Interconnecting Black Holes. The Apophatic in Intercultural Communication

Abstract

The main function attributed to culture understood as totalization is to modulate passions and anxieties into soothing “habits of the heart” (Bellah et al. 1985). But the aim of the present approach is to postulate the manners in which non-closure, as opposed to totalization, governs, intermittently, both the relationship of a culture with itself and the interaction between cultures. The concept of intercultural communication proposed in the following associates inner imperfection not with cognitive or ethical failure but with the virtues of prudence and modesty. The paper is about how cultures could convene not through positive tenets, but through their intimate misclosures, their hidden breaks, their innermost, and mostly hidden, sense of vulnerability. The negative empathy developed along these lines could be further construed as the premise for an apophatic universalism, i.e. reconstructed via negationis. This perspective implies imagining cultures as coming from different direction towards an ideal zero point marking the experience of confrontating their own focal incompletion.