On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking 2020945634, 9780268108816, 9780268108847, 9780268108830

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ON THE UN IVE RSAL IT Y OF WHAT IS N OT

ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF WHAT IS NOT The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking

WILLIAM FRANKE University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2020 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945634 ISBN: 978-0-268-10881-6 (Hardback) ISBN: 978-0-268-10884-7 (WebPDF) ISBN: 978-0-268-10883-0 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected]

To Steve Hammond, Peter Kline, Chance Woods, Jake Abell, Yong Chen, Heather Garrett Pellettier, Luka Cheung, Travis Wang, Felix Resch, Azucena Keatley, Nahum Brown, Dvir Melnik, David Dark, and the Others for believing and teaching (or rather disseminating) “The Apophatic Gospel” (the Good News of What Is Not) (not mine, nor theirs)

CONTENTS

Preface: Position, Purpose, and Structure of the Work Acknowledgments

ix xi

Part I.

Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

One

Introduction: Apophatic Thinking and Its Applications; Between Exhaustion and Explosion

3

Two

Outbound Reflection: Unsaying Theology in the Name of All

27

Part II. The New Apophatic Universalism Three

Apophatic Mysticism as Practical Philosophy: Nicholas of Cusa and the Applications of Ignorance

73

Four

Contemporary Atheist Philosophers and St. Paul’s Revolutionary Political Theology: A Genealogy of the New Universalism

Part III.

Comparative Philosophies of Culture

Five

Cosmopolitan Conviviality and Negative Theology: Europe’s Vocation to Universalism

129

Six

Except Asia: Agamben’s Logic of Exception and Its Apophatic Roots and Offshoots

154

107

viii  Contents

Part IV.

Cross-Cultural and Transhistorical Interdisciplinarity

Seven

Liberal Arts Education Worldwide Unlimited Inc.: The Unspeakable Basis of Comparative Humanities

183

Eight

Apophasis and the Axial Age: Transcendent Origins of Critical Consciousness

201

Part V.

Emergences in Literary and Cultural Theory

Nine

The Canon Question and the Value of Theory: Toward a New (Non)Concept of Universality

237

Te n

World Literature: A Means or a Menace to the Encounter with the Other?

254

Part VI. Critical Consciousness and Cognitive Science E l e v e n Postmodern Identity Politics and the Social Tyranny of the Definable

291

Tw e l v e Cognitive Universality between Science and the Humanities

315



365

Concluding Elucidation: On the Extension and Intension of “Apophasis”

Appendix: Analytic Table of Contents Notes Index

374 380 421

P R E FA C E Position, Purpose, and Structure of the Work

This book marks a branching out of my work striving to develop an apophatic philosophy for our time. It builds on my interdisciplinary reconstruction of the traditions of apophatic discourse in On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, (2007, 2 vols.), edited with theoretical and critical essays by William Franke, as well as on my elaboration of an original theory of apophatic thinking in A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014). It continues, furthermore, my extension of this project into an intercultural philosophy in Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders (2018). On the Universality of What Is Not pursues apophatic thinking in its applications across a variety of disciplines, media, historical periods, and geographical regions. The Introduction (chapter 1) explains why precisely this type of work and comprehensiveness is a necessary consummation of apophatic thinking in our time and begins to probe the key role of theology in originating and fostering apophatic consciousness. It also outlines, in more detail, how the various chapters contribute to the overall orchestration of the volume. Each chapter embodies substantially the same vision of apophatic thinking, but as applied in diverse relations. The selected applications interconnect with and illuminate one another. Yet each chapter is also in­ telligible on its own terms. None presupposes prior knowledge of the ix

x  Preface

aforementioned books. Applications can serve superlatively well as points of entry into the general concerns refracted into specific forms of apophatic insight. The most basic question, “What is apophatic thinking?,” cannot be answered, finally, except by showing what apophatic thinking, in its various employments, can do. Apophatic thinking does “the impossible,” and there is no explanation for that in general terms. Instead, it shows itself. The structural parts of the volume evidently overlap and interpenetrate in their concerns and contents rather than dividing and distributing the material into discrete, separate baskets. The division into parts, nevertheless, serves to organize and integrate these wide-ranging topics into an intelligible shape and order. It aims to help make manifest the component chapters’ multiple lines of connection—their manifold significant (even if often submerged) common insights arrived at from divergent directions. Synoptic, orienting paragraphs underscoring certain lines of coherence linking the chapters in sequence are embedded between the successive parts of the work. They help to unfold the logic of its partitioning and serve as connecting ligaments. They stand as intercalated, transitional guideposts leading from one part to the next. The first such connective link is inserted at the outset of part I, immediately preceding chapter 1, and alludes to all of the parts in summary, sketching the general design of the book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to the students and colleagues who debated with me the issues raised here in seminars and in conferences and lectures at universities around the world—in the Americas, Europe, East Asia, and Australia. Graduate seminars over the years at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School (Nashville, Tennessee) and in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Programme at the University of Macao (China, SAR) were home grounds on which many of these reflections—including self-reflections concerning our institutions of higher education and their politics—were incubated. I thank also the anonymous readers engaged by the University of Notre Dame Press and Professor Vincent Lloyd for their helpful suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to Professor Montserrat Herrero and the Instituto Cultura y Sociedad of the University of Navarra for hosting me as visiting professor and affording me opportunities for presentation and discussion of parts of this manuscript in the final stages of its preparation.

xi

Part I

T H I N K I N G T H E O L O G I C A L LY A N D T H E A P O P H AT I C

Part I sounds the present state of apophatic thought in relation especially to its theological matrices. Part II then broadens this apophatic paradigm into a new, but never definitively specifiable (always still open-ended) universalism. Part III extends this universality of the limit intrinsic to any system or discourse into the intercultural realm, while Part IV advances it into interdisciplinary and transhistorical applications. Part V treats all of these dimensions of recent critical discourse in their emergence from highly contested claims in literary and cultural theory revolving specifically around the literary canon and the idea of world literature. Exposure of certain ­contradictions—and of the ultimately fecund nullity inherent in both of these key concepts—enables us to see past the impasses of these debates. Part VI, finally, applies apophatic insight and orientations to current challenges posed by politicized humanities and by cognitive science as movements having a powerful tendency to dominate the agendas of academic administrations and faculties at leading institutions of higher education and research. The apophatic perspectives developed in this book are thus made to serve, in the end, to uncover and to compensate for some of the blind spots lurking in certain insidious trends and to expose ideologies that are currently steering much crucial decision-making at the ­university.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION Apophatic Thinking and Its Applications Between Exhaustion and Explosion

In the ever more fragmented medley that is multicultural society, with its backlash against globalization, the desperate need for principles of cohesion, for some kind of universal code or credo, has been felt more and more acutely. The world has fallen prey to aggressive, exclusionary forms of ­sectarianism and identitarian politics. The consequences are seen in the proliferation of populist nationalisms and geopolitical regionalisms, in crippling ethnic antagonisms and cultural rivalries, and in militant religious fundamentalisms. The task of finding a universal frame of ­reference— or even just some kind of shared ethos—in our postmodern predicament has become daunting. Nonetheless, it is an imperative of the greatest urgency. All attempts to define and delineate the rules of the game—through a universal charter of human rights, for example—are at risk of becoming invidious and, in any case, prove implausible.1 Such attempts are inevitably rejected, at least by some, who suspect them of being the means of elevating one ideology and its approach above others. The human need for a universal basis of consensus, together with the proven difficulty of establishing one, opens as a gaping abyss that threatens to engulf in bottomless vanity all of our most well-meaning endeavors to ensure order and dynamism in society and to regulate peacefully and freely our collective endeavors. Politics and diplomacy are driven into more and more desperate straits. 3

4  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

In the face of this pervasive predicament, this book makes a simple and practical proposal. It urges that we relinquish our drive to positively define our universe, or even just the arena of our relations with others, and, instead, render ourselves responsive, without preconceived limits, to all: this means also to the All that we cannot determine, even though we are surely determined by it as the undelimitable ambit of all our relations. Through this release of our grasp on the reality that we can define, we paradoxically find ourselves in touch with the sought-for basis of a common reality necessary for responsibly pursuing together with others our ongoing, openended, incalculably collective projects. We are thereby enabled to relate to an uncircumscribable whole via negative modalities that, nonetheless, prove efficacious. In fact, these modalities turn out to be just what we need—beyond our ability to account for why this is so or even to know exactly what we are going to do with them in advance. Integrating an “apophatic” (literally “negative,” but, in effect, eminently affirmative) detachment and awareness into our determinately, rigidly positive programs can make them open to others in ways that are critical to their success in generating consensus and the will to work together. The discretion of not saying (or knowing) is key to eliciting even just provisional acceptance from others rather than provoking resistance and retrenchment into oppositional camps and stances. This book brings together several related concerns based on encounters with specific approaches and models for knowing and acting ethically and politically and places them into the frame of an extension of my project of apophatic thinking. The fate of the humanities in university education, given the latter’s increasing specialization, depends, as I perceive it, on reviving the sensibility for knowing our ignorance—in other words, a docta ignorantia. Since Socrates, this awareness of our limits has been essential to the open, inquiring mind and spirit that are necessary today to counterbalance the positivistic methods of empirical science and research. Crucial issues include the question of the disciplinarity of knowledge at the university, the resistance to pressures of isolating specialization, and particularly the relationship with cognitive science as an approach claiming to radically reposition, and even in some versions to supplant, traditional humanities knowledge. These areas of concern all present impasses and pitfalls that can be constructively dealt with only by recuperating a different model of

Introduction  5

knowing that is fundamentally molded, not by the positive sciences, but by wisdom traditions based on unknowing knowing, or learned ignorance. The dialogue with other, in particular non-Western, cultures invites us to this refocusing of our own history and tradition. Intercultural philosophy and comparative religion and literature expose some of the frontiers that clearly call for a deeper understanding of apophatic aspects of human consciousness and existence.2 The axes of geography and disciplinarity serve, accordingly, in this book to open the apophatic into the dimension of its universality. The intercultural and the interdisciplinary configure spaces of the “between” that most effectively challenge us to think beyond our accustomed models and frameworks. This reaching beyond and renunciation of closure already demonstrates what it means to think apophatically, since such thinking cannot be confined by any specifiable method. Negative or apophatic thinking is an essential resource also for confronting pressing issues of social justice, such as racial and gender equality, that tear us apart—unless the confines of identity can be broken through into a more encompassing nonidentity that excludes none, a nonidentity in which all can recognize their common interest, since it enables all to coexist. The book in hand illustrates this negative or “apophatic” approach to seeking the universal by examining some select case studies drawn from philosophy, cultural history, and literature. Many other examples could be chosen to make this point, and the ones presented here, of course, reflect to a degree the author’s own predilections and even chance encounters. However, each has peculiar significance in a universal sense as well. Cognitive science, for instance, claims to discover mental structures and functions that are universally valid for all human beings and cultures. In the chapter (12) on that subject, I attempt to balance these pretensions by furnishing a humanities-based approach to the question of cultural and cognitive universals. I stress that science always explains some phenomena in terms of others assumed as already given, while necessarily leaving the ultimate explanation of All in its origins to be dealt with by irreducibly human and poetic means, such as myth and metaphor. Similar questions of universality surface in comparative philosophy, politics, and religion, and in literary and cultural criticism. The other chapters address those fields and emphasize how important it is to make a place for the negative

6  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

as the unsaid—or even the unsayable—in order to keep reigning discourses productive, open, and humanly responsive and responsible, so as to prevent their becoming unwitting instruments of repression through reduction to merely classificatory schemas.

THE PRESENT PREDICAMENT OF APOPHATICS

Impressive strides in the field(s) of apophatics have been made in recent years. Numerous, extensive, authoritative scholarly studies on key founding figures, such as Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scott Eriugena, Maimonides, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas Cusanus, Søren Kierkegaard, and many others, now appear regularly and turn explicit attention to the apophatic insights working at the heart of such masters’ projects. There are wide-ranging philosophical and theological works, often of highly original quality, marshaling rich resources of diverse apophatic traditions (Jewish and Islamic, Christian and Buddhist, Vedic, and more) and proving their acute pertinence to contemporary intellectual issues and current social problems. This interest in the apophatic paradigm may even have reached a point of saturation in some regards, after which looms the threat of exhaustion. However, an intrinsic refusal to become a paradigm, and even to be defined at all, is built into the apophatic as such. As Jacques Derrida astutely recognized, negative theology per se does not exist. If apophaticism is named, it is, at least in part and by necessity, betrayed. The quintessential apophatic gesture is that of unsaying itself. Consequently, to the extent that it becomes a paradigm—which cannot perhaps be avoided—it must be prepared also to forsake and repudiate itself. What remains, then, above all, for apophaticism today is to show its creative potential by interacting with its innumerable “others,” including even its ostensible nemeses, such as power politics and scientific positivism. Deploying apophatic thought, with its incisive insights, is a project already far advanced in the pathbreaking works of Catherine Keller, Elliot Wolfson, Hent de Vries, Gregor Hoff, Thomas Carlson, Wesley Wildman, Joachim Bromand, Daniel Heller-Roazen, and numerous other thinkers pushing the limits of almost any field today. Delineating a general paradigm in more detail is unlikely at this stage to enhance the overall intelli-

Introduction  7

gibility of the models that have emerged. Nevertheless, the apophatic can still work potently as a catalyst at the interfaces between disciplines, cultures, rationalities, and faiths. In these contexts, the apophatic is not a theory, but a practice of receiving the Other in its otherness and of interacting and discovering something unprecedented through the release of whatever is held to be one’s own. Letting one’s own prejudices be contradicted in order to grow in increasingly interpenetrating understanding with others is a challenge for which the apophatic sensibility is indeed indispensable. In these connections and applications, we still have everything to gain from the study and cultivation of what I am calling the apophatic. The new turn in apophatic thinking that I envisage, then, consists especially in emphasizing its productive applications. Considered from this angle, the apophatic functions not as a barricade to speech and expression, but rather as a limit that, in effect, turns into a threshold, thereby becoming its own opposite: it becomes an enabling condition and a bridge crossing to an unlimited “beyond” that invites exploration.3 Much of the new current of apophatic reflection aims to untie the knots—or to dissolve the Nots and interdictions to expression—that seemed to be entailed or implied by traditional apophatics in the form of negative theology. Yet this spirit of denial was never the most authentic voice of apophaticism, and it has become increasingly untimely in our current cultural predicament clamoring for always more diverse expressions. Illuminating cases include the development of an apophatic theology in the new phenomenology of the invisible after the theological turn;4 the elaboration of an apophatics of the body (with its associated gender politics and sexual poetics);5 an intensified reflection on and performance of apophatic aesthetics;6 and new initiatives in ecocriticism.7 Those working in such specialized fields as linguistics,8 for example, have also witnessed richly to the fertility of apophatic models in fostering some of the most timely, but also the most enduringly significant, developments of these ­disciplines. Applications of apophatics in literary criticism and cultural studies are, of course, legion.9 The most meaningful way to describe the purport of apophatic thinking is not by discourses about “nothing” that are left floating in the air. Instead, the relevance of apophatic thought stands to be tested and verified through engaging in debate on the burning issues of the humanities, and

8  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

of humanity itself, inside and outside of the academy. The chapters in this book do not erase the traces of such engagement in the particular occasions for which they were originally composed. They are sometimes addressed to specific audiences and contexts. They manifest these diverse origins even in their concerted turn to the overarching problems of apophatic thinking and its peculiar claim to universality.

THE RELEVANCE OF APOPHATIC THOUGHT TO UNIVERSALIST ASPIRATIONS TODAY

I propose apophatic thinking, or a philosophy of the unsayable, as the philosophy that most acutely answers to the challenges of thought in our age and, in some sense, in every age. Philosophy begins, with Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and other pre-Socratic thinkers, by focusing on the problem of the one and the many and on the dilemma of reconciling a logically necessary unity of things—of all that is, or of all that can be thought—with an undeniable multiplicity of phenomenal manifestations. But what may at first have presented itself as a theoretical conundrum has over time become an eminently practical and political problem. In postmodern times, we face the difficulty of thinking and of living together in a world of multiple nations, ethnicities, cultures, and religions, a world that in spite of uncontainable proliferation of diversity is ever more tightly squeezed into one by the pressures of globalization. Hence the apparent need for common codes and practices that would enable cohabitation with a certain semblance of unity, or at least of compatibility. This minimal commonality seeks to find a way to emerge from across the gaping differences between clans and constituencies entrenched in their respective ­particularisms. Yet, if this imperative implies eschewing tribalisms, it had best nevertheless not rule out the possibility that the model even of the tribe living in the openness of untamed nature might still illustrate superlatively well some of the virtues of conviviality. Particularly, living together with and honoring the sacredness of one’s environment, along with one’s ancestors and progeny, are virtues that may be necessary but that nonetheless are easily forgotten in our mass, industrialized, individual-based, and all-toooften alienated societies.

Introduction  9

The problem of universalism has recently become clamorously topical again in philosophy and in cultural studies generally.10 I wish to show how the key to, I believe, the most promising approach to it can be found in apophatics. An opening for the inconceivable can be produced through creating empty space around all definitions and their inevitable divergences that derive from different languages and their varying cultural and conceptual matrices. An apophatic sensibility or awareness is necessary to allow the virtual common ground, which cannot be grasped neutrally in any one of the participants’ own vocabularies, to operate fertilely between them so as to produce what none alone is capable of articulating. Required here is the emergence of some kind of shared existence and even a sense of a common project beyond the control and comprehension of any of the participating groups. This indefinable dimension between discourses, which is brought out by reflection on discourse itself and its limits as a medium, is an indispensable resource also for interfaith dialogue. I take such dialogue to be one important instance that can model communication between diverse cultures. A gesture of opening up in a kind of faith or trust, with self-abandon to a common ground or common prospect in which all alike share, though none can command or define it, is the necessary premise for getting along together. It requires each person’s or party’s overcoming their own egotistical, isolationist instincts and rising above inescapable conflicts of interest, not to mention inevitable mutual incomprehension. In arguing for an apophatic approach and outlook, I will review what I consider to be at least implicitly apophatic philosophies at crucial junctures in Western intellectual history. I will use them in analogy with our present predicament—which is multicultural, cosmopolitan, postcolonial, and menaced by daunting threats such as environmental apocalypse and endemic terrorist violence—to illuminate, at least indirectly, our own current choices and dilemmas. In some such manner, apophatic insight into the unsayable, impossible, inconceivable, and incommensurable has been deployed persistently throughout the past in order to foster an inspired, visionary intervention into human affairs. It lay, for instance, at the basis of the mutual understanding and reciprocal appreciation among the three Abrahamic faiths during the Middle Ages. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity communicated cross-culturally on the basis of a common recognition of

10  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

intrinsic limits to their ability to conceptualize God, as was emphasized particularly by great mystics in each of these three monotheistic religions.11 This common unground has often been rediscovered anew over the course of the history of these and other faith traditions, for instance, in the baroque mysticism of the Spanish Carmelites and in the Teutonic mysticism channeled through Jakob Böhme to Silesius Angelus and German Romanticism. The Lurianic Kabbalah and the Wafa Sufi Order pursuing the ­legacy of Ibn al-Arabi in Egypt, or Advaita Vedanta and Madhyamika Buddhism, represent further peaks of apophatic awareness serving to harmonize diverse cultural strands in their respective traditions. Nicholas of Cusa’s De pace fidei (1453) imagines and theorizes such an interfaith ­universalism. Another conceptually distinguishable coordinate that shadows apophatic thinking and at times converges and even coalesces with this negative theological or mystical vein can be identified in its apocalyptic/ prophetic axis. It reaches from Joachim of Flores and Dante in the Middle Ages to the aesthetic-religious vision of universal spirit at once human and divine of Jena Romantics such as Novalis and Schelling. Certain aspects of this vision are developed further by a strongly negative form of messianism that can be discerned in Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin and in other precursors of critical theory in the Frankfurt School, such as Ernst Bloch with his The Principle of Hope (Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1954–59). Some anticipations and prefigurations of it, furthermore, are made manifest by the civilizations of the Axial Age in the first millennium BC. Such points of reference will be evoked as revealing aspects of a perennial universalistic vision that issues in various sorts of political theologies that are best understood as negative or apophatic. In each case, this is a vision of the All and the Infinite as humanly ungraspable, as uncanny and otherworldly, sometimes even as monstrously strange, but nevertheless as offering a necessary and compelling orientation for our errant endeavors on earth. This orientation is universalist in refusing all dichotomous delimitations and exclusiveness such as traditional, binary, conceptual thinking inevitably imposes. At the same time as it favors and fosters unity, this apophatic approach deliberately evades every exclusionary determination of that unity and practices an unconditional respect for diversity.

Introduction  11

Such an apophatic ethos approaches the problem of dealing with often exclusivist ideologies and religious fundamentalisms in a non-exclusionary, non-oppositional manner. It asks, instead: Where is the undefined, unrealized common ground of conviction that can be found and affirmed with those who become radically opposed to others, and sometimes to the world virtually as a whole? Only such an attempt to find common bonds of understanding and interest behind all ideological formulations can reverse the radical separatism that is at work in militant movements, with their all too often deathly consequences. I propose apophaticism not as the one true philosophy over and against other contenders, but rather as the common denominator, or, better, the disappearing mediator, of what philosophies are all aiming at. It furnishes the element of (un)truth or (non)sense in which their diverging trajectories, nevertheless, converge asymptotically toward infinity. At this level, philosophy is not sharply distinguishable from religion, so what I propose might also be considered a philosophy of religion or even, in some sense, a religious philosophy.12 It falls within the domain of the philosophy of religion to the extent that it can be identified and classed at all. And yet, finally, it is neither exactly philosophy nor religion. In true apophatic manner, it aims, instead, at their common ground or un-ground, at what is ­diversely sought by each under the rubric of truth and yet can never be definitively attained in whatever disciplinary discourse. The truth is disclosed or happens—and an event of sense is thus made to occur—rather in the exceeding of all limits of every specific discourse toward what all alike fail to express adequately. The challenge is to see how all discourses aiming at truth and failing to grasp it are nonetheless normed by it and indirectly ­reveal it, even and precisely in failing to attain and articulate it. The genre of such thinking needs to be appreciated also as poetic—it is that, too, and especially that, inasmuch as it can be situated within any specific kind of thought or writing at all.13 Poetry, in this sense, as poiesis (or “making”), is not an aesthetic extra or a frill; instead, it makes our world what it is, at least in terms of its experience by human beings. My approach to apophatic thinking plays up the poetic aspect as fundamental to apophatics generally, as well as to its expressions across various disciplines and discourses. I distinguish my own approach on this basis from other approaches offering general paradigms of apophatic thinking developed out

12  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

of different disciplinary matrices—especially philosophy and theology— and likewise bearing witness to apophaticism’s acute relevance to our own times. My poetic emphasis, however, makes apophaticism no less philosophical or theological or religious or political. Instead, it blends a cultural poetics of apophasis into its philosophical, theological, and political or social expressions. Apophatic rhetoric and linguistics inextricably underwrite all formulations of apophatic discourse, whatever its object and content: it can therefore never be confined to just a poetic or an aesthetic register.

THEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF APOPHATICISM

Apophatic thinking in the Western tradition springs especially from theological matrices, even though these are at their origins hardly distinguishable from philosophy and literature or myth, or from the many other arenas of expression to which such thinking subsequently spreads. “Apophatics” becomes a “discourse” of quite general relevance throughout all fields of culture. This is acutely so in a postmodern age marked by certain phenomena of a “return of religion.”14 It is, nevertheless, important to keep theology in focus as a form of thought that points more persistently and deliberately than perhaps any other to the Unsayable as its lodestar and driving obsession. Theology aims at the Unsayable in what is arguably its most world-historically significant sense—that of “divinity,” or of a transcendent, infinite source of life and being. Still, admittedly, there can be no one “right” way of discoursing about the unsayable, so theology serves here as no more than an exemplary and heuristic discourse. Most important in any discourse taken as medium are the nondiscursive and the intermedial elements that make up its enabling conditions. In the interstices between word, sound, and image, discourse blends out or turns to silent meditation, while meaning crystalizes from an inarticulate background that bears, often imperceptibly, yet no less indelibly, on the complex sense that discourse spawns. Theology offers some baseline concepts and images—such as infinity, transcendence, unity, and being—for thinking about “God,” but all need to be relinquished in the apophatic movement of unthinking all that is thought about the Unthinkable. This negative or apophatic thinking is indiscernible from an apophatic speaking—which can take place, intensified,

Introduction  13

in writing—that unsays the Unsayable. As discourse about God, theology is about the Unsayable par excellence. Yet, like God, unsayability is not just a theme of discourse; it is not properly a theme at all. Like God, unsay­ ability is unthematizably manifest, or more likely covered over, in virtually every form of discourse—in its constitutive lacks, in the gaps that dis-articulate it. In addition to (and hidden in) this general claim, unsayability is making its claim especially in the new brands of culture emerging at present in the form of the intercultural and interdisciplinary in philosophy, religion, literature, and other disciplines. Some of these are placed under the aegis of postmodernism, but in their most authentic form, they are under no category or classification whatsoever. I have previously canvassed various contemporary theologies, as well as atheologies, which all tend to deny negative theology, in order to show how they actually, and more profoundly, depend on it. In chapters 4 and 5 of my A Philosophy of the Unsayable, postmodern a/theologies and radical orthodoxies serve as prime examples of such self-denying apophaticism. As to those types of thinking that affirm negative theology, whether consciously or unconsciously, I wish to draw on them for constructing what I discern as a distinctive approach to the problem of the universal—one that pivots on the universality of what is not. I aim, first, to situate the discussion of universality within a general cultural context of current criticism and of a certain social and conceptual revolution that I call “the new universalism.” What is new is that this universalism has to renounce exclusions, and thus cannot even define itself in a determinate concept, but rather embodies a style of relating oneself to others. This ideal of universality has a theological genealogy. Still in our own time theology is paradoxically powering the social and cultural revolutions that are most responsible for advancing the secularization of the contemporary world.15 We must focus on theology and on its unsaying of itself in order to understand the plurality of discourses that, in the name of everything else besides theology, dominate the critical and, more generally, the cultural scene today. However, it is actually negative theology that is most pertinent to the transformation of society at present, no less than to the normative values clustering around universality. So these movements do indeed read correctly as a reversal of theology—albeit a reversal that is ­anticipated and indeed executed, often most rigorously, in and by theology itself.

14  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

By negating its theological origins, apophaticism moves itself into a more properly self-questioning philosophical mode. As negative theology, apophaticism is marked as theological in origin, yet it becomes a universal philosophy. Negative theology is a critical form of thinking that is critical first and foremost of theology. This is how philosophical reflection originates in ancient Greece—as a form of thought critiquing traditional religious mythologoumena in light of a newly discovered philosophical logos. This pattern is found in many other cultures, starting with those of the Axial Age: such cultures turn a self-reflexive, critical eye on age-old religious beliefs and rites, even while renewing and affirming them.

APOPHATICISM AS UNIVERSAL APPLIED PHILOSOPHY

We see the apophatic angle of approach applied across a dizzying array of disciplines. The capillary nature of its penetration into concrete fields of culture is bewildering. The surging to prominence of such an interdisciplinary paradigm is itself an index of its vocation to a kind of universalism. The apophatic has a strong claim to be regarded as the new koiné of discourse stretching from the humanities to the sciences in the twenty-first century. This being the case, inevitably the question of universalism lies at its heart. One of the tasks of this book is to show how the decisive insights of many of our leading thinkers today, irrespective of their fields, tend to be essentially apophatic in nature. Michel Serres might be taken here as ­indicative.16 The most urgent task of apophaticism in its present predicament is no longer to recover its tradition or to define its theoretical model and premises, since much in this vein has already been done, but rather to test and reflect on how its insights can be plied to deal with the most troubling and intransigent issues that we face in all arenas. These range from metaphysics to the environment and are found at all levels of our social existence. The apophatic becomes manifest as an art and science of dealing with difficulty and as a resource for finessing, or at least addressing, the irresolvable. The references to the apophatic as marking an insuperable impasse of language and the constitutive limits of knowing have become so pervasive in all academic disciplines in the opening decades of the twenty-first century that,

Introduction  15

like any revolutionary idea, it eventually becomes a victim of its own success. At this point, rather than occurring as an incisive and provocative innovation, reference to the apophatic (or “nothing” or “the ineffable”) easily falls prey to banality, to becoming a perfunctory and hackneyed cliché. Consequently, in order to keep receiving the inspiration available in the thinking of unthinkability, we need to find new applications, and this endeavor is the specific undertaking of this book. The book demonstrates how apophatic insight can be used to illuminate impasses in a variety of fields ranging from comparative religions, intercultural philosophy, and critical theory to cognitive science. Apophasis hews close to the most difficult and unyielding of problems and brushes with the most formidable and prickly of paradoxes. In the last resort, any solutions that are possible to our dilemmas draw from and address what is apparently impossible. Although, as a trend and paradigm, apophaticism may soon meet with a sense of its own exhaustion, the application of the apophatic, in its potential to pry open the knottiest of problems in an unlimited range of fields, is now swinging into full gear. It is turning up everywhere and is being discovered as a necessary resource—often as the only way of sustaining impossible antinomies and impasses with apparently no exit. Apophatic thought does not offer specific solutions to technical problems, but it changes our relation to the surrounding context; it alters the human understanding of problems in a way that enables reconceivings that emerge of themselves to be received and recognized as such—without the usual exclusions that otherwise restrict the very possibilities of perception. This book develops an apophatic perspective specifically on how the issue of universality opens into a major philosophical preoccupation that demands an apophatic approach and handling at precisely our present juncture in intellectual history. It emphasizes the perspective of comparative or intercultural philosophy as indispensable and as an ineluctable challenge to which apophatic thought is now called to respond. It considers likewise the challenge of interdisciplinarity in an especially radical sense. In particular, the confrontation with the so-called cognitive sciences has called into question the legitimacy and the very existence of humanities studies. An adequate answer to this challenge, I believe, can be found only if we begin to understand both the humanities and the sciences through apophatic lenses. Otherwise, the claims of positive science threaten to

16  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

obliterate the assumptions on which humanities studies are based, as well as everything that humanities scholars, not to mention human beings, hold to be most evident and dear—starting from free agents and spiritual values. No definitions or explanations can be fully adequate to the unformalizable factors of experience that apophasis highlights: as irreducible realities or irrealities, they can only be lived and experienced and cannot be scientifically demonstrated and proved. It is through such encounters and applications that the perennial relevance of apophatic thought continues to demonstrate itself. Purely theoretical formulations working out formal models eventually exhaust and void themselves. The fertility of apophatic thinking can be shown only by its fruits in application to the full diversity of topics that call for thought at the present, especially those that present and display thought’s ultimate difficulties and dead-ends in our contemporary world. The theoretical model of apophaticism has already, in some cases, recognized its impotence purely as theory and has developed naturally into engagement on a sensory level with the body and with aesthetics at the opposite end of the spectrum from the desert of metaphysical abstraction. Emptiness and the void were and remain privileged themes of some of the matrices of apophaticism in Western culture, notably of its negative theologies and ascetic spiritual practices, and they are especially prominent in Asian, notably Buddhist, traditions. Yet contraries meet unexpectedly in the ambit of the apophatic, which situates itself before saying, and thus before articulation into differential oppositions. Hence concrete, saturated, pleonastic, and excessive forms of apophatic expression turn out to be no less forthcoming and insistent. These emphatic, hyper-positive expressions are dealt with in terms of specific discourses and disciplines in this volume. This volume’s focusing of the field on a specific problematic—­ universality—is accompanied by a shift from attempting to define a general paradigm for apophatic thinking to exploring its potential for intervening effectively in a variety of fields of application. The thinking of apophatics warrants a shift of attention to such applications in order to avert the vanity of simply turning on itself in the void. The need for something concrete to work with is felt acutely as apophatic discourse continues to evolve. The (de)creative moment of putting everything in question and confronting the Nothing head-on is necessary and fruitful, but it cannot be sustained in-

Introduction  17

definitely on its own. It acquires its meaning and relevance only within the movement of thought that is constantly solicited and challenged by developments in the world surrounding it. Consequently, the purely theoretical moment understandably passes or metamorphoses into a phase of more specific applications such as those undertaken in the present work. This is a natural and inevitable development. However, in order to keep the moment of fundamental thinking at the source of these currents open and alive, we need also somehow to adhere to the pre-positive moment of thinking in the abyss. This depth cannot be thought without gaining some form of traction in more concrete cultural vocabularies and discipline-specific concerns. And yet, reaching back to the originating negation inscribed in discourse as such and to the initial impotence that it imposes on thought is the necessary condition for truly original thinking— for thinking in and from the origin. This has been the task particularly of “theology” throughout the Western tradition in its many guises—as myth no less than as revealed Word. In whatever forms, such theological narratives invite us to “philosophy,” or to speculative thinking, with its universalist claims and aspirations. Accordingly, the present book engages crucial debates in a diversity of disciplines and cultures from an apophatic angle that shows how apophasis can open avenues to a more comprehensive and coherent understanding of the most intransigent impasses and aporias that we face in various fields today. These include historiographical debates about the Axial Age, controversies over method in intercultural philosophy, universal claims (and their denials) for a literary canon or for an expanded field of world literature, and the extraordinary claims made for cognitive science as potentially unifying knowledge. All these areas can be projected into a very different perspective by considering them in the peculiar kind of light cast by the darkness of apophasis. Issues of class, race, and gender, or of justice in ­society, are utterly transformed by the luminosity of this darkness—or shadow-light. Claims to universal right or truth can be revealed in their validity—and at the same time in their limits—by bringing out the apophatic a/logic that implicitly and invisibly governs our ability to think limits. The inescapable, unaccountable presence or possibility of the unlimited overshadows all such thinking and every attempt to delimit the field through an articulable system or paradigm.

18  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

APOPHATICISM AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY—OR A UNIVERSAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

As already intimated, I conceive of apophatic thinking as a philosophy of religion—to the extent that it is necessary to identify and place it in disciplinary terms at all. However, I also conceive of philosophy of religion as “first philosophy.” Our relations to others come first in enabling us to propound any type of philosophical discourse or reflection. A few decades ago, Emmanuel Levinas was able to overturn the hegemony of epistemology, as the foundational discourse dominating modern philosophy since Descartes, and to assert ethics as first philosophy. He thereby revised the original Aristotelian hierarchy according this preeminent status to metaphysics. Analogously, I propose that in our current intercultural and postsecular intellectual milieu, in effect, our most basic philosophical bearings are, and need to be, established in relational terms of how what we are saying “ties in” and “binds back” (re-ligio) to our relatedness with others in an unlimited context or open pluriverse. Philosophy of religion, thus conceived, is not just a narrow, specialized field coming late in history—and toward the end of the articulation of the Hegelian system as it branches out to encompass ever more specific and concrete areas of human culture and civilization. Such reflection is, instead, an origin for thinking per se. It reflects on our manner of relating ourselves knowingly to an unlimited range of contexts and cultures—and even to others beyond the range of our knowing altogether. In these apophatic optics, then, philosophy of religion is about the basic orientation that enables us to proffer a philosophical perspective in the first place. In relation to whom or to what are we speaking? This determination does not correspond specifically to the traditional field of philosophy of religion, but traditional philosophy of religion offers pertinent models for negotiating this prior issue of positioning ourselves. Thus we avoid simply taking for granted and as established the surrounding ambit that alone accords meaning and pertinence to any of our interventions. By virtue of its intentional directedness toward the indefinable—toward divinity or “God”—religion is related in a prior sense to the apophatic. It can take a lead in introducing and in guiding this discourse. It must be empha-

Introduction  19

sized that religion, in this sense, is not circumscribed by any content but is rather open to all manners of relating to others—and this entails even being exposed to the absolutely Other in its self-revelation beyond our control. So, philosophy of religion is no longer understood as just one discipline among others—one cordoned off from them within its own domain—but, instead, as an approach that puts relations with others first: and this includes even relations to an indefinable Other. Religion considers these relations as prior to an individual’s very existence, and thus to one’s being able to reflect and so define oneself and what is proper to one or one’s own. In this perspective, for all the importance of philosophy and of rational reflection, the question of faith or belief remains inescapable. Our thought is animated by our belief. The decision to believe—to believe what we think—is an existential decision with all the destiny-laden drama of the decision of whether or not to believe in God or the good or in any meaning or purpose whatever for our lives.17 What is being believed in apophatic thought is nothing determinate. Nevertheless, it remains decisive for every possible determinate thought and action. To believe, finally, is not merely and restrictively a cognitive act, but a commitment of one’s whole being. As love, this means to believe “all things,” as Paul proclaims in 1 Corinthians 13:7: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” It is not so much a matter of believing this or that—or this rather than that. Fundamental, instead, is the question of whether our believing is defined against something determinate, against some antithetical system or religion or political ideology, and is thus a relative belief, or is rather unqualified belief, unconditional belief in all, all that is (real or true). Such unlimited belief can entail taking this all as one or even, as some would say, “God.” This latter mode of belief (in “God”) is one shape or figure of apophatic belief; it exemplifies what I consider to be properly religious faith in its intrinsic openness to tying all together under some kind of universal figure. The latter might be divine presence—but also emptiness, as for Buddhists. It must, in any case, be open also to the honest disbelief of atheists. Of course, any such belief in the universal must begin, at least from a certain point of view, with belief in oneself—yet also with disbelief, or recognition of one’s own intrinsic limits. This formulation of apophaticism, then, as a philosophy of religion actually recoups its being universal philosophy while also being something

20  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

more than just rational reflection. It entails existential knowing and, what is more, something of the order of what has been understood theologically as revelation. These modes of knowing and unknowing all coalesce inseparably in the apophatic. Hence its unlimited pertinence to us and to our world today in its relations to yesterday and tomorrow—and to other worlds elsewhere and everywhere. Such is the revisioning of the relevance of apophatic thinking that this book undertakes to demonstrate and to ­fecundate. In effect, apophasis proves in its very exhaustion to be inexhaustible (“inépuisable épuisement”) because it means to say something other than simply “something.”18 It does not say anything that can be comprehended in propositional or constative terms. It is a saying otherwise than saying as stating, and it opens upon a different kind of sense, one that displaces the sense of discourse as a whole. This is why its saying is only a name for the unsayable rather than its articulation and expression—nothing save the name. Negative theology is not just another discourse; instead, it takes discourse to another place—without being able to say what that place is. Nor what it itself is. The apophatic is only an “over-against” that twists and tropes the sense of other discourses. What it intends cannot be analyzed or described, but it can be named—as an Other can be named and can even be addressed as “Thou,” thereby leaving inexhaustible mystery intact.

APOPHATIC BELIEF AND THE DIALOGUE AMONG FAITHS AND NON-FAITHS

Apophatics has a key role to play in interfaith dialogue. Most, if not all, religions have mystical dimensions and mystically inclined factions—at least at their fringes—that turn away from the more positive creedal formulations of doctrine and dogma in the interests of suitably honoring divinity in what they understand to be its transcendence of human thought and language. These mystical tendencies emphasize theology’s or religion’s less verbally and conceptually graspable, yet nonetheless most vital and ­pertinent, aspects. In their spiritual searchings, Sufis, Christian mystics, and Kabbalists, together with New Thought (neo-pagan) gnostics, not to mention Taoists, Brahma mystics, and Zen or Tantric Buddhists, have often found themselves in agreement on basics beyond the definitions and

Introduction  21

divisiveness of the orthodox faiths defined by the communities to which they nevertheless remain attached and whose traditions they grow out of and still cultivate. As religious teachings empty themselves of specific doctrinal content in order to concentrate on essential ethical principles and on their deepest convictions concerning the divine, reaching to their inarticulate modes of relationship to this higher order, the barriers between them fall away. Their adherents find that they can join hands with members of other diverse and often apparently very disparate faiths, or even contradictory confessions. This generalized meeting of minds and uniting of spirits does not necessarily entail a loss of specificity of the beliefs of the different religions that thereby become partners in dialogue. On the contrary, it can and should go hand in hand with a return to “the concrete stories, practices, texts and traditions in which religious truth is lived and experienced.”19 At stake is rather the manner of holding those beliefs. It entails a strategic distancing from their specific linguistic formulations and an attempt to look beyond what they say to what they do not say and perhaps cannot say as concealing the essential motivations behind their divergent discourses. In this manner, a large measure of common ground may be gained. We live in the tension between a growing and ever more inescapable global community, on the one hand, and the more specific, potentially divisive allegiances of particular cultural and religious identities, on the other. Often it seems that their claims are incompatible and that we must choose between them. In this situation, John Hick has proposed a “pluralist” ­approach to religions through contesting the “myth of Christian uniqueness.”20 My own apophatic approach aims not to refuse the claim of uniqueness, but rather to take it as exemplary of something at least latent in potentially all religions, not to mention other belief systems or ideologies.21 Uniqueness is thus embraced but also generalized and, in effect, negated or exploded into an apophatic universal. Being unique is revealed as the common nature of all religions and even of truth itself. Apophatics does not conspire to relativize religious belief but rather to relate all discourse to an absolute that it aims at and is attracted by, yet cannot grasp or encapsulate in any terms whatsoever, unique or not.22 This is what enables the absolute to belong equally to other religious or nonreligious currents and approaches. Religions and visions of truth in general envisage something absolute, and this “something” is therefore apprehended

22  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

inevitably as unique and incomparable. That it is so apprehended and experienced does not mean that it can be justified as such by explicit, objective criteria. For the absolutely unique is also absolutely unsayable—for lack of terms of comparison. And that precisely—paradoxically—is the universal. Working from the Christian tradition, it is possible to find the paths of apophasis that open toward dialogue with other faiths in the common study of comparative religions and reaching, no less importantly, beyond the pale of faith to non-faith. Christianity turns out to be, in this regard, a historically decisive cultural phenomenon: it is often presented as the catalyst of a surpassing of religion itself. Christianity is deemed by Marcel Gauchet (extending Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis) to be “the religion of the exit from religion” (la religion de la sortie de la religion).23 ­Jean-Luc Nancy follows him in this line of argument.24 Gianni Vattimo concordantly propounds interpreting Christianity as the agent of its own “deconstruction.”25 Christianity is historically the religion of the secularized West, and not by accident: it has often been said to be the chief architect or influence shaping the modern secular world.26 Seminal here is work in the sociology of religions not only of Max Weber but also of Émile Durkheim.27 Specifically, Reformation Christianity has had a leading role in affirming the individual’s worldly calling to productivity, in accordance with the famous Protestant work ethic.28 The universalizable aspects of Christianity that have been so crucial for determining its central place in modern history call out to be understood apophatically. For it is not because of specific beliefs so much as the ability to suspend them (or to universalize them, hence broadening their specificity) that Christianity has been able to exert this pervasive influence. Especially as the religion of the death of God (from Hegel to Altizer), Christianity has opened apophatic avenues that are unique to the Christian gospel and its outlook on the world. Christianity has deployed uniquely universalizing energies that cannot be understood apart from apophasis and the apophatic underpinnings of this faith in particular and of other world religions more generally. The dialogue opens not only toward other religious faiths, but also in the direction of all other forms of knowledge endeavoring to understand the world and to gain access to its truths or to a higher consciousness.

Introduction  23

This is a dialogue, then, equally with philosophy and with other types of wisdom, a dialogue that requires to be understood in terms of apophatic principles. Apophasis stands in close proximity even with atheism, with which its utterances may converge and, in some instances, actually coincide. This has sometimes become patent and has often been a cause for scandal, notoriously in cases such as those of Meister Eckhart and Silesius Angelus. Apophasis is, accordingly, key to the dialogue between religions and within the whole range of modern ideologies and secular creeds. These participants in dialogue include the humanities and the sciences as different cultures of knowledge with their own sets of presuppositions about what is real and about how it can be known. The present dialogical project includes also the cross-cultural comparisons that make up intercultural philosophy. Deeply considered, these are all exercises in “comparing the incomparable.” They are so understood by Marcel Detienne, who in Comparer l’incomparable excavates the fascinating story of the origin of the disciplines of comparative religions and philosophy, along with anthropology, as a challenge to a nineteenth-century, nationalist model of French historiography, in the struggle for legitimating comparison of ostensibly incomparable cultures.29 If Christianity, in the modern West, has had this role as a catalyst in the evolution of religion and culture into a secularized world order, it is thanks especially to the strength of negative theology within the Christian tradition. Along with Hinduism, Christianity has led the troupe in dancing away from its own formalized doctrines, even as it has also produced some of the most hardcore fundamentalisms. These two opposed tendencies actually belong together. By opening up a gap vis-à-vis the empirical world and all that is given and stated in worldly terms, Christianity opens the possibility of a radical transcendence of culture per se toward the unity of all religions, but also toward a valorization of the transcendent uniqueness and incomparability of each. Hence the crucial role here of the intercultural. Intercultural philosopher François Jullien points to the madness inherent in the Greek philosophy of transcendence that is inherited and developed to extremes by Christianity. He illustrates the sanity and sagacity of a countervailing Chinese wisdom that remains grounded in the world and in ineluctable, inarrestable change.30 This is a very apt and important call to consciousness,

24  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

but it too needs to be negated and opened outward so as to embrace its own opposite.31 If we have learned anything from Michel Foucault, we should be aware that we need to understand the reason in madness and not exclude the mad from the order of things. Throughout my discussion of Jullien in Apophatic Paths—an exterior supplement to this book, one that extends particularly the book’s comparative philosophies axis—I take issue with his erasing and eradicating of theology through intercultural comparison with China and Chinese culture’s presumed lack of theological content and interest. I am trying to show why theology, above all, is necessary to this discussion, why both Western and Eastern cultural traditions begin with conceptions of the divine, and even more exactly with what cannot be conceived of at all and so gives rise to mysterious figures like “divinity.” The theological inspiration of culture, as envisaged by Apophatic Paths, rises like a phoenix from ancient and modern civilizations worldwide, even though the theology in question is a self-­subverting, negative theology. The upshot is not an exaltation of theology over other disciplines and discourses but rather a recognition of negative theology’s distinction in leading all disciplinary and discursive formations forward in the process of their inevitable, but blessing-­dispensing, dissolution. This involves not a definitive, irreversible dispersal but rather allows for a regrouping of forces in previously unsuspected and unprecedented ways.

THE UNIVERSALITY OF WHAT IS NOT

So what is universality? I believe that it is not produced by humans alone, and that it cannot finally be achieved by merely human means. It is to be reached only by opening oneself to what is within one but also above and beyond one (intra me but also supra me, in Augustine’s terms)—to what is one’s ground and unground, in the sense of transcending one from within. The dimension of universality cannot be brought about and realized just by defining some particular belief, but neither through believing in n ­ othing—unless this be a positive, ardent, and actively productive believing in nothing specific and delimited. Such believing entails more than just a determinate belief: it is rather a disposition to believe or to seek some-

Introduction  25

thing beyond all that can be possessed in any determinate belief. Genuine universality can be accessed only by believing in what must reveal itself to us from beyond what we can formulate and encompass. Any defined, or finite, universal entails closure and exclusion, and so cannot be absolutely ­universal. It is possible to conceive of such an unknowable universal not only in traditional theological terms but also in the more futurist terms of technoscience. One might see such universality as being produced specifically by means of informatics, if one takes information technology as an all-­ encompassing System that englobes humans entirely but is empty at its core and without any meaning or essence, as Mark Alizart does in his “celestial informatics.”32 Many have underlined the fascinating analogies here with (negative) theology.33 An analogous techno-scientific approach to religion and especially negative theology has been cultivated provocatively by Mark C. Taylor and Thomas A. Carlson.34 My contention is not only that true universality does not come from human making alone, but also that any positive form attributed to it makes it not truly universal. A problem with orthodoxy, one with which John Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy creatively struggles, is its being exclusive of deviant forms. A truly universal orthodoxy must be one that cannot be ­defined and cannot dictate the one straight (ortho) way of belief (doxy), just as any true humanism must transcend “humanity.” It must grasp the human universal as the not-All. This is “revelation” in a sense that Eric Santner derived from Rosenzweig and that Slavoj Žižek elicits from Lacan, as is discussed below in chapters 4 and 11, respectively. The universal must be “revealed.” However, this revelation can come from within and as underlying us— as the “intimate universal”35—and also from without and above. It is, in any case, a revelation not confined to any one church or school. It can happen anywhere and everywhere. The churches have had a leading role in teaching what revelation is and how to recognize it, but revelation as such is not identical with any particular tradition or confession or creed. It is, instead, what all are aiming at. My warrant for saying this is not any superior knowledge concerning what revelation is, but simply the ethical imperative of respecting others and their different approaches to the experience of God—or of the elusiveness or absence of God. The philosophical schools

26  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

and their critical thinking certainly have their role here, too, in reflecting on conceptualities adapted to relating to the inconceivable. Beyond the proliferating multiplicity of identities in the contemporary political arena based on cultures, languages, religions, regions, nations, sexes, classes, and special interests, what makes us truly one without limits, without exclusions and restrictions—is nothing. Precisely Nothing. And nothing is more important for us to grasp than this, in order to be able to live together on our shrinking, globalized planet. This nothing is the nothing specifiable or stateable of the single individual, the person herself or himself intimated or divined behind or beyond all categories and groupings into which his or her specific differences can be fit. It is the nakedness of our person. That is what is truly universal. All fundamentally are this nakedness: in it alone, all are equal. Without any support from outside, without superiority of class, gender, race, or social standing, the naked self stands alone in the dignity of having nothing to disguise it or to answer for it, no alibi but itself. As such, each of us can stand out, ex-ist (from the Greek ἵστημι, “to stand or make stand”) in the full stature of our uniqueness and, at the same time, our universality. This is a universality of being nothing—nothing that can be said or specified.

C h a p t e r Tw o

OUTBOUND REFLECTION Unsaying Theology in the Name of All

STATE OF THE ART—APOPHATIC THINKING AT PRESENT

Where is apophatic thinking now, and where can it go from here? The last several years have seen some critical developments in this field. By assessing them, I aim to delineate the most plausible directions for the next phase of research and speculative thinking in this area. However, this alone is not my whole purpose, for I also wish to probe more broadly the question: What idea could possibly organize the whole cacophony of critical theory at present? My answer is that the “apophatic turn” is the crucially significant and epoch-making development that can best illuminate critical thinking in our time. It needs to be named in order to come clearly to consciousness, even though apophatic naming always evokes also the nameless and allows consciousness to grasp, most fundamentally, the escape of what is named. The largest part of the enormous body of work on the apophatic, which has become far more intensive especially in the last decade, has been exegetical and is directed to elucidating specific works or authors (Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, among others) or movements or periods or cultures. Recently, however, perennial pressures have also pushed reflection on apophasis to rise to a more general level of speculation. Apophatic thinking has become increasingly conscious of its 27

28  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

ambiguous potential to serve as a comprehensive philosophy or theology. In certain versions, the apophatic paradigm can become a panoptic literarycritical or cultural theory. Although such a role prima facie stands in contradiction to its negative nature and character, nevertheless an apophatic paradigm seems capable in certain respects of furnishing a kind of koiné—a common language or overarching discourse for all different types of interpretation in our age and intellectual milieu, which, by and large, have been suspicious of comprehensive systems. Hermeneutics was promoted from being an exegetical method for interpreting texts to propounding a general theory of existence and history and culture when it became philosophical hermeneutics in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer based on Martin Heidegger’s fundamental breakthroughs. Analogously, apophatics at the present moment is taking an audacious step of philosophical universalization in numerous individual initiatives that develop out of a variety of disciplines. Yet, apophatic thinking can finally fulfill such a purpose, not by providing any general code or overarching paradigm, but rather by just the opposite. By demonstrating the impossibility of such a total system and the necessity of critiquing all pretensions to supply one, apophatic thought engenders greater tolerance for alterity and openness to inevitable plurality. It furnishes not a master code or universal language but an open space, a common ambit, in which all are in relation to one another in and through an undefined, unsayable, common (or “undercommon”), virtual and potential, “relatedness” of all to all.1 The current maturity of the field of apophatics makes it ripe for taking yet a further step in turning its attention self-consciously toward applications. In this regard, apophatics follows a pattern of evolution that can be observed in “theory” in general as it has turned from the “high theory” of structuralism, hermeneutics, and deconstruction, which were also conceived as universal philosophies, to more concrete concerns with social and political, aesthetic and religious, material and scientific issues. Theory is no longer focused just on “difference,” as with Derrida and Deleuze, but on specific concrete forms of racial, gender, and class differences. No longer does it concentrate on the thinking of being, as with Heidegger, but rather on being political and convivial in active, local and global, forms of engagement, often in resistance or “counterpractice.”

Outbound Reflection  29

Something analogous is called for presently in apophatic thinking, yet with a twist. Paradoxically, the coming to consciousness of apophatics as representing a universal paradigm responding to a universal predicament, in which all share in common, coincides with its dissolution into only applied forms of thinking. Yet this supposed displacement into applications actually only renders explicit what has, in fact, always been implicitly the case. Given its inherent recalcitrance to assuming fixed, general definition, in reality apophasis can hardly be approached in any other manner than through singular instances and applications.

THREE WAYS TO UNSAY THEOLOGY

In this chapter, I select three books written under the aegis of apophatic theology, each aiming at a certain kind of unsaying of theology. Together they explore the options that have emerged recently for plying this type of thinking to address pressing concerns across disciplines and in the world at large. They take up different stances regarding especially the relations of philosophy and theology. However, they bear also upon art, politics, and science insofar as all discursive disciplines are determined fundamentally by the threshold between what can and cannot be said within their specific languages. The current state of apophatic theology might be represented by these three contributions, all published in 2014 or 2015 by a generation of scholars now reaching their peak and each having recently produced comprehensive works expounding in detail their approaches to apophatic thinking. These include, prominently, Catherine Keller’s Cloud of the Impossible and Elliot Wolfson’s Giving beyond the Gift.2 My own work, too, turns on delineating a certain way of unsaying theology. I include my A Philosophy of the Unsayable alongside them as representing another voice that in my case hails more from the experience of poetic language as potentially revelatory and even, at its limit, apocalyptic in import.3 In these different modes, there has been prolific writing in the name of unsaying theology. And this is the current—with all its sharp internal divergences—to which my own book belongs. Wolfson’s project is governed by the demand for rigorous philosophical critique and purification from all forms of even just conceptual idolatry, while Keller is driven by a

30  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

passion for theological vision as engaging the political and social exigencies of the present. Nevertheless, as I read them, it is the role of poetic language that in both cases also makes their personal approaches to apophatic thinking most fruitful and effective. In other words, from my perspective, it is the necessity of understanding language poetically that, above all, characterizes our common apophatic horizon and outlook. The crucial innovations and solutions offered by all three authors are best understood as accessing the poetic resources of language, and attending to these resources is what enables each of us to make apophatic insight work to address problems in our respective spheres and centers of interest. This chapter compares these books and their different ways of (dis)engaging theology in order to catalyze apophatic insight, whether the latter is conceived of as a promiscuous opening of all in relation to all (Keller), or as a rigorous purging of transcendence through uncompromisingly eliminating all inevitably illusory representations (Wolfson). The latter program is, in crucial respects, to be understood as deriving from a characteristically Jewish heritage that Wolfson transmits. Wolfson suggests that Levinas’s shift from image to discourse “is rooted in an adaptation of the biblical and rabbinic suspicion of images as a means of promoting idolatry” (Giving beyond the Gift, 123). Of course, this is only part of Wolfson’s program, since he also retrieves imagination through Kabbalah as an eminent expression of the apophatic. I am even led to wonder whether philosophical critique and poetic thinking are at odds with one another and not quite integrated in his thinking. In any case, he hews very close to “the identity of opposites.”4 Keller, on the other hand, is heir to the apophatic tradition especially of Christian negative theology (Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa), but with a strong inflection of feminist theological critique, which is in its own—yet similar—ways a negation of the dominant theological tradition. There are, of course, numerous other outstanding representatives of apophatic thinking today across nations and regions and fields of research. Thomas Carlson works from apophatic traditions and asks how the imagining of divinity in the void of unrepresentability correlates with shaping human life and identity after the collapse of the discrete subject into a ­complex system of relations and connections with an outside working internally to produce feedback loops by which it is in turn constituted.5 Hent

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de Vries has investigated, in depth and detail, various aspects of the apophatic, ­especially in contemporary philosophy.6 William Connolly employs apophatically inflected ideas of negativity in political theory to defend ­democracy and pluralism.7 Wesley Wildman makes his naturalistic religious philosophy turn on apophatic pivots.8 William Desmond at Louvain, Gregor Hoff in Salzburg, and Ingolf Dalferth from Zürich, now active at Claremont, represent further notable currents.9 The linguistics-based speculations of Barbara Cassin and Heinz Wismann raise the unsayable and untranslatable to the level of a general paradigm.10 In addition, innumerable researchers in comparative philosophy and religions focusing on East Asian traditions (Daoist, Confucian, Buddhist), such as David Chai and Eske Møllgaard, are breaking ground on similar topics in relation to these and many other traditions.11 These others include Indian traditions such as Advaita Vedanta, with Eliot Deutsch and Francis Clooney, and scholars such as Masao Abe working in the wake of the Kyoto school. Leveraging an ostensibly marginal, insular positionality in the Caribbean as a native of Martinique, Édouard Glissant shows the ungraspability of identity in Creole society and culture to be capable of taking on markedly apophatic connotations.12 This list could go on indefinitely,13 and that illustrates the point I wish to make initially about the capillary infiltration of apophatic modes of thinking in and across virtually all segments of culture and society. But I will concentrate in this chapter on a configuration of the selected American apophatic thinkers working from theology in very different ways and with different accents. They complement and contest each other and bring out exemplarily the stakes of the apophatic in our time. Although a crucial common resource of all is some form of theology and specifically the unsaying of theology, all are intent on pursuing this in a strongly universalistic direction. However, whereas Keller retrieves and revives theology in unsaying it, even after it has been largely rejected and surpassed by modern secular culture, Wolfson tends to want theology to be definitively unsaid and in principle aims to stop saying it, to overcome it. My own position is that we do very much need theology in order to be able to keep unsaying it. Theology is exemplary in allowing for and even demanding this “treatment,” which can be also a technique of healing. As an apophatic undertaking, theology is intrinsically its own self-unsaying.

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Theology has for its essential matter what it cannot conceive (“God”); it must therefore unsay all of its own conceptions. So understood, theology is even constituted by this kenotic penchant for self-unsaying.

THE UNIVERSALITY OF APOPHATIC THINKING IN OUR POSTMODERN MOMENT

Keller and Wolfson, then, have both developed extensive projects that, for all their differences, can be characterized as focused on or by the endeavor to unsay theology. Keller does this in order to bring out theology’s relevance, when taken in this apophatic key, for negotiating positive approaches to social and political problems, including race and gender equality and the threats of human-induced climate change. Wolfson is attempting to unsay theology, and even to do so definitively, so as to escape from metaphysical illusions and the falsities typically ascribed to “ontotheology.” He aims—following Heidegger, as he understands this towering thinker’s program—to finally overcome the theological impulse. He pursues this goal in a manner that owes much also to Mark C. Taylor’s­­ a/theology and even to Thomas J. J. Altizer’s death of God theology. This deconstructive purpose and its poststructuralist lineage at times seem to be at loggerheads with some other sources of Wolfson’s inspiration, considering that he works from the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. This makes for a tension between diverse loyalties that runs through Wolfson’s work. He is situated in a Jewish religious tradition, which, however, he takes as leading to and culminating in an a/theism that was and is espoused by certain avant-garde strains of this tradition. He is also deeply invested in the postmodern deconstructive philosophical critique that prolongs Heidegger’s battle to overcome not only metaphysics but the whole ontotheological cast of Western thinking. Wolfson joins a line of Jewish thinkers, including Levinas, Derrida, and Edith Wyschogrod, who have pursued this deconstructive project. Both of these works selected here for consideration embrace vast swathes of culture and highlight how these traditions enfold and embosom apophatic modes of thinking. Keller brings in Whitehead’s process philosophy, Whitman’s singing self, Judith Butler’s cross-gendered bodies, Hadewich’s mystical ecstasies, and infinitely more, centering in many re-

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spects on Nicholas of Cusa’s learnedly relational ignorance. Theology remains a crucial theme in spite of being unsaid and even undone, if not foresworn. This is the case also with Wolfson and his vast amalgamation of Jewish sources with postmodern philosophy, even if his purpose is not to revive theology, but the opposite. Nevertheless, the harder you try to erase something like theology, the more conspicuous the spreading human stain becomes. What is at stake here, for me, in unsaying theology is the potential for universal relatedness, the possibility of opening a relation of all with all. This is the positive side of negative theology, which writers such as Keller are at work making into a sort of “constructively theological contemplation.” Keller explains that “poststructuralist fascination with the apophatic has precipitated startlingly fresh engagements of theology. For the most part, however, it plies only the negative epistemology, not the relational cosmology, of the apophatic” (Cloud of the Impossible, 18). A central aspect of Keller’s purpose is to develop a positive relational ontology. She finds its elements already inherent in apophatic tradition and especially in the legacy of Nicholas of Cusa, who articulated a universalistic vision for world peace in De pace fidei (1453). Wolfson, too, addresses the question of the universal from the opening of his book. Although working especially from twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, this restricted choice of field is a particular way of raising universal questions. He chooses to “delve deeply into one tradition out of the conviction that the particular is indexical of what we are still compelled to call the universal” (Giving beyond the Gift, xiii). Such is his strategy for mounting a universalist philosophy based on a specific religious and cultural tradition.

KELLER’S CLOUD OF THE IMPOSSIBLE: APOPHASIS AND THE ONTOLOGICAL QUESTION

Apologies for Theology Keller emphasizes theology’s “negative capability” as part of her constant, yet also qualified and self-negating, partisanship for this discipline and tradition.14 In a world and culture that since the eighteenth-century

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­ nlightenment have often understood themselves as based on overcoming E religious myth and emancipating themselves from theological precepts and beliefs, theology may well seem to stand in need of defense and even of some apologies. Although far from endorsing dogmatic and bigoted forms of theology, Keller is willing to speak up for its rich tradition and culture and to defend the indispensable contribution that it can make to interdisciplinary discussion, as well as to the overarching, extra-academic mission of fostering justice in society. This is not theology as opposed to other forms of culture, but rather as inclusive of them and as covertly (cloudily) always folded into everything else. In her “beginning” chapter, Keller positions her “unsaying of theology” between the radical feminist theology of Elizabeth Johnson and the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Her conjugation of the two takes the shape of a “chiasmus” in which they play off each other, entangle, and then go their different directions. Johnson’s She Who Is remains related to a rather substantial God, the “I am that I am” of Exodus 3:14, a God approached in the lineage of the via eminentiae of Thomas Aquinas (minus, purportedly, the latter’s essentialism).15 This is for Keller an “ontological relationalism” that proposes a reconstructive analogical practice of theology as “an im/possible feminist transformation of Christendom” (Cloud of the Impossible, 44). Keller’s own approach embraces the ontological she who is of Johnson while also offering hospitality to Derrida and deconstruction. This is a challenge, since Derrida reacts so allergically to anything smacking of substantiality that he misconstrues the “beyond being” or “beyond essence” of traditional negative theology, classically expressed by Dionysius, as a “hyperessentialism.” Keller acutely observes that Derrida’s position rests on a misprision: “The language used to move beyond being is reduced to an inflation of being” (Cloud, 45; original italics). Yet Derrida’s later admission, in Sauf le nom, that he would “trust no text that is not in some way contaminated with negative theology, and even among those texts that apparently do not have, want, or believe they have any relation with theology in general” (cited by Keller, Cloud, 45) turns his stance in a rather different direction. Keller makes it her own in wittily sending the ironic compliment back to Derrida: “It is perhaps here that I cease to trust any theology that is not in some way contaminated with deconstruction” (45).

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Just this sort of reconciliation of seemingly incompatible alternatives through insight into the coincidence of opposites—in this case ontology and deconstruction—is exactly the kind of displacement and re-visioning movement in which apophaticism excels. Apophatic vision, I submit, not only sees that seeming opposites depend on some common basis or assumption; it sees into why this is inevitably the case—by regressing to the preverbal stage before the distinction in question that enables the divided points of view can even be articulated. These two very different strategies (the ontologically synthetic and the critically deconstructive), which seem impossible to unite, coalesce in another exemplary metaphorical transformation, one wrought upon the notion of the desert of theological language in our secular culture. Keller takes such language not as a place of sterility, but as pregnant with messianic meaning of the wild (im)possibilities of what is to come. This is an example of how Keller’s deconstructive apophaticism comes contaminated also “with some positively relational language” (Cloud, 46), and by this she means socioeconomically and politically charged rhetoric, with racial coloring and gender inflection: “Mother Sophia, Black Christ, Queer God and all” (46). Keller thereby accomplishes a distribution of the wholly (and holy) Other of negative theology into every im/possible other that we encounter anywhere and everywhere—in the street, at a drag show, in the workplace, or in our own homes. The tradition of negative theology and its “sublation” (Aufhebung; relève) by deconstruction may have seemed to be barren of the crowds of “shrieking socialities,” but actually they are there under cover of the traditional cloud of unknowing. Making room for them is an important objective of Keller’s refashioning of theology. She wants apophatic theology to be occupied by crowds that previously were theologically homeless. And hence her reproach against contemporary French deconstruction, even in its long ante-Parisian prehistory: And deconstruction, even in its antiquity as negative theology, does not much attend to the shrieking socialities making us up as subjects or as worlds. Too material, too cosmological, too many? The language on this apophatic side of our chiasmus remains elegantly bare of the cosmic crowds. But under cloud cover they may be sneaking into its desert. (Cloud, 47)

36  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

The essential move Keller makes is that of folding the apophatic in its various expressions into the relational (Cloud, 47). Deconstructive negation coincides with affirmative interrelation in her cloudy recasting of apophatic traditions so as to allow this heritage to yield its “deep dynamism of relation” (48). By “mindful unknowing,” she saves us from “God” (echoing Meister Eckhart’s prayer to God to deliver us from God) and thereby saves at least the name of God, integrating Derrida’s Sauf le nom (Save the Name). Thus she “rescues a space for the uncertainty of our God-relation and so of theology” (49). Theology is preserved as a possible impossibility. It ­certainly does not fit with our current secularized worldview. In those terms, theology is impossible. Nevertheless, thanks to this very incom­ patibility, theology has the virtue of calling this worldview and us into ­question—and into questioning. Theology, by Keller’s accounting, is at least entitled to the benefit of its own doubt (28). Keller is well aware of the challenge before her in face of the strongly separative transcendence of the Neoplatonic One near the outset of the apophatic tradition that she wants to rehabilitate. “The tension unfolding in the present book, that of an apophatic relationality, means to unsay any separative transcendence, but the unsaying will come entangled in the alter-­knowing, the darkening complexity, of the most transcendent early efforts” (Cloud, 58). The Neoplatonic One was thought of as transcendent of all relation, most explicitly and insistently by Damascius. Of course, no definition of the Supreme can be final, or can even apply, ultimately. Keller follows and adopts as ancestors for her project especially Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing, and, most programmatically, Nicholas of Cusa. These figures, whom she emphasizes and embraces, manage to hold even this transcendence of all relation in relation to all that is—by a paradoxical logic and coincidence of opposites. Christian metaphysics, in fact, combines a quest for the One beyond Being, which is characteristically Neoplatonist, together with the typically Scholastic recognition and identification of God as Being itself. This mediation is first forged in a Middle Platonic mode with Clement of Alexandria and Origen, among other early patristic writers. This synthesis holds from Augustine through Aquinas and thus becomes a mainstay of Christian orthodoxy. It suggests how integral even Neoplatonic negative the-

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ology is to orthodox Christian theology, particularly the Roman Catholic. This synthesis is related to the affirmation of God as supremely transcendent, with which Keller is in conflict. Her refusal of such a God powers her polemic against the creation ex nihilo doctrine already in her The Face of the Deep.16 We might, nevertheless, discern in Keller a certain affinity for the Middle Platonic way—one that reappears in Aquinas’s ipsum esse formula for God—his identifying of God with Being itself (esse ipsum) or with the excellence and purity of being (puritas essendi). There is a crucial nuance of difference in such ontological theologies from a fully deontologized, ­deconstructive approach to theology hailing from Neoplatonic sources. In the end, Keller derives her apophaticism from process theology rather than from the radical separatism of the Neoplatonic School that is expressed most strongly and explicitly by Damascius and that still dominates apophatic thinking in Rosenzweig and Levinas. In this respect, Keller, with her “ontological relationalism,” is closer to the tradition of Middle Platonic apophaticism than to radical Neoplatonic negative theology. This commitment distances her also from the radical Jewish deconstruction of Levinas, Derrida, Wyschogrod, and Wolfson. Perspectivism and Exemplarism In this perspective, all that is said (and understood) about God is based on God’s relation to creatures and is true not directly, but only indirectly, about God. In reality, this is already clear in Aquinas and medieval Scholastic mysticism. But Keller attributes it to Cusa and highlights it as a great breakthrough to modernity. “Has Cusa’s nonknowing nonetheless rendered theology meaningless—no logos left for theos? His answer brings a fresh twist to the conversation: ‘if affirmative names apply, they apply to God only in relation to creatures.’ For we take any attributes—creator, justice, ­father, son—from creatures and so ‘transfer names to God’” (Cloud, 94; italics original). Keller exaggerates the originality of this insight, but the universe does become infinite and does indeed play a new role in Cusa and his age. The universe has become more clearly incomprehensible in itself, even though Nyssa and his anthropology already moved decisively in the direction of

38  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

rendering even the immanent and mundane, exemplarily the human body, an infinite mystery never to be exhausted (epektasis). In a creative misappropriation and misprision of her own, Keller takes Cusanus’s idea that “affirmative names . . . apply to God only in relation to creatures” as a radically new, modern insight in order to construct her genealogy of how “affirmative relationality unfolds from negative theology as the fold, angle, or—in Cusa’s language—contraction, that is perspective itself ” (Cloud, 94). One of Keller’s characteristic positions, accordingly, is to turn the unique and exceptional into the exemplary, thus emphasizing not divine difference, but rather the “enfolding” of the divine into the worldly, and vice versa. Her “Christography” emphasizes Jesus’s work of love as an exemplum valid for and to be repeated by all. She objects to Jesus’s loving example being congealed into an exception, reverenced as an inimitable event and an absolutely unique achievement, that none can possibly ever repeat. She quotes Jesus in the Gospel of John (14:12) as promising that those who believe will do even greater works than he himself has done. Most subtly and provocatively, she refigures the incarnation of Christ as an “intercar­ nation” that redistributes the divine act of self-giving in becoming flesh among all those who follow Jesus (Cloud, 296). This entails that the incarnation of God occurs in many different relations and perspectives. There is something eminently modern about perspectivism, since a perspective is presumably the perspective of a subject, and the subject is the modern postulate par excellence. However, even in medieval Kabbalah, the imagination of an invisible other world was vigorously developed without modern subjectivity. That everything affirmed about God is understood only in relation to his creatures is a cornerstone of the teaching of apophatic thinkers since antiquity (notably Proclus) and is given very precise analysis in Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy (Summa theologiae Ia, q. 13), which Keller wishes to leave behind in turning to modern breakthroughs (Cloud, 95). What is most momentously new in Cusanus (even if not without precedents, for example, in Stoicism) is his taking the creaturely world itself as infinite and so as fully and necessarily coinciding with the divine infinity. The participatory ontology that Cusanus takes over from Platonist tradition takes a new twist toward immanence when the transcendence in question is directed not beyond the world to an other world, but is operative rather on the (now infinite) plane of the world or cosmos itself. An in-

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finite cosmos is a giant step in the direction of a modernity that materializes divinity, for example, with Spinoza. Each of us is a finite infinity—by virtue of our endless e­ ntanglements— yet materialized here and now, in this mortal body and its perspective on the whole that is always viewed only from one embodied angle or another. Not only is all in God and God in all, but all creation is contracted into each creature (to use Cusa’s vocabulary). The universe is in each creature, and the universe is the creature. In these terms, apophatic theology leads to affirmative, constructive cosmology. This is the spirit of modern apophatics that emerges in different ways also in Jakob Böhme and the Carmelite mystics. Remarkable about Renaissance apophasis is the leverage it gives for mounting elaborate discourses regarding the other world and even the inner workings of the Godhead (as one sees in Böhme) based on the microcosm especially of the human being. Teresa of Avila, too, confabulates otherworldly places or stages (moradas) beyond words and knowing. Michel de Certeau explores the experience of the limits of experience in his studies of classical age and baroque mysticism as opening the way already to postmodern discourses on the absolutely other.17 New languages of mysticism and theosophy well up on the wave that overwhelms these ardent baroque believers in what they cannot know or say. Keller’s Apophatic Relationalism What Keller seeks to find in the apophatic ancestors she resuscitates, and especially in the Church fathers she “adopts,” is an apophatic relationalism that can mediate the exigency of transcendence and transform it into immanence and intimacy. An apophatic cosmology is lacking in Dionysius, the putative father of (Christian) negative or apophatic theology, and there is no trace in Dionysius of reciprocal influence of the creature on the Creator. Nevertheless, the erotic nature of the love of God’s yearning for all creation in Dionysius constitutes a kind of root for a universal apophatic relationalism to which even God would be no exception, in Keller’s estimation. Dionysius’s descriptions, especially in De divinis nominibus, of God’s ecstatic loving, his “being carried outside of himself in the loving care he has of everything,” is intensely and affectively relational.

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According to Dionysius, God is “beguiled by goodness, by love, and by yearning and is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself ” (712B).18 On such bases, Keller concludes: “God beguiled: the silhouette of an apophatic relationalism begins to appear, it seems, where the negation of the negation of divine love folds the distance of its transcendence into intimacy” (Cloud, 76). This folding back into the bosom of immanence is the sort of picture and language that she prefers. Keller does not accept the God-Being identity that she attributes to Thomas Aquinas, and “well-nigh” to Jean-Luc Marion as well. This identification, which she equates with their third way of eminence, via eminentiae (Cloud, 73), incurs the problems of ontotheology, despite Marion’s best intentions to do everything to overcome that. Yet even Thomas Aquinas can be read as avoiding hypostatization of divinity.19 In any case, Keller reacts against the imperious oneness of Being, yet she remains very much ­attached to beings and to the relational ontology that is based on their unlimited mutual relations. So much so that Being is not God, but beings are indeed divine, at least in potential. Her God is the becoming God of process theology. Keller wants to avoid pantheism, but that God is in all things—what can be called panentheism—does hold for her. Yet God’s being in all things as the source and sustainer of their being is not really different from Aquinas’s position, even though Keller wishes to make this relation very much more reciprocal than Aquinas does. She has persuasive reasons for this, but perhaps they should not be heeded to the extent of excluding their opposite. Rather than a process divinity, the apophatic relational ontology she seeks should in principle, I submit, give us rather a more-than-in-process God. God should not simply be identified with process. A rigorously apophatic theology should treat process itself as an unknown, a mystery, one that is not separable from the mystery of eternity, the eternity of God. The insistence on reciprocity applies so long as we are talking about distinct beings that can be conceptualized as distinct individuals. But if God transcends individuals, then the language of nonreciprocity expresses precisely this transcendence. It designates not the transcendence of any conceivable Supreme Being or “God,” but rather marks the apophatic space

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for acknowledging that all that can be conceived and set into relation still cannot completely exhaust the all. This dimension transcending all sayable and conceivable things must not be excluded. Whenever we are talking about things, “God” included, such things can be conceived only relationally. In terms of discourse, relational ontology is correct. But, viewed apophatically, the discourse of relational ontology exists in order to negate itself and point to what is not itself, not discursive, and perhaps not able to be absorbed completely into articulated relations. Keller wants to understand the divine, if that is the subject of theology, not as an object abiding apart, self-sufficient in its aseity, and repellent of all dependencies: ab-solute. That would be the error that she constantly calls “separative transcendence.” And this is to be enthusiastically granted. God cannot be an object. And yet representations of God’s infinite distance are not without some validity alongside representations of God as ­process— no representation at all being remotely adequate. Representing God as transcendent object is erroneous, and yet images of transcendence may be necessary to capture some aspects of our relations with any other or even with ourselves, no less than with the divine. A kind of unsurpassable transcendence needs to be acknowledged even just in the face-to-face of our human encounters with others, as Emmanuel Levinas so powerfully insists. In principle, Keller breaks the experience of God open to involving every kind of possible and impossible relation. Her spirit and her divinity is pluralist rather than fixed on any other-repellent One. God seems not to be—at least not simply to be—the one God or the God who is One. For Keller, rather, the reverse is true: “diversity implies, it implicates, divinity” (Cloud, 265). Of course, a lot can be said against the one-God idea, and indeed no idea of God could possibly be adequate. But are we going to forget all that has compelled so many of our ancestors throughout the ages to embrace some idea of God as One? Is there nothing in it that might be valid and necessary for us still? I suspect that totally rejecting it simply swings to the other side of a dialectic rather than transcending oppositional logic and marking, instead, the inadequacy of either alternative alone. In some respects, Wolfson errs or exaggerates in just the opposite direction of overemphasizing separation or lack of relationality, stressing the utter inaccessibility of the ultimate—to the exclusion of its implication in anything and everything.

