdum, d. h. at the same time ‘discordant’ (with the rest of the literary and cultural productions) and ‘silence-dawned’ [ab-surdum] in the sense of something emerging from a mute source. This radical poetic subtraction is an attempt to give the voice to those who cannot give expression to their suffering, not only because they are dead but mainly because of the desecrating way in which they were murdered (his thematization of the Shoah).
14. This aspect of the crisis of Western culture was magnificently exposed by Jean-François Lyotard in his book Heidegger et « les juifs » (1988), in which the French philosopher shows quite convincingly that the problem of Western culture’s having forgetten “the question of being” (Heidegger) is not its ultimate cultural challenge, since Western thought, including that of Heidegger’s ontological clearance, symptomatically forgot a dimension of otherness incarnated by “the Jews”, in the face of which even the fundamental question of being appears as part and parcel of an ideology of homogenization and murderous dominance.
15. Cf. Paul Celan: Ibidem, p. 12.
16. Paul Celan: Ibidem.
17. Such accentuation cannot lead but to a fading-out of the meridian line, that is, to mental illness and self-destruction. Throughout his adult life, Celan experienced more than once psychiatric intervention (which plunged him even further into disorientation and hopelessness), and he ended up committing suicide. But his meridian line was not fully erased. His poetic work is an indicator of potentially alternative lines of thinking and writing which can be added to his meridian.
18. The cross is the basis of the classical type of Labyrinth identified with the ancient Palace of Cnossos (V century BCE), which is the oldest variant of this architectonic figure in Western culture. From that central cross emerge the four branches sketching its puzzling spiral-like structure (cf. Malek Abbou (ed.): Les Labyrinthes, Paris 2023, p. 34). Karl Kerényi points to the clay tablets of Mesopotamian excavations dating back to the III millennium BCE as an earlier variant, but that variant is no Western example. In those tables, the entrails of the sacrificed animals appear as a spiral building and bear divinatory significance (cf. Karl Kerényi: Labyrinth Studien, Zürich 1950, p. 14).
19. Cf. Hermann Kern: Labyrinthe. Erscheinungsformen und Deutungen, 5000 Jahre Gegenwart eines Urbildes, München 1999, pp. 48-56.
20. Karl Kerényi: Labyrinth Studien, p. 11.
21. Cf. Henri Béhar: André Breton. Le grand indésirable, Paris 1990, p. 361
22. Cf. André Breton: Carnet de voyage chez les Indiens Hopi (Œuvres Complètes III,) Paris 1999, p. 194.
23. The importance of the drum is wholly omitted, as well as the identification of the dancers with non-human presences. Such aspects had already been noticed and emphasized back in 1939 by the remarkable art historian Aby Warburg (cf. Aby Warburg, A Lecture on Serpent Ritual, in: Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol. 2, N°4 (1939), pp. 277-292, especially p. 282.
24. André Breton: Carnet de voyage chez les Indiens Hopi, p. 194.
25. André Breton: Ibidem, p. 197. A question that imposes itself is whether Breton had any grasp of that ‘religion’. In an essay on the same subject, D. H. Lawrence (who will occupy my thoughts in what follows) writes the following: “[The snake-dance] as a religious ceremonial: well, you can either be politely tolerant […] or you must have a spark of understanding of the sort of religion implied” (D. H. Lawrence: The Hopi Snake Dance, in: Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays (ed. By Virginia Crosswhite Hyde), Cambridge 2014, pp. 79-94, quote p. 81).
26. D. H. Lawrence: Indians and an Englishman, in: Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, pp. 111-121, quote p. 116.
27. For Lawrence, the sphere of the instinctual was not something that must be surpassed for humans to achieve their dignity, but something to be retrieved to step out of religious and modern alienation, which consists in a separation of consciousness from instinct (i. e. the true unconscious): “What then is the true unconscious? It is not a shadow cast from the mind. It is the spontaneous life-motive in every organism” […] “The Word cannot be the beginning of life. It is the end of life, that which falls shed. The mind is the dead end of life” (D. H. Lawrence: Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, Cambridge 2014, pp. 15 and 42, respectively.
28. D. H. Lawrence: Indians and an Englishman, p. 120.
29. The colonial ideology of the time was not only present in ethnology but also in Marxism. The critique of Marxism in the 1930s is, as we shall see, a central subject of dissent between Artaud and other European artists and intellectuals (including Breton) who entertained a cultural relation with North America (Mexico and/ or the United States) and had the revolutionary Western model in mind as the only hope for those countries.
