Modernity and Prophetic Speech: The Ethical as the Impossible in the Post-Religious Vision of Kahlil Gibran

Ghazouane Arslane

《Concentric： Literary and Cultural Studies》 46卷2期 (2020/09) Pp. 11-35

https://doi.org/10.6240/concentric.lit.202009_46(2).0002

摘要

This paper argues that an essential aspect of the bilingual oeuvre of Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), the eminent Arab-American writer, lies in reinventing the religious in and against modernity by reclaiming its Abrahamic, prophetic mode of speech as a poetic form of enunciation. This literary and ethical enterprise is at once post-religious and post-Nietzschean in that it re-imagines the notion of God, in evolutionist terms, as a horizontal form of transcendence beyond the vertical metaphysics of creation, fatherhood and morality. This horizontalization of transcendence reclaims religion, with a particular focus on Islamic-Sufi concepts, beyond monotheism's worldview and eschatology. Hence the post in post-religious. Gibran's re-imagining, with and ＂after＂ Nietzsche, of God, the self and the world is much occasioned by modernity as it seeks to interrogate and disrupt its calculative and identitarian reason. Ultimately, this Gibranian prophetic vision is a poetic attempt to posit the impossible-not the non-possible, but the utmost horizon of the possible-as an ethical alternative both to traditional morality and to modernity’s calculative and rationalist reason.

關鍵字

Kahlil Gibran ； prophetic speech ； the Abrahamic ； modernity ； the post-religious poet ； Nietzsche ； the ethical ； the impossible

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