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WOLFSON’S GIVING BEYOND THE GIFT: UNSAYING OF UNSAYING ITSELF

Wolfson seemed to be fully in sympathy with the new wave of enthusiasm for apophatic theopoetic expressions after the turn of phenomenology to theology and the reclaiming of the body and imagination as sites for the realization of apophatic expressions open to the infinite and the abyss. He contributed an essay to Apophatic Bodies,20 one of the landmarks of the latter turns in apophatic thought. The ostensibly kataphatic vocabularies of aesthetics and the body were injected with new life and vigor by being correlated with the dark apophatic ground that they cover over, but also allow to appear. In true phenomenological lineage, Wolfson follows painstakingly the dialectic of concealment and unconcealing, with Heidegger as his guide. But for all his attunement to the use of imagination in the Kabbalah, an imperious exigency of Wolfson’s project is to purify apophasis of metaphorical reappropriations of theism and of any residues of theism’s anthropomorphic personalization of divinity. The radical moment of apophasis that he hovers over is the epiphany of the Abgrund (abyss), the ungrounding that for Heidegger takes place in all-unsettling anxiety. From this position of radical negativity, Wolfson argues against the postmodern apophasis of Keller, Caputo, and others such as Kearney as not radical enough. He pursues an uncompromising phenomenological critique designed to deny all false figurations particularly of the gift. The turn to theology in recent phenomenology is fraught with metaphorical language that personalizes transcendence.21 Wolfson objects to these tendencies as “undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent other.”22 Although willing to admit the reasonability of attempting to marshal the best metaphors for what nevertheless remains strictly speaking unrepresentable, Wolfson warns that often these efforts “ensnare the human mind in representing the unrepresentable and imaging the imageless by the production of images that, literally speaking, are false” (Giving beyond the Gift, 227). One senses in this stringency an aniconic rigor that has characterized Jewish philosophy since Maimonides. It weighs heavily in the Bible itself and is echoed in the Talmud. In keeping with impulses deeply embedded

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in Jewish tradition, Wolfson’s approach to apophasis is acutely heedful of the interdiction against images of God. And yet, he finds images not unacceptable as momentary manifestations of the divine in the Kabbalah. Together with Rosenzweig, he finds problematic not the use of images per se, but only their fixing in static forms (Giving beyond the Gift, 31–33). It is important to strive by means of metaphor after the abysmal unground, as Kabbalah so intriguingly does, but to give it a theistic face—that is the danger. This is the problematic that Wolfson works over through the image of the gift. Behind this image is the issue of the person. He is adamant against personalizing in theistic manner the ineffable source of all. Otherwise, Wolfson is willing to revel in the metaphorical energies poured out—exemplarily in the Kabbalah—with the aim of figuring the unfigurable and making the invisible visible.23 Decisive here is that Wolfson, like Heidegger, personally struggles against theistic belief and acknowledgment of God. He views apophasis, instead, as an expression of the imagination vis-à-vis the abyss, and this is vital and exciting for him. But apophasis taken as somehow justifying theology, as intrinsically theological, contradicts some of his own fundamental commitments, notably to a/theism. Wolfson’s Jewish Radicalization of Postmodernism Fundamentally, Wolfson is criticizing the new turn in postmodern negative theology for not being rigorous enough in its critique of representation. He condemns its turn (back) to the theological as employing a metaphysical or ontotheological language that personalizes transcendence, thereby undermining the alterity and invisibility of the transcendent Other. In his words: In my judgment, recent attempts to harness the apophatic tradition of Western Neoplatonism together with Derridean deconstruction in order to construct a viable postmodern negative theology, a religion without religion, are not radical enough. Not only are many of these philosophies of transcendence guilty of a turn to theology that defies the phenomenological presupposition of an immanent phenomenality, as Janicaud argued, but they fall short on their own terms inasmuch as they persist in employing metaphorical language

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that personalizes transcendence and thereby runs the risk of undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent other. (Giving beyond the Gift, 227) Wolfson refuses the new theological turn in phenomenology because he refuses theology. This refusal seems to be grounded more in his own philosophical commitment to radical anti- or a/theological postmodern thinking than in Jewish tradition. Some kind of theological commitment is fundamental to the Kabbalah, even if taken to its limits it becomes ambiguous and contradictory of any theology pretending to translate and state the divine nature. Nevertheless, Wolfson’s refusal is articulated in the terms of the traditional anti-idolatry polemic of Jewish sources since the prophets. His atheism is shared by numerous Jewish thinkers who have followed out monotheism to atheism as its final consequence. For them, God’s not being identified with anything worldly entails, ultimately, God’s not being at all. Wolfson’s stance serves to check the slide toward “anything goes” that disqualifies postmodern thought in the eyes of many. Wolfson represents the backlash of radical aniconic critique against the new trend in apophatics to recuperate the body and the aesthetic and all manner of positive modes of expression as valid vehicles of apophasis. Wolfson is issuing a reminder that it cannot be that easy. We cannot simply redeploy all positive modes of expression freely—once the caveat of their necessary unsaying (dis)qualifies them. But neither, I believe, can we avoid this turn to incarnational and especially intercarnational apophasis, where the incarnation of divinity takes place not in any one substance or person but in their relations and interactions with one another, indeed of all with all. Nor would its avoidance be desirable. Wolfson resists the resuscitation of theology after ontotheology along lines proposed by Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and by many others such as Kevin Hart, John Caputo, and Jean-Luc Marion, whom, in contrast, Rubenstein specifically acknowledges as opening new apophatic paths.24 For Wolfson, these postmodern writers fall short of Heidegger’s forsaking of security and peace by a plunge into the nocturnal of an “enactmental not” (vollzugsmäßiges Nicht) (Giving beyond the Gift, 231). Bolder than Keller’s apophasis of gender would be a shattering of the icons even of the aniconic

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itself. Wolfson strives for complete transcendence and unmitigated erasure of the theological. “Transcendence of transcendence” or “unsaying of unsaying itself ” are the self-reflexive, self-critical moves Wolfson propounds. I emphatically agree that they are genuinely apophatic moves. But I do not agree that these moves should be made definitively against all kataphatic forms of transcendence or against all rhetoric of the unsayable. These apophatic moves should be deployed not to exclude what apophatic thought presumes to think beyond, but rather to think with its supposed others so as to move beyond its own limits. Wolfson seems to take the language of the writers he opposes as necessarily descriptive and propositional rather than as transcending that function (Giving beyond the Gift, 229). Indeed his criticisms apply only if the language of postmodern apophaticism is taken descriptively rather than performatively, and therefore as self-undermining in its positive positions. The authors he criticizes, when thinking apophatically, I submit, unsay their saying so as to dynamically dissolve what they have said and thereby effect a continuing movement and evolution of discourse beyond themselves and their own saying. And this must be true of any discourse whatsoever that aspires to apophatic validity, including Wolfson’s own. Keller, in particular, might rejoin that Wolfson is setting up barriers to relations that presuppose a certain knowing of unsurpassable limits, a knowing that must itself be critically questioned. She writes: “What a constructive apophaticism in its solicitation of its past must avoid is both foreclosure by knowledge or by the knowledge of not-knowledge: the fixing of mystical ‘no trespassing’ signs on the boundary of the unknowable” (Cloud of the Impossible, 61). This statement contains an answer to Wolfson’s critique and makes Keller’s very different goals evident. Keller points to the endemic downfall of transcendental arguments that fix the boundaries of knowing by claiming to know its “conditions of possibility.” This, too, belongs to the realm of representation, and although it represents a condition prior to representation, it remains itself nevertheless only a representation and projection, and as such it is subject to critique and necessary revision. Wolfson reacts allergically to all forms of reification of the ineffable (Giving beyond the Gift, 228), but how can there be any other approach to the ineffable, at least for scholarly dialogue, except through representations

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and their negations? He aims to counter the turn to theology (in phenomenology or in philosophy) that employs a metaphorical language that personalizes transcendence as undermining the alterity and invisibility of the transcendent Other. Such language does this indeed if you take it descriptively, but that is exactly what apophatic thinking critiques and undoes. Used apophatically, the language of personhood is based on unknowing, not on knowledge, of persons. Known to us is only personhood as we experience it in finite persons. This experience does not disclose the nature of ultimate personhood, but it reveals something about a certain dimension of our relation to the unknown. We personalize even the Unknown, of which we have an uncanny sort of experience. How could we do otherwise, since we, as persons, experience others in relation to ourselves? Wolfson, in effect, simply renders explicit the critique of anthropomorphism rather than actually practicing it by hearing anthropomorphic language differently. This is a purely philosophical approach such as has been familiar since Xenophanes of Colophon. Is it predicated on belief in philosophy and in critique? Are these discursive forms, then, the proper disclosure of truth, or even of God, and so to be preferred to false representations? Heidegger certainly saw poetry as the disclosure of Being, and even of the insuperable undisclosedness or truth of Being. Poetry, language, and thought in Heidegger are mediums of disclosure, even though the Ultimate eludes definitive formulation in words. Perhaps, for Heidegger, philosophical critique alone can preserve that awareness. But others have leveraged other resources of imagination and belief for that purpose. Wolfson’s Jewish Heideggerianism The driving force for Wolfson’s position comes from Heidegger’s meditations on the unrepresentable ground or unground of being. He finds ­Heidegger to have already anticipated the purportedly more radical positions from which Levinas critiques Heidegger, his phenomenological predecessor. Wolfson emphasizes not the differences, but rather the similarity, between Levinas’s dia-chrony and Heidegger’s temporal ecstasies (Giving beyond the Gift, 376). Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality of parousia enacts the Event’s present not by waiting for the future, but rather through discerning its eruption into the present. This happens through repetition (Wiederholung) as a new becoming (neues Werden) or “duplication.”

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Heidegger became acquainted with the eschatological realization of repetition or duplication as a specifically Christian living of time in the primitive Christian experience excavated especially from Paul’s letters by Rudolf Bultmann. Heidegger does, of course, in Wolfson’s view, have to be criticized for convoying the age-old prejudice against Judaism as waiting for a literal event versus Christian spiritual enactment of salvation and the eschaton. But Wolfson himself, in drawing on the Kabbalistic sense of a purely present future, a “not-yet” that already is, brings Jewish messianism close to Christianity, and particularly to a Pauline living in the end-time, or in the time of the end. Moreover, Heidegger is right and radical, according to Wolfson, in recognizing a necessary godlessness of the poet. It is necessary for the poet to stay near to the absence of God in order to hear and transmit an originating word. Wolfson’s overriding (and traditionally Jewish) concern is to avoid deriving gods from the divinization of nature or of human powers and drives. This line of attack repeats the Jewish-prophetic purge against idolatry. Wolfson thus aligns Heidegger rather with Entgötterung, or divestment of idolatrous objectifications (Vergöttung). This permits a restoration of the Abgrund (abyss), and thereby reverses metaphysical obliteration of the ground of Godhood (Giving beyond the Gift, 234). This more radical negation that Wolfson seeks is beyond effability and ineffability and results ideally in the definitive end of all God-talk or “theolatry.” There is simply nothing more of which to speak. This was also JeanLuc Nancy’s position in Les lieux divins (Of Divine Places), among his most aggressively anti-theistic works. Such a position belongs also to the tradition of Jewish atheism that is described, among others, by Blanchot.25 In the lineage of Jewish ethical transcendence, Wolfson thereby undermines the impulse to a relational cosmic transcendence. Wolfson dismisses Richard Kearney’s representing the givenness of being as divine (Giving beyond the Gift, 235), and he vehemently rejects Caputo’s theopoiesis of the divine gift in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (1999), which includes contributions by Kearney. Both authors remain for Wolfson covertly beholden to the theism that they ostensibly seek to subvert. Wolfson writes in the wake of Heidegger and evidently follows “Heidegger’s insistence that authentic philosophical thought must rid itself of any theological impetus” (Giving beyond the Gift, 23). This constitutes an early warning that, unlike Keller, who wishes to revive some form of

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t­ heological discourse, Wolfson wishes to overcome theology and cure us of “theomania,” as he puts it. Wolfson wishes to defend radical apophasis and its transcendence (which should no longer perhaps be spoken of even as “transcendent”26 ) even at the price of relinquishing or overcoming theology. Unlike mobile, dream-like imaginings, a logos of theos always runs the risk of fixing the transcendent. Wolfson is a proponent of the imagination as he finds it at work in the Kabbalah, but he sees it as working against “theology”; thus he believes that the seeds of his own atheology are to be found in the Kabbalistic source texts. He writes of Wyschogrod’s “neo-kabbalistic atheology” (Giving beyond the Gift, 226) as based rather on the “deep negation” of abyss and ­unground (436). For Wolfson, evidently, the anthropomorphic and erotic imaginings of Kabbalah are not compatible with theological, or at least with theistic, beliefs. Whereas, in the traditional sources, the wildest imaginings are still intended by and large as vehicles of theological belief, Wolfson gives instead the impression of being a modern secular spirit like the postmodern deconstructionist critics in which he is so versed—and even more so, since he resists precisely the quasi-religious inclinations that are expressed and explored by Derrida and Levinas, no less than by Kearney and Caputo. Theological or Theomaniacal Imagination On the one hand, against Maimonides and his extension into modern philosophy by Hermann Cohen (based on Kant), Wolfson is advocating “a far more active role of the theological imagination” (Giving beyond the Gift, 25). He is objecting to Cohen’s restricting and impoverishing of theological imagination by paring down the legitimate representation of God to an austere ethical personhood. Revelation and reason must not be allowed to collapse together as they do in the neo-Kantian philosophical project of Cohen. This fails on Cohen’s own terms because a rationally reduced and purged notion of God is still an image of human fabrication and thus a mythologization of God. Wolfson, with Martin Buber, is against any fixing of God’s image: he embraces instead an “exclusive immediacy” of relationship with God. For Buber, however, God is “‘the personally present One’ that can never become a figure,” as indicated by ehyeh asher ehyeh (“I am that I am”) in

Outbound Reflection  49

Exodus 3:11, and God is “the supreme subjectivity that cannot be objectified” (Giving beyond the Gift, 27). For Wolfson, “It is precisely because God remains hidden in the ‘exclusive immediacy’ of this relationship that God is manifest in innumerable forms in space and time. To turn any of these manifestations into a fixed image is to subvert the prophetic truism that God is imageless” (27). We might infer that what is necessary, in Wolfson’s view, is a wild imagining that can self-critically expose itself as imagining and not pretend to be an adequate concept or revelation of God. At the sources of Christian negative theology, Dionysius the Areopagite stressed the unlikeness of images such as “worm” and “mud” as making them paradoxically the most appropriate figures of God, since they most clearly signaled the lack of any likeness or even proportion between the infinite and the finite, between God’s glory and its vestigia here below. Endlessly proliferating images would be a way of unsaying the said and also the unsaying itself, so that we can heed the pregnant silence. However, Wolfson pronounces himself to be against excesses of imagination: “My thinking is very much in accord with philosophers who have taken a critical stance toward the excess of imagination on account of its potential for fostering idolatry and leading the masses deficient in reason to incorrect views.”27 In explicating Buber’s revelation of God in the moment as the formless shining through innumerable forms (Giving beyond the Gift, 28), Wolfson recognizes the “human predisposition to incarnate” as “a theopoetic propensity to imagine the transcendent in forms that are no more than a projection of our will to instantiate in form that which is formless” (29). Again, we are left to infer that God is made present through this imaginative process itself and not as any of its forms or products. Buber spoke of the process of “imagining the real,” and this participatory mode of being theopathically affected—as Abraham Heschel suggests—is perhaps an alternative to the impossible attempt to represent God and fix his (or any) reality in an image. Wolfson takes note of Leo Strauss’s critique of Buber for asserting that images are both true and false. Such contradictoriness is evidently criticizable from Strauss’s Aristotelian point of view, but Wolfson points out that for Buber an image is to be taken also as a concealment and not unilaterally just as a purported revelation (Giving beyond the Gift, 28–29). This inflection leads Wolfson to the solution developed by Rosenzweig. Unlike

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for Cohen and Maimonides, for Rosenzweig the problem with idolatry is not that it represents God in images, but rather that it fixes images. For this limits God’s freedom. An invisible divinity can manifest itself mythopoetically only in a constantly changing imagined reality. This may well be a figure, a Gestalt, as long as it is a representative (Vertreter) and not a representation (Vorstellung) of divinity, to use Leora Batnitzky’s exegesis of Rosenzweig, also cited by Wolfson (30). Such a figure can authentically stand in for and manifest God, but cannot fix his nature in a static image. Such a figure is not literal, but also “not merely metaphorical” (31). It is the authentic inscription of a momentary meeting in which God’s self-­revelation, even God’s self-embodiment (Selbstverleiblichung) or self-­ spiritualization (Selbstvergeistigung), is achieved as a worldly happening and among humans (32). For Rosenzweig, in his own words, manifestations of the divine have a “concrete and momentary character” (konkret-momentanen Charakter). In a theopathic encounter, divine reality is bodily and spiritually manifest in figures that are “a genuine present manifestation of the real God,” but are prevented from congealing into “a lasting image of God,” which would be idolatry and polytheism.28 Rosenzweig insists on revelation in the present as necessary to give ­creation (past) and redemption (future) their reality or “ever-renewed actuality” (allzeiterneuerte Wirklichkeit).29 God must take the initiative of self-disclosure and is not otherwise in any way available for human cognition. Ironically, this happens to be the emphasis also of Karl Barth’s radically Protestant theology, but for Wolfson such an understanding aligns Rosenzweig with Kabbalah imaginings of God, and indeed Rosenzweig saw Kabbalah as a reaction against the strict rejection of images for the divine that was imposed by Maimonides. Maimonides’s teaching led to a codification of the “incorporeality” of God, but even this became somewhat too fixed an attribute, erasing the mystery of the Ein Sof, “the Infinite,” which has no proper form. Being formless, Ein Sof is freed, in some regards, to manifest itself in unlimited corporeal, and spiritual, forms. Rosenzweig saw in the anthropomorphic propensities of what he called the high or late Kabbalah (Hoch- und Spätkabbala) affinities with Christian incarnationalism and saw therein a motive for the appeal of Christianity to Jews such as himself (Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift, 32).

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Representation of God, at least as a personality (Persönlichkeit) revealed as face (Antlitz), is basic to the Kabbalah and is, in fact, based on Scripture. Nevertheless, Wolfson raises the question of whether Rosenzweig, following the Kabbalah, can reclaim mythological representation of divinity as part of “meeting a real God ” without “reducing that reality to a metaphorical configuration of the imagination” (Giving beyond the Gift, 33). This question is the final sentence of Wolfson’s chapter on Rosenzweig. It remains unclear whether Wolfson finds this type of solution valid. He is intrigued and disposed to valorize Rosenzweig, but remains unwilling to embrace his (or any) theism. Philosophy and Imagination’s Role in Knowing In his introduction, Wolfson opens a long historical perspective on this problem of imagination in its relation to idolatry and the typical condemnation of simulacra by philosophy. Since at least Plato, imagination has labored under the suspicion of philosophers who see it as producing deceptive likenesses, and thereby of being a deadly obstacle to truth. Nevertheless, Plato’s imagination bequeathed many undying myths to the textual treasury of Western culture. Ironically, it was Aristotle, in his much dryer, scientific style, who began actually to probe the role of imagination in cognition and to appreciate its essential contributions to perception and memory. Nonetheless, throughout the Middle Ages, imagination was still generally taken as the enemy of truth. Wolfson individuates Kant as the source of “the major shift in orientation” whereby imagination was clearly recognized as the synthetic mental function that is, in fact, a hidden condition of all possible knowing. In Kant (more precisely, in the Third Critique), imagination encroaches upon, and in some ways even subjects, reason. Kant thereby laid a basis for the Romantic exaltation of imagination as the creator of the world. Fichte emphasized the imagination as mediating between the determinate and the indeterminate, between the finite and the infinite, in ways running parallel to Jewish esoteric lore. Medieval Kabbalists, too, had exalted imagination rather than intellect as divine by virtue of its power to make the finite self coincide with the infinite. However, Romantic imagination has a tendency to establish this unity of reason and

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imagination on the basis of total immanence of the divine in the human, thus collapsing the difference between finite and infinite spirit. This is what, by most accounts, happens in Hegel and in Schleiermacher, and also in Romantics such as Blake, as well as in Goethe and his Faust. Jewish tradition has another orientation and other resources that insist on respecting the absolute difference of the divine. Wolfson practices a strict critique of all ontotheological representations of the divine in this spirit of Jewish anti-idolatry fighting against all forms of paganism. He becomes stricter even than Levinas. In “Apophatic Vision and Overcoming the Dialogical,” Wolfson becomes critical even of the “dialogical thinking” of modern Jewish philosophers from Buber and Rosenzweig to Levinas as presupposing fixed personae as conditions of dialogue and of gift giving (chapter 2 of Giving beyond the Gift). Like Derrida and Marion and those whose project is the overcoming of ontotheology, Wolfson wants to free giving from the gift and the giver. In this respect, he takes some important cues from Abraham Heschel. The Jewish religious imagination is described by Heschel as “anthropotropic,” or prophetic, whereby God turns toward humanity, and also as “theotropic,” or mystic, whereby the human turns toward the divine. Heschel argues against using symbolism to reduce theology to aesthetics, thereby endangering true transcendence. Wolfson wants to follow He­ schel’s intuition that the imagination with its symbols reaches beyond itself toward the ineffable. Heschel elicits from these religious traditions insight into how the imagination opens creatively to the impossible and therewith resists the modern tendency to interpret all religious phenomena in terms of radical immanence and a consequent eclipse of transcendence. These immanentist tendencies predominate in philosophical idealism following Hegel and in the atheistic humanisms of Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Freud. Jewish philosophical speculation aims to counter them through a dialogical emphasis in Buber, Levinas, and Rosenzweig that refuses, at least in its intention, to allow the divine to be reduced to the human (Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift, 7). Religion pivots, instead, on a gift that is not fabricated by humans. Wolfson pursues this line even more rigorously than the Jewish dialectical philosophers, and without their theism. He conceives of the gift in terms owing more ultimately to Heideggerian phenomenology than to Jewish theological imagination. The Derridean and Levinasian extensions of

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­ eidegger’s battle against ontotheology are taken up by him and pressed H as the truth (or untruth) to be vindicated and upheld against all idolatry or “theomania” that theistically attributes especially personalized being to God—as Giver. Overcoming Philosophical Idolatry: The Roles of Theology and Poetry Wolfson’s overarching issue, consonant with Jewish critical philosophy, is that of how to escape idolatry. This concern comes especially from Maimonides in the Jewish tradition of negative theological reflection. Maimonides, in a medieval, proto-Scholastic frame of mind, tried to rationalize knowledge of divinity, and for this purpose he felt the exclusion of the imagination to be necessary. The imagination of divinity, nevertheless, took on vigorous development in the Kabbalah. Rosenzweig defends Kabbalah against Maimonides’s rejection of all forms of anthropomorphism. He even interprets Kabbalah as a natural reaction to this extreme Maimonidean asceticism of the imagination. But the question remains for Wolfson of whether Rosenzweig’s championing of revelation as God’s own religion is viable (Giving beyond the Gift, 33). It does entail attributing agency to God, and Wolfson refuses to do that: he argues instead, adopting a phenomenological vocabulary, for giving without a Giver. For him, the absolutely transcendent must not be personalized—every personification counts as a crude anthropomorphization. His fundamental gesture is to radicalize critique by the rejection of any agency for giving, whether formulated in terms of transcendence or of immanence. Yet Wolfson also champions a phenomenology of absolute immanence. Phenomenology beyond Theology, Apophasis beyond Atheology Imagination is capable of a coincidentia oppositorum, of making the invisible visible—on condition that the invisible, like the transcendent, is not hypostatized into something else that preexists its being made immanent by being imagined. In this way, the absent becomes present, even though it is absent only in and through this presence fabricated in and by the imagination. Wolfson would then seem to recuperate the terms of transcendence and revelation reinterpreted in fully immanentist terms. There is a danger that this would liquidate the faith and the community out of

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which he works and thinks. This danger, in fact, haunts the previously cited interview “On Imagination & Narrative in Jewish Thought” that probes somewhat more directly Wolfson’s intentions. Wolfson’s apophasis is not a negative theology so much as a negation of theology, and in this respect his position is comparable to that of certain of the self-declared atheistic apostles of postmodernism. An earlier work offers confirmation of this position that we infer for him: Theopoiesis thus avoids the ontotheological by deobjectifying all discourse about the divine in a manner that coheres to some degree with the apophatic tradition of naming the unnameable, the gesture of speaking-not, which is to be distinguished from not-speaking. Theology, however, always runs the risk of literalizing the metaphor and turning the figurative trope into a reified idol of veneration.30 Wolfson wishes to pursue, instead of theology, a strict and rigorous phenomenology, as if it could be a rigorous science, a “strenge Wissenschaft” such as Husserl envisaged, without any foundation in belief (Giving beyond the Gift, 236). However, in an apophatic vein, he calls for surpassing all representations and sets as a goal, instead, remaining in aporetic ­suspension. Nothing can be said by rights of the giving of the event: “What is necessary, although by no means easy to achieve, is the termination of all representation, even the representation of nonrepresentability, a heeding of silence that outstrips the atheological as much as the theological, the unsaying of the unsaying that thinks transcendence as the immanent other beyond theism and atheism” (236). Here, by not embracing either atheism or theism, Wolfson remains in an apophatic posture—as long as it does not become a stable position definitively excluding other options. For neither is simply avoiding commitment the apophatic way. Either position is possible to adopt as a standpoint for dancing beyond its confines toward what would encompass also the opposite position. Following Wyschogrod, Wolfson’s preferred position seems to be that of “Jewish immanent atheology” (Giving beyond the Gift, 226) and its “immanent transcendence.” He does, however, take the “physical universe” as a given in affirming that “there is no recourse to a transcendence that is external to nature” (225).

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Wolfson wants to escape all doxa and every recourse to representing transcendence and therewith any theopolitical agenda such as Keller’s apophaticism underwrites. He strikes out against analogical imagination and its outdated cosmos (as expressed in Cusa or Dante) and against all personification of the impersonal. In his extreme iconoclasm, he speaks of the need “to rid monotheism not only of the psychological tug to personify the impersonal but also of what Corbin called the ‘pious illusion of negative theology’ and the pitfall of ‘metaphysical idolatry’” (Giving beyond the Gift, 228). But how can he know that God or reality is impersonal? Would it not be more thoroughly apophatic to allow God to be beyond personality and impersonality, even while giving rise to both? Wolfson adheres to a constant philosophical exigency of rigorous antiidolatrous or antimetaphysical critique expressed historically by Maimonides, Kant, and Cohen and, more recently, by Derrida and Marion. Wolfson also has strong affinities with the postmodern a/theological critique pursued by Mark Taylor. He avows his complete agreement with Taylor’s critical treatment of Altizer, whose death-of-God theology is another important influence and precursor. This is Wolfson’s genealogical line as it can be pieced together, in this book, together with, of course, the con­ genital line of contemporary Jewish philosophy of Levinas, Derrida, and Wyschogrod. Yet Wolfson comes back to Heidegger in the “Heideggerian Afterthought” to his book on contemporary Jewish philosophy of apophasis from Rosenzweig through Levinas, Derrida, and Wyschogrod to himself because fundamentally his project is still one of overcoming ontotheology. He condemns ontology (alias metaphysics) together with theology as idola­ trous, just as they were already condemned by Heidegger for losing and covering over the truth of being that had been revealed to thinking among the pre-Socratics. Immanence and Apophasis Wolfson aims to uphold as phenomenological truth the postulate of ­“immanent phenomenality,” giving priority to immanence in the style of Nietzsche and Deleuze. This outlook holds sway in the secular-minded modernity that dominates modern and contemporary philosophical critique. Its will to reduce everything to some “facet of immanence” to my

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mind fights shy of fully opening to the luminous darkness of the apophatic dawn. From the very cover (in the author’s own type of language), Giving beyond the Gift propounds the move back to immanence as “an apophasis of apophasis, based on accepting an absolute nothingness—to be distinguished from the nothingness of the absolute—that does not signify the unknowable One but rather the manifold that is the pleromatic abyss at being’s core.” We can agree that the ultimate is what can be apprehended only as absolute nothingness, but that does not describe the ultimate nature of reality itself in any definitive terms. The desire to have and the impulse to seek such a description is what apophatic critical consciousness enables us to diffuse. “Being” and “core” and “abyss” are still operating as proper terms in this description. At least they are supposed to operate on an altogether different level of truth from that of personalized theistic metaphor. I am left to conclude that these formulations are still striving to say what reality ultimately is rather than giving up that quest, or at least recognizing it as impossible and letting the figures be free to interpret and mediate what we have no proper, especially no philosophical, language to describe and can only imagine. Theistic and personal terms, as witnessed by tradition, have great importance in conveying our relations to and experience of aspects of the real that no terms of ours, notably “divinity,” can properly describe. I think we need an equally forceful critique of immanence and an undermining of its presumable self-sufficiency and self-evidence in the light that is shed from we know not where (as in James Turrell’s installations)— light that has been figured and fathomed in theological language and images throughout the ages (see Kosky, Arts of Wonder, in chapter 1 above, note 6). It is customary to speak of the “transcendent” in order to express this unknown. Wolfson opposes postmodern philosophies of transcendence, but I think that his position, as a postmodern philosopher of immanence, runs the risk of choosing just one side of this tension and thus failing to give full due to its coinciding with its opposite. He argues, with consequence, to a position of Jewish atheism, but does not acknowledge the extent to which atheism is a theism—it requires a concept of God to negate. Atheism, at its most lucid, means not excluding or overcoming theism, but rather reorienting theism to its unfathomable ground that cannot be apprehended except through figures, including figures of person-

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hood, since being persons is surely constitutive of human relationships—­ including our relatedness to the unknowable. In the end, Wolfson’s reason for being critical of language that fails to respect the transcendent is not that he wants to defend God against idolatry, but rather that he wants to put a stop to talk about God (theology) altogether. I suspect (or am given to feel) that, like Mark Taylor, he wants to unsay theology once and for all so that we can be done with it. Then it would seem that we were getting somewhere. In these optics, language for the transcendent is really language for nothing at all and should be exposed as such.

COMPARISON WITHIN THE OPTICS OF A PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNSAYABLE

The Difference between Wolfson and Keller: Separative versus Relational Transcendence Keller and Wolfson propose seemingly incompatible versions of apophaticism. Keller’s apophatic relationalism pivots on a rejection of “separative transcendence,” but this is what really inspires Wolfson in his uncompromising pursuit of Levinas’s thought of absolute alterity and its development as Derridean différance. Levinas thinks within the radical cleavage of the Same and the Other (“la séparation radicale entre le Même et l’Autre”).31 For Levinas, the transcendent is absolutely separate (“absolument séparé”), wholly other, wholly apart from the desire for the other that drives metaphysics. This is necessary to rupture the totality that would otherwise form between Same and Other. Levinas is following Rosenzweig in this decisive move, and it is echoed by Adorno, among others. Separateness, in contrast, enables an ethical relation in exteriority between the same and the other, me and the other person. However, even while intending someone completely other, the intention and conception of the wholly other are formed within the one or the same (me) who is inhabited by this metaphysical ­desire. There is thus something always impossible and compromised about the conception of the absolutely separate and transcendent. It is, after all,

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what cannot be conceived. The moment the Other is conceived by the Same it becomes no longer wholly other but, instead, is inevitably measured to the Same’s own means and possibilities of conceiving. Derrida pointed this out early on in his critique of Levinas’s Totalité et infini (1961).32 And this led Levinas to a more radical formulation in terms of language, Saying and the Said, in his Autrement qu’être et au-delà de l’essence (1974). Only the moment of Saying can preserve an open address to the Other: the Other is always betrayed by any Said, any fixed content that accrues to the pure act of Saying. Ostensibly, the spirit of Keller’s apophasis moves all in the opposite direction from this purge against theolatry.33 She is not seeking separation from the compromised, the idolatrous, the anthropomorphic, but is affirming, instead, a credo of radical nonseparability. Keller’s “theology of apophatic entanglement, cosmopolitically developed” (Cloud of the Impossible, 258), effects, or at least aims at, planetary solidarity between religions, races, sexes, classes, and, in general, all categories. Far from scrupling over the danger of falling into tainted forms of representation, Keller encourages all social groups to grow more free and spontaneous in their self-­ expression. She aims to promote peace through universal “removal of inhibition and not its introduction” (258). In order to articulate the apophatic, Keller and Wolfson have used opposing and even contradictory languages and conceptualities. We seem to have incompatible apophaticisms, with a participatory relational ontology, on one side, and a separative, nonparticipatory atheology, on the other. However, viewed apophatically, systems and postulates that oppose each other may show up as ways of unsaying themselves that then shed light on a common ground or background. My strategy in juxtaposing these opposed approaches in order to elicit a horizon shared in common with my own is reminiscent of Hegel’s Differenzschrift.34 In her championing of the many, the crowd, against the ideal of oneness and the One, Keller is actually in agreement with Wolfson. Wolfson, too, is concerned to deny that Ein Sof (or the Neoplatonic One or the Christian God) can exist without and in abstraction from the Many. This is certainly true, as far as representation is concerned. We only have any idea of the One through some kind of negation of the many. But why, then, deny the power to exist on its own to the One or God or Ein Sof ? This is

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a question that I would pose to both of these authors. By what right can we in any way deny this purely positive, in-finite being, which is thought of as more positive even than any being that we can imagine or think or say? What right do we have to delimit it? Why do we even want to do so? In order to assert our own mastery, no doubt. At least there is, then, some final limit, however minimal and marginal, to our impotence! It is true that any assertion of almighty power attributed by us to the One will be infected with our own will to power. But so is any denial of the same. So we perhaps should just take stock of the formulations of our ancestors and admit that they correspond to proclivities in us and, to that extent, also in the real such as we can and do grasp and experience it. There is no warrant for us not to credit theistic belief in one God as expressing at least a certain kind of human experience and a stage of evolution in the ­relational capacity and acknowledgment of our predicament in all its potential abjectness and radiant glory. And can any of us lay claim to articulating a truth that is not deflected in some such way through our history and ­constitution? Inviolable Separateness versus Cosmic Entanglement Wolfson is extending, even while critiquing, Levinas’s take on separateness, which is itself taking cues from Rosenzweig’s separate elements: God, Man, and World—on which basis Rosenzweig builds his theosophy in Star of ­Redemption. By emphasizing radical separateness, Wolfson’s critique goes in the opposite direction from the cosmology and ontology championed by Keller. He critiques Levinas for not being rigorous enough in repudiating all anthropological language, and he levels a similar objection against Rosenzweig, trying to reconceive the latter’s thought as implicitly lending itself to a/theism. Levinas insists on “radical separation” between self and other as the necessary condition for breaking the totality that precludes ethical relation to the infinitely other. The nature of language or discourse is to maintain this separation: “Discourse by the very fact of maintaining distance ­between me and the Other, the radical separation that prevents the reconstitution of totality . . .” (Le discours, du fait même qu’il maintient la distance entre moi et Autrui, la séparation radicale qui empêche la reconstitution de la

60  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

totalité . . .) (Levinas, Totalité et infini, 29). Language is not simply continuous with nature. It is not to be folded into a seamless web of relations such as Keller typically envisions. The separateness defended by Levinas is also an asymmetry. The infinite ethical obligation to the Other entails no reciprocity. In the theological register, God is not quite folded into the creation because God (or the Other) has to represent an unassimilable, inappropriable, absolute exteriority. Keller’s discourse of enfolding cosmic entanglement without limits would seem to reach a limit in being confronted with the ethical thinking of Levinas. The infinitely entangled, cosmic connectedness of all at the basis of her ethics of relationality is precisely what Levinas denies in affirming the absolute separateness of the Other from the Same as the fundamental principle of all ethical relation. The commandment against representing God turns, for Levinas, into an interdiction against in any way enfolding the Other into the Same. Derrida and other radical Jewish thinkers’ thinking of difference, including Edith Wyschogrod’s, as Wolfson reconstructs her thought, would also seem to be incompatible with Keller’s apophaticism and its principle of nonseparative transcendence. Starting with Rosenzweig, the orientation of this current of thinking, which insists on the eternally separate “elements” of God, Man, and World, sets itself against the speculatively totalizing tendency of German idealism. Kierkegaard and the late Schelling loom in the background here for what is basically an existential orientation that makes knowing secondary to relationality. Of course, this relational emphasis is shared by Keller, but she sees endless connectedness or entanglement and does not wish to underscore any necessary break consisting in relation to an absolutely Other. Behind this polarization of approaches stand debates that have been raging throughout the centuries between paganism and monotheism, or again between Catholic cosmological rationalism and radical Protestant voluntarism, with the latter insisting on God’s incalculable Will as transcending any idea of the Good. This debate took a particular shape in the Scholastic Middle Ages with Franciscans, prominently Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, arguing for univocity and contingency of being against the analogical participative ontology of Aquinas and Henry of Ghent.

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Thinking separates and distinguishes its objects, yet it is in itself a synthetic process. This contradiction inherent to thinking as such produces the divergent directions pursued by Keller and Wolfson. The move of separating may be necessary, and indeed the essential apo-phatic gesture, but the question of what is separated cannot receive any determinate answer. Every specific answer identifies an element that can be folded back into what it was supposed to be separated from, since the distinction is made by the activity of thought in which the separated elements are united. Only the unthinkable lies definitively outside all definitions of thought. It cannot be thought, and yet it can be acknowledged. Keller and Wolfson are taking up different positions along a continuous process of radicalizing ­unsaying that has its moments of saying “not” and then of unsaying that very unsaying. External Relation versus Participation: The Necessity of A/theism Any idea of participation in transcendence will be rejected by Jewish thinkers such as Wyschogrod and Wolfson, following Levinas, as dependent on the myths of positive religion. Levinas embraces a “metaphysical” relation in which the infinite simply speaks to a completely separate being and thereby to an “atheist being” and so avoids the “sacred violence” of positive religion: “Only an atheist being can relate to the Other and already absolve itself of this relation” (Seul un être athée peut se rapporter à l’Autre et déjà s’absoudre de cette relation). “To relate to the absolute as an atheist is to receive the absolute purged of the violence of the sacred” (Se rapporter à l’absolu en athée, c’est accueillir l’absolu épuré de la violence du sacré). In this sense, “monotheistic faith, purified of myths, presupposes a metaphysical atheism” (la foi épurée des mythes, la foi monothéiste, suppose elle-même l’athéisme métaphysique).35 The sacred relation of participation in divinity is replaced by an atheistic relation to the absolute. Monotheism is thus understood as the overcoming of paganism and of the latter’s sacrali­ zation of aspects of the creation and particularly of humanity. This leads to Levinas’s affirmation that “revelation is discourse” (La révélation est discours) and that, to receive it, a separate being is necessary as interlocutor (“Il faut pour accueillir la révélation un être apte à ce rôle d’interlocuteur, un être séparé”). Revelation of the truly other cannot occur to

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a being enfolded into participation. In this manner, “atheism conditions the authentic relation with a true God, one present on its own terms, or καθ’αύτό” (L’athéisme conditionne une relation véritable avec un vrai Dieu καθ’αύτό),36 one who thus is not produced by representation and is consequently not just a figment of human imagination. In Levinas’s terms, revelation is necessarily a discourse directed to a separate being. Hearing the divine Word is not objective knowing, nor even some kind of ecstatic contact with the Transcendent or participation in the numinous, but rather a purely exterior relation, relation to the other human being in society, a relation calling for justice: “A relation with the ­Transcendent—and yet free of all domination by the Transcendent—is a social relation” (Une relation avec le Transcendent—cependant libre de toute emprise du Transcendant—est une relation sociale). Here, in the face of the other human being, “a revelation of an absolute presence” (révélation, d’une presence absolue) that is “disengaged from all relation” (dégagée de toute relation) “expresses itself ” (s’exprime).37 This Levinasian ethic is the basis for a paradoxically atheistic embrace of monotheism. Such a monotheism arises as an attack against paganism and its cult of divinities generally associated with natural and worldly ­powers. The countervailing thesis of monotheism is that divinity transcends the world. This has often been advocated as a great religious truth and used to justify violence. Islam and Christianity were very energetic and often violent in the suppression of pagan cults. Judaism, too, often understood itself as religiously superior because of its having conceived of God’s transcendence of everything worldly. However, on this basis, many modern Jewish thinkers have realized the potential confluence of Judaism and atheism. In order to carry out the undermining of pagan cults and their gods to the end, one has to transcend religious belief altogether, give up all pretenses concerning supernatural powers, and embrace a purely ethical interpretation of the real meaning of religion. “Revelation,” in anything other than an ethical sense, thus needs to be overcome. The true revelation is only that of the ethical obligation of human beings to one another. This, then, would be what the Jewish idea of transcending natural divinities had been driving at all along. Levinas ­demands to be read this way. He uses these terms himself in Totalité et infini. He deepens philosophically the broader currents of Jewish atheism or

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atheologism that Wolfson is tapping into. Derrida and Wyschogrod, too, in many ways transform religion into ethics in order to evacuate all claims of an ontotheological nature. But one can also go in the other direction under the influence of—and in reaction against—our modern secular global culture. Rather than reducing the sacred to the ethical and driving divinity out of the world, one can find the sacred in everything. The result is the extreme development of monotheism into denying to God any distinction whatsoever, even that of existence itself. Since God is nothing separate and distinct—nothing that we can know anyway—everything can be considered to participate in God. This is pushing to its limit the pagan tendency to multiply gods and cults. God might even be simply the connectedness and connectivity of all things. Unlimited relational enfolding. A sacramental cosmos. However, by eliminating God’s distinction, the sacredness of everything again is at risk of losing its theistic and even its religious dimension. The sacred is no different from the profane. A transcendent God might be missed at this point by those who wish to retain religion. This second direction reaching toward all-inclusiveness is expressed in Keller’s rejection of “separative transcendence.” Apophatic thought, however, can keep both of these possibilities—along with what is compelling in each of them—in play. The logic and definitions of any religion can be taken to extremes where they lose their sense. All religious discourses (like all discourses) at some point have to be negated as diverging from the immediately real, which is eternally evolving, unlike the fixity of linguistic formulations. And just at that point is where the dimension of the unsayable and unthinkable opens and the ineffable truth of religion becomes manifest. The connectedness of all, if it is formulated in a thought or concept, becomes totalitarian. The separateness of the other, if it is thought and said at all, no longer respects that alterity, but defines and appropriates it. Either way, it is not the intention of respecting the otherness of the Other or of acknowledging the connectedness of All that goes wrong, but rather the fact that formulating these intentions in thought and language perversely cancels out what they, in either case, envisage. This is the paradox of ­thinking—that it reverses and ruins what is thought by thinking it. In that case, what is necessary in order to attain to the dimension that is being

64  Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic

aimed at by religion and ethics alike is for thought to be able to think against and negate itself. Opposites Meet: The Separate Is Unsayably Related Levinas speaks a language of separative transcendence. This can be found everywhere in his oeuvre, but we can turn especially to the subsection “Séparation et Discours” of Totalité et infini (45–79), where it is first focused thematically and is systematically worked out. Paradoxically, we find there that his separative transcendence is itself based on radical relationality: “The invisible God does not signify only an unimaginable God, but a God accessible through justice. Ethics is the spiritual optics” (Dieu invisible, cela ne signifie pas seulement un Dieu inimaginable, mais un Dieu accessible dans la justice. L’éthique est l’optique spirituelle).38 This implies that there is no knowledge or experience of God, except via relations with humans. Levinas even expresses himself, ironically, in terms of nonseparation: “There can be no knowledge of God separate from the relation to humans” (Il ne peut y avoir, séparé de la relation avec les hommes, aucune “connaissance” de Dieu).39 Thus, even Levinas aims to avoid separating discourse about the Transcendent from actual engagement among human beings held responsible to the demands of justice. This seems to be a version of what Keller would recognize as nonseparative transcendence. By opposite conceptual paths, separatist and connectionist apophatic thinkers (represented by Wolfson and Keller, respectively) can arrive at some similar results. In fact, a discourse of separative transcendence à la Levinas, which is pushed even further and purified of all substantialist, personalist residues by Wolfson, proves to be necessary via the paths trod by Levinas and Wolfson to arrive at a vision of social justice and its irrecusable, transcendent claim on us. For the same purpose, Keller, in contrast, requires the vocabulary of relationality deployed against all separateness. The inescapable contradictoriness of discourse is what comes here to the fore. Either discourse, whether of insuperable separation or of inescapable connection, can hardly help but summon its opposite as included by exclusion. To talk about separative transcendence as excluded is to include it. Conversely, a Jewish condemnation of the fusion of all in one as unacceptably pagan necessarily includes just such a conception as negated in imagining what transcends discourse unutterably.

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In developing a discourse in any conceptual terms whatsoever, one e­ xcludes one’s own opposite. Yet what is excluded is just as necessary to one’s own vision as what one discerns and articulates as one’s theme. The moment when this contradiction surges into view is the apophatic moment, a moment of truth—more than the discourse itself, which only seems to give coherent voice and vision to truth. The truth transpires in actually seeing this discourse collapse into a kind of unintended dependency on, or complicity with, its own opposite, with its contrary or contradiction. Of course, we cannot reach this vision without struggling to develop a coherent discourse. But the irony is that the vision comes in and through the failure and fissure of that discourse. We have to learn how to construct our discourses passionately and coherently, and at the same time to detach ourselves from them, so as to let go of them when they reach their inevitable limits vis-à-vis the unfathomable. Toward a Poetic Perspective Wolfson seems to want to translate theology, even apophatic theology, into a purely phenomenological or “neutral” language about “absolute nothingness,” a language used not “to signify the unknowable One but rather the manifold that is the pleromatic abyss at being’s core.” But these terms are not really more adequate by apophatic lights: they are still human, linguistic artifices that depend on differential opposition and exclusion in order to be meaningful at all. The most fundamental difference is not between one vocabulary and another, but rather between a poetic use of language and constative uses that purport to state what things really are. All metaphors, or at least a great variety of them, can be and are employed by apophatic thinkers. It is not, finally, a matter of choosing the right ones, but of using any of them indirectly to indicate what they cannot properly say. The great merit of Keller’s approach, in my view, is its thoroughgoing metaphorical character. This, I believe, might enable her to be more understanding of some of the vocabularies for divinity that she rejects. The motivations for rejecting notions of divinity as impassive and unchanging, together with all forms of hierarchy, may be more political and pragmatic than dictated by strict necessity of truth. Reasons to imagine the divine otherwise than in the conventional ways certainly emerge in particular social struggles. But there are usually considerable human motivations also

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for the historical languages that many have lived by for centuries. An apophatic perspective enables us to see the conflicts in the perspective of the unity of opposites, even while exposing more pragmatic motives for choosing certain exclusionary languages in our present predicament. In both cases, and indeed in all (I include my own A Philosophy of the Unsayable), language needs to be taken otherwise than in a propositional sense. In effect, this means that it should be taken poetically. Apophasis needs to be understood theologically and philosophically, but also always poetically. This understanding is what has made possible a recuperation of negative theology as not purely negative, but as open to wide-ranging expressions in literature and art. In fact, mythic and even theosophical traditions all through history have often been expressive of essentially apophatic insight. Apophasis needs not to be situated within either theology or philosophy, but rather to adumbrate the larger arena in which their sense is made and unmade. This, in effect, is the space of literature (Blanchot) or of the poietic thinking developed by Heidegger in his turn (Kehre) from the fundamental ontology of Sein und Zeit (1927), according to the reorientations worked out in Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Contributions to Philosophy) (1938). This represents the most aporetic phase of Heidegger’s consistently apophatic thinking. Heidegger’s purpose in the Beiträge is to use language not to talk about being, but rather to let being eventuate in language. He speaks of “the essential swaying of beyng” (Wesung des Seyns) as to be apprehended in the originary (unsprünglich) and inceptive (anfänglich) Saying (Sage) of language that is itself its own “to be said.”40 Humans need to learn to listen and respond to this Saying. They do so essentially in poetry. Eminently, Hölderlin captures and shelters (bergen) the withdrawal of beyng (figuring it as the flight of the gods) in the words of his poetry, while the thinker, Heidegger, employs conceptual words (“begreifende Worte”) in order to deepen this apprehension through thinking. This constitutes an alternative to the propositional use of language and lets beyng speak even in its withdrawal from disclosure back into abysmal silence.41 Literature has been losing ground as a foundational study in the academy, as we become a more and more technically and numerically oriented civilization. But, as Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), for one, long ago made clear, literature and poetics are key to understanding our cultural

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traditions in broader terms reaching beyond their scientifically accurate ­deciphering. Without this sensibility for the limits of determinate meaning and the submerged, never exhaustible conditions of sense-making that are probed in poetic language, our cultural traditions eventually become unintelligible to us.42 By taking Keller’s and Wolfson’s positions poetically—or as expressing in inevitably objectivizing and exclusionary terms something that reaches beyond these expressions—we overcome their apparent mutual exclusiveness. In performing such a mediation, my own position is not even a “position” so much as a mediation between positions. Others’ positions, of course, are potentially this, too, if not fixed and defined—as they inevitably are in critical discourses, including my own. In our postmodern moment, we witness an explosion, but also an exhaustion, of apophasis. At this point, we begin talking about its expressions in art and elsewhere, which are inexhaustible. Everything depends on our being able to understand the languages of poetry and art in general, including arts of living in society, as languages of the unsayable. These expressive modalities invent means of conveying something that language cannot ­ordinarily communicate. Only the recursive reflection on the limits of its ­saying enables the unsayable to resound in a language that has renounced capturing the intention of a discourse in an adequate concept. Keller and Wolfson represent opposed approaches to apophasis, through relational ontology and through rigorous critique of ontotheology, respectively. But both agree in valorizing poetic language. At least this is so if we consider not Wolfson’s rigorous philosophical mode so much as his interpretation of imaginative expressions in the Kabbalah (not to mention his own artwork). The proliferation of expressions of the unsayable in literature and in all the arts opens a vast new horizon for apophatic thinking. We have to understand this opening as resulting from the poetic nature of language, by virtue of which language always says something more and other than what it explicitly affirms. Language relates us always already to the apophatic as an unsaid and unsayable in every saying. Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy resists talking about the unsayable (“Preis dem Engel die Welt, nicht das unsägliche”). It counsels leaving that to the angel and saying rather “bridge,” “jug,” “well,” and such, that is, common things: “Tell him about things” (Sag ihm die Dinge).

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Yet Rilke thereby casts ordinary language in the shadow of what it avoids saying. Negating the apophatic is itself a form of apophasis. Such is also Wolfson’s unsaying of unsaying itself. Apophasis turns out, then, to be a very loquacious field or discipline or genre or mode. In fact, it seems almost too open and unlimited, as if anything goes. Wolfson argues for a rigorous apophasis refraining from characterizing God as in any way personal, and finally renouncing theism altogether. Imaginative expressions, as in the Kabbalah, nevertheless are welcome to him, evidently because they do not purport to describe an independently existing object. Yet calling what these descriptions do refer to “immanence” likewise incurs the risk of making it sound like we know what we are talking about. It is rather in the unknowing of immanence, as also of its counterpart, transcendence, that the apophatic dimension opens up. Unsaying Theology for the Sake of Metaphor or True Myth One thing I will say for Keller is that she thinks poetically, in images, throughout her book. The image of the cloud guides her from beginning to end, just as it served to guide the Israelites through the desert. She lets her thinking play with the cloud image and ply it in every different direction that the imagination can turn and fold it. This gives beauty and creativity to her exposition. And it enables her to evade some endemic traps of conceptual thinking—and unthinking. It helps her to invent and explore a poetic thinking that Heidegger might applaud, and that analytic philosophers would be likely to decry. But neither is her work void of conceptual thinking. From her very title, her cloud image works together with an abstract concept of the impossible. For his part, Wolfson adopts Ricoeur’s reading of Rosenzweig’s thought as “a speculation that is metaphoric throughout, a metaphorics that is speculative throughout” (Giving beyond the Gift, 43). But elsewhere he seems uncomfortable with relying on metaphor as the ultimate frame of discourse. He repeats that truth is inseparable from untruth, but he also rather decidedly rejects certain representations as unequivocally false. Wolfson wants to give theology up entirely, to the extent that it is a logical discourse rather than an imaginative narrative. He objects to meta-

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phor, but evidently only if it is supposed to be integrated into a logical discourse of theology and philosophy. He does not apparently object to the absolutely metaphorical and even thoroughly anthropological imaginings of the Kabbalah. Discourse seems to redeem itself—in this view, as in the other two views compared here—as poetic and by renouncing its claim to scientificity. By distilling her entire theology into the metaphor especially of the cloud, Keller’s imagery covers over and finally vaporizes conceptual definitions. Keller’s unsaying of theology is basically a slide into poetry. She is creating a poetic theology, as much as she means for it to have its bite in social issues and in the literal reality of contemporary society. Nevertheless, this supposedly literal reality cannot be given at all without poetic shaping. Reforming society is always also a matter of reimagining it. That was palpably the intention and ambition of theological poets such as Dante and Blake, along with many other social revolutionaries. Theology is unsaid by these authors in the name of all, in the name of a new universalism, but also in the name of poetry. Poetic language provides the means of universalizing the resources of theology in the interests—and for the ­questioning— of all. The apophatic turn in critical thinking in the end demands that we acquire ears to hear the poetry consistently at work as an immanent critique of our concepts, breaking them open to what language cannot say.

Part II

T H E N E W A P O P H AT I C UNIVERSALISM We have already encountered, in Keller’s work, the key role of Nicholas of Cusa in propounding a new apophatic universalism. Part II picks up with Cusa in expanding theology into a wide-open cultural cosmopolitanism and a universal interdisciplinarity (chapter 3). Chapter 4 then takes a step back from Cusa in the Renaissance to Paul in New Testament times. It thereby brings to focus another crux of recent debate around the issue of the universal. “St. Paul” and “Nicholas of Cusa” are made to stand out exemplarily as two epochal signposts of originating moments for the revolutionary turn in thinking in which we are presently engaged—both in this book and in the making of contemporary intellectual history. After establishing here in part II St. Paul and Nicholas of Cusa as two pivotal turning points for the historical unfolding of Western apophatic universalism, we pursue this history in an intercultural perspective in part III, which outlines some of its major stages in the West and, to a lesser extent, in the East. Part IV then follows out the interdisciplinary ramifications of these apophatic turnings, which in their respective times and places gave a new direction and shape to our historical destiny.

Chapter Three

A P O P H AT I C M Y S T I C I S M A S PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY Nicholas of Cusa and the Applications of Ignorance

CRITICAL ORIENTATION TO CUSANUS REVIVAL IN CONTEXT OF APOPHATIC TRENDS OF THOUGHT

Apophasis has proved to be acutely pertinent to modern and especially postmodern times. Yet its roots are sunk deep in the cultural humus of the ancient world, while various forms of it flourished also in medieval civilization in conjunction with the then-reigning monotheisms, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. A key figure for thinking through the specifically modern shapes that apophaticism is apt to assume is undoubtedly Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64)—known and designated simply as “Cusanus” by his contemporaries writing in Latin. He has frequently served, both in older and in the newest scholarship, precisely for the purpose of rethinking the presumably new character and cultural stakes of modernity. Thus, excellent materials are available to build on and elaborate. What remains to be done, however, is to focus the turn to modernity specifically on the question of apophasis—its loss or transformation. Precisely against this backdrop, the pivotal importance of Cusanus in opening an alternative path to modernity is thrown into sharpest relief. The strongly apophatic character and thrust of Cusanus’s thinking was already well recognized by Maurice de Gandillac and his students, including Jacques Derrida, and is receiving confirmation from many quarters still 73

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today in a sustained renaissance of Cusanus studies. Cusanus’s essentially apophatic inspiration as the advocate of “learned ignorance” has proved to be the key to a recalibration of his place in the intellectual history of the West and to determining his unique significance. New scholarly work demonstrates in particular Cusanus’s paramount importance for the still emerging critique of modern thinking from a specifically apophatic point of view.1 Exactly how this apophatic thrust is to be taken and what it implies, however, remain wide-open questions. I pursue them here to the end of discerning an applied apophatic logic and metaphysics that remain viable for philosophical thinking today. Cusanus’s thought contributes prodigiously to this undertaking. Johannes Hoff, in The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa, has distilled many of the most significant breakthroughs of the newer scholarship into a lucid statement calling attention to the centrality of the apophatic for Cusanus.2 Hoff outlines Cusanus’s alternative to certain dominant tendencies of modern thinking, notably its voluntarism and subjectivism. Modernity stands under accusation here of having lost what Cusanus calls the “vision of God” (visio Dei) through its regressive introversion and consequent reversion to certain forms of narcissism. This narcissistic introversion is symptomatically displayed already in the otherwise pathbreaking technical innovations in linear perspective, innovations that are foundational for modern artistic representation and, in its wake, for far-reaching scientific and technological discovery and development. Michel de Certeau’s essay “The Gaze of Nicholas of Cusa” (1987) laid some of the essential premises for this renewed understanding of Cusanus that is now coming fully to fruition in the concerted efforts of a wide assortment of scholarly endeavors.3 The central issues revolve around modern modes of perception invented by the Renaissance arts of painting and architecture based on mathematical perspective. These modes bear on what is meant in Cusanus’s language by “the vision of God” (visio Dei).4

CUSANUS’S AMBIVALENT RELATION TO MODERNITY

Cusanus’s ambiguous position between the Middle Ages and modernity has long been recognized as defining his pivotal role in intellectual history.

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Influential interpreters from Karl Jaspers and Ernst Cassirer to Kurt Flash and numerous others have made this the obligatory starting point for ­evaluating his contribution to Western thought. However, the exact nature of his debt to—and modernization of—medieval thinking has recently emerged with much greater clarity. Hoff discovers an alternative path to modernity in Cusanus, one that does not renounce the tradition of Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great and the “symbolic realism” of the Middle Ages such as it is expounded by Henri de Lubac in Corpus Mysticum.5 Cusanus’s method and approach cut off in the bud the epistemologically based foundationalism that would grow into a subjectivist and subjectivizing modernity. This is the main branch of modern philosophy that, especially through its Cartesian and Kantian formulations, develops into the paradigmatic metaphysics of the subject. These, in their own self-understanding, epistemologically based philosophies crystalize the world framed by and founded on the clear and distinct perceptions, or introspective apperceptions, of individual subjects. What is meant by “symbolic realism,” inter alia, is that things have intrinsic meanings because the world is created purposefully. Meanings are not just arbitrary, conventional designations assigned by human beings and expressing only their own projections of value in terms of usefulness and perhaps aesthetic pleasure or displeasure. In a modern, radically secular worldview, ultimately all value is a subjective creation and projection on a world that in itself is merely matter in motion and, as such, meaningless. Such a world is describable in purely factual terms and is neutral as to any and all value judgments. In this case, value terms signify only the meaning with which human intentions invest things. There is no natural or intrinsic meaning to being or to beings. This is the modern, scientific worldview that Cusanus does not accept. He adopts, instead, a stance in which certain meanings are inherent in things themselves. Symbolic languages can reveal to us the true natures of things even beyond their immediately visible properties. Signs and the things they signify can in this worldview be truly sacramental. They can be manifestations of a higher meaning than that assigned by arbitrary human conventions: they can even be manifestations of a divine intention. This type of vision bears affinities with mystagogical philosophies and theosophies and is powerfully expressed in esoteric terms later, for example, by Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) in a further relay of this

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strain of German philosophical thinking, which might well be traced back to Meister Eckhart. As suggested by his championing of the traditional wisdom of unknowing right from his earliest works, Cusanus’s program is best understood as being on its guard vis-à-vis the rising pretensions of the objectivizing, positive science of his day, with its heady and almost boundless optimism. Cusanus’s letters bear traces of his recoiling from the proud and inflated science (scientia superba et inflans 6 ) that he encountered already in his student days in Heidelberg and Padua (1417–23). In Cusanus’s estimation, objectively foundational scientific knowing was not the only, nor even necessarily the best and truest, sort of knowing. Unknowing was profounder than every positive kind of knowing, and this is what Cusanus defended in his encyclopedic project, building not on scientific foundations, but rather on the traditional wisdom of knowing ignorance (docta ignorantia). He traced this fundamental posture of the love of wisdom back to Socrates as the one who was distinguished by knowing that he did not know. Recent research has permitted a nuanced articulation of Cusanus’s relation to the Middle Ages and modernity particularly in terms of the epoch-­making notions of autonomous subjectivity and its correlated representationalist space. The unified space created by central (or linear) perspective in painting presents the world for the first time as totally present to and available for representation by a knowing and viewing subject.7 This concept of space, first invented by Florentine Quattrocento artists, was made into the premise of the new systematic philosophy of nature two centuries later by Descartes, specifically in his Discourse on Method (Discours de la méthode: Pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences, 1637). This treatise was originally designed to be published t­ ogether with and as an introduction to his scientific works Dioptrique, ­Météores, and Géométrie. Among Florentine artists and architects, Leon Battista Alberti and Filippo Brunelleschi have crucial roles in laying down the premises for the new worldview that would take its definitive shape with Descartes.8 Hans Belting, among others, places them in their historical context in fifteenthcentury Florence, bringing out how they—and in any case their contemporaries and collaborators (notably Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli and Giuliano Cesarini)—were often close working associates and friends of Cusanus.9

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Cusanus is conversant with the artistic developments of his time and indeed directly in contact and conversation with some of the protagonists and leading figures of the new science. He receives the exciting, empowering new impulses, yet without giving over the tenets of perceptual realism inherent in his medieval symbolic and sacramental outlook, in which no visible or physical space as such can be complete and autonomous. True space he understands rather as a form of manifestation of a reality that is supra- or extra-spatial. The complete and total reality in question cannot as such be represented by any spatial representation. There is, for Cusanus, another and a higher reality than that which is fully manifest in space. The visible, measurable space that Renaissance artists and scientists began to master by new mathematical techniques of representation was for Cusanus an abstraction from the full and unfathomable reality that is only partially perceptible in space. This reality extends from the visible to the invisible. It is endlessly concrete and cannot be exhausted by any representational model. Cusanus inherits from patristic and medieval tradition, moreover, his sense of space as correlated to concrete and embodied experience. This is comparable to the experience that a more recent critic of modern modes and habits of perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has attempted to recover through his notion of the flesh (la chair) as a connecting tissue between the visible and invisible.10 We are in touch feelingly, through our flesh, with realms that we sense but that remain invisible and undisclosed to us. Embodied experience is more real than any mathematical abstraction, such as the idea of central perspective, can comprehend by carving space up in a grid. The latter is a construct that artists, first, and in their following scientists collaborated on inventing and developing. Modern painting, as theorized by Leon Battista Alberti in De pictura (1435), and even architecture, as Alberti presents it in De re aedificatoria (1452), are based on a representationalist fiction. The artwork simulates reality by disconnecting itself from any real continuity with the empirical experience of bodies that can touch one another and communicate in a common space. The famous technique of “central perspective” is based on a vanishing point that unifies space from the angle of vision of the artist or the viewer, who have disappeared. Artist and viewer alike are themselves no longer bodily present in the painting or in the space surrounding it. Their bodies are occulted and recede to the position of the all-seeing eye of God. This reframing, in effect, erases God from the picture. The eye that now

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sees the space created by this representational technique is the only “God” that oversees or in any way belongs to this scene. Such an all-seeing (cuncta videntis) point of view comes to be identified with the perspective of the artist or the human spectator. In other words, there is in the new art of painting no space transcending the space of the represented world—and thus no longer any space for a transcendent God. Alberti’s insignia of the eagle-winged eye in his bronze-relief self-portrait (“autoritratto,” National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC) vividly captures the spirit of this vertiginous new perspective in a revealing emblematic depiction.

THE VANISHING POINT AND THE BYPASSING OF REAL EXPERIENCE IN DIVERSE DOMAINS

The vanishing point in Renaissance painting introduces infinity in a representable form into the field of representation by identifying it, in effect, with the all-seeing eye of the artist or viewer. Therewith the infinity of the divine is supplanted. A single, finite view organizes the world. The world is no longer a social and liturgical space constituted by interactions among viewers communicating with one another concerning their relation to the invisible, as in the space shared by the monks addressed by Cusanus in De visione Dei. In 1453, Cusanus sent this treatise to a Benedictine monastic community along with an iconic image of Christ that he urges them to gather around and contemplate as a group. They will discover that the icon of the face of Christ in turn gazes on each one of them directly, no matter what their respective position. Each monk views the icon from his own angle of perception, and each has the experience of being the exclusive focus of Christ’s gaze. They then communicate this identical experience to one another verbally. And in believing one another’s accounts, something invisible to them as individuals is disclosed to them collectively. Such was to be the remarkable encounter of the monks with the all-seeing icon (figu­ ram cuncta videntis) sent by Pater Nicholas, accompanied by his treatise, to the Tegernsee monastery in the appropriately picturesque Bavarian Alps.11 This experience contains in nuce Cusanus’s alternative to the new type of vision engendered by his contemporaries through the technical mastery of space. Cusanus’s critique is not so much—or at least not directly—that

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the new techniques and outlook compromise the position or the postulate of God, but rather that they sacrifice rigorous adherence to reality. They are scientifically inexact and only approximating abstractions and therefore not intellectually rigorous, in spite of all their practical power. Hoff details ways in which such a representational technique introduces a “representationalist concept of ‘realism’ that is inconsistent with our experience of the real world.”12 Such representation fabricates the fiction of a stable and perfectly unified space that does not correspond to our actual experience. The new perspective is an artificial construction, as was pointed out by some, notably Leonardo da Vinci in his Trattato della pittura, and as Cusanus explicitly argues in his direct critical engagements with Alberti in particular. For the innovators on the vanguard of the new scientific modernity, “the subsequently higher level of mathematical control was considered to be more important than the appeal to a kind of realism. The sacrifice of reality was the price to be paid for a simulacrum that permitted representational security.”13 But Cusanus was not willing to make this sacrifice and so laid down the premises for an alternative modernity, one that would not abandon the symbolic realism of patristic and medieval tradition as outmoded.14 The invention of central perspective in painting is a revolutionary development in this art and a momentous symbol of the whole modern era, with its new world picture. This technical innovation bears significant similarities to the introduction of zero into the number system by Arab businessmen.15 The latter makes the infinite concretely present in a controlled manner in the representations of arithmetic. It enables the system to function as complete and self-enclosed, giving it its own foundation through a fiction that apparently makes the infinite graspable and representable. However, this is only an artifice designed to represent the ­infinite—just like the new representational space of Renaissance art. In its indeterminateness, the zero is a kind of infinite, but one that is wholly determined by its functioning in the system. The merely abstract and vanishing “point” is represented emblematically in Alberti’s winged-eye emblem, which has sweeping implications across diverse domains of culture. It became the Freemason symbol that appears ubiquitously, for example, in the Great Seal on the verso of the U.S. dollar bill, with its all-seeing eye inscribed in the transcendent height of the

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separated, triangular tip of an Egyptian pyramid. This figure is encircled by two mottos of Virgilian inspiration (Eclogue IV) announcing the auspicious beginning (Annuit Coeptis) of a new world order (Novus Ordo Seclorum). The connection of this iconography with money is of more than coincidental significance. There are unmistakable continuities linking the new mode of perception in a totally representational space with capitalist economics, which are based on a similar drive to totalization and domination of all available resources.16 Across numerous fields, modern techné creates systems of total immanence no longer beholden to anything beyond or other to themselves. The representationalist fiction leads to an elision of the imagination of an invisible divine mind and reality by substituting for it a controllable construct of human fashioning. Just as the real body of the artist or viewer has to be eliminated in order to perfect the simulation of reality through representation, so any real worth or value is substituted for by the pure exchange value of money, of an artificially instituted currency, in place of real goods. The infinite regression of a point of view to a mere abstract hypothesis parallels the asymptotic disappearance of use-value (in Marx’s terms) in the modern economy. As use-value is absorbed into exchangevalue in the capitalist economic system, real value likewise becomes purely theoretical. Securities are traded and enormous profits or losses are made with no correspondence to actual worth, but only to alleatory and unfounded bidding up or down of market prices. These technical innovations stand on the threshold of a certain modernity, and the paradigm shift spans from art to economics to politics, with the elimination of the incarnate sovereignty of the king by representative government. The voiding of presence by representation is consummated eventually by the ascendency of the media society and its spectacles. In each domain, bodily reality has been supplanted by an image, and we find ourselves, to echo Heidegger, in the age of the world picture. This ­explains why Alberti distinguishes so sharply between the ergon and the ­parergon, between the work and its frame, as Hoff points out. This distinction separates what is within the work from what is outside it, or (literally) “beside” it, by the device of the frame taken as impermeable. Precisely this artificial separation—put in these Kantian terms of ergon and the parergon (Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, sec. 14)—is broken up by

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Derrida’s reading of Kant in terms of his own postmodern logic of the supplement in La vérité en peinture. But, in the Resaissance, this sort of artificial distinction is used by Alberti to invent a new space subject to rational manipulation. In architecture, Alberti uses the central point of perception in order to reinvent the space of architecture as an image. Space is effectively made into a picture and is apprehended as an image: it becomes “Bild als Raum” (picture as space) in the terms that have been developed in an intercultural art-historical perspective by Hans Belting in Florenz und Bagdad. Belting traces the precursor of this innovation to Arab science, notably Alhazen’s “Perspectiva” (circa 1000) based on his original construction of a camera obscura as model for the eye as passive receptor, resulting in a perceptual subject-object dualism, as catalyzing this technical revolution in Western art and optics.17 Modern art thus creates a virtual, imaginary world that can be controlled from the zero-point of the artist’s geometrical eye. The real world in this manner is dismissed or dissolved as the viewer is invited to dwell in the supposedly higher, purer (and in any case mathematically calculable) realm generated by art. According to Hoff, this leads to Cartesian dualisms and eventually to the Romantic religion of art (Kunstreligion): the resultant view is complicit more generally with the pervasive phenomenon of modern narcissism. Broadly speaking, beauty becomes merely a subjective effect of self-reflection, an illusion: it is no longer the glory that suffuses the real with the light of its origin in the unity of being. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit (Glory of the Lord ) monumentalizes innumerable theological interpretations of this latter cosmic-aesthetic sensibility, delineating its enormous range and embracing premodern art and culture.18 On the other side of this divide, on the cusp of an emerging Romantic sensibility, Giacomo Leopardi, with his poetics of disillusion (disinganno), pathetically expresses the sense of emptiness and loss entailed by the new merely subjective aesthetics.19 He is exemplary of what becomes a widespread predicament in the modern aesthetic age of the subject. Hoff points out that the elevation of a subjectively constructed model to the status of a universal frame for the real leads in Kant to the procedure of measuring beauty and value in nature by our perceptions rather than the reverse. Beauty is made thereby to be merely imaginary. Hoff captures well the paradox produced by this absurd reversal: “Consequently, the beauty

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of nature has to be conceived as a likeness to the imaginary beauty of paintings and buildings, and not the other way around, just as if the virtual reality of our imagination, rather than helping us to enhance our perception of the real world, were instead arranged to increase our sensitivity to the imaginary world of artists.”20 For Cusa, in contrast, the perception of beauty is a mode of knowledge that relates to the actual world first and foremost. There is always a prior reality of the beautiful that is absolute and that is the enabling condition of any perception of it or reflection on our part. Gathering together several source traditions, Hoff elsewhere describes how the aesthetic as a more commonly contingent realm becomes essential to the revelation of reality for Cusanus.21 The beautiful is what links knowing and willing through the attraction of the object that is known by its form. As also later in Kant, a disinterested relationship (without practical purpose or benefit) to a known object becomes motivating and determines the will purely and universally. The beautiful is convertible with the good already in Dionysius the Areopagite’s De divinis nominibus (chap. 4), and is understood to be the cause of all spiritual movement. Cusanus, in a daring synthesis, combines the Pythagorean theory of beauty as a harmony of elements in a whole with the theory of beauty as a singular shining of form that gloriously exceeds its surroundings, as in Neoplatonic metaphysics of light. This later notion of beauty as kalokagathia involves a calling (καλώ) to mind of an ungraspable ground or Good (ἀγαθός) rather than a blending out of this hidden, transcendent principle absorbed, instead, into the context and background. Such innovation is emblematic of Cusanus’s use of traditional resources to invent an alternative new approach to knowing. Nicholas’s resistance to the modern age registers in his refusal to accept the fiction that everything that is or that counts as real and true can be represented in objective space or even as an objectively determinable thought. Modernity is built on just such pillars as central perspective or the infinitesimal calculus that consist in inexact approximations to a reality that, as such and in its own nature, remains beyond the grasp of all reductive formulas and concepts. Technical tricks and fictions are discovered or invented that enable applying some finite formula systematically without limit in such a way, presumably, as to corral a whole domain of the real (space, for example) so

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as to render it autonomous from other aspects of experience and apparently manipulable by our technological means. But these techniques are dependent on mathematical abstractions that deliberately ignore the inexhaustible density and complexity of the real in its interdependent manifestations. Cusanus has sufficient scientific reasons for rejecting the chief technical breakthroughs of the new science that will make the modern age possible.22 He holds that the new techniques are inexact and not scientifically rigorous. They are, in reality, intellectual compromises. Cusanus’s vision here may be steadier than that of others because of his metaphysical faith and spiritual insight based on the all-seeing multiperspectival gaze of God. He knows that “the rest,” which is left out of account by the calculations of the new science, is not nothing, not just a negligible trifle. In fact, the integrity of the whole of reality is at stake, and therefore he could not accept the ­approximations proposed—however easy they made it to invent materially powerful methods and to construct redoubtable machines that would exert awesome power. There was another truth than that of manifest power, one that Cusanus was not willing to forsake, a truth not merely pragmatic, but bound up with ethical and existential commitments, without which, ineluctably, any notion of truth becomes only a travesty.

SELF-REFLECTIVE NARCISSISM OF THE MODERN AGE TURNED TO THE ART OF CONTEMPLATION OF DIVINITY

More or less directly under accusation here is the tendency of modernity to reduce to a species of navel-gazing narcissism. This tendency, which was already patent to Cusanus, is manifest in myriad ways, some relatively innocuous, but also some that are lethal for human values and dignity. The latter can be seen to be fleshed out and enacted by the exasperated hedonism and irresponsible, excessive consumerism typical of a certain late modern decadence. The world is reduced to being a representation for a subject: it is made available, with all its resources, for human exploitation. It is subjected to manipulation by the will of the human subject for whatever purposes or perversions may please or flatter the subject’s fancy. This placing of the real within a frame of the human subject is what Heidegger called Ge-stell. He analyzed it as the essence of technology, with all the

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c­ atastrophic consequences entailed quintessentially by the human attempt to dominate the world. Such striving for total control by means of representation, with the consequent forgetting of Being, Heidegger diagnosed and denounced as the withering introversion of Western civilization in “the Age of the World Picture” (das Zeitalter des Weltbildes).23 This age dawns with the European Renaissance. The humanism of the Renaissance inaugurates its specifically modern phase. Heidegger configures this humanism as fundamentally a narcissistic centering on oneself that goes hand in hand with a concomitant growing deafness to the call of Being in its unassimilable otherness.24 Heidegger’s history of the forgetting of Being begins from and is destined by the Greeks. The pre-Socratic philosophers’ discovery of the Logos as revelation of Being was turned by Plato and Aristotle into a metaphysics. Being as such was forgotten through exclusive focus instead on beings as objects known by subjects. This objective frame of mind fostered the science and technology that developed in the modern West. In his early, but decisive, studies of poststructuralist thought, Hoff works most directly from philosophers in the wake of Heidegger, specifically Foucault and Derrida as critics of Enlightenment reason.25 They and Heidegger alike see this historic self-affirmation of reason as the decisive relay of human narcissistic self-confidence and self-absorption based on the self-exaltation of the unchecked power of human reason in the Logos. Nearest to Cusanus historically is Alberti’s rehabilitation of Narcissus, his “new Narcissus,” with a new premium placed on individual autonomy and subjectivity. In his treatise De pictura, Alberti sets the new painting that serves as mirror of the real emblematically under the aegis of Narcissus, and he elaborates on this humanistic recentering in his treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria (1452). The world is made to turn upon the pivot-point of the individual subject, whose perspective is the organizing principle of a supposedly totalizing, but in effect also navel-gazing, vision. Cusanus adopts this characteristically modern championing of the singularity of the individual, but at the same time he remains attached to the mystical vision of God rather than to objective, scientifically certified vision of measurable objects in space. He embraces the self-reflexivity of the human subject as made in the image of a Trinitarian God, who is intrinsically self-reflexive. But, at the same time, he resists the hyperreflexivity of the narcissistic age,

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for which everything turns out to be merely a reflection of the human subject as the source and principle of all reality. There is, for Cusanus, a reality that transcends human self-reflection, even if self-reflection proves to be our best (and perhaps our only) means of access to it. It is indeed through self-reflective analogy that the transcendent reality of God becomes conjecturably accessible to us: our own inexplicable depths can orient us to the unknowability of the divine. As suggested by Augustine’s theology of the vestiges of the Trinity in the creation, the relations in the soul of the faculties of memory, thought, and will mirror those of the persons of the Trinity in the Godhead. We are made in the image of God, and in realizing our self-reflective capabilities of mirroring the real we can become God-like. By this means, for Cusanus, the human being’s self-reflection recognizes itself as a reflection of a higher self-reflexivity that is not its own and that transcends its control. This self-reflection is, and remains, analogical knowledge of God, or of the ultimately real. It is knowledge at all, rather than pretense and falsehood, only under the condition of not taking itself for the whole of reality—on condition, that is, of self-reflexively acknowledging a higher instance beyond its own purview, an infinite and divine instance, on which it and all else depends. Such self-reflection, accordingly, entails a knowledge of limits: it is knowledge not of itself as a knowable object and as a whole, but rather of its own incompleteness when taken in and for itself. This knowing of one’s limits is for Cusanus a crucial acknowledgment of alterity and of not being God. Modern thinking, in its narcissism, has all too often taken its own self-reflective capacity for totalization as definitive and autonomous and has therewith effaced all relation to otherness. This is the great heretical risk at the heart of the Hegelian dialectic. It ­becomes, in perverted forms, the logic of totalitarianisms such as have ­ravaged modern history in forms ranging from national-socialist statism and communism to colonialism, imperialism, and globalized laissez-faire capitalism. Cusanus’s sensitivity to the “non-other” (li non aliud ) anticipates, in a striking manner, the dialectic engaged some centuries later by Kierkegaard’s challenge to Hegelian self-reflection (Selbst-Reflexion). Kierkegaard found it necessary to negate the dialectical absorption of every other as truly just oneself in order to open up a dimension of authentic ­existence toward God—in effect, the non-dialectical Other.

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There is indeed a manner of self-reflection that belongs to the rigorous, devoted, and life-fostering imitation of God as the Absolute. But there is also a form of “imitation” that absolutizes itself and that thereby loses— or even outright denies—its relation with any essentially external Other, let alone with God. At stake here for Cusanus, as for Hegel, is not a choice between human or divine subjects, but rather the manner of integrating the relation between the two. As suggested by Hoff, “our being has the character of a mirror, not because it reflects a divine ‘subject,’ but because its differentiated mode of mirroring participates in an exemplary mode of mirroring that eludes all creaturely distinctions, including the distinction between seeing and being seen.”26 God has a way of mirroring or reflecting that transcends objectification and that opens infinitely into being that is prior to all distinctions. This is the sense of the Trinitarian consubstantiality of three Persons as one divinity opening into the unlimited gift of being in the Holy Spirit. Seeing and being seen are the same for God and the same even for creatures as seen in God’s view, according to Cusanus’s argument in De visione Dei (notably chaps. VIII–XII). Seeing symbolizes God’s infinite creative power, and is also not distinct from speaking. The Creator Word of Genesis is indistinguishably God’s gaze. Even the distinction between the visible and the invisible collapses (chap. XII). Vision of God is vision of the invisible in the visible. It is an analogical vision of the invisible God in all things of the visible universe. Realizing that our seeing is our being seen by God reframes a subjective act of seeing into a prior passivity of being created and therewith into a much more encompassing act of an infinite seeing or consciousness. At the basis and origin of our act of seeing is the infinite act of God in which our seeing remotely participates and in which absolute seeing is realized in some form of otherness. Our seeing in particular forms reflects God as the ultimately formless “form of forms” (forma formarum).27 Cusanus instructs us that the invisible, or the mystery of our desire for wisdom, furthermore, is “not something we can penetrate by our power of vision alone; but neither is it completely distinct from visible things; rather, it requires us ‘to see the invisible in the visible’ (videre in visibili invisibile).”28 Addressing himself to God, Cusanus writes: “The being of the creature is your seeing and being seen alike” (Esse creaturae est videre tuum pariter et videri).29

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By reflecting on our seeing, we approach our being seen and our being itself as ontologically supported from beyond our will and faculties. Selfreflection is our way of approaching the very being of being, which is God. God is revealed as Trinitarian self-reflection to our faculty of knowing through self-reflection, or as not-other than this reflection itself. Self-­ reflection on our own infinite void reveals God to us. Thus God can say, “Be your own, and I will be yours” (sis tu tuus et Ego ero tuus) (De visione dei, chap. VII, n. 26). Cusanus works through metaphors of mirror and seed to conclude that God’s seeing all things in seeing itself is actual infinity and, as such, dependent on neither objects nor powers. An act of seeing or of consciousness can be opened up into infinite consciousness and infinite being, from which any act whatsoever is not independent. Instead of seeing just an object, the awareness of being seen from the infinite that envelops us is the way that God’s vision can be experienced by us.30 This places Cusanus’s thinking in the context of a kind of mystical seeing, or knowing, or contemplating. Meister Eckhart taught: “The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye and one seeing, one knowing, and one loving” (Daz ouge, dâ inne ich got sihe, daz ist daz selbe ouge, dâ inne mich got sihet: mîn ouge und gotes ouge das ist éin ouge, und éin gesiht und éin bekennen und éin minnen) (Predikt 12).31 Key to understanding such paradoxical perception is contemplating works of art. Art and artisanry are eminent modes of participating in the infinite selfreflection that Cusanus discovers and interprets in theological terms.