30. Artaud’s practical alchemy, which pervades the totality of writings, has been fully ignored in the reception of his work. A precious exception to this institutionalized denial is Françoise Bonardel’s book Artaud ou la fidelité à l’infini, Paris 1987.
31. Ronald Laing: Wisdom, Madness and Folly. The Making of a Psychiatrist, London 1986, p. 13. Laing made himself an outcast among his colleagues for reading not only Artaud, but also authors like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Joyce, on which he comments the following: “I dreaded much more than ever becoming like them” (Ronald Laing, Ibidem, p. 12). Of course, when he says ‘them’ he does not refer to the authors he liked but to his work colleagues!
32. This is clearly expressed in different passages of his poem Les malades et les médecins: “The disease is a condition / Health is one other, only uglier / I mean more cowardly and pettier […] I have been sick all my life and I beg to remain so. / For the states of deprivation / have revealed me much more about / the plethora of my power than the petit-bourgeois belief in ‘good health is enough’ (Antonin Artaud: Œuvres complètes XXII, Paris 1986, pp. 67 (my translation).
33. Cf. Antonin Artaud: L’anarchie sociale de l’art, in: Œuvres complètes VIII, p. 287.
34. “The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this way […]. But I did not consider that the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power […]. The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical” (C. G. Jung: The Red Book. Liber Novus, New York: London 2009, pp. 119-120.
35. Antonin Artaud: Surréalisme et révolution, in: Œuvres complètes VIII, p. 183.
36. Artaud knew that Mexico had been converted to Marxism, but that Indigenous cultures did not play any role in the revolutionary project, or – even worse – the preaching of Marxism was a second conversion they had to go through (cf. Florence de Méredieu: C’était Antonin Artaud, Paris 2006, pp. 567-569).
37. This phrase should be taken, in the first place, literally. When Artaud arrived in Mexico, he was in a terrible state (withdrawal symptoms, hyper-anxiety, premature ageing), and he puts his hopes in the Indigenous wisdom to help him out of that hole. However, the idea of the poet being healed by the shaman also points to a possible transcultural intersection of poetic genius (as a differential component in the modern West) and shamanic wisdom (as the cohesive factor of traditional Indigenous societies). A ‘healed poet’ can broaden the horizon of Western culture toward a new gaze on radical alterity devoid of the religious and evolutionist prej- udices of the past.
38. “We expect from Mexico a new concept of revolution, and a new concept of the human, which will serve to feed, with his magical life, this ultimate form of humanism being born in France with a spirit diamet- rically opposed to that of the XVI century” (Antonin Artaud: Premiers contacts avec la révolution mexicaine, in: Œuvres complètes VIII, p. 239). It is obvious that his comment on the magical life introduces quite another dimen- sion to the usual expectations in the social revolution. For Artaud the only possible ‘revolution’ (that is, a rotation back to the origins) could come from the red soil of the Indigenous land and not from the Marxist ideology.
39. “The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian’s. The two ways, the two streams, are never to be united” (D. H. Lawrence, Indians and Entertainment, in: Mornings in Mexico and other Essays, pp. 59-68, quote p. 61).
40. Antonin Artaud: Le rite du Peyotl chez les Tarahumaras, in: Œuvres completes IX, Paris 1979, pp. 11-32, quote p. 16.
41. Antonin Artaud: Ibidem, p. 11 (my translation). Helen Weaver translates the phrase rite d’anéantisse- ment as “rite of humiliation” (Antonin Artaud: The Peyote Dance, New York 1976, p. 18). In my opinion this rendering is not adequate, because the sense of ‘being struck’ does not mainly refer to a submission to the authority of the Tutuguri priest but to the annihilation of the modality of (white) consciousness that would otherwise block every connection with the healing and illuminating power of Ciguri during the rite.
42. The reproduction of knowledge in the field of anthropology consists in the translation of marginal, alien, or unknown modes of being-in-the-world into dominant, hegemonic, or culturally digestible regimes of discourse. As a general tendency, it is only with the so-called ‘ontological turn in anthropology’ at the end of the XX century that certain deeply embedded ethnocentric traits of the academic reproduction of knowledge were partially contested and other (non-Western and non-scholarly) voices began to be heard. Of course, there have been exceptions to the rule, even before the consolidation of the ‘ontological turn’. Heterodox anthropology, beyond the widely discussed issue of ‘going native’, also moved dangerously close to literary or poetic subver- sion – it suffices to think of authors like Zora Neale Hurston and Hubert Fichte.
