Vrasidas Karalis

Gurdjieff beyond the Personality Cult: Reading the Work and Its Re-Workings: Notes on René Zuber’s ‘Who are You Monsieur Gurdjieff?’

This article is a philosophical, aesthetic, and existential exploration of a small book written by one of Gurdjieff’s disciples, Rene Zuber (1902–1979), under the title Qui etes-vous Monsieur Gurdjieff? (Le Courrier du Livre, 1977, editions Eoliennes, 1997 and in English, translated by Jenny Koralek, Arkana, 1980). Formally the book belongs to a hybrid genre mixing autobiography, philosophy, religious reflection, memoir, and essay. It was composed by Zuber in order to interpret and contextualize Gurdjieff’s teaching and presence particularly during the last years of his life in Paris. At the core of the narrative rests the strange, tense, and somehow ambivalent relationship between Zuber and Gurdjieff, a relationship of equal admiration and reservation, in an attempt, after the death of the master, to establish the proper intellectual and phenomenological locus for Gurdjieff’s work.

Situating G. I. Gurdjieff’s Meetings With Remarkable Men

G.I. Gurdjieff’s masterwork, Meetings with Remarkable Men (published posthumously in 1963), the second part of his All and Everything series, is probably one of the least studied books in the field of spiritual literature and has never been approached in regards to its literary structure. While the personality of its writer has monopolised the interest of most scholars, and the veracity of what is described in its pages has become the permanent obsession of many readers, the book itself as narrative structure, dialogic form and autobiographical self-revealing has remained a mystery and a veritable cryptogram. This article is focused around the dialogic form of the book and excavates its literary texture in order to frame the semantic centres of its discourse. Gurdjieff’s serpentine prose aspires in recapturing implied rituals and modes of wordless interaction. It is constructed around forms of ritualistic unfolding of words circumscribing the core of an argument without ever articulating it, reinventing the literary tropes of the travel-writing genre. The absent yet ubiquitous enunciation of the semiotic centre is the most significant aspect of this narrative. This article briefly analyses the generic keys of Gurdjieff’s prose and delineates his attempt to create space for pre-verbal, and occasionally post-verbal, self-presentation.

Reflections on the Project of a Renewed Polis: After Athens and Jerusalem

This article discusses the historical opposition in the Western world between Athens as the centre of democratic political thinking, reason and philosophical knowledge and Jerusalem as the centre of religion, faith and revelation. It examines the historical trajectory of the debate from early Christianity to this day with special emphasis on the work of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin; it addresses the relation between faith and reason as two existential and political principles reinforcing each other and explores the symbiotic relationship existing today after both symbolic landscapes have been replaced by new patterns of social organization. It suggests that we must recast the duality Athens/ Jerusalem, not as terms of antagonism, but as two complementary dimensions of existence and orders of experience. It proposes that the event of human natality belongs to the religious order while that of human conscience belongs to the political order. It concludes that modern complex trans-national societies must absorb the experience of both traditions and articulate a new conceptual framework about the relationship between faith and reason.