ANALOGICAL (UN)KNOWING OF LIMITS THROUGH ART

In De possest and elsewhere, Cusanus points out that man’s being made in God’s image as self-reflective is what enables him to have an idea of his total lack of understanding of God. And the more this incomprehensi­ bility is understood, the more understanding there is. God, for human understanding, is “that which it understands alone by not understanding” (De visione Dei, chap. XVI, n. 69). God is understood only by reflecting on our lack of understanding. Furthermore, only our understanding that our ­desire for understanding cannot finally be satisfied can finally satisfy it, since anything else would be merely finite and therefore not finally, not infinitely, ­satisfying.32

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And unless You remained infinite, You would not be the End [finis] of desire. You, then, continue to be infinite in order to be the End of all desire. For intellectual desire does not aim at that which can be greater and more desirable, but at that which cannot be greater and more desirable. Now, everything that is less than infinite can be greater. Therefore, the End of desire is infinite.33 Et nisi maneres infinitus, non esses finis desiderii. Es igitur infinitus, ut sis finis omnis desiderii. Desiderium enim intellectuale non fertur in id, quod potest esse maius et desiderabilius, sed in id, quod non potest maius esse nec desiderabilius. Omne autem citra infinitum potest esse maius. Finis igitur desiderii est infinitus. Understanding one’s own unsurpassable limits is itself a kind of transcendence, one that paradoxically enables us to approach the God who is without limit. He is understandable only negatively—by disanalogy. We approach him in the deepening apprehension of our own impotence to conceive of him rather than by securing and validating more adequate conceptions of his infinity. We cannot bring God under the control of any representational system. McGinn evokes Bernard Lonergan’s idea of a reverse transcendental insight—“an understanding that our drive toward total understanding can be understood as the affirmation of the existence of an ­incomprehensible Truth that is both within us as infinite desire and outside us on the other side of what Cusanus calls ‘the walls of paradise.’”34 Limits that are recognized become, after all, the occasion for endless self-transcendence, for continuing and endless movement of mind in this very recognition. Limits bring an unfocused “beyond” into view. Hegel similarly maintained that limits that are recognized are in a manner transcended, since they are taken up into thought (Phänomenologie, preface). They no longer simply limit thought externally. Instead, they become part of thought’s own unlimited activity of self-unfolding. Mind itself, for Hegel, is without limit: it is rather a form of dynamic becoming. A limit exists for some definite subject, but also indicates an undefined field beyond itself. From where is the limit drawn or set? To see unsurpassable limits to our knowing is a manner of seeing that there is something beyond what we know, and this unknown can hardly help but be imagined

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as (at least conditioning) the beginning and end and connectedness of all things. In the limit’s shadow, an unfocused “beyond” is at least dimly glimpsed. Cusanus contemplates such empowering/disempowering limitation especially in the layman’s discourses in Idiota de mente (1450). Here he probes some practical limits of knowing. For Cusanus, pragmatic knowledge is understood not in opposition to theoretical and speculative knowledge, but as its enabling means. Rather than condemning speculative knowledge and turning instead to praxis (a gesture that will become typical and almost obligatory in the modern age of experimental science), Cusanus sees the practical knowledge involved in making something, even a simple everyday object like a spoon, as a way of specularly reflecting—and thereby indirectly knowing—the highest act of creation. In its own exemplarily humble way, such an act of making enacts a knowledge by performance and participation in the supreme creative act of divinity. This act is at the same time the height of theory (as expounded in De apice theoriae) and a possible model for an act of contemplation. Even while remaining merely a specific, limited act, making sets the unlimited act of creation into play analogically and enables a contemplative realization of unlimited potential or posse. Cusanus anticipates the modern elevation of art and the artist to the status of primary revelations of the real. Creation of artworks is, in many ways, the best analogy for the activity of God that human life and action can afford. Man’s being a “limit without limit” (Grenze ohne Grenze; De venatione sapientiae, n. 29) is constantly experienced and verified in artistic activity and appreciation. Such activity embodies our own endless desire to know and the continual approximation of its plenitude. The figure of the artist is paradigmatic, in this sense, for the symbolic manner of knowing that is possible for human beings alone. Art embodies a knowing by doing rather than by objective conceptualization.

PRAGMATIC MAKING AS ANALOGICAL CONTEMPLATION

The creative making or art that Cusanus treats as a mode of contemplation is modeled especially by artisanry. The craftsman’s spoon, with its convex and concave mirrors, can become an instrument for exemplary sorts of

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contemplation of the whole of reality and of the divine itself in the curvature of our finite perspective. This is, in effect, Cusanus’s counter-emblem to Alberti’s all-seeing eye. The whole of reality is experienced rather in the humble work of the artisan or craftsman that, nevertheless, mirrors the All. Through pragmatic engagement with worldly things, the craftsman really and concretely achieves a wholeness in his relations that is only simulated by the overtly speculative pretensions of representational science. In Cusanus’s thinking, the gap left by the lack of any possibility of objectively representing God is filled in by human creativity that provides a negative and (dis)analogical knowledge of God. In this way, the incommensurability between God and man, infinite and finite, becomes productive rather than being just an impasse. The meaning of humanity’s being made in God’s image is realized through artistic making as a mode of contemplation of the divine. Robert Miner correctly sees these two aspects of Cusanus’s thought as inextricable: “In the activity of facere, the mind discovers itself to be an image of the divine. Its constructive power indicates its status as an absolute measure, not restricted to any quantity. In this sense, Cusanus affirms the power of the mind to create, although he adds that the world it creates depends on a world not of its own making.”35 Such activity, then, is not simply free and arbitrary creation in a human, secular sphere cut off from the unknowable realm of things in themselves, as would become the case for Kant. Such a severance of human making from things themselves holds also for the Kantian reading of Cusanus proposed by Ernst Cassirer in The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy and by many others in his wake.36 For Cusanus himself, in contrast, God remains normative for all that humans can create. The world in and from which humans work cannot be understood at all except as being in the likeness or image of divinity. A kindred idea is developed especially in the Italian humanist tradition from Petrarch to Vico.37 The motif is powerfully, even if more implicitly, employed by Dante in the Para­diso in images drawn from crafts (sewing, drafting, painting) and the liberal arts and sciences (geometry, optics, astronomy) that undergird his intellectual ascent to the vision of God. On the basis of his own references, Hoff situates Cusanus in the tradition of theosis, of becoming divine, and of the apophatic anthropology of Eriugena.38 This sets Cusanus against the voluntaristic philosophy that stretches from Scotus to Kant and leads to

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the modern nihilism of Nietzsche as analyzed, for example, by John Milbank and by other proponents of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy in their scathing critique of modern culture. In this alternative tradition (alternative to Kant and scientific epistemology), which I am here arguing is best understood as apophatic in tenor, man can be understood as a “second God” participating in the creativity of the Creator.39 This intuition is found already in the so-called Hermetic strand of esoteric tradition. The expression deuteros theos comes from the Corpus Hermeticum, specifically from the Asclepius; it is then further convoyed in Christian Neoplatonism, notably by Dante. Dante is carried away with enthusiasm for the newfound dignity of the human being, whom he conceives of as a quasi-natural incarnation of divinity. Given the embodiment that harbors a potential for self-expression reaching even beyond that accorded to the angels as purely intellectual creatures, a human born under ideal astrological conditions “would be almost another incarnate God” (quasi sarebbe un altro Iddio incarnato) (Convivio IV.xxi.10). Dante’s use of the vulgar tongue and his proto-democratic vulgarization of philosophical and theological wisdom anticipates Cusanus’s valorization of the layman, or idiota. This layman, although ignorant of Latin learning, by virtue of knowing and practicing a handicraft is in crucial ways most receptive to the highest truths handed down and literally “handled” by philosophy and theology. Knowledge in its plenitude must relate to a context of the whole, even if it does so only in unknowing. The mode of relation recommended and enacted by Cusanus’s thought is best understood as a poetic making— folded into a liturgical performing—of ways of relating as a finite individual to a whole context that cannot be encompassed by objective representation, but nevertheless can be creatively performed and engaged. Creative performing turns out to be an eminent way to authentic knowledge not only of the world and of oneself, together with one’s limits, but also to a speculative knowledge of the whole of reality and of its ultimate sources. The whole of our cosmic context bears in delimited ways on us and is reflected in what we produce when we make something artistically. Cusanus is fully modern in approaching everything, including God, through self-reflection. But his self-reflection does not produce a defined, measurable, calculable object. Rather than narcissistically fixating on an

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objectivized representation of itself, such self-reflection opens into an unfathomable abyss of unknowing, in which everything is pre-reflexively infolded into everything else. Cusanus demonstrates the distortions inevitably introduced into knowledge when it is unfolded into systematic, totalizing representations.

LITURGICAL PRE-REFLEXIVE KNOWING

Cusanus’s decisive alternative to the futile and fatal self-enclosure of narcissistic self-reflexivity draws on his understanding of a pre-reflexive type of knowing experienced exemplarily in the performance of the liturgy. His De venatione sapientiae adumbrates a doctrine of praise as a species of pre-­ reflexive knowing that would enact rather than only articulate a judgment. He quasi-evangelically announces his discovery that “the most savory science consists in the praise of God, which establishes all things from his praises and for his praise” (sapidissimam scientiam consistere in laude dei, quae omnia ex suis laudibus ad sui laudem constituit) (chap. XVIII, n. 53). The liturgical performance of praise can in this manner be taken as the basis of the wisdom of unknowing. Cusanus applies such a teaching throughout his works, which are inextricably both gnoseological and devotional. In De dato patris lumini (chap. III, n. 107), Cusanus designates giving praise to the ineffable God (“deo ineffabili”), where to be silent is to speak (“ubi silere est loqui”), as both the source and the summit of all creaturely activities. It stands above all speech and silence (super omnem loquelam et silentium) of this world and belongs rather to the eternal realm (non est haec loquela de hoc mundo, sed est regni aeterni). Hoff outlines how “this liturgical focus on pre-reflexive possibilities [possibility being taken in the sense of possest] informed both the innovative and the conservative features of Cusa’s thinking.”40 Liturgical praise “had a constitutive, gnoseological function: only the praise of God can preserve our truth-seeking mind from the analytic pretensions of a disoriented rationality for its own sake.”41 Most importantly, without this element of praise, knowledge is liable to turn narcissistic and thus to become an illusory figment of self-reflection rather than an opening through self-­reflection

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upon the real in its infinite transcendence of the finite self. As Hoff concludes, summarizing and citing Cusanus, “Whenever scientists praise the selective achievements of human progress more than the glory of their ­creator (suam gloriam dei laudibus praeferunt) (Epistula ad Nicolaum Bonaniensem, n. 27), the philosophical quest for knowledge becomes caught up in a maze of self-deception. We lose our ability to distinguish between what is essential and what is ephemeral.”42 Cusanus’s historical significance is located by Hoff in his maintaining traditional wisdom based on liturgical utterance that remains always apophatically inadequate to its aim and intent, even while embracing the human creativity that has brought about such spectacular achievements in the finite spheres of human industry. Thus: “He aimed to develop an apophatic way of thinking that preempts the nihilistic self-deconstruction of Western Christianity by reconciling the premodern synthesis of wisdom and science with the modern ideals of social, political, cultural, and scientific innovation, and the related ideas of individuality and creativity.”43 The practice of liturgy can bridge and integrate purely speculative with concretely applied kinds of knowledge. The broader problematic of a liturgical praxis reflecting the basic presuppositions of all knowing is searchingly examined also by Catherine Pickstock in After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, hailing from within the ambit of Radical Orthodoxy.44 Pickstock defends Plato’s religiously and ritualistically backgrounded philosophy against Derridean deconstruction by focusing on the apprehension of a truth enacted bodily through liturgical performance. This style of philosophizing deploys powers of signifying that reach beyond those of writing and the letter.45 In these reflections, concrete media-historical considerations rejoin metaphysical speculation as an expression of lived experience.

THE APOPHATIC AS THE NON ALIUD AND AS POSSEST

Cusanus is, above all, the thinker who opens for us a perspective on the significance of apophasis as it is at stake in the turn historically to modernity, albeit in mostly covert ways. He enables us to gauge the loss of the genuine apophatic wisdom of the ancient and medieval worlds through

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the ­subject-oriented, positive, and empirical philosophy of the major founding thinkers (including art theorists) of modernity. We master reality by defining concepts that enable us to grasp it in our own self-­reflective terms, but actually we grasp only our own abstractions and not the real itself in its infinite depth and density. Cusanus’s key (non)concepts, such as Non aliud and Possest and Idem, the first two of which furnish him with the titles of specific treatises (Trialogus de possest and Directio speculantis seu de non aliud ), make this explicit and self-reflexively undo their self-­reflexive closure, opening it to the unfathomable, thereby recognizing God or the infinite. Such self-exploding concepts are, in fact, names for the ­Unnameable. Cusanus fully participated in the milieu of the new artistic discoveries, which would be instrumental to ushering in the modern age. But he sees something there that others are blind to, or choose to ignore, and he works it out speculatively as the dimension of the non aliud, or “not other.” To see things from the point of view of the not-other changes completely, from the ground up, their status and purport. The not-other (non aliud ) avoids systematically defining a relational ontology and rather opens ontology into the dimension of the indefinable. God cannot be defined relationally simply in terms of being other than the things of this world. God is disproportionate to all the particular “others” that can be understood correlatively with the things that are. This is one reason why “he” cannot even be said unequivocally to be “other” than they. That the infinite bears no proportion to the finite (“infiniti ad finitum proportionem non esse”) (De docta ignorantia, bk. I, chap. III, n. 9) is one of Cusanus’s constant and fundamental postulates. It places him in the tradition of Dionysius the Areopagite and of the negative theological thinking of which Dionysius is a chief fountainhead. Given this impasse to first-­ degree analogical description, one needs to think otherness in other than conceptual terms and rather more along the lines of Blanchot’s “relation without relation” in order to come close to the generating insight that drives Cusanus’s thinking. Not relation as a positive quantity or proportion, but its negation, is the key to opening thought toward a more radical thinking of otherness—or rather toward an otherness that cannot be thought at all. This radical, unthinkable otherness, however, does not isolate God into a metaphysical transcendence completely beyond and without contact with our experience. On the contrary, everything is defined by its being

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“not other,” that is, everything in its singular and inimitable being is “not other.” Singularity is the common way that things in general have of being not-other. Each thing is not-other than its own unique self. As attributed to a finite entity, such absolute uniqueness is, after all, universal. The lens of singularity produces an apotheosis of each individual as not-other. Still, God is not-other in a much deeper sense than are all other things. They are not-other specifically with respect to themselves (since they are identical with themselves), whereas God is really not-other with respect to anything at all. For there is nothing lacking in him, and there is nothing that is not in its very being entirely dependent on and derivative from God. The being of all things, in their deepest core, is not other than God. Their singularity is, in effect, the partial presence of incommensurable infinity or divinity in each thing as its enabling power and original gift of being. Other things are not-other in the sense that they are what they are and nothing else. They are not-other than themselves. But God is not-other than anything and everything that is. Other things are not-other because of their limited and exclusive identities, whereas God is not-other because of God’s having no finite, and therefore no definable, identity. One might think that being without definable identity makes God vague and abstract. Analytic and empiricist philosophies, in fact, tend to concentrate on and credit only things that have definition and identity. But it is far from clear that this is the only, or even the primary, type of reality. The most real and concrete being of all might well be considered to be a wholly other type of being that is not identifiable, but that accounts for all things being related together: this would be a kind of being that somehow underlies and is presupposed by them all. What we are can hardly be grasped in abstraction from our relations with others. This type of being as relationality cannot be assumed to be a being. But to say that it is just a relation, and to assume that this attributes less being to it than belongs to any substantial thing, makes assumptions that cannot be decisively proved to be true or even preferable to their denials. Such saying expresses simply the modern prejudice in favor of an empirical universe of individuals as primary realities. It presupposes a nominalist ontology supported by a substance metaphysics. Individuals, then, are supposedly given as atomic units that are positively other to (or diverse from) one another. Seen otherwise, however, the “other” is already a negation, and the not-other negates negation itself,

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thereby opening an infinitely positive dimension—so positive, in fact, that it cannot even be delimited as “positive” or in any other way. The non aliud is an operation opening by means of negation into a concrete experience of the infinite, beginning from consciousness that is negated as being other. It is accepted, instead, immediately and without qualification, in its being present beyond all appearances and identitarian distinctions and divisions. Similarly, the possest eliminates all restrictions and divisions within the real. It situates itself between the possible and the actual by combining posse, meaning “can be,” with est, meaning “is.” Possest embraces both the possible and the actual and is finally the coincidence of the two. Each constituent is negated by the other, and in an infinite manner, such that the possible becomes infinitely actual and the actual infinitely possible—open to ever greater actuality. This key idea of the possest, like that of the non aliud, contains the beginnings and enacts the essential moves of an apophatic logic. The notion of the possest thinks possibility at its greatest as necessarily actual and actuality as the greatest of all possibles. How could the most possible not include the actual among its possibilities (since if it did not, its possibilities would be diminished)? And how could the actual not include also everything that is actually possible? In other words, how could anything be or become possible if it were not made possible by what is actual? Possibility and actuality cannot be divided in their origin and deeper reality. In God, they must coincide. God is absolute actuality, but also infinite possibility. Each line of thought based on one or the other concept cancels itself out by turning into its opposite and therewith breaking thought open to the unthinkable without limit. The latter line of thought—thinking God as possibility—has been developed in postmodern religious speculation, notably by Richard Kearney (The God Who May Be) and John Caputo (A Theology of Perhaps), without much reference to Cusanus and often with considerable skepticism toward traditional negative theology.46 These postmodern apostles of possibility might, if they tried, find in the negative theological speculation of the ­Middle Ages and Renaissance, particularly in Cusanus, apt antecedents in the tradition for their most radical proposals and provocations. Giorgio Agamben’s speculations, too, on potentiality, programmatically in La potenza and most provocatively in relation to the figure of Her-

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mann Melville’s character Bartleby (who would always “prefer not to”), are suspended on the same kind of apophatic insight.47 Taking possibility in its absoluteness beyond all possibility of definition and circumscription frees it from anything opposed to or other than it. Such possibility is infinite and, in effect, coalesces with God, the non-other.

FROM SELF-REFLECTION TO APOPHASIS

The non aliud and the possest, among other conceptual constructions employed by Cusanus, are self-deconstructing concepts that point us back to the pre-conceptual and pre-reflexive bases that lend sense to all subsequent concepts and possibilities of conceptualization. There is always some field or background presupposed for the emergence of sense. Sense that is defined is oppositional and exclusionary, whereas there is a non-oppositional and non-exclusionary ground or unground that is the condition of its possibility. This prior instance cannot be named or conceived, except by opposition to and exclusion of something else, and therefore only improperly or analogically. Cusanus uses mathematical images and stretches them to their limits for this purpose. He demonstrates, for example, graphically how the curve of a circle enlarged to infinity becomes a straight line. He also uses self-deconstructing concepts such as the non aliud and the possest in ways that show how their constitutive concepts turn into their own ­opposites. Thinking, by virtue of its objectifying propensities, normally bases itself on some object with a determinate content. This object stands as its indispensable starting point and premise. Apophatic thinking reverses these natural assumptions concerning the basis and beginning of thinking: it takes every defined object and content as derivative and makes thinking begin instead from what is before all definition, all objectification, all positing, and all determination of any object or content. These forms are always themselves produced by some action or process of thinking that precedes every thought that can be captured by reflective self-awareness.48 Most radical is precisely what is not thought nor even thinkable, but is rather unthought, undefined, that from which determinate thoughts arise and are produced. So apophatic thought is characterized by the

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­ egation of itself as determining and producing the thoughts that are n known and perceived in order to reach back toward what can only be ­gropingly acknowledged as the formless and fathomless source from which thoughts and definable things have come. Cusanus’s self-deconstructing concepts attempt to perform the kind of dismantling or interruption of self-reflection that is necessary for such thinking. In taking this step away from every defined content, apophatic thought opens itself to the undefined and infinite. However, in order not simply to substitute these negative concepts for positive ones, and in order to continue existing as thinking rather than merely as silent openness to mystery, apophasis needs to think in tandem or in dialectical relation with some kind of kataphasis or defined discourse. This is why apophatic thought has a special relationship, a kind of elective affinity or Wahlverwandtschaft with theology. Theology interprets in its symbolic language the unobjecifiable and unthinkable; it offers a guide to apophatic thinking of what the feeling experience of this mystery can offer to our conjectures and imaginative ­exploration. Cusanus’s De mente offers a detailed account of how ratio constructs beings of its own (entia rationis) based on likenesses and differences of sensible things that it makes for itself (ratio facit).49 These constructions are conjectural and are based on likeness and difference, unlike true (and divine) reality, which is without difference. Cusanus construes true reality apophatically as an infinite form that is beyond articulation in speech. Human names are merely conventional constructions, but they are images of an ineffable name (ineffabile nomen), of an infinite nameability (nominalitas). Human arts, similarly, are made in the image of the infinite art of God and can disclose only some part of its workings.

THE PARADOX OF INDIVIDUATION AND ACTUAL INFINITY

The apophatic method that we can learn from Nicholas of Cusa instructs us to direct our attention to the aporiae, where the impossible confronts us, and to understand them as generated by the articulation in finite terms of matters that in their true nature—like every true nature—are infinite.

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Finite articulations give always only partial truth, as we see once we understand truth in its full meaning as infinite. Learned ignorance aims to orient us to the common ground beyond finite and contradictory articulations. For example, the issue of whether will is subordinate to intellect or vice versa points us toward the unity of both in the absolute simplicity of a God who is himself goodness and truth at once—and indistinguishably. This is a classic conundrum that comes up still in the highest physical heaven, the primum mobile, of Dante’s Paradiso (XXVIII.109–14). It runs as a divisively debated issue throughout the philosophical and theological thought of the Middle Ages. There is a voluntaristic tradition stemming from the Franciscans, ­Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus, passing through Thomas Gallus and Kant and extending even to the likes of Marion, that gives priority to the will and the good on the grounds that metaphysical knowledge of the true is not possible for finite human beings. But there is also its opposite number giving priority, at least in the first instance, to intellect and its object, the true—a position attributed to Aquinas and Eckhart, for example.50 In this perspective, any determination of the will can only follow discernment by reason of what is truly worthy of being chosen. However, both approaches inevitably meet their limits and dissolve into the dialectic that relates them together and mutually qualifies them. In the purview of the coincidentia oppositorum, which is Cusanus’s view, not priority but reciprocity and mutual interpenetration—leading to the ultimate unity of all in God—prevail. Not deciding but rather undeciding such controversies by referring them to the infinite ground beyond all their finite determinations is the apophatic way. The question is one of our approach, and each theology’s approach is different. There are farreaching reasons for why certain theologies prioritize either will or intellect rather than the opposite. Will is associated with the subject-centeredness and the obsession with freedom that is characteristic of modernity, whereas intellect, in typical medieval fashion, is more attuned to the order of things given as an absolute rather than as freely formed by an individual subject. The extraordinary achievement of Cusanus is that he manages fully to mediate and conjugate the modern with the medieval approaches pivoting on the primacy of will and of intellect respectively. He envisages functional orderings of intellect to will, and vice versa, so that each is fulfilled through

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the other. In his homo creator doctrine, Cusanus anticipates Vico’s verum factum principle, which holds that the activity of making is the basis of true knowing for humans. But Cusanus also retains the metaphysical understanding of an actual Infinite, as does Duns Scotus, in the perfect being of God as source of all that is. In this manner, he transmits intuitions from Avicenna, taken up by Scotus, regarding God’s infinity as actually intuited but not distinctly comprehended in concepts by the intellect. He even anticipates the mathematical formulations of the actual infinite by Georg Cantor and in some sense also by Kurt Gödel, since he stresses the necessary incompleteness of any representation or system of all. Yet another parallel points up the revolutionary implications of this rethinking of infinity. Alain Badiou’s “Eight Theses on the Universal” (“Huit thèses sur l’universel,” 2004) reach a conclusion that ends up identifying universality with singularity. Although paradoxical, this is made logically compelling and coincides with Cusanus’s thought. Badiou, like Cusanus, is a thinker of the actual infinite, and this accounts for their striking convergence. In his revolutionary élan, Badiou reverses modern logic and metaphysics in some ways that interestingly parallel the premodern proclivities of Cusanus. Badiou’s theory of the universal, nevertheless, belongs, in his own understanding, to the age of the subject as absolute origin, as instituting a historical dispensation by a (revolutionary) act that originates the event of the world. In this, Badiou is thinking along with the founders of Cartesian and Kantian modernity and is forgetting the tradition of Christian humanist learning that nourished Cusanus and his predecessors Eckhart and ­Eriugena. Cusanus’s authentic heir as theological and mathematical thinker of actual infinity is rather Georg Cantor.51 One could argue about who is more rigorous. The formal perfection of modern science and its mathematical calculus is abstract. It works perfectly on its own terms, but it does not take the real completely into account. It excludes the incalculable dimension of the infinite. To this extent, it is very imperfect. Cusanus and his tradition aim to relate to the ultimate perfection of the divine that is only very imperfectly apprehended and represented by human concepts and calculations. Cusanus sacrifices perfection at the level of representations, which is merely an abstract construction, in order to adhere rigorously to the perfection above them and to the real perfection of things—indeed of everything in the infinite. Of course, this di-

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chotomy (like all dichotomies) is ultimately invalidated by apophatic thinking, and we find that scientific, representational modes may after all be the best—or even the only—way of analogically and concretely approaching what we acknowledge as wholly other and beyond our grasp. This is the spirit of Cusanus’s apophatic project beyond any theses that can be directly articulated. One quite provocative consequence of Cusanus’s theory of individuality is that we are truly individual only in contemplating God. Cusanus’s De visione Dei makes clear that individuality is not intrinsic to finite being but, instead, belongs properly only to infinite being. This suggests why Hoff finds that in De visione Dei Cusanus in “his philosophical holism leaves no room for anthropological speculations on an individualized afterlife.”52 Such a conception of the afterlife, according to Hoff, compensated for the decline of the premodern concept of visio Dei in the age of Enlightenment. It was an invention of the modern bourgeoisie. In any case, premodern contemplation of God certainly envisaged realizing divine being on earth and thus evaded an impermeable dichotomizing of this life and the next. The two belonged together as different faces of one ultimate reality. Analogously, Cusanus’s “theology of the circle” (theologia circularis, from Ramon Llull) is “tautological theology”: it treats different predicates simply as different names for the same “focal reality.”53 Cusanus shared the modern desire for perfection. However, as his paradoxical account of the divine triunity indicates, he resisted buying into the deceptive representationalist logic that made this perfection consist in something graspable and representable and led to the liberal dichotomy of individualism and totalitarianism. Instead, he adopted a middle path between the extremes of atomization and absorption. He built rather on the apophatic rationality of the patristic tradition, in which the plurality of our individual viewpoints is not primarily a matter of predication or spatiotemporal differentiation but of ordo (order), as in the ternary taxis of Gregory of Nyssa’s account of the triunity of God.54 The key to individual difference, and to any difference within the unity of God, has to be found in the notion of order in the sense of the Latin ordo, itself informed by the Greek taxis (τάξις). The order within the divine Trinity serves as template for hierarchical orderings down through the entire created order of the universe. However, all orderings of distinct components or individuals are only relative distinctions and are

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justified only as pointing to and holding the place of the one absolute distinction of the Absolute from all else—of Creator from the creation, of the inconceivable from the articulated. Only the latter distinction holds as more than an artificial and relative drawing of distinctions that are functional rather than distinctions of intrinsic worth. Every individual throughout the differentiated order of things serves to indicate that which is without any difference whatsoever. Such is the sense, ultimately, of order and hierarchy. Divine difference levels all human distinctions: in Isaiah’s pictorial prophetic rhetoric, valleys are raised up and mountains and hills are made low (Isa. 40:4). All earthly and articulated differences are erased in the face of God’s absolute and incommensurable Difference. Recognizing the absolutely transcendent and incomparable, which, however, can in no way be defined or determined, is the whole reason and basis for affirmation of multiplicity and difference in this paradoxical coincidence of hierarchy and equality (Cusanus, De aequalitate). Cusanus works toward a solution of the problem of individuation without individual autonomy in terms of hierarchy. Curiously, this fulfills something of the same purpose as the degrees of intensity that Deleuze, following Scotus, uses to solve the Spinozistic problem of differentiation of individuals within the one Substance.55 Both solutions give criteria of individuation that do not depend on a strong doctrine of numerically differentiated substances. Instead, individuation can be secured by different degrees of being, which itself remains one and the same. A metaphysic of separately subsistent material entities, as bequeathed by Descartes, has become our empirical common sense, but is widely felt today to be dated. Postmodern thinkers are impatient with the strictures of classical metaphysics and have looked for ways to break out of them. To do so, sometimes they turn back to intuitions and propose solutions uncannily akin to those launched at the other end of modernity by Cusanus.

SELF-REFLECTIVE VISION OF THE WHOLE: INTELLECTUS VERSUS RATIO

We have seen that Cusanus’s method of thinking is based on the methods of negative theology as developed by his recognized predecessors, especially

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Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scott Eriugena, and Meister Eckhart. Rather than positing a knowable finite object, Cusanus looks at things whole. He includes in his vision even what is not properly a thing, and he acknowledges a principle that is unknowable because it is infinite as the necessary ground of all knowing. Although this principle cannot be known as an object, still thinking itself is an instance of being that is made in its image and participates in it. By knowing its own limits, human thinking can begin to understand that there is something transcending it and its capacities, even though it cannot objectively or positively know what this higher instance is. Its knowledge is rather negative in nature—a knowing of its own limits. Such knowing of our limits points us toward what we cannot understand. On the basis of his negative theological sources, perhaps most directly of Meister Eckhart, Cusanus develops a distinction between ratio and intellectus. This discrimination lays the ground for the distinction between Verstand and Vernunft that is later employed by Hegel and other German idealists. The faculty of knowing finite objects, our rational, calculative faculty, is surpassed by another faculty that relates to the infinite, which is not given to us in any objective form. This higher faculty is defined as intellect (intellectus) by Cusanus, for example, in Idiota de mente (chap. VIII, n. 108). By thinking the limits of our own thinking, we are able to imagine a thinking that is not so limited. The principle is that self-reflective knowledge of one’s own limits opens a way into the endless and infinite as what is not known or knowable, and yet is thereby brought into conscious relation with us in a relation of unknowing. This is the basis of the (dis)analogical method that opens the way to an unknowing knowing, a docta ignorantia or “learned ignorance,” and this is our authentic mode of knowing in relation to God. It constitutes our way of living consciously and reflectively in relation to the unfathomable ground of our being. But this type of thinking requires images in order to be made concrete and convincing. Cusanus uses mathematical, especially geometrical images, like the triangle, already profusely in De docta ignorantia. He develops this symbolic or analogical method in other works, perhaps most indelibly, in De beryllo, and it remains with him through to virtually his last work De ludo globi, where game and play become revelatory symbols. His trilogy of books on the layman, or Idiota (De sapientia,

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De mente, De staticis experimentis), is likewise essential to working out his conception of finite knowledge as a sort of measure that relates us to the ­immeasurable. Returning to basics, and employing a particular type of mathematical example, Idiota de sapientia insists that “one” is the measure of every other number, but is not itself measurable. The one is presupposed by every number: all are measured in terms of it. Nevertheless, the one cannot be attained by any number, none can measure it. “Although we discriminate numerically by means of one [Nonne sicut per unum numeratur]” (n. 5), which is to say that numbers are differentiated by the number of their units, nevertheless “oneness is not attained by number, because number is subsequent to the one [unitas non attingitur numero, quia numerus est post unum]. Similarly, the ounce is not attained by means of weight, nor is the inch attained by means of measure [sic nec uncia pondera nec petitum mensura].”56 Something provides the ground and substance for measurable quantities in whatever genre, but this is not itself just another measurable quantity: a different ontological level of being is required. It is presupposed and is not itself measurable by the measure in question. In this sense, only the measureless enables every measuring.57 This same logic that relates the measurable and the incommensurable applies also to the speakable and the unspeakable. Something unspeakable is always presupposed as the enabling condition for everything that is spoken or even speakable (“in omni eloquio est inexpressibilis”).58 This is an apophatic logic that presupposes what it cannot as such grasp, but can only remark as its own limit. Concerning this ungraspable specifically as unspeakable, Cusanus writes, “Similarly, it is that by means of which, from which, and in which everything that can be spoken of is spoken of; and, nevertheless, it cannot be attained by speech [Est similitur per quod, ex quo et in quo omne fabile fatur, et tamen fatu inattingibile]. Likewise, it is that by means of which, from which, and in which everything that can be bounded is bounded and everything that can be limited is limited; and, nevertheless, it cannot be bounded by any bounds and cannot be limited by any limit” (Idiota de sapientia, n. 8). Thus, in speech too, the limit serves to orient us to the unlimited. This insight defines Cusanus’s overall orientation from practically the beginning of his oeuvre. He describes his original philosophical outlook as

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having been formulated during a visionary experience or epiphany that he received on his sea voyage back from Constantinople to Venice in 1437. He had served the papal delegation of Pope Eugene IV (1431–47) in meetings with the Byzantine emperor and the patriarch. He depicts this inaugural moment in terms making unmistakable the apophatic inspiration of his thinking from its very beginnings. In his “Author’s Letter to the Lord Cardinal Julian,” published at the end of his first and most fundamental philosophical work, De docta ignorantia, he writes: Coming back from Greece by sea, I was led, I believe, by a supreme gift from the father of lights, from whom is every good and perfect gift, to embrace in learned ignorance incomprehensible things incomprehensibly through transcendence of the incorruptible truth that is humanly knowable. quousque in mari me ex Graecia redeunte, credo superno dono a patre luminum, a quo omne datum optimum, ad hoc ductus sum, ut incomprehensibilia incomprehensibiliter amplecterer in docta ignorantia, per transcensum veritatem incorruptibilium humaniter scibilium. (n. 263) This supremely speculative insight emerged in the wake of Cusanus’s practical engagement with problems of establishing concordance between faiths and peace between peoples divided by their different confessions. This coincidence of contraries lies at the origin of Cusanus’s philosophical trajectory and is emblematic. In the Council of Basel (1432–49) and its controversy concerning the role of the pope’s authority (whether or not it should be superior to the council’s), Cusanus actually changed sides in 1437. He was initially on the council’s side in his De concordantia catholica (1433), but having seen how the political manipulation of conciliar power could destroy organic egalitarianism in the name of individual rights, he then found the imperatives of unity of the Church to require the acknowledgment of supreme papal authority. This practical ground for playing out the dialectic of the transcendence of the one over the many, even though the one and the many are not ultimately separate and distinct, was surely integrated into his theoretical understanding.

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Theory and practice, like all other opposites, come to coincide in their mutual truth. Just such an insight is richly illustrative of Cusanus’s characteristically apophatic outlook. And I would venture to surmise that Cusanus’s practical engagement in the ecumenical negotiations was nourished and at least unconsciously guided by an apophatic approach to problemsolving. For all his speculative élan, Cusanus expounds his apophaticism through applied examples. This dovetails with his being engaged throughout most of his life, notwithstanding his dedication to speculative thinking, by the practical activities of a churchman and, finally, a cardinal. The very quest for knowing, when it butts up against unknowing, opens into an experience of this state that relates the (un)knowers to a whole that cannot be embraced, but by which they are embraced. This practical activity of unknowing, yet of experiencing oneself as in relation with all that is, as open to all others without limit, constitutes a figure of apophasis as a broken-open self-reflection that remains on the vanguard of apophatic speculation for us today.

Chapter Four

C O N T E M P O R A R Y AT H E I S T P H I L O S O P H E R S A N D S T. P A U L’ S REVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL THEOLOGY A Genealogy of the New Universalism

PAUL’S ALL (PAN ) BEYOND DEFINABLE DISTINCTIONS

An eyebrow-raising affair and unlikely liaison between the Apostle Paul and a handful of postmodern atheist philosophers lies near the heart of much renewed interest in and rehabilitation of the idea of universality in recent Continental philosophy. The reflections of this chapter aim to trace a certain trajectory of the re(dis)covery of a new horizon of universality in contemporary theory as it emerges from the work of politically minded thinkers, including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben. This chapter moves particularly from these philosophers’ innovative readings of St. Paul as a revolutionary political thinker.1 Rereading Paul’s testament as a political theology has been a powerful catalyst to forming a new horizon of universality that reverses several decades of rejection within critical theory of any claim whatsoever to universal truth or value.2 Since the undermining, especially by poststructuralist critique, of logocentric, ethnocentric, heteronormative universalistic discourses, beginning in the 1960s and ushering in the heyday of multiculturalism, all claims 107

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to universal norms or validity have tended to be rejected out of hand. They are taxed with being totalizing and with obliterating significant differences between individuals and groups, and so are faulted for being inevitably oppressive. But with the new development of critical thought brought to focus here around St. Paul and his postmodern interpreters, literary and cultural theory wakes up to find itself no longer stupefied and stymied by an interdiction against envisaging any type of universal message or mission. It opens its eyes to find itself faced rather with the challenge of conceiving universality anew. What critical thinking discovers, however, I contend, is that adequate means for taking up this challenge can be found only in the self-negating resources of the apophatic. The above-mentioned interdictions against universalizing discourses had resulted from the scathing critiques spearheaded by a generation of post–World War II philosophers, including eminently Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor Adorno, in which pretensions to universality or totality were immediately identified with illusory and violent metaphysics or ontotheologies. Adorno’s thought, in this respect, was allied with and indebted to that of Walter Benjamin. Similar critiques were leveled also by the likes of Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot, and they exercised a virtually unimpeachable moral authority deriving ultimately from the horror of the Holocaust. The universalizing cast of European thinking stood under the accusation of complicity in this calculated system of total destruction aiming at the annihilation of whole ethnicities and of genders with deviant identities and of other groups of supposedly degenerate human beings. Humanity as such had been unconscionably violated through the imposition of a single, totalitarian regime of violence by the National Socialist authority of the Nazi Party and by other similarly totalitarian powers that ravaged the landscape and horribly scarred the visage of the twentieth century. In the wake of this historical nightmare, to speak of almost any type of totality of vision or of universal human ideals seemed, to many, to be tainted with blasphemy. Critical theory today, in the historical turning here under examination, is rediscovering other needs and other means for thinking the whole and total—or more exactly the unlimited—in new forms. I say “forms,” but in reality it is especially in and through formlessness that it has become possible to apprehend the new universality of which I speak. Such a possibility is effectively insinuated by the deformations characteristic of “anamorphic”

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thought and language—language that aims to undo and unsay itself and therewith to undermine any kind of fixed form or static meaning. Especially the millenary traditions of apophaticism or negative theology and mysticism stand behind certain of the new initiatives aiming to think the universal again—but differently—in the most radical kinds of critical thinking today.3 The new universality that it has become possible to think again in postmodern times has been pried wide open by the encounter of philosophy with theology. This has taken place eminently in the political theology of Paul as reinvented by his modern, or more properly postmodern, proponents among contemporary philosophers, specifically Badiou, followed by Agamben, Žižek, Eric Santner, and numerous other recent thinkers.4 Paul has been seminal in sparking off these new directions leading to a wholly new way of thinking universality—or actually of not thinking it, as I will contend. For it is as unthinkable and unsayable that this new universality has radically transformed (and is even now transforming) our hermeneutic horizon and therewith the intellectual lay of the land in our time. Especially the political theology of Paul has opened this new horizon for postmodern thought, pivoting specifically on the question of universality and re-proposing its new nonconceptual All, or rather its not-All, as the necessary antidote to the most oppressive threats of our postmodern ­predicament. Paul’s eschatological vision is one that articulates itself around the Greek word pan (πάν) for “all.” All humans, without distinction of class, sex, or nation, are called to a universal faith by the gospel that Paul preaches: “For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him” (Romans 10:12). The world itself, which counts as “all,” has become passé (“the fashion of this world passeth away”; 1 Corinthians 7:29–31).5 At the same time, all that is, the world as a whole, has been opened up to a new dispensation and to total reconfiguration through universal grace. Paul proclaims a universal salvific event that is the same for all: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Irrespective of race, gender, or class, salvation in Christ is for all. All are invited—ideally, all are destined—to be ­included in this event. Despite all socially instituted separations and ­discriminations—and notwithstanding all talk in the Jewish scriptures of

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gleaning only a remnant of God’s people to be saved—all Israel, and indeed in some sense perhaps the whole human race, will (or at least could) in the end be saved, as Paul explains most fully in Romans, chapters 9–11. Faith in Jesus Christ as the Savior of humankind, according to Paul’s preaching of the gospel, is thus grafted onto what was initially the faith of a certain nation or people—the Jews. There could have been no Jesus Christ outside the context of the millenary messianic expectation that arose in Israel and that was developed theologically within the religion of the Jews.6 But according to Paul’s understanding of the Christ event, this national or ethnic faith has now been broken open into a universal messianism that is unrestricted in terms of social categories of race or religion, and even of social standing and gender identity. In Paul’s messianic outlook, all such worldly values and distinctions are leveled and relativized. All socially sanctioned forms and functions are to be handled “as if they were not” (hōs mé / ὡς μή; 1 Corinthians 7:29–32). Humanly created distinctions do not count in the eschatological perspective of the consummation of all in a final resolution of history as a whole that Paul expects in the form of an imminent end to the world as we know it. Crucial to observe here is that Paul’s “all” is intimately connected with a not: it comes from not making certain distinctions or, more exactly, from not allowing inevitable distinctions to become invidious exclusions. For all alike—slave or free, male or female, Gentile or Jew—are called to salvation in Jesus Christ. The new (non) category of “Christian” might in fact best be construed not as a new identity alongside and excluding the old ones, but rather as the negation of their mutual exclusiveness. The revolutionary implications of this have become more fully evident in light of the crisis of conceptual thinking and of certain breakthroughs reaching beyond categorical reasoning that have been brought about by the intellectual revolution of postmodern theory. This revolution will be examined here principally as it is manifest in the thought of Badiou, Žižek, and Agamben.

REVOLUTIONARY UNIVERSALITY: BADIOU AND ŽIŽEK

This universal faith of Paul is taken as the model for a revolutionary event of truth by Alain Badiou in his Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.7

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What counts most about Paul’s vision of truth for Badiou is that it is universal and that it is so in a revolutionary new form. Badiou’s reading of Paul abstracts from the content of Paul’s faith. For Badiou, the resurrection of Christ from the dead is a “fable.” Yet the militant form in which this truth is embraced and promulgated by Paul is tantamount to the discovery and founding of the event of truth as universal and as possessing therefore a potential for stemming the evils endemic to sectarianism and fragmentation into warring identities. This divisiveness is what most plagues our multicultural world today, just as such racial, national, and religious factionalism posed an analogous threat in the Hellenistic milieu in which Paul lived. In both cases, an empire extends across the known or significant world (significant relative to the dominant classes of the time). Today the oppressive empire of world capitalism, to use the terms of Negri and Hardt,8 occupies the place of the Roman Empire of Paul’s day and age. This overarching structure of a violent world order stands against the possibility of any real event of truth, as Badiou and other Marxist-­ influenced philosophers, such as Slavoj Žižek, see matters. This order is built on exclusionary differences dividing those who are within its legitimating categories of power from those who remain outside it, the marginalized and outcast. Each group has its own standards and values, which are not subject to critique from without. There are no objective truths to which all alike can be held accountable. For Badiou and Žižek, the most revolutionary and perhaps the only effective strategies of resistance against such an invidious order are modeled on Paul’s messianism. In this and perhaps in any situation, truth, such as it can be grasped by human agents, cannot be erected into an overarching frame or structure. It originates, instead, from the order of a singular event. But such an event also changes the order of the whole. This is the startling discovery pertaining to the origins of Christianity that has been made by contemporary atheistic philosophers starting with Badiou. These recent and remarkable attempts by philosophers to find a viable form of universalism (arguably its only viable form) in the event of Christianity and especially in St. Paul, its first theologian, have taken place, somewhat surprisingly, in the context of radically secularized contemporary Continental philosophy. The purportedly timeless universals of abstract concepts have certainly lost their credibility in postmodern philosophy. However, it is now more

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necessary than ever for claims of universality to reassert themselves again against the tug toward fragmentation—against the resurgence of particularist tribalisms of regional, ethnic, sexual, social, special interest, and invidious class identities that only contribute to a world open and vulnerable to unrestricted manipulation within the webs of cyberpower and plutocracy in the age of unlimited, unrestrained global capitalism. All these generic and specific differences can be exploited for purposes of marketing commodities and unscrupulously managing people’s desires. Magazine subscriptions, club memberships, solidarity lists, and all manner of online social networking can be exploited for selling consumer products of all types and styles more effectively by targeting differentiated groups of users or buyers. Is there any universal norm or gender-blind, race-neutral, economically elastic standard that can resist the rampant imperialism of such market capitalism, whose principle is the old, reliable “divide and conquer”? Badiou finds such an invention of new truth precisely in St. Paul and specifically in his call to a universal faith. Although no universal norm can be imposed in one hegemonic language as binding for all, nevertheless all are called in their irreducible differences to commit themselves to a truth that embraces all together in one universally shared world and destiny. Such a truth is always singular and is apprehended by singular individuals in unique ways and circumstances. Yet such a vision of truth envisages the whole of humanity and indeed the universe as a whole, and it is responsible to all without limits. Its intention is as unconditionally universal as its embodied and encultured realization by certain individuals is irreducibly singular. The new universality emphatically entails a singularity that is exempted from the rule of homogeneity and from the repetition of established routines. It interrupts business as usual and erupts onto the scene as an unexpected, unpredictable event. John Caputo identifies a common denominator across a wide range of postmodern thinkers in pointing out that common to Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou, and Žižek is the correlation between universality and singularity: “What everything has in common is its unique difference.”9 Of course, what this difference consists in cannot be said without making it a common property shared also by others. Whatever common quality can be said is one shared by different individuals, albeit in different ways: each instance is unique in some manner beyond all that can be said of it in any general terms.

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This uniqueness is what is missed by world capitalists, for whom everything reduces uniformly to its market price, that is, its exchange value, which is the only value that counts. Nothing has any unique worth in itself, but only the value assigned it in the undifferentiated currency of money, for which it is exchanged. The uniqueness in question may be missed equally by identity rights advocates who are militant in the name of a delimited class or identity belonging to a specific group. Such politics can all too easily become blind to the unique singularity that does not as such belong to any group and is not properly identifiable at all. To the extent that they are cast in terms of “us” versus “them,” all these politics are at risk of becoming invidious. There is then no true universality in them. Universals in this more limited sense are closed in on themselves, on some specific subset with a label: they become exclusive of others. True universality in the new universalist vision (which I call “apophatic”), in contrast, belongs only to the singular that cannot be delimited by definitions or be identified by any exclusionary difference. This is momentously the case for Slavoj Žižek, for whom Paul assumes a similar exemplary value in numerous books constituting a heterodox and especially a Hegelian (and Lacanian) apology for Christianity even in some of its orthodox forms. G. K. Chesterton, the English Catholic apologist for Christianity, exercises a steady, pervasive, and guiding influence on Žižek. Christianity is embraced by Žižek as harboring an orientation toward universal truth that remains unsurpassed in contemporary culture. His philosophy, like Badiou’s, is Marxist in inspiration and motivation and more specifically Leninist, whereas Badiou’s orientation was originally Maoist. Žižek likewise declares himself to be an atheist, yet he too finds the resources necessary for revolutionizing culture and society today invested in Christianity and particularly in the form that it takes on in Paul. Paul pioneers a new understanding of universality, one that departs radically from Greek philosophical tradition. On this basis, Paul has often been recognized as a species of antiphilosopher, not least in our own time. Following Badiou’s lead, Žižek not only abstracts from the dogmatic content of Paul’s truth: he completely and explicitly identifies the content of this truth with “nothing.” The truth that Christianity reveals to be universal is that of the nothingness of God and of the nothingness of the human subject made in God’s image. Each type of subject is but the “gap” separating it from the other, and even from itself.

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Žižek emphasizes the nothingness at the core of the subject, but he takes this as the pivot for opening toward a universal community of love under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, acknowledging Hegel as his progenitor in this conception. This classical Christian doctrine, with its latent heterodox potential, is the most illuminating context for his theory of the person as irreducible, as distinct from one’s given nature and all its definable qualities. It is only as a person in a community, or in other words in the “Holy Spirit,” that I can attain to my singularity. This singularity pertains to my person as an abyss of freedom rather than to my qualities as an individual—the specific differences and idiosyncrasies by which I am distinguished. Schelling can be heard behind Žižek here in his language about freedom as an abyss.10 Following also Orthodox Trinitarian doctrine, as expounded by Vladimir Lossky, Žižek emphasizes that our being made in the image of God consists not in any analogy of being between human and divine qualities, but rather in the abyss-like structure of the person common to both: “It is only at the level of person qua person, qua this abyss beyond all properties, that man is ‘in the image of God’—which means that God himself must also be not only an essential substance, but also a person.”11 Žižek finds in Christianity the injunction to love of neighbor not just in the imaginary realm of narcissistic self-mirroring, nor only in the symbolic dimension of law and duty. Beyond the Law, in Pauline agape, love is accountability to others in the concreteness of singular existence and in the abyss of the Real (in a Lacanian sense). This is the “fragile absolute” that opens the dimension being sought here through delineating a new universalism.12 It is emphatically an unknown, and it is unmistakably apophatic (I would add) in being withdrawn from all definitions and identities. Indeed, Žižek himself finds Paul’s message to be ineffable, whether because of its perversity or obscenity, “a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss,” in the words he borrows from Chesterton’s novels.13 In fact, all this is perfectly conformable to classical negative theology in its denial of all positive attributes as predicated of God and to the corresponding anthropology as developed, for example, by John Scott ­Eriugena in his Periphyseon (De divisione naturae). The forms in which Žižek’s philosophy of “parallax” and the “gap” are elaborated are innovative. Nonetheless, in essentials they are comparable also to the para-

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doxical pronouncements of Meister Eckhart in the apophatic tradition of Christian a-theism, not to mention Maimonides, Ibn Arabi, and others in other traditions. This is something that comes out, or that can at least be discerned as implicit, in Žižek’s debates particularly with John Milbank, who pertinently makes reference especially to Christian sources of negative ­theology.14 Curiously, then, the universal can be attained or approached only by a strategy that is evidently the opposite of what universality was typically taken to mean and imply. It is attained only through absolute singularity, in which the singular individual is called to faith irrespective of all identifiable groups to which individuals may belong. It is in releasing the claim to say and encompass the universal in a formula, the claim to formulate its meaning fully or adequately, that something truly universal emerges. This gesture alone allows all others, regardless of their own system or discourse, to find themselves in nonexclusionary relations with whatever paradigm of thinking has been released. This necessity of universality—and at the same time of not explicitly formulating and stating it—emerges philosophically from a variety of angles, perhaps even more perspicuously than in Badiou and in Žižek, from the thought of Giorgio Agamben.

AGAMBEN’S APOPHATIC UNIVERSALITY: DIVIDING DIFFERENCE

Agamben’s approach to Paul in The Time That Remains,15 his commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, is apparently quite different from the closely and deliberately connected readings of Paul by Badiou and Žižek. Agamben is an uncompromising thinker of difference and so hardly predisposed to go about seeking, let alone proclaiming, universal truths. Nonetheless, his manner of treating difference does orient it in the direction of a universal openness. And this is why Paul’s universalism turns out to be crucial also for Agamben. His reading of Romans, like those of ­Badiou and Žižek, is a philosophical reading that inevitably universalizes Paul. Beyond all sectarian allegiances, the philosophical principles that Agamben finds in Paul’s thought cannot help but bring out something in it with a claim to universal validity. Yet by eschewing universalizing

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f­ormulations, Agamben’s reading of Paul is more consciously sensitive than the others considered so far to the ineffable burden of Paul’s message. For Agamben, as a deeply apophatic thinker (see chapter 5 herein), it is what is inarticulable that is decisive. Agamben quotes Romans 8:26—“the Spirit himself makes intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered”— as a keystone text for his thinking of the messianic, which opens significantly upon the dimension of the unsayable. When Agamben thematizes that which is not defined or definable as what counts most, crucial for him is the immemorial and unforgettable— what cannot be forgotten because it cannot become conscious at all. The unforgettable (l’indimenticabile) because not even formulable is the presupposition of all that is remembered and transmitted as history.16 What cannot be grasped and formed in memory and language is nevertheless the presupposition of all linguistic and conceptual production of sense. What is unforgettable in this sense-making cannot but remain with us as always possible: bearing it is a historical responsibility that must be assumed unconditionally. To refuse it is to risk being haunted by its return—in the guise of the impossible. Faithfulness, as Agamben describes it, to what is lost and not even findable because unforgettable, precludes belief in any worldly identity or calling. A messianic calling, paradoxically, for Agamben, calls to living in the world without God and without salvation.17 Paul’s messianic solution to the divisions among people is in Agamben’s analysis emphatically apophatic in yet another precise sense. With the “cut of Apelles” (taglio di Apelle),18 Paul applies his flesh/spirit division to the other divisions, those between Hebrew and Greek, and between circumcised and uncircumcised, so that the true Jew, the circumcised, is such no longer according to the flesh but according to the spirit. By this means, Paul divides division and produces a remnant: the division is no longer exhaustive. No longer are all simply circumcised or uncircumcised: Paul introduces a further distinction of being circumcised either according to the flesh or according to the spirit. Some who are circumcised according to the spirit are not circumcised according to the flesh, and some who are circumcised according to the flesh are not circumcised according to the spirit. A logic of double negation that admits a third term besides A and not-A, namely, not-not-A, emerges and replaces, or at least displaces, binary logic. Agamben links this doubly negative logic expressly to Nicholas of Cusa’s

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On the Not-Other (De li non aliud, 1461), one of the beacon texts of apophatic thinking in Western tradition, as emerged from our discussion of Cusa in the preceding chapter. Agamben quotes 1 Corinthians 9:21 on how Paul became a Jew to the Jews, but as one who is not under the Law to those not under the Law (Gentiles): “To them that are without law, as without law (being not without law toward God, but under the law toward Christ), that I might gain them that are without law” (see vv. 20–23). Those who adhere to the Messiah are under the messianic law, which is a state of being not not under law. Being under messianic law cannot be positively and legalistically defined. Yet it does not mean being simply lawless either. It is somewhere in between being under the Law and being lawless. It is being not not under the Law in the sense of being liberated from the Law of the Jews and yet not simply without the divine Law like the Gentiles. The adherents of the Messiah are in a state of being not not under the Law, and the divine covenant with humanity becomes, for them, a positive modality of freedom—of living in the liberty of adherence to the Messiah. By such an apophatic logic of double negation, Paul discerns a remnant that is redeemed by the Law and from the Law to live in a liberty that is possible only through this double negation, which becomes a sort of apotheosis of the Law. This true way of being Hebrew and its correspondingly true circumcision (of the heart) constitute a new universality that remains open beyond any ethnic or other barriers, and it does not end in the mechanical production of the same by some merely outward mark (such as literal circumcision) producing uniformity. Agamben positions this new universality in opposition to Badiou and his idea that Paul passes through differences to the Same. Instead, according to Agamben, Paul divides divisions themselves. Rather than forming a new identity by subjective decision and commitment, it becomes impossible for any subject to coincide with itself. There is in this logic no universal above or before divisions: the universal opens up from within divisions and annuls their discriminatory and exclusionary limits. This is, moreover, a prophetic logic proclaiming grace in the form of a remnant: “Messianic salvation, which is a divine work, has for its subject a remnant” (La salvezza messianica, che è opera divina, ha per soggetto un resto).19 Thus Paul, according to Agamben, cuts across differences such as male and female, slave and free, Gentile and Jew, so as to cut them open: they

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are no longer dichotomies of mutually exclusive terms. Instead, each term is broken open to another difference that is absolute and not relative to its opposite, not the counterpart of a binary. Instead, all can share alike in the difference brought about by believing in Christ. No term of any categorical difference (male or female, slave or free, etc.) can count as exclusive of or excluded by the one absolutely important difference, the one between immortal life in grace and truth (in Jesus Christ) and mortal existence under condemnation and death (by the Law). This is the only difference that really counts now in Paul’s vision, and it erases the others, creating a new and peculiar form of universality, one without (definitive) exclusions. As in a certain postmodern anti-logic of the thought of difference, paradoxically this sort of apotheosis of difference makes our ordinary, however inveterate, differences indifferent. Derrida’s signifiers likewise play into one another without end, without ever encountering the difference of a signified that does not itself in turn become a signifier. Absolute difference relativizes all definable differences. In keeping with the outlook of post-metaphysical philosophy and its privileging of finitude and particularity, Agamben prefers to speak for the particular over and against the universal. He emphasizes the particularity of the Jewish messianic event against Badiou’s metaphysical universalism. Already Jacob Taubes, in Die politische Theologie des Paulus, had stressed the specifically Jewish matrix and problematic informing Paul and particularly his Letter to the Romans. Agamben expressly acknowledges his indebtedness to Taubes. However, Taubes was also very much alive to the universalistic implications of Paul: he read Paul through a whole gamut of modern philosophers, including atheists such as Nietzsche and Freud, for whom Paul was nevertheless a model as the founder of a universal culture. Most importantly, Taubes emphasized the pervasiveness of the “all” (pan) in Paul’s vision. For Paul, all that happens in history is worked out in the (to us) crazy and apparently contradictory ways of providence in order to come to the conclusion that all shall be saved. God would even have destined all to transgress in order that all might be forgiven: “For God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all” (Romans 11:32). Agamben, in principle, rejects the language of universality and accuses Badiou—wrongly, I think—of reintroducing a transcendent universal subject. He seems to be misled especially by the subtitle of Badiou’s book on

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St. Paul—The Foundation of Universalism—into thinking that Badiou’s individual subject is foundational.20 Nevertheless, Agamben, too, is proposing a universalizing, philosophical reading of St. Paul, albeit one that insists (following Taubes) on the specificity of his Judaic roots. Even while delving into this zone of historical and cultural specificity, Agamben finds at the core of Paul’s thinking something irreducibly philosophical and universal.

THE POETICO -POLITICAL BREAKING OPEN OF THE UNIVERSAL TO A NEW ORDER

Agamben perceives an extraordinary, messianic form of universality in the general form of the poem, particularly in rhyme as introduced by Latin Christian lyric. A messianic universalism is embodied most intensively in the prosodic scheme of repetition in the sestina.21 In the sestina, the “rhyme words” (parole-rima) ending the verses recall and announce the same words in the preceding and succeeding stanzas: each is repeated in a rotating pattern from strophe to strophe until the programmed cycle of permutations has been exhausted. Time is effectively transformed into the time the poem takes to end. The poem thereby posits itself as a remnant, as what remains before the end. Every poem, thus considered, is a soteriological machine. In Christian allegorical terms, the six stanzas of the sestina correspond to the six days of Creation. As its name suggests, the sestina has only six lines per strophe and six complete strophes, whereas the seventh line or strophe would be the Sabbath. The tornada at the end is the messianic completion, with its concentration of rhyme-words occurring doubled up in only three final lines. Still, the seventh strophe and the end of time are missing. Agamben thus analyzes the form of the poem as analogous to history. It has an internal eschatology: it will end. But while it lasts, it has and generates its own proper temporality. As a metaphor and microcosm, it can stand for universal historical time. The rhythmic measures of the poem in general, punctuated by its rhymes, concentrate and recapitulate its timing and mirror this temporalizing self-reflexively from line to line and from strophe to strophe. Time that is marked as coming before the end is measured with more intensity

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and precision and is invested with a surplus of significance, as the form of the poem upstages and displaces its content. The poem’s language becomes an absolute, a performance of itself in which, however, the rhythm of a new cosmos in emergence is mimetically evoked. From a literary-historical point of view, rhyme originates in ancient Christian poetry, and from the beginning of this tradition, it is associated, thematically and formally, with the messianic event and its Second Coming. Accordingly, Agamben reads rhyme as encoding the structure of messianic time. His striking, even if not entirely original, thesis is that “rhyme is born in Christian poetry as a metrical-linguistic transcoding of messianic time structured according to the Pauline play of typological relations and recapitulation” (la rima nasce nella poesia cristiana come transcodificazione metrico-linguistica del tempo messanico, strutturato secondo il gioco paolino delle relazioni tipologiche e della ricapitolazione).22 Paul’s letters, as modeled on classical rhetoric and Hebrew prosody, create their own internal patterns of parallelism and homophony. Paul, by this account, would seem to have bequeathed rhyme, in its essential rudiments, as a legacy to modern European poetry. Rhyme seems to confer a structure of closure, whereas time is generally a wide-open structure. Rhyme repeats and returns to its point of departure, yet in order to evoke what exceeds it—the dawn of a seventh day beyond the end of the sestina. The shape of eschatological time and the universal in Paul is not that of a completed circle that encompasses the all in its closed circuit, but rather that of a fissured circle that opens to all without limits. A circle can be broken open into a chiasmus, such as . . . ABC CBA . . . , which circles back to its start, A, but on an outward directed trajectory. This is the pattern that Dante deftly weaves into his circular heavens in Paradise (thematized in Paradiso XIV.1–30), through which he spirals in his ascent. Dante’s terza rima, likewise, is open and, in principle, unendable by virtue of introducing always a new rhyme word in the middle verse between its rhyming first and third lines.23 The chiasmus is, in this respect, an incomplete and uncompletable universal. It furnishes an apt figure for reconceiving universality. By employing an open, infinite structure to figure another such structure, one in terms of the other, it moves along lines like those that Badiou follows in envisaging his universal as an actual infinite.24 Badiou uses set theory and

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its multiplicity of infinities that can be mutually ordered to one another in order to escape the simple indeterminacy that is typical of postmodernism and even of a negative theology that would deliver the infinite over to unintelligibility. Nevertheless, for Badiou, the division of the individual subject is necessary in order to avoid having it identify itself by a particular difference that would exclude and separate it from the universal. For Agamben, in contrast, dividing the divisions themselves—­dividing Jews and Gentiles alike into those who believe in the Messiah and those who do not—is the way of reopening the closures of these categories. The believer in Christ is “not not Jew.” No longer estranged from the revelation and the messianic promise to the Jews, which previously divided the world into Jews and Gentiles, the Christian among Gentiles is the one who is not simply not a Jew, since the prophetic oracles and divine revelation of the Jews become the Christian’s very own. This double negation of identity opens a space beyond the divisions, a space in which all, whatever their initial designation, can be united, as is indeed the ambition of Christian messianism. This “cut of Apelles” achieves essentially the same end of breaking universality open to all: it “traverses” all differences, to put practically the same point in the vocabulary used by Badiou.25 It must be admitted that Agamben is not working under the banner of a new universalism: he critiques Badiou’s claim to find in Paul the “foundation of universalism.” Nevertheless, his programmatically apophatic approach to reading Paul in terms more of potentiality than of action contains the universal—provided only that it be understood apophatically as unexpressed and inexpressible. Not as a definable identity, but rather as what remains as undefined in all definitions and still perdures when all orders end, the universal does actually put all into communication with all. Subjectivity is, in the first instance, particularizing and isolating for Agamben. And yet, Agamben envisages a subjectivity that is broken open toward other subjects, potentially toward all other subjects. No subject has private possession even of itself. This notion of universality as unlimited openness to others rather than as an achieved, definable content that is the same for all and in all is, I submit, the operative non-concept of universality that is discovered by St. Paul. This is what makes him attractive to contemporary philosophers, even to thinkers of very divergent persuasions. The true universality in some sense invented and put into effect by Paul is not

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defined as A so as to be exclusive of not-A. It is not defined at all. It is indefinably in all as a unique singularity that can be expressed only indirectly or apophatically as inexpressible. Of course, there is a confessional discourse that defines itself, after Paul, in the “symbols” or creeds hammered out by the Church’s ecumenical councils at Nicaea, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and elsewhere. But the universality in question here, as promulgated by Paul, is of a different nature: it is not any type of defined closure, but rather an unlimited openness. This apophatic notion of universality is what Paul articulates and what enabled Christianity to assume the destiny of being the vehicle of a universality that has so shaped the history of the West. It has given birth, in crucial respects, to the whole modern world. Of course, its opposite number, the universality of the concept, with its logic of exclusion, has also achieved dominance and, in fact, global hegemony in this same modern age that equally erases the universal uniqueness of the singular individual and perverts democratic emancipation to the enslavement brought about by systematic uniformization.26 The new notion of universality originating with Paul is more than ever needed again in our own times so fraught with ethnic and religious conflict. Gender conflict, too, belongs centrally to this constellation, and it, too, can be brought to focus around Paul and the new type of negotiation of difference within the “one body” that he makes possible.27 This new universality is being forged anew by philosophers reacting against fragmentation into identity politics (see, especially, chapter 11 herein) perpetrated by factions left without the means of communicating, let alone of communing, with one another. Paul discovered a Christian calling addressed to an individual, but abstracting from his or her particular, differentiating characteristics as an individual and appealing directly to the singularity that is present as undefined and indefinable in each individual person. All can rise from the dead, as the (supposedly unparalleled) resurrection of Jesus proves. Momentously, the universality that Paul envisaged was not circumscribed by any exclusive or outward, socially visible sign of difference. It appeals to and rests on an interior act of will on the part of the singular individual. It is open to all to participate in this event: all can find the Word as Savior for themselves in the concrete historical person Jesus of Nazareth, who gives himself, and ­belongs equally, to all. In these terms, all are called upon to “risk the abso-

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lute.” This move or leap is seen by the postmodern philosophers responding to Paul as the only escape from the demise of universality with the death of philosophy and theology alike, a universality which otherwise must inevitably succumb to world capitalism and its totalizing empire.28

DIFFERENCE AS ABSOLUTE AND EMPTY—OR INDEFINABLE

In tracing the trajectory of the rediscovery of universality from St. Paul through contemporary philosophers, including Badiou and Žižek, I aim to offer a redefinition of universality as not a conceptual determination, which is its status within classical philosophical discourse, but rather as unlimited openness to others. This redefinition has, in effect, emerged from the transformations of theory in the past several decades, since the fall from high theory to difference-based and often politically driven forms of theoretical reflection. While these developments have sometimes seemed to toll the death knell of all claims to universality, and to follow in a direct line of descent from the death of God, they can also be understood as occasioning a rediscovery of universality in a new and more lively key that is no longer simply and rigidly the universality of the concept. We are required to apprehend universality as it is actually realized in life and existence rather than only as it is thought in the concept. This concretely existential realization of universality is often understood in postmodern discourse as going against Hegel and conceptual thinking. However, it is in crucial ways actually a return to precisely the Hegelian concept, the concept that emerges from historical dialectic, unlike Kant’s and Aristotle’s categories and their respectively transcendentalist and essentialist connotations.29 My contention is that such a (non)concept of universality can best be descried through the lens of negative thought, or more specifically of negative theology, and that it requires articulation in apophatic terms—in terms of what it is not. The fundamental insight of apophaticism is that behind or within all that is said there is always something else, something more, which is not being said, and that this unsaid is in fact what is essential and what indirectly motivates all that is said. In any case, connection with context cannot help but enrich the said’s meaning and motivations. What is actually

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said is only a mode of letting what is not and cannot be said nevertheless be intimated. Apophaticism, understood in this manner, applies to Badiou’s understanding of truth. Truth, for him, cannot as such be known: it is not objectively given. It is the correlative of a subjective decision concerning what is “nothing” within the definable terms of any “situation.” Even as occurring in time, it is the “pure Event.” He identifies it with a “declaration,” and yet a declaration of what? That question turns out to be not even relevant. Badiou himself has indicated that his approach to truth is “formal.” It is not the content of Paul’s proclamation that interests him but rather its form as a model of “truth procedures.” Paradoxically, Badiou’s notion of truth is ultimately Platonic. Commentators on Badiou typically point to his treatment of Paul as a thoroughgoing “dehistoricization.”30 Badiou himself remarks that the truth proclaimed as universal by Paul is notably without content: it is a pure event that is indifferent to all the differences that lend a discourse worldly content. Particularly in chapter 10 (“Universalité et traversée des différences”), Badiou maintains that “Christian militantism must be a traversing indifferent to worldly differences” (Le militantisme chrétien doit être une traversée indifférente des différences mondaines).31 This contentlessness of the universal truth event, its being a pure event without doctrinal or political differences, is stressed also by Dale Martin. Martin broadens the scope of the contention from being just about Paul to applying also to Badiou and Žižek themselves among Paul’s interpreters: “Paul is concerned with the event and what it will mean in the lives of people, nations, and the cosmos, but not with identifying the truth content of the gospel in any philosophical or propositional sense. And in that case, the writings of Badiou and Žižek and Paul himself are notably similar in the absence of content to their truth. They proclaim a truth without ­content.”32 Reinforced by its very contentlessness, the universality that has been found in Paul converges upon something inarticulable, even while it demands Paul’s persistent pronouncement. The universal truth in what Paul is saying is precisely what he cannot say. This has been the common upshot of the approaches developed by Badiou, Agamben, and Žižek. Paul is ­concerned with an event in its excess of all attempts to formulate it in doctrines. His message, especially as interpreted by Badiou, according to Martin, “tells us much of what truth is not but little of what it is. It doesn’t

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tell us what truth actually says in a propositional manner. Truth in this sense cannot be defined. Indeed, it seems that it cannot even be ‘said,’ apart from repeating the narrative of the event itself.”33 Martin points to the epistemological limits of Paul’s messianism and particularly to how knowing God consists rather in being known by him, as Galatians 4:9 suggests (cf. 1 Cor. 13:12). Knowing Christ by faith is not knowing any stateable truth affording objective mastery over the world and its contents. As Gianni Vattimo insists, precisely that sort of pretense to objective knowledge is what is superseded by the revelation of Christ as himself the truth (“I am the way, the truth, and the life,” John 14:6) and of love as the only and universal commandment (Matthew 22:37–40).34 Badiou closely identifies universal truth with enunciation: the truth that Paul apprehends is realized only in being declared as the gospel. But we need also to recognize that such truth is unrealized or derealized in being declared. For, in being declared, the recognition of what is true becomes an ideological program, one that remains fixated on words and forgetful of the truth as such or as universal in its difference from all that we grasp and expressly formulate. We retain only the verbal message that has translated the ineffable experience of truth as openness to all. What is retained is but the husk of the true meaning and its freedom. Being faithful to the truth in this express form inevitably becomes a betrayal of the truth, except to the extent that one can still remember through the words that which is ­beyond them and cannot be formulated or even be remembered as such. The words are reminders of what they cannot as such retain. All of these contemporary, Paul-impressed philosophers are at certain points critical of negative theology and the apophatic (although Agamben is generally favorable). Yet I maintain that, properly understood, just this apophatic moment is what actually unites them. However much it is bent or inflected by these authors in several seemingly contradictory directions, what we can best understand as apophaticism proves to be key to opening their new perspectives on universalism. Behind all their militancy and emphasis on the performative and declarative, these new philosophies call to be understood in light of a philosophy of the unmanifest and unsayable.35

Part III

C O M PA R AT I V E P H I L O S O P H I E S O F C U LT U R E Part III continues to examine the ideas of the contemporary philosophers treated in part II, chapter 4. Part III places the ideas of Agamben in particular, and also of a number of historical predecessors, in an expanded East–West comparative context that has become inescapable today for thinking the apophatic, as well as any other notions aspiring to universality. The challenge is to conceive universality anew as envisaging unlimited openness and thereby as thinking against any given culture and its ineluctable, limiting presuppositions. The history of the West emanating from Europe as the culture that understands itself largely in terms of evolution toward ever greater realization of the universal needs to be confronted with Eastern cultures in order for the West to gain critical distance on itself. East Asian cultures are especially instructive in their more characteristically ­apophatic approaches to thinking universality imagistically and poetically rather than through the strictures of noncontradiction and the logic of the concept.

Chapter Five

C O S M O P O L I TA N C O N V I V I A L I T Y A N D N E G AT I V E T H E O L O G Y Europe’s Vocation to Universalism

At stake in interrogating “cosmopolitan conviviality,” particularly in the European tradition, is a rethinking of the very meaning of universality and of its claim upon us.1 We are challenged to consider the claim to universality as being, in some sense, a European vocation but also, more broadly, an inescapable human concern and even imperative. The rethinking I propose here is guided by the tradition of apophatic or negative ­theology, but also more specifically by deconstruction and critical theory, which I take to consist, in crucial respects, in adaptations and extensions of apophatic thinking in the postmodern world.2 In our postmodern intellectual milieu, the universality that can be envisaged and defended is no longer that of the Hegelian concept. At least not as the latter is commonly conceived. The concept is built on a logic of determinate negation that works from defined notions along with their inevitable exclusions. Any actual concept has an expressible content that excludes everything else, everything that is not comprehended within its definition: A is not not-A. But what is at stake in apophatic thinking is rather a universality without any definitive or definable content, a universality that consists, instead, in an attitude of radical openness toward all others. The approach to apophatic thinking that I develop here and in other books pays careful attention to other cultures and their different, ­specific expressions, yet always on the basis of what can be confined to no 129

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­ articular entities or specifiable identities—the infinite and i­ nconceivable— p as holding open a space that must be preserved against appropriation by all inevitably idolatrous conceptualities. It is, of course, possible to argue that Hegel’s dialectic is moving in just this direction, as some of the most recent, shall we say, “postsecular” approaches to Hegel have attempted to do.3 Hegel, especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit, can well be interpreted as an heir to and a precursor of certain types of apophatic thinking that were transmitted through Nicholas Cusanus and Jakob Böhme, among others.4 I agree with Merold Westphal that Hegel thinks of the concept in a way that actually overcomes the characteristic exclusiveness of conceptual thinking.5 Hegel attempted to embrace both Aristotelianism and Christianity, and hence his legacy remains ambiguously poised between a foundation in finite, determinate being and an embrace of the infinite, giving precedence now to one, now to the other, and attempting to mediate their difference. Nevertheless, the idea of the System closed by Absolute Knowing through the concept, which was and is typically taken as Hegel’s final testament, provoked the rebellion of numerous highly influential thinkers, notably in France in the second half of the twentieth century, giving rise to various postmodern styles of thinking.6 This postmodern milieu and its provocations form the background here for an attempt to rethink the idea of universality in a way that takes account of and integrates several decades of revolutionary ferment and radical reflection, particularly in the fields of literary theory and cultural studies. One of the main thrusts of these movements has been to challenge and disperse Eurocentrism, and yet their impetus can also be seen as deeply and enduringly European in origin and inspiration. I aim, in any case, to show that a revolutionary and transformative notion of universality issues from Europe’s involvement in world history and specifically from the engagement of European thinking and theory with other cultures throughout the world.

