The Religious Affairs Office

The prefix trans is one we use every day, from transgender to transreligion to transhumanism. Understood as something going beyond the established order, the idea is not actually new: if we look at cosmovisions and traditional religions, many of these questions are addressed. Human beings do not appear to be resigned to their bodily finitude.

Both transcendence and transgression, two timeless terms, continue to appeal to us. If we think about two different spheres, the spiritual and the material, we could pair transcendence with the first and transgression with the second. Yet both terms, like everything that has the prefix trans, imply the notion of movement, of a driving force.

Does that mean transcendence and transgression contradict each other? Simone Weil wrote that “the contradiction that the mind comes up against is the criterion of the real”, and it is in this contradiction, if we adopt exploration as a criterion, that we start getting an idea of something broader. The trans prefix itself takes us beyond binary logic.

For instance, take the binary concept of life-death. Religions have traditionally sought to break this duality with transcendence, while other spheres such as the various utopian ideologies have done so with transgression: non-conformity is at the heart of it all. And in the religious sphere, transgression is often seen as heresy, the foundations of most spiritual traditions are based on this transgression (of values, paradigms), which seek transcendence.

Reflections and film

In this session on Saturday, 15 October, explicitly entitled “Transcending, transgressing” and forming part of the Biennial of Thought, we even sought to transcend and transgress thought: not to hold a purely reflective session for intellectual or academic discussions, but also to include other narratives.

The first part consisted of a talk by the anthropologist Carles Salazar, where instead of offering us a speech, he put a hypothesis to us: where does the religiousness we have forever seen spring up in every corner of the globe come from? Is it a natural, biological disposition? Can we live without recognising it? What drives us, profoundly, to transcend and transgress?

Poetic language is most commonly used to articulate these notions of transcendence and transgression, a transgression which starts with the same prose-based discursive thought. Vedic, Taoist and Greek poets, the language of Buddha or the Semitic prophets and resulting mystics all have this poetic language in common. That’s why we felt it was important to start the second part of the session with a screening of Les dormants, an audio-visual poem by film director Pierre-Yves Vanderweerd, who explained his work in more detail afterwards, accompanied by the anthropologist Sandra Anitua.

Les dormants speaks to us of men and women who move in a space where transcendence and transgression combine: two worlds which can be one (of those absent and those living) and also between two states of consciousness, of wakefulness and sleep. Using technology designed to conjure up physical experience (for instance, analogical film to better capture ambivalence and a camera without a zoom to get us closer to those operating the camera), Vanderweerd offered us a way of getting closer to the questions formulated by Salazar in an unusual way for a debate, yet entirely in tune with what we sought from the outset: a session in which to taste, ponder and poeticise existence.

Dídac P. Lagarriga

Curator of the activity "Transcending, transgressing. Technology as a shaper of utopias and spiritualities"