43. Antonin Artaud: Le rite du Peyotl chez les Tarahumaras, in: Œuvres completes IX, p. 13.
44. Antonin Artaud: Ibidem, p. 25.
45. The discourse of mysticism is dominated by Christian theology, and Artaud seems to avail himself of such discourse when he refers to “the very Spirit of Ciguri” (Antonin Artaud: Le rite du Peyotl chez les Tarahu- maras, in: Œuvres completes IX, p. 26).
46. Antonin Artaud: Ibidem.
47. For the analogy of the descensus ad inferos and the itinerary of a labyrinth, cf. Paolo Santarcangeli: Nekya. La discesa dei poeti ad inferi, Milano 1980, p. 16. Santarcangeli underlines the chthonic aspect of the labyrinth paths and the danger involved in the itinerary, which can push the explorer into madness or physical death (cf. Ibidem, p. 19).
48. Antonin Artaud: Ibidem, p. 28.
49. In Celan’s poetry this voice is that of the victims of the Shoah. This is a strong indication of the essen- tial link between poetry and the collapse of representation. The voice of the poet can never speak for the dead, and the alternative intelligibility of the poem cannot reached the point of fusion with the absent voice to render it audible. Celan’s poetry can never be a poetry of cruelty (in Artaud’s sense of the word), since the weight of history is in his case heavier than the gate to any mystery.
50. For a summary of the main characteristics of the Cretan labyrinth (structure of the labyrinth revealing – if unrolled – one single thread, a one-way path with multiple detours leading inevitably to the center, etc.), cf. Umberto Eco: Dall’albero al labirinto: studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione, Milano 2017, p. 71.
51. Cf. Umberto Eco’s description of this labyrinth (which he calls “manieristic”): “If it were unrolled, it would take the form of a tree, a structure of blind alleys (with exception of one)” (Umberto Eco, Ibidem, pp. 72-73).
52. Francis Affergan: Anthropologie et poésie. L’effondrement du symbolique, Paris 2020, p. 7.
53. Francis Affergan: Ibidem, p. 11.
54. Francis Affergan: Ibidem, p. 13.
55. For the distinction between meaning [sens] and signification [signification], see Affergan, Ibidem, p.26. My reference to epistemic thinking may seem contradictory, since Affergan relates the “malady of language” with a procedure that goes in the opposite direction: adaptation of lexical and semantic resources to an ideolog- ical hierarchy (for example the world ‘reactionary’ applied to anyone that does not follow what is prescribed as ‘progress’) and proliferation of fake synonyms (as in the chain ‘criminal’, ‘marginal’, ‘foreigner’). Epistemic thinking should correct those pathological deviations of language. However, in his critique of symbolic thinking, Affergan poses the question of ‘alterity’, which goes much deeper than an observation on ideological or political misuses of language within the Western culture. The question of alterity is related not only with the way in which we perceive the other, but also with the possible way to avoid introjection mechanisms that pre-define the other within our own (reified) system of values to the detriment of the quality or the intensity of the encounter as ‘discovery’. In this respect cf. also Francis Affergan: Exotisme et alterité, Paris 1987, p. 9.
56. Umberto Eco: Dall’alberto al labirinto, p. 15.
57. Umberto Eco: Ibidem, p. 42. My translation and my emphasis.
58. Francis Affergan: Anthropologie et poésie, p. 96.
59. Francis Affergan: Ibidem, p. 97. It must be said, however, that Affergan does not give up his attachment to “the universal” as a regulative idea in anthropology. Quite on the contrary, he severely criticizes the critical relativism that seeks other articulations of discourse to render alterity perceptible: “The hatred of ethnocentrism, anthropomorphism, essentialism and identity leads to delirious elaborations based on imaginary variations or counter-factual hypotheses that could never attain the slightest degree of validation or invalidation stemming from the reality of the world” (Francis Affergan: Ibidem, p. 104, my translation).
60. Francis Affergan: Ibidem, p. 112.
61. For the coincidence between the single path and Ariadne’s thread in the unicursal labyrinth, cf. Umberto Eco, Dall’albero al labirinto, p. 71.
