„Nigdzie kostko do gry mej wiary drążącej“: Františka Halase paradox víry  K postavantgardní negativní teologii

Josef Vojvodík

doi:10.32798/zl.1840

Published: 2025-12-29

Vol. 62 No. 1 (2025)

František Halas’ paradox of faith. Towards a post-avant-garde negative theology

Josef Vojvodík

Zeszyty Łużyckie

Section: Articles

https://doi.org/10.32798/zl.1840

Abstract

The poem Nikde (“Nowhere”) (1936) by František Halas (1901–1949) represents one of the most original experiments in the context of Czech post-avant-garde poetry of the 1930s. Halas updates the mode of religious discourse (especially the litany), deconstructs the principle of free association as a basic principle of poetism and surrealism and replaces it with a combination of disparate and strongly contrasting motifs. At the same time, he not only updates the oxymoronic-paradoxical poetics and the ‘rhetoric’ of the unspeakable, but also the tradition of negative theology and apophatic discourse in order to express the questioning of the ontological position of (modern) man and the instability of his existence in the face of the ‘hidden God’ (deus absconditus). Halas’ neo-baroque onto-poetics of “standing in nowhere” is interpreted here in the context of Helmuth Plessner’s philosophy of “eccentric positionality” of man as well as in the context of Derrida’s interpretation of the mystical tradition of apophatic thought.

Keywords:

František Halas, negative theology, Baroque, post-avant-garde

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Vojvodík, J. (2025). František Halas’ paradox of faith. Towards a post-avant-garde negative theology. Zeszyty Łużyckie, 62(1), 121–136. https://doi.org/10.32798/zl.1840

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Josef Vojvodík

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3311-7769

Affiliation:

Charles University, Faculty of Arts Czechia

Bio Statement:

Josef Vojvodík (b. 1964), Professor, is a literary and art historian and theorist affiliated with the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. He is a co-founder of the journal Slovo a smysl and co-author and co-editor of A Glossary of Catchwords of the Czech Avant-Garde. His major publications include Imagines corporis. Tělo v české moderně a avantgardě (Imagines Corporis: The Body in Czech Modernism and the Avant-Garde) (2006), Povrch, skrytost, ambivalence. Manýrismus, baroko a (česká) avantgarda (Surface, Concealment, Ambivalence: Mannerism, the Baroque and the (Czech) Avant-Garde) (2008), Patos v českém umění, poezii a umělecko-estetickém myšlení čtyřicátých let 20. století (Pathos in Czech Art, Poetry and Aesthetic Thought of the 1940s) (2014), Jan Zahradníček. Poezie a skutečnost existence (Jan Zahradníček: Poetry and the Reality of Existence) (2018, co-authored with J. Wiendl), and Extremum. Poezie výjimečných stavů (Extremum: Poetry of Exceptional States) (2024).