Philosophical thought and religious experiences in contemporary Argentine poetry

This doctoral research—directed by Dr. Silvio Mattoni and co-directed by Dr. Adriana Musitano—addresses the relationship between poetic discourse, religious experiences, and philosophical thought in a corpus of poetic works by Héctor Viel Temperley (Buenos Aires, 1933-1987), Hugo Padeletti (Santa Fe, 1928), Oscar del Barco (Córdoba, 1928), and Hugo Mujica (Buenos Aires, 1942), recognizing in them the elements that outline the uniqueness of a poetic-religious experience characterized, in some cases, by the manifestation of a mystical ecstasy, and in others, by the affirmation of thought and language in the absence of the sacred. Given the originality manifested in these poetic expressions in relation to  a certain religious experience of the emptying of the sacred, they are analyzed from categories derived from modern post-Nietzschean philosophers such as Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995), Jean-Luc Marion (1946), and Giorgio Colli (1917-1979). In this way, by relating the category of experience to the sacred in contemporary thought, we can see the specificity of a type of religious experience that—as we observe in the poets of the corpus—is linked to philosophical thought and manifests itself in poetic writing.