62. It goes without saying that there are metaphysical models in which the multiplicity is integrated, which come close to the figure of the labyrinth: the transcendent instance of the Tantric mandala (for example the bindu in the case of the śrīcakra, with its cosmic unfolding of energy rotations) is not the same type of tran- scendence as the discontinuous brahman of Advaita Vedānta; the emanation of the Nous in Neo-Platonic philos- ophy is not the same as the dichotomic primacy of the intelligible [noetón] over the sensible [aisthetón] in Plato’s philosophy. However, the asymmetric focus on transcendence, in whichever form it is postulated, confiscates the energy and power residing in the richness of diversity in a non-place beyond human reach. In the best cases this is a sort of anti-cathexis that might serve as consolation in the face of death; in the worst cases it turns out to be the exercise of political power in the name of the ineffable, the unsurpassable, or the almighty.
63. Malek Abbou: Les Labyrinthes, Préface égaré, pp. 43-44.
64. The term ‘expenditure’ in the sense given to it by Georges Bataille may be functional to my reasoning, since it is related to a reversal (of accumulation and arrangement), a transgression (against established limits), and a dissipation (in the face of calculated restraint). Cf. Georges Bataille: La part maudite, in: Œuvres completes VII, Paris 1976, pp. 17-280, especially pp. 15-16, and pp. 197-204. The addition of the adjective ‘non-territorial’ is related to Félix Guattari’s notion of ‘machinic autopoiesis’, which opposes a pluri-dimensional flux of non-sig- nifying intensities to the self-contained notion of (extensively determined) structure for the characterization of relations (cf. Félix Guattari: Chaosmose, Paris 2022, p. 70). This non-territoriality of the autopoiesis is solidary with the notion of ‘intensive language’, which defies the primacy of paradigmatic invariants to be realized in syntagmatic associations before an virtual overflow of “transformation and creation lines” (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Mille Plateaux, Paris 1980, p. 125) preceding any division between ‘potentiality’ and ‘actuality’.
65. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: L’Anti-Œdipe, Paris 1973, p. 170.
66. The following passage of L’Anti-Œdipe shows quite clearly the rhizomatic rejection of everything that links preservation of quality and sacredness: “The primitive, savage unity of desire and production is the earth, for the earth is not only the multiple and divided object of labor; it is also the unique and indivisible entity, the full body folded back on the productive forces to appropriate them as a presupposed natural or divine instance” (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Œdipe, p, 168). Under the influence of the remarkable ethnological work of Barbara Glowczewski on Aboriginal Australians and the progressive contact with Brazilian intellectuals, espe- cially through the aid of Suely Rolnik, Félix Guattari modified that point of view toward the end of the 1980s. The starting point of the dialogue between Barbara Glowczewski and Félix Guattari is documented in the first issue of the review Chimères (1987), although the dialogue took place between 1983 and 1985. His first trip to Brazil took place in 1982 (cf. François Dosse: Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari: Biographie croisée, Paris 2009, pp. 574-577).
67. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Ibidem.
68. I use the term ‘Indigenous’, which in the European context is exclusively associated with the Indige- nous populations of North and South America, in a broader sense that includes also autochthonous cultures in Africa, South Asia and Australia. All these cultural groups share important features that, even before any explicit political action on their part, embody a considerable dissidence with regard to the dominant world view based on Western (hyper-)modernity: historical continuity with a pre-colonial past; non-modern social and political organizations; distinct languages, customs and beliefs; determination to preserve their ancestral values against globalized Westernization, and resolute affirmation of the “conflict-laden difference” they incarnate.
69. Valuable reflections on the tension between the global and the local as well as on the fetishization of aboriginal life and the neo-colonialism of university scholars can be found in Faye Ginsburg, Resources of Hope: Learning from the Local in a Transnational Era, in: Claire Smith & Graeme K. Ward (eds.): Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World, London: New York 2020, pp. 27-48.
70. In a letter to Johan Peter Eckermann dated 18 September 1823, Goethe says that any occasion becomes a special case if the poet deals with it (which leads to the conclusion that all poems are poems for occa- sions [Gelegenheitsgedichte], cf. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens 1823-1832, ed. by Regine Otto, München 1984, p. 39). In the case of philologists, the reflection of the feminine in their anima renders the occasion poetic. In other words: they are the ones being dealt with, and poetry is not in their hands, so ultimately none of their poems is a poem for occasions.
71. “The motif of the woman or goddess in the labyrinth is one of the great labyrinthine myths. Like the Minotaur legend, it involves the labyrinth as a place of capture and defence. […] The woman in the labyrinth motif can be divided into two types of legend: one tells of the woman who is abducted and imprisoned in the labyrinth, who has to be liberated, whilst the other involves a young woman who has to be reached by the young man” (Nigel Pennick: Mazes and Labyrinths, London 1990, pp. 38-39). In the second type of legend, the woman is not the prey, but the ‘monster’ at the center of the labyrinth. This points to a much deeper issue than an anxiety complex of men. For Erich Neumann it points to the elementary character of the Feminine (as archetype affecting both women and men). In the consideration of that aspect, goddesses like Artemis and Cybele come closer to the Minotaur, since on that level “there seems to be no difference between male and female gods. Both can assume animal form” (Erich Neumann: Die grosse Mutter. Eine Phänomenologie der weiblichen Gestaltungen des Unbewussten, Olten: Freiburg 1988, p. 258).