EUROPE’S VOCATION TO COSMOPOLITAN UNIVERSALISM

Europe’s geographical shape and orientation as continuous with and opening upon the Euro-Asian landmass inscribes a kind of call to cosmopolitan-

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ism into its very physical constitution and cartographical outline. It takes on the paradoxical shape of an incontinent continent—one that cannot contain itself. This uncontainable flowing out beyond its own ostensible boundaries is more than just a superficial impression gathered from a rapid glance at the map. It depends not only on the lack of separation from Asia. Europe’s historical emergence from and dependence on the Mediterranean (literally the “in-the-middle-of-the-earth”) Sea as a connecting passage to other continents likewise sets it up as rebounding back upon other areas of the earth rather than withdrawing into itself in continental autarky. From its inception, and even before acquiring any specific institutional structure, Europe is configured geographically as an open way of passage more than as a discrete territory or separate entity unto itself. It is, in this regard, nothing like the “Central Country” (Zhōng guó—China’s name for itself ), nor like a destined New World, and even less like an eschatological Promised Land. Each of these fantasies is, in its own way, a place that has no need of any other, a place of sufficiency, plenitude, and perfection, a place that contains everything essential within itself, a place where everything is present. Europe, in contrast, turns outward toward a world that exists before—and also beyond and outside—itself. In this respect, Europe originates in and with its relation to others. The symbolic value of this geographical configuration is itself highly suggestive and has been exploited by philosophers who have addressed themselves to questions concerning the formation of a European identity. There is a fascinating subfield of philosophical reflection devoted to speculative interpretation of the meaning and destiny of Europe. Such speculation may or may not include hypotheses regarding any actual predestination by geography. Among relatively recent contributors, Rémi Brague broached the idea that Europe is nothing but a container for content coming from elsewhere. He influentially philosophized the status of Europe as determined by an “eccentric identity” (identité excentrique), since its veritable sources in Judaism and Hellenism were exogenous. These two extrinsic sources confer upon Europe a character of “Romanity” (Romanité), which carries a strong connotation of cultural secondariness (“secondarité ­culturelle”).7 Rome is noted for “having invented nothing” (n’a rien inventé). Its achievement was rather the transplantation of culture into new contexts. In this relation, Rome contrasts with the insistence on autochthony dear

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to the Greeks. As the direct successor to Greece on the stage of world power, Rome knew itself to be the transmitter of another culture superior to its own. As Horace (65–8 BC) long ago recognized, Greece, having been made captive by arms, conquered its Latin conqueror in turn by arts (Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis / intulit agresti Latio) (Epist. 2.1.156). Rome saw itself as situated between its Hellenic predecessor, furnishing a classicism to be imitated, on the one side, and barbarity, as a rude uncouthness needing to be educated, on the other. It was but the conduit between the two. The Roman aqueduct is symbolic of Rome’s function of drawing from a higher source (Greece) in order to transmit civilization to the uncultivated hordes, “barbarians,” below it. These aspects of Romanity remain by and large applicable to Brague’s conception of European culture generally in its most characteristic expressions.8 Brague examines in detail the consequences of the fact that European civilization, as it flourished in the West, was based essentially on appropriations from elsewhere, particularly the East, its two principal progenitors being Judaism and Hellenism. These antecedents were preserved in their integrity, with acute attention to original source texts and languages, especially in recurrent moments of “renaissance” and return to these founding traditions. Both cultures were thereby opened to worldwide dissemination and to world-historical transformation in a newfound or newly created dimension of universality. Distinctive of this antique European transmission of the past was that it idealized and even canonized the original cultures that it transmitted, thus conferring a classical status on them. The Arabic transmission of the same traditions, on the other hand, rather than preserving their sources as classics, tended to dispense with them. Islam digested and discarded the original texts, transfusing a selection of their contents into its own new linguistic and cultural corpus. For Islam, in its assimilation of Greek science and philosophy, the Arabic translations wholly superseded and supplanted the originals. Once they existed, the Arabic translations alone were considered authoritative, indeed the only true and reliable form of the knowledge in question. The source texts in comparison were typically held to be inferior and erroneous and often to have been compromised by deliberate falsification. All that was true in them had been restored and absorbed without remainder into the Arabo-Islamic rendering that was considered to be incomparably superior and, thenceforth, normative. This type of su-

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persessionism (tahrif ) begins in the Qu’ran itself, with its assimilation of Jewish and Christian traditions, while claiming to correct the original source texts and to reveal unimpeachably the religious truth that they are held to distort and corrupt.9 In this manner, the source cultures in question are wholly appropriated and their alterity erased. Europe, in stark contrast, remains obsessed with its sources as permanently external and other to it and as unsurpassable. They enshrine mythic, mystic moments of preternatural creativity and even of divine revelation in relation to which its own transmission remains always secondary. Cultural secondariness with respect to its Hellenic origins and religious secondariness in relation to its Jewish heritage prevented Christian Europe from ever seriously considering itself to be its own source (“de se considerer ellemême comme sa proper source”).10 Dans le domaine religieux comme dans le domaine culturel, l’Europe a un même rapport à ce qui précède: elle ne s’arrache pas au passé, elle ne le rejette pas. L’Europe ne prétend pas, quant à la culture profane, avoir absorbé en elle tout ce que contenait l’hellénisme ou, en religion, tout ce que contenait l’Ancien Testament—de telle sorte que l’on pourrait jeter la coquille vide.11 In the religious domain as in the cultural domain, Europe has the same relation to what precedes it: it does not break with the past and does not reject it. Europe does not claim with respect to profane culture to have absorbed into itself everything that was contained in Hellenism or, in religion, all that which the Old Testament ­contained—in such manner as to be able to discard the empty shell. For Brague, the role of mediating and transmitting what it receives entails that Europe is open to others and open upon the universal. He thus conceives of Europe and its culture not as a determinate “content” that can be possessed, but rather as an infinite task of self-opening and of mediation of alterity. The content (“le contenu”) of Europe is that it is to serve as a “container” (contenant) and in this sense “to be open to the universal” (le contenu de l’Europe, c’est justement d’être un contenant, d’être ouverte sur l’universal).12 We would, nonetheless, be remiss should we fail to note also an acquisitive aspect to this openness: nothing is really proper to Europe except

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to appropriate what is foreign to it (“son propre est une appropriation de ce qui lui est étranger”).13 An ambiguity thus begins to show up even in this preliminary sketch moving from the propositions of Brague, who does not, however, highlight or even specifically identify such an ambiguity. This chapter proposes to examine this ambiguity expressed in Europe’s historical record of both deconstruction and domination—of self-critique, or selfdeconstruction, and colonial imperialism. In a critically reflective extension of Brague’s argument, Denis Guénoun in Hypothèses sur l’Europe: Un essai de philosophie effectively brings out the significance of the myth of Europa, who was herself an Asian princess abducted by Jove to the land that would be called by her name.14 This myth clearly conveys how Europe from its inception is endowed even with its name by others from beyond its borders, indeed, others who are violated. The myth of Europa becomes emblematic of the European predicament defined as possessing nothing originally of its own. All that is proper to Europe is having nothing proper to itself at all—and, consequently, appropriating everything from others. This originary dependence and openness to its ostensible others and outsides is bound up with another aspect of Europe’s predisposition for and preoccupation with universality. It is an aspect that I wish to place into particular relief, namely, Europe’s vocation to critique, especially to self-­ critique. Whatever may appear prima facie as one’s own and as proper tends, when subjected to close critical scrutiny, to show up as derivative, as actually borrowed or adapted from elsewhere. From this point of view, what makes Europe come harshly to light as more acquisitive in appropriating others’ goods may be its characteristic (self-)critical awareness and outspokenness, as much as any exceptional or uncommon rapaciousness. In its disposition to acquisitiveness, Europe is not so different from numerous other civilizations. It is, however, distinguished by an outstanding critical and especially self-critical emphasis that can be traced in European intellectual tradition from an early matrix in the philosophical critique of mythos by logos. This predisposition to critique defines the very origin of philosophy, which in crucial ways counts as Europe’s most characteristic contribution to world culture.15 Self-critique flourishes throughout European tradition, at least from the time of Socrates, and already in ancient Neoplatonism, which in its final stages can even be defined as “limitless criticism.”16 This self-critical

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spirit undergoes constant metamorphoses throughout European intellectual history all the way to contemporary theory, with its many applications in cultural studies and literary criticism.17 A critical temperament naturally issues in acute self-consciousness vis-à-vis the exterior civilizations from which one’s own is born or at least endowed. This is patently the case already for Rome with regard to Greece, and such critical self-consciousness is typical of Europe’s relation to history in general. It has become especially evident and self-conscious in European intellectual and cultural history up to and through contemporary movements, such as deconstruction in French philosophy or—crossing over to the other bank of the Rhine— critical theory in the Frankfort school. The new universality in question here does not entail the imposition of any content: indeed, Europe here is considered to have no content proper to itself. It is rather only a critical, and especially a self-critical, clearing of an empty space, precisely the space necessary for “conviviality.” Critique is another kind of universalism, one perhaps bound up with—and yet also radically different from—that of appropriating everything and assimilating it to oneself. It is predicated on detachment from all particular and parochial bias and from any contingent circumstances. This has clearly been the case ever since the Kantian critique of reason stipulated that disinterestedness is prerequisite for valid universal judgment. Such is, for Kant, the condition of the universality and therewith, equivalently, of the validity of (aesthetic) judgment, definitively in the Critique of Judgment (Die Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790). Critique, however, was essential to the European spirit already long before Kant and even before the skeptical currents in ancient thought that left their imprint on mature Neoplatonism, indeed before philosophy altogether. It began more originally and radically as critique of idolatry in one of Europe’s most indispensable extraterritorial sources—the Bible.18 The inadequacy of all representations of God, the supreme principle of ­reality, is written into the Ten Commandments, with their interdiction against graven images (Exodus 20:4), and even into the strictures against taking the name of the Lord in vain (Exod. 20:7). The latter proscription, considered critically, applies to virtually any verbal formulation. What name for God on human lips could not but be profane (at least in the ­absence of saving grace)? This rigorous critique of representations of the divine should be held alongside the type of critique that flourishes in

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the other principal source of European culture according to a widely acknowledged historiography, namely, the Hellenic tradition, particularly with the birth of philosophy and its reflective, critical bent. This searchingly critical tendency develops to a pinnacle in the late Neoplatonic philosophy of Damascius (480–ca. 550).19 With respect to these sources and precedents, Rome is realized not in a creative act of self-expression and self-affirmation so much as in a reflective, self-critical movement that is acutely conscious of its own limits. The pervasive, melancholic, often self-deprecating sense of inferiority expressed in Virgil’s Aeneid vis-à-vis its Homeric forerunner is a classic instance of this attitude.20 The awareness of one’s own secondariness calls forth an attitude of critique, which entails another kind of universalism that is different from englobing all in one’s own order, or bringing it under one rule—one’s own rule. Such is the spirit of critique that has evolved and culminated in postmodern times in what is currently called “deconstruction.” Considered as a generating principle for European and (in historical perspective) specifically for Christian civilization, deconstruction involves first and foremost self-deconstruction, as Jean-Luc Nancy brings out in his Deconstruction of Christianity.21 Of course, again, these two universalisms, that of domination and that of deconstruction, which have so marked European history and, as a consequence, also world history, are not likely to exist independently of one another and without intimate interconnectedness and even secret collusion. Consequently, holding onto the tension ­between these two, often dissonant aspects—that of the quest for the universal and that of conquest by means of the universal—is surely a prerequisite for understanding the ambiguities of universalism and the motivation for introducing the new vocabulary of “conviviality” into the discussion.22

THE NEGATIVITY OF IDENTITY: FROM NEGATIVE THEOLOGY TO CONVIVIALITY VIA THEORY

In its historical forms in Neoplatonism and medieval mysticism, but also in its contemporary theoretical guises of French deconstruction and critical theory in the Frankfurt school, negative theology turns out to be key to defining European cosmopolitanism, and more particularly to determining

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the sense of any European ideal of universalism. This is so because of the impossibility of these tasks. The universal and cosmopolitan prove to be precisely what cannot be defined or given any determinate sense. Universality can be approached asymptotically only through a practice of ­criticism— even of limitless self-criticism. This, I submit, has been revealed especially through the vicissitudes— the evolution and devolution—of literary and cultural theory in recent ­decades. Particularly the quest for identity in the midst of the multiplicity of cultures that have emerged in all their inextricable hybridity more and more in the postmodern era has proved identity to be nothing if not elusive. This impasse to the quest for identity lies at the very origin of the ­attempt to reconceptualize certain aspects of the postmodern predicament in terms of convivial cosmopolitanism. Paul Gilroy has proposed conviviality as, in crucial ways, an alternative to, or at least a refinement upon, the vocabulary of multiculturalism and its attendant identity politics: I hope an interest in the workings of conviviality will take off from the point where “multiculturalism” broke down. It does not describe the absence of racism or the triumph of tolerance. Instead, it suggests a different setting for their empty, interpersonal rituals, which, I suggest, have started to mean different things in the absence of any strong belief in absolute or integral races. Conviviality has another virtue that makes it attractive to me and useful to this project. It introduces a measure of distance from the pivotal term “identity,” which has proved to be such an ambiguous resource in the analysis of race, ethnicity, and politics. The radical openness that brings conviviality alive makes a nonsense of closed, fixed, and reified identity and turns attention toward the always unpredictable mechanisms of identification.23 Gilroy’s conclusions, which are rooted in contemporary British politics and cultural theory, corroborate the views I wish to elaborate here from a broadly apophatic perspective grounded in comparative philosophy, religion, and literature. Identities are flimsy, fragile, relative, and exclusionary constructions. They need to be critiqued in the interests of universal conviviality. Otherwise, they tend to become rivalrous and invidious forms of

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self-assertion in the Enlightenment liberationist tradition. Such movements of self-affirmation typically aim at autonomy. However, the original insight into difference that motivated and sparked off the whole multicultural movement was a vision of universal relativity, of difference without positive terms, in the famous Saussurian formulation that gave such a powerful impetus to the rise of literary theory in the last several decades of the twentieth century. (This issue is pursued further chapter 11.) Not essentializing differences as identities, but rather the opposite, was at the source of the resurgence of theoretical reflection that issued in cultural studies and in many other parallel projects and programs emphasizing differential ­particularities. The language of “radical openness,” which we have just seen used by Gilroy, is actually a classical component of European tradition, once we include therein the heterodox, radically critical (and especially self-critical) expressions of this tradition reaching back to classical negative theology, for example, in Plotinus.24 Precisely this language still defines Ulrich Beck’s notion of Europe as cosmopolitan: “Radical openness [radikale Offenheit] is an essential distinguishing trait of the European project and the true secret of its success” (Die radikale Offenheit ist ein Wesensmerkmal des Europäischen Projektes und sein eigentliches Erfolgsgeheimnis).25 An explicit link to the “cosmopolitan” idea is made a few pages later: “The adjective ‘cosmopolitical’ stands for this openness, limited by the critique of ethnonationalism, which battles for the recognition of cultural difference and diversity” (Das Adjektiv ‘kosmopolitisch’ steht für diese Offenheit, begrenzt durch die Kritik des Ethnonationalismus, der für die Anerkennung der kulturellen Differenz und Diversität streitet).26 There is, after all, something contradictory in a battle for open, cosmopolitan universalism being waged under the banner, and in the interests, of particular differences and exclusive identities. There is an odd confluence in the genealogies of identity-based regional, gender, class, or special-interest groups and movements that can make their agendas conflictual, or at least confusing. Are these ideologies of identity informed by the structuralist insight into the relativity of all oppositional terms that lies at the origin of the critical theory revolution of the last several decades, especially since poststructuralist reflections, such as those of Derrida, Foucault, or Baudrillard, that began exerting such in-

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fluence around the 1970s? This theoretical paradigm entailed a powerful valorization of difference—and consequently led to strong self-assertion by non-mainstream groups of their different identities.27 Or are these ideologies of identity and difference rather ascribable to the Enlightenment agenda of promoting freestanding, autonomous individuals? This latter agenda has also been important in fueling a wide spectrum of liberation movements since the 1960s. The principles of the Enlightenment have been subjected to a rigorous critique and have often been the preferred object of attack in the milieu of postmodern theory: postmodern theory typically understands itself precisely as a turn against the Enlightenment as the leading project of modernity. Already within the Frankfurt School itself (and therewith critical theory), known for its championing and defending of the modern Enlightenment project, especially with the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas, the ambiguity of the Enlightenment as producing forms of enslavement ­dialectically inextricable from the achievements of liberation in modern society had been brought out fully and in detail by Horkheimer and Adorno (Dialektik der Aufklärung, 1944). In this perspective, the Enlightenment was charged with generating its own myths of individual autonomy and mastery by means of instrumental reason that eventually led to the totalitarianism of consumer society and global markets.28 Critical theory has been aware of the importance of theology and specifically of negative theology in assuming a posture of critique vis-à-vis the world of total immanence and functionality that has gained ascendency in our times of total technological, technocratic domination of the planet.29 European traditions of negative theology, as explored also by Jacques Derrida and extended by Jean-Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo, Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and others, can be drawn on in order to think the “democracy-tocome” from the basis of the unknowability of God extended to the nonidentity, and thus also the unknowability, of individuals in their deepest core. Recognizing this inherent nonidentity may be the key discovery that European thought can contribute to opening the way toward a convivial cohabitation of the planet.30 Negative theology emerges here as the deep root for thinking a radical openness and its possible social incarnations in the European tradition. It must be admitted that, ironically, just this sort of insight has been forthcoming in Eastern traditions such as Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana

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Buddhism, and Taoism, so the “contribution” in question here is again a matter of a particular manner of mediating and realizing something that is anything but unique to Europe. The Mulamadhyamakakarika of Nagarjuna (ca. 150–250), for example, the fundamental text of the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism, is a relentless deconstruction of any sort of concept of stable or self-subsistent identity.31 Even in its most radically self-negating forms, the critical universalism by which Europe ostensibly distinguishes itself (since such an outlook has been so decisive there historically) turns out on cross-civilizational examination to be a factor actually connecting Europe with other cultures and traditions rather than separating it from them.

THE NEW APOPHATIC UNIVERSALISM AS CO -GIFTEDNESS AND WOUND

Recent revolutions in literary and cultural theory have come full circle—or perhaps spiraled back around—to a concerted quest for universal values and ideals or principles and projects. After several decades of accentuated splintering into national, regional, sexual, racial, class, and religious particularisms, the cry has gone up for attempting to recover some sense of a common bond of universal democratic enfranchisement.32 Such a universalist perspective and sentiment is felt to be imperative for our collective survival on the planet—and for our being able to live peacefully and productively together in a globalized world. The cry comes from a variety of quarters, both academic and political, and most remarkably from the very self-styled progressivist factions of the intelligentsia that had, until recently, spearheaded the denunciation of universalistic categories and claims as an ideological instrument serving for the oppression of disempowered minorities and colonized masses of subaltern peoples. The language of universality is again in vogue, after having been the target of strident protest on account of its presumed complicity with the ethnocentrism manifest in racialism, colonialism, and associated evils. This regained popularity depends on decisive new nuances in the term “universal,” slanting it toward what Gilroy calls “conviviality” and what I strive here to work out in terms hailing from apophatic tradition.

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This means, of course, that the notion of the universal “returns” metamorphosed. It is no longer the universality of a closed system or of a delimited concept that is in question, but rather an open and in some ways indeterminate universal. The new universality is characterized most importantly by a non-conceptual act of opening of self. My thesis is that this new universality is currently being—and even must be—rethought in what are at least implicitly apophatic terms. In other words, I contend that the apophatic tradition can serve as a crucial and even indispensable guide to framing the new universalism and to making it fruitful. This is so because it is not a new concept of universality so much as a non-concept that is necessary. Theology, in its traditional and yet radical form as negative or apophatic theology, is revealed or rediscovered as the custodian of rich resources for elaborating a general philosophy of precisely this type. Identity and universality in their intrinsic negativity—their being apprehended always only through difference and as elusive, indefinable idealizations— prove to be analogous to the transcendent God who cannot be apprehended except negatively. The ways and means of this incapacity can be learned from negative theology, where they are explored in depth and in detail. The critical examination of identity and universality follows patterns established by negative theological discourse in its critical turn against all idolatries, including conceptual idolatries, and toward denial of any positive definitions of the divine. Indeed, there may well be some vestige of divinity lingering in every purportedly essential identity, whether of person or party or people.33 Thus the crucial breakthrough in the rethinking of universality can best be understood as a turn to construing it not as conceptual but rather as what defies conceptualization.34 Universality, in the sense that is now becoming current, is non-predicative and must be thought of as “that which resists or exceeds the closure of identity.”35 So construed, the discourse of universalism expresses an apophatic sensibility. It opens a radically alternative vision to that of the Enlightenment philosophies that have typically paraded under the banner of universality. At the same time, it also undermines the traditional opposition between rational enlightenment and religious or mystical obscurantism. Indeed such an opposition was challenged all along, beginning in the very heart of the German Aufklärung itself, by religious thinkers such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) and Johann

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Georg Hamann (1730–88).36 The universal in this new sense opens up a mysterious region of incommensurability as, paradoxically, our only common measure; it is not any rational formula or faculty: it is nothing that can be defined at all. Identity, in this perspective, is more profound than what we can possess. It should be thought of as a common wound—our being separate from others. Whatever identifies us also individualizes us and sets up ­categorical exclusions vis-à-vis others. And yet precisely this state or condition of separation from one another is something that we share most deeply with others. We are co-gifted with this open wound in our very being and deepest identity. We are one another’s gift: this is just what the word “common” or “co-munus” (from Latin munus, “gift”) says etymologically—­ “co-gifted.” Taken in this sense, the “common” becomes in many regards a more adequate term for what philosophy today—and also yesterday in some of its most challenging forms—strives to think under the concept of the “universal.”37 This sense of the open mystery of the Other—and of our mutual woundedness in and from one another—is prerequisite to convivial cosmopolitanism. Paul Celan (1920–70) thought of language as bearing the scars of this woundedness, which his poems so effectively expose, placing it excruciatingly into evidence. In his poetological discourse “Der Meridian” (1960), Celan describes the language of the poem as wounded by and searching for reality (“wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend”).38 The wound is a recurrent, neuralgic image in his poetry. A sort of metaphorical wounding is repeatedly performed by the (de)realizations of language in virtually every poem.39 In some sense, all his poetry stands in the shadow of the wound or scar up in the “air,” suggesting a negative incarnation of language’s inevitably violent idealizations. This woundedness of ­language is intimately related to its standing for no one and nobody—in the kenotic moment of self-emptying or self-wounding: STEHEN im Schatten des Wundermals in der Luft. Für-niemand-und-nichts-Stehn. Unerkannt, für dich allein.

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Mit allem, was darin Raum hat, auch ohne Sprache. TO STAND in the shadow of the scar up in the air. To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing. Unrecognized, for you alone. With all there is room for in that, even without language.40 The wonder or “miracle” (Wunder) of this “wound” (Wund) is, first of all, that both meanings indissociably inhabit Celan’s ingenious invention “Wundermals.” In this curious coinage, “mals” verbalizes both nouns into events happening one or more “times.” The miracle or wonder consists, furthermore, in this expression’s opening a passage beyond language altogether and thereby making room for the other, for no one, for an indeterminate “you” (“für dich”). This other is unrecognizable within any language and can first emerge only when one is “without language” (ohne / Sprache). Standing in shadows, Celan’s Wundermals turns in the air like a mill (“Mühle”) that grinds our words down to nothing and exposes our human wound beneath.

DIS-ENCLOSURE OF RADICAL COSMIC ­ COMMUN(ICAT)ION

Derrida learned a good deal from Celan, as also from Georges Bataille, about language as inscribing an originary woundedness. He emphasized particularly the origin of language in the wound of écriture as writing or “script,” a word related to Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Proto-Germanic words for scraping and scratching and to Old High German rizan for

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tearing. He announced the democracy to come (“démocratie à venir”) as based on such a sense of ineradicable rupture and tornness—of structural ­openness to an always unattainable Other such as is cultivated and theorized in negative theology. Negative theology (so Derrida) keeps in view the unfathomable depth of an otherness that it cannot grasp. Yet this faculty of leaving space for the Other is not confined to theology, since “every other is wholly other” (tout autre est tout autre).41 Every other human, too, is absolute and places us before the abyss of the unsayable, of what eludes every word and concept. Derrida, of course, resisted others’ attempts to identify deconstruction with negative theology, as if that gave it a known figure and pigeonholed it in intellectual history. However, at other moments he recognized the resistance against all such identificatory reductions as the peculiar resource of what he, too, faute de mieux, calls “theologie négative.” Indeed Derrida suggests that the openness and indeterminacy of negative theology may be necessary for any tenable idea of Europe and for any possible political democracy, or any universal, law-governed community, today. It is necessary to the very intelligibility of our indispensable axiological, evaluative terms: “But there would no longer be any ‘political’ or ‘juridical’ or ‘moral’ without this possibility [of negative theology], that same possibility which obliges us from now on to put these words in quotation marks. Their sense will have trembled” (Mais il n’y aurait plus de “politique,” de “droit” ou de “morale” sans cette possibilité [de théologie négative], celle-là même qui nous oblige désormais à mettre ces mots entre guillemets. Leur sens aura tremblé).42 All of these determinations, which lie at the foundations of ­constitutional law, jurisprudence, ethics, and any other human sciences, depend fundamentally on their own indeterminacy. Exemplary in this vein, in the wake of Derrida, is the work of Jean-Luc Nancy in his deconstruction of Christianity as responding to a vocation to radical openness that characterizes Europe and particularly its Christian heritage. Metaphysics and Christianity turn out, according to Nancy, to bear the seeds of their own deconstruction within themselves. As Nancy argues in La Déclosion (2005), Christianity assumes a role of bearing the vocation of opening or “dis-enclosure” (déclosion) characteristic of the West and its Enlightenment into the modern and postmodern worlds. Turning toward (“ad”) and opening through orifices such as the mouth (the oral ­cavity), notably in prayer (“oratio”), is the very meaning of “Ad-or-ation” in

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its Latin roots and in the title of the companion volume and sequel L’Adoration (2010). L’Adoration turns traditional Christian language outward ­toward a world in process of dissolution and of liberation from all its metaphysical moorings. Christianity has the leading role in this historical deconstruction leveraged from the West (Europe) and its Enlightenment heritage. Such is the purport likewise of Gianni Vattimo’s deconstructive project, in which Christianity opens to radical secularity as the foundation for a common life of humanity across cultures. Both Nancy and Vattimo rely on Marcel Gauchet’s thesis, in Le désenchantement du monde (1985), concerning Christianity as the religion of the exit from religion (“la religion de la sortie de la religion”). However, Nancy’s Christianity is radically Protestant. At least that is the tradition he valorizes as carrying out the self-­ deconstruction of Christianity through its death of God theology (see, for instance, L’Adoration, 50–51). The Christianity of Vattimo, by contrast, is Catholic and hermeneutic—in the sense of basing itself not on the letter of scriptural revelation so much as on its realization historically in the life of the community. In either case, Christianity in its self-deconstructing ­impetus is what Europe’s historical experience most specifically has to offer to face the challenge of rising above divisive identities and into world community. These directions of thought, as tradition-laden as they are, can nevertheless provide guidance for reading Paul Gilroy’s and Ulrich Beck’s appeal for a “radical openness” in society and exposure to our colonial past and postcolonial present. Vattimo, in Dopo la cristianità: Per un cristianesimo non religioso, works especially from two paradigmatic historical models. One is Joachim of Flores’s prophetic eternal gospel (Evangelium aeternum), particularly as proclaimed in his Liber Concordiae Novi ac Veteris Testamenti (1260). By dint of his subsuming of universal history into his own visionary, typological interpretation, Joachim represents for Vattimo the affirmation of a hermeneutic approach to reality exposed as entirely an interpretive construction without remainder. The Christian, for Joachim, is no longer under the ­authority of either the letter of Scripture, as were the Jews in the age of the Old Testament, or of the Church, as in the age of the New Testament. Now, the Holy Spirit itself illuminates each individual directly and without need of institutional authority or mediation. For Joachim, who was a Cistercian (or a reformed Benedictine) monk, a truly new Third Age opened with St. Benedict and the advent of the monastic orders. In this new age

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of free spiritual life for individuals, all the Lord’s people become truly prophets, just as Moses had wished (Numbers 11:29). Joachim’s vision is projected forward to a poetic apotheosis by Dante in his Paradiso, where the Calabrian abbot Joachim (“il calavrese abate Giovacchino”) appears transfigured in glory and “endowed with prophetic spirit” (di spirito profetico dotato) (Paradiso XII.141). Joachim enjoys beatitude in harmonious conviviality together with some of the very saints and sages with whom he was most at loggerheads during his life on earth. He is celebrated in Dante’s poem specifically by the towering figure of Saint Bonaventure, who, ironically, in his life on earth aggressively attacked the radical Franciscans of Joachimite inspiration. Although there is a fantastically positive and assertive symbolic theology in Joachim, he nevertheless inaugurates a revolutionary break with the old religion and its certitudes, opening everything radically to unceasing reinterpretation by individuals living freely in the Spirit. Nothing that has been said is definitive or binding for those living in the freedom of the Spirit; perhaps nothing definitive can be said at all. Another exemplary historical watershed for such universal openness is represented for Vattimo by Novalis’s Romantic vision in Christenheit oder Europa (1799). Novalis’s tract builds in some ways on Kant’s treatise on perpetual peace, Zum ewigen Frieden (1795), even while reversing its secular Protestantism into a Catholic, poetic universalism. In contrast with Kant’s call to autonomous individuals to take up the task of constructing an enlightened modernity by thinking for themselves and throwing off the yoke of tutelage imposed by tradition and authority, Novalis expresses a medievalizing nostalgia for an inextricably communal life, one still in unsevered communication with a living, throbbing cosmos. Such a sense of cosmic communion can be conveyed best by mystical, archetypal poetry and its universal symbols. Novalis finds in the medieval Catholic worldview the figure of a messianic future. However, in the very midst of his discernment and celebration of such cosmic communication of the divine, Novalis also acutely expresses the apophatic predicament that relates to . . . it knows not what, since the sense of these communications is not intelligible to us: Alles, was wir erfahren ist eine Mittheilung. So ist die Welt in der That eine Mittheilung—Offenbarung des Geistes. Die Zeit ist nicht

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mehr, wo der Geist Gottes verständlich war. Der Sinn der Welt ist verlohren gegangen. Wir sind beym Buschstaben stehn geblieben. Wir haben das Erscheinende über der Erscheinung verlohren.43 All that we experience is a communication. Thus the world is in fact a communication—a revelation of spirit. The time is no longer when the spirit of God was understandable. The sense of the world has been lost. We remain behind with just letters. We have lost what it is that appears over and beyond the appearing itself. Yet these limits to our conceptualization turn out to be fruitful. Rather than simply stopping us in our effort to know the absolute, the experience of the limit is sounded in the affect-laden judgments of aesthetic perception and through the exercise of the will in ethical action. These new ­dimensions of relationality are opened up by the check to intellectual appropriation and assimilation. The arrest itself forces mind and spirit and body into a movement reaching beyond conceptualization. Ganz begreifen werden wir uns nie, aber wir werden und können uns weit mehr als begreifen.44 We never intellectually grasp ourselves completely, but we become much more and can do more than simply grasp ­ourselves intellectually. The general human predicament described here is one in which we are oriented toward what exceeds and transcends us in all our thinking and feeling and seeing and hearing: Alles Sichtbare haftet am Unsichtbaren— Das Hörbare am Unhörbaren— Das Fühlen am Unfühlbaren. Vielleicht das Denken am Undenkbaren.45 All that is seeable cleaves to the unseeable— The hearable to the unhearable—

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The feelable to the unfeelable. Perhaps the thinkable to the unthinkable. This is Novalis’s version of a philosophy of revelation that anticipates some aspects of what will be developed explicitly under that title a little later by Schelling:46 in and through phenomena, we relate to we know not what beyond phenomena. But perhaps this was always so. Of course, in other cultural predicaments, for example, that of the Middle Ages and its shared faith, this situation seemed different—and to that extent already was different. But, in any case, a new and acute consciousness of the apophatic predicament comes to consciousness here in the recognition of all experience as leading up to the threshold of what defies and withdraws from ­experience. Novalis’s vision expresses aspects of the philosophy of revelation—and, at the same time, revolution—of the early Jena Romantics. It bears much in common also with the program of the German idealist philosophy that germinated in the youthful exchanges among Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin and produced their “Oldest System Program of German Idealism” (“Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” 1796).47 Here we see already among key formative modern thinkers the swing in the ­theoretical understanding of identity that moves it toward a revolutionary kind of universal opening that embraces even religious revelation. These crucial architects of modernity are uncannily close to broaching ideas that will later be considered characteristic of postmodern thinking. Perhaps most significantly, they help us to discern the negative theological matrices of the new thinking of universality that is emerging into explicit formulation at present. In the last several decades, theory has passed from the epistemological and ontological generality of “high” theory to the particular political agendas of various revindications of identity. This has often resulted in the quest for individual or sectarian liberation following an Enlightenment paradigm of autonomy. But the dialectic of Enlightenment is such that it also generates its own myths, its own forms of closure and oppression.48 Conviviality endeavors to bring theory back to universalist perspectives in a new key that does not eclipse difference and social-political specificity. Yet the ethos of conviviality must also open itself to the infinite mystery of the Other.

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This is learned from authors such as Nancy and Vattimo, who are working out and transmitting negative-theological or apophatic traditions. It may seem to be mystification and therefore also anathema for many, especially for the more politically minded of those in the following of Gilroy. And yet apophatic critique is an efficacious antidote to the ambiguities and—I dare say—to the idolatries of identity politics that Gilroy himself has felt the need to react against. “Radical openness” such as Gilroy and Beck both prescribe as crucial to the call of conviviality can be interpreted as pointing in either of two directions: (1) toward a universal humanism; or (2) toward infinite openness to an inconceivable otherness. My conviction is that any universal that can be defined will inevitably become a vicious circle of self-affirmation and exclusion of otherness and will eventually defeat the aims of conviviality in their most radical challenge. We are returning to the challenge and the quest of universality today, and need to do so, but this quest needs also to remain open to what it cannot quite define or even adequately conceive in order not to become inevitably exclusionary and oppressive. This is the type of critique that negative theological modes of thought have exerted upon all forms of idolatry throughout the ages. It has arisen again lately in the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer contra the conceptual idolatry that is rampant in modern and postmodern culture, with its unbridled consumerism, its commodities fetish, and its culture industry dominated by technocratic power. Such critique is being further extended still today by authors such as Nancy, Vattimo, and (we must now add, with a view to the next chapter) Giorgio Agamben.49

DECONSTRUCTIVE NEGATIVE THEOLOGY, NIHILISM, AND CHRISTIANITY

A related viewpoint, yet one often in tension with the radically self-critical and deconstructive approach to the question of European universalism that I have pursued here, following Brague, Guénoun, and others, has been broached by Peter Sloterdijk in Falls Europa erwacht (In Case Europe Awakes).50 Sloterdijk castigates most post-1945 Cold War European thought for its self-effacing, sometimes even nihilistic attitude and temperament.

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He deplores it as an era of being dominated by the ideology of absence and emptiness (“Ära der Vakuum-Ideologien,” 16, cf. 53; “Nachkriegs Nichtigkeit,” “Nihilismus,” 19; “europäischen Absence-Ideologien,” 23). Sloterdijk analyzes these negative, self-emptying approaches as a sort of Christian nihilism and as symptomatic of Europe’s trauma upon being decentered after 1945. This analysis turns out to echo Nietzsche’s at an earlier epoch, even if with only faint acknowledgment. Massimo Cacciari, in Geo-Filosofia dell’Europa, starts expressly from Nietzsche in order, instead, to recommend Europe’s constitutive and incurable indecision.51 But Sloterdijk sees in this negativity only sterility and not its endless creative potential. He expresses consternation and dismay that this self-minimizing sentiment, which gripped Europe in its dismal post-Yalta condition and lasted throughout the period of the Cold War, should have been taken up eagerly by American intellectuals as well (Falls Europa erwacht, 23). Following Paul Valéry’s “La crise de l’esprit,”52 Sloterdijk attributes to Europe, as its defining characteristic, rather a maximum development of activity and intensity in all respects—economic, scientific, vitalistic—and an unlimited “intensification of power and life” (Intensivierung von Macht und Leben).53 He considers the decentering and self-emptying of Europe, its Vakuum-Ideologie in the era of its absence (“die Zeitalter der Absence”),54 to belong to the period of Europe’s being caught in a vice between victorious superpowers (Russian and American) and its temporary self-­deprecating renunciation of a leading role in the world-historical process. He calls on Europe to awake into a new era, a return (Wiederkehr) in which it is to reassume its maximizing destiny on the world stage (Maxima-Politik)—­ echoing the “Maximierungsformel ” of Valéry—as Mother of ­Modernity. The essence of Europe is to be found in its metamorphoses (“ImperiumMetamorphosen”) translating the imperial ideal (“Mechanismus der Reichübertragung”) of a unified order for all as handed down throughout the successive ages of its history.55 In reacting with impatience against the ideologies of emptiness and impotence that held sway in Europe and crippled its self-confidence during the Cold War period, Sloterdijk envisions for a reawakened Europe a role that will be a transformation of its past imperial avatars into some new form of “visionary,” “prophetic” apprehension of wholeness and greatness.56 Thus Sloterdijk, too, in aiming to reclaim for Europe its central place in

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the world, exhorts Europe to wake up to a universal mission that would require it to look beyond all its national boundaries. He fails to acknowledge, however, that this needs to be done without overlooking the negative conditions of this vocation. For this kind of universalizing vision could hardly be circumscribed or given a definitive content once and for all. It must remain open and receptive to an otherness that exceeds and defies ­adequate conceptual apprehension. Moreover, even in embracing the heritage of the translatio imperii, Sloterdijk propounds a European universal vision according equal human status, with recognition of cultural variations, to all members of the species. This is starkly unlike the typical generic divisions in the ancient world between wild barbarians and civilized burgers. Sloterdijk’s new incarnations of empire are emphatically purged of all forms of “imperial contempt” (“Absage an die Menschenverachtung, die allen Imperialismen innewohnt”),57 and thus it would seem that he too can hardly do without Europe’s characteristically intense engagement in self-critique as a check to the unscrupulous programs of overweening self-aggrandizement that arise inevitably. Deconstructive Christianity and self-critical Europeanism incorporate and share in common a vocation to radical openness toward others and ­toward the indefinably Other. The crucial role of radical Christianity in this European vocation to universalism—in the sense of a universal openness without fixed content—has been discerned by thinkers of the most varied and divergent persuasions. It is Protestant for some, notably Nancy, but Catholic for others, including Vattimo, who builds on Joachim and Novalis. Orthodox Christianity, too, participates in this new apophatic universalism in forms emerging, for example, through dialogue with Anglican Radical Orthodoxy.58 A Christian origin for the new universalism has been underlined in some startling and paradoxical ways by the discussion of contemporary ­European philosophers around the claim of universalism in St. Paul and in the intellectual revolution embodied by primitive Christianity (as examined already in chapter 4). Alain Badiou touched off the debate with his explicitly atheist account of Paul’s revolutionary project of a universal truth not reserved for a philosophical elite, and not just a matter of objective contemplation of intellectual verities, but rather of adherence in faith to a

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historically revealed truth that is lived and that revolutionizes all of the subject’s perceptions and possibilities. Other likewise atheistic appropriations of Paul’s revolutionary and apocalyptic vision, which upsets every rationally objective order of the world and breaks it open to a very new and different kind of universal claim upon all who can hear, are pursued further by Agamben and Žižek.59 These contributions illuminate the need to avoid the idolatry of the human and the political in order to remain truly open to the cosmic event of truth—aletheia, as Heidegger understands it, particularly in his “Letter on Humanism” (“Brief über den Humanismus,” 1947). Building on this event-character of truth, Agamben, in The Time That Remains, interprets Paul’s announcements that “the time is short” and that “the fashion of this world passes away” (1 Corinthians 7:29–31) as indicating how the present time (“the time that remains”) becomes universal eschatological time. It concentrates all time into itself—into a present in which the end of time is already being accomplished proleptically. The present thus relativizes and revolutionizes all finite, worldly forms, opening them to a beyond, to an event of salvation that is always still in arrival and that must remain forever open to the one who is coming. Walter Benjamin’s messianism of the Jetztzeit works similarly at the level of a kind of divine violence that violates inevitably idolatrous human orderings of history and society.60 Paul’s Christian messianism, as reflected on by these European thinkers, represents another breakthrough moment in history, one at which ­polity and cosmos practically come to coincide. These moments can serve as models for the construction of a convivial cosmopolitanism. Europe ­becomes the locus of a cosmic revelation of freedom and of political and social revolution. This happened in spectacular fashion following the French Revolution, particularly as it was taken up by the German idealists. Something comparable, in intriguing regards, had already occurred pur­ suant to what might be called the “Franciscan revolution” in the thirteenth century, drawing its inspiration from St. Francis and from his advent as it was interpreted particularly by Joachim of Flores. The Romantic, post-revolutionary German “state” and the medieval Franciscan order, respectively, were imagined as forming polities that opened upon the universal. The polis expanded without limits to become coextensive with the cosmos, while conversely cosmos was realized as con-

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cretely incarnate in some visionary form of polis. Both directions are indicative of a realization of universalism in politics and religion and ethics and aesthetics all at once and in one. Some such cosmic openness of our political community beyond invidious exclusions is what is necessary for living together in cosmo-politan con-viviality. Its indispensable precondition is to be sought in the unexpressed and inexpressible, in the darkly vanishing apophatic background of the (self-)critical discourse of universalism in the European tradition of the En-lightenment.

Chapter Six

EXCEPT ASIA Agamben’s Logic of Exception and Its Apophatic Roots and Offshoots

FROM THE APOPHATIC LOGIC OF SOVEREIGNTY TO NEGATIVE THEOLOGY

The critique of universality, for example, of universal human rights, and even of universality as an epistemological possibility, has been nourished increasingly in recent debate by the reflections of Giorgio Agamben.1 Among Agamben’s own acknowledged predecessors, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault figure prominently as thinkers who have fundamentally challenged traditional discourses of universality and ushered in alternatives for conceiving of something else in its place—or perhaps, more realistically, for conceiving of universality otherwise. Together with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Agamben occupies a leading position among a new generation of thinkers who have endeavored to radically revise our ways of thinking and of practicing the claim to universality. Some such claim seems to remain, nevertheless, indispensable to almost any conceivable form of social existence. All these thinkers are concerned with probing viable models of the political suited for understanding and coping with a complex and contested universe of different, often disparate societies interacting with one another in today’s globalized world. How can there be any form of universality of rights, let alone of outlooks and values, in this complex and 154

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often conflictual situation? I believe that Agamben’s work suggests provoca­ tive answers to this question, but the answers are levered into an apophatic vein that, when excavated, exposes the deep-seated negativity of u ­ niversality. Agamben begins his Homo sacer with a searching examination of the “logic of sovereignty.”2 This turns out to be a logic of exception and therewith, at least implicitly, a negative or apophatic logic. Agamben elaborates a logic of what is neither within nor outside of any order, a logic based on the “state of exception,” as constitutive of sovereignty. He follows Carl Schmitt’s Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre der Souveränität (1922) in postulating that sovereignty consists in the power of making an exception to the order of law over which it reigns.3 Only the sovereign is above the law and so has the right to decide on a state of exception to it—in effect, the option to suspend the law. Precisely this power of making an exception is what makes power sovereign rather than just a subordinate faculty of executing dictates or applying norms within an already given regime of law. The sovereign has the power to decide what may be exempt from the application of the law. That is what makes him “sovereign” in the etymological sense of supra regnum (literally “above the reign”). Agamben maintains that this state of exception of the sovereign is constitutive of the entire political realm. There is an arena or a realm of power, of ordered rule rather than just lawless force, precisely insofar as this sovereign power of exception holds sway. Of course, this order paradoxically is itself based in turn on the arbitrary force exercised by the sovereign (at least potentially) precisely in his holding the power to make an exception. He can suspend the law, placing himself outside and above it, and thus authorize otherwise unlawful force—even murder with impunity. The paradoxes entailed here are poignantly dramatized, for example, by Albert Camus in his Caligula (1944), with the iconic figure of the youthful Roman emperor capriciously condemning patricians to death with chilling gaiety. A symmetrical counterpart to and inversion of the sovereign, the homo sacer is the one who lives or dies in a state of exception with respect to every legal jurisdiction by being below rather than above the rule of law. The sovereign ban placed on the homo sacer (“accursed man”) exposes him to being killed summarily by anyone. He is beneath every legal status and is homo sacer precisely so far as this condition of being without any legal status reaches. He may be killed with impunity, but not in sacrifice, for

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neither the divine law (as represented by the institution of sacrifice) nor the human law (civil or criminal) recognizes him or his life as having any determinate status. The awesome power of sovereignty to decide an exception to universal right and law, whether human or divine, is more formidable than the power of priests to sacrifice. Priests must observe the rules of the sacred rite: there is a norm existing beyond them and standing over them by which they are bound. Their power is, to this extent, not fully or truly sovereign. A life given over in sacrifice, moreover, has a determinate significance, even a transcendent significance, as offered to the gods, and so cannot be disposed of arbitrarily by sovereign power. The sacrificial victim, as consecrated and thus as belonging to the gods, is, in a certain sense, inviolable for all mortal beings. In general, human lives protected by laws against homicide have a ­defined significance and legal standing. They are not just “bare life” (vita nuda) without qualification. But the power to make an exception, to declare and render a life bare life with no further status or significance, reveals the incomparable privilege that constitutes sovereignty. Sovereignty is the faculty to dispose of life without any constraints and as having no intrinsic inviolability of its own. Sovereignty, to this extent, consists in a power of erasure of all significance and of reduction of a living being to nothing beyond bare life. Sovereign power, in this way, defies the gods and so becomes itself, in a sense, theological: it claims to be itself the exception to all even supposedly transcendent significance. Such is the mysterious and awesome potency that Agamben traces from its ancient, immemorial sources to its modern political apotheoses in order to reveal the secret wellsprings and mechanisms of political power in human society. The simple power of deciding an exception to the rule, which violates and in the same act creates the universal, is the most absolute power that humans can wield. And it is this power that Agamben follows from the obscure origins of humanity to its modern manifestations in order to diagnose the threat of catastrophe that hangs over our contemporary world poised in a permanent state of crisis. Fascinating in Agamben’s analysis is that it reveals even the most crass and crushing forms of power, the brute and bestial force exercised by a tyrannical government or dictator, to be based on nothing positive and

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present like a solid rock that can grind down enemies or an iron rack used for torturing political prisoners. Power is based rather on something indefinable, on a neither/nor, a betwixt-and-between. The secret seat of political authority is something of this elusive, and at least prima facie mysterious, nature. It remains invisible behind all overt manifestations of force. The power of exception is a negative, a void dwelling in the midst of the immense, impregnable fortress of the state as an apparatus designed usually to impress and intimidate by its ostentatious might and menacing presence. Yet it is only as an exception and through the possibility of ­making an exception that this power exists. Not being anything in and for itself, sovereignty has the power to be what every actual regime of power and ­effective force is not—ab-solute and in-finite—and as such it is supreme over all other powers, even those possessing an air of sacredness in the religious sense. Agamben’s analyses suggest ways of thinking the entire system of human right and politics as grounded on nothing positive, but rather on the negation of positive law and order—precisely on the exception to it. Agamben is developing a logic, the “logic of sovereignty,” that is founded on negation, but negation in such a fundamental sense that it is neither metaphysical nor social nor even “human”: a negation that cannot be ­categorized or qualified, perhaps not even, finally, as “negative.” Such indefinable, ultimately not even negative negation of every possible definition or determination, positive or negative, is what I call “apophatic.” It can be expressed in a variety of rhetorical forms, including anacoluthon, ellipsis, litotes, neither/nor constructions, and contradiction. In this regard, it is rather like Blanchot’s “neuter” (le neutre). Unlike Blanchot, however, Agamben develops his logical notion neither speculatively nor literarily so much as through minute excavation and dissection of documentary history as sedimented in language. The exception embodied in the sovereign ban is itself a kind of contradiction that can be detected in the very vocabulary of banishment. A ban on something or someone is an exclusion making that person or thing unlawful within the jurisdiction of the ban. However, the effect of the ban is ambiguous in that it inadvertently includes what it expressly excludes. It places the excluded individual under the sanction of death within the realm that excludes him or her—thus applying to him or her the force of the law.

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Such a contradiction dwells etymologically in the notion of the ban or ­expulsion across many linguistic registers and semantic fields. Bando in Italian means both “banished” or “excluded” and also “announced to all,” for example, a position open for applications (bando di concorso) or a banquet prepared for invited guests (mensa bandita). In traditional English, likewise, a wedding banns is a public announcement making known to all a couple’s intention to marry, but at the same time inviting anyone with knowledge that could be considered as barring the legitimacy of the marriage to make a public declaration. The dialectic of inclusion and exclusion works in the various senses of these and other cognate words riddled with contradictions, and its effects can be traced in correspondingly paradoxical and enigmatic aspects of social existence. In these words, something that cannot as such be stated is nevertheless elicited and exposed as holding sovereign sway over people’s lives. Rather than positing something manifestly existing as the object of thought, there is at bottom always something that does not objectively appear itself but is nevertheless determining for the sense of everything that does appear—or, in other words, for every object. The notion of “bare life” (la vita nuda), on which the entire project of homo sacer pivots, is just such a “phenomenon” that does not as such appear. It is like, in the domain of metaphysics, “pure being” that never appears as pure or unqualified, but only in the qualified forms of specific beings. In this respect, Agamben’s thinking has some intriguing affinities with that of the contemporary French theological phenomenologists of the invisible in the wake of what is now often called the “theological turn” in phenomenology.4 Following Merleau-Ponty’s discovery of the invisible as something nonobjectifiable on the horizon of any perceptual field of visibility (Le visible et l’invisible, 1964), thinkers including Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and Jean-Louis Chrétien have imparted to phenomenology a “theological turn,” turning it toward the invisible.5 The negativity of the nonappearing is nevertheless the source and foundation of all phenomena and finds an archetype in the notion of God. God can be thought of only in terms of some relatively positive attribute and not purely as such, since God cannot be grasped as anything except perhaps as being or essence without qualification, which is then not even “essence” or “being” in any specifiable, and certainly not in any “univocal,” sense.6

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What is so intriguingly apophatic about the notion of bare life is that it posits no content of its own but is defined only by subtraction from what is not it. We should avoid imagining that bare life is anything definite that can serve as a baseline for various forms of life or as their underlying substrate. On the contrary, it can itself be grasped only as their negation. And yet neither is bare life simply excluded from any form of life whatsoever: instead, it is the necessary presupposition of them all. It is the null cipher that is more fundamental and paradoxically more powerful than any positive determination of life can be. All life and power is based on it in a manner that cannot be grasped except by mythifying it in ways that always need to be demythologized. In this respect, “bare life” operates exactly like “God” in theological spheres of discourse. The difference is that the universality of bare life is limited in its scope to the realm of the living, whereas the realm of God is even more extensive and rich and comprehensive and impossible to delimit. Inherent in the paradox of the logic of exception is that the exception is not simply absent or missing from the law. The exception is rather constitutive of the law. Sovereign rule is thus suspended from or dependent on precisely what does not come under it. The whole positive system of the force of the law presupposes something that cannot as such be forced or ruled, but can only be excluded, and thereby escapes the rule. The intrinsic contradiction of sovereignty is starkly revealed in this paradox. And yet this manner of being outside the rule is itself a way of being determined by it, even of being fatally condemned by it in the case of the homo sacer. The homo sacer, as banned from the civic order, is placed outside of it, and yet this very banning keeps him within this order as one who is excluded from it. Just so, symmetrically, the sovereign is paradoxically within and also outside the juridical order, since the sovereign can make the exception that grounds the whole order. This might seem to lend sovereignty itself a “sacred” aura. However, Agamben eschews narrowly religious formulations and insists rather that Sacer esto is “the originary political formulation of the imposition of the sovereign bond” (la formulazione politica originiaria dell’imposizione del vincolo sovrano).7 This seems to privilege political over religious categories. However, crucial here is actually the “double exception”: the sacred is in the “zone of indecision” belonging to neither the human nor the divine. It entails a negation of traditional,

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­positive religious and political categories alike. Just such a suspension of all positive categories and attributions (for the sake of liberating the unlimited possibilities and power they delimit) is also precisely the characteristic defining gesture of the apophatic. Negative Theology in Agamben’s Homo sacer Project Apophatic or negative theology (“apophasis” is the Greek word for “negation”) is a classic tradition of interpretation of what Agamben is (not) talking about in his analysis of sovereignty. Negative theology happens to be lucidly revealing of the logic of exception that the political-juridical history reconstructed by Agamben also illuminates. Negative theology can serve as a model here partly because historically it served as matrix for virtually all later, more secularized forms of critical thinking, eminently that of philosophy. Negative theology is born of the spirit of critique—even of “unlimited critique”—by exposing the inadequacy of any and every name and description, every pretension of human logos to grasp divinity.8 It is itself a decisive first step on the path of secularization, exposing a logic of negation behind all positive, mythic formulations of the divine and its putative power. Negative theology remains conversant with both theology and its negation—precisely the negation that is (secretly or imperceptibly) foundational for any possibility of theological discourse and, more generally, for any distinctively modern approach to reality. It thus retains what it ­excludes—just like Agamben’s “inclusive exclusion,” which is similarly foundational for any possibility of a non-mystified discourse on power and its political origins.9 The “sacredness” of which Agamben writes presents the enigma of a figure of the sacred beyond the religious—or before it (“sacer ci presenta l’enigma di una figura del sacro al di qua o al di là del religioso”).10 It constitutes rather the “first paradigm of the political space of the West.” Of course, apophatic or negative theology likewise aims at what is beyond or before all figures of the religious and even of the sacred. My thesis is that Agamben shows us how to read apophatics as revealing the unrevealable secret source of (our) being from a specifically political point of view. In apophatic thinking, it is ultimately mistaken to oppose the theological to the political—or to the immanent or human, for that matter. Precisely this

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oppositional logic is surpassed by an apophatic logic that can and needs to be expressed, in Agamben’s terms, as a logic of exception. Thinking non-oppositionally is also the “way” of traditional Chinese wisdom and of other kindred Asian traditions, which is one reason why Agamben turns out to be so unexpectedly pertinent in the Asian cultural context, even though he generally ignores Asia in his writings, at least on a thematic level. This issue will be taken up in the conclusion to this chapter. It should, however, be emphasized that unlike classical Asian wisdom, from the Upanishads to the Buddhist sutras and Laozi’s Book of Tao (Tao Te Ching), the tenor of Agamben’s discourse is rather anti-mystical. In any case, it is against all forms of mystification. His thrust is to demystify the myths of political sovereignty and social power so as to strip them down to their basis in bare life.11 The “inclusive exclusion” of bare life of the homo sacer in the juridicalpolitical realm is the originary foundation of the political order. This order depends on what can be neither in it nor outside it. Agamben does not wish to mystify this unspeakable origin in the terms of any theology or religious anthropology but rather to expose it in terms of his analysis of homo sacer as a “juridical-political phenomenon.” The sacredness of life is precisely the “unsacrificeable killability of the homo sacer” (l’insacrificabile uccidibilità dell homo sacer).12 And yet this analysis has the same critical and icono­clastic function as does negative theology. It undercuts every purportedly adequate or definitive conceptualization, while at the same time sanctioning all sorts of poetic imaginations in the approach to the divine. What is left after all such rigorous critiques—and what bare life is or how it is to be lived—remain infinitely open questions to be explored by the imagination. There is, after all, something of a mystery here: it is expressly recognized by Agamben as the arcanum imperii. In a sort of addendum at the end of the first section of the “Logic of Sovereignty,” Agamben himself draws the parallel to negative or apophatic theology that I am suggesting here. Just as, according to Vico’s theory of jurisprudence, the exception transcends and suspends positive right (ius theticum), so negative or mystical theology—“teologia negativa (o ­mistica)”—with its “neither . . . nor” negates and suspends all possible attributions to God. However, rather than being simply outside of theology, negative theology rather “functions as the principle that founds the

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­ ossibility in general of anything such as theology” (Essa non è, tuttavia, al p di fuori della teologia, ma funziona, a ben guardare, come il principo che fonda la possibilità in generale di qualcosa come una teologia).13 Only by being presupposed negatively as what remains outside of every possibility of predication can the “divinity” become the subject of predications. “In an analogous manner, only because the validity of positive right is suspended in the state of exception can it define the normal case as the ambit of its proper validity” (In modo analogo, solo perché la validità del diritto positivo è sospesa nello stato di eccezione, esso può definire il caso normale come l’ambito della propria validità).14 In both cases—theology and law—the exception founds the rule, along with the whole positive, normative system as such. Language and the Apophatic The key role of language in Agamben’s thinking is another confirmation of its apophatic basis, since apophasis, too, gives priority to language as the site of negation—even in driving toward a surpassing of language. Apo­ phasis, as unsaying or unsayability at the limits of language, nevertheless requires language and its failures in order to register at all. Language is, to this extent, paradoxically both within and outside the order that it establishes. The order of language must be the order of things, at least if language is to be true. And yet language must not be just a thing: it is rather an order of meaning in which things take on significance relative to one another. As Agamben, taking cues from Hegel, expounds it, this inconsistency inherent in language as belonging and also not belonging to the order of things lies at the mystical roots of literature and law alike. Agamben attributes to Hegel an understanding of language as the permanent exception to the norm that it establishes: language is both within and outside of its own order—the order of things that it establishes. Agamben writes of a “relation of exception” as that extreme form of relation that includes something uniquely by means of its exclusion. The capacity to maintain its relation to an exteriority even constitutes the “vigor of the rule.” Just as the law presupposes what is non-legal, namely, violence, so language presupposes what is not-language—namely, an object, or a world to which it can refer.15 Language is, like sovereignty itself, in a per-

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manent state of exception—opening the realms to which it refers by its own signifying activity. This activity apparently is not in itself any actual thing, but rather is operative between and in relation to things. The boundary between the two orders, that of language and that of things, is not finally discernible. This is demonstrated especially well by the performative structure of the oath, exerting real power by mere words, as Agamben shows in Il sacramento del linguaggio.16 It is the nature of language to make things what they are by how it defines them. The outside of language is included within it because what language refers to does not simply remain what it is but is reshaped by how it is taken up into language. Language ordinarily, or at least in principle, functions by effacing itself in the face of what it designates or signifies. However, is there any reality for language to refer to before and without language? If there is, language can approach it best not by what it designates or signifies, but rather by what it is—by recursively pointing to itself, as in allegory and in other strongly self-referential poetic figurative modes. Highlighting the mediating role of language and of conceptualization in constructing reality in any form whatever in which we can apprehend it lies at the heart of the methodological reflections of Agamben. This penchant, too, draws him near to the iconoclastic type of critique that has been developed by negative theology ever since its inception as a form of anti-idolatry. Agamben’s Method and Apophatic Theology Agamben fashions a language to speak in historical and material terms about an uncategorizable reality that eludes any terms introduced to schematize and control it, including terms such as “matter” and “history.” Considered psychologically, this reality may be something like the Lacanian “real” (le réel ) beyond the reach of every symbolic order. Agamben pushes such an ungraspable instance into the political arena as preceding the formation of individual subjects, and, moreover, he avoids naming or conceptualizing it. He writes always in concrete, historical terms, yet he negates and voids those terms of significant content by probing and exposing their limits. Definite content is signified necessarily by a binary logic (A or notA), but Agamben seeks to divulge something that such binaries inevitably conceal. His method is consistently to employ and to work from significant

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binary distinctions, yet to show where they break down and confound what they were supposed to distinguish and separate. Only the negation and ­dismantling of a positive law, or of significant institutional ordering, can reveal where such structures have really come from and how they are grounded. The exception is the negation of the rule that alone establishes it in the order of relations that constitute our reality as human beings. We are constituted and created by such negativity, and it is the purpose of Agamben’s methods, for example, that of the segnatura rerum, to recover some sense or implicit grasp of this negative ontology or negative theology that underlies and undergirds all that we are and experience. The unspecified reality of negative relations, which Agamben deals with and evokes without naming it, is not positively given as such in objective form. It can be elicited only by means of negations. However, it and it alone is all-powerful and has the incontrovertible presence and indestructibility of reality per se. It is signaled to us only by what is lacking in the reality that we experience and know and articulate in our language. The importance of Agamben’s work for apophatic philosophy is that it shows us how to think in terms of negative theology without becoming trapped by the abstraction of Nothing—of the purely and emptily negative. Agamben’s analyses begin always from the factuality of the positive, significant distinctions, on which culture is based, such as the distinction between the sovereign and the accursed, or between the sacred and the profane. But these putative facts are referred always to something that is not as such factually manifest—and indeed cannot be. A good symbol for this predicament is the empty throne that becomes a central theme in Agamben’s Il Regno e la Gloria. This image renders symbolically visible the fact that power is definitively vested not in any identifiable subject but rather in what is lacking. The valence of such facts needs, then, to be interpreted according to the methods that Agamben outlines in his methodological discussions signally of (1) paradigms, (2) the signatures of things, and (3) philosophical archeology.17 The paradigm imposes and generates itself as exemplary in a series that is supposed to exist already independently and not only as a result of the paradigm itself. The logic of the paradigm thus presupposes its own ­inexistence—even while, in effect, it becomes the generating principle and rule for all the phenomena that are organized with reference to it. Similarly,

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the signature, without any significant content of its own, like a pure proper name, and therefore being not even properly a sign, nevertheless refers things to something or someone. Things are marked by a “segnatura” as beholden to or as indexed to something or someone else in a kind of relationality even before any determinate signification with a definite content can be assigned. Traditionally, this indexing of things was considered to reside in their being created and in their bearing the vestiges of the Creator— yet in some inexplicit way that escapes the semiology of signs. A philosophical archeology, finally, works by projection of an origin that does not exist independently of its own discursive construction: such archeology ­illuminates the origin by inventing its own hypothetical relations to it. Agamben’s philosophical archeology, in this sense, excavates the inexistent or unsignifiable origins of things and of culture as a whole. Agamben’s thought adheres always to precise, generally textual facts and phenomena in order to read their limits and inherent negativity as disclosing what they themselves cannot say or manifest as such. By his use of this method, Agamben practices what I call negative theology in his analysis of the political and social archives of humanity. Every fact and phenomenon is determined by an exception that does not itself appear as such but remains a virtuality holding sway over every aspect of the significance of our world, both of its contents and of its consciousness. The titular case of the signature (Segnatura rerum) has historically been a widespread epistemological frame of reference in the West. A “signature” is not itself a sign but rather a mark that indicates an interpretive ambit, a context or register, in which interpretation of the signs so marked is to take place. “Secularity,” for example, is a signature marking certain concepts as to be interpreted in a profane rather than a sacred frame of reference, or, in other words, as not having reference to God or providence or other such theological postulates.18 Traditionally, signatures were most typically used to displace concepts in the other direction—from the mundane to the religious order. Beyond all their essential properties, things were thought to bear the signature of their origin—the Creator, in a monotheistic, creationist ontology. Such a system was deployed, for example, by Jakob Böhme and was developed by Paracelsus based also on Greek notions transmitted by Galen and ultimately on Aristotle’s “privations.” This perspective presupposes a general analogical logic that spans the entire Creation. Things, for example, plants, like lungwort or bloodroot,

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were seen as bearing a visible likeness to their own essential medicinal, healing properties. The mandrake, too, was read as having a manlike form, with its forked “legs,” and as magically inducing sexual desire. Such analogical thinking employs a poetic logic that begins always from an order of things that we can only imagine rather than simply from the positively given objects themselves. All things are marked in a way that refers them beyond themselves to some other reality that is alluded to and evoked but that cannot be apprehended as such. For Paracelsus, this other reality was none other than the paradisaical state. Signatures are, in this sense, “transcendental”: they refer to a realm that cannot as such be known but that never­ theless operates as a condition of the possibility of knowing. This kind of hyper-signification can be discerned as a sort of logic of thinking peculiar to the humanities. It is based especially on an age-old theological conviction that we are always thinking about what cannot be defined except negatively. In this sense, the theology in question is a negative theology. Indeed, the reality in question is inevitably missed by any possible definition of the object. Agamben’s thinking is very aware of this. His method is to think from precise facts, but to probe what they do not make manifest—except negatively. This is the case with the exception, and it is also the nature of the segnatura as a reference to a non-present, nonspecifiable reality that transcends the order of beings that are positively present within the known frame of nature. Traditionally, again, the segnatura was interpreted as a theological mark. “Theology” itself, so understood, is not a sign but a “segnatura” operating, in the absence of specifiable content, as the exigency of infinite significance that no specific signified could possibly fulfill. As theological, discourse is marked as belonging to someone Other—and thereby as, for human beings, a gift. As of the order of the signature, moreover, theology operates in the absence of adequate content and rather as the exigency of infinite significance to which no finite signified can answer. As such, theology is a “transcendental,” a dimension of all discourse rather than a specific discourse distinct from others. Similarly, God is not really a distinct entity among others: “he” is distinguished only by being indistinct from all other beings, as Eckhart and Cusanus taught.19 Negative or apophatic theology, as a discourse, bears the consciousness of itself as the infinite openness of discourse to unlimited relations with all that is. Theology, so

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conceived, is not a (distinct) discourse but rather the opening of all discourse infinitely to its own unlimited possibilities of signifying. Symmetrically, “secularization” is a signature that marks concepts as exceeding themselves toward what they cannot have conceived: they are beholden to a “theological” anteriority that they have voided or erased. The self-signifying of the signature does not grasp itself: it is a self-signifying trace in its very self-cancellation. This is the movement that negative theology traces in every attempt to signify God. In reviving such an epistemological model, Agamben positions himself with respect specifically to deconstruction understood as the thought of the signature as pure writing. He annexes the Derridean indefinite deferral of significance by différance, as well as the Foucauldian genealogy or archeology, for which there is no pure sign without a signature. Benjamin’s version of the philosophy of signatures points it more explicitly back toward its theological matrices in Creationist paradigms—specifically the myth of Creation by the Word. Benjamin also understands language as a magic-mimetic element, and yet the negativity of language remains primary even here. As an archive of nonsensible similitudes, substituting abstract, systematically codified marks, language also liquidates magic as a physically efficacious operation. The archive of signatures collects together a mass of non-semantic material that forms the condition of possibility for every significant discourse. There is no origin to be sought here. Signature and event are reciprocal. For Foucault and Agamben, the only origin is the discursive act itself. Speaking is praxis: it is doing something, and this is where “archeology” comes in as a distinctive method of producing significance specifically by pointing to what does not exist independently of or prior to the signifying act itself. Here, too, a creationist paradigm (creatio ex nihilo) is at work, and it operates by negation of what is, so as to open up a space for what is new and other.

CONTEMPORARY APOPHATIC APPLICATIONS: FROM THEOLOGY TO POLITICS

Agamben takes up the enigma of the homo sacer starting from the archaic Roman law stipulating that anyone can kill him without committing

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­homicide (sed qui occidit, parricidii non damnatur) but also that he cannot be sacrificed (neque fas est eum immolari).20 This is enigmatic because the homo sacer appears to be, and at the same time not to be, protected by the gods. The traditional interpretations of the homo sacer are able to explain, according to Agamben, either the license to kill him or the interdiction against sacrificing him, but not both. It seems that the homo sacer does and does not belong to the gods. Essential for Agamben is that the homo sacer is outside human and divine law alike: only so can he illuminate the limits and mutual relations of ius divinum and ius humanum. For this reason, the condition of being homo sacer is often taken to function like a taboo; it is so understood in ethnology. However, Agamben refuses to explain the double exceptionalism of the homo sacer in terms of such a purported originary ambiguity of the sacred. Agamben wishes, instead, to assert an originally political structure that precedes the distinction between the sacred and the profane. He thus argues against the widely diffused theory of the intrinsic ambiguity of the sacred and profane, which began in the Victorian Age with Robertson Smith’s theses on the indistinction of what he considered to be two species of taboo. The presumed ambiguity of the taboo or ban as a consecration/condemnation expressing veneration/horror was taken up by a series of anthropologists, including Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, and Wilhelm Wundt, and thence passed into the theory of sacred horror articulated in terms of the numinous by Rudolf Otto in Das Heilige (1917). This approach, for Agamben, risks reducing religion to a trivial emotional frisson such as horror films produce. Such an account he attributes to times in which modern culture has completely lost touch with the word as in any sense revealed and as more than just a tool of instrumental reason. Freud, too, propagated the taboo theory, and he accordingly embraced a theory based on the linguistic ambivalence of Latin sacer as meaning at once “holy” and “accursed.” But Agamben argues that sacer had already, early on, lost the meaning lent it by its original contexts of use, so that it could then be invested with any—even with contradictory—senses. The problem with the thesis of the equivocal meaning of sacer is that it includes homo sacer under a religious norm that absorbs the ambiguity and normalizes it in line with the notion of taboo generally in religions, whereas Agamben sees at play here rather the exception: the non-inclusion of the homo

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sacer in either the religious or the profane order. The secret and inexplicable abides in the disapplication of all available categories rather than in the application of any given category rendered ambiguous by desemanticization over time. Not simply semantics, furthermore, but real mechanisms, by which power is effectively exerted, even without transparent understanding on the part of those involved, determine the significances of words as they emerge from historical processes underway and traversing human institutions. Since power derives ultimately always from the power of exception, its springs remain generally invisible, or at least hidden. They cannot be positively stated. The exception, qua exception, is a lack that comes to exist only in relation to what it is not. The exception, as a lack, exists only for subjects who will and project what is not given as such. Such an inexistent or at least non-actual thing is not delimited or localizable, yet it can for that very reason open up a realm without limits in and around what it projects as lacking. This is the nature of the new, apophatic universality that Agamben, together with other thinkers in the postmodern age, is bringing to light. He brings out, by his “archeological” analysis, the unsuspected operation of such a purely negative universality specifically in the archaic ­origins of political sovereignty in human communities. Agamben’s point is that “not simple, natural life but rather life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element” (Non la semplice vita naturale, ma la vita esposta alla morte [la nuda vita o vita sacra] è l’elemento politico originario).21 Such life is politically produced, and it conditions all, even natural life as we are able to apprehend it negatively from our own position within society. Such bare life is, in effect, ­created by the logic of exception that should be understood, I am arguing, as an apophatic logic. Agamben repeatedly stresses that sovereign power is constituted not by any kind of positive bond or norm but rather by the dissolution (scioglimento) of all such positive expressions. He draws here from Badiou’s notion in Être et événement of “déliaison,” or the untying of social bonds as constitutive of the state. All forms creating social cohesion beyond bare life are dissolved as having any intrinsic power that could stand over and against the sovereign, and sovereign power is constituted as power over this latter (bare life) in the zone of indistinction between human and animal life, bíos

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and zoé, which turn out to be mutually constitutive by mutual exclusion.22 These mutual exclusions bring out a “between” that binds even in unbinding, and it is here alone that a truly unconditional power emerges. Bare life as such cannot be placed directly under the jurisdiction of any authority without being transformed into something defined and qualified. There is no juridical power over bare life as such. Yet the power of life and death (vitae necisque potestas) that a sovereign wields gives power indirectly over what otherwise no human being can command. This is power such as belongs normally only to a Creator. We have seen that the vita sacra, which exposes bare life to death, is not to be simply identified with zoé because it is rather the “zone of indistinction” in which political bíos and natural zoé constitute each other by mutual implication and exclusion (la vita sacra è la zona di indistinzione in cui, implicandosi ed escludendosi l’un l’altro, essi si costituiscono a ­vicenda).23 As such, bare life or vita sacra is, in fact, a perfect figure for the apophatic as the indefinable that is between all positive entities and is indeed their essence or life, but without conceptual limitations. Bare life, as inexpressible and “sacred,” is life in the infinite potency of its indifferentiation from every form of life. This is life in its universal communion with— and its undelimited contamination of—everything else, insofar as all else relates to life. Bare life is, in effect, not not life because it is itself no specific form of life. Hence, not life in any of its stateable forms, it is nevertheless presupposed by every form of life and thus is not not present, or is indirectly included, in any life whatsoever in any—and all—of its manifest forms. Modern Incarnations of Biopolitics in Light of the Apophatic Logic of Exception A key to understanding the deeper springs of Agamben’s thought is thus to see his work as exposing this submerged apophatic logic of double negation that governs human society and culture in its emergence. The emergence of which he writes, however, is not historical or prehistorical any more or less than it is absolutely contemporary. Society is ever in emergence in our midst, and the logic of exception is at work currently as its invisible structuring principle. According to Agamben, the supposed exclusion of natural life or zoé (as in zoology) from the ancient state based rather on bíos or personal his-

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tory (as in biography) has yielded in modern “democratic” societies to its generalized inclusion. All life, including the natural bodily life of its citizens, becomes the concern of the state, which, by excluding no level of life from its sphere of influence, includes all in the condition of absolute subjection to sovereign power and, in effect, turns all life into vita sacra. The modern state in this manner makes explicit the archaic “secret bond” (il vincolo segreto) between political power and bare life. The “absolute killability” of bare life was the exception in the ancient political order that protects its citizens, but in modern states it becomes the rule. There is no longer any natural difference between zoé and bíos, and exclusion and inclusion enter into a zone of indifferentiation.24 Modern states live thus in a permanent state of exception. State discipline and democratic liberation of zoé converge in modern democracy, where bare life is supposedly transformed from signifying servitude to a form of liberty and fulfillment. However, despite this emancipatory appearance, in reality bare life is more threatened than ever in today’s decadent democracies.25 This means, for example, that in consumer societies the pleasures and comforts offered to bodies as such are at the same time the means of their domination and subjection to a kind of servitude to the capitalist system. Bare life in the common person’s body seems to be liberated to fulfill itself and its own desires: it is free from all alienating ascetic morality, or religious discipline, or even economic austerity. But, at the same time, it is manipulated in every imaginable way so as to serve the purposes of commercial exploitation and development. The difference between granting full liberty to individuals for unbridled hedonistic indulgence of their desires and total subjection of every level of life and desire, leaving no sphere outside the control of political power, becomes unclear and even indiscernible. All pleasure and entertainment, like everything else in this modernized state, is part of the system regulated by advertising ­images and commercial markets and media spectacles used as instruments of the biopolitics of the state. In modernity, simple life becomes part of the political calculus, part of what generates “biopolitics.” There is no longer anything “sacred” or set apart about life—nor any real difference between living and dead, between organism and machine, no unsurpassable threshold, neither of life nor of the holy. The cyborg could be taken as one symbol of this generalized amalgamation and breaking down of difference between the biological and the

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inanimate or mechanical. The modern subject has taken control over life itself, including its own, with all the attendant self-destructive powers pertaining thereto. This leads to a totalizing of science with no ethical limits and eventually makes the Holocaust conceivable. All clear oppositional distinctions break down vis-à-vis a more fundamental, enigmatic phenomenon of historical humanity that cannot be explained by any merely immanent principles but needs instead to be teased out by a negative method, and so be made to release its secrets. In modern democracies, say, since the French Revolution, with its toppling of class hierarchies, bare life is liberated and becomes itself in some sense sovereign. The Constitution of the United States of America extends and materializes this liberation: the “pursuit of happiness” by individuals, independently of larger social bodies and purposes, is promoted as a value in and for itself. Yet, since bare life itself becomes specifically the object of sovereign power in modern biopolitics, this “liberation” in reality coincides with state control and discipline, which has never before been so pervasive in its sway over everything and everyone without qualification or limits. One consequence is that there is no longer any clear separation between public and private spheres. Through mediatization, the private lives of political figures become fully integral to their public role and service. More generally, there is no longer any level of merely natural life (zoé for Aristotle) at least ambiguously outside the historical-juridical life (bíos) and so not expressly subject to state power. Bare life in classical politics was the exception: natural life or death was subjected to political authority only exceptionally in the form of the homo sacer, who no longer had any legal status. But in the modern biopolitical state, this exception has become the rule, as bare life in all is the object of a totalizing state apparatus. Liberation and subjection of bare life thus become indistinguishable. The Nazi regime first revealed in its full horror this new configuration of power in our modern world of nation-states in crisis. By an inadvertent complicity, modern democracy in its decadence is converging upon the totalitarian states that have generally been supposed to be its worst enemy.26 In this perspective, Agamben proposes an incisive revision of the foundations myths of the modern state. Typically, such myths attempt to justify certain forms of government as natural. Classical rights theories of politics since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been built on a hypothetical state of nature. But the state of nature is in reality apprehended

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only negatively as a state of exception in which the order of the city and the rule of law are momentarily suspended or hypothetically dissolved. Thus nature is never really apprehended independently of or prior to the state. Establishing state power is not simply natural, but entails a deliberate, artificial foundation and indeed requires continual refoundation by sovereign decision. Agamben shows that this decision is taken in relation not to the free will of consenting subjects, as in contract theories of the founding of society, but rather in view of bare life that is neither natural, reproductive life nor biographical, juridically recognized life. Modern sovereignty founds itself by power over a sort of life that lies between the two in an in-between of indifferentiation between man and beast. A most revealing figure for this ambiguous state in the collective unconscious and popular imagination is the werewolf (wargus; lupo mannaro; loup garou).27 The werewolf is one who passes secretly between the state of being a peaceful member of the community and being a murderous preda­ tor upon it. This figure of popular imagination witnesses to the uncannily frightening power of such in-between states in the collective unconscious. Popular legends and myths such as Zeus liceo (recorded in Plato, Republic 565d–566b) or Marie de France’s “Bisclavret” register the closeness and collusion of the werewolf with the sovereign, who is revealed thereby (at least unconsciously) as a vestigial form of the wolf within the city. In Marie de France’s lai, the werewolf is deprived of the ability to change back into a man because his wife has sent her lover to steal his clothes from their hiding place in the forest at the spot where he changes back and forth. A year later, when chased down in the hunt by the king and his courtiers, the werewolf shows itself to be tame and civilized by ­approaching the sovereign in a fawning manner with supplicating bows and gestures. The miraculously tame wolf is adopted into the marveling court and eventually changes back to a man in the bed of the sovereign. This obliquely suggests the complicity between sovereign rule and savage, predatory nature that dwells in secret at the foundation of the social order and that cannot become fully conscious without undermining the very bases of legitimacy of the state. Breakdown of Constitutive Differences and Slide toward Indistinction What Gianni Vattimo in his postmodern hermeneutic philosophy hails as “dissolution of objectivities”28 is signaled by Agamben as a breakdown of

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constitutive differences. I suspect that any process of reflection whatever carried far enough eventually annuls the very distinctions on which it is based. In and through reflection, all terms of distinction are mediated to the point of becoming virtually identical in the dynamic of mediation itself. Hegel called this “the identity of identity and difference.” This is what happens concretely in history, too, to oppositional terms in the evolution of society. For example, contemporary capitalist societies are in many ways divided no longer into qualitatively distinct classes, with different cultures and traditions and goals, but simply into groups—richer and poorer—quantitatively differentiated by their degree of wealth or ­penury. Real functional and qualitative distinctions are erased, being absorbed into the all-conquering, indifferent, anonymous power of money. In the end, what Agamben emphasizes most—and the only result he can claim as genuinely new in our own age—is the total breakdown of distinctions between the political and the biological, between the realms of right and of life, between the public and the private, between values and facts. And this sort of removal of distinctions as only relative and of no ultimate validity is eminently characteristic of apophasis as well. However, apophatic thought, for example, in the tradition stretching from Dionysius the Areopagite to Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus, tends to place the emphasis on the positive potential that is liberated thereby. Apophatics endeavors to point to the enabling ground beyond all positive differences, all differentiating characterizations and their inevitable exclusions and contradictions. Verbally articulated distinctions are all relativized as mere artifice in the face of the absoluteness of the real and determining grounds that remain unsayable and that are, of course, not even properly “grounds” at all. They belong, instead, to the mystery that there is anything at all— “mere being” or “naked being” (bloßes Sein), in Schelling’s peculiar idiom. A theological or religious view of this predicament would be apt to stress that there are no more distinctions because all explicit distinctions are only humanly instituted and are therefore always discardable. Only what is somehow recognized as transcending human distinctions and as a difference that is not man-made can stand against the universal leveling that Agamben finds to be gaining ground everywhere today. Heidegger sought this point of resistance in terms of the ontological difference between Being (“das Sein”) and beings (“das Seiende”). Radically Orthodox

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theologians and similarly minded thinkers seek it in terms of the “Christian” difference between Creator and creation.29 But all terms are inadequate, which is what I mean to express by suggesting that the ultimate difference in question is unqualifiable or “apophatic.” In the modern world, all supposedly given or natural distinctions collapse and become mere instituted conventions. Agamben’s paradigm case is the concentration camp and emblematically the figure of the musulmano (not Jew, not Western), in whom there is no longer any distinction between fact and right, life and norm, nature and politics. The same logic stretches to the other end of the power hierarchy, where the charismatic Führer (“leader”) represents the life of the people immediately.30 His sovereignty is not an office, but is one with his very physical being. His biological life is, as such, political—the body of the state. There are no longer two king’s bodies, the one natural (a human corpus) and the other political (the body politic), as in medieval political theology.31 The modern condition immediately identifies the two, but as a merely empirical, factual identity. Agamben underlines as particularly symptomatic the indifferentiation in which the production and the application of norms are no longer distinguishable.32 The application of the norm is its production in the case of the Führer in Nazi Germany, but also in the mediatized society of the spectacle, such as we witness it today, in which the real and the virtual blur.33 Medi­ atized sports events, or rock concerts, or political rallies take place more essentially through their projected images than through any actions or words of real bodies in the flesh. In the logic of sovereignty that was fully exposed by the Nazi regime, it is the decision of the sovereign that makes the law and that nullifies any objective distinctions: “The sovereign decision from one instance to the next renews the threshold of indifference between external and internal, exclusion and inclusion, nómos and phýsis. . . . His decision is the positing of undecidability.”34 Very near the beginning of Western tradition, Pindar’s fragmentary hymn to the sovereign law, Nómos basileús, underlines the conjunction between violence and right, or killing and justice, even to the point of their indistinguishability. Sovereignty is indeed constituted precisely in a moment of indifference between violence and right.35 By pointing out this originary indifferentiation, Agamben calls into question all the mythical structures that are built on the purportedly clear

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separation between evil and good, violence and right. Beyond the articulated discourses separating one antithetical category from another, there is always a common origin in negation or exception that is being forgotten and erased. This is fundamentally an apophatic insight, one Agamben is striving to recover. He does so in a critical spirit, without claiming it as a positive paradigm that delivers the truth, even though he does employ a language of the unveiling of secrets (arcana). He uses his insight into the logic of exclusion, or into the negativity at the origin of every system of right, of every politics and its accompanying discourse, in order to expose ideologies and their contradictions. This procedure is at least compatible with critical Marxism and may even coincide with messianic Marxism, particularly that of Walter Benjamin. And yet, it is very difficult to make Agamben take sides on any decidable issues of contemporary politics because he is concerned above all to expose the aporiae from which contradictory positions spring. The issues and moral dilemmas for the State originate in its necessarily ambiguous founding in difference and negation as embodied in the state of exception. This is the level at which Agamben’s analysis operates, bringing to light the grounds of the aporiae. The importance and potential of such a negative outlook becomes evident especially in its applications to our enigmatic life in society and the world, where more straightforward explanations in terms of positive power are inevitably distorting, however politically attractive and seductive they may be. More deeply considered, every constituted power and every positive bestowal of “right” is founded on exclusions. This is what such power wishes to occult, and it is the secret that Agamben endeavors to divulge. However, the exclusions are at the same time inclusions. And this is why bare life, as excluded in founding the unconditional power of the state, becomes also the very object of its totalizing biopolitical management and manipulation. The goal or final significance of Agamben’s work is not always clear, or at least not unequivocal. It remains open in many directions. The precision of his analyses does not narrowly delimit their potential applications and wider implications. However, they are remarkably consistent in finding some negative logic of an absent or, more precisely, banished element as the secret spring of each phenomenon of power that he examines. This is what I mean by “apophatic” (literally “negative”) alogic, and it is crucial to the underlying cast and overall strategy of Agamben’s thinking.