72. For the essential relationship between the figure of the labyrinth and the twisted path of knowledge, including remarks on the sexual character of its realization, cf. Alain Daniélou: Shiva et Dionysos, Paris 1979, pp. 115-116.
73. Cf. Alain Daniélou: Shiva et Dionysos, p. 153.
74. In order to dispel a widely repeated commonplace of post-modern criticism (which as a whole does not consist only of commonplaces), I must point to the fact that Daniélou did not conceive Nature as a self-suffi- cient homeostatic balance preceding the irruption of human culture, but as a complex field of living forces with an intelligence of their own, with which human beings are permanently intertwined (whether they are aware of it or not). In this sense, what is called ‘culture’ in the modern sense of the term would not be an elevation of the spirit over a former stage of idealistic simplicity, but rather a reduction, or an impoverishment of the multilay- ered and pluri-subjective energetic field of human and non-human socialization so richly codified in traditional cultures in India, Africa or Pre-Columbian America.
75. I call ‘existential framework’ Daniélou’s animistic sensitivity for other-than-human agency in Nature, something which began early in his childhood with the installation of a shrine on his parents’ property in Brit- tany. The ‘life-long learning’ process refers to his life in India, where he was re-educated in a traditional setting with quite different values from the ones in the modern West. The ‘auspicious place in a land of exile’ was found in his mature years and turned out to be a qualitative step toward a practical philosophy of integration. On his return to Europe (after spending more than twenty years in India), Daniélou’s coordinates of self and otherness were significantly displaced: “Europe was for me a land of exile […] What I had known of it seemed to me a former life perceived in a dream” (Alain Daniélou: Le Chemin du Labyrinthe. Souvenirs d’Orient et d’Occident, Laus- anne 2015, p. 217). But an elaborated displacement can also be an accomplishment. In that period of exile, he found in the Italic peninsula a place “where the energies of heaven and earth meet and one can feel the presence of the gods […] the hill of the Labyrinth” (Alain Daniélou: Ibidem, p. 226, my translation).
76. This is the inevitable destiny of local cultures exposed to global interconnectedness, and it is true that not everything in such transformations is detrimental. However, the general direction of such appropriations, from a shamanism adapted to the caprices of white middle-class Europeans to spiritual mass tourism encom- passing forest medicines like Ayahuasca or Iboga, are not so promising – not because they consciously ignore, betray or transgress the framework, contents and methods of traditional settings, but mainly because the sense of the appropriation is to reproduce capitalist commodification processes without any retroactive transforma- tion of their most alienating aspects.
77. The ignorance of the complex link between anthropization and entropy, especially regarding the destiny of human’s ‘exosomatization’ i.e. the implementation of inorganic objects in their social structure and organization to enhance cultural and especially economic production (cf. Bernard Stiegler (ed.): Bifurquer, Paris 2020, p. 75) inevitably leads to an amalgamation of instances of alienation’ with patterns of relation. Max Weber’s pronouncement of a ‘disenchantment of the world’ contributes to clear this matter. The expression – repeated ad nauseam – does not mean that the animistic, spiritual, magical, or religious powers that rendered past soci- eties cohesive and meaningful have been banished from the cultural arena. It points rather to the mainstream tendency to subordinate them under the abstract principles of capitalist reproduction. The superimposition of abstract principles and processes on the sphere of living interactions and its subsequent naturalization cannot be called a new modality of relation. Despite its effectiveness in the sphere of economic production and distribu- tion, it is mainly a device of fragmentation and isolation of living organisms from all possible forms of dignified sociality. Alienated relations are still relations, but they go in the opposite direction from that of a cohesive community and the preservation of meaning through creative interactions and inner fulfillment.
78. But some of them do, and they are a model for change. Edith Turner, Bruce Albert, and Paul Stoller are examples of the humanist spirit engaged in the perception of the other side with a robust elaboration of its consequences.
79. The proper name refers to Alain Daniélou’s Labyrinth, the place he chose to live in the last part of his life (cf. supra, note 75).