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I do not mean to imply that apophatic thought is always or necessarily positive for Agamben or that it is consistently advocated by him. Apophasis can also turn up as complicit in, and indeed as radicalizing, the “logic of domination” that is typical of the metaphysical tradition. However, Agamben’s notion of “impotentiality” does clearly enshrine the fecundity of the nothing, and this suggests that his critique applies only to certain ways of appropriating the apophatic or of using the Nothing as a ground used once again to name and control the field of definable, disposable objects or entities. “Impotentiality” is a constant concern in the essays by Agamben gathered under the title Potentialities.36 An icon for this predicament is found in Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The reservoir of potentiality in Bartleby’s simple formula, the constant refrain “I would prefer not to,” with its undecidability as to whether he is refusing or is simply unable, is understood to be more than either a state of being (able) or of not being (able): it is the source from which both spring. Only a power capable of potency and impotency is supreme potency. Bartleby’s reticence, his not saying, is quintessentially apophatic, and this is the heart of the mystery that implacably attracts Agamben in his most teasing reflections.37 The undecidability between unwillingness and inability in Bartleby’s answer leaves him supremely undetermined and unlimited in his potential—by negating even negation itself.

UNIVERSALITY EAST AND WEST

Agamben’s thought on the exception impinges on the status of the universal. Specifically, it brings out the nature of the universal as constructed by negativity. The provocative phrase “the West and the rest” is a particular example that renders patent how a single pole (the West) functioning as a norm can organize a discursive space on the basis of what it is not, of what it leaves undefined and indeterminate, namely, “the rest.” Such an “apparatus” (to invoke Foucault’s vocabulary), spanning numerous different registers, is used to control and manage what can be identified only as an exception to the rule that it defines. Applied to the geopolitical sphere, Agamben’s logic of exception doubles the logic of negation upon itself, so that Asians, in our globalized

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world, are not not Westerners. Asian societies and cultures are so thoroughly invaded by materials and ideas of Western provenance that Asians, even as non-Westerners, are nevertheless formed and configured by the West and in this sense are not not-Western. Conversely, considering the West’s construction of itself, through the whole history of colonization and postcolonialism, in symbiosis with its colonies and in dependence upon its profits from the East, geographical Westerners likewise cannot but be considered as not not-Eastern. In other words, the Orient enabled the West to become the dominant power on the world scene and is, as such, constitutive (whether consciously so or not) of Westerners’ self-understanding of themselves as Western. In this sense, Westerners must recognize themselves as beholden to the East for their identity, so that they are not not Eastern: they are indeed constituted by this relation, even if geographically they belong to an area that is discrete and even distanced from the East. This is true for all, and it is consciously so for those who recognize this constitutive cultural hybridity and acknowledge it as opening a level of insight beyond the simple platitude of “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” It behooves us to observe in the context of this meditation on Agamben’s thought as an outstanding realization of apophatic logic in Western tradition that precisely these apophatic postures of thinking are most natural to Asian philosophical and religious traditions. This is exactly the sort of insight that has been developed from earliest times in Asian currents of culture, such as Chinese Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, and Mahayana Buddhism. The Mulamadhyamakakarika of Nagarjuna (ca. 150–250), for example, the fundamental text of the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism, is a relentless deconstruction of any sort of concept of stable or self-subsistent identity. It works like the logic of exception to dismantle all apparently self-standing essences and to show their dependence on what they nominally exclude. The sources for such reflection are inexhaustible. They can be found also in classical Chinese wisdom right from the Book of Changes (I Jing): such a logic is modeled in the inclusive exclusiveness of yin and yang. The not very well acknowledged apophatic thrust of Agamben’s thinking is one axis aligning it with the Asian traditions that are generally excluded from his otherwise remarkably wide-ranging allusions. At one point in his Homo sacer series, Agamben explicitly avows that he limits his his-

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torical data “essentially to the Greco-Roman arena” (limitiamo per l’essenziale all’ambito greco-romano).38 I maintain that exposing apophatic thinking as the underlying a/logic and the driving inspiration of Agamben’s thinking shows him to stand in unexpected proximity to millenary tendencies of thought running deep especially in Asian philosophy and culture. Fittingly, the deep and far-reaching significance of Agamben’s own work is thereby revealed by what it ostensibly excludes, or at least leaves largely out of account. The apophatic cast and inspiration of Agamben’s thought was already patent well before the Homo sacer project. It was, in effect, Agamben’s starting point in his first major book, The Man without Content (L’uomo senza contenuto) (1970), with its focus on what is often mistakenly taken to be theorized by Hegel as the definitive “death of art” but is actually art’s ­indefinite continuation in a self-annulling mode. The apophatic can be clearly descried, again, in the thirty-three anecdotal philosophical reflections of Agamben’s Idea della prosa featuring “the absolute potential, the pure power of representation itself: the blank writing slate!” (la propria assoluta potenza, la pura potenza della rappresentazione stessa: la tavoletta per scrivere!).39 With essays on authors ranging from Damascius, in whom ancient Neoplatonic apophaticism culminates, to Nagarjuna, one of the most subtle and potent expressions of apophatic thinking in South Asian traditions, this collection probes the silence that inheres in the word and traces its becoming visible, particularly in the human face and its beauty. In a deliberately fragmentary manner, Agamben expounds the guiding insights at the foundations—or more exactly in the cracks in the f­ oundations— of the traditions he explores throughout his subsequent oeuvre. The eventual destiny or, we might say, the wider potential of his oeuvre to extend its range eastward to Asia shows through between the fragments at this preHomo sacer stage in Agamben’s thinking. A contemporary apophatic thinker—again, in my interpretation more than in his own self-understanding—who could be evoked in order to supplement Agamben’s analyses with analyses drawn explicitly from and based on Eastern sources is François Jullien. Jullien’s work deserves notice as an important precedent working between Eastern and Western approaches to apophaticism, bringing out some of their uncanny parallels and convergences by working from the gaps and intervals (“les écarts”) between them. The universal that is fecund for dialogue between cultures becomes

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in e­ ffect the common as opposed to the uniform, as Jullien argues in De l’universel.40 Agamben similarly defines a process of “profanation,” which consists in returning the exception to the common: one discovers common humanity at the bottom of all exceptions and their apparent transcendences. The transcendent, in the end, is simply what all bear in common, even though it cannot be individuated and grasped as such. Jullien’s work, in attempting to mediate between Eastern and Western approaches to apophaticism, comes to insist on this aspect of the common (“le commun”) as a shared fund of understanding (“fonds d’entente”) that lies between various cultures and enables them to interact with each other across the distance of the gap. It is ungraspable and unformulatable in any given culture or language: in other words, it is apophatic. The common enables representatives of different cultures to understand one another, even in disagreeing. In these terms, I submit, Agamben’s questioning of universality cannot be followed out to its furthest consequences except in relation to Asia and to the rest of the world that his thought may have seemed to exclude or at least overlook.

Part IV

C R O S S - C U LT U R A L A N D T R A N S ­ HISTORICAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY Chapter 7 pursues the question of the intercultural further by taking it into the heart of the controversy concerning the liberal arts and humanities, whose viability and very survival are being so fatefully debated in the current turn from the second to the third decade of the twenty-first century. Throughout part IV, these discussions turn on the issue of interdisciplinarity. The interplay of disciplines has already been in full swing throughout this entire book, beginning from the consideration of theology and its “others” (notably philosophy and literature) in part I. But part IV reaches back to a time before distinct disciplines, with their differentiated methods and protocols, had established themselves. Chapter 8 features a repristinated interdisciplarity, which is being recovered today in the context of the postmodern university, as mirroring itself in the fluid nature of knowledge characterizing the Axial Age two and half millennia ago. From Socrates and Laozi, who are set up in parallel in chapter 7, and who both also belong to the Axial Age examined in chapter 8, we stand to relearn the apophatic wisdom that has again become necessary for us in what emerges here as, in telling regards, a postdisciplinary age of humanities knowledge. As a token of this loosening of disciplinary rigidity, furthermore, a more personal register of discourse is employed here from the outset in order to make manifest a vital dimension of human knowledge as grounded in personal experience.

Chapter Seven

L I B E R A L A R T S E D U C AT I O N WORLDWIDE UNLIMITED INC. The Unspeakable Basis of Comparative Humanities

INTRODUCTION

The nature of knowledge in the humanities, as involved knowing, is to be inextricably contextual and therefore comparative. To this extent, such knowledge is destined also to be inherently international. While working in and visiting universities in Macao, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines, over the years 2013 to 2016, I had occasion to observe how traditional humanities are often being pursued most energetically and ambitiously in East Asia.1 Ironically, the West can relearn from East Asia the meaning and purpose of studying the humanities. I have found humanities cultivation to be still comparatively youthful and vital in greater China and its neighbors. The liberal arts there are often still felt to afford accession to a new kind of empowerment and self-awareness. This has been my experience in certain teaching institutions oriented to broad enculturation rather than serving narrowly defined career goals of professional development.2 The crisis in the humanities is, of course, worldwide, and in the end Asia is no exception. However, the effects of history in the evolution of ­society and culture in the East are understandably out of phase with their movements in the West. This a/synchronicity enables East Asia to offer an 183

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intriguing foil affording sometimes surprising perspectives counterpointing developments in Western universities, as well as in other types of educational and research institutions. To the end of interpreting the purport and motives of any such flourishing of the humanities, the issue of the specialization of knowledge in the context of the university, with its double mission of fostering research and general education, serves especially well as a key focus.3 Taking up just one aspect of the broader topic of the progressive specialization of knowledge, I wish to pursue the question: Why do we still need unspecialized knowledge? Our specialized scientific knowledge seems to have become so successful today that we take it to be the absolute paradigm of what genuine knowledge should be. Empirical science has given us prodigious powers to transform our world. Yet, unless we have some measure of understanding and control over its potentialities and take responsibility for the final ends to which it is put, this knowing is at risk of becoming only that much more mighty a form of manipulation and even recklessness. Not that we can know, in any definitive way, the ends of human existence or the ultimate purpose and potential of the universe. But we can and do need to know and take account of our own ignorance vis-à-vis its endlessly open possibilities. This self-awareness is a fundamental premise for the benign use and humane exploitation of any branch or aspect of our knowledge, and it is essential to protect us from the worst ravages of our own limitations and inevitable blindnesses. My thesis, then, in its baldest and most outrageous form, is that knowledge in the humanities is—and should be—fundamentally ignorance. The humanities’ highest purpose is to teach us our ignorance. This was the lesson of Socrates near the outset of the Western tradition of philosophy: he understood that the oracle of Apollo at Delphi had designated him as the wisest of men simply because he knew that he did not know. Instead of being a possessor of knowledge, he was simply a lover of wisdom, a devotee in the pursuit of philo-sophia (literally, “love of wisdom”). This Socratic wisdom is not without close parallels in the Daoist and Confucian traditions, where the sage is acutely aware of how the Dao persistently escapes from human grasp and from all the constructions of knowledge and language. Still today, as in all ages, this may well be the hardest thing of all for us to know—or at least to acknowledge and accept. The unknowing that

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underlies, antedates, and conditions all our knowing, remains in essential ways the better part of wisdom—however advanced and powerful our technical know-how becomes. This unknowing is what relates us to everything else beyond our ken and releases us from confinement to the narrow sphere of our own familiar territory surveyed and charted by our measuring instruments into grids of information. This cognizance of our ignorance, as a form of acknowledgment of what is beyond and other to our own systems of explicitly rationalized knowing, projects us into relation with the All and the Unknown. Humanities knowledge, then, at a certain fundamental level, is about human limits. Such knowing of one’s own limits is the gist of the injunction “Know thyself ” inscribed over the temple of Apollo, the god of wisdom, at Delphi in Greece.4 Yet the limit is also what enables us to think past a circumscribed field of knowledge and to intuit an uncircumscribed, undelimited region beyond. The limit marks what is beyond the limit and opens this “beyond” in another register of awareness trained on what exceeds objective representation and explicit conceptual grasp. The narratives and archetypes of myth and religion offer us a fertile resource for this purpose: they provide what we could call an “imaginary.”5 In millenary traditions across cultures, the deepest wisdom of humanity consists in knowing our own ignorance, and this knowing opens upon an unspeakable dimension of consciousness that is profoundly expressed across cultures in the modes of literature and religion, as well as in other artistic genres and ritual activities, and in other types of human endeavor. The negation of discourse and mystical surrender to knowing “nothing” turn out to be intimately bound up with a kind of (un)knowing of everything, or more precisely with an inarticulable relation to and awareness of the connectedness between and among all things without limits. The negation of our claim to definitive knowing, our understanding of ourselves as more fundamentally in a state of unknowing or of learned ­ignorance (docta ignorantia), opens this infinite sphere. This is the sort of wisdom that the oldest traditions of myth and religious ritual have perennially intimated by indirect means in their own poetic and symbolic vocabularies. It is also the kind of knowledge that the humanities have a mission to continue to cultivate in our modern, ever more technocratic and managerial civilization. Otherwise, we are ever more fatally gripped in the vice of specialized, technical knowledge that ignores and obliterates all such

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intuitive, as-yet-undifferentiated awareness. We lose our peripheral vision of a nonobjective dimension of existence as underlying everything human and sustaining its meaning. Whether or not we believe in any special intuitive cognitive faculties, or in any sort of higher mind or reality, still we must concede that the knowledge of every discipline is both limited and open on all sides in the direction of other disciplines. Such knowledge necessarily looks toward what remains unknown to a given discipline’s knowledge taken simply by itself and on its own terms. Without presupposing any kind of mystic sensibilities, we are all nevertheless aware, in any given act of cognition, of the impingement on all our apparent knowing of background factors that cannot be determined or thematically focused in a fully exhaustive manner. This circumambient reality saturates knowing but can never be taken in as a whole, since it is no distinct object of knowledge: it is in effect “nothing” insofar as exact or objective knowledge is concerned. Yet it is all-important as a kind of connective tissue for determining contextually the purport and sense of all that we might claim to grasp or understand by means of our mental powers. This is the unspeakable basis of knowledge in the humanities that the following reflections endeavor to make indirectly discernible. We need to recognize and appreciate it as the secret source of value in all our knowing, even knowing of the most technical, precise, and positive sorts.

THE HUMANITIES AS INVOLVED KNOWING

Shifting our perspective to East Asia helps us to discern what is truly universal about the university in its vocation to cultivating humanity. However, the universal turns out also to be in the end the singular, since we are all unique individuals. Accordingly, I will take up this topic in a more personal voice and from an autobiographical angle, with reference to particular occasions. This more subjective dimension—which has some claim to belong to what may be called, to use William Desmond’s term, an “intimate universal”—is, after all, inextricable from humanities knowledge. A recent book of mine—The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante (2015)—mounts a defense

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of the humanities as an indispensable and universal way of knowing. It considers the humanities specifically as “Involved Knowing,” starting from the very title of the introduction. The Revelation of Imagination concentrates on the tradition of epic and prophetic poetry that sustains Western literature as perhaps its central axis and brings this tradition into relation with the claims to inspired knowledge that are characteristic particularly of revealed religion. Underscoring an irreducibly personal and poetic dimension as mediating such revelation, the book outlines a philosophical theory of the ways and means of acquiring insight in the humanities. The introduction and conclusion of the book work out a “poetic epistemology of knowledge in the humanities” that contrasts with—but in the end also ­encompasses—scientific method as itself just one more means of human knowing. Science, too, as actually practiced by human beings, needs to be viewed, finally, as a kind of poetry. It, too, entails the creative invention of modes of seeing and experiencing. Human knowledge is personal, contextual, historical, perspectival, and relational, and this includes even scientific knowledge considered as a form of human knowing. Knowledge, at its origins and in its core, is necessarily involved knowing: it cannot be made purely detached and objective. As Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) con­ vincingly showed several centuries ago, we know essentially by doing and making. We cannot abstract our knowledge from this human rootedness in existential acts of being. Scientific objectivity apparently demands making some such abstraction. Nevertheless, the significance of all our knowing is indissolubly bound to embodied and encultured human subjects. Such subjects alone can make knowing meaningful by their conscious and participatory acts of reflection. This notion of knowledge as a fully concrete act rooted in both physical and social existence is enshrined in the traditional model of the liberal arts. As involved knowing that engages whole individuals at every level of their being, both body and spirit, the liberal arts naturally and necessarily resist the more extreme sorts of pressure toward ever greater specialization. It is impossible to completely objectify and exhaustively analyze an act of knowing in which one is currently involved. The knower is enveloped within an unfolding process rather than standing outside of it and able to encompass it all with an adequate concept in a bird’s-eye view. We

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can only reflect on our participation in this process: we cannot fully comprehend it as a whole because we are ourselves within it and are part of it. Our relation to and within this imaginable whole remains paramount. We cannot abstract from this wholeness without forgetting or distorting the nature and purpose of knowing itself as an incalculably meaningful form of life. Therefore, we must think of the liberal arts not as separate ­disciplines—a handful of specific options among others on a menu of course offerings or choices for a major, options that in the course of time seem to have become increasingly obsolete and irrelevant. Instead, every one of the liberal arts, more deeply considered, is an angle of approach to the whole of knowledge. A liberal art, considered profoundly, is not just a specific subject focused on a designated type or category of things, such as forms in space for ­geometry, or different permutations of numbers for arithmetic, or mathematical proportions for music and astronomy. These quantitative disciplines, making up the quadrivium, are to be understood as more generally about relationships that structure the entire universe. Moreover, they presuppose, at a minimum, the verbal arts of the trivium. Here again, we tend to think of grammar as dealing only with the valences of verbal expressions, of ­rhetoric as concerned just with constructing discourses, and of dialectics as about valid syllogistic forms of argument for the discernment of truth. However, each of these latter three disciplines (the trivium) was conceived of anciently as geared to training a whole individual to be perfect in every excellence—to possess every moral and intellectual virtue. According to their long-attested tradition in the ancient and medieval worlds, each discipline of the liberal arts is a window on the whole of life and being—a window opening on the overall order (or disorder) and purpose (or meaninglessness) of the universe. Each of the seven artes liberales just mentioned, those making up the trivium and the quadrivium, is distinguished by having been established as canonical already in ancient and medieval tradition. Today they are studied alongside many more subjects, including all those designated as “sciences, social sciences, and humanities” in the curriculum of the liberal arts college. Each of these furnishes a way of exploring the relation of the knowing subject to others as a self-aware, individual person. Each brings into focus from a particular angle of vision the totality of the person’s relation within the world, and thus their relation to knowledge as a whole.

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One of the most transformative and significant implications of this orientation to wholeness is that each of these disciplines fosters fundamentally a form of self-knowing, of knowledge of oneself within the unlimited context of the international community and of the entire cosmos. What is known in liberal arts, and most transparently in humanities studies, is not just an isolated object or even a specific field walled off from others. It is rather the whole of knowledge viewed through the prism of a specific disciplinary subject matter by a certain unique individual—a self-reflective, thinking subject. This is the nature of wisdom (sapientia) as opposed to knowledge simply of facts and objects (scientia, in its vulgar acceptation). Authentically human knowledge has a self-reflective structure shaping it into a whole that is actualized by a human being: it is not made up merely by the accumulation of objective data in a definable domain. The specific objects known in any of the liberal arts—geometrical or gram­ matical or astronomical or whatever—serve chiefly as material for an exercise in self-reflection that is unlimited in scope and that aims at self-­ comprehension on the part of the knower in relation to others in the global situation. A self-reflective subject is thereby placed in unlimited relations with others throughout the universe. A college course today, for example, one covering U.S. trade wars and foreign relations with China, or even one focusing on the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century between Western powers and the Qing dynasty, is not just about a certain segment of history, with its particular protagonists and special issues and problems. Instead, such a course illuminates also the way that any of us—and the communities to which we belong—engage in relations with one another, negotiating compromises in the face of real or perceived threats and conflicts of interest. This more general and applied type of insight and awareness is likely, in most cases, to be of more lasting significance to those acquiring it than all of the specialized knowledge of facts that may also be learned. Most students taking such a class will never become foreign affairs experts or work in the State Department. But all can learn to comprehend something significant about the complex interaction among incalculably shifting factors in creating and upsetting the delicate sorts of equilibrium in which human relations consist. This humanly universal type of dynamism has a direct pertinence for all students in their own life struggles and aspirations.

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In this sense, humanities educators are all engaged in what can be called “general education.” However, it is not by creating another box with the label “General Education” that this purpose can be served best. We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that general education as such can be taught by offering courses earmarked by that label. The general can only be approached through the specific, the global through the local. It is disciplinary courses in the liberal arts that have the duty to carry out “general education,” with its vocation of awakening the intellect and attuning the human spirit to become capable of entering into fruitful participation with others in the general order of things. This type of enculturing study is not a separate and supplementary material that can be added in alongside the others. It is rather the common goal and purpose of all of the liberal arts, including the social and even the natural sciences. They approach and achieve it each in their own way and from their own differentiated disciplinary backgrounds. They offer so many different incitements—suited to different students’ tastes and talents—to contemplate the overall frame of things. The purport of specialized knowledge concerning geology, history, art, or whatever discipline taken as a liberal art is to be understood analogically and exemplarily. Whatever the specific subject matter, it involves an instance of an individual human being engaging in a relationship with others in the world as determined by specific cultural coordinates and filtered through certain identifiable traditions, with their characteristic concepts and methods of thinking. Saint Augustine understood each of the liberal arts as revealing analogically something about the nature of the divine mind and intelligence that informs the universe in every feature and aspect throughout all levels of reality. In this spirit, knowledge in the liberal arts is not fundamentally about a circumscribed field of objects but rather about a relation to the whole of being. For Augustine, the liberal arts were all ways of contemplating God. Yet they were not merely propaedeutic to theology. They were already themselves implicitly theological in the sense of revealing some aspect of the whole of being in its deepest grounds and cause. The leading role of theology here as “queen of the sciences” (regina scientiarum) became much more explicit later in the Scholastic period with Bonaventure’s De reductione artium ad theologiam (Reconducting the Arts to

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Theology).6 In this light, liberal arts knowledge shows up not as a means to an end, but rather as ordered to envisioning a unity that reveals all things in their deeper natures in and through manifesting their relations with one another. It is in this sense that humanities consist, from the ground up, in irreducibly relational knowing.7

HUMAN ENCOUNTER AND THE UNKNOWN

Unlike the strictly specialized knowledge of the sciences, humanities learning teaches us to pursue knowledge as a way of relating to an infinite—or at least an endlessly open—world consisting in unlimited relations. We are concerned with the quality and vitality of our relation with the whole and not just with solving particular problems within defined parameters and coordinates. This relation to the whole of the universe, however, has to start with our relations to those immediately around us. A humanities course is first and foremost about human encounter with the others in the course— and about the horizon of being human that discloses the unlimited potential of such encounters. From there, its scope expands to touch on the many different contexts of these encounters in the uncircumscribed horizon of the universe and even to its “beyond.” This “beyond” gestures toward the transcendent dimension that, even if it remains unknown in itself, can, via relation—by its being related to and relativizing all our action and even our passivity—lend a different kind of meaning to everything that is within the sphere of our knowledge and experience. Already in the ancient world, geometry and arithmetic, for example, were not only about figures and numbers, but also about the design of the universe and about the proportions necessary for harmony between people and among all beings. If knowledge cultivates only technical expertise in managing factual information, without moral reflection or spiritual vision and aesthetic inspiration, it becomes merely mechanical. We are then no longer educating persons, but are merely programming machines. We might as well be training robots. Of course, the infinity of our relations is nothing that is ever knowable in any definitive terms. Accordingly, the disciplines of the liberal arts and sciences, together and all at once, are forms, above all, of relating to the

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unknowable—to what cannot be objectively grasped or controlled. The unknowable is our true starting point in any endeavor to pursue knowledge to its ultimate grounds, and it remains a constant point of reference ever after. This, in the last analysis, is what we need to acknowledge in order to preserve our knowing as authentically human and so prevent it from turning into a monster—like Frankenstein—that will threaten to destroy us.8 The unknowable has priority because it is the horizon necessary to allow the unencompassable whole of things to remain operative on our minds in their striving after the unconditioned that lies beyond all the finite limits and conditions of our knowing. Otherwise, we are liable to force a reduction to our own known and artificially delimited frame of reference applied for purposes of defining a circumscribed field of objects that we can manage and control. This idea of humanities knowledge as orienting us to unlimited relatedness of all with all, and as being based above all on human encounters, requires us to learn to be open to one another, as well as to acknowledge what we can never completely know even about ourselves. It leads us ineluctably in the direction of an international, and indeed a global, perspective on learning. Since it entails unlimited openness to others and to the Other, humanities knowledge is intrinsically international and is naturally destined to become worldwide. It fosters communications across national and cultural boundaries. It cultivates knowledge of local and regional traditions, yet it cannot help but seek to place them in a global context. Knowledge in the humanities understands universal human concerns, furthermore, as impinging incisively on the present—on our own decisive and inescapable moment in world history. My previously mentioned book The Revelation of Imagination is exclusively about the Western humanities tradition, but my working in East Asia enabled me to extend my vision of the humanities to comprehend also Eastern traditions. In the course of my several years as head of a program in philosophy and religious studies at the University of Macao, I wrote a book engaging these traditions: Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders, now in a series on Chinese Philosophy and Culture, with SUNY Press. As a testament witnessing to my transglobal experience, this work elucidates how my pursuit of the way of unknowing, or of “what cannot be said,” through what I call “apophatic” thought, led me to East

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Asia, especially to its ancient mystical traditions, which are so keenly sensitive to and reflective about the limits of knowledge and language. The preface to the work lays out this itinerary in both an autobiographical and a theoretical register. Through this experience of geographical displacement, my approach to Western humanities has expanded into a work of comparative philosophy engaging particularly with classical Chinese thinking. I endeavor to explain, specifically in terms of my apophatic philosophy, what is at stake for me in extending humanities studies beyond the borders of the Western tradition by bringing it into conversation with East Asian thought and literature. I focus on currents of apophatic thinking, which are actually very strong in both the East and the West, but especially and most obviously in ancient Eastern traditions such as Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Apophatic Paths from Europe to China serves to illustrate the deeper grounding for an approach to global humanities education in a postmodern—and now even postsecular—world. Such an approach, as I conceive it, is based on the classical wisdom of unknowing.

THE IMPERATIVE OF DE-SPECIALIZATION IN THE HUMANITIES

Humanities knowledge quite generally proceeds by attempting to understand something in relation to something else, and even, finally, in relation to everything else. For all delimitations of context are relative to certain interests and reflect pragmatically motivated decisions: they thus show up as arbitrary in relation to the whole of knowledge. This makes the humanities inextricably comparative in method. Most importantly, comparative humanities studies enable us to glimpse in the interstices something absolute that is neither Western nor Eastern but connects with both and is imaginable as their common source—or, equally and inversely, as the global future in which East and West share a common stake. For, in addition to the ­aggregation of different disciplines, there is also something between disciplines, in their mutual critique and reciprocal challenge, as well as in their coherent complementing of one another, that highlights each one’s insufficiency in itself.

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The interdisciplinary, as the space between disciplines and diverse subject matters, is not just a matter of gathering up leftover fields of study that are not quite adequately accommodated within the categories of one discipline or the other. Instead, interdisciplinarity exceeds the disciplinary framework altogether and thereby opens upon a dimension that encompasses, or at least conditions, all disciplines: this in-between space precedes their differentiation and can even call it into question. This dimension of the undisciplined and absolute opens in and through the negation of every specific discipline as determined by the fiction of a delimited field of objects that is isolatable from the rest and so can be known with certainty on just its own terms. Beyond such artificial constructs lies the dimension of the absolute that is explored in various ways by religion and the arts. It requires being conceived of as transdisciplinary and transcultural. What I have presented so far bears indirectly on the issue of the pressures in our institutions of higher learning toward specialization and contains resources for rethinking this demand. It leads me to undertake, in the name of traditional humanities study, to advocate for nonspecialized forms of knowing. I defend these humanistic studies not in opposition to specialized knowledges of a technical, scientific nature, but rather as their necessary ground and background. The humanities have a crucial role to play in countering the incessant pressure toward specialization and the consequent loss of global vision and of any kind of awareness reaching beyond the objective field of arbitrarily and artificially defined formal objects. I advocate specifically for what I call an “apophatic” (literally “negative”) approach to culture, an approach that places the emphasis, first, on what cannot be objectively articulated and differentiated but rather abides as an inarticulate ground or background of all possible makings of sense. Such nonspecialized knowing is to be found eminently in literature and art and in other humanities studies. It includes the study of culture and, in particular, a study of religion that remains open to personal imaginative appropriations of symbols. Such appropriations can be motivated not only by religious belief but also by ethical conviction, aesthetic vision, social sentiments of solidarity, and so on. However, in any of these cases, an element of de-specialization is vitally necessary for humanities studies aiming at the unity of knowledge. We need to hang on to a kind of knowing that cannot be distilled into various types of expertise with their

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parceled-­­up and mutually exclusive fields of research. We require a knowing that, instead, connects us with the unsayable and unclassifiable. As necessary as specialization may be to scientific advance and technological progress, it is the inchoate and global intelligence of what cannot be specifically defined that is the lifeblood of the humanities. This uncategorizable awareness of unlimited potential for connectedness courses through the entire body of human knowledge. It is cognizance of and sensitivity to this unencompassable and only imaginable dimension of the whole that is most necessary for the vitality of the pursuit of knowledge in a global sense. This undelimitable pursuit entails, above all, the wisdom of unknowing famously articulated at the origins of Western philosophy almost two and a half millennia ago with Socrates’s realization that his superior “wisdom,” proclaimed by the oracle, was knowing that he did not know. We have already noted the comparable wisdom of unknowing in the Daoist tradition of Laozi and Zhuangzi in classical China.9 It is also in this intercultural sense that we need to understand what de-­specialization can mean and why it is so incomparably important. This perspective, which I call apophatic, contributes, furthermore, to setting up worldwide dialogue across humanities disciplines. One concrete step that we can take in the direction of non-specialization is to move toward the study of world literature (see chap. 10 below). Something emerges in the cross-cultural comparison of texts and traditions that is otherwise missed in the always further dividing of humanistic fields and regions from one another with a view to ever more specialized examination in terms of differentiated languages and cultures. A potential for relation and connection is disclosed through the overarching synthesis that is greater than the sum of its isolated parts. The idea of world literature is being probed today in the wake of a crisis in humanities education. In part, this global reconceptualization of literature is driven by curricular reform in universities reflecting demographic and cultural shifts. I have explored this idea recently, with other scholars especially of comparative literature at an international summit on world literature at Beijing Normal University: Ideas and Methods: What Is World Literature? Tension between the Local and the Universal.10 This summit discussed the topic of world literature in the tension between the demands of worldwide accessibility and the requirements of language-bound and

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culture-specific informed reading. I have also recently debated with classical scholars the topic of “Comparative Global Antiquity” in a workshop on “Global Classicism” hosted at the Yale NUS (National University) campus in Singapore.11 Drawing on my conclusions from these events, I offer here some reflections—cast in terms of my apophatic philosophy—concerning the paramount place and catalyzing role of literary study and comparative cultural inquiry in humanities education from a perspective encompassing both Eastern and Western approaches.

MEETING OF EAST AND WEST AS CATALYST TO GLOBAL HUMANITIES EDUCATION

The idea of global humanities education is all too easily misunderstood as masking an imperialistic bid for territorial expansion, or as dissimulating an insane aspiration to conquer and dominate the entire world. Yet, the idea of worldwide humanities education, cast in an apophatic mode, can be turned rather in just the opposite direction. The encounter with the Other places us face to face with our own insuperable limits. Most importantly, it is in crossing borders into encounter with other cultures that our own limits first become visible to us so that they can become objects of self-conscious reflection. It is necessary, therefore, for us not to set up a dichotomy between Eastern and Western incarnations of humanity, but rather to underline the continuities between them as deriving from a common basis that is properly nowhere, neither East nor West: it is a basis that neither culture can encompass or confine. The much-maligned Rudyard Kipling stated as much with disarming ingenuousness in proffering an apocalyptic image of the overcoming of a seemingly fatal divisiveness between peoples who inhabit opposite ends of the earth: OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!12

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Kipling’s “neither/nor” rhetoric happens to be one of the principal resources also of apophatic thought and writing as used, for instance, in the Upanishads (neti neti). It enacts what Madhyamika Buddhists would call “nondualism” and is an effective device for surpassing dichotomous thinking. I do not mean to attribute deliberate and consciously nondualistic thinking to Kipling; nevertheless, even such a faint echo or vestige is not insignificant. The universal propensities toward negation and self-­limitation, and even prophecy, inhering in our language are operative at the most ordinary and mundane levels, and they can be placed into relief—so as to produce heightened awareness—by poetry of genius, regardless of its style and orientation. Today, furthermore, we might imagine Kipling extending this logic by supplementing his statement with a further corollary: “But there is neither man nor woman when two true singularities meet face to face in the impassioned fray of the oldest war in the world.” Ernest Fenollosa’s essay “The Coming Fusion of East and West,” first published in 1898, is similarly clairvoyant in envisaging not only mutual nonaggression, but also a necessary and a fertile marriage between Western and East Asian cultures.13 Fenollosa was an American philosopher and art historian who, as professor at the Imperial University in Tokyo, participated in the modernizing reforms of the Meiji Era (1868–1912) in Japan. Situated historically on an international frontier fraught with the mounting tensions of the decisive age of crisis for Western colonialism, Fenollosa prophetically urges such a union of opposites as indispensable for uniting people everywhere into a complete Humankind. Each culture needs the other for its own completion. This was a vision appropriate to Fenollosa’s fin-de-siècle, and it energized specifically the modernist movement in poetry. This fusion of cultures was imagined by him with an ardent religious fervor true to the prophetic cast of his outlook and communicating its apocalyptic import. As the historical record attests, Fenollosa’s vision was a crucial catalyst in the West’s encounter with East Asian culture. It conveyed vital impulses that proved seminal to the dynamism of the West’s own artistic and literary development. Ezra Pound’s modernism was to a very significant degree derived from Fenollosa’s discovery of the Orient and its aesthetic sensibilities. Pound’s new “imagist” movement in poetry took its captivatingly innovative orientation especially from Fenollosa’s idea of the classical Chinese written character, the Hanzi (漢字), as adhering to the language of nature.

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As a prominent educator and political commentator on East–West relations in his time, Fenollosa disseminated influence and outlined broad historical perspectives that are still coming to fruition and being verified today, especially with the rise to eminence of China as an economic and political superpower on the world scene. Still, new work was necessary, and has indeed been forthcoming, in order to update the analysis of the crisis of encounter and confrontation provoked by the emergence of Asian nations to new leadership roles in the modern community of nations. Prasenjit Duara, in The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future, carries the analysis of this crisis forward to our global situation today.14 More and more scholars everywhere today are responding to this geopolitical transformation and are beginning to work in this comparative mode. Comparative scholarship by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Anthony Yu, among numerous other contributions, might be taken as exemplary of the sort of cross-cultural literary and cultural studies that this type of reciprocal reflection between Eastern and Western traditions can produce.15 Alongside Chinese and Japanese classics, and the Vietnamese verse epic, Nguyen Du’s Tale of Kieu, Korean classics such as the epic Songs of the Flying Dragons (Yongbi och’on ka), The Memoires of Lady Hyegyong (1795– 1805), and The Song of the Faithful Wife Ch’unhyang, the so-called Romeo and Juliet of Korea, likewise belong in this curriculum of an emerging world literature.16 Today, however, I feel, it is imperative not just to celebrate the plenitude and completeness that is to be achieved through fusion of universal archetypes, but also to emphasize that from the apophatic point of view each culture needs the others in order to remain open to otherness so as to be exposed to its own insuperable incompleteness. Facing the other is indispensable in order for us to avoid recoiling into a complacent posture of self-enclosure, which would be deadly in our world of shrinking distances and imperative interactiveness. Beyond all descriptive typologies, there is something that no culture grasps on its own or in any terms—“something” that remains, nonetheless, for all that, precisely what is most essential. This sensibility for and openness to the ungraspable and indefinable is what ­enables each culture also to relate to the others. Comparative criticism be-

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tween cultures helps make us aware of and sensitive to what otherwise remains invisible: it is a dimension of being that emerges only in and through our relations.17 Only in relinquishing our relative cultural identities can this elusive nonidentity or the “Nothing” of our unlimited relatedness to others be glimpsed so as to be remarked at all. It is proper to no culture: it is found only where each and every culture tends to lose—or to escape from—itself. This empty space of the inter is where identities—whether geographical, national, racial, or sexual—and wars all come from, even though it is itself unidentifiable and therefore also unopposable. This dimension is dealt with explicitly in terms of “transcendence” as defined by the Axial Age cultures of the first millennium BC embracing Confucianism and Daoism, along with Buddhism in India, the prophets of Israel, the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers, and Persian Zoroastrianism.18 This exalted and sublime dimension of self-reflexivity and freedom can be touched on provocatively even through the exercise of laughter.19 These references suggest the sense in which we might adopt Fenollosa’s prophetic anticipation of the future union of East and West. Indeed, I take such prophetic vision to be inherent in the often explicitly visionary outlook propagated in humanities texts. I have traced a certain genealogical line of such texts in Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante (2016). This work, having nothing to do explicitly with Asia, brings my understanding of the prophetic vocation of poetry forward from the ancient world and the Middle Ages into modernity. It thus completes and complements my other recent book (The Revelation of Imagination) mentioned earlier in this chapter. The topic of the prophetic inspiration of literature calls for (in)completion through correspondences and echoes from Asian traditions. This prophetic strain running through all ages in humanities knowledge remains more than ever fundamental to our efforts in the present. Universalizing prophetic vision, which in some regards is the most robust precursor to a necessarily global vision today, is essential to humanities teaching aimed at opening a path for us and for the next generation to a future that can be genuinely new. Such a new future must also be regenerative of human wholeness as our collective and common birthright—or perhaps rather our imaginable destiny.

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CONCLUSION

In an apophatic perspective, one that can hinge from the East as well as from the West, we are all most deeply identified not by our differential identities, but by the “nothing” (nothing expressly sayable) that we share in common and that alone can unite us. We must simply find the courage to embrace it as our own rather than running away from the exposure of this nakedness of our common—unqualified and undisguised—humanity. This, finally, is the greatest lesson to be learned from humanities studies, one that has to be constantly relearned in innumerably specific and concrete ways corresponding to the contingencies of our lives and potentially illuminated by the extremely variegated insights offered by the explorations of science and literature. This level of learning is not a matter of being filled up and programmed with information, or of being flush with the pride of knowledge, but rather of knowing our limits and ignorance as harboring our infinite potential for learning. This precious faculty of emptying ourselves and becoming “nothing,” “no-thing”—not just some definable thing—in the end, is the source of the constitutive freedom and openness of being human. It emerges in and through apophatic theoretical reflection on human culture and literature—and can touch on the divine.

Chapter Eight

APOPHASIS AND THE AXIAL AGE Transcendent Origins of Critical Consciousness

TENSION TOWARD TRANSCENDENCE: THE CRITICAL PARADOX OF THE AXIAL AGE

The discussion around the so-called Axial Age is a kind of neuralgic center for feeling out the difficult and complicated issues concerning religious beliefs and practices in their relation with the rationalization of society in the course of history. This discussion bears equally on the limits of such rationalization and thereby reaches also into the zone of the apophatic— from which all reasoning covertly hinges, as is brought out in what follows. The religious phenomena in question can be extraordinary ones, such as prophetic revelations and miracle cures. But they can also be common ones, such as the ritual gestures and confessions or declarations of belief that make up the tissue of daily life and its interactions. Such acts belong to the routine practices of religions in their cultic functions. Modern secular society seems to be based on the exclusion of irrational or supra-rational gnoseologies, such as religious revelation, no less than of myth and magic. But study of the Axial Age can help support calling into question this dichotomy by demonstrating, instead, the indissoluble interdependence, at their origins, of supposedly rational modes of knowledge and the correlative “pre-rational” types of practice.1 Sociologist of religion Robert Bellah is one who emphasizes “unitive experience” as the mainspring of Axial Age vision.2 In adopting this emphasis, he is building on an extensive groundwork of scholarship in the wake of Karl Jaspers.3 201

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The Axial Age hypothesis, as originally put forward by Jaspers, descries parallel, simultaneous intellectual, moral, and spiritual transformations as taking place in ancient Israel, Greece, India, China, and perhaps Persia, pivoting on breakthroughs (Durchbrüche) to “the transcendent” through which “man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations.” These crucial words quoted from Jaspers’s Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte 4 echo all through the scarcely containable bibliography on the subject of the Axial Age.5 They are identified by Johann Arnason as Jaspers’s “most condensed statement” of his thesis. Arnason also quotes the phrase that man “experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence,” and he notes how similar this all sounds to Jaspers’s own existential philosophy.6 In order to avoid the arbitrariness of simply projecting one’s own situation onto the Axial Age and reading one’s own ideas into it, as Jaspers seems to have done in Arnason’s view, Robert Bellah resorts to Merlin Donald’s evolutionary frame for understanding culture and cognition.7 This scheme breaks human cultural and cognitive development in prehistory down into certain essential, but not strictly successive, stages: episodic culture, mimetic culture, mythic culture, and theoretic culture. The Axial Age breakthrough is constituted by the emergence of the fourth stage, that of theoretic culture. There is at this last stage a reflective, critical break with the metaphors and narratives of the early, mythic culture, even though all of the previous stages and their characteristic forms of cognition remain operative, at least vestigially. One strikingly new element is external memory storage in the form of writing and records. This powerful new technology of script is the early prefiguration of what will eventually be revealed in all its apocalyptic purport by our age of digitalization and telecommunications over the World Wide Web, whereby the traditional limits of space and time for embodied life are suspended and transcended. Technology thus proves to be a very ambiguous feature of the Axial Age and its legacy. What integrates these seemingly disparate directions of discovery, I maintain, is the relation to a dimension transcending discursive definitions. The realm of the spiritual is discovered in the transcendence of immediate, given reality and in a new consciousness critical of preceding conceptions as rigid and idolatrous. The ability to relate to the Open and Unknown opens up the new unlimited horizon of the humanism that dawns with the Axial Age breakthrough.

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“Transcendence” in some form is reiterated as the keynote of the Axial Age transformations by many of its most prominent interpreters since Jaspers. Notably, Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt develops the corollary thesis that the discovery of transcendence entails remarking a kind of ontological difference between beings and Being, or between the empirical world and true reality. He stresses “the perception of a sharp disjunction between the mundane and transmundane worlds.”8 The Axial Age is treated emphatically as “the age of transcendence” also by Benjamin Schwartz, but then also as “the age of criticism” by Arnaldo Momigliano in the same special issue of Daedalus entitled “Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C.”9 Transcendence emerged specifically in new forms of criticism that placed into question claims about divine commandments and that led to “desacralization of political domination.” This development was linked in turn with a new sense of the sacred as present above all in individual human freedom and in the possibility of transcendence beyond all merely worldly realities. Although the two at first seem to be in tension with each other, a transcendent perspective first frees the human and worldly intellect to evaluate critically its own situation and society from beyond a merely intraworldly perspective. Hans Joas expressly highlights Eisenstadt’s emphasis on the “origin of new forms of criticism” in the Axial Age and notes that transcendence and criticism actually go together in the momentous emergence of Axial Age culture.10 This prima facie paradoxical conjunction of attunement to the transcendent and critical reflection informs also Charles Taylor’s seeing the “axial revolution” as bringing about the “Great Disembedding” of human thought from its cultural and cultic contexts.11 Thought acquires a measure of distance from society and the freedom to reflect critically on its own practice. Human individuals, for the first time, emerge from their anonymous immersion in society or the clan and acquire minds of their own. Taylor suggests that in the Axial Age there is a notion of “a higher, more complete human good, a notion of complete virtue, or even of a salvation beyond human flourishing (Buddha), while at the same time the higher powers, according to this view, are unambiguously on the side of human good.” This uproots value from the archaic, monistic world of sacred kingship, in which “human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine.”12

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Taylor stresses that, whereas in the archaic, integrated world, good and evil are inseparable, they come apart in the Axial Age religions. The highest power, once it is understood to be “transcendent,” loses its ambiguousness and becomes unalloyed goodness: it is identified with an ideal rather than remaining bound up with an infinitely dark, dense, and complex reality. Evil is no longer simply accepted as a natural part of things and as belonging to the balance of the universe. In the new, idealizing perspective, human happiness and fulfillment in this life and world are no longer our highest goal. Striving for redemption from this world comes onto the scene in religions like Buddhism and Christianity. At this point, furthermore, ­religion can become a special vocation that can break with the life of the larger society as a whole. Hence monastic orders become common collective ways of life. Free individuals engaged in a willed remaking of society constitute the Axial Age society uprooted from its embeddedness in the cosmic-sacred continuum, with all the forms of objectification and instrumentalization that this autonomous emergence entails. Such is the logical conclusion of the “great disembedding” brought about by the Axial Age as analyzed by Taylor. The cosmos becomes not only a unified, but also a normative order. And yet this order is unstable because it has excluded its opposite: it has an enemy, namely, chaos and dissolution, notwithstanding their “restorative powers.” In fact, the pre–Axial Age order of things has to draw on its opposite in order to sustain itself. But Axial Age thinking succeeds in fashioning a good and a “goal that is unitary, harmonious, and inwardly consistent.”13 However, it does so only through a certain measure of abstraction that remains an arbitrary act of artifice. ­Dualisms arise setting into opposition body and soul, matter and spirit, et ­cetera. Thus Taylor is also, in effect, at least implicitly, a critic of the Axial Age and the crises and instabilities that it engenders. Whereas in polytheistic systems, more gods constantly added to the pantheon are part of the norm and do not threaten the general picture, they are incompatible with Axial Age religions and destabilize its whole framework. Taylor sees Axial Age spiritualities as “unstable amalgams” hemmed in by majority religious life around them still in the old pluralistic mold.14 The more traditional religions are oriented to human thriving in a matrix of embeddedness rather than to the individual outside the world and aiming at a higher ideal than

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the actually existing order of the world. In Axial Age religions, the previously diverse and even potentially conflicting demands made by different gods are smoothed over, integrated, and unified. The perfect peace of Buddhist nirvana or Christian paradise or Platonic ideal perfection, in which all negatives are finally erased, now becomes possible. Consequently, any adverse or insubordinate force that does not fit in tends to upset the whole order of things, which is supposed to be perfectly harmonious. The new model cannot absorb contentiousness or a plurality of norms or gods: it projects one universal and unified right order. Joas brings out the fact that there are opposed versions of the Axial Age as religious or as antireligious, or we might also say as tradition-oriented or as modern. I contend, from my apophatic standpoint, that the Axial Age exposes the undecidable juncture between the two. This is where the question of modernity’s need to recuperate religion—or at least the integrative vision that is expressed through religion—arises. And at this point we encounter the question of the postsecular, which is raised expressly by Habermas, as requiring an outlook that finally is neither religious nor secular, even though religious forms of thought and existence still prove, in any case, to be irrepressible. As one crucial example, according to Joas, “The question of ‘revelation’ cannot simply be put to rest.”15 In fact, this question was at the source of Jaspers’s thinking in general in the form of “philosophical faith,” as is suggested by the title of one of his key works—Der philosophische Glaube (1948). For Jaspers, philosophy serves as mediator in the inevitably and irreducibly plural experiences of transcendence and of fundamental values. Philosophy can help foster interreligious dialogue on the never exhaustively articulated fund of experiences of divinity. Philosophy can also initiate dialogue between religion and itself. Such philosophy, in Joas’s words, can help in founding a “contemporary discourse that is open to all religious articulations of the transcendent and to nonreligious forms of moral universalism.”16 Behind this communication among religions and even between religion and secular reason is the recognition of the cultural, historical, and linguistic relativity of all ­discourses whatever. Ideas of reason and revelation are all grounded in contingent histories, even though they all aim at the universal and transcendent. This is why their mutual dialogue can be so fruitful in bringing out the common bases of our reciprocally revealed and mutually correcting ­limitations.

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However, Björn Wittrock, in attempting a systematic conceptualization of the Axial Age, has denied that the breakthrough to transcendence is necessarily its distinguishing characteristic. Indeed, his objection must be granted, if transcendence is taken to exclude immanence, for not all ­recognized Axial Age cultures necessarily insist on a cosmos-transcendent reality. An immanentist cosmology is very often alleged, for example, in the case of China’s Axial Age culture. What Wittrock does accord universal ­status as a defining characteristic of the Axial Age is that reason appears as reflexive consciousness; Axial Age cultures are all distinguished by “the ability to use reason to transcend the immediately given.”17 And I would emphasize that this is “transcending” in the sense that counts most, especially from an apophatic perspective. The world-picture or cosmology of a culture is only a matter of imagery and cannot express the breakthrough to transcendence that is accomplished essentially through the use of reflexive rationality. This emphasis on critical reflexivity as keynote was, in fact, already present in Jaspers’s Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte and has been pursued in greater detail by those following him, eminently Eisenstadt. Witt­ rock contributes detailed reflection for historicizing this idea in terms of the cultural and societal contexts of the Axial transformation. In this vein, in his contribution “The Axial Conundrum between Transcendental Visions and Vicissitudes of Their Institutionalizations” to the collective volume on The Axial Age and Its Consequences, Eisenstadt starts from the visionary character of the Axial Age breakthroughs, but he also analyzes the dilemmas that arise in their becoming incarnate in institutional forms. These more concrete realizations of reflexive rationality are subject to a more pragmatic logic, one in which opposites do not so easily coalesce and can rather enter into conflict with one another. There is, then, a tension between the “inclusivist universalist claims and their exclusivist tendency, rendering their institutionalization potentially destructive.”18 Constitutive of the Axial Age is the combination of a tendency to “radical distinction between ultimate and derivative reality” through “growing reflexivity and second-order thinking,” on the one hand, and, on the other, “the disembedment of social activities and organizations from relatively closed ascriptive, above all kinship or territorial, units or frameworks.”19 The recognition of a world-transcendent reality comes together

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with its mediation and appropriation by autonomous worldly agents, such as new castes of priests or philosophers. Using sociological instruments of characterization and analysis, Eisenstadt offers the following comprehensive synopsis of the Axial Age, emphasizing its élan toward the universal: The common constitutive features of Axial Age worldviews might be summed up in the following terms: they include a broadening of horizons, or an opening up of potentially universal perspectives, in contrast to the particularism of more archaic modes of thought; an ontological distinction between higher and lower levels of reality; and a normative subordination of the lower level to the higher, with more or less overtly stated implications for human efforts to translate guiding principles into ongoing practices. In other words, the developing Axial visions entailed the concept of a world beyond the immediate boundaries of their respective settings—potentially leading to the constitution of broader institutional frameworks, opening up a range of possible institutional formations, while at the same time making these formations the object of critical reflection and contestation. The common denominator of these formations was their transformation into relatively autonomous spheres of society, regulated according to autonomous criteria.20 Eisenstadt focuses attention particularly on how the vision of the selfelected elites that were the bearers of the new universalistic culture (Kulturträger) was translated into institutional terms so as to be able to effectively exert power and radically transform the world. This new possibility emerges in the Axial Age as an unprecedented discovery of agency and human freedom. But this process is, at the same time, fraught with paradox: finite individuals with contingent histories claim to represent values or divinities that are transcendent and unconditioned. Thus the claim to some kind transcendence proves to be especially complex and problematic. The antinomies here can be resolved only by understanding this alleged transcendence apophatically as a transcendence that cannot be grasped and articulated and thus instrumentalized, but one that is nevertheless at work immanently in phenomena.21 The apophatic, in this optics, emerges as the key to the Axial Age breakthrough. When the Axial Age is

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understood apophatically, both its emphasis on critical thinking as transcending existing social structures and the appreciation for higher powers beyond human agency (and thus presumably transcending critical faculties) become intelligible: they can come into focus as mutually reinforcing rather than as contradictory. Since the higher powers cannot be grasped or represented in any absolute or even adequate form, all social embodiments of them are subject to critique. It is necessary not only to represent transcendent powers, but also to acknowledge their transcendence of representation altogether—of the human power to know and name. What we learn through study of the Axial Age is that the first emergences of a universal consciousness in cultures around the world show it to be an inarticulable kind of transcendence that manifests itself and its power in exceeding and confounding all human expressions. In other words, from its earliest dawn in known history, in the Axial Age, universality first appears in a radically apophatic light.

ROBERT BELLAH’S EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO UNITIVE EXPERIENCE

The notion of transcendence remains crucial throughout the discourse on the Axial Age, notably in the work of Robert Bellah. Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age begins with a wideranging meditation on “Religion and Reality” (chap. 1). He starts from the idea of religion as presenting us with experience of “Multiple Realities” that can place into question—and induce us to step outside of—the world of ordinary daily life. His major premise is that what counts as the ordinary world is itself a construct. It is not simply given all by itself but requires collective effort in order to be established and maintained. This world entails a selective focus on certain phenomena and a blending out of others.22 This relativization of our notion of an ordinary reality is supported by a passage from the Zhuangzi (chap. 2: 48) about a man dreaming that he is a butterfly: he could just as well be a butterfly dreaming that it is a man.23 There is a higher reality to which we are summoned by both art and science, by flights of imagination and by empirical investigations, for both in different ways move to bracket the so-called natural reality and to reveal a deeper dimension within it than what is immediately seen and observed.

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All that we take for reality may be revealed to be but a dream at the “great awakening” that Zhuangzi envisages as taking place one day. Still, the transcendent reality in question is conceived not as another objective world, but rather as the depth of the world. Sounding this depth is a matter of apprehending a dimension of “transcendence,” in the terms used customarily with regard to the Axial Age. Bellah evokes at the outset of his study a capacity for “beyonding,”24 as it is audaciously worded by Kenneth Burke: “Burke argues that Aristotle’s theory of tragedy involves a kind of beyonding, when catharsis transcends pity and fear. He gives as an example Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus: ‘We feel pity and fear at his [Oedipus’s] death precisely when he is transcending the miseries of this world—that is, going beyond them, and becoming a tutelary deity.’”25 In order to ground the drive to transcend and justify the penchant to go beyond the world of ordinary experience, Bellah refers to sociologist ­Alfred Schutz’s analyses of how the world of daily life is not the only reality and can be maintained only with effort. Like other realities, it is socially constructed. We must, then, allow also for other realities, as Bellah e­ xplains: By this I do not mean that the world of daily life even in its cultural variability is not real—it is real enough. But it lacks the unique ontological reality, the claim to be perfectly natural, that it seeks to secure when it puts in brackets the doubt that it could be other. It is one of the functions of other realities to remind us that that bracketing is finally insecure and unwarranted.26 Art, science, and especially religion pierce this illusion and open a view into other realities or fuller, ordinarily hidden dimensions of the real. Thus Bellah stresses wholeness of understanding in narrative and myth: their truth is in the coherence of the whole. Mythic narrative is in this respect something like music, which obliterates time as an external, worldly phenomenon through its internal organization. Even scientific knowledge originates in unitive experience. By this standard, Kepler and Newton were Neoplatonic mystics.27 The daily working world’s insufficiency is, according to anthropologists such as Victor Turner, compensated for by ritual as relating to a higher reality. What Bellah calls “unitive” experience is not objectively r­ epresentable

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as such, but there is “enactive representation” as the “bodily acting out of religious meaning, as in bowing, kneeling, eating, dancing.” This remains fundamental for symbolic, and eventually also for conceptual, representation at later stages. Bellah’s approach to religion is “evolutionary” inasmuch as he endeavors to discern the persisting presence of the first, most basic, and primitive forms of religious expression as operative still in the most evolved and sophisticated manifestations of religious spirit and culture: “this total bodily relation to reality is never lost.” Accordingly, “enactive representation is at least subliminally present also in symbolic and conceptual forms of representation.”28 The idea that “nothing is ever lost” thus becomes the aphoristic leitmotif running through Bellah’s book. Bellah has a strong sense particularly of religion as based on a unitive event that transcends, and yet requires, representation. “Representation implies a duality between the representative form and the reality it represents, but it is just this duality that the unitive experience transcends.” This “paradox” of representing religious experience through dualistic forms that it transcends is accepted in a spirit of negative-theological reflection, or correlatively of the Buddhist sense of emptiness (sunyata), the void, nothingness, as constitutive of the aporiae of religious experience—experience of the divine or absolute—rather than as a problem needing to be solved.29 Bellah’s approach, furthermore, is Durkheimian in basing itself on the distinction between the world of the sacred and profane reality—the world of the everyday. It is also Durkheimian inasmuch as the unitive events that it posits are often a collective experience. Accordingly, “it is the profound creative and transformative power of society itself that is the reality apprehended in the ritual.”30 As long as Bellah retains the negative theological reflection admitting an orientation to a “unitive experience” that cannot be exhaustively articulated or explained, he avoids reducing religious phenomena to an epiphenomenon of society. He allows, instead, for society itself to be a manifestation of “divine” mystery, and then there need be no quarrel between his evolutionary sociology and theology. Bellah positions himself sympathetically, yet critically, with respect to Eric Chaisson’s Durkheimian move beyond conventional science to a kind of religious-moral community in which the sacred is situated in social bonding—in the transformative power of society itself.31 Bellah proposes evolution as a kind of modern creation myth. He does not want to elevate science above religion, but rather to absorb science’s metanarrative of the

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origin of all things into an account retaining reference to the unitive experience that cannot be articulated and that remains beyond scientific measure and logos. Science is not as such a worldview, however it does give rise to many such overall views of reality.32 It does not answer all questions, and should not itself be taken as a religion—as it is, Bellah thinks, finally, by Chaisson and by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, author of The First Three Minutes. Bellah embraces a form of religious naturalism, but he endeavors to explain why symbolizations of the beyond are natural, and why the natural cannot be symbolized adequately as purely immanent, or in any other way. Here he links his outlook with that of Terrence Deacon, who emphasizes the transcendence inherent within natural evolution, especially as expressed by symbolic faculties of creating symbols and narrative: “Consciousness emerges as an incessant creation of something from nothing, a process continually transcending itself.”33 The emergence of memory from episodic and procedural cognition is the basis for personal identity as a form of transcendence of inarrestible natural flux. Bellah’s theses have been probed further by various hands as they apply to subsequent history in the volume, edited by Bellah and Joas, The Axial Age and Its Consequences. This collective work emphasizing what the Axial Age brings in its wake complements the field covered by Religion in Human Evolution—Bellah’s magnum opus—which investigates Paleolithic expressions of religion in their evolution up to the Axial Age. In the opening essay of the follow-up volume (“The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse”), Hans Joas brings out the central importance to the Axial Age of the discovery and enactment of reflexivity. Although often counted as an affirmation of purely human autonomy, reflexivity can also be understood as revelatory or productive of a kind of transcendence. Among the precursors for Jaspers’s theorizing of the notion of the Axial Age, Georg Simmel’s “axial rotation” designates the recursive tendency of culture to react upon the natural physiological conditions out of which it arises and transform them. For instance, physical sexual desire can evolve into a love relationship (at the individual and at the species level), and this is a case of “forms of culture that, although being a product of life-­processes, now have a retroactive effect on these processes of life themselves.”34 Overall, Bellah takes his evolutionary approach in the direction of an acknowledgment of the transcendence of the really real rather than

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using the evolutionary paradigm in order to reduce everything knowable to a plane of immanence consisting in purely natural causality.

BLIND EVOLUTION VERSUS VISION IN THE EVOLUTION OF CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Though we can admit the prime importance of rational reflexivity, it is also crucial to realize that the Axial Age revolution is not achieved only through theoretical or conceptual thinking. Although this new stage counts as a sort of culmination in cognitive evolution according to Merlin Donald—as taken up by Bellah in “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?”35—and serves incidentally to align the Axial Age with the modern European rational ­Enlightenment, it does not definitively supersede and efface its predecessors. There remains at every step an equally indispensable aspect of intuitive and visionary experience reaching beyond the range of abstract and calculative reason. In “The Buddha’s Meditative Trance: Visionary Knowledge, Aphoristic Thinking, and Axial Age Rationality in Early Buddhism,” Gananath Obeyesekere emphasizes a “preoccupation with visionary experience and the derivation of knowledge outside of reason.”36 This experience, though traditionally embedded in the shamanism of small-scale local communities, becomes universalized and is “articulated with transcendental salvific goals and ethics” in the Axial Age. This is the nature of the Buddha’s enlightenment by a kind of visionary knowledge, his “awakening.” This type of ­cognition or awareness is then expressed best by aphoristic language and thinking rather than by strictly linear, logical discourse and thinking. Such preter-verbal awareness constitutes, after all, an apophatic aspect of the Axial Age, and apophaticism can thus be located in the heart and at the origin of enlightenment reason. Apophasis pertains to an aspect of things that withdraws from direct expression and issues rather in riddles and koans that put into play various strategies of not-saying. These extrarational or supra-rational sides of Axial Age reason, however, have often been ignored, and in any case they prove elusive and difficult to grasp and keep firmly in mind. This sets an agenda and task for this strand of philosophical thinking in the future, namely, the reintegration of the religious

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heritage of humankind with its galloping rational and technological advance. This, in fact, becomes crucial for Jürgen Habermas in his extension of the philosophy of the Enlightenment as examined in the concluding ­section of this chapter. Habermas is also acutely aware of the ambivalences and darker sides that shadow this luminous, Enlightenment heritage. Bellah’s closing chapter “The Heritage of the Axial Age” and Richard Madsen’s contribution “The Future of Transcendence” in The Axial Age and Its Consequences both draw on Habermas, as well as on Jaspers, in order to raise the problem of why our globalized world today, prodigiously united economically and technologically, in a manner resembling the advances of the Axial Age, is lacking all spiritual or ethical foundation in any type of unified vision or aspiration. We are faced with a gross disparity between technological progress and human and cultural relapse into forms of barbarity, with “dissonance between the developmental-logical advance and the moral-practical regression.”37 This, then, marks out the task before us specifically as philosophers of culture. Culture and philosophy have to take the lead here. Their way cannot be that of selecting and advocating one right model but must rather entail working between paradigms. Is this, then, a matter of comparative philosophy and religions? One can exalt multiplicity, but to do so one-­ sidedly runs contrary to the idea of a necessary (even if ungraspable) unity—the ideal of universality that also emerges as a kind of revolutionary epiphany with revelatory power during the Axial Age. The undefined unity between different discourses and their various paradigmatic images can unite us with the world and others around us in working toward a worldtranscending, world-transforming, and world-restoring ideal expressed through mutual respect and harmony. Such an indefinable—and yet operative and effective—unity is what I understand and elaborate under the aegis of “the apophatic.” The Axial Age is an age of crisis of legitimacy for archaic social systems and their power hierarchies, for they are subjected to scrutiny in the light of transcendent ideals and according to newly discovered universal principles of reason. Old class and caste systems, together with traditional cults and customs, all become subject to social criticism. This underlies the social dynamism of the Axial Age and lends it much of its exemplary value

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for our age, since today we often suffer from the lack of any sense of spiritual and ethical transcendence as we struggle to create a semblance of unity in a world of proliferating multiplicity. Madsen finds this “critical task of seeking a spiritual unity” to be our only axial resource and imperative today: “The Axial insight compels us to constant critical search” beyond all mummified forms of expression, all symbols and idolatries. The Axial Age “proclaimed that there was a great universal fountain of Truth that existed beyond all the particular alliances of this world. The search for this Truth and obedience to its demands was the lever for criticism of exclusive myths and particular communities.”38 There are strong resonances here with Alain Badiou’s thinking of universalism. Badiou champions universality that is created by singular individuals through their decisions and fidelity that, in a revolutionary mode, exit from the already given set of existing facts.39 In this perspective, the Pauline universalist revolution examined in chapter 4 shows up as a relay from the Axial Age to Badiou’s and our own (post)modernity. Bellah takes, rather, an evolutionary approach, but he also underlines his conviction that social evolution is judged by normative, as well as by purely cognitive, standards. This is the case factually (and not just the way things “ought” to be, as judged by certain ethical principles). It is so because in society the evolutionary process is really affected by the societies that humans form on the basis of all sorts of morally inflected value discourses. The Axial Age is exemplary as a time when critical reflection enters into the very process of human evolution. Values and standards are no longer seamlessly embedded within the social structure as natural norms. What Charles Taylor designates as “disembeddedness” entails that human reflection not only reflect the society in which it takes place, but also that it actively shape that society, thereby assuming an external position and perspective. Such reflective externality is the sense of “theoria” that Bellah examines in the Axial Age dialogues of Plato and compares with Buddha’s even more voluminous textual corpus of sermons and dialogues, not to mention the accreted literature on his life, including a vast genre of stories about his previous lives. Buddha’s release into enlightenment from the samsara of reincarnated existences parallels Plato’s ascent from the cave to the sunlight and to contemplation of intelligible forms. A kind of transcendence of the world through “theoretical” and meditative reflection is

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made into an exemplary, if not salvific, paradigm to be followed and imitated in each case.

THE QUESTION OF THEORIA AND ITS RELIGIOUS MEANING

Following Andrea Nightingale’s Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: “Theoria” in Its Cultural Context (2004), Bellah recalls that theoria, as the “quintessential activity of the true philosopher,”40 is modeled on the journey abroad to observe religious festivals. The philosophical theoros loves the spectacle of truth, which is unitive and comprehensive: “Although the highest form of theoria is contemplation of the divine and through it the philosopher, however briefly and partially, actually participates in the ­divine, theoria includes the search for knowledge of all things, including the transient ones.”41 Plato’s ideal of education, of course, begins with the liberal arts, particularly arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, which all involve seeing higher truths, mathematical principles or universals, with the mind’s eye. There is still at this stage a continuity rather than only a split between knowledge of divine and of mundane things. An aura of the holy invests rational knowledge as such—the intellect rises to a sphere of universality above the bald factuality of things. Theoria is a momentous discovery of the Axial Age, as Plato’s example shows. Yet Bellah’s history questions whether it is a resource or a burden. This has become a weighty question today not only about this heritage but about the entire civilization that it has spawned. Theoria, as it emerges in Plato, is utopian vision: although it inspires the noblest of human actions, it can also be complicit in some of the worst systems of oppression. This sinister side emerges already with Aristotle, for whom theoria is a kind of disengaged knowing. His ideal philosopher was not the ruler of a republic, but the prototype of the scientist dedicated to knowledge and ­research for its own sake. Theoria is for him the best life, even though it can consist either in pure contemplation or in empirical observation and inquiry into special fields. The segregation of theory from ethical and practical life can have advantages and preserve theory’s integrity as pure knowing, but it can also have disastrous consequences both for theory d ­ ivorced

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from practice and for ethical and political life unmoored from the disinterested search to know the truth without any exploitative designs. Such, in Bellah’s narrative, is the difficult and ambivalent heritage of theoretic consciousness as the distinctive legacy of the Axial Age. Still, in spite of these reservations, the advances of the Axial Age are not to be denied or minimized. Another crucial aspect of them is thrown into relief in the succession or turn from Plato to Aristotle. For Aristotle, in sum, theoretical life is good in itself, but without direct consequences for practical and political life. That precisely preserves it from being instrumentalized and manipulated. Plato’s utopian republic in contrast makes everything, including the philosopher, purely functional to the ends of the state. This basically still pre–Axial Age integralism has appeared since the emergence of individuality in the Axial Age to be inimical to the open society. Karl Popper linked Plato’s totalizing metaphysics to political ­totalitarianisms—and thus to the height of horror—in The Open Society and Its Enemies. Axial Age freedom and transcendence, as discovered by Plato, can be taken to reinforce a monolithic social model, enfolding even internal criticism, whereas our late modern society has demanded, above all, democratic pluralism. This ambiguity of the Axial Age is brought out in a religious register by the sociological and historical analyses of José Casanova in the collective volume edited by Bellah and Joas. Casanova examines the historical and cultural constitution of religion as a category, and in conclusion he dis­tinguishes between two opposite directions of secularization: one is “the ­dynamic of internal Christian secularization,” which spiritualizes the temporal; the other is “laicization,” which aims “to emancipate all secular spheres from clerical-ecclesiastical control.”42 Although the latter tendency attempts to establish rigid boundaries between the religious and the secular, these boundaries are liable simply to be pushed to the margins. A place is preserved—at least in a private sphere of individual liberty and free ­expression—for the genuinely spiritual and transcendent that does not belong in the secular public sphere of the laity. Thus both of these contrasting narratives and lines of argument aim in their own ways to overcome medieval dualism and to imbue the im­ manent with quasi-transcendent meaning that is realized in and through human freedom and flourishing. They both underwrite a universal teleology of history as human progress. These directions converge in moder-

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nity on a “secular-religious” system of classification that could be seen as restoring the unity of vision that was characteristic of the Axial Age. To this extent, Casanova seems willing to accept Bellah’s narrative and to reconstrue it in his own terms. However, Casanova disputes whether this characteristically Axial Age development should—or can—be characterized as “religious” in any analytically meaningful sense. He demands, in reading Bellah, further differentiation as to what qualifies as “religious,” as opposed to simply “human” characteristics, in the Axial Age transformations. The Axial Age breakthrough to theoretic culture, moreover, is not confined to any particular historical period. Its precursors are clearly discerned (following Jan Assmann’s work) in archaic Egypt, and it funds, in Bellah’s own analysis, historical transformation all through the modern period in the more specific form of the scientific revolution. Casanova stresses, more than Bellah is willing to do, the radical newness of modern forms of theoretical consciousness, which are not specifically Axial but rather are best understood as proper to the sharp historical break of secular modernity. Although he grants a large measure of consensus concerning the ontological monism of archaic cultures, Casanova points to disputes concerning the alleged Axial dualism of the transcendent and the mundane. He questions in particular whether the transcendence at issue is specifically religious. It is religious in Israel, but not in Greece. There are, in fact, very different Axial breakthroughs leading to religiously transcendent cultures in Israel and India, but not in the same way as in China and Greece, where an immanent sensory sphere and a proto-­scientific empirical reality, respectively, are brought sharply into focus. Thus Casanova draws on Guy Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity (2009), in order to critically qualify Bellah’s very broad overarching Axial Age thesis and to reconfigure it as reflecting historical contingency rather than any universal necessity of human evolution: Following Stroumsa, one could perhaps attribute “Axial” relevance to the historical religious transformations of late antiquity only in the sense that they formed the basis for the European religious system of medieval Christendom, out of which emerged the modern process of secularization, which in turn culminated in our global secular age. But this is a particular historical development with

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world-historical consequences, not a universal or evolutionary process of human development.43 Casanova admires the synthetic power of Bellah’s vision as a self-­ reflective self-understanding. As such, it has more of a religious than an analytic and scientific value and bearing. Bellah’s evolutionary scheme uses the Axial Age in order to bring out positive religious potential even in the modern and postmodern periods of the death of God and in their thoroughgoing secularization and unsparing rationalization of all spheres of human existence. Following the lead of Talcott Parsons, secularization can be interpreted as a translation of religious symbols and practices rather than as their decline. Modernity, in effect, sacralizes the individual. Its distinctive religiosity is forged through progressive rationalization (Weber) as demythicization and deritualization consequent upon disenchantment (Entzauberung). Yet even this modern quest for salvation by individual, rational self-interpretation might qualify as an elementary form of religious life in the sense of Durkheim. Thus, in modernity, religious values are not erased but are rather mediated and realized through secular institutions. Bellah’s narrative traces a continuous development from the initial indifferentiation of the religious in primitive societies, through the world-historical process of rationalization and separation into differentiated functions, and then once again to religious forms that are widely diffused in an undifferentiated manner into a new, heightened premium of value placed on “individual authenticity and self-expression” in modern society.44 Casanova remains unsatisfied with the lack of analytical criteria for distinguishing what is specifically “religious.” Yet this is to refuse to recognize the religious as what is not just a differentiated property distinguished by oppositional logic from the nonreligious. In an apophatic approach, which is suggestively, even if undeclaredly, approximated by Bellah, the religious serves just this purpose of mediating and symbolizing what does not lend itself to differentiated treatment as one field of objects among others that are differentiated for analytical treatment. Such is the purport of “unitive” experience in Bellah’s vocabulary. At this point, he tends to become more a religious thinker than a sociologist. The sociological approach focused on scientifically definable and differentiated objects misses the deeper

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meaning of the religious as understood apophatically. Admittedly, nevertheless, differentiations and their limits are often our best tools for evoking the undifferentiated regions that exceed them. The dependence of immanent, corporeal expressions on something intimated as entirely beyond them, and vice versa, has been probed revealingly through study of the process of symbolization.

THE BODY AND SYMBOLIC EXPRESSION OF THE TRANSCENDENT

Moving back closer to Bellah’s evolutionary perspective, Matthias Jung places emphasis again on the necessity for a discourse of transcendence in his contribution “Embodiment, Transcendence, and Contingency: Anthropological Features of the Axial Age” to the collective volume The Axial Age and Its Consequences. The Axial Age renders explicit human beings’ symbolic relation to the world. Transcendence and the symbolic are discovered together, albeit contingently and with a time lag. There is an asynchronicity between the introduction of new symbolic means and their reflective usage leading to explicit formulation, but this does not mean that they are not internally related. Meaning (and therefore transcendence) is always already implicitly embedded in (symbolic) practice. Jung conceives the symbolic means in question in terms of Peirce’s three types of signs (icons, indexes, and symbols) and of Merlin Donald’s transitions from mimetic to mythic and theoretic culture. He cites Donald’s rhetoric of the “spiraling coevolution of thought and symbol.”45 The basic insight is that symbolization establishes an indirect relation to reality and thereby transcends immediate experience. In this scenario, an awareness of the remoteness of transcendent realms arises naturally from human conceptual capacities. Transcendent worldviews and the process of symbolization represent two internally connected aspects of transcendence in the Axial Age. Jung stresses that both “physical embodiment” and “symbolic universality” must be preserved in evolutionary anthropology’s analysis of successive stages of cognitive development. Such is the basis for the “anthropology of embedded transcendence” that Jung proposes as “the appropriate conceptual framework for dealing with the Axial Age and its contemporary

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importance.”46 Jung underlines “the continuity between the Axial Age, in which the intertwined character of transcendence and contingency came to be experienced for the first time, and the consciousness of both universality and pluralism that has manifested itself in Modernity.”47 Whereas Habermas accentuates the categorical difference made through the liberating transition to rational argument and theoretical consciousness as an emancipation, Donald insists always on the continuity with previous stages and styles of cognition that remain conditioning for later stages of evolutionary development. Rather than sharp breaks of liberation, Donald’s evolutionary continuity envisages the holistic transformation of the episodic, mimetic, and mythic stages of cognition as continuing within the succeeding stage of theoretic culture. Building also on Deacon’s The Symbolic Species (1997), Jung evokes the “tradition of expressivism”—realized by Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Wilhelm Dilthey, as it feeds into American pragmatism and the semiotics of Peirce—as also affirming such continuity across thresholds. Symbolicity, or indirect reference, is genuinely new and yet functionally integrates direct reference in mimesis and ostension: “The genuinely new character of symbolic-usage as transcending the local ­environment—the ‘difference’ part—comes not from the abandonment but the functional reintegration of embodied relationships to the world— the ‘holistic’ part.”48 In the case of Israel, the transition to symbolic transcendence as regrounding the relation to God paradoxically appeals to episodic corporeal experience—to local context and embodiment, for example, in the narrative of the Exodus to the promised land. This makes for the “semiotic ambiguity of the discovery of transcendence.” The internal relation between transcendence and contingency has been at the root of violence ever since the Axial Age. The contingent contingency of local, embodied religious practices is reconfigured as the “necessary contingency of the new, monotheistic articulations of meaning.”49 However, the other side of this monothe­istic intolerance is the recognition of something else altogether transcending the symbols and consequently also recognition of their limited, contingent nature. They are recognized as only analogical expressions of ultimate truth, and yet this realization comes about only in the course of time. Naturalist premises open the way here to a negative theology of transcendence or “ultimacy.”50

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Jung consistently stresses the time lag between developmental possibilities and their reflective appropriation. The consciousness of semiotic contingency can be operative implicitly even in pre-theoretical narrative. He also stresses that the relation between embodiment and transcendence is particular in each Axial Age culture. As Charles Taylor shows, an expressivist anthropology is necessary for the felt, embodied aspects that are constitutive of meaning and that are functionally indispensable to symbolic communication. This level of communication cannot be rendered fully ­rational, and it escapes the grasp of the individual agent. Taylor, as we have seen, critiques the Axial Age’s individualistic exit from the natural and social embeddedness that is characteristic of the general and human good in early religions. Nevertheless, in defense of Axial Age visions, we need also to recognize that lived experience in its immediacy can also return through reflection, and with redoubled emphasis. Thinking is itself a way of being and creates new immediacies of its own. New, artificial forms even of embodiment are produced, and social mediation is reintroduced at other, more complex levels. New, indirect modes of communication, moreover, reactivate direct referential modes. One of Taylor’s key examples (in A Secular Age, 146–58) of this is the way that Luther’s principle of sola scriptura disembeds divine revelation from its lived oral contexts and yet makes it bear in its immediacy on lived experience of individuals and their inner struggles (Bußkampf ) in unprecedented ways.51 Once again, theology assumes a pioneering role historically in pointing to the decisiveness of what no actual historical discourse is able properly to articulate because theological discourse opens a new, inner dimension of transcendence.

THEOLOGY AND TRANSCENDENCE

A specifically and deliberately theological approach to the issue of transcendence is developed by Ingolf Dalferth in “The Idea of Transcendence” in The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Transcendence, as a distinguishing characteristic of the Axial Age, is defined by Dalferth as an infinite whole and “ultimate encompassing reality” existing beyond time and space. It is correlated with the human search for unity as an unending task. Dalferth distinguishes five different paradigms for understanding transcendence in the

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West: it can be (1) the true world contrasted with the world of ­appearance— that is, ontological transcendence, as in Plato’s allegory of the cave; or (2) the eternal truth, as in the Christian “radical distinction between creator and creation”52—in other words, divine transcendence, in which eternal ideas in the divine mind are the truth that transcends all human knowledge; or (3) epistemic transcendence of the knowable as infinite and always beyond any finite realization; or (4) subjective transcendence of the knower as always beyond any given known, as for Kant and Sartre with the transcendence of the ego; or (5) the ethical transcendence of the Other as developed by Levinas. In any of these cases, the logic of transcendence involves drawing a distinction between the observable and the unobservable. It is with this distinction that religions are concerned rather than with either component alone. As for Niklas Luhmann, “The code of all religious communication is the distinction between immanence and transcendence, the observable and the unobservable.”53 This distinction can be made in different ways coming from the directions of immanence or of transcendence. The latter most radically entails absolute transcendence of all transcendence that is merely relative to immanence. Transcendence can be conceived of as the beyond of a boundary that is discerned as a horizon within a realm of immanence. But, as Kant’s critical philosophy remarks, there are in addition to boundaries (Grenzen) also limits (Schranken). Whereas boundaries can be viewed from both sides, within and beyond, limits cannot be transcended, or perhaps even be reached. “Transcendence” is, in this latter case, not a descriptive, but only a limiting term. Absolute transcendence is not a boundary, but a limit. Philo’s ontological, Levinas’s ethical, and Augustine’s epistemological modes of transcendence are all examples of immanent transcending. They are leveraged from an experience of immanence “and never cross the decisive line to the Absolute Transcendence.”54 There is, however, also a transcendent transcending or a seeing of immanence rather as the consequence of self-differentiation of the Transcendent as the Unconditioned: Now the side of Absolute Transcendence is the marked side, and the side of Immanence the unmarked one. Thus the Immanent or conditioned is seen as a consequence of the self-differentiation

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of the Absolute Transcendent or Unconditioned. By distinguishing itself from itself the Transcendent becomes the Unconditioned that, without ceasing to be the Transcendent, constitutes the difference between Immanence and Transcendence not merely by distinguishing itself from Immanence (Immanence/Absolute Transcendence) but rather by breaking into the Immanent in such a way that its re­ entry makes it impossible not to distinguish between immanence and transcendence within Immanence (immanent immanence/transcending immanence).55 Thus, the initiative must be attributed to the Transcendent itself, as in the case of Karl Barth’s God: “Absolute Transcendence (unconditioned) cannot be construed from the side of the unconditioned without thinking a movement of self-differentiation on the side of Absolute Transcendence (absolute activity) and an enrichment or empowerment on the side of Immanence (absolute passivity).” This schema applies properly to theological transcendence as it is understood by Barth and also by Karl Rahner, and it therefore requires a properly theological language: “It is a movement of Absolute Transcendence (or, rather, of the Transcendent Absolute) that posits the difference between Immanence and Absolute Transcendence by representing itself as Absolute Transcendence in Immanence; and this has been worked out (in different ways) by Karl Barth and Karl Rahner in their ­accounts of divine self-transcending in God’s self-revelation.”56 Absolute Transcendence, therefore, is to be differentiated from all forms of the transcendent and transcending that are not necessarily theological in the proper and restrictive sense of Christian theology: “Absolute Transcendence is neither the utter beyond of Neoplatonist metaphysical transcendence nor the total Other of Levinas’s ethical transcendence, but rather the immanent trace of ‘something missing’ that can only obliquely be indicated or referred to by pointing to the gap or absence of that without whose presence immanence could not even be named ‘immanence’ in a meaningful way.”57 Dalferth distinguishes in this way between anthropological and theological perspectives on transcendence. In the former, “the self of self-­ transcending never moves beyond the immanent side of the Immanence/ Absolute Transcendence distinction which functions as its horizon of transcending.” In theological transcendence, by contrast, transcending occurs

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as an event that is not in answer to our problematics. The infinite participates in the finite rather than the reverse, which is what takes place in selftranscending. Such theological transcending is experienced as a completely gratuitous gift and as “more than anything that can be symbolized or expressed in language.” It is, nevertheless, the transcendent condition of the possibility of all expression. For Absolute Transcendence is not a dimension of Immanence, but rather “becomes present as Absolute Transcendence in the immanence, which it thereby constitutes. This, in turn, is only possible if Absolute Transcendence is in itself a Self-Transcending that establishes the difference between Immanence and Absolute Transcendence precisely by becoming present within the horizon of Immanence as Absolute ­Transcendence.”58 To this extent, Absolute Transcendence is not simply “wholly other,” but is rather the Becoming Present of Divinity. In Christian terms, “God is not the Wholly Other but the one who becomes present to creatures in the horizon of Immanence in Jesus Christ and through the Spirit.” Thus Dalferth points up the insufficiency of human self-transcending alone. Even Paul Tillich’s ontological realism, which describes God as the “breaking-­ ­in of eternity into time,” is finally only a purely phenomenological transcendence without true theological transcendence. For Tillich, “It is the event (that) of transcendence that counts, not how the event is symbolized.” This event “opens up a glimpse on the universal dimension of reality, whereas the way it is re-presented or symbolized is always particular and due to the particularities of the situation or context in which the rupture occurred.”59 Yet the event of God in Christ is absolutely singular and particular and God’s own initiative, without any universal conditions that we can establish. Karl Barth, in contrast to Tillich, describes the self-presentation and self-communication of God as God in terms of faith rather than of the analogy of being or of philosophical reflection. God’s being is to be found wholly in becoming present to us as creative and transforming love according to this self-reiteration. God is therefore inexhaustibly comprehensible (rather than incomprehensible, in the terms of negative theology), eternally self-transcending toward us. This is his being Wholly Other: this is how God becomes present to us, God’s self-revelation. God’s comprehensibility is grounded in his creative self-presentation as God rather than in any im-

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manent structure of human reason. God’s being accessible under the conditions of immanence is his transcendence, for this is purely impossible in any human terms. An unfathomable closeness rather than an inaccessible remoteness is the gift of (and to) the new self. Of course, symbolization of this event is contingent and reflects subjects’ understanding of themselves self-reflectively in the light of this event and in dependence on it. The event, however, is an anamorphic self-transcending rather than an aspiring self-transcendence; it is not possible humanly, but only by divine means. Jürgen Habermas’s thought, in the Enlightenment tradition affirming a universal communicative rationality, is designed to counter and correct the sort of tendency exhibited by Barth’s language of revelation to become hermetically closed to those not participating in his own brand of faith. This hermeticism may be thought to be a tendency inherent in theological language generally. And yet Habermas is at the same time also acutely conscious of certain inherent limits and insufficiencies of all non-theological or religiously uninflected secular discourse. A recognition of the necessity of theology as inherent in enlightenment, ever since its earliest Axial Age expressions, paradoxically emerges from his project of a rationally regulated society.

HABERMAS AND PHILOSOPHICAL UNIVERSALISM: THE MODEL OF THE AXIAL AGE

Juxtaposing theological and secular approaches to transcendence illuminates the universality emergent from the Axial Age as inhering in an ambiguity between the two. Neither can achieve universality except through relation to the other. However universal our globally rationalized, secularized society becomes, something is missing from purely practical reason today, and becoming conscious of that lack is a first step necessary to recovery of our cultural health and spiritual well-being. In An Awareness of What Is Missing, Habermas finds a guide to this diagnosis particularly in the philosophical and historiographical literature on the Axial Age.60 Reason and faith emerged there historically as complementary forms of expression of the new powers of reflection that would eventually usher in the modern age and its revolutionary transformations of society and of life

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itself all across the planet. These were in significant ways the first flourishings of universally human cultures, and they typically took the form also of the origins and founding of the great world religions. Momentously, in this world-historical epochal transition emerged “the transcendental standpoint of seeing things as a whole, an All” (die Welt von einem transzendenten Standpunkt aus als Ganzes in den Blick zu nehmen).61 Of course, just what kind of seeing whole this involves is complex and vexed. The Axial Age is predicated on breaking up an immediate bond of wholeness, the wholeness of archaic society, with its characteristic embeddedness of the individual in society and of society itself in the cosmic order. This unruptured integrity is lost in the Axial Age for the sake of a different kind of wholeness inclusive of transcendence. This new vision of transcendence no longer objectively sees anything whole, but finds wholeness rather through blindly relating to a transcendent order that, at least hypothetically, encompasses it and everything else, too. The supreme transcendent principle of this order cannot be adequately conceptualized, but can only be imagined—analogously and inadequately. Such relational wholeness in the Axial Age puts into perspective the concrete wholeness of pre-Axial, archaic culture. Objective wholeness is only produced in idea and as lost in the age of reflective intellect. Wholeness becomes explicit and conscious at the moment that it is no longer graspable in concrete terms of the primordial, archaic social-political-­ cosmic order. At this point, the wholeness that informs the revolutionary insights of the Axial Age can only be conveyed poetically. It is more of the order of the wholeness of poetic vision intended by William Blake: To see the World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your Hand And Eternity in an hour. —“Auguries of Innocence” Vision of the infinite in the finite is whole in a sense that is not comprehended by any objective logic or rational calculus of discrete objects, but rather by a kind of mystic and poetic intuition. For Blake: “If the doors of our perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, ­infinite.”62

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Such Romantic vision is uncannily attuned to the Axial Age breakthrough that opens the way to the modern era. In the fusion of philosophy, religion, ethics, and aesthetics proclaimed by the youthful idealists Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin, who seem to have collaborated in producing “The Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism,” a kind of visionary Axial Age renews itself.63 It turns on seeing all things as internally related to one another and as concrete universals embodying the infinite. Such ­vision is typically anticipated in poetry of whatever age: “And every Thing is truly Infinite / In its Relation deep and exquisite” (Thomas Traherne, d. 1674).64 One crucial aspect of the history of philosophical reason, one that often leads to metaphysical speculations, is the orientation that entails relating to an All without limits, or at least relating to things in general without the restriction of a specific field of objects that characterizes each of the particular disciplines and sciences. Yet Habermas typically brackets out the whole, and therewith metaphysics and infinite self-reflection. He does not want to allow speculative reason to be completely context-free or to create its own context out of itself. This would give it the form of the unconditioned, and that is a theological figure. And yet, there is always de facto some operative whole, even if it remains unformulated. This is so even in any purely pragmatic thinking. In spite of this limit in his receptiveness to the Axial Age and its penchant for holistic thinking, Habermas can agree that at this stage reason and faith are inseparable. Philosophy, too, like religious consciousness, was contemplative and salvific in its original inventors or discoverers, such as Pythagoras, and still for its first systematizers, such as Plato, and even in some respects for Aristotle, with his Unmoved Mover making the whole world go round by the pure power of its being loved or desired as final telos, or End-in-itself. The “common origin of philosophy and universal religion in the worldview revolution of the Axial Age” (den gemeinsamen Ursprung von Philosophie und Religion aus der Weltbildrevolution der Achsenzeit), as Habermas writes,65 needs to be taken seriously again by secular reason. Secular reason now lives in the age of “postmetaphysical” thought, when the synthesis of faith and reason, as it existed in the Middle Ages through Scholasticism, is broken. But we need to find ways to cope with this rupture and to compensate for its effects.

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Habermas was not happy with Pope Benedict’s anti-modern or “modernity-­critical” turn (modernitätskritisiche Wendung)66 on the basis of his embrace of the faith/reason synthesis that served as a backbone of Western intellectual tradition from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. For Habermas, this synthesis is definitively broken by the revolutionary eruptions of the modern world. We must then ask, however, what survives this rupture? Can Glauben (faith) be excluded from Wissen (knowledge), which itself would be left intact? A deeper assessment of the postmodern predicament requires admission of the brokenness of reason itself, even as it works in its technical-scientific applications. Its “success” must not blind us to the blindness that is thereby engendered regarding the overarching values that orient human life and endeavor. It is no more possible today to adhere to a triumphalistic notion of reason than to a harmonious, seamless synthesis of faith and knowledge. Even to take reason as definitively postmeta­physical is still to think in dichotomous terms such as have proved inadequate in our historical moment, notably in its opening of frontiers toward the quest for intercultural understanding. It is no longer possible today to keep faith and reason rigidly separate from each other. Habermas is asking, before all, whether a historical perspective on the common origin of religion and enlightenment in a “common reason” (“Genealogie der ‘gemeinsamen Vernunft’”) can help in our situation of conflict between religious groups and secular liberal states.67 My suggestion is that we should read the history of faith and knowledge, Glauben und Wissen, rather, in the light of a certain unknowing that underlies both forms of spirit or consciousness. We might conceive of this possibility somewhat after the motto “Not-knowing is profound; knowing is shallow” bequeathed by the Chinese sage Zhuangzi.68 I agree entirely with Habermas that secularization transforms the stream of tradition. It does so, however, also from within religious tradition itself rather than as an alien alternative to religion. This is clear, certainly, in the case of apophatic Christianity or negative theology, with its powerfully secularizing impetus as unlimited critique. All positive concepts of God are critically undermined by negative theology. To this extent, secularization is produced by the essential insights of such a theology. Habermas points to the pivotal moments of this history of secularization, but in each case they can lead in different directions.

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Habermas identifies key nodal points in Western intellectual history for the secularization of Christian consciousness in Duns Scotus’s doctrine of univocity, which issues in nominalism and modern experimental natural sciences; in Kant’s transcendental critical turn, leading to a concept of ­subjective and agential autonomy that enables modern understandings of rights and democracy; and in historicism, such as we find it in Hegel, ­laying the ground for sensitivity to cultural difference and the relativity of values. In these emphases, Habermas is in accord with what many Christian theologians view as crucial aspects of modern culture, innovations that are ushered in through Christian revelation and the unprecedented, revolutionary, and modern culture that it contributes prodigiously to creating and fostering. However, there are also some crucial differences between Habermas’s understanding of the historical role of Christianity in culture and the understanding that is apt to be upheld by theologians. Although Habermas turns to the Axial Age because of the integration of reason and critique with religious forms of belief, he seems reluctant to grant them parity. In principle, the idea of the postsecular should be that neither the secular nor the religious can provide a neutral framework, but Habermas often tends to take the secular state as neutral and as the necessary frame of reference. In effect, it dictates the rules of the game that Habermas recognizes as necessary and legitimate for social communications. In “Glauben and Wissen,” Habermas lays down three conditions for participation of religions in pluralistic modern secular society.69 They must, among other compromises, accept the authority of science as having a monopoly on knowledge of the world (“das gesellschaftliche Monopol an Weltwissen,” 252). Thus, not only giving up their own exclusivist claims to ground morals and consciousness, but recognizing science’s exclusive ­authority in determining what is genuine knowledge of “the world,” is required of well-behaved, civically acceptable religions. This seems to me to presuppose an undialectical and dogmatic notion of the world and of ­scientific knowledge of it. Habermas accurately distinguishes between the internal rationalization of faith by theology and the translation of Christian contents by postmetaphysical thought into a secular horizon, to the end of evaluating them by other standards than their own. But he seems unwilling to give up control of the playing field by secular reason and liberal institutions. This

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makes practical sense. It might prove to be the best guarantee of freedom of expression to all. However, anti-liberal revolutions currently sweeping across Western countries show that large swathes of voters no longer believe this, and without consensus such rationality is powerless. In any case, the personal predilection of Habermas should not be mistaken for a theoretical grounding or a secular predicament that would lend postmetaphysical reason self-evidence in its claim to truth. Habermas, in effect, by default, takes the secular world or ambit and its reason to be normative for the whole of humanity. Religious concepts are worthwhile to the extent that they contribute to lending “power of conviction” to the philosophical concepts such as person, freedom, individuality, community, emancipation, solidarity, etc., that translate them. (“Was auf diese Seite zählt, ist die Überzeugungskraft, die philosophische Übersetzungen für die säkulare Umgebung gewinnen”).70 These, for him, secular concepts define the vanguard of historical progress, and they are in need simply of support from religious traditions, whose resources are to be translated into secular terms so as to be generally applicable and useful. Habermas is effectively taking the secular to be normative and is attempting to supplement it with some necessary resources borrowed from religion. He sees the history of culture still in terms of general progress from mythos to logos. Yet he is painfully aware also of certain losses incurred with these purported advances. Lost, for example, is the ability of people to passionately attach themselves to values such as solidarity. Furthermore, Habermas’s idea of translation into secular terms ignores that the religious message is lost by transferring it to a different intellectual and cultural framework. Indeed, he has very little to say in reply to Friedo Rickens, who raises this kind of objection in his essay in Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt. Believing a faith entails learning a new language, just as does thinking a new philosophy. The new vision is not translatable into the old terms. It must rather translate them into its own new horizon. In fact, translation is always necessary for any communication of personal experience or cultural understanding. Habermas’s idea of translating into secular language that is universally intelligible creates an artificial division between language that is and language that is not generally intelligible. In reality, this is always a matter of degree and relative to context. The fiction of a neutral secular framework can itself be constructed only via operations of translation.

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What Habermas does admit is that religion has some unique resources that seem to be missing from purely secular reason. He is dismayed to see the rout of reason and the widespread insistence on its deficiencies in times of postmodern critique. One of Habermas’s objectives in “Glauben und Wissen” is to counter a certain “defeatism of reason” (“Vernunftdefätismus,” 30) that has taken hold with the postmodern moment of radically undermined confidence in rationality. Habermas sees the dialogue of rational knowing (Wissen) with religious faith (Glauben) as essential in order for reason to re(dis)cover its own ungraspable depth—what enables it to have community-building and morally binding force, as in previous periods of history. It is troubling today that pragmatic reason seems able to pursue its purely exploitative aims and purposes unbridled by moral ­scruples. This was not Kant’s understanding of practical reason, and in fact the relation with religion was understood by Kant as intrinsic to practical reason itself. However, with the separation of reason and faith in the secular age, reason needs to struggle to find its way back to a more moral vision of reality and a worldview based on solidarity between humans and among creatures in general sharing in the environment. It was inevitable that Enlightenment reason lose the traditional religious images of an ethical wholeness of God’s kingdom on earth as a collectively binding ideal (“aufgeklärten Vernunft die religiös konservierten Bilder vom sittlichen Ganzen—vom Reich Gottes auf Erden—als kollektiv verbindliche Ideale entgleiten müssen,” 30). However, practical reason misses its own vocation, when it is no longer able to inspire a sense of solidarity in people’s profane minds. We need, above all, “a consciousness of what is missing” (“ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt,” 31) in a purely pragmatic, calculative, instrumental approach to the use of reason. This deficiency alone is able to be the bearer of consciousness of a “worldwide wounded solidarity” (“weltweit verletzte Solidarität”) that like Abel’s blood spilled by his brother, Cain, “cries to heaven” (“zum Himmel schreit”). In his reply to Norbert Brieskorn in Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt, Habermas explains in more detail the problem of deficient solidarity in secular reason and its natural morality. Practical reason is strong in its appeal to individuals and to their own autonomous moral judgment and conscience, but it cannot compare with religious communities in motivating solidarity and collective commitment and action. Religions are oriented to communitarian praxis, whereas practical reason is based primarily

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on individual judgment. Its starting point seems to bias it toward an individualistic outlook and approach to the world: “In contrast, religious consciousness remains bound up with ongoing life practices within a community, and in the case of the major world religions with the worldwide communities united in common rites of all the faithful. From this universalistically structured communitarianism, the religious consciousness of the individual can receive even in a purely moral perspective stronger impulses to solidarizing action.”71 This is the resource that Kant found in religion. Religious tradition was his way of making up for the weakness of collective rational morality. Habermas looks to the genealogy of reason in the Axial Age for help with understanding this problem and stumbling block for postmetaphysical reason. We can infer that reason needs to be based not just on individual judgment as ultimate arbiter, but rather on some instance of transcendent authority such as revelation. Of course, this authority must present itself not as apart from or as alien to reason but as reason’s own ground or depth, even though it may be largely hidden from objective reason itself and not, as such, directly graspable. This is how Paul Tillich understands the nature of the relation between reason and revelation (Systematic Theology, pt. 1). Revelation, as the ground of reason, binds individuals and their rational powers together at a level of depth that is expressed in ways exceeding the conscious control of rational operations by individuals. I would question whether reason, so understood in terms of this need and structure, should be construed as “postmetaphysical.” This is Habermas’s term for reason become aware of itself as missing something in its most immediate and transparent form as individual self-consciousness of one’s own reasons. But what has been decided or presupposed by this term “postmetaphysical”? Is it not something completely foreign to the Axial Age and its underlying ethos? Should we remain bound by the defaults of history and an objectively knowable world delivered by means of an analytical vivisection, or is emancipation not precisely about transcending such constructs? And thus about finding the way back to metaphysical thinking and wholeness? Even Heidegger, in all his anti-theological ressentiment, was looking in this direction. The event (“das Ereignis”) of Being in its wholeness could never be circumscribed within any delimited field of beings. Heidegger evokes it determinedly under the figure of “the last God” (der letzte Gott) in his Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis).

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Somewhat along the lines I am suggesting, Michael Reder argues for a less oppositional understanding of faith and reason than Habermas’s. Reder evokes the negative dialectical understanding of their relationship in negative theology, particularly in Cusanus. He also evokes the necessarily cultural mode of expression, as this is reflected upon by Schleiermacher, for what is beyond the limits of reason. These are important premises for honoring the indispensable role of religion in social discussion and for shaping a world order in the globalized predicament that we face today. Part of Reder’s purpose is to enlarge Habermas’s moral understanding of religion in public deliberation. Habermas thinks within the Kantian tradition of a strict link between religion and morality. Religious knowledge stands on grounds of practical reason applied in knowing what is morally necessary, even though theoretically it cannot be proved. This is the case with knowledge, for example, of the existence of a supremely good and ­all-powerful Being and of the immortality of the soul. And yet faith and reason remain strictly divided for Habermas. Just as for Kant, they are ­incommensurables. Habermas even stops short of Kant’s grounding of ­religion on practical, moral reason. Habermas’s postmetaphysical reason remains completely external to religious belief, even though it still needs a relation to religion as an external partner able to arouse emotion and the common feeling necessary for collective action. Habermas wants to divide the ethical and existential from the universal and moral. Morality is supposed to be universally intelligible and nonpartisan, whereas ethics is a matter of personal commitments to communities and of one’s own individual life experience, the meaning of which cannot exactly be communicated to others who have not lived through the same things. The values that result are not necessarily universally valid, however compelling they may be for those directly involved. Is this not based on the modern (Enlightenment) postulate of a self that is separate from the social conditions that surround it rather than admitting the thoroughgoing interpenetration of the personal and the social, the private and the public? The sphere of universal validity can perhaps not be defined by being set off against the private and singular, but rather by being placed precisely in that subjective connection and commitment. The truly universal is in this case the singular, and it cannot be formulated in uncontroversial terms that are valid for all alike. And yet what is beyond terms altogether may still be a universal and binding norm, if only all parties can

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be made willing to admit to the relativity of their own terms and language and culture. Habermas works from the premise that a “neutral” secular state is necessary in order to guarantee the peaceful coexistence of different religions in the social life of a nation. He takes the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom for all as exemplary. In fact, Habermas writes that secularization of the state and religious freedom are two sides of the same coin (“Die Säkularisierung der Staatsgewalt und die positive wie negative Freiheit der Religionsausübung sind zwei Seiten derselben Medaille”).72 But he overlooks the religious aspect and dimension of secularism itself, as of any ideology. This has become more and more evident with regard specifically to Marxism through its apocalyptic and messianic spin-offs in Habermas’s own Frankfurt School, represented by Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin in particular. Not any positive assertion of a secular state, but rather withdrawal from positive assertion imposed on others, is necessary to grant religious freedom or a/religious, atheist tolerance for all. This discussion has exposed the dense nexus of connections between questions of universalism, the Axial Age, and secularization that emerge in Habermas’s encounters with theologians and in his attempts to do justice to the role of religion in the emancipated society that he envisages. My aim here has been to explore the ultimate reliance of reason on revelation (and vice versa) and to show that even self-critical Enlightenment rationality as represented in Habermas’s thinking (notwithstanding certain personal resistances) accords with Axial Age critical reason in its discovery of enlightened rationality as opening to a higher instance and source beyond itself through self-reflexive consciousness of its own inherent lack.73 In my apophatic view, both of these historical watersheds in the history of free, universalist thinking—the Axial Age and the Enlightenment—witness to the transcendent origins of critical consciousness.

Part V

EMERGENCES IN LITERARY A N D C U LT U R A L T H E O R Y Literature and cultural theory are areas that have proved especially sensitive to the claims of the multicultural and the interdisciplinary explored in parts III and IV. Part V analyzes and evaluates how these areas have been affected by the pressure for increased inclusiveness. This pressure has been acutely felt and fractiously debated particularly in relation to the question of the literary canon (chapter 9). This debate is one site where the same forces that have led to the opening of the liberal arts curriculum to non-Western sources registered earliest and most strongly. More recently, World Literature has become another battleground for the imperative of expansion of humanities studies beyond Western culture (chapter 10). In both cases, apophatic insight proves to be crucial to negotiating these scarcely avoidable conflicts. The two chapters comprised in this part chart a passage through these notorious hotbeds of controversy in literary and cultural theory. Each arena in its own way shows the productivity of such dialectic once it is understood as letting something else emerge that neither side as such can comprehend or articulate, but to which both are beholden. Behind such emergences we discern the operation of the apophatic universal.

Chapter Nine

THE CANON QUESTION AND T H E VA L U E O F T H E O R Y Toward a New (Non)Concept of Universality

THE ATTACK AGAINST THE CANON AND AGAINST LITERATURE

The wide diffusion of theoretical awareness about literature has taught us to view the canon not as a thing, like a stone monument rising out of the desert sands, or a bronze plaque with names engraved on it, but as an ongoing historical process.1 It is not as if the literary canon went unchallenged for thousands of years until critics suddenly woke up in 1968 and declared the need for a change. The canon throughout history has been continually forged and reforged on new and different bases, and not without struggle and conflict: it has been constituted by recurrent, hard-fought negotiations issuing sometimes in precipitous change. Nevertheless, any theoretical debate over the canon presupposes that claims concerning values communicated in and through literature can be intelligible to other peoples and perspectives—in other periods and in other cultural contexts—than those in which they originate. In other words, literature, with its social significance and cultural meanings, must be capable of being understood and validated transhistorically. Such transhistorical communicability of value is a minimum requirement for any work’s being recognized as canonical. This constitutes universality in a sense far different from that represented by static categories held 237

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to be true in all times and places: it is a universality that can be apprehended always only in the making, never as a finished product but always only in the process of being forged. Such universality exists as discourse in the present that is being communicated into new and emerging situations and contexts and thereby makes contact and connects with other discourses in unrestricted ways and in all directions. Such universality might be more accurately termed omniversality. It eschews the fixation of determinate content and requires, instead, constant turning, as on a pivot. Such universality consists in an ability to be all-inclusive even, paradoxically, in its selectiveness. Selection serves to point to an outside or higher ground of selection that can never itself be included or selected—a criterion that cannot as such be stated but that nevertheless impinges on and manifests itself in the selection process. It can exclude nothing categorically, somewhat like the open invitation to the Kingdom of God in the Gospels. All souls are summoned: nevertheless, the gate is straight and narrow and few find it. This chapter aims to elicit such a notion in its emergence from discussion concerning the canon in contemporary literary theory. To ground this notion, which is apophatic in evacuating any fixed content, it will be helpful to start with a telescoped retrospective, however summary, outlining the metamorphoses of conceptions of the literary canon since antiquity. The Alexandrian critics of the Hellenistic age, signally Aristarchus (ca. 217–145 BC) and his pupil Apollodorus (born ca. 180 BC), began to establish a canon of ancient Greek classics. In doing so, they were steered by their own philosophically reflective standpoint, imposing allegorical interpretations that completely transformed and distorted the presumable intentions of the literature and its authors, including Homer and the Greek tragedians, whom they were interpreting and evaluating. A few centuries later, Roman critics from Horace to Quintilian elaborated a canon of Latin-language authors imitating Greek models that were selected, sorted, and hierarchized according to a very different outlook and standard of taste. Late in the life of the Roman Empire, Augustine and Jerome, among other fathers of the Church, excised and exorcized the authors canonized in classical pagan tradition by filtering them through a Christian theological lens and screen. Meanwhile, a new canon of Christian literature written in Latin also emerged, including epic poets such as Prudentius (348–413) and Sedulius (early fifth century). Later, the medieval accessus ad auctores ushered in further selections and revisions, partly reflecting the

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rise of new vernacular literatures that began making their own new claims to canonicity. Renaissance humanism sought to return behind these patristic and Scholastic mediations to the classical texts themselves and tended to disparage popular medieval literature in comparison with the classical models. The querelles des anciens et des modernes revolved around open strife between different canons and particularly around differences over whether modern works needed to be based on ancient models in order to rank as canonical. Later, Enlightenment criticism rejected Latin influences and exemplary authors such as had guided the Renaissance humanists and returned to their Greek progenitors as more original: Homer rather than Virgil, Pindar rather than Horace, Sophocles rather than Seneca. Subsequently, Romantic critics, following Johann Gottlieb Herder, gave the canon a wholly different twist and emphasis with their valorization of nationhood and of the genius of the folk as the matrix of genuine literary creativity. In all these transmogrifications, myriad works were reevaluated: some were posthumously rediscovered and belatedly canonized, while others were uncanonized. Some were decanonized and recanonized several times over.2 Nearer to our own era of epochal shifts, some time in the 1970s, a concerted outcry against the canon of literary classics, perceived as immobile and oppressive, arose. This provoked reactions such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987) against what was later called “canon bashing” (David Bromwich).3 These works supplied tinder for inflammatory debates that raged especially in the years 1987–91.4 After a great deal of difficult discussion and often bitter strife and fighting (which is still going on), universities saw some deep-cutting reconfigurations of the reading lists for their courses in general culture and humanities. However, although the dissatisfaction with a static canon of classics has been effective in bringing about change, the question remains as to what constitutes literary value and why any particular selection of texts should be held up and prized as deserving of study, as exemplary of worthwhile learning and culture. Since literary theory has been such a crucial catalyst in the revision and revaluation of the literary canon, it is logical to look to theory for guidance in illuminating the grounds for canonicity of the more dynamic type that theoretical reflection and questioning have introduced and promoted in our institutions of higher learning.

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At first glance, however, theory seems to have far more to offer of a purely negative nature, undermining whatever norms and standards may hitherto have been applied in assessing and conferring literary value. This is also the special mark of theory’s “apophatic” vocation. Especially recent developments in theory seem to preempt and render vain any efforts to establish valid and stable criteria for evaluating literary art. The eminent literary theorist Terry Eagleton, in his essay “The Rise of English,” the opening chapter of his widely read Literary Theory (1983), exposes the political motives for mystifications that declare aesthetic value timeless and universal. According to Eagleton, the canon of English literature has taken over from religion in sanctioning these sorts of illusions that direct people’s attention away from the divisive class interests that otherwise threaten to discomfit society and upset its forcibly imposed order.5 The canon of superior literature exalted as timelessly true, universally valid, and ponderously meaningful shows up thus as a political construct serving a ruling elite. Even a much more reverent discussion of the canon such as Frank Kermode’s wrestles with the idea of “literature as a kind of substitute for revealed religion.”6 Is the “higher pleasure” of literature—as Wordsworth worded it, evoking the pleasure of a glass of sherry in comparison—a covert gesture of bringing back through literature the higher authority envisaged by Matthew Arnold for Christian revelation? Providing some empirical substantiation for Eagleton’s point of view, Richard Ohmann’s “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960–75” documented concretely how “aesthetic value arises from class conflict” and is dictated in indirect ways by the interests of “monopoly capital” and the common values and beliefs of the professional-managerial classes.7 In concluding that “the values and beliefs of a small group of people played a disproportionate role in deciding what novels would be widely read in the United States” (70), Ohmann stressed that “the emergence of these novels has been a process saturated with class values and interests, a process inseparable from the broader struggle for position and power in our society, from the institutions that mediate that struggle, as well as from legitimation of and challenges to the social order” (69). Another prestigious literary theorist, Barbara Hernstein Smith, adduces more general philosophical grounds for undermining claims to canonical authority. The canon pretends to be based on disinterested aesthetic

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value, but according to Smith there can be no such thing. It is impossible even to define what aesthetic value is except in terms of other pragmatic use-values from which it is supposed to be independent. In her Contingencies of Value, Smith insists on the contingent character of all aesthetic value against the Kantian aesthetics of disinterestedness as founding a universally valid standard of taste.8 And she is voicing convictions that have been very widely shared and have spearheaded a great part of the new initiatives in criticism that have emerged under the aegis of theory in recent decades. Pierre Bourdieu lends a sociological basis to this view with his theory that aesthetic taste is above all a means of affirming class identity.9 Theory, seen from this angle, would seem to be naturally biased against any canon and against any claims for enduring and more-than-contingent values. Attacks on the canon, however, are often predicated paradoxically on what turns out to be just the opposite assumption: they assume the validity of canonicity in general and its foundation in authoritative and enduring values even in the very attempt to challenge and change the canon’s specific contents. This ironic turn touches no less the most vehement detractors from “the” canon, such as Chinua Achebe. In “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Achebe attacks Joseph Conrad as a racist and challenges his right to be honored as a classic author on grounds of political incorrectness.10 This attack may be recognized as having an important impact and very practical effect. However, it is not really against the canon as such, against any canon, that such critics are arguing. Instead, they are actually relaying the concept of a canon and reinforcing its legitimacy. They dispute only the prevailing views about which works should be accorded the honor of being included in it. This is appropriate, for the canon is an open and evolving body of works. Yet these arguments do not so much question the canon and its claim to universal validity as contest certain results that the process of canonization has produced. These attacks fall rather under negotiations aimed at deciding which works will be valorized as canonical. The complaint against the existing canon as invidious and exclusionary, as elitist and an instrument of domination, as represented by critics like Paul Lauter and Lillian Robinson, usually presupposes that a canon could also work in a more evenhanded and socially progressive manner.11 What is being attacked is the imposition of a certain race’s or gender’s or class’s

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literature as canonical. Again, such protests are motivated not by objection to the idea of canonicity as such, but rather by a desire to participate in this claim and to have it work for rather than against one’s own identity group or constituency. A more fundamental issue can be raised as to whether canonizing certain literary works and canonizing literature per se as a privileged mode of cultural expression is not itself inextricably ideological, political, and merely an enforcement of political and cultural power. Literature understood in this way is not at all about appreciating ideals such as beauty and cultivating aesthetic taste or other generally valid values. All these softer, subjective phenomena may be unmasked as screens for asserting the interests of empowered groups and applying oppressive measures to control others. They are deployed to engender the consensus necessary for civil society by covering over breaches caused by conflicting material interests within society. Some attempts have been made to use purely socioethnic and socioeconomic parameters in selecting works to read so as to give up the effort to make distinctions of literary value. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Taban Lo Liyong, and Henry Owuor-Anymba in “On the Abolition of the English Department” (1968) argued for changing the criterion for inclusion from excellence to representativity.12 Their argument constituted a direct challenge to Matthew Arnold’s idea of literature articulated in his famous definition of culture as “the best that has been thought and said” (Culture and Anarchy [1869]). This is an intriguing proposal, yet it is doubtful whether value judgments should or even can be avoided in selecting works to study as literature. If, in the interest of being fair to all contenders, no real distinctions of merit are made, it then becomes arbitrary—from an aesthetic or artistic point of view—which works are selected as representative. Without at least the prospect of selecting works for their intrinsic worth, we will soon forget what we are reading for or why we are reading literature at all. The difficult business of evaluating what is excellent and worthwhile, with all the contentiousness that this must entail, can hardly be avoided. Any selection results in some kind of canon, and as E. Dean Kolbas points out, “the very concept of a canon necessarily involves qualitative judgment, because to be canonical also means to be exemplary.”13 The more radical critiques and rethinkings of the canon are not those that wish to retain its authority in order to invest other works and traditions, those of their own choice, with the privileges thought to have been held to date too exclusively by an unjustifiably small circle of elites. Chal-

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lenges of the latter type have sometimes been effective in actually changing the canon, making many more women and non-Western and non-elite writers staples in courses at elite universities. But this would hardly have been possible without the searching theoretical questioning that forced recognition of the relativity and changeability of any possible canon—its necessarily dynamic mutability. Theory has proved invaluable for opening to investigation every aspect of the literary canon and every settled assumption about it. However, such scrutiny works as a two-edged sword: well beyond all useful rigor and recalibration fostered by this critical vetting, the unrestricted scope of its corrosive effect reaches to dissolving the category of the literary as such into ideological mists—or mystifications. The prestige of literature itself has been subjected to severe questioning, and the privilege accorded literary writings in public instruction and cultural institutions has been challenged head-on. Why should texts labeled as literary be elevated above others as having enduring value beyond the pragmatic use-value accorded to instruction manuals, research data, and news reports? Such “distinctions,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, have ideological implications. These implications have been exposed forcefully, for example, by Raymond Williams’s analysis in Marxism and Literature (1977) of the rise of a modern concept of literature in the eighteenth century as a special category of creative, imaginative writing in correlation with the rise of a new bourgeois middle class and its “sensibility” in response to industrial capitalism. John Guillory similarly uses Bourdieu’s thinking to reflect on the impact of the institutionalization of literary theory on the formation of literary canons.14 Consequently, there has been a tendency to impugn the status of literature as canonical, to challenge its cultural authority per se, without distinction and without questioning which works are worthy of canonical status and which are not. Yet even if the literary as such has no stable and definable content that is constant across cultures, its characteristic freedom of form as a genre of unrestricted invention and creativity suits it to serve in the transit of contents and concepts from culture to culture. To this extent, literature surely can be a force conducive to social dynamism. Although we have seen literature attacked for political reasons as associated inevitably with conservative ideologies, this ignores the key role that literature has also played in radical and revolutionary movements. Pierre Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro (1778), a ferment for the 1789 French Revolution, is a particularly celebrated example. It was followed up by

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­ ictor Hugo’s work as catalyst for ensuing revolutions in 1830 and 1848 V and for the Parisian insurrection known as la Commune in 1871. Most extreme, the early twentieth-century modernist literary avant-gardes such as Russian futurism and Dadaism proposed to destroy libraries together with museums and the established institutions of society across the board. The attack on literature has been part and parcel of the wholesale ­attacks on all forms of cultural authority since, shall we say, 1968. Yet again these are typically bids to lay claim to cultural authority on behalf of parties representing themselves as disenfranchised. The more radical challenges deny the possibility of such authority altogether, and this is where the most searching theoretical reflection is apt to lead. René Wellek, in “The Attack on Literature,” examines a variety of political and ideological reasons for why literature per se has been denigrated in recent decades and then proposes that “much more serious and interesting is the attack on literature which is basically motivated by a distrust of language.”15 Roland Barthes, for example, characterizes literature as “a system of deceptive signification,” and Maurice Blanchot prophesies the “disappearance of literature” by its reduction to silence.16 Wellek himself points out, finally, that “less apocalyptically, literature and writing have been seen as a transitory form of human communication to be replaced by the media of the electronic age” (8). These are challenges to literary value per se. Indeed, if context and motives of social power alone are decisive in determining which books and which kinds of discourse are treasured and kept, then texts are emptied of all intrinsic value and are canonized on only extrinsic grounds. The canon is considered to be a matter only of consolidated power, not of literary merit or aesthetic value.

THE ATTACK AGAINST THEORY AND ITS SELF-CRITICAL RECONFIGURATION

Lately, not only literature but theory itself has come under attack, and for similar reasons: the literature of theory, too, is viewed as privileging Western, white, bourgeois, phallogocentric discourse as normative and as putting itself in the position of judging all others. Voices from the margins identifying with minorities object to theory and its exclusionary drawing

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of boundaries around the appropriate object of literary criticism as complicit in establishing the canon and its power. But this is rather too gross a generalizing, difference-effacing view itself, and it ignores how theoretical work has actually highlighted the historical contingencies that go into making up the canon. The critics of the canon sometimes write as if it were a centrally organized conspiracy, whereas history shows the process to be much more complicated and aleatory than that. Beyond all deliberate manipulations, what effectively establishes a literary canon in the collective mind of a culture may well be more like an “invisible hand,” the result of incalculably complex interactions of myriad individual, intentional efforts at the micro level.17 Paradoxically, this linking of the canon question with that of the justification for theory is key to illuminating and even to “justifying” them both. Theory, like the canon, has come under fire, yet both these challenges are reflexes in which theoretical reflection turns back on itself and turns into self-questioning and self-limitation, or even self-liquidation. The questioning of literature and theory alike is an eminently theoretical activity. Whether theory is valorized or impugned, theory is in any case actively deployed by such critique, and to that extent whatever is said depends on and presupposes the value and validity of theoretical reflection as such. Indeed, the challenge to the canon belongs to the vocation of theory: this challenge is itself theoretical and cannot flourish without theoretical methods and instruments, not to mention a theoretical frame of mind. Canonicity, too, is a theoretical—indeed originally a theological—construct, and even the attack against the canon is a further manifestation of the self-reflexive and even self-subversive powers of critical reflection—alias theory.18 Even the argument “Against Theory” of Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp is in its own way an eminently theoretical argument.19 It takes a general position against theoretical criticism on philosophical grounds. The reason is basically that, no matter what reasons are given, the argument is first of all a practice that cannot account for itself theoretically except by producing and promulgating more beliefs that remain, however, always practical positions of belief rather than theoretically justified truths. The pretense of stepping—or of attempting to step—outside of one’s practical commitments in order to ground them in some belief-neutral theory is exposed as bad faith. Even the highly pragmatist Stanley Fish succumbs

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to this temptation in presenting a general theory of how theory as such has no practical consequences.20 But then does not the same hold for Knapp and Michaels’s own argument? As an intervention into literary-theoretical debate, it has a practical point to make. It ought not, however, to be believed as a theory, and therefore its prescription that the theoretical enterprise be ended has no general, theoretical validity. It may be implemented by those it happens to serve in strategic or pragmatic ways, but it is not justified as prescriptive on any universalizable grounds. It must not be allowed theoretical credibility or validity. And yet, its endeavor to persuade us as a rational argument insinuates just such a claim to general validity. Theory is inevitably reductive inasmuch as it abstracts from the infinite complications of practice. It does, nevertheless, open a space for negotiations between different points of view because theory places certain of these pragmatic assumptions into question. Our practical critical assumptions are indeed different and sometimes even incommensurable. The value of theory is the stimulus it provides to opening up the parameters of our discussions. Theory, as such, has no positive doctrine to offer. It is, rather, a facilitator, for theory projects a forum for discussion where none could be supposed previously because there is no self-evident practical intersection between disparate fields like modern anthropology and ancient Greek tragedy (Girard) or between the history of seventeenth-century religious conflicts and the use of signs by poets and artists in the early twentiethcentury avant-garde movements (Barthes).21 Theory invites to such hybrid discussions. Having no fixed framework of references of its own, it opens up an in-between space for comparison that might otherwise never be discovered. In opening up this space of free play, where boundaries and definitions are set in motion, theory behaves like literature—it operates free from the constraints of fixed frameworks and set fields of objects, free to reconstrue them in creative and imaginative ways.22 In this vein, which opens to indetermination as a peculiar virtue, Gerald Graff makes a case for featuring theory in the literature curriculum.23 Although he acknowledges the many conflicts and impasses with which theory is fraught, he maintains that the conflicts need not be resolved in order for theory to be taught. According to Graff, theory should catalyze exchange rather than become one more specialization. Theory is currently threatened with compartmentalization into discrete disciplines, whereas it is suited by its nature to play a role between departments, fostering reflec-

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tion on connections and contextualization. Rather than being consigned to the well-defined precincts of a specialized discipline, theory should be central to all the different specializations represented within academic departments, “not by putting theory specialists in charge but by recognizing that all their members are theorists” (Graff, “Taking Cover in Coverage,” 201). Theory’s power and relevance lie not in its specific qualifications or qualities, but rather in its protean indeterminacy. Insight into the contingency of all value judgments is most assuredly a theoretical insight, perhaps the essential theoretical insight. It is judgment that distances itself from immediate belief in any judgment—even in itself as concrete, determinate judgment. For theory is itself dependent on contingencies in reaching any of its judgments. They come about in certain historical conjunctures as the result of a whole set of contingent conditions and biases. “Theory” taken etymologically means “seeing” (from Greek theorein). As such, it objectifies and knows, even while stepping back into a position of detachment. Sight is traditionally the sense that affords knowledge at a distance and in detachment from what is known. Although in principle theoretical knowledge is an objective and, to that extent, absolute knowing, as practiced it is relative; it is always only a particular endeavor at theorizing that realizes one angle of vision in a determinate set of circumstances. Theoretical formulations cannot help positing themselves as having some sort of general validity, but their actual impact depends rather on their opening possibilities for communication between positions that in themselves seem to be incompatible with one another. By taking a more objective view, it becomes possible to recognize commonalities between alternatives that appear to be mutually exclusive. The significance of theory, accordingly, is in the possibilities it opens for negotiating relationships and making connections across what are apparently entrenched divisions and impermeable boundaries. Theory enables and promotes discovery of the diversity and multiplicity of literatures and cultures through its insight into the contingency of purportedly universal norms and supposedly enduring, or even unchanging, standards. A theoretical perspective relativizes the motives for any particular viewpoint. This placing in perspective is what the objectifying, distancing outlook of theory is apt to offer. It relativizes its object or uproots it from its natural ground, detaches it from its unconscious

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a­ ssumptions, and places it in contexts in which it must negotiate complicated relations and sustain conflicts. While the object of the theoretical gaze is thus relativized, the gaze itself seems to reveal truth—though only until such time as it, too, is taken as object for further theoretical reflection. The pretense to objective knowledge, which is indeed objectionable for all the reasons that have been urged against the whole historical edifice of Western thought as metaphysics, pertains to first-order formulations of theory—but not to the life of theory as an ongoing process of self-critical reflection. In specific, applied instances, theory relativizes—only to turn, in turn, into a normative discourse itself. Yet theory remains, at the same time, the capacity and the drive to subject its own discourse to critical scrutiny anew. The meaning and importance of theory lies in its dynamic working rather than in any achieved results or static precepts. The theoretical outlook distances from concrete claims and motivations, thereby relativizing them and opening up alternatives and catalyzing mutations. Theory, in the literal sense as “theorein,” entails stepping back to see the field as a whole rather than remaining embroiled in contentions from a given position that obstructs one’s outlook and restricts seeing. Ideally, a theoretical position is disengaged from all practical standpoints and, to this extent, is “objective.” This objectivity, of course, is illusory, yet as an ideal it can be efficacious in loosening the stranglehold of apparently self-­evident dogmas. This freeing up for the sake of considering alternatives is all that theory can deliver. It has no positive, prescriptive value, as Knapp and ­Michaels insist. It is an emphatically negative type of thinking—albeit not to the exclusion of its penchant for constructive creativity on the basis of this negativity, which affords it freedom. Yet such an activity of detached analysis and evaluation does have practical consequences, even if it cannot control and prescribe them. It fundamentally changes how literature, and consequently life, are viewed. Although it cannot impose specific values, theory frees and complicates literary value, exposing it as not given, but negotiated, as not natural, but instituted. Hence the rather piquant paradox that theoretical detachment is practically useful and even necessary, even though it is strictly and rigorously—that is, in principle, or in theory—­ impossible. Theory is thus never merely theory. It is always also, at the same time, a practice. Distancing and objectifying is always dialectically related to tak-

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ing a position and manifesting one’s positionality in ways that escape conscious control. As a moment of detached reflection, theory is a necessary and enlightened way to deal especially with the differences and conflicts that inevitably arise in all human affairs. This is why the view against theory, that “theory is nothing else but the attempt to escape practice,”24 is far too reductive. Just as this pragmatic attack uses a theoretical tone and form of statement to try to convince us that it is right, even so other theories also are to be evaluated always in terms of their meaning as practiced. This is an insight traditionally found at the heart of hermeneutics—the theory of interpretation. Knapp and Michaels conclude, “Our thesis has been that no one can reach a position outside practice, that theorists should stop trying, and that the theoretical enterprise should therefore be abandoned.”25 Yet, striving to achieve objectivity, to stand outside the limitations of one’s current point of view, is crucial for the attempt to meet with others and interact with their practices so as to compromise and cooperate with them rather than only blindly playing out the conflicts between our different, apparently incompatible practices. From Matthew Arnold to Italo Calvino, theory has been extolled for its capacity of rendering practice indirect and thereby escaping from the typically deadlocked, polarized impasses of the circumambient political scene and its embattled institutions.26 Theory is necessary in order to see past the blinders of one’s own practice and to see a little more than one does when focused on doing alone. According to Arnold, “A polemical practical criticism makes men blind even to the ideal imperfection of their practice, makes them willingly assert its ideal perfection, in order the better to secure it against attack; and clearly this is narrowing and baneful for them. If they were reassured on the practical side, they might be brought to entertain speculative considerations of ideal perfection, and their spiritual horizon would thus gradually widen.”27 In other words, try to see the other’s point of view, determined as it is by a different practical angle and exigency that you do not share but can theoretically approximate and hypothetically adopt. That is how new, unforeseen possibilities can emerge in order to negotiate conflicts in creative ways, preserving what is valuable on both sides rather than surrendering to the logic of triumph of one over the other, and to consequent fortification and rigidifying of the one and erasure of the other.

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The value of theory is demonstrated consistently by its weaning us away from too positivistic a view of literature and its value. We see how value is produced through relations negotiated in social fields rather than being inherent in the nature of linguistic products themselves. This outlook is contained in embryo in the basic structuralist insight into the relativity of linguistic significance dictated by the diacritical nature of the linguistic sign.28 From this insight rises the great tidal wave of theoretical rethinkings that have rocked the latter half of the twentieth century and continue their revolutionary stir on into the present millennium. Such insight is effectively shown to dwell diffusely in a great variety of subsequent theoretical movements, many of them political in inspiration, for example, Homi Bhabha’s analyses of the mutual implications of nation and narration.29 Theory furnishes a more flexible outlook on the choices we make concerning what to value in literature and which literary works to canonize. Certainly, the intensive questioning of the canon in recent decades has been possible only on the basis of the theoretical ferment that opened up perspectives on literature and culture to reassessment and renegotiation. The foundations of our cultural institutions and literary canons were challenged by free theoretical reflection, which, in part, undermined theory and theoretical foundations and made the more practical claims of literature paramount. Theory is a self-subverting discourse. Its vocation is to call everything, and ultimately itself, into question. That is what makes it so ­invaluable—even and perhaps especially to those to whom it is ­objectionable. Why has criticism evolved since 1968, over the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, away from the ostensibly disinterested and universal researches of struc­ turalism, of hermeneutics, even of deconstruction and other forms of “high theory,” toward ever-more concrete forms representing specific groups and identities according to their race, class, and gender? This, too, is the work of theory. It is a necessary consequence of the self-critique to which Western epistemologies of universal and necessary knowledge have subjected themselves. It is the distancing movement of theory that has brought out and exposed the ethnocentric, class-, and gender-interested character of traditional, elite Western culture and its epistemological models and methods. Even the rejection of theory is itself a theoretical gesture par excellence: it is a further pursuit and projection of critical reason, which has

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been the soul and inspiration of Western thinking since the first discovery of Logos over two and a half millennia ago in the speculatively theoretical texts of Parmenides and Heraclitus. With respect to the canon, the challenges and struggles over selection of texts are the continuation of the very process in which, historically, canon formation consists. There may be good theo­retical arguments for the rejection of canonicity altogether, but this very penchant for self-critique and self-annihilation has been the most characteristic gesture of Western culture all along. This impulse is embodied quintessentially today in theory—together with the anti-theory that it engenders. This self-subverting dialectic betrays the fundamentally apophatic or kenotic character of theory taken as a capacity for unlimited self-­criticism. It must be conceded that the relativizing discourse of theory can sometimes be experienced as stultifying and disempowering for particular political agendas. Barbara Christian speaks out against theory, or against the “race for theory,” as she puts it, since there is and has always been a dynamic type of theoretical reflection antithetical to Western logic at work in the narrative and gnomic forms of the colored peoples, especially black, Third World women, in whose name she speaks.30 This is another kind of “race” and another kind of theory that resists all expropriating generalization of its specific differences. Against the neutralizing tendencies of theory in general that would reduce unrecognized, as well as new and emergent, literatures to silence and nonexistence, strong assertion of life requires unquestioning self-confidence and the projection—be they only mirages—of one’s identity and ideology. Theory, with its dissolution of myths, is not helpful for waging wars either of repression or of liberation. The two types are, in fact, inextricably linked in a theoretical perspective—however diametrically opposite they may be (like good and evil) in the practical perspective of those who feel the duty to fight for what they deem right. And culture wars are no exception. On the other hand, and in another obvious paradox, the claims of difference, notably of racial and gender difference, are being asserted against generalizing, presumably theoretical discourses thanks to the thinking of difference that emerged on the wider critical scene emblematically with Jacques Derrida and the theory explosion sparked by the many theoretical movements following in the wake of deconstruction. These included the

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currents of New Historicism and cultural studies. With varying degrees of acknowledgment of this indebtedness, Cornell West and Henry Louis Gates, and also bell hooks, have attempted to incorporate theory into projects of showing specific racial differences as relevant to general philosophical thinking.31 Whence the motto “Race matters.”32

THEORY OF CANONICITY AS COMMUNICABILITY, OR APOPHATIC UNIVERSALITY

Such a theoretical viewpoint has seemed to entail the demise of any and all appeals to universal values. It would seem that no standard, no “canon” for measuring literary merit and thereby establishing the enduring value of literary works, is possible in such a perspective. Indeed, no work has value simply on the basis of its intrinsic qualities alone, but only as a function of what these qualities can mean to someone in some concrete historical context. Nevertheless, this can still be value of a universal nature, where universality is a matter not of fixed properties, nor even of definable content, but rather of communication without restrictions, of opening outward toward encounter with readers in other times and places and in other ­cultures.33 Although it is never over, history finds some way of deciding what is to be valued and credited with enduring worth, and the condition of this recognition, and hence the criterion of canonicity, cannot but be some form of communicability, a power to translate and transmit oneself and one’s own meaning into other contexts and further matrices of significance. This is the universality not of a changeless Platonic Idea, but of discourse in action, a universality of which the content cannot be isolated and settled once and for all because it is constantly being renegotiated and can only be discovered in its emergence as it transmigrates from one form of historical and institutional instantiation to another. This is universality in a performative sense: cross-cultural, transhistorical communication of value that is demonstrated in being enacted. Not without reason, then, theoretical reflection on literature has led to a new and acute sensitivity to the importance of “crossing borders” in validating literary and cultural values. In recent decades, we have in effect witnessed the emergence of a new concept—or rather non-concept—of universality based not on the cate-

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gorical thinking of a general concept, but on the open-ended reaching out toward communication with others and connection in all directions of what remains conceptually undefined, or always newly to be defined. The concept is based on a cutting, a “cept” or incision.34 It works by exclusion. For example, the ancient Greek concept of anthropos as zôon échòn lógon (animal endowed with speech) cuts out and excludes all those beings that are either not living or not “logical,” not endowed with reason. The new universality, which is discovered here through literary theory and particularly in contemplating the canon, works rather by inclusion that is potentially without restrictions. It is universal precisely in its unlimited openness to new connections and endless aggregation. This is a new understanding of universality, and it is being introduced and concretely worked out today in relation to myriad literatures and discourses and peoples and nations and cultures.35 It renders possible a reconfiguration of the relation between the “hallowed ground” of the canonical and the outcast “margins.” In particular, the new universality that I envisage makes it possible to recognize individual works and their empowering sources as “nodal points” on an “open field,” to which they would lend contours and orientations, but without the rigid, impermeable framing devices of exclusive, hierarchical classifications.36 However, such an understanding of universality also issues in recognition of the exemplarity of works that are received as having something to say far beyond the original contexts of their production—as is shown in the following chapter (10) on “World Literature.” Safeguarding and promoting this recognition is the work of theory as a malleable koiné of crosscultural discourse. Such transfusion across cultures demonstrates how an idea of universal value such as is enshrined in the concept of canonicity lives and grows by transforming itself from age to age.

C h a p t e r Te n

W O R L D L I T E R AT U R E A Means or a Menace to the Encounter with the Other?

A BENJAMINIAN HORIZON FOR THE QUESTION CONCERNING WORLD LITERATURE

Any literary tradition, such as the Chinese—which by default has a certain exemplary value in the present discussion1—to the extent that it has a significant role and presence in the world today, is bound to be considered in the perspective of World Literature. This idea of Weltliteratur, which stems from Goethe in the eighteenth century, has recently been the subject of much debate in the wake of theoretical works, including especially David Damrosch’s What Is World Literature? and Longxi Zhang’s Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China.2 I will present this debate in a few of its salient features that make evident its bearing on the problem of how it is possible to encounter the other person or culture in their radical difference from oneself and one’s own. This reflection will suggest how the idea of World Literature can serve to highlight and preserve such difference rather than to erase it in the amalgam of globalization. However, I will present this discussion in the course of expounding an approach sharply divergent from those of both of the scholars just named. I aim to make use of the most important insights of each of these very different proponents of the idea of world literature and to turn their tensions into synergisms. 254

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My own approach is based on starting from what is unsayable and inexpressible in any tradition whatsoever—in other words, from the incommensurable or the “untranslatable.” This is also where culture borders on the transcendent dimension of the religious, which modern society, however secularized and globalized it becomes, excludes or forgets at its peril. I invoke the incommensurable, not in order to posit an insuperable limit to human projects of translation and mutual understanding, but for exactly the opposite reason. Paradoxically, only facing and acknowledging incommensurabilities enables us to find our common measure. The incommensurable is the possession of none in particular: it is rather the condition of possibility of all. It consists minimally in our all being mutually conditioned by one another. We find ourselves face to face with, and vulnerably exposed to, the other person and their other culture or ideology, which we cannot reduce to any measure of our own. In seeking some kind of common currency for worldwide assimilation of culture and for its expression in language, any approach to world literature needs therefore to safeguard, and even to accentuate, recognition of a dimension of reality that remains ineffable and beyond appropriation. Chinese classical traditions of Confucianism and Daoism are exemplary in their attunement to what remains beyond the reach of language. This is so from the very first lines of the Dao-de-jing: “The Dao that can be said is not the constant Dao” (道可道, 非常道).3 In adhering to this principle and applying it analogically, my contention is that what is constant or universal in literatures generally—their animating spirit, so to speak—needs to be acknowledged as what can never be fully or adequately said. The Dao is the principle that animates all things and is manifest in their relations, but never as itself. No words can ever express it adequately. Dao is analogous, in this respect, to what Walter Benjamin calls “pure language” (die reine Sprache). Pure language is present in all languages and in language as such, but it can be apprehended as itself in no language in particular. It emerges in and through translation of literary classics from one language into another as what nevertheless eludes all efforts to make it ­coincide with the specificities of any given language. It is rather the unity and adequacy of expression in adhering to the real that every specific language strives after but can never fully attain in isolation from other languages. Translation projects languages onto a higher ontological plane

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through expressing their innermost relations with one another (“Ausdruck des innersten Verhältnisses der Sprachen zueinander”) and by envisaging their integration into one true language (“Integration der vielen Sprachen zur einen wahren”).4 This vision of some kind of ideal, transcendent language, however, can only be apprehended negatively. What translation reveals as essential is not the (referential) content it communicates but the “way of meaning” (Art des Meinens) that is proper to any language, and this can be inferred only by comparison between languages that points up the insufficiency of each on its own to attain the objective of total adequacy. Translation reveals this way of meaning by calling attention to what any given language cannot as such say and to “what in any translation is more than communication of content” (dasjenige, was an einer Übersetzung mehr ist als Mitteilung). This is the ungraspable and enigmatic more (“das Unfaßabare, Geheimnisvolle”) of the purely linguistic manner of conveying and relating to reality that is proper to any given language. Benjamin illustrates this by the difference between “Brot” for Germans and “pain” for French people. The words name the same thing (bread), but in very different ways. They evoke different values and connotations, for example, by approaching their common object as the most basic nutriment for subsistence or as an extra amenity added in a restaurant, for instance, usually free of charge, in order to fill out a meal.5 “Bread” is many things to many people. Different cultures and their respective languages grasp aspects of its range of possible meanings from divergent angles of approach. In another intriguing analogy, Benjamin suggests that language clothes its content (“Gehalt”) the way a king’s robe (“Königsmantel”) covers his body with its wide folds. It is a loose fit—ungainly, voluminous, and strange (“unangemessen, gewaltig und fremd”). Different languages will be cut very differently in their own fantasy-filled invention of some kind of fit with the same contents. Each language therewith, through the very awkwardness or “brokenness” (Gebrochenheit) of its correspondence with referential content, allusively points to another language, one higher than itself (“eine höhere Sprache als sie ist”). Although each language’s nomenclature grows out of an organic relation between language and its content, like that of a fruit and its rind (“Frucht und Schale”), it is only when set in comparison through translation that the uniqueness—and the

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a­ rbitrariness—of each one’s peculiar way of “growing” (wächst) a relationship with the real shows up in relief. Precisely this is the purely linguistic element that concerns the “true translator” (des wahren Übersetzers). It is what is left over as untouchable (“unberührbar”) after the equivalent contents have all been translated and taken out of the language of a text. Not the common content, but only the unique manner of its own that each language has of expressing the universal contents of the real, is purely linguistic. Pure language emerges by being emancipated from the common content conveyed differently by different languages. Lining up their different manners of saying the same things, as translators, practically speaking, aim to do, is not the true task of translation as Benjamin understands it. The aim of translation, from Benjamin’s point of view, is not rendering equivalences of meaning, but rather exposing the gaps between languages and thereby transposing the literary work into a higher, purer sphere of language (“höheren und reineren Luftkreis der Sprache”). This “Luftkreis” (literally “circuit of air”) floating in the space between languages, I submit, is the same sphere that renders intelligible and lights up the idea of World Literature. By achieving the status of counting as “world literature,” a literary text raises literature above all functional employments that subordinate it to other kinds of values: the work rises into the ether of autotelic, properly literary value that transcends all specific cultures and their instrumentalizations of language. Of course, in order to work as literature, the work of world literature can never sever its bonds with these concrete bases of meaning in particular languages and cultures, but it moves these elements of meaning beyond their own context of origin and projects them into an ambit of more general and even unlimited significance. By refashioning the work for its life beyond its original cultural and linguistic matrix, the translator ideally liberates or conspires to “redeem” (erlösen) the pure language that has been imprisoned in the work. We can conceive of pure literature, analogous to Benjamin’s pure language, as existing in an indefinable dimension that cannot be exhaustively described by any number of punctual comparisons. All descriptions of one specific literature or another, or of any particular literary history as object, fall short of the literary as such. Literature as such is liberated or released, instead, through election of a particular text for preservation or, in any case,

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for translation. The selected work accedes thereby to a new and more capacious life in the realm of world literature. Literature thus takes on an unlimited value and relevance that is not restricted to any specific cultural parameters or subordinated to any other type of value or agenda extrinsic to itself—whether political or societal or confessional in nature. Instead, literature becomes itself an original source of value. As such an emanating source, literature can never be detached and abstracted from social and cultural and personal contexts, yet it operates with a measure of creative freedom or autonomy within them. It can instigate new modes of feeling and experience. This is why Benjamin states provocatively at the beginning of his essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” that any consideration of the audience of an artwork is always a serious mistake. It is a mistake to take human existence or an audience as a condition presupposed by an artwork. The reverse is more true: the human addressee comes to exist in a concrete and complete manner only in and through the artwork. Translation should not be conceived of as serving either the artwork’s maker or its receivers in their particular aims and purposes. Instead, translation reveals language as making use of the work and its recipients for purposes of its own. Through translation, the work shows itself as aspiring ideally to attain to an eternal afterlife. Taken as world literature, a literary work achieves a universal scope and validity that exceeds the local and opens upon a dimension that might be called “pure literature” in analogy with Benjamin’s “pure language” (die reine Sprache). Such a work is on its way to becoming a classic with an enduring afterlife, acceding to a new level of existence transcending its origins in a specific time and language and culture. Every literary translation belongs to a specific linguistic-historical context and yet represents the possibility of translation into all remaining languages. Translation transplants (“verpflanzt”) the original work into a “more final realm of language” (endgültigeren Sprachbereich). Translation’s task is to bring the seed of pure language (“Samen reiner Sprache”) eventually to ripeness (“Reife”). This promotion to a higher life and more universal sphere of existence as world literature cannot be manifest directly: it must be achieved indirectly. It does not exist as such except in the unlimited potential for further translations. The transcendent life of the work as world literature cannot be stated as a property that it possesses flat out or objectively.

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The work’s unlimited life lies rather in the pure communicative potential of what it withholds as necessarily only implicit and, strictly speaking, ­incommunicable—its manner of expression. Sensitivity to the unsayable, or to what we can call the “apophatic”— here, the inexpressibly unique spirit of every language and culture and ­person—is paramount in this process, since only a work’s uniqueness can make it world literature, and this is imperative for us today to (re)learn how to perceive. This uniqueness of each, paradoxically, is also where all individuals meet and merge in the discovery of their common humanity. All of us are unique—and nothing can express, fully or adequately, the singularity that distinguishes each of us from all others. Yet, as far as language goes, this singularity remains “nothing”—in spite of all our best expressive efforts. And this is a predicament in which we all share! Awareness of this negative or apophatic status of ourselves and of all our works is necessary in order to make World Literature a genuine source of mutual self-­discovery and respect for the other’s cultural and personal differences—as well as for one’s own—rather than a steamroller that turns everything into globalized English by the flattening effect of translation.

DEFENSE OF THE APOPHATIC AS NECESSARY FOR DISCOVERING OUR COMMON HUMANITY

In some ways, what I am calling for here and in other chapters is not so much a new horizon as an erasure of horizons. I argue for the impossibility of defining a visible, determinate horizon for reflection and thought about culture and literature. At the very least, I am advocating for the need to start from an orientation to what cannot be known or defined. Lucid reflection and clairvoyant vision require acknowledging a penumbra of darkness as their surrounding condition. To some participants in the debate, the apophatic path that I trace will seem to be a Holzweg all too literally in the sense of a path in the woods that leads nowhere. Some such impatience and something of a widespread predisposition against emptily speculative and sterilely theoretical tendencies sometimes imputed to apophatic thinking can hardly be overlooked in Longxi Zhang’s opening position statement critiquing Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013) as a philosophy and even a theology of the ­unsayable

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or ineffable. Zhang protests that “untranslatability is more of an imagined aporia of philosophical or religious mysticism than a real issue.”6 This statement, alongside some others, suggests that he may feel that the unsayable has nothing at all to say to us. Admittedly, unsayability can and often is taken in ways that make it unproductive and irrelevant. But stopping there, in the conviction that “neither the philosophical nor the theological mystic idea of ineffability is convincing” (Zhang, “What Is World Literature?,” 5), does not do justice to these traditions. They are rooted in our deepest sources of wisdom East and West, notably in Daoist sources such as the Zhuangzi, which directly inspires Zhang. Even more important are the aspirations of peoples today all around the world, whom language in various ways fails. These peoples grope and strive beyond language and its limits toward a common understanding with one another. Often mutual recognition of the impasse of linguistic insufficiency is necessary to enable them to affirm what they do share in common. Precisely this recognition of incommensurability can catalyze their efforts to understand one another, in spite of linguistic and cultural obstacles. I wish, then, in this chapter, to show how my apophatic approach is meant to work with, and not against, other approaches to world literature that seem to be rather more positive in adhering to some recognized values and definable guidelines. Historically, apophasis works always only in tandem with kataphasis. Negative theology needs the positive images of myth and religion in order to gain traction for the purpose of opening theological doctrine to the infinite and indefinable. It does this by negating or suspending its own ineluctable human limits, and it needs to do so in emphatically concrete, specific, and embodied ways.7 Apophatic aesthetics, for instance, is not meant to replace more positive, doctrinaire, and even hyperbolic types of poetics with a monotone aesthetic of the desert so much as to break them open and make them communicate with the infinite and with one another in modes that are unpredictable and uncontainable.8 Zhang in his brief opening statement throws down the gauntlet to the ideology of unsayability, at least as he finds it in a certain style of postmodern theoretical discourse, which he takes to be a remodeled elitist ethnocentrism and perhaps (we might surmise) a reactionary Mandarinism. Curiously, Zhang appears to enter into the lists, riding on the provocation

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of these remarks, as the chastising knight or nemesis of this perennial tendency, or perhaps temptation, of thought to evasiveness. And he is certainly not alone or isolated in these dispositions and sentiments. Yet, we need also to understand the reasons for the persistence of apophasis, or the negative way (via negativa) to truth, across so many ages and to appreciate the motives for its powerful persuasiveness to so many. After all, literature’s mission can often be equated with making something count that otherwise is accorded no reality by most people’s yardsticks. The imaginary or the unreal, as Blanchot reminds us, is the specific domain that literary language inhabits and makes real.9 I believe that Zhang himself is actually a valiant champion of the apophatic—as his inspiring source text, the Daoist classic Zhuangzi, certainly is—whenever apophasis comes up in pertinent ways and in specific contexts. And there is, in fact, no other way for the apophatic to make itself felt or to register at all, since it does not as such exist. As an abstract concept, it is precisely nothing or even less than nothing— not even the concept of nothing at all. It can be made manifest only ­relationally. Deeply understood, the ineffable is not an impasse standing in the way of translation or of communicability between cultures. It functions, instead, as their enabling condition. We need to avoid dichotomizing—to adopt one of Zhang’s key terms and prescriptions—between untranslatability and translation. Either one is always already intimately at work within the other. Likewise, recognition of incommensurabilities enables us, paradoxically, to find our common measure. It is even necessary as the only practical alternative to taking a certain party’s measure as normative for all. Like Zhang, I am against positing the incommensurable as an unsurpassable limit, if this means defining it in some way that is supposed to set up a barrier and interpose an inviolable curtain, a veil of mystery sealing off access to the sacred. Nevertheless, recognizing the incommensurable is the only way we have of starting to create something genuinely in common; otherwise, we start with one or the other party’s already prefabricated ­formulas. In order to avoid simply imposing on the unenfranchised, all parties need to begin from no one’s framework or defined system. All need to begin, in effect, rather from a common orientation to what has no name or identity at all and yet is latently the common ground of all existents.

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This orientation is best left tacit and de facto. It cannot be turned into any kind of common confession. That would be self-defeating. It can, nevertheless, be realized in all possible and imaginable styles and modes by acknowledging others and their unassimilable difference. The incommensurable is recognized already simply in recognizing the otherness of the other person. We have no right to presume upon the other’s otherness, or to ­determine or define it, certainly not without their assent and participation. And in the end, no one has this right even over themselves. All are beholden, instead, to the otherness that remains always beyond the reach of any of our own determinations and even self-determinations. Even what we will be, for instance, harbors this holy—or (w)hole(y)—otherness. As a matter of words, the incommensurable seems to be only an abstraction. And yet it stands in for what is unspeakably concrete and more intimate to us than even our own conscious, articulate selves. It is standing right in front of us in every other person we encounter, as well as in the impenetrably dense mystery of our own bodies. It is in every instance unique and yet also universal. It is ownmost and yet common to all: it is, in fact, prior to individuation into separate selves. The question, or difficulty, is how to gain access to it. The incommensurable is equally ­inaccessible— and, therefore, also equally accessible—to all. It is an equalizer of everything that is anything—and therefore not it. In this role historically, the transcendent God of monotheism has provided an indispensable premise and catalyst for modern democracy in the Western world.10 In the introductory chapter of his book Allegoresis, Zhang announces a kind of credo of equality: “I will argue that the belief in the possibility of common knowledge and cross-cultural understanding, in the availability of conceptual tools for the interpretation of human behavior across the boundaries of language, geography, culture, and time, can indeed come from a genuine appreciation of the equal capabilities of different individuals, peoples, and nations.”11 The equality in question here is emphatically an equal capacity to receive and shape creatively rather than simply an identical fund of static standing resources. I would further suggest that individuals and their collectivities, if taken merely in and for themselves, are equal in all being ephemeral and insubstantial. An equal nothingness of finite things, of everything short of the ultimate, is envisioned by the Zhuangzi, but its basis is in the unfathomable

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and measureless: “Ultimate speech is to be rid of speech; ultimate action is to be rid of action. How shallow it is to equate all the understanding that can be understood.”12 There are some caveats here even about equality when it is hammered into a verbal construct and is understood. A homogenizing equality that brings all to our own level of understanding is surely not what Zhuangzi means to recommend. He envisages, instead, the radical equality of all things as finally nothing in and for themselves, but as equally beholden to relations with others in order to be anything at all in a ceaselessly changing universe. It should be clear, then, that a stress on the apophatic, or even on the untranslatable, in no way excludes the “universalist” position that Zhang embraces. Some forms of postmodern relativism represented for Zhang by Emily Apter, among others, have employed what seem like theoretical or even theological apophaticism in the service of elitist relativism. But I wish to bring out another side of apophaticism, or rather the fact that it has no stable sides at all, since, like Zhuangzi’s pivot, it is the unceasing self-­critical negation of its own inevitable one-sidedness in every possible expression.13 This image dizzyingly illustrates the unlimited universalizing potential and propensity of the apophatic. There is also—not to be denied—in Zhuangzi’s paradoxes a species of mysticism. He even opts for and recommends a certain kind of non-action. The mystical (and in large part apophatic) fringes of religions—whether in the figures of Sufi Muslims or Jewish Kabbalists or Christian Gnostics or Daoist sages—have always been strongly inclined to embrace the universal beyond all dogmatic confines of their own specific religious traditions and to stress the spiritual oneness of humanity irrespective of all confessional creeds. These mystical movements in the margins of official religions typically aim at a universality that is beyond definition in the terms of any ­specific culture. They aim, in other words, at an apophatic universality.

SOME VIRTUES OF VAGUENESS AGAINST CALAMITOUS CLARITY

It is, of course, perfectly possible to give a clear, formal definition of world literature. David Damrosch, most influentially, has done so in terms that

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likewise seem to eschew settling for anything vague and ungraspable. He explains: “My claim is that world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material, available for reading established classics and new discoveries alike.”14 The mode Damrosch envisages consists in works traveling outside the cultures and milieus of their origin by taking on significance in other countries and cultures. This augmented scope of resonance can be, and very often is, catalyzed by translation. In either case, the essential thing for Damrosch is the circulation itself: “I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language (Virgil was long read in Latin in Europe).”15 Although not vague, this definition relates world literature to a potentially infinite circulation, the contents of which remain perpetually open to redefinition. Thus Damrosch acknowledges at least a functional limit to definitive closure. We might even detect here implicit recognition of further, deeper, structural grounds for this incompleteness. Damrosch is thinking—to put it schematically—in something like an evolutionary mode that accounts for how literature evolves into world literature. Yet, in his definition, “literature” as such is presupposed, and much remains concealed in this term. It is important to think through how literature becomes “literature.” Some seeds of becoming relevant to and for the world at large are already contained in the notion of the literary per se, even apart from functional considerations concerning works’ circulation. Literature presents the world as refracted through human desire—and hope and fear, among other emotions. This poetic perspective, as Aristotle pointed out long ago, is more universal or “philosophical” than any perspective that history can afford (Poetics, chap. 9, 1451b5–7). In it, an in­ choate All, consisting in all possible relations, is always already operative. Literature opens a word’s meaning beyond its literal sense to all manner of metaphorical meanings via all its imaginable relations. Language turns into literature by having a significance not confined by the original situation of its utterance. A literary utterance is not circumscribed by specific practical interests that motivate its enunciation. As literary, an utterance assumes broader interest and a more general value. It has aesthetic value, according to Kant, precisely to the extent that its worth

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is attributed to it disinterestedly—as valid for all, regardless of their own needs and particular purposes. In these respects, literature is already in­ cipiently oriented to universal and potentially global significance. Damrosch’s definition indicates how literature evolves from the local into the global. Yet, just as essentially, the local emerges only in and from the global, which in some ways precedes it. Literature develops in and from an un­ limited weave or entanglement of relations and motives that precedes and exceeds anything that can be framed and circumscribed as a work or an object—or even perhaps just as a discrete field of culture. There is generally some aspect of stepping back from all positively given realities in the (literary) gesture of (re)imagining the world. Damrosch shrewdly brings out a constitutive distance and detachment as characteristic of reading texts as world literature.16 As world literature, a work is read in relation to other cultures and contexts rather than only through immersion in its original culture and context. This refracted style of reading can be highly revealing and yields not necessarily less “original” insights than do more straightforward, historically contextualized readings. By reading works as world literature, Damrosch observes, “We encounter the work not at the heart of its source culture but in the field of force generated among works that may come from very different cultures and eras.”17 There is a deracinating effect here that opens works to new associations that can be productive of new meanings. This grafting of disparate contexts on one another opens up a “space” between cultures that, for all its vagueness, may in some ways prove to be more momentous and productive than any strictly objective determination within the frame of a given culture. This open space without fixed horizons is in crucial respects the element most appropriate to literature in its unlimited creative potential. Damrosch has praised and embraced world literature, thanks to its virtues of “detached engagement,” as less destructive than typically imperialistic enterprises that aim at appropriating foreign cultures. The latter are emblematized by the grandiose 1798–1801 campaign of Napoleon in Egypt, which proved disastrous for the French and the Egyptians alike. In a similar critical spirit, I propose the apophatic or inconceivable as the unbounded horizon that perpetually unhinges our framework and breaks apart its ­presumable fusions. Rather than seeking to dominate and control a domain, we find ourselves on an open and level playing field without the

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c­ onfinement of a defined horizon. We all become estranged from ourselves and are thereby first enabled and obliged to find ourselves through one another. This is the common humanity that King Lear, for example, discovers only when he is stripped bare by radical negation of his kingship. He discovers his bare humanity through relations to others, including a clown and a beggar and his own youngest daughter, all formerly his inferiors. Such undoing and deranging of our comprehensive frame or horizon constitutes an apophatic moment in the movement toward becoming world literature. Damrosch himself suggests that the shift in contexts may lead to “almost the opposite of the ‘fusion of horizons’” envisaged by hermeneutic thinkers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher—and, I must add, Hans-Georg Gadamer, as conferring this vocabulary on critical thinking today. The skewing of horizons that brings the foreignness of works fully into view, as suggested by Damrosch, produces rather an effect of estrangement. This effect was considered by the Russian formalist school to be the specific characteristic of literary language. Such language was perceived as different from ordinary usage and even as rendering the latter strangely unfamiliar. Yet “defamiliarization” is perhaps supremely important not only for perceiving the foreignness of the foreign work, but also for making us perceive more of what is latently strange in our own language and culture. It thereby enables us to become strangers to ourselves.18 The strangeness in question is thus a shared condition and not just an insuperable barrier. It entails an effect of (dis)orient(aliz)ation that does not deprive us of a universal relation to others but, instead, actually enables it. Indeed, Longxi Zhang argues cogently against the alienating depiction of cultures as wholly “other.”19 It is more our recognizing our own otherness to ourselves that enables and motivates us to open up to the common humanity that bonds us together. Zhang accordingly understands the fusion of horizons as a way of transcending both self and other. Such fusion uniting presumable strangers is enshrined in the classical Chinese wisdom of yin-yang, which in Zhang’s terms breaks our “dichotomies” down into “differences” that are susceptible of comparison. Otherness begins at home and in our own selves. If each person, and analogously each culture, is uniquely individual, this uniqueness is nothing that can be said as such, for individuum ineffabilis est. The deepest core of our existence and reality is nothing sayable. But precisely this condition of

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nothingness at our center is universally shared. It is, furthermore, the precondition of human freedom.20 Otherwise, we would find ourselves always already predetermined by some given nature or fixed essence. The self-­ critical exposure of this universal “nothingness” within, in our deepest core, is the key to unlocking the richest resources of our humanity. Such common resources can be possessed by none except in being shared—that is, by being received from, and also given to, others.

CONCEPTUAL UNIVERSALS VERSUS COMMON HUMANITY

Knowing and acknowledging this nothing at the core of our individual existence is the key to our finding common ground with others—with all others and not only with the like-minded. In fact, our unbridgeable difference from one another is also what we share in common with them. While nominally all absolutely singular existences are Nothing, this “Nothing” is actually individual and incommensurable in each case as an infinitely separate real existence.21 Common grounds are best recognized, or rather forged, against a background of recognizing ineffaceable incommensurability. But typically just the opposite is attempted, even if it takes forcing. Common grounds are simply posited as clear and universal, and as coercing recognition by all alike. Such claims are frequently heard today, for example, from advocates for human rights or for cognitive universals. The universalism of such approaches is echoed by Longxi Zhang. He makes deferential reference to the cognitive linguistics of Lakoff and Johnson as proving the universality of certain conceptual constants across cultures. For cognitive linguists, the metaphors of different cultures may be curiously and marvelously varied, but they express conceptual structures that are invariable and grounded in the species structure of the body and brain.22 This type of universality is championed by Edward Slingerland in his influential advocacy of cognitive science and particularly in his attempt to make it palatable for humanities scholars.23 This cognitive approach, however, aims at a reduction to physical reality as basic. Slingerland admits and even insists on this. We are our bodies, and they are machines, even if we are, in his view, predisposed and even

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biologically programmed not to accept this fact. I maintain that cognitive theories such as those of Lakoff and Johnson or Mark Turner are poised between two different possibilities and divergent directions in their application. They can open up knowledge to its metaphorical and physical-­ emotional contingency—à la Vico24—or, alternatively, they can impose a mechanistic explanation on everything. But this latter alternative entails erasure of all that is other. And the erasure involves not just other cultures: there is also an effacement of the otherness that is each one’s own, the otherness to ourselves, from which we all come. (See, further, chapter 12 herein.) China and the West can agree all too well in adopting and exploiting the conceptual tools and technologies that afford mastery over the world, starting from the world of nature. But that which is other to all our human making and technological control is suppressed and lost when we make concepts the medium of universality. The human has another dimension, a shadow side that is refractory to rational analysis and control. It turns up as expressed indirectly, among other ways, by the imaginations of myth and the rites of religion, or even by the unconscious as revealed in dreams through psychoanalysis. This other reality—which is also witnessed to by common and yet incalculable experiences such as love and freedom and anxiety—is endangered wherever the apophatic is forgotten and erased, whether aggressively or inadvertently. What threatens to preempt the dimension of transcendence is not the common but the conceptual, or more exactly, the reduction of the common to the conceptual, for this can make it impossible for us to discern and respect otherness even in ourselves. This is why world literature is so important to any world-scale cultural project, such as comparative religions or philosophy. Literary sensibility and perceptiveness is necessary in order to check the intrinsically dominating propensities of strictly conceptual thinking. Metaphorical language and fictive and mythic narration catalyze non-reductive forms of representation. They help us to see ourselves and the world not just as blobs of matter, or as brain machines (as scientific rationality left to its own devices in the cognitive sciences has a strong tendency to do), but as having a spiritual dimension, and in this sense even as indwelt by divinity. At issue with human beings, ultimately, is not just an empirical, factual reality, but also an ethical and metaphysical—not to say,

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theological—capacity. This is a matter of not taking possession, not even of ourselves, by humanly wrought and defined concepts. For the latter are but instruments—tools that we have forged, for working our will upon things, yet only as reduced to what we recognize and cognize about them. What things truly are must still be acknowledged in its otherness to the conceptual schemas we impose.

CULTURAL UNIVERSALS CONFRONTING ABSOLUTE DIFFERENCE

Longxi Zhang started the 2015 Beijing World Literature summit off with a pointed protest against taking recourse to the ineffable, since this move can be a cheap evasion and work simply as a kind of mystification of our all-too-human problems. Admittedly, one of the liabilities of the apophatic is its vagueness. Although in many contexts there can be much virtue in vagueness,25 this gesture of evoking our limits is certainly not enough in all circumstances, at least not as the sole resource deployed. It must not be allowed to become merely a weak excuse for condemning different cultures to remain in mutual isolation, with their unique expressions presumed untranslatable. Moreover, the meeting of minds made possible by the Beijing summit was certainly an exceptional opportunity to articulate a clear concept of world literature, along with some pragmatically useful guidelines for it. However, concepts are not enough, either, for dealing with culture. Cultures also relate to something radically refractory to conceptual analysis. Culture is no more reducible to concepts than is language.26 Zhang is arguing against a philosophy of relativism that claims that cultures are incommensurable and cannot understand one another. He protests against “an excessive emphasis on their difference and alterity” to the exclusion of universality in recent criticism and sinology.27 I share this concern with him in the field of comparative philosophy and poetics.28 Nonetheless, I am also arguing for radical incommensurability, not just between cultures, but also within them and even within each one of us, as an essential moment of nonidentity with oneself that is characteristic of the human as such in its inherent malleability and potentiality. We must recognize ourselves as inhabited by the incommensurable in order to recognize ourselves and others ethically, or even just accurately.

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The human is not, finally, measurable, and all the features of it that are relatively measurable need to be seen against this horizon of the incommensurable, which inhabits us from before our possession even of our own selves. In this perspective, the commensurabilities that do give conceptual tools for comparing and conjoining cultures are clearly seen to be fabricated. Only then are such common denominators not at risk of being absolutized, and this is so precisely because one remains mindful of the incommensurable absolute to which everything human (and therefore also moral) is beholden. This move against the idolatry of the objective can be felt and registered as the absolute ethical demand of responsibility to the other, as Emmanuel Levinas so powerfully demonstrated, beginning with Totality and Infinity (Totalité et infini) (1961). It is also made manifest in religious convictions and devotions, and in various forms of social ­commitment. Difference and alterity, even between cultures as distant from each other as the Chinese and the Western, are always defined within some sense of common intelligibility. Zhang—like François Jullien—usefully points this out. But there is also a kind of alterity that can never be recognized and acknowledged too much, nor even sufficiently. It can hardly be exaggerated, even after all the relativizing perspectives have been given their due. Beyond just agreeing among ourselves (inevitably just some of us) about common standards, there remains still a question of respect for others, and even for ourselves, beyond all our own self-conceptions. What altogether transcends our capacity of conceptualization needs to be safeguarded and highlighted by universalizing projects such as World Literature. Because they resort inevitably to concrete common denominators, like translation into English, such projects run the risk of reducing the universal to what is, in fact, only a particular form of its expression, one among many. It is not English per se that should be elevated as the universal language, but the universality of language as such for human beings and for communication in general.29 Such universality is merely convoyed by translation into a worldwide language, which happens in our historical moment to be ­English. In order for the World Literature project to remain free of an amalgamating, imperialistic cultural politics, it must tenaciously retain and cultivate the apophatic dimension of the incommensurable that this chapter

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aims to discern at its heart. The cultural and even quasi-theological transcendence envisaged by notions such as “pure language” or “pure literature” is precisely the property of no language and of no specific literature.

SELF-CRITIQUE AS A PATH TO THE TRANSCENDENT AND UNIVERSAL

Aspiration to the transcendent universal is often identified as a danger in almost any human or cultural context. David Damrosch evokes this danger in discussing the self-appointed vocation of comparative literature in the styles of René Wellek or Albert Guérard to battle down the nationalistic heresy that would seek to confine literature to the boundaries of the nationstate grid of the globe.30 Abstraction from the particular, a blurring of specificity, and amateurism all threaten to take hold when the impulse to transcendent universalism becomes dominant. These dangers are indeed real. Still, we need not to forget, as Hölderlin famously wrote, that “where there is danger, there grows also redemption” (wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch) (“Patmos”). Why do the styles of thought designated with this label of “transcendent” arise in the first place and continue irrepressibly to assert themselves? They must correspond to something inherent in human beings and their cultural aspirations. This impulse I take to be an intercultural constant that can be verified in Western and in Chinese traditions alike, starting from their respective literary classics and founding religious texts.31 It can have dangerous aspects and potentials, but something as persistent and perennial as the quest for the universal and transcendent cannot simply be excised from the human psyche like a non-adaptive vestigial organ. It has been a constant of civilization at least since its momentous discovery across cultures from Greece to Israel and Persia, India, and China in the middle of the first millennium BC in the so-called Axial Age,32 as presented in chapter 8. This impulse needs, instead, to be understood and controlled and cultivated. Damrosch himself concedes—or rather maintains—that “great works of literature do have a transcendent quality that enables them to reach across time and space and speak directly to us today.”33 He is far from

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i­ nsensitive to this transhistorical demand and its claim on us. Still, for him, as for most critically minded individuals today, the emphasis probably falls on the dangers posed by the programs of cultural hegemony inspired and supported by ideologies laying claim to some form of transcendent universality. This is why I feel it is imperative to bring out the necessarily and infinitely self-critical character of specifically apophatic transcendence and universality. These forms involve a negative theology that by rights undercuts all positive theologies, or rather renders them critical of their own dogmatic formulations and returns them to their status as striving against the impossible in their effort to manifest the divine. Accessing divinity is impossible for negative theologians except by their relinquishing their own authority in self-abandon to the inconceivable and to total reliance on its grace—on its lending them its power, which is not their own. It is in this sense, I suggest, that we ought to be receptive to the drive to transcendence particularly in the form of self-criticism, indeed, of infinite or unlimited self-criticism. This drive entails a constant readiness to transcend our own achieved system and framework. The apophatic withdrawal of all our own assertions makes space for the uncoerced self-manifestation of things in their otherness and in the persuasiveness of their own intrinsic truth. The reference to the incommensurable and transcendent (like reference to “pure language”) does not solve political or philological problems of a determinate nature; still, it is part of the strategies of displacement necessary for taking us beyond already-drawn boundary lines of entrenched conflicts. In this way, it serves to create a space for the reconceptualizations that are so crucial to the work of the comparatist. The converse, admittedly, is equally true: the generalist has a responsibility to take specialized knowledge of the subject into consideration and to refract its most significant discoveries. As Damrosch sagely remarks, “The specialist’s knowledge is the major safeguard against the generalist’s own will to power over texts that otherwise all too easily become grist for the mill of a preformed historical argument or theoretical system.”34 He prescribes that “the generalist should feel the same ethical responsibility toward specialized scholarship that a translator has toward a text’s original language: to understand the work effectively in its new cultural or theoretical context while at the same time getting it right in a fundamental way with reference to the source culture.”35 I accept this reciprocal qualifying of the general and the specialized willingly, but what I propose, with apophatic thinking, is more of the order

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of a universal anti-system that is open to all and exclusive of none. Damrosch points out that “a category from which nothing can be excluded is essentially useless.”36 However, although it is useless for purposes of categorizing, it may help shift us into another dimension and into another kind of thinking altogether exceeding limits and opening beyond categorical thinking. Visionaries in all disciplines have often imagined the theological trope of the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum). This way of seeing the world marks and delightfully riddles many of the most exalted works of world literature, from the Book of Tao through the Divine Comedy to Finnegans Wake. It is the specific focus of many more treasures and treatises of philosophical and mystical literature, such as Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei (1453) and Angelus Silesius’s Cherubinischer Wanders­ mann (1657). The open and indefinite space of literature exists only as incarnate in particular languages: these languages thereby become metaphors for language as such. Consequently, transcendence is not to be opposed to the immanence of particularity and its claims, but should rather be seen as the means of keeping interpretation of particulars infinitely open to reinterpretation and reappropriation in the uncircumscribable contexts of world literature. In this undertaking, generalist and specialist alike need each other reciprocally.

THE SPACE OF LITERATURE AS MATRIX FOR AN APOPHATIC APPROACH

Comparative study in the humanities illustrates the tension between divergent methods for reading literature. Some are based on defining specific differences of sensibility and of conception between traditions, while others emphasize certain common and universal aspirations animating literary endeavor across cultures. My approach finds the common, unifying resource for critical thinking of all types in the apophatic—the unsayable ground or background that enables all making of sense, without itself ever becoming fully accessible and exhaustively manifest through the differentiating, signifying action of signs. This orientation attends to an undefined dimension of the “space of literature” as the arena of an always yet-to-be-defined universality.37 An apophatic approach, beginning from the i­ ndefinable, also

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emancipates criticism from standard, generalizing characterizations and reigning stereotypes, and thereby enables interpretation to concentrate fully on the emergent singularity of local traditions and individual works. There is no finally correct paradigm for what surpasses conceptual definition, but only the latter’s infinitely various manifestation in phenomena illuminated dialectically by comparison with one another. The idea of World Literature, within this approach, proves by design to be resistant to any general conceptual definition. It is conceivable, instead, only within the horizon of the inconceivable. Criticism in this open horizon can benefit from assimilating the negative philosophical methods of self-critical reflection and of negative theology in order to better fulfill its mission of serving to generate a basis for common dialogue among peoples, scholars, and students of all countries and cultures. I have undertaken in previous publications,38 as well as in a new book venturing into the domain of intercultural philosophy,39 to demonstrate how this methodological principle shows itself to be necessary and highly liberating for approaching classical and emerging issues in philosophy. In this chapter engaging in debate with leading scholars of comparative literature who champion the notion of world literature, I extend this debate by connecting it to issues concerning access to others and to alterity as such. The new (non)conceptual horizon that I, along with other comparative cultural theorists and like-minded comparative literature scholars, am seeking to discern is to be found especially in the self-critical capacity of conceptual thinking to become conscious of its own limits and, on that basis, to open itself up to what lies beyond them. This process of reflection opens up from what seems a typically philosophical maneuver into what is eminently a literary way of thinking. It is inventive and conjectural, not grounded in any positive, independently given object. Literary thinking thinks rather in and from the world that it projects through its own desire.40 But it is also capable of negating its own desires and of relating self-­critically to others and to their desires. This, too, opens into the dimension of the infinitely possible and uncontainable “space of literature” (l’espace litéraire) in the phrase of Maurice Blanchot that I have already appropriated and invest anew. This vocation of literature or literary thinking to a universal dimension in the conversation between cultures lies near to the heart of the urgent motivation for World Literature in our present worldwide culturalhistorical predicament.

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The interpretation of literature and its cultural underpinnings is indispensable for the instruction it affords in how to think in ways that are not all dictated by strictly technical and analytic methods. These methods have increasingly tightened their grip on all aspects of culture, starting from the various aspects of economic organization and administrative control that so dominate practical life in modern society. In our current, highly ­internationalized global predicament, the need for cultivation of traditional humanities knowledge—including the poetic knowing that has been transmitted exemplarily also by East Asian classics and their c­ ommentaries— has become only the more urgent and acute. In crucial respects, as Gayatri Spivak suggests, relaying Jacques Derrida’s respect for rhetoric as more fundamental than philosophical logic, literature must become “our teacher.”41 The very undecidability of the poetic figure, with its rhetorical capacity of reaching beyond the grid of dichotomous logic and all its formal categorizations, becomes an indispensable resource as we attempt to forge cultural practices adequate to the planetary world to come.

THE APOPHATIC CALLING FROM THE SPACE OF WORLD LITERATURE

World literature emerged as a means of undermining and breaking up national literary traditions and challenging their self-serving canons. Martin Kern’s response to Longxi Zhang (in the conference manual) stresses this important service and conjures up the specter of a globalization that makes all literature a consumer item rather than an unfathomably fecund reservoir of reflection and richly nuanced perceptions. Damrosch likewise emphasizes the different dynamic into which literary texts and classics are placed through the recontextualization incurred concomitantly with their becoming world literature. Literature is freed from parochial frames of interpretation fixing their meaning in terms of certain countries and cultures and their own characteristic coordinates, not to mention their nationalist, often partisan political programs. However, from the other side, there is a risk of literature being coopted by worldwide webs and systems, with their unitary codes, and so being subdued by engines of homogenization and of the suppression of difference. At stake here is not only qualitative cultural difference, the local

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differences between one tradition and another, but, more radically, the deeper difference even with and from ourselves. Kern touched on this with his reference to the nonidentical (“das nicht Identische”) in the philosophy of Theodor Adorno.42 The latter is the difference through which the ethical and religious dimensions of human experience show and open up. It is conceivable that all manner of objective differences could be signaled and articulated in and through an overall system or overarching scheme. But there is something else that would be lost in however comprehensive an inventory of differences. There remains still a difference of a more indefinable kind. It finds its place in the theories of Niklas Luhman as the “unmarked” and in those of Giorgio Agamben (following Jakob Böhme) as “segnatura,” a kind of signature of the Creator that is not just one more sign among others, but rather overdetermines the valence of them all (see chapter 6 herein). For a time, Derrida held the academy’s ­attention spellbound by free play with this indefinable difference as “différance.” But in all these cases such difference proves impossible to objectively focus and eventually defies all attempts to attend to it as a solid crystallization, or in any stable form whatsoever. It has been variously treated as “ontological difference” (Heidegger), or as the “religious difference,” or even “the Christian difference” between God and the world, Creator and creation.43 It aspires to divinity as absolute difference or transcendence, for example, in Kierke­ gaard’s existentialist backlash against Hegel’s all-comprehensive logical System of immanence. For Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus, God as absolute simplicity is different from every other being by alone having no definable distinguishing difference. In all these extremely various forms, this undifferentiatable difference has to do with the experience of being face to face with the absolutely Other, certainly with the other person and perhaps even with what is experienced and theorized as the transcendence of divinity.44 This experience spurs theological reflection in its attempt to find metaphors and allegories for an analogical approach to the experience of the unsayable and unrepresentable. For Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, God as absolute simplicity is different from every other being by virtue of alone having no definable distinguishing difference. As we forge an ever more worldwide system of literature, we are more and more in danger of thinking of it as all-comprehensive and therewith

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of forgetting all its others—all that any system inevitably leaves out, namely, all forms of the Difference that no system of differences can comprehend. World literature might seem to make all literatures one. In the Beijing summit gathering, under the guidance of recognized leaders in the field, we understood world literature as standing necessarily in a dialectical relation with national literatures—and also maybe with other subfields of literature that are not distinguished along the lines of any political boundaries. Folk literature, oral literature, religious literature, disciplinary literatures, a variety of multimedia “literatures,” and cartoon literature—all might be found to have some kind of claim to universal interest. Nonetheless, in any of these cases, whatever specific works might be selected as belonging to world literature would be literary in a sense in which the literary is unclassifiable and rather a channel to what defies comprehension. Such works are the source of a universality that gives and creates experience, without being itself an object of experience. For Kant, art generally, and therewith also poetic literature, is oriented to the dimension of the inconceivable—or at least to what cannot be analyzed exhaustively in terms of concepts. For him, this status of exceeding strictly objective comprehension applies to aesthetic experience as resting on judgments of experience that cannot be adequately demonstrated purely by concepts. This, then, is one philosophically precise sense in which literature is intrinsically about the inconceivable—and in which its horizon is open to conceptually unlimited experience. This applies in a specific way to aesthetics and applies more generally also to other value realms, including ethics and religion. Whatever proves to be most important to us proves also to be inevitably beyond all fixed and definable categories. This is asserted again in Wittgenstein’s theory, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), of value discourses such as ethics and religion as factually and conceptually nonsense. We live, if not in, then at least from the dimension of the infinite and indefinable. If we forget this inconceivable dimension, we are in danger of identifying the universal and world literature with some particular and positive form of culture that will circumscribe its universality. It is admittedly delimited at least as “literature,” yet that designation in the end is best understood as an avenue of access to the unlimited and indefinable. World literature offers an opportunity to open this avenue in its universal bearing

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and relevance to society and culture in general and at large through the agency of a particular institution—namely, the study of literature in our universities. My main thrust here is to emphasize the relation to the open and infinite as belonging intrinsically to the nature of literature itself and as marking its special capacity for meaning and for conveying human values like love or freedom, which know no intrinsic limits. In this sense, a certain vocation to or possibility of becoming world literature could be seen as inherent in the literary as such. The literary gesture of sharing experience with a reader who is not otherwise connected with the text or writer involves a drive toward the unconditioned. Literature as such entails detaching, or at least widening, human meaning and value from the particular circumstances in which they are generated. Beyond just effecting a transfer from one category to another, from the local to the global, world literature is a powerful token of a vocation inherent to literature of rising beyond and defying the limits of categorical reasoning. Literature is a free expression of the human spirit that envisages boundaries only at the same time as it exercises its freedom of reaching out beyond them.45

BECOMING WORLD LITERATURE AS A PROCESS OF SELF-DISAPPROPRIATION

This suggests why our common worry as comparatists has been that world literature can become a steamroller for flattening all literature into a uniform, consumable shape as translated into English. However, it can also be a way of placing us face to face with the radical difference of what cannot be said—or with what I am calling the apophatic—by dispossessing us even of what is presumably our own. This happens especially when our “own” revered classics come back to us as world literature: they have to be rediscovered and reinherited as sometimes quite different in their significance from what we previously held them to be. We have to confront the rest of the world—the Other—opening up in the midst of our inner constitution of ourselves and of our own identity. An inspired idea implicitly driving the agenda of world literature is that everything comes to us from the Other, or at least from others. What

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is ownmost, or held to be our own, is not truly ours except in the moment of our own radical dispossession. We receive what is our own only from our encounter with the Other. Such a relational vision of reality is a vision that transcends the world seen in terms of objectified essences or properties. Only through entering into circulation can properties be possessed or perceived as belonging anywhere—and even then only as on loan and in transit. This is the nature of belonging and of the proper—to be perceived precisely and paradoxically in the moment of disappropriation. Yin and yang—the one always inevitably brings on the other as already inherent in its own core. This core is—or can only be lived out as—nothing but the relation to the Other. This is why world literature cannot be just a summative, cumulative concept forged by adding national literatures together. It rather takes literature to a “new place” (Kern), a universal place—the space of literature. As world literature, literature discovers and affirms itself in its vocation to speak out beyond all confining political borders and self-enclosed cultural spheres. Moreover, much more than just the variants of classifiable differences that can be catalogued is at stake in the idea of world literature. I have been trying here to suggest how this idea brings us face to face with ontological difference. In my own previous experience, I have encountered the concept of world literature typically as an English department’s alternative to compara­ tive literature. The argument goes that the English department already “covers”—or at least can and should cover—literature in other languages, so that there is no need for comparative literature as a separate program at all. This reasoning affords administrators a golden opportunity to economize by consolidating units and reducing staff. It also revives the resentments between competing colleagues divided into rivaling factions by stirring up new opportunities to take advantage and settle scores in old power struggles—to the satisfaction of some and inevitable disgruntlement of others. Apart from this all-too-human side of institutional politics, Comparative Literature harbors, or at least connects with, World Literature through the mediating work of translation. Translation does not concern only the languages that one is translating from and into—the “source language” and the “target language,” respectively. At stake in translation—what is drawn

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on and aimed at—is something else entirely. Through translation, literature is freed from specific limits and determinations of its original appearance and is made into a medium of circulation beyond all boundaries of particular languages and cultures. Literature is revealed as something of a miraculously protean medium, a matrix of unlimited metamorphoses. This process projects language and culture onto a higher ontological plane. Literature is not apprehended as an object or instrument to be manipulated by human subjects, but rather as something of an agent in its own right, one that creates, or at least transforms, the world.

THE NEGATIVE-THEOLOGICAL NOTION OF PURE LANGUAGE/LITERATURE

Something of this kind was the intuition inspiring Walter Benjamin’s theory of language and literature in “The Task of the Translator” (“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”), with which the present chapter began and which it endeavors to extend into a reflection on world literature. Benjamin’s essay was, in fact, originally an introduction to translations of Baudelaire’s “Tableaux Parisiens” and is, as such, inherently invovled with the production of world literature through translation of a literary classic. As in the case of this Baudelairean classic, becoming world literature through translation opens the dimension of “pure language” (die reine Sprache), and we might also say, analogously, or by extension, of “pure literature.” Pure language can be seen as a negative theological notion that attributes to language no positive qualities, but only the negation of all finite, determinate content as “impure.” Applied or turned negatively (“negativ gewendet”), Benjamin’s idea of pure language functions rather as an integrative ideal of harmonizing languages among themselves in their common “intention” (Intention) of expressing the real. Each individual language on its own gives only a limited and un­ stable access to the objects it envisages. Various languages’ approaches to the same reality even exclude one another, since their respective metaphors make choices in conception that are incompatible. In the shifting play of various languages’ angles of approach or “manners of meaning,” pure language remains concealed. But translation places these differences in the

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frame of a history of evolution toward the expression of what they all intend in common. The messianic end (“messianische Ende”) of this history is the reconciliation of all languages, the harmony of the different ways of meaning (“Harmonie all jener Arten des Meinens”) proper to individual ­languages. Translation enables this ideal to be glimpsed at the same time as it shows how far each individual language is from actually attaining it. Pure language flashes out as lit up by translation, whenever and wherever translation is ignited by the afterlife (“Fortleben”) of the work, by its glory, we might infer, and by the unending resurrection or springing to life (“Aufleben”) of pure language. Still, in Benjamin’s finally messianic and eschatological vision of the redemption of language, pure language is understood only apophatically as a negation of the communication of objective, referential contents. What makes the redemption and afterlife of the work of world literature possible is precisely what cannot be translated or communicated (“ein Nicht-Mitteilbares”). It cannot be adequately said, and just that, paradoxically, is both universal and unique. This is the negative-­ theological or apophatic predicament of pure language, and it constrains us to concede that translation cannot translate what is most essential in the literary utterance, namely, “the ungraspable, the enigmatic, the ‘poetic’” (“das Unfaßbare, Geheimnisvolle, ‘Dichterische’”). All this remains per se inaccessible as pure language. Nevertheless, this limit calls attention to what motivates translation from one language into another—and beyond that into the higher sphere of world literature: namely, the intention (“Intention”), which all languages share in common, to communicate the real in its fullness. Pure language, as conceived by Benjamin, is expressed especially in the silent (“schweigend”) intention that all languages share in common to communicate the real and true and to do so wholly and without remainder. This intention, as in the Garden of Eden, is to make sign and object correspond perfectly, so that signifier and signified coincide and, consequently, what is said becomes perfectly adequate to what is meant. For this to be the case, pure language must include the molten potential for all possible manners of saying and conceiving. The task of the translator is to set free, into the translator’s own language, this pure language that is found in actual languages only as “banished.” Ordinarily, pure language is banished

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into what is foreign to it—into information and content—and so is placed under the spell of another language, a fact-stating or information-giving language.46 Deeper than such a congealed, objective language is the infinite potential of language to become all things. A translation fulfills its task especially by making its own language strange in order to enable it to accommodate the foreign work. The mutual estrangement of languages after Babel points to their distance from the one true and adequate language that alone would reconcile them. On this showing, the ultimate intention of language and literature turns out to be eschatological and redemptive. The imagined wholeness of language as such, consisting in its perfect adequacy to express the world of things in all its emotional tones and differentiated, nuanced possibilities of conception, can be evoked by each actual human language, but only as lacking. Translation exposes this lack. Precisely by exposing the untranslatable essence of each language (its particular, inimitable correspondence with reality itself ), translation provokes an imagining of the totality intended by all languages taken together. In Benjamin’s image, the multiplicity of languages shows up as being like the shards of a shattered vase (“Scherben eines Gefäßes”). Translation exposes the untranslatable essence of each language by rendering the strangeness of the work in the receiving—the so-called host— language. “True translation” must not read like an original that is consummate and complete in its own right. In that case, the translation would stand in the light of the original and overshadow it. Instead, the true translation, by opening up and highlighting the gap between it and the original, allows the light of pure language to fall on the original all the more fully.47 When all the constraints of a literal, communicative sense are eliminated, and the sense plummets from abyss to abyss (“stürzt der Sinn von Abgrund zu Abgrund”), the bottomless depths of language (“bodenlosen Sprachtiefen”) themselves threaten to reduce language to silence.48 The archetype or exemplar of such translation for Benjamin is Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles. Rather than furnishing equivalences for forms of expression, which are peculiar to each language, true translation opens the unfathomable depths of non-equivalence to view and thus relates language to its infinite, abysmal groundlessness. Pure language is like a tangent touching communicative content at one point only and otherwise following its own trajectory to infinity.49 Likewise, world literature, as literature

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with an afterlife, is uprooted from its culture of origin and follows its trajectory to infinity in shedding light purely as literature unbounded by any specific context. It refracts its manifold relatedness to cultures in ways unconfined by any pre-established cultural-conceptual framework.

THE RETURN OF ONE’S OWN AS WORLD LITERATURE

World literature implies the extension of translation on a global scale beyond all regional boundaries and potentially for purposes of building a kind of literary canon. It aims to offer the finest fruits and the most exquisite flowers of literary cultivation to all, irrespective of their national, ­ethnic, or regional origin. We have considered, through this discussion informed by comparatists, how becoming world literature prevents the classics from being limited to their appropriations for merely nationalistic purposes or for the ideological aims of any specific and exclusive cultural politics. As world literature, classic works attain to a wider and potentially more lasting sort of significance. They become anyone’s and everyone’s property. There is a necessary letting go of one’s own culture in order to let great works operate as world literature. Only when we receive our own ­literature back from others has it truly become world literature—for us, too. But then it comes back to us radically changed in its fundamental ­significance. An intriguing example can be found in the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. It existed as a little known and not highly esteemed work in Arabic for centuries until it was translated into French by Antoine Galland in the early eighteenth century and became fabulously popular in Europe. Only afterward did it acquire prestige in the Arab world and assume status as a classic instead of being regarded as an embarrassing congeries of low-life, lascivious tales. Translation brings about an inevitable flattening of particular nuances that are possible only in a given language or culture, but the type of transfer exemplified here also frees a work for new associations that can en­ gender previously unsuspected possibilities of meaning. This is why a classic never finishes saying what it has to say (“Un classico è un libro che non ha mai finito di dire quel che ha da dire”), according to Italo Calvino’s

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definition of it in “Why Read the Classics?”50 Translation in this respect can actually furnish means of resistance to the literary work’s being contained by one uniform code, or to its being circumscribed by a historically or ideologically fixed framework. In becoming world literature, the work is translated into a kind of universal language that remains open and evolving as the work migrates from language to language and so travels into further cultural zones and historical universes. Even if English has become, practically speaking, a universal linguistic medium of the world in our time, the omnibus of world literature breaks it apart into many, in effect, different languages. Salmon Rushdie’s Indian English and Dereck Walcott’s Caribbean English are new revelations of the English language, as are also the poetic languages of Native American authors, including Layli Longsoldier, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Norman Scott Momaday, Sherwin Bitsui, Heid Erdrich, Kim Blaeser, ­Michael Wasson, and Santee Frazier. And this happens not only at the level of language. Taken as world literature, classics such as James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans or Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn come back to an American audience profoundly changed and unsettled from what they seemed to mean in their original contexts. Huck’s apparently good-natured and always serviceable black companion, Jim, can suddenly come sharply to light as a locus revealing racial tensions that tear the ­American union asunder. I wish to focus for a moment, in closing, on a particular example of this metamorphosis of a literary oeuvre through its becoming world literature. Through its promotion to the standing of a world classic, Walt Whitman’s poetic corpus is transfigured and takes on a new and different dimension of significance from what it has traditionally had for most American readers. Whitman becomes not just the poet of a rugged ­American individualism, as expressed quintessentially in “Song of Myself.” He shows up more clearly as a dispossessed prophet overtaken by a messianic eschatological history. He has long been recognized as the poet of the body (“I sing the body electric”), of the earth and immanence, while the dimension of prophetic and theological transcendence has remained relatively unapparent, or submerged, at least for American, secular, academic criticism. Whitman’s religiosity has rather been framed, and correctly so, within ecstatic spiritualities of physicalism and shamanism, of somatic energy and animal

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“electricity,” of magneticism and mesmerism.51 But his whole poetic project reveals yet further significances when viewed in the penetrating light of world poetry’s vocation to proffer revelation in a prophetic vein. Although Whitman’s poetic testament seems to announce the modern secular era of American democracy, a self-made nation constructed by selfmade men and women, what comes out clearly when he is read more in a European historical perspective is his continuity with a certain religious tradition, notably that of the Bible and prophetic poetry. The Bible turns up here at the heart of secular, democratic America, for it is the model of a poetry that is the authentic voice of the people, just as it was for Johann Gottlieb Herder and his mentor, Johann Georg Hamman.52 Whitman is unveiled by such a postsecular reading as the poet of an immanent transcendence projecting the American experience and its promise into the utopian sphere of apocalyptic prophecy.53 All America and the entire world are brought into Whitman’s elastic democratic embrace. But Whitman is also deeply a poet of the unsayable. One would hardly expect it, given his singing of things indiscriminately in their democratic equality. Finding words for all and sundry, Whitman’s poetry is inclusive of everything, no matter how low and common. His verse is so full of the abundant saying of things, of the articulation of the whole range of the sayable throughout the visible, tangible (as well as smellable, tastable, and audible) universe, that the remarkable extent to which he is also a poet of the unsayable has not always been very noticeable. Never­theless, it is clearly expressed in moments of darkness and silence, even at the core of the “Song of Myself,” where “the dark hush promulges as much as any” (sec. 45). And the promulgation of darkness turns up explicitly as the leading theme in his poem “A Clear Midnight”: THIS is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best. Night, sleep, and the stars.54 This is the burden of a certain mysticism that does not articulate things in their essential being so much as evoke them in their impenetrable

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mystery. A sort of negative theology is intimated in the “Song of Myself ” in its reflections about God having dropped letters in the street (sec. 48). Shifts of perspective through a European historicist analysis, and especially through religious cultural lenses, serve to refocus this poetic corpus and to bring some of its largely overlooked meanings to light. Of course, the prophetic emphasis is not unprecedented or even undeveloped in American readings, and the contamination between European and American culture is in any case pervasive.55 But a European angle of approach, nevertheless, changes our overall picture of this poet. Bernadette Malinowski reads Whitman’s poetry as the fulfilment of an eschatological promise. His performative use of language, reaching out beyond the boundaries of the text in a direct embrace of the reader, is a prophetic word that enacts what it announces. Like the Word of God, it creates and makes real what it proclaims and poetically depicts. This is what Malinowski understands Whitman to mean by the phrase “Wording the future,” which occurs in a letter he wrote to Emerson (August 1856). Malinowski shows the extent to which the whole apparatus of prophetic poetry from antiquity through Dante and Klopstock to Blake and Shelley is present and active even in this modern American poet celebrating new beginnings with his radical individualism and grassroots democracy. Whitman’s writing adopts an artistically apophatic mode that stands for more than can simply be said. The ineffability topos at the end of the “Song of Myself ” emerges as the key to this type of reading. In fact, Whitman ends by telling his reader: “I too am untranslatable” (sec. 52). And yet, self-abandon to the Other is performed through an invocation of the reader, to whom the poet’s own breath and pulse are transferred programmatically in the envoi to Whitman’s collected poems, Leaves of Grass. In “So Long,” Whitman steps out of the cadre of the literary altogether to embrace his reader bodily: My songs cease, I abandon them, From behind the screen where I hid I advance personally solely to you. Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man, (Is it night? are we here together alone?)

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It is you I hold and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth. (lines 51–57)

It is only in fusional identity with the reader that the poet lives on— through, we might say, a “de-ceasing” (a ceasing to cease) that uncannily suggests a kind of living-on or sur-vival in and through his readers. In closing the “Song of Myself,” the poet’s persona advises: I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. (sec. 52) This is the constant challenge for us: to become more than what we are at present through opening ourselves to constitutively transforming relationships with others. My purpose here has been to give a philosophical interpretation of the idea of world literature. However, this notion’s most persuasive verification is finally more literary than philosophical, and for that reason and in that spirit, I conclude not with philosophical propositions, but with this literary instance. In so doing, I return to the practice of criticism as I understand it to have been made possible by the­­­­­ (non)horizon—or rather the broken-open horizon—of world literature.

Part VI

CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE The historical considerations of part IV turned toward often very remote history or, more exactly, prehistory, whereas part V examined, from the standpoint of apophatic thinking, some especially significant junctures in the recent history of theory. In part VI, we turn to some of the most burning current issues in the academy today. The fate of the humanities hangs in the balance and depends on how we are able to handle the challenges engendered by the politicization of humanities knowledge (through lenses of gender, race, and class) and the diametrically opposite tendency to take refuge in a supposedly disinterested scientification of all knowledge (“cognitivism”). Both tendencies are at risk of dehumanizing our understanding of ourselves by erasing respect for the unsoundable mystery of being human. There is always something in human beings (something ambiguously essential and inessential, since not definitively specifiable) that remains beyond the reach of manipulation by willful appropriation through the ideological agendas of identity politics—but neither can this mystery be adequately known in an objectifying, scientific mode. Part VI, in continuity with part V, examines some historically significant emergences of politically motivated critique and of scientific method. It illuminates the dire need for apophatic insight in these areas against the background of the historical trajectory of the apophatic turn that was outlined in parts I and

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II. This turn was drawn out in the selectively significant directions of interculturality and a widened interdisciplinarity in parts III and IV. Parts V and VI, then, advance this reflection from recent controversies over canonicity and inclusiveness or receptivity vis-à-vis otherness (V) to challenges, particularly identity and cognitivism (VI), on the horizon of our future.

Chapter Eleven

POSTMODERN IDENTITY POLITICS AND THE SOCIAL TYRANNY OF THE DEFINABLE

In what we are now used to calling postmodern times, discourses about race, class, and gender are characteristically fraught with ambiguity.1 Various unprecedented gender identities, and new forms of ethnic or racial consciousness, have emerged in these dynamic times and have asserted themselves irrecusably, bringing about world-transforming changes. In spite of sometimes bitter resistance, they have succeeded in claiming political rights, gaining economic power, and acquiring social legitimacy. The consequent social revolution is manifest in a wide spectrum of sociological phenomena, ranging from a new female workforce restructuring previously all-male professions, new minority middle classes, and unprecedentedly large immigrant populations, notably in Europe, to gay and lesbian matrimony and the going-public of alternative, hybrid, cross, or queer genders displaying their differences in transvestite performances and drag shows. Institutionalized declaration of one’s preferred “pronouns” has contributed to promoting recognition of public gender identification as a matter of free choice for the individual rather than simply a natural fact of being either male or female. Official documents and public facilities increasingly allow for more than just the traditional gender binary. Many new voices have spoken up, moreover, on behalf of racial or ethnic minorities and have highlighted their cultural distinctness, even in making a bid to be r­ ecognized 291

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as fully integral components of a now unmistakably multiracial, multicultural, multigender society. Such conspicuous and colorful new identities have successfully insinuated themselves, infiltrating particularly into the bastions of the academy, but at the same time the idea of identity has been eroded from within by the very logic or illogic of postmodern thinking, which does not take any identity as more than an arbitrary invention or convention. A new postessentialist epistemology exposes identity as being at most a purely heuristic construct. The hard-nosed identity politics of the 1960s have come to seem outdated, if not unproductive, after the pervasive deconstructions of identity that gained ever greater currency, especially through the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, the proliferation of new claims to identity goes on unabated. Can some strands of postmodern theory afford critical insight into and increased sensitivity toward what identity and its claims consist in? Such theoretical reflection should serve at least to sharpen our awareness of the ultimate indefinability of our true identity. Whatever it is that makes human beings what they are is, in the end, not reducible to identical terms.2 So far, perhaps, most of us working in the academy today, and in variously theoretical disciplines, tend to agree. However, widely divergent pedigrees for this kind of insight can be produced, and the stated consensus concerning the ultimate indefinability of identity turns out to be the premise for much debate and threatens to precipitate into apparently irresolvable ­controversy. My purpose here is not to take sides in such controversy, but rather to light up the normally invisible background of the nonidentical against which all identity claims are implicitly projected. There is something absolute in the background here that relativizes all identity claims, which otherwise tend toward absolutization of their own claims in their own inevitably partial, oppositional terms. We are duped into seeing only competing identities on the field, and the rest, including the field itself, sinks below the threshold of perception. Then conflicts become irresolvable and tragic. The absolute value of persons actually resides in an invisible depth or unarticulable height—above and before any differentiation into exclusionary identities. The following reflections attempt to hold up the dilemmas of identity to this unapparent light as necessary for keeping cultural identity politics in perspective.

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There are, of course, many sorts of critiques of identity. Anti-­ identitarian thinking seems at first to belong to radical and iconoclastic movements aiming to liberate individuals from static myths inherited from the past and purportedly fixed in stone by tradition. Ironically, however, this emancipatory vision can also be cast in apparently traditional theological terms through reference to the image of God. A towering historical landmark here is Pico della Mirandola’s De hominis dignitate (1486), with its scene of the Creator endowing humans with no gift. Having given all away already to the animals, he has nothing left to give to humans except for free choice—an undetermined capacity to choose for oneself what one will ­become. Our being made in the image of an infinite God entails, at the same time, our being infinitely open and indefinable as any sort of identical individual or essential nature. This is the consequence of God’s infinity, which no language or knowledge can adequately encompass. More precisely, a deeper insight into the nonidentity of individuals derives from negative theology, that is, from the admission that God is unknowable in any definable concepts or terms.3 In classical negative theologians such as John Scott Eriugena and Gregory of Nyssa, the unknowability of God extends to the unknowability—and thus also to the nonidentity—of individuals in general in their deepest core. What defines human nature is, paradoxically, its lack of any essential, defining characteristics.4 The pervasive, almost irresistible privileging of what can be defined and specified and claim rights for itself in a democratic society supposedly based on argument and rational justification, including self-justification, entails certain liabilities engendering optical illusions or epistemic biases and susceptibilities to being abused. The focus on definable identities proved itself historically to have been necessary for social progress, in particular for reversing overt and covert identity-based discrimination. However, it has also led to some systemic distortions. For not only those whose identity can be well defined have needs and a claim to protection and respect. In the overall scheme of things, those who have not yet come to a highly developed degree of conscious, sometimes even combative, awareness of self are just as important and often even more in need of benign fostering. There are certain important parts and aspects of us all that have no individuated, isolable identity. Yet, in the politics of identity, only those

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identifiable as belonging to some definite group are recognized as warranting protection and perhaps even compensatory advantages. In these artificially created circumstances, if you do not have a label, you hardly exist at all. Only a socially marketable or politically appreciable distinctive identity can give you a publicly recognized status or a “face.” Without this, in a society based more and more on positive and politicized identities, you have no social capital and no political leverage. You are no one, at least no one special having a claim to attention and benevolent encouragement and patronage. This, too, builds invidious biases into the social system and its communicative practices.

COMPETING GENEALOGIES OF IDENTITY CLAIMS AND THEIR BIBLICAL SOURCES

In order to make a case for the nonidentical, and to defend those persons and aspects of life and existence that fall below the threshold of identity and its claims, we need to critically examine the basis for the widespread vindication of identity in contemporary society. It proves to be complex. A contradictory confluence of inspirations and derivations, with their different genealogies, makes the agenda of these identity-driven ideologies based on regional, religious, gender, ethnic, class, or special-interest groups and movements conflictual, or at least confusing. Are these ideologies of identity informed by the structuralist insight into the relativity of all oppositional terms that lies at the foundation of the critical theory revolution of the last several decades, especially since the 1960s and 1970s? Ferdinand de Saussure famously proclaimed, with farreaching repercussions, that in language there are only differences without positive terms. This insight was carried over and applied to culture generally by, among others, Roman Jakobson in linguistics, Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, and Roland Barthes in cultural semiotics. This structuralist theoretical paradigm entailed the valorization of difference and consequently the self-assertion of their different identities by non-mainstream groups under the banner of their being different but not less valuable or less worthy of entitlement than those belonging to majority identity groups. The advocacy of difference became central to the agenda of French poststructuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.5

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In an alternative genealogy, the new ideologies of identity are beholden, instead, to the Enlightenment ideal of promoting freestanding individuals. This latter agenda has also been of the utmost importance in fueling a wide spectrum of liberation movements since the 1960s.6 Rebellion against the authority especially of religion and against supposed domination by the one God had revolutionized society in the wake of the 1789 French Revolution and had lived on as the animating spirit of continued revolts and protests in the name of finite individuals in their inherent, notto-be suppressed multiplicity. Nevertheless, an ideal of universal reason that would be normative for all human beings remained at the core of Enlightenment ideology. The assumptions of the Enlightenment have been placed under a heavy pressure of critique within the ambit of theory, especially post­modern theory, which is generally anti-Enlightenment in its premises and per­ suasions, since Enlightenment was in crucial ways the leading project of modernity. Even the philosophy of the Frankfurt School itself, for all its continuity with Enlightenment thinking, made programmatic especially in Jürgen Habermas’s thought, was based on a deep sense of the ambiguities inherent in the dialectic of Enlightenment. In this perspective, the Enlightenment was charged with producing myths of its own and thereby leading to the totalitarianisms of consumer society and mass media culture steered by capitalist interests.7 Some recent revisions of identity theory register and react to the backlash against identity politics from left, right, and center, both within the academy and within political movements themselves.8 These new identity theorists attempt to defend identity politics and sometimes even advocate a realist theory of identity. Such revisionist efforts take stock of a certain reversal of the positive valence of identity in the discourse surrounding the liberation movements on behalf of disenfranchised minorities of a few decades earlier.9 They admit the anti-essentialist arguments showing that identities are socially constructed, but they nevertheless insist that “identities can be no less real for being socially and historically situated.”10 In the end, these authors wish to defend the concept of identity and its relevance, despite the recent critiques provoked by its excesses: “We . . . believe that these critiques of identity are largely mistaken, too often based on anecdotes about incidents where specific groups used poor political judgment rather than empirical studies of identity-based movements from which a

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larger analysis of their effects can emerge.”11 Like Habermas in his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, 1985), such new proponents of identity turn away from the dominant trends of postmodernism in order to reaffirm something of a classic modern vision of progressive social liberation. But this (liberal) ideology works only to the extent that it can be valid for all, above and beyond all determinate communitarian identities. In other words, it works only so long as all individuals can identify themselves with a common vision or destiny, such as the proverbial American dream. Dear to liberationist ideology, especially in our contemporary context, is the discovery that individuals are valuable in themselves and not only in their relations within the social order in which they are good for performing useful functions by delivering differentiated services, such as those of butcher, baker, or candlestick maker. The individual’s deepest or highest value is not functional, but absolute. Human persons are “endsin-­themselves” in a jargon handed down from Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Historically, the Bible and Judeo-Christian culture have played a key role in bringing about this affirmation of the unconditional value of the individual person. In St. Paul’s terms, the individual is no longer essentially qualified as male or female, slave or free, Greek or Jew (Galatians 3:28). All are equally and infinitely valuable in the sight of God. Such a notion of unconditioned individual identity and worth emerges as a concept historically from theological discourse. Paul’s role here has been key to recent discussion among philosophers of the unconditional or universal value of the individual.12 Alain Badiou has turned to Paul as the antidote to the particularisms and sectarianisms that plague society in our historical moment and make it all the more vul­ nerable to manipulation by capitalist interests exploiting mass markets.13 Equally provocatively, Giorgio Agamben has analyzed Paul’s revolutionizing of the logic of identity in the context of his political theology.14 Being Christian can be construed as a matter of being “not not Jewish,” for in the Christian testament the revelation to the Jews becomes relevant even for those who are not Jews. Christians are not entirely not Jews to the extent that their revelation is based on the Jewish testament. Both Jews and Gentiles are displaced from their settled, exclusive identities by the call to faith in the Gospels that cuts across this and all other divisions of identity (see chapter 4 herein).

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Judeo-Christian culture, in this instance, intervenes to interrupt the tradition of logical thinking hailing from Greece by introducing irre­ducible singularities that exceed all terms of identity. Hence the recovery of this “other” tradition for philosophy by thinkers such as Adorno and Levinas, who are following in the footsteps of religiously inspired reactions to the Hegelian system by Schelling and Kierkegaard.15 More recently, Slavoj Žižek and Eric Santner have leveraged Judeo-Christian tradition for similar purposes.16 Žižek redeploys a heterodox Christian theology in his reopening of the question of universality beyond the politics of identity. Actually, however, the aporiae of Greek thought in the late Neoplatonists, particularly Proclus and Damascius, can be shown already to point in this direction of undermining absolute or essentialist identity.17 Indeed, these insights into the limits of identity are culturally universal. Axial Age cultures across the planet already envisaged such a transcendent universality that exceeded the grasp of finite rationality (see chapter 8 herein). Nevertheless, biblical tradition certainly constitutes a fundamental source undermining finite, essentialist identities of an Aristotelian nature in the West. The Bible declares that Adam was made in the image of God. Patristic and Scholastic philosophy understood divine being or absolute being as a higher sort of being than individual being. But when God became something of a dubious hypothesis among Enlightenment thinkers, the human individual, newly discovered in its previously unsuspected freedom and potential for self-realization, stepped forward in a bright new light. Without a transcendent foundation for value, the autonomous Enlightenment individual in some unprecedented ways became an absolute value in him- or herself. (The generic individual, at this stage in modern history, was usually designated as he, but many women, beginning at least with the revolutionary “tricoteuses” [knitters], were in fact exceedingly active and influential in disseminating the new outlook.) Individual identity and the autonomy it claims are themselves, in some respects, newly invented in the Enlightenment, even though the basis for them is borrowed from biblical religion and ethics, especially as interpreted by Protestantism since the sixteenth century, with its emphasis on the single individual standing directly face to face with God.18 Monotheist theology offered the description of God as the source and ground of all being. God alone is unconditioned being. All else is derived from him and is therefore conditioned being. In the emancipatory

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movement of the Enlightenment, however, absolute value was transferred from God to the human individual.19 This was already implicit in the proclamation of the Incarnation—that God became man. Such was the central thrust of Christianity for Enlightenment thought, as one can see, for example, from Hegel’s philosophy of religion and even more unambiguously in the liberal theology of Adolf von Harnack, celebrating the man Jesus as moral teacher. But with this absolutization of the ethical and the human, the problem arises (or becomes acute) of a plurality of absolutes, or of claims to be valuable in oneself and not only in relation to some greater whole within which one functions. The claim to self-grounded, self-­ sufficient, self-generating value persists, but now in a fractured world, where all is no longer placed under the one supreme, unique source of value affirmed by monotheism. The death of God was definitively the birth of the autonomous individual self with a claim to unconditional value. Theoretically, each individual is an origin of unconditioned value in and for herself or himself, just as theologically God is the unconditioned, ultimate source of all good. In practice, however, rights and privileges for human individuals can only be granted and guaranteed on a very relative basis. Each person’s absolute value is, in fact, qualified and severely restricted by everyone else’s because each other person has exactly the same claim to being valued absolutely for him- or herself alone. The gain in intrinsic value for the individual was at the same time, in effect, a loss of the vital kind of value that is based on the individual’s playing a part in a greater whole. Our modern Western, emancipated societies are crippled by this breakdown of the necessary, or at least the enabling, conditions for solidarity in the community. This registers dramatically in various cultural expressions of existential Angst, for example, in Expressionist paintings such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream, or in Martin Heidegger’s analysis of the “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) of human existence. Certain consequences of existential despair are drawn out in the argument for suicide as made by Albert Camus in Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942). The modern, supposedly liberated and apparently valorized individual is also devalued by being made valuable only for him- or herself alone: he or she has no foundation for his or her attempt to be and to be significant. What worked for God is very difficult, if not impossible, for a human individual to pull

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off or sustain. To create and emanate value from oneself alone is divine, but the human way can only be to create and transmit value through relationship and interacting with others. Humans become valuable by serving purposes more significant than themselves. Existing for themselves alone as mere particulars rather than in relation to always larger wholes, they are liable to reduce and deflate to vain pretense and empty ciphers.

COMPETING CLAIMS AND RIGHTS OF INDIVIDUALS

Liberationist ideologies have encouraged and keep encouraging individuals, nevertheless, whether alone or in groups, to claim unconditional value for themselves. The premise of this claim is that every individual is entitled to the full privileges of value-in-him-or-herself. This type of value is what Kant in his moral philosophy called being an “end-in-oneself ” (Zweck-an-sich), and it leads to movements of various types militating for the rights of individuals of one group or another that for no good reason seem to be denied the rights and privileges of being valued for their own sake alone. These movements are typically powered by energies of self-­ assertion: they focus on class interests as extensions of self-interest that is expanded and made collective. Their common premise is the Enlightenment bourgeois valorization of the individual as such and without necessary relation to anything greater or more important. There is in this ideology of the individual an absoluteness and inviolability about each singular I that is at least quasi-religious and that would even be marked culturally by some as particularly Christian. As unconditional, the value of the individual person can be derived or borrowed historically from the absolute value of a Supreme Being or divinity. And yet, in human reality, all rights for any individual or group must be negotiated against the rights of others. This cannot be avoided in the social context, even though it did not apply in the theological context, where the monotheistic God is indeed without equal, truly the one and only. Therefore, as we translate this idea of being valuable in and for oneself from a theological to a secular register, we need an appreciation not just of the unconditionality, but also of the relativity of rights. Every individual does have an infinite dignity and worth, but not by virtue of their identity as defined

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differentially against others’ identities. This unconditional worth can only be based on that which in the individual cannot be identified or delimited in any definable way. Something of this nature is being theorized currently by philosophers from Jean-Luc Nancy to François Jullien and Giorgio Agamben, in various modes, as “the common.”20 The “nothing,” or no determinate identity, that we all share in common is actually worth more, infinitely more, in our valu­ation as human beings than any distinguishing traits or characteristics. It is only by virtue of this common being that we are ultimately—and all equally—valuable. Crucial to conceiving the common in the West was imagining a being—and a kind of being—without identity because above identity. This metaphysical and theological imagination was key historically to ushering in the conditions permitting the development of democratic society. Thus, the founding principle is not so much equality per se—which requires measurable differentials—as the absolute value of each individual. This indefinable absolute is what is equal about us, not our identities and their specific determinations. Trying to measure and equalize our identitarian determinations, as if “female” had to be made equal in worth to “male” (or even greater in order to compensate for past injustices), effaces qualitative differences that inflect the equally absolute, but indeterminate and incommensurate, worth of each in its own kind. The one being that all share in common is something that transcends all particular determinations. It is truly holy, the social sacred, we might say, borrowing from Émile Durk­ heim’s most essential insight.21 Valorizing, instead, the differentials—some of them, such as female or nonwhite or gay, or their opposite numbers—places such determinations into competition with one another, which is absurd. They should be complementary determinations intelligible only through mutual recognition rather than contenders for domination of one over the other. Identities are delimitations of an indeterminate being that is the only positive source of worth. Consequently, instead of being the basis for claiming rights, identities should be evoked rather as means of according recognition to distinctive qualities of others. The fact that all individuals have an equal claim to absolute being or value, which, however, has no specific (necessarily oppositional and therefore divisive) determinations, should be taken to signal

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the endless limitation of our rights by others’ rather than their unrestricted claims and unlimited scope. A strong sense of the mutual limitation of our rights by those of others is needed because of the tendency to absolutize the rights of any given class of individuals who come to self-consciousness and assert themselves, acquiring thereby identity and voice, even through such channels of social communication as literary theory itself. All such organs of self-expression, as means of communicating, are liable to become the special concern of theory. They are intrinsic to how any identity comes to be significant and to how it signifies itself. But beyond the contingent relativities that determine which individual identities emerge into visibility and self-assertion, there is an ethical question of relation to others, or to the Other (as highlighted, for example, by Levinas’s ethics), that forces us to look beyond the absoluteness of self-affirmation on the part of any one individual or group and of their claim to value. Without this sense of an Other, or at least of others, beyond all definable identities, we are constantly at risk of absolutizing ourselves or some specific, exclusive, identitarian class.22 The seminal inspiration of the human rights movement, for instance, is the idea that certain rights are natural and universal and ought to be guaranteed independently of history or social context. They are taken as context-transcendent and are advocated as applicable irrespective of local or regional or cultural or any other contingent norms. However, in any explicit and formulated rendition, they are not culturally neutral and do not come from nowhere.23 Every declaration of rights in the name of whatever identity entails also a definition and an appropriation that is in some ways partial—it is fashioned by someone in particular and in certain circumstances. American Indians, for example, may well object to unilaterally declaring the rights of “man,” or even “human” rights, as prejudicial to other creatures.24 Any specific and concrete formulation of what someone declares to be universal and absolute creates a disequilibrium, for other, contingent norms are threatened by an absolute.25 Any system of value might well aim at the absolute and universal, but only on condition of not appropriating it for any particular, finite, delimited, and therefore exclusive code and language. Disability theory might be pondered here as an illustration. The rights of the handicapped require special attention and provision. There is even

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an absolute ethical imperative in support of this special consideration. However, when these rights are absolutized in specific forms, they risk infringing on the rights of others. Loading and unloading wheelchairs on buses in major metropolises at peak hours, for example, can cause traffic jams that bring circulation to a standstill (especially when the lift mechanism refuses to function properly). This certainly has to be tolerated up to a point, but there are, nevertheless, limits. Those who are not officially ­designated as handicapped are, in many ways, weak and vulnerable, too. The stresses and strains of public transportation can cause illness and injury to anyone, not just to those certified as disadvantaged and wearing an official badge to that effect. This is where there has to be negotiation and balancing, a weighing of which rights are to take precedence when and where, in consideration of all. Many find themselves confronted today with situations where it is impossible to find any place at all to park without a handicapped sticker on their car, while rows of handicapped-reserved places remain empty day and night. One theoretical tendency of movements like disability rights is to create the fiction of a generality of normal people who do not have special needs. But this fiction of the “normal,” too, is an invidious labeling. It functions, in effect, to deprivilege those not qualifying for a more advantageous tag or designation. Without question, recognizing certain kinds of disadvantaged or oppressed groups has been the right thing to do in specific times and contexts. An ironic reversal has occurred, however, when by complaining about being discriminated against through normally stigmatizing categories, such as black or female, a particular identity group is able to exploit its status as minority and presumably disfavored in order to gain advantage and claim special privileges and compensations—for just a tiny sampling of the group, of course, and perhaps to the further disadvantage of the vast majority. Treating people as tokens of identitarian groups, whether to privilege or to penalize them, inevitably does injustice to individuals. In many competitive activities, such as seeking jobs or applying for admission to universities, being in some minority category can prove to be a distinct advantage. Preferential or prejudicial treatment on the basis of race or gender has not been eliminated but is simply reversed to work in the other direction. The claim for enfranchisement on an equal basis mutates into a garnering of privilege in the name of some particular category or group and its claim to

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preferential treatment. Easily identifiable, publicly recognized categories become the basis for according special favor, but there are many kinds of weakness and disadvantage that do not fall into such categories, or are at least not easily identifiable as doing so. Most importantly and detrimentally of all, our perception remains focused on general categories such as race or gender and becomes blind to the unique value of individual persons, to what they need and have to offer. Nature respects the unique value of each person, even in creating inequalities and limited abilities. It is human beings who decide what counts as a disability and consequently calls for compensatory treatment. As far as nature is concerned, certain capacities simply come with certain bodies and faculties: they are accorded to some and not to others. We may well feel that social justice needs to step in to counteract the arbitrary injustices of nature. However, we are the ones who perceive these aberrant phenomena as injustices, or as demanding correction, rather than just as differentials in capacity such as pertain to any unique individual in relation to others. We choose which differences merit special provisions and compensations. Of course, our favoring of some classes can also tragically devalue its beneficiaries by masking their real accomplishment. At this point, we cannot help but perceive a certain arbitrariness that is now legislated by a human politics rather than resulting simply from the arbitrariness of nature in distributing its favors. Made into law or policy, identity-based legislation produces arbitrary inequalities of its own. And inequality that is produced by artificial means has a different status and moral valence. It entails a new kind of responsibility. It also harbors its own, more or less concealed, vested interests. We cannot, any more than nature, definitively determine what is fair and unquestionably justify who gets what. We can only try to set up our own processes of selection as equitably as possible. Ideally, everyone should be entitled to every humanly ­possible favoring that caring institutions and technological capability can afford. But decisions are made to favor some and not others. Unlike nature, human decision-makers can be held accountable to justify their reasons for according preferential treatment to some and not to others. Treating individuals according to our abstract, general categories in any case violates their uniqueness. Ethically valid reasons concern particular cases and unique individuals rather than class actions. Appealing to the global or world-historical disadvantage of women and nonwhites

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­ articipates in the same sort of mystification that accords whiteness or p maleness a specious superiority and privilege on whatever basis of presumptive right justified by a certain group’s reading of their own history. To ascribe to ourselves and our interventions any kind of objective justice—as if now a more moral race or gender or group had finally acceded to power— is likely to be short-sighted, self-deceptive moralizing. The insight, and I daresay revelation, of apophatic thinking has to take the form, once more, of self-critique, even infinite self-critique. This capacity has enabled modern Western democracies to at least begin to redress unwarranted, exclusionary domination of certain groups so as to benefit from the creative contributions of all ethnicities and genders to society. The same kind of tyrannical tendencies rooted deep in our endemic human insecurity that led to the suppression of some groups by those in power in the first place can all too easily take their revenge in pressing the advantage of being in (or at least identifying with and championing) a minority or any identity group. What we lose track of, in this case, is the assignment of rights and responsibilities on the basis of actual competencies and performances. Individuals are rewarded or sanctioned for who they are racially and sexually and for how they are classed socio-culturally and economically, or for a political/ideological adhesion, rather than for what they do and produce. Certain human beings decide what others merit or are worth in abstraction from—and even designedly to counteract—any natural standard or measure geared to the actual performing of useful services or the creating of commonly necessary resources. Such factors are neutralized and replaced by human judgments of desert on grounds of compensatory entitlement. In place of natural differences that can be valid grounds for differentiated outcomes, we substitute ideologically loaded designations, whether as valorizing or as stigmatizing, that are designed to favor some categories over others. We can never know definitively what is natural, but still we can orient ourselves to it as an unattainable idea—or, if not, assume responsibility for our own choices. Of course, it is sometimes simpler to deal with people through general categories rather than to try to discern individual differences. And culturally produced gender differences, for example, might help in selecting people for certain roles not because of natural capacities but because of culturally induced circumstances and expectations, which can also be im-

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portant factors in determining pertinent conditions. It may prove appropriate and effective for women to be in control of university programs or national governments at a certain stage in history. What I wish to question with my argument is not the principle of giving preferential treatment to individuals belonging to vulnerable classes, but rather the self-righteous moralizing that often goes along with it and the sometimes hypocritical pretense that our determinations instantiate an objective “fairness.”26 Such a position, instead, has to take responsibility for itself as a certain configuration and exercise of power rather than posture as universal justice. It, too, is interested and is all too likely to provoke hostile reaction from others not falling under its special protection. We can say that those reactions are morally wrong and not to be tolerated, and we can even exercise force, if necessary, to contain them. But then we enter into an oppositional logic of ideological conflict with those whom we have excluded rather than inviting all to participate in an equitable sharing of common vulnerabilities. Once a certain party presumes to define what is just and right, the spirit of fair-mindedness of which all are capable, but which none has the moral authority to unilaterally impose, is taken over, appropriated, and turned into a political power, and even weaponized. Those who dissent from our determination of universal justice can find themselves branded as immoral. They understandably feel as patent injustice their being stigmatized for their race or gender presumed en bloc to be guilty and unjust and may even feel themselves criminalized for refusing to endorse and subscribe to a gendered, racialized, or otherwise biased agenda that an empowered group has succeeded in establishing as the moral norm. Indeed, a moral imperative of justice is at stake, but absolute justice belongs to the realm of the apophatic as unspecifiable, not to our interpretations and applications. Apophatic awareness affords a negative knowledge that saves us from identifying our own agenda with absolute justice. All the support and sympathy in the world are due to the aspirations of minorities and the handicapped. In fact, an irrecusable moral absolute is expressed in their demand for justice. This naturally induces to representing their claim in uncompromising and even militant terms. Yet we still need to guard vigilantly against the idolatry of confounding our own intervention with justice itself. Our interpretations and realizations of social

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justice require critical distance and self-critical openness in order to avoid being felt as oppressive by others with their different visions and interpretations. The elevation of the “rights” of a certain category can easily take on a holy and unimpeachable aura. Even to try to balance its claim against those of others is decried and subjected to shaming tactics in the prevailing climate of grievance studies at the university. Of course, these social climates are mutable and subject to volatile winds of political change, but a certain liberal orthodoxy, where it achieves hegemony, sometimes tends to impose itself as beyond question and to silence anyone who would dare to think differently.27 When attributions of power by right entirely eclipse actual performance and natural capabilities, we are landed in a shadow world of vying with one another merely by the power of the label rather than mediating anything real as power’s source and ground. The bitter irony is that this paves the way for an illiberal backlash and the insidious reign of ­“post-truth.” Reversing the direction of discrimination, while continuing to treat individuals in terms of classes, is not generally a very satisfactory solution. It is more likely to polarize than to make peace and promote mutual respect. Women banding together to denounce sexual abuse or harassment perpetrated by men is certainly necessary for political progress, but it tends also to deepen the stereotyped treatment of both sexes divided into victims and predators. Only a universal basis beyond the male/female dichotomy, and thus beyond defined identities, can motivate all to renounce violence rather than simply reinforce the will to turn it in the other direction in order to gain revenge, which perpetuates an endless cycle. Only such a universal basis can enable the particular charism of being female or male to express itself in mutually saving and gracing ways that will not be condemned to sinister cycles of exploitation and retaliation. The tyranny of identity, of the recognizable category and label, has become pervasive in our society. People are treated in terms of their definable characteristics and the discriminating traits by which they fall into designated groups. The definable and categorizable becomes the carrier of political capital. The digital logic of 1 or 0, such as reigns in administrative milieus, furthermore, dictates that you either are or are not ­disadvantaged—a member of a minority or of some class of victims—

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and entitled to special treatment. It ignores the fact that all of us are these things, rather, in various ways and in infinitely varying degrees and according to variable circumstances. Those without any special label may be the most apt not to be represented. A politics that manipulates power or advantages always on behalf of what is defined and categorized builds something more than just a prejudice into the system. It installs something rather of the order of a general systemic distortion. In fact, these are the same epistemological tendencies that Cornel West analyzed as having engendered white supremacy and the demotion of blacks as a race in the first place: “observing, comparing, measuring, and ordering of the physical characteristics of bodies” led to a certain type being perceived as ideal and normative.28 To this extent, a fixation on the special categories of identity politics entails the perpetuation of an invidious and oppressive system. The problem was not just that of the supremacy of whites over blacks but, even more fundamentally, the blinkered perception of human beings through such reductive categories. They tend to blind us to the entire dimension of the indefinable as the only true source of human dignity and worth. Once we are seeing only black or white, male or female, either/or, we have lost sight of what is neither the one nor the other and yet is the only true basis of the infinite value of each. This infinite value cannot be asserted as such. It can be affirmed, instead, indirectly through kenotic self-emptying and offering of self for the benefit of others. Rather than demanding diminishment of anyone else’s natural power on moral grounds, an ethos of self-giving incites to the employment of one’s own natural powers for the common good. Imaginative literature from Homer and Dante through Don Quixote and Beloved effectively teaches such self-sacrifice, even when it does so by parodying, or even by abhorring, presumably heroic virtue.

THE INDEFINABLY COMMON AND INCOMMENSURABLE

This sort of epistemic problem has long been a cause of concern in national politics steered, or at least deflected, by special-interest groups. Pretending that all that exists and needs to be cared for humanly is parceled out into

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definable groups with labels blinds us to a deeper level of human and even nonhuman reality. As in many of the cruder versions of Marxism, the mistake is made of treating all reality, including ourselves, as at the disposal of society, as exhaustively comprehended by our humanly cut-out categories. This impedes our fostering, instead, greater sensitivity toward the deep vulnerabilities in the human body and psyche that remain unidentified in explicit social terms. It eclipses, furthermore, what transcends the human and thereby resists the totalizing systems of human beings and yet nevertheless demands to be respected at least equally. Ecology or nature and divinity or life itself are prime examples. In the postmodern perspective, there is a degree of choice about identities, since they are recognized as constructed. It is not that we have no identities, but we do not simply have them. We own them and appropriate them in ways that we have to freely choose. This means that we bear responsibility also for what they exclude. We have to look beyond the bounds of the identities that we have constructed and not be mesmerized by our own idols, since they are made with human hands. Like the dead God who, once dead, becomes an omnipresent obsession among survivors in the human community, according to Freud,29 so the deconstructed identity is not done away with: it is made over into an obsession with identity, an obsession that threatens to nullify concern for what is not so easily ­identifiable. In a more productive reaction to this situation of shattered and reasserted identity, we should accept the challenge to take responsibility for our identities and be willing—and even eager—to acknowledge their limits. This is a prerequisite for our being able to see past identity and attain to the truly universal beyond all its divisive designations—to our being able to see the infinite in each individual. I conceive this task as one of learning how to think past the logic of exclusivities—or perhaps, in some sense, past logic itself as per se based on exclusions. It is a matter of how to unthink our thinking and its inescapably invidious, exclusionary logics. Ernesto Laclau, for one, has struggled with the challenge of recuperating some sense of universal responsibility to all from beyond the shattering of a certain European hegemonic ideology of the universal.30 European colonialism was, after all, very particular in its conception of its “civilizing” mission. Situating himself between poststructuralist ideologies of difference and traditional Marxist doctrines based on a monolithic conception

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of historical universality, Laclau analyzes the paradoxes of identity as pointing negatively to a universality that is necessarily lacking. Particular identities require always an oppositional positing of their contraries—and, for this reason, are dependent on them. They are, to this degree, incapable of true universality. Ultimately valid (if not classically logical) universality is incommensurable with every particularism, and to this extent the universal does not exclude particularity but, instead, becomes variously incarnate in it. My analysis of identity politics is based on religious tradition and cultural theory rather than on a neo-Marxist, politicized social vision; nevertheless, it agrees with Laclau’s apophatic logic in acknowledging the incommensurable. Laclau concludes that the “non-resolution” of the paradox of a universality that is incommensurate with every particularity, and yet depends on the particular in order to exist at all, is the “pre-condition par excellence of democracy.”31 His purpose is to resist the monolithic rejections of universalism as irrevocably tainted by a particular ethnocentric history of dominant classes in the Occident. He is moving toward what I call an apophatic rethinking of identity in a horizon of universality. He takes the discourse on the Names of God in Dionysius and Eckhart as a model illustrating the incommensurability, yet ineluctable contamination, between universality and particularity—between the absolute fullness of the divine and the emptiness of all language about it—as constitutive of the ­political.32 Analyses like that of Laclau, who invokes the universal as a “constitutive void” (vide constitutif ) or “empty signifier” (signifiant vide), help us to recognize that the universal is not to be identified with any of its possible formulations. It has no identity, but is rather the “something more and different” that is always missing in any and every formulation of identity. On these grounds, we can appreciate that there is always a degree of nonidentity in every identity that we may choose to acknowledge or assume. The nonidentical should be recognized as our deepest being and “nature.” Here, again, “nature” may come back from beyond the obliterations that modern and postmodern culture have perpetrated against it. It may then be that race, for example, should be a criterion in hiring, but it should also be recognized as an artificial construct used for pragmatic purposes and even at times against the most naturally suitable choices on the basis strictly of competence: the hiring agency must take responsibility for its use of

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such a criterion. This bias in policy should not be mystified as natural justice. It is the result of a certain politics. And politics means taking up the cause of a certain party. But, in that case, it ought to be done still in the interest of keeping an equal measure for all, just as God is “no respecter of persons” according to an older scriptural idiom (Acts 10:34; Romans 2:11). This means giving precedence to what is not differentially defined about a person, to what is not the mask (persona, in its original Greek sense) that (mis)identifies an individual. Without careful attention to the nonidentifiable, to what is indeed no person and remains virtually invisible because unidentified and unidentifiable by discourse, identity politics are at risk of becoming an attempt to make exclusionary tactics work in favor of a group that has been harmed by those very tactics in the past rather than to escape—or at least to provisionally exit—from the system of binary opposition and oppression. The result can be, at best, the attempt to achieve retribution for past wrongs rather than to right the system for the future. In the interests of all, the point is not, or should not be, whether the person hired or otherwise preferred is black or female or gay. Or if it is, then this choice has to be one open to all to embrace and affirm rather than be forced by some upon others, notably on those who are of different race or gender and presumed to be culpably privileged on that basis. It has to be a choice in the name of what all equally share and can identify with—a non-gendered, non-­racialized nonidentity. Such redress or rectification needs to be understood as, in effect, for all and in the name of all rather than as a victory for certain categories and a loss or intimidation for others. It can truly succeed only to the extent that it is based on a respectful garnering of general assent rather than on a forcible imposition of power by some. I wish, then, to voice a plea on behalf of whoever or whatever is nothing and no one identifiable. The nonidentity of what is deepest and most precious in human beings is apt to be forgotten for lack of any identifying label or discursive marker. This nonidentity is in all of us, and only cherishing it can motivate humans to unite universally in solidarity with one another. The order of identity is an order of discourse and is differential. It is apt to distort or suppress the other order or disorder that invisibly subtends every discursive, artificial system of instituted significances. This other, separate, literally “sacred” sphere of existence is what Georges Bataille seeks

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to gain access to through sacrifice and festival.33 It is also what Michel de Certeau traces through Christian traditions in his “heterologies.”34 It is what has been held sacrosanct as the divine throughout the ­history and especially the prehistory of cultures. Axial Age cultures bear witness to this transcendent source of culture at the dawn of critical ­consciousness. I have endeavored to show here how certain recent, let us say, loosely, “postmodern” theorists of identity have brought out ways in which the very notion of identity escapes treatment by an objective logic that would enable it to be deliberately advocated and directly established in any straightforward way. And yet the practical applications of identity politics often still tend to conceive of identity in individualistic terms and as something other than just a relation. They conceive of it as something substantive or reified rather than relational to the extent that they make unilateral assertions of identity. The dialectic between the claims of identity in the style of the Enlightenment and the deconstruction of identity, following the insights of poststructuralist theory, can be traced, as we have seen, in some of the most highly influential work on the politics of identity down to Cornel West and Judith Butler.35 Following Gayatri Spivak, Butler sees identity terms as “necessary errors” and recognizes the necessity for a “self-critical dimension” in every use of such terms because of the risk of their becoming invidiously exclusionary. As much as it is necessary to assert political demands through recourse to identity categories, and to lay claim to the power to name oneself and determine the conditions under which that name is used, it is also impossible to sustain that kind of mastery over the trajectory of those categories within discourse. This is not an argument against using identity categories, but it is a reminder of the risk that attends every such use. The expectation of self-determination that self-naming arouses is paradoxically contested by the historicity of the name itself: by the history of the usages that one never controlled, but that constrain the very usage that now emblematizes ­autonomy; by the future efforts to deploy the term against the grain of the current ones, and that will exceed the control of those who seek to set the course of the terms in the present.36

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These remarks point to the necessity of negotiating a new status for identity claims and terms. Identity can come back in postmodern thought as an indefinable sort of nonidentity. Identity is one of the primary concepts of metaphysical tradition, but it can also return after the poststructuralist critique of metaphysics in an unsettled and unsettling form as dis-identity, a kind of return of the repressed. Nonidentity (“das nicht Identische”) is a key concept—or rather the key to moving beyond conceptual thinking altogether—for Theodor Adorno in his philosophy of “negative dialectics.”37 Of course, we still need to think in terms of identities in order to think our way beyond them. All this can be considered to lie broadly within the tradition of the Enlightenment and indeed emphasizes the self-critical turn whereby the Enlightenment illuminates and exposes its own myths, including that of identity, whenever it is construed as a sort of pure or natural entity. Enlightenment, along this critical path of thinking, has to think against Enlightenment itself and so turn itself into the dialectic of ­Enlightenment. Clearly, fundamental issues in philosophy that do not admit of defini­ tive answers, but remain inevitably controversial, are engaged here. It is imperative that we recognize something as not resolvable in verbal terms at the bottom of all our discourses. A crucial and difficult question of philosophical logic is whether that indefinable Namelessness which elusively appears here should be recognized as the absolutely and indescribably unique and singular or, alternatively, as the absolutely universal. However that may be, the difference in question is not predicative, but appellative: like the proper name as it is theorized by Franz Rosenzweig, such difference names unique or universal being that cannot be said nor be linguistically determined at all.38 It can, nevertheless, be invoked or called upon as a difference that could be made by one who opts to respond to its silent appeal. Issues of recognizing racial, gender, and class differences have been cast in a new, original light by political and cultural theorists thinking along these apophatic, nonidentitarian lines.39 Creative writers, too, Édouard Glissant, for example, have made indispensable contributions. For Homi Bhabha, postcolonial poets Derek Walcott and Sonja Sanchez, responding to their heritage in the “disjunctive present,” show how “claims to identity must never be nominative or normative.”40 Somewhat similarly, Zygmunt

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Bauman has been influential in bringing into focus the “modern liquidity” of identity.41 I would highlight, furthermore, especially the theologically oriented approaches by feminist thinkers opening up a space for the apophatic, which transcends the oppositional logic of much now institutionalized gender discourse.42 There is a new wave of American feminist theologians who are overcoming traditional tensions that polarized the European and American approaches of an earlier generation. Attunement to a quasi-­ theological dimension of indeterminacy enables them to converge with French feminism and its pursuit of an indefinitely indeterminate ideal of “écriture” (writing).43 French feminists, including eminently Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, have long pursued a reinscription of female identity, whereby the identity of woman as equal and therefore commensurable is not simply asserted against that of man—since that is typical of the oppositional logic that has proved inadequate in the postmodern view—but as irreducibly diverse. Consequently, one of the most fertile fields for development of an apophatic approach today is found in gender studies. A powerful argument for why any gender identity needs to project an ideal for itself to identify with in the shape of its own “God” (Dieu) is made by Irigaray in “Divine Women” (“Femmes divines”).44 This reflection offers a starting point for developing an apophatic approach also to gay rights and transgender consciousness. The apophatic is the key to making these movements about connecting with other groups and identities in order that they valorize one another reciprocally through common relation to an absolute nonidentity above identity (as modeled by “God”). This “divinity” is necessary as an ideal shared in common and potentially uniting all. When identity is expressed and defined, it becomes exclusive. Only in being an avenue toward the inexpressible and nonidentifiable can it serve for harmony and unity. The paradox, however, is that identity as negated can be conducive to, and can actually be necessary for, surpassing the impasses and competitive frictions, or mimetic rivalries, that are generated by identity when it is used in oppositional forms of thinking. There is a dialectical relation between identity and nonidentity—they require and imply each other. A highly sophisticated sociological analysis of the prime importance of the unidentified or “unmarked” in the construction of social dynamics and

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particularly of religion as a symbolic system is developed by Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann, in effect, systematically constructs the social logic of the unidentifiable, or what I would call the apophatic, as a necessary key to interpreting every identity.45 Every mark of identity marks itself against the unmarked, and it is the relation between the marked and the unmarked that originates the peculiar domain of religion.46 The nonidentical generally seems to be hardly worth worrying about. It has no face or front, nor any constituency at all, to represent it. It tends to become invisible. But if we lose sight of it, the conflicts between different identities can only tragically battle out their differences unto death or, at best, effacement and suppression, and in any case inculpation, of one by the other. Most importantly, it is necessary to discern and retain this elusive dimension of the nonidentical in order to deal in a more supple manner with the identities that are overtly declared: we must remember that such identities do not declare everything and that they, in fact, inevitably dissemble what is actually most important about each and every one of us. This existential paradox of asserting identity as necessary, but only for its own negating, also underlies the critical questioning of science vis-àvis humanities disciplines. The latter include, notably, theology, in which identity proves to be irreducibly relational (Trinitarian) and can never be definitively pinned down in finite, context-free terms. Theology, especially negative theology, turns out to be particularly illuminating on these questions of identity, which remain rooted in the mystery of who we are. Classical modern science, in contrast, is based on positively definable properties and identities, but its deeper truth and meaning emerge only when it is viewed against this broader background of the mystery and ultimate nonidentity of persons—human or divine. Hence the continuity of the identitarian concerns presented in this chapter with the dialectic of science and the humanities understood historically in their intrinsic connection with theology—in the spirit of Bonaventure’s “reconduction” of the arts to theology referenced in chapter 7. This dialectic is engaged in the next and final chapter (12). Here I have argued not that the advocates for identity politics are wrong but rather that even what is right in their discourse calls forth a counter-discourse—just as what I am saying cannot claim to be right in itself but requires another’s intervention to curb and correct it.

C h a p t e r Tw e l v e

COGNITIVE UNIVERSALITY BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES

In other contexts concerned especially with the reading and interpretation of classic humanities texts, I have developed what I call “a poetic epistemology of the humanities.”1 That philosophical project endeavors to recuperate science as a quintessentially human activity, one that requires reflective awareness of its own affective and aesthetic motivations. So understood, science must also be cognizant of its moral presuppositions in order to remain humanly responsible and culturally significant. This means that, in order to be meaningful and self-critically aware and complete, scientific knowledge has to be grounded in humanities wisdom rather than the other way around. However, in the university curriculum today, typically it is science that is accorded this foundational role of setting the standards and norms for whatever type of study and reflection. The rhetoric of “demonstration,” “proof,” and “evidence” is likely to prove necessary in order to make even humanities grant applications viable. The critical interpretation of literature, too, among other humanities disciplines, is strongly influenced by scientific models of investigation and proof: such study is classified and assessed at the university as “research.” Scientific methods are not only integral parts of the liberal arts curriculum, but oversee and legitimate knowledge in general. Their authority is virtually incontestable. It becomes difficult even to conceive of any other paradigms to which we might turn. Yet there are other traditions of wisdom 315

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and other hermeneutical approaches offering alternative methods—and even alternatives to method tout court. This recognition is, in fact, central to the vision of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960). Knowledge in the arts and humanities is oriented to different kinds (or at least aspects) of truth proper to domains such as aesthetics or religion or ethics. Creative engagement and the irreducibly singular witness of lived experience with its personal epiphanies can be decisive in forging original, ­autochthonous approaches to truth in the corresponding disciplines and apposite fields of culture and dimensions of the real. These alternative avenues to knowing also assert a kind of claim to universal validity, even though it is a claim transcending strict subsumption under concepts and eschewing abstraction from particular situations and persons, with their unique feelings and intuitions. Even Kant’s philosophy, at the very summit of Enlightenment universalism, evinced the need for alternative canons of truth to account specifically for aesthetic experience, for in this domain judgments of taste cannot be proved by concepts (Critique of Judgment). The same goes for moral knowledge, since it transcends empirical concepts and requires regulative ideas. Religious ideals such as the immortality of the soul and a Last Judgment finally effecting justice, too, cannot be verified experimentally. They are, instead, considered as necessary postulates of practical reason and moral behavior (Critique of Practical Reason). I have in subsequent work attempted to place science, furthermore, in an intercultural perspective that likewise aims to qualify its claims to being a uniquely and self-sufficiently valid frame for all knowledge and inquiry.2 This endeavor entails a historical-cultural approach to an essential issue in religion and cognition, namely, that of conceptualization. I construe the concept as a special form of thought that empowers, but at the same time also separates us from vital resources of our life as beings interacting physically with nature and relating intellectually to reality as a whole. The concept has proved to be an incomparably powerful instrument of thought in rendering possible the technical revolution of modern times. It has resulted in an unprecedented domination of the entire planet by human industry and technology. Yet, there are other dimensions of thought and experience that transcend conceptualization, ones that have been cultivated throughout the ages in the wisdom traditions of various cultures and religions.

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These dimensions tend to be lost in the total and exclusive universalization of conceptual thinking, which is based on objective, categorical, and inevitably oppositional modes, for such modes cannot think the type of whole that lies beyond the sum of finite objects, with their oppositions and ­exclusions. In this final chapter, I undertake to compare and contrast my humanities-­based approach to such holistic awareness with an approach through cognitive science geared to comprehending the activity of our own physical organism as integrated into its environment. Cognitive science lays claim to discovering mental capacities that extend across all cultures and history and even to prehistory as attested by the anthropological record.3 It questions the notion that logical-conceptual thinking is, in any exclusive sense, the invention of the West. At the same time, in making a strong claim for the universality of its theses and findings, cognitive science is liable to fall into some typically and parochially Western modes of thought and expression. It all too frequently runs the risk of becoming just an extension, rather than a critique, of the universal logos of speculative philosophy. Such a logos has been the idol of philosophy ever since its inception in classical Greece, and cognitive science typically proposes to smash such speculative idols by subjecting them to the rigors of empirical research. Nevertheless, in spite of its own critical findings, cognitive science often tends uncritically to promote belief in strictly and purely conceptual thinking as the only possible way to any true knowing. There are thus pitfalls to be eluded, along with important challenges and alluring opportunities, for humanities-­oriented thinking, with its own peculiar kind of critical sense, in undertaking to engage in a dialogue with cognitive science.4 A central tradition of humanistic scholarship in the West has long maintained that Western culture is distinguished especially by philosophy and its supposedly unique logos. This tradition of identifying philosophical logos as the guiding inspiration of Western civilization passes from the ­ancient Greeks through medieval Scholastic philosopher-theologians and Italian Renaissance humanists such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino to German Romantic Idealists such as Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin, and thence to Heidegger and, in his wake, to continental philosophers today. Philosophy, taken as the West’s distinctive invention, has been the major axis for a certain widely accepted reading of cultural

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history. Industrialization and modernization all follow in the train of the concept and its immense transformative power manifest especially in applied technologies. All this is traced to an origin in ancient Greece and ­particularly to philosophy, with its unique brand of critical, conceptual thinking. Such is the narrative promoted most influentially by the likes of Hegel and Heidegger.5 However, this narrative has been challenged and refused by recent cognitive scientists. Cognitive science appeals to current research in order to expose such a generalizing historical synopsis based on the universality of the logos of Western philosophy as consisting, to a considerable degree, in cliché and caricature. And yet the narrative of the evolution of human consciousness that cognitive science substitutes in its place has its own pretensions to universality, a universality now based no longer on intellectual reflection and philosophical speculation, but on supposedly provable physical facts. The physical organism of the human body, and especially of the brain, is asserted as the factual basis for a truly universal understanding of the conditions of human existence. One particularly interesting voice currently articulating such a view is that of Edward Slingerland. As a Sinologist and a scholar of religious studies, specialized in early Chinese thought, and a formidable advocate for cognitive science, Slingerland attempts to bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities. His mission in What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture (2008) is especially to convince humanists laboring under the spell of postmodern epistemological relativism and social constructivism of the bankruptcy of their emptily and futilely theoretical approaches. He aims to make them aware of the need to open themselves up to dialogue with the hard sciences by taking seriously science’s experimental findings based on empirical data. He directs attention particularly to those findings that concern the nature of the human body and brain, or more specifically the investigation of primate brains and bodily functions, especially perception, viewed in an evolutionary perspective. In Slingerland’s understanding, this is the natural basis for a true universality reaching across cultures.6 The discourse of the humanities, with its universalizing claims, of course, arises from the Western intellectual tradition, but it also has wellrecognized analogues in Eastern humanistic traditions emanating from

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India, China, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, such convergences are generally of only incidental interest to cognitive scientists. Cognitive science is seeking a natural rather than only a cultural basis for universality, and such a natural basis would automatically dispossess any given culture of exclusive rights to custody of the supposed keys to universal knowledge. Admittedly, Western culture has no right to claim a monopoly on the invention and diffusion of the idea of universality based on the supposed uniqueness of the discovery of the logos in ancient Greece. Nevertheless, most persistent and perennial intuitions propagated by humanities traditions are not without some basis, even though every explicit formulation inevitably proves in the course of time to be only provisional and parochial, especially in the larger unfolding picture of evolutionary biology. Following just one strand of a typical humanist narrative, some kind of break between thinking in metaphors and myths, on the one hand, and the logical thinking of the concept, on the other, is surely epoch-making for the history of human culture in general.7 Undeniably, too, the West has had a global impact and has been particularly aggressive in the development of such universalizing conceptualization throughout its history, which expands in crucial ways into world history in the modern era of the technological domination of the planet by the human species.8 This originally “Western” destiny has typically been traced, as just noted, from ancient Greece to modern Europe and the world in its everwider application of philosophical or logical rationality, which then becomes increasingly technical. I have already conceded that this sort of development is not the exclusive property of European civilization: it proves rather to be “universal.” However, Slingerland views the universality in question not historically but rather as a matter of natural fact. For him, it is imperative that “the sort of conceptual variation that emerges from comparative religion be contextualized within a framework of basic human cognitive universals—indeed it is this very framework that allows texts or thinkers from another era or cultural context to be comprehensible in the first place.”9 While I am certainly disposed to admit the existence and especially the ideal of cognitive universals, nevertheless my conviction is that the universality of cognitive structures such as those that Slingerland discerns can never quite be pinned down by any express terms. Such universality can be

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elicited from the conversation between cultures, but it inevitably escapes adequate definition in the categories of any one of them. I can agree with Slingerland that “all of this cognitive and cultural innovation has to be seen as ultimately grounded in—and constrained by—the structure of our body-minds.”10 But that structure and those body-minds are not given without some kind of interpretive mediation. We must not assume that bodily experience is a plain fact that can be comprehended or even apprehended without some conceptual framework. Plain nature and brute fact cannot provide adequate terms since, as such, they are mute. A discourse embedded in a certain culture is always required for mediating supposed facts into articulate expression of their significance. This is why the universality of physical structures ought not to be used as a basis for asserting the presumed universality of the method and language of scientific ­explanation. Cognitive science sometimes pretends that this orientation to the body gives definitive answers to the classical problems of philosophy and thereby puts an end to millennia of idle speculation. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson formulate their project this way most extensively in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought.11 But when Johnson elsewhere admits that “because of the limitations of our propositional modes of representation, we have a hard time trying to express the full meaning of our experiences,” he is allowing for something that escapes definitive articulation.12 The unfathomable “mystery” of cognitive operations and “creativity” has been emphasized by a number of other researchers working within the cognitive science paradigm, for example, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner in their work on “conceptual blending,” and this opens a space for a great deal of internal dialectic and debate.13 My own approach takes this unarticulated (and ultimately inarticulable) element from the margin and makes it the center, and in a certain sense the foundation (or rather anti-foundation), of true knowing. The body is not the answer to all questions, but rather a further dense locus of mystery.14 The physical organism is never just a fact but remains always also—however far science advances—an enigma inexhaustible in any vocabulary whatsoever and in spite of whatever encyclopedic elaborations of knowledge are woven around it. On the scale of the universe as a whole, analogously, inventorying however many, even innumerable, causal regu-

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larities can never fully explain the fact that there is something rather than nothing. This fact is of a different order that must be—and historically has been—interpreted by a different sort of discourse, one that is often designated as “metaphysical.” Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz delivers the classic formulation: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (Cur aliquid potius extiterit quam nihil?) in his De rerum originatione radicali (1697). Not only metaphysical but also metaphorical motives unsettle and take the ground out from under any purportedly pure, objective knowledge and language. The logical propositions characteristic of science are, after all, ­explicitly and radically relativized by the cognitive science of Lakoff and Johnson. Propositional knowledge is only the surface of much deeper embodied and unconscious modes of knowing.15 Science does not necessarily give the only, or even a privileged, access to this pre-conceptual, pre-­ scientific type of knowing of how to skillfully operate in the world: the latter is a know-how that operates normally without theoretical or scientific cognizance. Granted that human embodiment is natural and universal, still science has no direct or natural access to it. The access of science to preconceptual experience is never purely natural because science itself is always already encultured. One would like to have the feeling of having delimited the problem of cognition by making it merely a matter of understanding the body, and this is what some believe that neural science is on the way to doing in, at least potentially, definitive terms. However, to think this is to fail to recognize the dynamic, projective, interpretive nature not only of the body but of knowing as such. Human knowing inevitably transcends—­ because it also creates—all of its own frameworks of objectivity. Empirical science is far from being the only valid general framework for knowledge. Other disciplines and modes of thought invite to a poetic vision of things as a whole in other than merely causal terms. This is especially so if causality is reduced to efficient causality alone, neglecting final and formal causality as pre-scientific. Certain Romantics and still Baudelaire believed that universal analogy was the most comprehensive and true science. William Blake succinctly articulates such a conviction in his “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see the World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”

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Cognitive science’s focus on the body-mind is just one example of a creative act metonymically enabling conceptualization of a whole universe of cognitive activity and evolution. It entails a choice of a certain possible basis for understanding the greater whole of humanly accessible reality, but it is not the only possible choice of focus. The putatively spiritual, self-­ reflective, “free” nature of the human being has also very often been taken in tradition as universal and as distinguishing humanity among other species as the “rational animal.” Even though it certainly has its limits, there may be something true in this vision, too. What we have here are different imaginative projections of humanity as a framework for having a world and for structuring reality. The privilege of science is not context-free and unqualified; it is itself circumscribed by a certain defined domain of objects; it cannot command access to reality in any absolute sense. Some maintain, and many assume, that the privilege of science is warranted by its demonstrable pragmatic power, but that, too, is only a relative value confined to certain arbitrarily defined and circumscribed spheres of experience. We do not control nature per se. Our technologically engineered power over nature, our ability to manipulate and control it, comes about only to the extent that we obey nature’s own dictates and dispositions, and even then our power proves to be a two-edged sword to an alarming degree. It can all-too-easily turn into a dystopic power that menaces us, undermining the very basis of life on the planet in our uneasy age haunted by the specter of environmental apocalypse. Our very mastery of some aspects of nature may prove to be our ­undoing, since we only master a circumscribed field and never the total context, nor even all of our own (sometimes unconscious) motivations as a constitutive part of that context.

FIGURING THE LIMITS OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION

Slingerland is attempting to moderate the claims of scientific objectivism, on the one hand, and to deflate the pretensions of postmodernist relativism, on the other, so as to enable a more flexible and fluid approach to accounting for human creativity. Yet he still seems to believe that there is some kind of basic truth to be had on the grounds of the body-mind struc-

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ture of human being and that this is truly universal. Although he generally recognizes that this structure is always given through conceptual frameworks that are culturally mediated (particularly in the section “Putting the Culture in Body” in What Science Offers the Humanities, 210–12), he wants the facts of cognition and its conditions to serve nevertheless simply as commonsense givens and as an incontrovertible starting point for a scientific knowledge of human nature. He affirms, for example, that the world does appear to human beings as made up of discrete objects with clear boundaries and as falling into sharply demarcated ontological classes—living things, objects, agents. Even the basics of algorithmic reasoning seem to come naturally to us: formal operations such as basic arithmetic, geometrical reasoning, modus ponens and modus tollens are not entirely foreign to any conscious, cognitively active human being. What is probably unique to the West is the manner in which, especially since the Enlightenment, the particular cluster of human cognitive abilities encompassed by the label “objectivism-rationalism” has been both obsessively refined and increasingly singled out as the only worthwhile mode of human cognition. It is this fetishizing of what is, in the end, merely one among many ways human beings cope with their world that sets Western epistemology up for the big fall.16 What I find to be missing in Slingerland’s discourse is any acknowledgment that the empirical facts he appeals to are themselves infinitely mysterious in ways that invite and even require (because they are not completely independent of ) unbounded interpretation and discursive elaboration. The physical facts of the human organism that he invokes as setting up constraints to speculation are not discrete and independently accessible: instead, they are always apprehended within an interpretive framework and its attendant language. I grant that physical reality exercises constraints, yet how and within what limits is not fixed by the facts themselves but only in terms of the categories of one discursive framework or another. These facts cannot, therefore, be stated in any neutral terms that are not themselves always already also part of some interpretation. I grant that there is a difference between empirical reality and the discourses woven around it, and

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I grant that the sensory experience of physical phenomena is not just another discourse. Even so, articulate access to this reality is not direct or unmediated. If I pick up a stick, I might be wielding a weapon, or performing a dance, or caring for the environment, and the physical properties of the object in question will be perceived and described differently as a function of these different meanings. Accordingly, I am in agreement with Slingerland about the existence of cognitive universals and about their status as natural rather than as mere cultural artifacts. However, not only is there no neutral or authoritative language for defining such cognitive universals; I believe, furthermore, that reflective knowledge of them can be approached only dialectically and asymptotically by unlimited self-critique exercised from within a given linguistic and cultural system. Slingerland, being a cognitive scientist, would like to recognize natural facts that are not culturally relative as lying at the basis of human knowledge and as constituting its truly universal foundation. I certainly agree with this recognition of something outside of and before language, but things become more difficult when we inevitably resort to a determinate language for expressing this recognition. For expressing this most fundamental level of our experience of reality, there is no adequate or literal conceptual language. This lack in concepts is recognized and demonstrated in detail by cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. What we have at this level of translating dumb experience into speech is rather the language of the imagination. And this language is culturally mediated: the work of the imagination is, arguably, always culturally inflected. Even just the idea of the purely natural and universal conditions of cognition can be approached only through cultural languages of the imagination. Western science forges a certain kind of language based on science’s own cultural imaginary (expressed most often today in the English language, with all the biases conveyed therein), but it is not the only one possible, nor is it necessary or natural. Scientific evidence gathered from experimentation never comes bearing its significance nakedly written on its face or inscribed on the things themselves without interpretation in a language, even if it is evidence of natural facts presumed to be prior to language. Such supposed facts are not simply or immediately available for our appropriation and use without discursive mediation.

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Slingerland, with his brand of cognitive science, would like to be able to dispense with, or at least to circumnavigate, language and to work from natural facts that are universal and that are conceived in more or less the same way, with only minor inflections of difference, from culture to culture. Slingerland maintains that “culturally specific tweakings of the perceptual or conceptual world seem relatively shallow: . . . a rather thin and malleable wafer riding on a deep, massive, and mostly invariant set of ­cognitive universals.”17 He cites researchers who distinguish between core cognition and culture, or between first- and second-order cognition. For example, some form of body/mind dualism turns out to be just such a universal cross-cultural given in Slingerland’s estimation. Cultural differences in conception are minor in comparison with the facts that present themselves naturally and prior to any kind of linguistic or cultural construal. However, even if this is so, nevertheless there is still an epistemological gap between embodied experience and the articulated concept. Cognitive scientists, notably Johnson and Lakoff, have brought out the elaborate unconscious work of the imagination that goes into forming concepts, starting from the experience of pre-conceptual, embodied sensory-motor transactions in the world. This level of physical experience is treated as universal to the species on the basis of a certain body type. Still, to put it into language is another matter and one where culture certainly does count. It is not only, or even principally, the differences between cultures that count here so much as the difference that culture per se makes. There is an ontological—or at least a semiological—gulf between embodied experience and a concept of it formulated in the language proper to any culture whatsoever. This is not a dualism between two constituted orders of things alleged to be without communication or common measure with one another. It marks, instead, a limit to what can be expressed and articulated; this gulf alludes to something more than, and radically different from, what can be said in any finite expression. Making this transition of crossing a threshold from the inarticulate and mute to the verbally expressed may be a purely natural process guided by evolution, but it is still a border crossing that cannot completely account for itself in any language whatever. It is something that life and intelligence do without knowing or being able to explain or say exactly how they do it. The mind possesses no algorithm for accomplishing this (shall

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we say) miraculous feat of crossing the threshold into the symbolic order, which is tantamount to bringing rational reflection itself into existence. Now, Slingerland might well consider this type of analysis to be a mystification. We can learn more and more about the stages and phases, and the ways and means, of this transition that evolution astonishingly accomplishes. There is, for Slingerland, nothing at work here but a purely natural process. However, to say that it is completely “natural” hardly renders it devoid of mystery. What makes us think that natural process is not itself the greatest mystery of all, one figured as divine by peoples of so many and such diverse cultures from all times and places? Why should the otherness called sacred or holy not be found inherent in nature itself? On what grounds can it be excluded? Admitting that the evolutionary process is all natural does not automatically render inapplicable figures of strangeness and absolute otherness such as the idea of the divine. The latter should not be construed as a competing cause in the same ontological order and epistemological register as nature. Instead, divinity figures the limits of the concept of “the natural” to completely explain the comprehensive scheme of things or—more to the point—their very being itself. When we refer to the empirically given as physical reality and project onto it our conception of a mechanistically determined universe of cause and effect, why is this construction more plausible or valid than conceiving of this same empirically given experience in terms of manifestations of the magical or appearings of the miraculous or demonic? It is only a question of whether we focus on explaining particular regularities or on contemplating them from the standpoint of the scientifically incomprehensible, un­ accountable existence of the whole of which they are, in any case, a part. Everything depends on our frame of reference for interpreting the given sensory experience, and that frame is not given by the data of experience itself: it depends on our operative forms of making sense of our experience. This is an imaginative choice and act, one that is inculcated through our belonging to certain types of community to which we adhere through forms of emotional bonding. Nature itself en bloc can always show itself to be radically other to our understanding, no matter how many regularities we may discover in it. The fact that it is at all remains wholly beyond our explanatory powers and our ability to reproduce it. Is this constatation perhaps just a fetishizing of otherness such as occurs also in treating other cultures as incommunicably

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other? I can agree with Slingerland that “it is important to recognize that a fully exoticized ‘Other’ cannot engage us at all, and that the religious or philosophical challenge of texts such as those of early China can only be felt against a background of cognitive universality.”18 And yet, if we erase this margin of otherness vis-à-vis other cultures or vis-à-vis other possible realities and claim to univocally grasp the universally real, the one and only, in our own language, we lose our ability to engage all others who are not already within our language and cognitive paradigm or framework. And we lose the ability to encounter reality as having any intrinsic challenge and recalcitrance—apart from and outside of our domestications of it in our own conceptual system. A puissant reminder of this difference between the real itself and our apprehensions of it comes to us from the ancient Daoist text Zhuangzi, with its uncompromising critique as radical as anything postmodernism produced.19 The universality that is in question, I submit, cannot be simply of the order of a given fact, for it cannot be neutrally defined in any hermeneutics-­ free way. If we forget this, science falls prey to the temptation to take concepts like “demonstration” and “evidence” as self-evident. Such culturally defined and motivated categories are set up as a frame that cannot be questioned rather than as themselves contingent heuristics. My purpose here is not to advocate for some kind of cultural relativism. It is rather to relate our culturally forged conceptions to the real that is as such beyond conception: it is (at least arguably) always only partially and never definitively grasped and translated by our inevitably finite conceptions. Just this sort of self-reflective awareness has been cultivated in ­reflection on the limits of our knowledge and of our language within humanities disciplines, notably in philosophy, theology, and literature, but also, in various ways, in anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, and others. Without this awareness, science assumes authority and forgets the inevitable element of arbitrariness that inhabits any of its choices of a formal language, whatever the constraints imposed by physical reality. The assertions of the physical sciences do not simply assert what directly manifests itself as true. They register, instead, the authority of a certain discourse in our academic institutions. There is some arbitrariness even in our choice of purposing to predict and manipulate and control nature rather than to contemplate and emulate it. The purposes of domination and control can and must be questioned as not just conducing to the greater comfort and

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empowerment of our own species, but also as leading potentially to disaster by undermining the very ecosystem that supports life on the planet. The same type of proposed self-critique must apply equally to any humanities discourse that slides into a posture of self-sufficiency rather than proposing a dialectical intervention into a larger discourse that it does not definitively comprehend. Slingerland is constantly on the lookout for such a “slide,” as he maintains his line between the justified critique of objectivism and the excesses of radical postmodern relativism. But just this vigilance on his part is itself, ironically, a perfect example of taking critical insight into the limits of a given discourse and perverting such insight for the purpose of defining a self-sufficient, all-explaining paradigm of one’s own. Slingerland himself fails to avert such dogmatic perversion when he erects cognitive science—interpreted in his own strictly physicalist and ­declaredly atheist mode—into the position of the key for a “universal decoding.” He ventures to assert that “all of this cognitive and cultural innovation is grounded in—and remains ultimately constrained by—the nature of our embodiment. This means that, even when confronted by the most alien of cultural practices or artifacts, our own body-minds can serve as a universal decoding key.”20 Slingerland propounds his own brand of physicalism—with its concomitant reduction of humans to mechanical systems—as objectively warranted by the evidence. According to him, this is simply the way things are: we are at bottom no different from robots, even if we are determined by evolution in such a way as makes it emotionally difficult or even impossible for us to fully admit this naked truth to ourselves. Slingerland’s most difficult claim in his own estimation is that “as products of a blind process of replication and selection, human beings as a whole—body and mind—­ differ only in degree of complexity from robots or machines: we, like everything in the world, are causally determined, purely physical systems.”21 I do not resist this thesis as one possible description of the human being, but it does not answer my most urgent questions. What is matter, or causality, or the world? If these were known quantities, then admitting the continuity and even the consubstantiality of human beings with them would be a reduction of the human. However, taken at their most fundamental and provocative level, all these “matters” remain bottomless ­enigmas.

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NONDUALISTIC DIFFERENCE AND THE LIMITS OF EXPLANATION

The mind/body dualism is not what truly limits explanation—as if this were some kind of threshold that cannot be crossed. The limit of explanation is to be found rather in the difference between structural formations of determinate entities and the indeterminate, infinite dimension of the whole of reality (at least for us in our finitude here and now). I completely agree with superseding mind/body dualism. What we have are not two different realities but, instead, two different degrees of one continuous reality. There is a range of phenomena that can be dealt with by concepts, but there is also in each type of phenomena the absolute degree that exceeds such discursive and conceptual handling. This is the difference that sets limits to explanation, and such difference is not a dualism at all. The early modern thinking of Spinoza (and even earlier of Duns Scotus) is exemplary here for thinking differing degrees of intensity within the immanence of the phenomenal world. Gilles Deleuze brings this out from his postmodern perspective of a world open to the infinite and indeterminate.22 It is only for secularist modernists that Slingerland’s collapsing of the dichotomy between matter and spirit is so disconcerting and so difficult to accept, for only they are deprived thereby of every form of transcendence. Secularism took the divinity out of matter and the universe and vested it solely in the human spirit, which then proved in due course, thanks especially to the findings of brain research, not to be different from the rest of the real. But the continuity of the natural and the human was already perfectly evident to an ancient poet like Lucretius, who was only following Epicurus’s teaching. Nevertheless, divinity was still present in everything and especially in the cosmos as a whole in most ancient and medieval conceptions of the universe. The divine was one with and was perceived as the wholeness (or essence) of physical reality rather than being set up dualistically in opposition to the materially real. This, of course, meant that the whole was finally infinite and not humanly comprehensible. And that idea frustrates the claim of science to explain everything causally. But science should realize that, while it may be able to give some causal explanation of every phenomenon it encounters, causal explanation is always a limited

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e­ xplanation of one thing in terms of some others and not a total explanation of the very fact that any of them exist at all. Why, then, should causal determination be the default position for all our understanding? It can enable us to manipulate particular phenomena, but not to understand the whole. Why should explanation necessarily work from the simplest, most basic levels to the more complex? This depends, finally, on what we want to explain. The vector of explanation can also point in the opposite direction. Depending on one’s aims and purposes, the existence of consciousness can be just as necessary to explain matter and to explain explanation itself, which is nothing if not an intentional phenomenon of consciousness. Eastern, particularly Hindu, philosophy stresses this priority of consciousness. Which view we decide to adopt depends on our goals and cultural dispositions, and even on personal and intellectual temperaments. In ways contingent on all these factors (and many more), our underlying view of the world is not finally proved but is rather presupposed. Even for Aristotelian logic, the ultimate premises of argument cannot be proved but must be assumed as self-evident. The intuition that our human reality is of a piece with everything else in the sublunary world and in the supercelestial universe is not necessarily reductionist and is often part of the central tradition of the humanities in its classic sources of cosmological vision. Still, we require different languages for speaking about different aspects of this one reality. Language can never adequately grasp and articulate the real as a whole and all the way down to its roots. This is underscored equally by ancient Neoplatonic speculation, most radically in Damascius, and by ancient Chinese sources of wisdom such as the Dao-de-jing. In fact, the differentiation of the real and its segmentation into categorically different realities itself has to be understood as taking place only in and by virtue of language. So language cannot be treated as just a secondary or derivative reality. Why should molecular machinery be considered to be the basis of complex moral reasoning? Why accord priority status to material explanation? Because it works? But it is not the explanation qua explanation that works. It works only relative to our specific aims. What is a good explanation, finally, is a matter of meaning and has to be judged by intellectual satisfaction rather than by material results. Matter never explains everything all the way down. Instead, it is only certain configurations of matter

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that can be explained in terms of certain others. The existence of matter itself, its having being rather than being nothing, and its having any order at all (as opposed to its having specific dispositions of order), is a mystery that cannot be definitively accounted for by any innerworldly causal explanations.23 In some sense, this mystery of existence contains and informs and pre-explains (albeit by not allowing analytical explanation) everything else that material causation proves to be capable of explaining. Slingerland, in the manner cited, defines his own ultimate belief. He does so in very personal terms from the very beginning of his book (but also later on, especially on pages 286–87). This way of proceeding, I submit, is more a poetic than a scientific gesture and method. It is necessary for emotionally satisfying self-expression, but not for dispassionate, objective investigation of the nature of reality. The two may not finally be separable, but it is important to recognize that Slingerland’s appeal, considered in the light of cognitive science and its analysis of metaphors, works primarily at this emotional level more than at the level of intellectually compelling argumentation. An atheist must have a concept of God in order to disbelieve it. To this extent, an atheist is still a theist, even if of a negative type. Apophatic thinkers, in contrast, recognize language like that for God as belonging to the realm of things—or rather of the Nothing (no objectifiable thing)—for which there are no adequate concepts. This realm cannot perhaps be humanly engaged without some element of myth or belief, or even of what is best called faith, be it even faith in science. This is the background from which religions emerge throughout the ages. It is the ground or ungrounding (Meister Eckhart’s or Jakob Böhme’s ungrunt) that is interpreted through religious ideas, or better through non-concepts such as divinity— concepts that dismantle themselves in recognition of their own inadequacy, when understood in a negatively theological way. On this account, scientifically defined objects cannot be the base or the bottom line of our knowledge. Scientific explanation is itself already building on another kind of knowing, an ignorant knowing or knowing ­ignorance—a docta ignorantia, in the terms made current by Nicolaus Cusanus—as far as the articulations of scientific language and of language in general are concerned (chap. 2). This knowing aims at the pre-­propositional and pre-conceptual experience of reality that can be

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i­ nterpreted as the apophatic: indeed, it has been so interpreted throughout the history of thought. Cusanus stands within a multi-millenary tradition of apophatic thinkers from Heraclitus to Heidegger that embraces both scientific spirits and humanistic geniuses from antiquity to postmodern times. In fact, many of these thinkers—like Cusanus himself—were both.

HUMANITIES AND THE HUMAN GROUNDS OF SCIENCE

I am very much in agreement with a certain idea of vertical integration of knowledge from the humanities down through the natural sciences, but not with the idea that the sciences are the basis of the humanities. It is not the case that explanations in physical and causal terms convey the most fundamental level of knowledge and that, consequently, speculation in the humanities should be constrained by this inescapable baseline for truth. The notion of “consilience” proposed by Edward O. Wilson subjects all knowledge to a unified causal scheme, but such a scheme is really only one conceptual apparatus, one of a highly objectifying nature. The integration of the disciplines envisaged by Slingerland on such a basis ought not to stop with physical science and its molecules or atoms, or with any other concepts and constructions. There is something else that imperatively needs to be integrated into knowledge—or rather to be acknowledged at the limits of knowing as what cannot be so integrated. It is treated by Mark Johnson, for one, in convincing detail as the pre-conceptual experience of embodiment.24 Exact or empirical science, however, does not have exclusive, or even privileged, access to this reality. In fact, this “reality” or irreality is grasped at all only by means of imaginative metaphors. There is something encountered at this level of cognition that cannot be smoothly integrated into the continuum of knowledge that Wilson and Slingerland envisage. In descending into the depths of the body beyond the reach of language, knowledge encounters the unknowable. There is here an epistemic break. It is not a dualism because the two realms are not of the same order at all and cannot be ranged alongside one another. Still, they remain completely interdependent and interpenetrating. Their relation is more like that between Being and beings in the Heideggerian notion of ontological difference or like that between God and the world in a mono-

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theistic, creationist theology in which the world has no ontological subsistence independent of God, from whom all beings in every moment derive. Researchers like Slingerland might feel that this kind of break in the causal chain of explanation poses no problem because evolution knows how to negotiate and traverse it. Nevertheless, how evolution does this ­remains a mystery to us, and that is why in this case evolution itself may be understood as a “theological” event or process. No matter how much more we know, our enhanced knowledge only brings us more directly face to face with an inexhaustible mystery. The mystery in question is simply not of the order of the knowable. This fact becomes invisible only if we, like Slinglerland, choose to concern ourselves only with investigating how things work or with what as a matter of fact objectively exists rather than with the fact that anything is at all. The latter is what Wittgenstein in Tractatus 6.522 recognized as the inexpressible (“das Unaussprechliche”) or the mystical (“das Mystische”). “Explaining” can mean reducing to uninteresting mechanisms, or it can lead to opening up to contemplation the inexhaustible mystery of life and being. I think that at the bottom of such a difference there is ultimately a matter of choosing our beliefs and even our faith. If we take matter in motion as the bottom line of the real universe, and consider it to be dead and opaque, then we explain things by reducing them to postulates that may seem (or seemed, to a classical scientific worldview) to admit of no mystery. However, if we believe that being and life and matter itself are mysteries to their core, then “explanations” are ways of access to the discerning and contemplation of these mysteries. Lakoff and Johnson admit that knowledge is deeply rooted in the unconscious, and they use the famous “invisible hand” metaphor to describe its enigmatic operations. They suggest that “our unconscious conceptual system functions like a ‘hidden hand’ that shapes how we conceptualize all aspects of our experience.”25 One might argue that this is only a metaphor, but Lakoff and Johnson constantly stress the constitutive nature of metaphor as forging understanding rather than only elaborating fancifully on what can be described independently in literal terms. Mark Turner, too, in Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism, plumbs the mysteries of metaphor in venturing to make humanities scholarship, particularly literary criticism, work together in synergism with the science of cognitive linguistics.26 An issue that I wish to raise, then,

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is that of whether Slingerland’s use of cognitive science is in line with this current’s own deepest intentions and most far-reaching implications. The emphasis on empirical research is an important point of reference. But is this research best used for a unified causal explanation of the universe, as in certain versions of the tradition of the Enlightenment, or does it rather serve best for illuminating the unconscious darkness in which knowledge is rooted because it is lived and felt in the body?27 My proposal is that cognitive science can be understood as a project for exploring what in terms of a certain strand of humanities tradition can be called the apophatic body.28 Speculation and research in this case are not in a dichotomous relationship. Reflection in the tradition of negative theology has come to conscious recognition of its frontier with the inexpressible aspects and never exhaustively soundable depths of the body. Cognitive science does not have to impose an already achieved model of science on knowing generally: it can, instead, be part of the open exploration of what it is to know. The basis in embodiment does not need to operate as a dogma used to invalidate other approaches as erroneous because not adhering to the mind–body continuum as the one valid key for universal decoding. This factor does not have to be the explicit and exclusive foundation for knowledge, even if it is always in some way operative even in speculative forms of knowing that do not focus on it thematically. Slingerland sees the humanities as part of a comprehensive system of explanation of the universe. He enlists them into the service of scientific progress: To move forward as a field of human inquiry, the humanities need to plug themselves into their proper place at the top of this explanatory hierarchy, because the lower levels have finally advanced to a point that they have something interesting to say to the higher levels. Human-level meaning emerges organically out of the workings of the physical world, and we are being “reductive” in a good way when we seek to understand how these lower-level processes allow the higher-level processes to take place.29 This is meant as a conciliatory gesture, but it remains one-sided. The order of explanation and its “allowing” or “enabling” can go in the other

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direction, too. In many respects, the sciences should be ordered to the purposes of the humanities rather than the reverse. While molecules say what structures of thought can be physically supported, it is human beings who say, depending on their aims and contexts, what theories will be taken to be more fundamental and will be preferred for delivering the more important and vital kind of knowledge. Only we can decide this, even if we are not different from our molecules. They, too, are decisive at their own level and in their own way, but “we” are the ones who are answerable at the human level of giving reasons and explanations. These are not alternative explanations but rather parts of a whole that neither level of explanation could possibly encompass and complete. The fact that some kinds of knowledge enable more efficacious manipulation of the material world does not decide which aspects of the world, including our mental worlds, are most in need of being structured and foregrounded by the theories or pragmatic beliefs or religions that we adopt. Slingerland perhaps assumes that survival and pragmatic purposes are simply given throughout our evolutionary history as our goal and that this cannot be questioned or critiqued—or at least that doing so would be pointless, or suicidal, or evolutionarily regressive. He is taking the normative question to be answered by the facts of human evolution. This is to deny the split between fact and value, and I agree with dismantling that dualism. But Slingerland’s way of doing so gives priority to fact and makes it determinative for value, which is too unilateral. Facts need to be seen in their relativity to values, as well as vice versa. The physical apparatus is not simply the given basis for all our knowledge and cognition: it is also a fact within the human process of evaluating everything as to its importance and assigning things specific purposes. We do this even before any specific concept of a physical apparatus becomes objectively defined or is knowable for us. Which facts are recognized as primary depends on our evaluations and is not in and of itself already a primary fact. I agree about according a certain priority to what simply is—to what is phenomenologically given before all social or symbolic constructions. But why this given should be considered dead matter more fundamentally than a living creation, or even an eternal emergence of divine power and energy, is not evident. This view depends on a choice of metaphors and conceptual systems. Slingerland is pretending that there is a certain

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r­ eality—one disclosed through the study of body and brain—that is necessarily the baseline and foundation for any true understanding of human cognition and knowledge. However, admitting the mind’s dependence on a physical organism does not explain it. The mystery of life and being is in the physical itself. Cognitivism is convincing in breaking concepts down to their physiological, functional dependency on body and sensory-motor activity. But its finding this bodily activity and this physical nature to be basic in terms of a certain type of “explanation” must not be mistaken with having definitive concepts of the body-mind apparatus. Both mind and body, as living realities beyond our conceptual figments, prove to be infinitely elusive and impossible to define in any literally adequate terms. What everything is ultimately referred to in cognitive science is not as such sayable. Only certain selected aspects of the physical organism are articulated and explained in terms of others. And even then, the explanation proceeds only in terms of certain well-defined and circumscribed factors in those other things. The empiricist assumption that the world consists in independently knowable discrete particulars is a metaphysical assumption undermined by the researches of cognitive science itself, which in this regard meet up with more mystical understandings of the nature of reality that bring to light the limits of the scientific paradigm as such. Hence the necessity for more ­supple and flexible understandings of scientific investigation and of the object-world that it projects. In this respect, certain discourses in the humanities, notably classical Chinese wisdom and worldviews, can productively contribute to our holistic sense of what knowledge is and thus help to revise our understanding of scientific method—and of the very idea of an objective empirical reality—in essential ways. Slingerland’s work, as I understand it, is inspired by this kind of conjunctive marriage of paradigms across very great comparative distances and disparities between periods and cultures.30 Yet Slingerland seems to want to rely on a supposedly direct and evident relation of concepts to physical facts, whereas cognitive scientists such as Lakoff and Johnson emphasize that “we have no direct conscious access” even to the mind’s operation and therefore to our own thought. This means for them that “phenomenological reflection, though valuable in revealing the structure of experience, must be supplemented by empirical research into the cognitive uncon-

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scious.”31 Crucial here is that empirical research is not portrayed as the foundation of knowledge but rather as a necessary supplement. The same point is registered again in the remark that “since most thought is unconscious, the mind cannot be known simply by self-reflection. Empirical study is necessary.”32 In light of this, the pretension on the part of some cognitive scientists that empirical knowledge renders obsolete classical philosophical insights such as Plato’s seem to me exaggerated and unwarranted. Empirical research gives one angle of vision for understanding them, but not the single right explanation of phenomena. Although Lakoff and Johnson take a blanket oppositional stance to classical philosophy at the outset of their Philosophy in the Flesh, they do admit little by little the profound insights of philosophers across the ages, even if they still wish to give their own thought a rhetorical posture as revolutionary and virtually unprecedented. There is, however, a figure in the history of philosophy whom most cognitive scientists seem not to take any notice of, so far as I am aware. The thrust of their program of tracing the bases of human cognition to metaphorical projection in our language from bodily experience is actually central all along to the tradition of the humanities as crystalized particularly in the work of Giambattista Vico, especially his New Science (La scienza nuova) (1744). Vico’s insights were picked up on by Herder among others and have been paralleled by the likes of Nietzsche and Ernst Cassirer. Particularly the constitutive role of metaphor in structuring linguistic meaning and experience itself has been explored in this branch of humanities tradition hailing from ancient rhetoric.33 Vico’s thought is recognized by some humanists as offering the most vital and original theorization of the epistemological foundations of the humanities.34 Lakoff and Johnson work out explanations by cognitive science of how the idea or, more technically, the “image schema,” for example, of BALANCE, as applied across such divergent fields as penal justice and environmental ecology, is grounded in basic bodily experience. Their elaborations are very interesting, but the poetic invention of such connections, as expressed by Vico in his analysis of the etymological roots of abstract terms in physical fact, are in some respects more penetrating than the detailed accounts evoking empirical research for proving what can also be made intuitively evident to acute observation. Marcel Danesi contends explicitly

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that cognitive theories of the last two decades of the twentieth century consist in giving a “Vichian turn” to linguistics “without realizing it” (“la linguistica oggi . . . ha preso una svolta vichiana . . . senza che lo sappia”).35 For Danesi, the Vichian vision furnishes “a theoretical frame for deepening in a substantive way everything that today is being ‘discovered’ by linguistic and psychological science” (una cornice teorica per approfondire in modo sostanziale tutto ciò che oggi viene “scoperto” dalle scienze linguistiche e psicologiche).36 Vico, in Danesi’s view, even furnishes “precise suggestions for scientific research.”37 In any case, the predilection for a certain kind of evidence and proof as superior is a cultural choice and remains relative to one’s chosen values. Other sorts of explanation are not intrinsically less worthwhile. They are simply less conformable to the aims and outlooks of certain societies and groups.

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH, REFLEXIVITY, AND THE LIMITS OF SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVITY

Cognitive science prides itself on giving explanations that are more complete and satisfactory than all those given before in the merely intuitive mode of traditional speculative philosophy. It supplies empirical proof for what previously was only conjectured. The mode of scientific explanation of everything in terms of physical causes seems to certain scientists to be definitive, even if always susceptible of further refinement in detail. This is the ethos, or at least a certain ethos, of science—of a science that believes in progress. But what counts as adequate explanation is relative to our needs and interests, and these are not simply given: they are chosen and construed in interested, and therefore always questionable and criticizable, ways. Patently, then, one of the crucial issues in the challenge that cognitive science presents is that of the place accorded to empirical research. In the tradition of the humanities, such research counts as suggestive and as useful for illustrating crucial conceptual differences and imaginative schema. Rarely, if ever, however, does it prove anything significant simply on its own. Research always requires interpretation in order to be meaningful. Scientific data are not a foundation but only a stock of materials to be

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­ anipulated by those propounding a certain theoretical outlook, or at least m building a structure of thought. Yet the spirit of cognitive science is to make empirical research basic to all genuine knowledge. Mark Johnson proceeds by following the lead of what researchers discover about various systems of perception. This is an enriching source of ideas and opens paths for reflection. It even has the advantage of taking its point of departure from “things themselves” and so orients us to objectivity. Still, empirical research cannot itself be the absolute foundation for knowledge because its meaning is always a matter of interpretation and is always inscribed into an interpretive framework that it only contributes to making. My own claim, on the other hand, is that there is something about the vocation of the humanities that makes its knowledge not just another know-how. Furthermore, this ultra-utilitarian, thing- and world-­ transcending quality of knowledge must not be elided or ignored because it is presupposed unthematically by any thought or consciousness whatsoever. This level of reflexive awareness points to something—an aspect of reality—that remains outside of Slingerland’s integrative approach based on science. Still, my approach, too, is emphatically integrative and does not exclude even empirical science. Science, too, must be understood as human knowing, but it is only a restrictive form of such knowing geared, most often and most closely, to pragmatic ends. Meeting such ends is not the only purpose of the exercise of our cognitive abilities. In the vast arc of the evolutionary development of life, ­explicit theorization is perhaps a more recent mode than pragmatic engagement in the world. But it is, at the same time, and in important respects, an extension of modes such as myth-making and theologizing, which are in turn based on ageless forms of awareness such as dreaming and imagining. A record of such a mentality is found, for example, in the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira. There is in premodern and primordial cultures a very considerable history (and an even vaster prehistory) of types of contemplation based on, and yet reaching far beyond, the compass of thought that limits itself to seeking to achieve practical ends. Cognitive scientists emphasize that the world is interactional: what we perceive, say Lakoff and Johnson, is dependent on our “neural makeup” and on our practical “purposes and interests” as embodied beings moving within a world.38 There is no objective world with primary qualities for

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such cognitive scientists. We must, then, also ask, are these bodily and ­neural things objective facts? What seems to be refused or elided in this philosophy is the need to reflect on science’s own basic terms, too, as interactionally and interpretively constructed. Without some conceptual vocabulary, no objects whatever can be apprehended as such. Cognitive scientists tend to take insights and knowledge tied to the body-mind apparatus as the only, or as the most basic, truths rather than as simply a selection of the knowledge that interests them most. There is, however, also a reflexive element in knowledge: we know our knowing, and this reflectiveness we can know even more directly than any objects.39 Admittedly, the cognitive apparatus that serves in knowing is crucial to the content of knowledge. Still, it is not a uniquely privileged object of knowledge. Cognitive science, by focusing exclusively on the brain and on bodily experience as the sources and grounds of all knowing, selects a certain content, indeed a certain object, but it does not consider self-critically its own manner of knowing this object of choice. That manner is not objective, and our knowing realizes this, if it reflects more fully on itself. This, then, is where the issue of reflexivity arises—of self-reflexivity and even of infinite reflexivity. Cognitive scientists, and notably Slingerland, typically reject postmodern indeterminism. However, this rejection carries conviction and is justified only if indeterminism is asserted as itself describing the objectively true nature of reality. An apophatic approach avoids all such assertion and thus remedies this flaw in dogmatic forms of indeterminism. Apophatic thought admits that, beyond all our cognitive determinations, the real remains: it has its own uncategorized and inexhaustible nature—or what, at any rate, never discloses itself to us completely and definitively. A concerted critique of scientific objectivism is mounted by Slingerland himself in the first chapter of his book What Science Offers the Humanities. And cognitive science as formulated by Lakoff and Johnson explicitly recognizes that there are no objective facts because the cognitive apparatus of the embodied subject fundamentally determines all that can be perceived as fact. But cognitive science does not seem to turn the same critical eye upon such supposed objects as “body” and “brain” themselves. Why should they be exempted and treated simply as unconstructed, objective facts? Is there a restricted but residual objectivism in cognitive sci-

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ence that applies only to our neural apparatus and to our bodily structure and function? A privileged epistemological status seems to be accorded to these physical organisms. But as “organs” and “objects” and “material” are they not also produced or construed by metaphor? We have no unmediated gnoseological access to the literal brain or body; we have only metaphors for them. One can argue that body and brain are primary because they are the enabling conditions of all our knowledge, but the same argument can, and I think should, be made for language and thought as enabling conditions of all knowing. They, too, are conditions of all our articulate, discursive knowing. The pre-propositional is itself approached through ­language—exemplarily in the books written by cognitive scientists themselves. Our knowledge of any knowing that is prelinguistic passes through linguistic filters in order to be recognized and designated as “knowledge.” One can subject the body and the brain to exacting scientific investigation that produces a wealth of precise information about them. This enables research projects to be conceived and to garner funding in the form of research grants. It does not, however, make these objects in themselves fundamentally different from every other type of object of our knowledge. All such objects are construed by metaphorical thinking and are thus ­determined by our human interests and purposes. Most importantly, the ­differences in question concern what kinds of knowledge possess power and prestige in specific institutional contexts.

CONSILIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC REDUCTIONISM

Slingerland staunchly defends scientific method as offering the best kind of model for knowing, even though he tries to bring it into a relationship of mutual acceptance and communication with the humanities and their forms of knowing. He undertakes to modify the original consilience project of E. O. Wilson in ways that might make it more palatable to humanists. He wishes to reassure those to whom consilience appears to be just a way of breaking down and digesting all humanities knowledge into strictly ­scientific terms. At the same time, however, he means to defend a form of scientific reductionism as necessary to genuine understanding that amounts to more than merely empty verbal restatements of obvious facts. He wants

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to move beyond the more naïve assumptions underlying the idea of knowledge as supposedly objective representation of an object, yet he finds in modified scientific explanation of phenomena the only path forward for research and knowledge of the real. Slingerland maintains that reduction is in any case necessary for any interesting and productive explanation at all. Without reduction, we are just restating what things are in some kind of jargon rather than showing why they are the way they are. An explanation sheds light by making things understandable in some more basic terms, and this applies to humanistic, just as much as to scientific, explanation.40 Yet, whenever some aspect of a phenomenon is explained in this way and generates some kind of insight, the phenomenon as a whole remains in shadow, and whatever is being explained about it leaves numberless other, further aspects still unaccounted for. No explanation of given features annuls the inexplicable fact that something is at all. The idea that explanations in terms of lower-level entities such as DNA molecules give more true and convincing and definitive explanations than those more vague hypotheses available to Mendel and Darwin in terms of the science of their times betrays only a predilection for determinate information over more open and flexible, more metaphorical concepts. This is finally a matter of preference as to what is more intellectually satisfying, and it belongs to the phase of being enamored of one’s own constructed explanatory tools for focusing on certain select aspects of things rather than of being open to the mystery of what stands before us in the spectacle of nature as a whole. This spectacle constantly invites us into direct relations with the actual happening of the real that exceeds any and all of our conceptual schemes. The reduction always explains only a particular aspect of things and should not be taken as disenchanting the whole world in which they exist, but rather as foregrounding all the more the mystery of their being and working in precisely determined ways within a whole order of things. Meanwhile, that order itself remains forever beyond our ability to account for it as a whole. Only certain aspects and respects are explained and can be explained within the artificially defined frameworks imposed by our analysis leveraging one science or the other, with its associated instruments. Such explanations divest phenomena of nothing at all of their global incomprehensibility. The fact that thunder and lightning, for example, can

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be explained by friction among molecules within vaporous cloud masses, and by the electricity that this friction generates, does not explain either that electricity is or the fact that the cloud masses—and their constitutive ­elements—exist. The earth itself cannot finally be explained as to why it (or the universe itself, for that matter) is there in the first place. We may be able to explain further aspects relating to how electricity functions, and we can even produce it by artificial means. But can we produce those means themselves? We can do so always only by recourse to other means that we find already given to us in nature. We must always start with some materials that are given to us and that we do not ourselves create. By such procedures, we never know things truly and definitively, but only ­hypothetically—until proof to the contrary concerning what we had taken to be their modus operandi. That nature is at all and that it has any order remains completely beyond the scope of our understanding. Moreover, what its total, overall order is beyond the limited aspects of it that we investigate in any given experiment or theory—aspects that we can learn to control to some extent—is never scientifically explained. We can choose not to want to concern ourselves with such ultimate questions. This is a choice to be more interested in what we can know than in what we cannot know—at least not definitively and exhaustively. It is a choice to concentrate on the objects created and enclosed by our framing devices and their determinate empirical schema rather than to contemplate the unlimited—the open mystery of being and life in the universe. Truly evenhanded consilience would require keeping these two possible directions of our inquiry together rather than splitting them apart as belonging respectively to the realms of insight and illusion, the way Slingerland, evoking Nietzsche, does.41 Nietzsche reduces Kantian moral theory to German foolishness (niaiserie allemande), but the comedy Nietzsche finds there is more serious than Slingerland allows. Kantian moral theory probes some vital aspects of our experience and potential as moral beings, ones that the measures of physical phenomena do not capture—and not because they belong to a different ontological order, but simply because of the different conceptual frameworks that are applied in order to sound out profoundly different aspects of reality. The reality in question is, in itself, neither one nor many: it can be such only according to our various ways of apprehending and construing it.

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To focus exclusively on nature as presented through our explanatory filters is to block out recognition that it is in itself always something more than this. To keep to such a focus means not to care to know reality truly, but rather to reduce the scope of our interest and care to only what it is for us as measured and manipulated in certain dimensions specified and determined by our interests and instruments. This, after all, is a form of navelgazing, an immature attitude of being so enamored of one’s own inventions as to miss seeing the greater whole in which they flourish and exist. Like Ulysses, in Kafka’s parable, completely taken with the cleverness of his technical inventions (putting wax in his ears, etc.), we make ourselves deaf to hearing the silence of the sirens.42 The larger picture places one, with one’s own ingeniously devised mechanisms for regulating and filtering one’s exchanges, within a boundless universe that is inexhaustible in its otherness. That strangeness can be terrifying to encounter and acknowledge, but to shut it out is asphyxiating and cuts us off from “life” and “being,” or from the inconceivable mysteries that have inspired and informed such unmasterable notions as these. For strictly empirical sciences, such terms can be but empty ciphers, names for what exceeds our comprehension, even while it astonishingly saturates our senses, overwhelms our capacity for experience, and calls us into novel forms of relation and invention such as poetic composition and creation. Such forms certainly include also religious rites. Once it is admitted that humanities and sciences alike are more fundamentally about what can never be definitively explained, even more than about any defined field of objects, then the compatibility of the two types of study is not a problem. The sciences do not set up the obligatory frame for any valid type of inquiry. Instead, they are themselves just attempts to get a certain kind of handle on a territory that in itself, or in its own proper nature, is unchartable. It may be that “all that consilience demands is that explanations for higher level phenomena—such as ethics, morality, and ­religion—should take account of any limits that are set by well-established hypotheses concerning lower-level phenomena.”43 However, both types of study are dealing ultimately with a reality that is unlimited by any human parameters and boundaries. These different types of discipline can illuminate, but not delimit, one another—unless they are using the same humanly fashioned instruments or are investigating the same aspects of the real. In that case, they may be able to mutually reflect on and criticize one

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another, but still none is in a position simply to regulate or integrate all the others into one authoritative system. In fact, Slingerland acknowledges a possibility for reciprocal influence between science and humanities within the consilience project: “This exploration can move in either direction along the ‘vertically integrated’ chain of explanation. It is not the case that the sciences simply set limits upon the humanities, but it is also possible that work in the humanities may ­require reformulation of scientific hypotheses.”44 Understood thus, consilience is to be embraced and pursued. The limits of scientific explanation should point to the need for exploration by means proper to the humanities. Among the things needing to be “explained” are the enigmas of life and society and also the nature and limits of science itself. Slingerland envisages unifying the two different kinds of “research” carried out at the university. However, the envisaged integration actually needs to reach much further and also to acknowledge its limits ­vis-à-vis what cannot be integrated. It can do so by striving to go beyond such “disciplined” ways of knowing and thereby to communicate with the myriad ways of unknowing that are just as essential to making us human— in a sense of “human” that is expressed in cultures and religions and arts long before any systematic type of research activity begins. In fact, “research” was pursued most originally by primordial humans in just such ­activities as inventing symbols and creating myths and performing rites. The “urgency” of the call “to achieve consilience” comes not, or not only, from any need to nail down and agree on the right explanation of phenomena, but rather from the exigency of opening us up to the inexplicable in a manner that creates relationships of harmony and fruitfulness among us and reaching even beyond us. Implicated, ultimately, are relations with everything else that exists within the All. The consilience project presupposes “an overall shared conception of the nature of reality and the goals of human knowledge.”45 Missing here, however, is an acknowledgment that every actual experience of reality is unique and that its mastery by explanation reduces and eventually digitalizes it in abstract and artificial forms.46 There is surely a dialectic concerning the goals of human knowledge that needs to be worked over in debate between the sciences and the humanities. More than a shared conception of reality, the richness of our

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d­ ifferent conceptions in relating to the inconceivable is perhaps to be prized as the most important source of cross-fertilization. In any case, this irreducible disparity is not to be preempted or circumvented by any conception of consilience that conforms already essentially to the scientific understanding of reality and human knowledge. This understanding has developed in the modern scientific age without critical awareness, and often with deliberate forgetting, of the historical conditions and limits of its paradigm in the much larger arc of human cultural history. In a longer historical and prehistorical perspective, reality and knowledge have meant and been many different things to countless cultures and civilizations. This diversity is multiplied further by individual sensibilities, as expressed eminently by poets and artists in all ages. This is especially, or most explicitly, so in the modern age, when collective knowing has seemed to some to shrink to just the ­empirical knowledge of nature. What people all agree on and see the same way is not necessarily true; it is, in fact, typically not the kind or degree of truth and insight sought and conveyed by the most original texts in the humanities. There is an irreducible singularity to the poetic vision of Goethe or Shakespeare, an inspiration that cannot be understood in just one publicly acceptable way but has instead to be appropriated variously by innumerable interpreters according to their own individualized contexts and circumstances and temperaments. Not everything true and profound can be proved and publicly verified. Heidegger spoke of “the they” (das Man) as producing an inauthentic knowledge that belonged to no one. In revolt against this predicament, existentialism was searching for an authentic knowing or unknowing that is individual, personal, and true-to-life experience without recourse to generalizable verities. Common knowledge is not the only, nor necessarily the highest, ideal of knowing. Scientists have often conceived of a knowledge of things that would no longer be mediated by history or language, or by personal experience, but would rather be one and the same for all and perfectly conformable with things themselves—with natural things as given in empirical experience. Such a characteristica universalis would cut out all the complicated and contentious mediations introduced by human perception and imposed on things themselves. But “knowledge” is not fundamentally a matter of knowing an object as it is in itself so much as of constructing a world in which to live and

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think. This makes it a project of creative individual expression. Some aspects of it exceed and escape collaborative, consensual formulation. Consequently, one task of the humanities is to find appropriate ways to communicate personal knowing. Such knowing can be communicated not directly in formulas that are the same for all, but only by appropriation in one’s own personal terms and contexts and circumstances. Humanities education teaches techniques for such interpretation, but ultimately it is the inventiveness of individuals and their own creativity that needs to be encouraged and fostered. It may be a Romantic notion, but the idea that the humanities are based on a body of creations of individual and unique geniuses is not all wrong. A corresponding creativity in their reception, moreover, is called for and is necessary for such works to be appreciated. This becomes especially and conspicuously so for modern artworks.

THE DIVERSE MOTIVES AND MATRICES OF HUMAN KNOWING

The consilience project proposes a framework for studies in the sciences and the humanities alike. It is very much in the spirit of a unified field theory in science, or of ecumenicalism in religion. In either case, it envisages working together in order to overcome the unnecessary, artificial barriers erected by humans and their divergent ideologies, even where the aims and object of their concern is one and the same. As human beings we are obliged to learn to live together and to share one world in common. Consequently, having a unified framework seems to impose itself as a natural necessity. My conviction, nevertheless, is that what can ultimately unite us is not a determinate framework that we can share. Only what is beyond every framework and what remains recalcitrant to all kinds of conceptualization and enframement (Heidegger’s Gestell ) is truly universal and, in effect, c­ apable of forging a consensus or commonality without exclusions. The human conditions of finitude and of being encultured will inevitably make every formulation of a framework somewhat tendentious and u ­ nacceptable—or at least not well adapted—to some potential participants. Only by fostering a relation to what exceeds every framework can

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we bring a h ­ umanity engaged in diverse types of research and intellectual inquiry into nonconflictual and mutually nondestructive relations. More than searching for the common denominator, a single paradigm to impose on all, an approach that acknowledges the impossibility of such an enterprise can open us to the unity and universality that we cannot on our own achieve. We can live in relation to and in openness toward this goal of a shared universality only to the extent that we renounce trying to define it in terms that are simply our own. The humanities do not belong exclusively within the university. The vocation of the humanities in the university is partly to keep research open to and connected with life outside the campus precincts—with the extended social contexts that alone can make knowledge humanly relevant. I propose such service for the humanities not as a social duty, but simply as a necessary condition for maintaining the vitality of the search for knowledge. Scientists often uphold the autonomy of the drive to know, emphasizing that knowledge is sought for its own sake. Still, like everything else human, this type of endeavor—doing research—is to a considerable degree socially motivated. It is far from pure of interestedness, nor is it selfsupporting: it will etiolate and die if it cuts itself off from other vital human endeavors. The human value and meaning of research depends on the univer­ sity’s maintaining a relationship with other contexts and parallel sorts of activities taking place outside its ivy-covered walls. Much of what concerns the humanities in particular is best practiced and pursued best in zones ­exterior to the university and independent of its ethos of research— for instance, in artistic milieus and religious institutions, or in other types of cultural organizations geared to some kind of human flourishing and fulfillment. Scientific research needs to maintain and to cultivate a relationship with human interests and concerns at large—just as much as humanities activities can gain by having some place within the university as a focal point of reference for reflection. The exacting professional reflection carried out at research universities can serve as a guide for criticism in literary circles, for example, or for art history as it is displayed and disseminated in museum programs, or even for yoga and sports club activities and exercises. Slingerland’s modified consilience project aims at fostering dialogue within the university: it should no longer be a bi-university split into two

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blocks of disciplines that may ignore or even despise one another. Nevertheless, the deeper sources of inspiration of the humanities are to be found in art and poetry, or in religion and social life, in experiences that as such are not yet forms of research. Communication with and among researchers treating more humanistic or more scientific subjects at the university is still a very far cry from actually dealing with and responding to the substance of human cultural life and creativity, and these broader concerns and ambits are the more important sources of inspiration for the humanities. My point is that to take up the humanities simply from the angle of “research” is already a perspective biased toward a scientific framework. “Research” is a misnomer for what many, if not most, humanities scholars really do. The humanities’ strongest affinities are more often with the creative work of poets and artists, or with activities of social and cultural organizations, or with meditative and edifying reflection. The latter are often pursued also in various types of communitarian educational institutions and their spiritual traditions. It is important for such activities to be represented in public universities: only so can universities continue to expose the young to the full range of possible pursuits for the development of their highest human sensibilities and capabilities. The purpose of attending university at the formative stage of a young adult’s life is not simply to undergo a process of training in research, but more importantly to discover something of the extraordinary range of possibilities for leading a meaningful life.

FROM LANGUAGE AS PRISON HOUSE TO LANGUAGE AS THE UN-HOUSING OF BEING

Slingerland argues relentlessly against postmodern enclosure within the prison house of language. But what is missing from the postmodernism he targets is its openness to the apophatic “beyond” of language that arises out of a self-critical consciousness of language’s intrinsic and insuperable limits. Yes, there is a beyond of language, as Slingerland insistently argues, and this beyond is the context and the basis of all substantive, humanly meaningful, self-reflective knowledge—knowledge that surpasses simple formal ­categorization and taxonomy by merely conceptual constructs. Yet, if this

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“beyond” is construed just as a field of objects within the frame of science and its concepts and categories, it is no longer genuinely beyond language. Such an objectified reality, in effect, reduces simply to a particular language claiming to be prior to (and necessary for) all the others. This imperialistic claim is typical of forms of knowledge unwilling to acknowledge genuine otherness. Vitally at stake here is the nature of knowledge as relational and not simply as unilateral control and mastery of discrete objects. Such relational knowledge is most revealingly pursued by means of the kind of hermeneutic techniques that are cultivated in the humanities disciplines. In the interpretation of poetry and music, for example, or in the narration of history, or even in the performance of a symbolic ritual, self-forgetting participation can turn out to be necessary and intrinsic to understanding. Empathetic and sympathetic interpretation are enabling conditions of these types of knowing through doing. Within the framework of his “second-wave” consilience project, Slingerland welcomes some supplementary critical reflection on science from humanities disciplines that could call for more coherent formulations of scientific theories. Nonetheless, Slingerland tends to treat the sciences essentially as autonomously intelligible, whereas, more deeply and appropriately, they need to be understood as forms of human or involved knowing—and therefore as dependent on an only imaginable whole context of interpretation—in order to be humanly significant.47 He recommends empirical experiment, whereas I employ “theological” speculation in the attempt to perceive the unity of phenomena with one another—and their unity even with the imperceptible at the limits of phenomenal appearing. My way out of what Slingerland terms the “closed circle of endless human conversation”48 is theology and more particularly negative theology. I choose theology as the historical discourse concerned with the origin and ground of all things and thus with relating all things together, which I take to be the root meaning of religion (re-ligare) as “a binding back” to origin. What I propose is a historical discourse rather than simply a declaration of personal belief. But this discourse acknowledges belief as an inextricable component of cognition and does not pretend to be pure of personal, emotion-­based conviction and even of “theology” in a sense defined at least by negative theology—or by the “no-thing” of religious experience in face of the unfathomable.

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I am not advocating any type of dualism between humanities knowledge and scientific knowledge. But neither do I accept that the humanities need to conform to scientific criteria of evidence and empirical demonstration in order to gain legitimacy. This may work to convince budget ad­ ministrators and grant allocation committees, but aping the empirical, experimental sciences is a travesty of the true nature and vocation of the humanities. Their authentic relation to the sciences consists much more in calling to mind the human, social, and historical embeddedness of whatever knowledge can be gained by scientific and experimental means. Their interpretation of this information as it arises out of specific historical situations is crucial for it to be meaningful and useful in a reflective way rather than only in mechanical and mindless, unaccountable and potentially ­destructive modalities. The vocation of the humanities is not to emulate the experimental sciences by adopting their canons of method and proof, but rather to interpret and integrate science with human emotional life, with social action and motivation. Slingerland is surely right to recoil from some of the pretensions and arrogance that have characterized humanities scholarship in recent, selfstyled “postmodern” times. Grotesque, pretentious posturing on the part of some humanities scholars expresses insecurity that comes from misunderstanding or from a shallow grasp of what is actually at stake in knowledge in the humanities as personal, historical, contextual, and relational. Such knowledge cannot be publicly proved but must rather be experienced. It must be personally witnessed and individually appropriated and should not pretend to be authoritative or definitive. But humanities-informed reflection should make us realize that science, too, is thoroughly human and historical and contextualized knowledge. Science, too, accordingly, should not pretend to be authoritative or definitive.49 Instead, the human contingency and openness to infinitely different and personally meaningful interpretations is what makes our knowledge interesting and important, and the humanities are equipped to take the lead here in connecting the results of experiments with other gnoseological resources and in interpreting them in their full implications and significance in terms of their cultural-­ historical contexts. The humanities, furthermore, and most importantly, consider their subjects not only within abstract and artificially defined schemata, but also, at least ideally, in relation to the unfathomably real as

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such—which by most humans, at most any time, has been apprehended as, in some way, divine. This is a reality—or a dimension or level of ­reality—that cannot be adequately contextualized or objectified at all but rather remains as an inexhaustible source and resource beyond all our own determinations of our world and its phenomena. Human-level knowledge is as basic in its own way as is the knowledge of molecules and atoms in its way. The human-level knowledge that Slingerland admits as ineliminable only because of human weakness and emotional incapacity or indisposition to fully embrace the truth without comforting illusions is actually telling a story more basic in its own genre than any of the narratives of science because the meaningfulness of science is itself humanly determined. Even the fact that science “works” is subject to evaluation and critique in terms of the human or extra-human values that such working serves. Such values must be humanly validated in order to have any significance or normativity for us. Concerning this scientific knowledge, we have to ask the question for whom does it “work,” and to what ends and purposes? Manipulating matter prodigiously is not in and of itself a value unless it lines up with humanly recognizable aims and purposes, and these remain always subject to criticism. Otherwise, “knowledge” is merely a technical capacity as indifferent as the other powers of nature themselves. Slingerland wants to “plug” humanities knowledge into its proper place in the scientific enterprise, with its defined goals and agenda and its comprehensive explanation of the universe in terms of a continuous, uninterrupted causal skein.50 However, this outlook can justify itself and make sense only on the basis of reasoning in human terms. It is the humanities and their interpretation of existence that alone can illuminate the general ambience in which scientific research is significant and can become critically conscious of itself. I agree with Slingerland that humanities scholars have a lot to learn from the natural sciences and should pay attention to them, but not because their methods and empirical foundations are necessary to guarantee the validity of discourses in the humanities. Instead, as Slingerland himself at one point puts it, the natural sciences have something interesting to say. I think that they can enrich the humanities principally by means of providing provocative metaphors and analogies leading to new possibilities of conceptualization. The sciences suggest perspectives on how things work

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in certain domains and dimensions that are deeply revealing of patterns and aspects to be found also across a range of other domains. Throughout tradition, at least since Homer or Lucretius, imagery drawn from the natural world and from protoscientific observation and understanding of natural phenomena (for example, the analogy of the “society” of bees in Homer and Virgil) has enabled intriguing connections to be made across the borders from the natural to the human and cultural and historical, thus bringing ostensibly disparate regions of the real together into a unified vision and focus.51

SCIENCE AND (NEGATIVE) THEOLOGY AS PARALLEL FREE FORMS OF CRITICAL THINKING

The modern and contemporary world finds itself confronted with a widespread and perhaps intuitively natural tendency (although its naturalness could be doubted) to think within a purported dualism of science and religion, and this tendency is, in many respects, growing even stronger at present. Cognitive science could serve to help abate and overcome this drift into alienation and ever greater mutual incomprehension. But everything depends on how this intellectual resource and direction of research is appropriated and pursued. The development of cognitive science can also be used to reinforce and render even more rigid the dichotomy between science and religion and their respective types of knowing and experiencing or verifying and validating. The principal idea that unites the various types of scholars of religion that come together in response to the clarion call of cognitive science is the idea of a scientific study of religion. Nevertheless, represented among them are some very different and even incompatible approaches to defining such study and such science. The most radical position among those who presented, including Slingerland, at the conference “Cognition, Religion, and Science” of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) held at the University of Macao, co-sponsored by the Institute for Advance Study of Religion in Toronto, in January 2015, was taken by Donald Wiebe, the Toronto Institute’s director. He proposed as a matter of principle that the study of religion needs to be purely scientific and must

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r­ igorously excise—not to say “exorcise”!—from its midst any contamination by nonscientific, prescientific, or unscientific forms of religious practice. The scientific study of religion is proposed in this perspective as an end in itself and as the only end regarding religion that is worthy of being pursued by academic study in a research university. Wiebe actively and ­fervently—even zealously!—advocates rooting all remnants of theology out of the academy.52 He expressly advocates a radical marginalization of all humanities studies as purely peripheral to the university on the grounds that the humanities en masse are all, in fact, forms of crypto-theology. I happen to agree, and strongly, with Wiebe on just this last point, undoubtedly his most radical and provocative claim, even though I wish to draw certain consequences from it that are diametrically opposed to his conclusions. As is so often the case, opposite extremes tend to circle around and meet up with each other. Wiebe indicated that he does not like to use the word “religion” or the word “science” and that he has tried in recent years to avoid them in his writing. This seems a productive suggestion, even if it can hardly be rigorously implemented. But let us, in any case, suspend momentarily all that we think we know about the extremely multifaceted and complex kinds of cultural practice that go under these names and just hang on to the fact that they are reflective forms of thinking. As such, they are capable of placing into question their own intentional fields of objects and their own process and activity by recursive, self-questioning reflection. Science can be identified (as it is, for example, by Karl Popper) simply with the ability to doubt and question and test every scientific hypothesis and every claim to know anything at all. Science as such is unlimited in its critical questioning of thinking, including scientific thinking, and has no dogmas of its own to defend. Science aspires to pure, uncontroversial, publicly testable, verifiable knowledge. Something similar can be said of theology in arguably its most original form as negative theology, which begins as uncompromising critique of idolatry in the Bible and carries on into modern times as unconditional critique of every ideology.53 Negative theology, too, can place all knowledge—including, first and foremost, supposedly theological knowledge—into question. It has, in fact, done so historically in unrelenting fashion, particularly through the lineage of theological thinking that we are learning more and more to recognize as apophatic theology and its derivatives in other humanities disciplines.54

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Apophatic theology (as anti-idolatrous discourse) and science (as a purely formal method of testing and falsifying hypotheses) are both infinitely critical forms of reflection. Both are apt to work themselves free of determinate content and to become purely negative forms of thinking. Of course, they are most often, and in fact almost always, found in mixed or alloyed forms that do, after all, aim to uphold some kind of doctrine. However, thought through purely and rigorously, each consists simply in a commitment to unlimited critique. This includes also, and especially, unlimited self-critique. As such, (theoretical) science and (negative) theology cannot be said to positively exist in any definable shape or form. This in itself is a powerful motivation for the effort to avoid using the terms “science” and “religion,” even though these names still need to be mentioned in order for us even to gather some idea of what is supposed, then, to be avoided. Science as such is not to be confounded with any articulated models or systems, since these are always only provisional and hypothetical, just as all theological concepts are self-critically suspended and negated as inevitably inadequate to God or divinity as inherently inconceivable. Now “theology” in some of its more familiar senses is what many modern secular-minded scholars typically think their work and beliefs are opposed to, just as certain fundamentalist religionists take a trenchant stance against science and its theories, notably the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. But do we, any of us, want to be conditioned by such oppositional thinking? Is there perhaps another, a non-oppositional way of understanding ourselves, one that can follow from our effort to grow and our ability to transcend our own current understanding of ourselves by discovering and trying out how we might embrace what seems in our current understanding to be opposed to us? Such is the challenge for me as a humanities scholar, a speculative philosopher, and a negative theologian facing cognitive science. This principle of embracing and learning from one’s ostensible opponents or nemesis guides me as I enter into dialogue with cognitive science as a (for me) relatively new and powerful presence in the academic arena. Might those who believe in science, by the same token, possibly discover ways in which this conviction of theirs is like religious belief, especially when such belief is apprehended in its most enlightened moments of emergence during revolutionary, revelatory junctures in the history of human thought and culture? The founding revelations of historical religions (emblematized by figures such as Moses, Jesus, ­Mohammed,

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Buddha, Confucius, Laotze, Zoroaster, etc.) were typically moments of spiritual enlightenment and social emancipation. In their most original forms, they were very much in line with the purposes of scientific research in overcoming superstition and power-mongering in the name of universal reason and benevolence. They worked in the interests of liberating in­ dividuals and releasing human energies for a more free and productive life for all. Wiebe’s scientific study of religion views it simply as a form of behavior that can be observed and analyzed scientifically like any other phenomenon and that can, by such methods, be, in principle, definitively known. One should certainly point out that the intentions of religious practitioners (at least in many religious traditions) are typically trained on God or divinity and that Wiebe thus leaves out of account what is most essential for them, since for him, scientifically speaking, God or divinity is nothing but a figment in the mind of believers. However, in light of the recognition concerning theology that I have just advocated, I would like to make a slightly, and yet crucially, different point, one that can serve to avoid the stalemate or standoff between static positions of the believer and the non-­believer alike. Although either a believing stance or an atheistic stance might prove miraculously and admirably fertile when pursued with integrity, entrenched in conflict with one another they become sterile because they are not able to accept and mediate what the other has to offer. So I wish to suggest that the problem is not that religious believers are convinced that they know a God that Wiebe thinks he knows has no objective reality. The problem with Wiebe’s reducing of religious belief to nothing but an intentional state is that religious belief is a case of an intentional state that cannot be definitively determined at all. What distinguishes belief in God is that it does not and must not know exactly what it believes. If that is what is distinctive about religious belief as a form of knowledge, then religious belief cannot as such be the object of scientific study. The behaviors that can be studied cannot begin to exhaust the meaning that is unconceived in religious belief. In fact, they can only falsify it by attributing to it a determinateness that arises inevitably from human motivations and betrays authentic belief in the inconceivable. What science studies is always an object, whereas religion deals ultimately (beyond the self-­understanding of certain unreflective believers) only with what is ­nonobjective.

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Looked at a little more closely in light of this distinction not of kind but of degree—between degrees of determination culminating ultimately in complete indeterminacy—there is no dualism here. Admittedly, there is also an objective side of religion, just as there is something at the bottom of science, let us call it “reality itself,” which remains always beyond all our objectifications. The real difference between science and religion is not that they have separate domains or are grounded in separate epistemological faculties. Such distinctions are always artificial wherever the essential human vocation and drive to know as such is at issue. What separates science and religion—and even then, not in their essential core, but only in their most common manifestations—is simply that their interests are different. Science is interested in what can be objectively known and manipulated, whereas religion is interested in what transcends our control and what we can relate to only through means other than objective knowing, for example, by worship, ritual devotion, love, commitment, and engaged action. These latter activities and dispositions are forms of self-giving and self-relinquishment rather than means of attempting to control and use things for our advantage. There is, of course, also an objective side to religion that is potentially manipulative: religious practice unfolds in concrete rites and acts, not to mention political actions and social movements. Symmetrically, there is also a nonobjective reality that science is directed toward, even though science only ever actually attains to knowing proximate phenomena of schematically defined and measurable formal entities. Ultimately science, too, in my view, has no proper object, but is rather purely critical in nature. Negative theology shares precisely this absolutely critical character with experimental science in search of knowledge through a process that can never yield ultimate truth but can only advance by means of progressive and ongoing falsification. Not only empirical methods, but equally the intellectual and even spiritual exercise of self-critique, are crucial to this continuing advance. Wiebe acknowledges the value realms that he excludes from having any pertinence to science as nevertheless relevant to how he lives his life as a human being when he leaves the laboratory or office. From his scientifically integralist point of view, such actual life experience would seem to be only a tissue of illusions. So it is not as a scientist, but only as a human

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being with his own preferences and prejudices, that Wiebe can undertake to deal with the nonobjective aspects of his life. Only by suspending his cognizance as a scientist can he pursue morality as a human being and lend his solidarity to the communities of which he is a part. There are no scientifically valid reasons for doing so, for no value statements for him can be more than subjectively true and defensible. This position would be a thoroughgoing pragmatism, except that Wiebe does not want to give up, in the name of pragmatism, the scientific pursuit of knowledge simply and purely for the sake of truth and knowledge. In fact, a fairly evident problem with this position is its postulating a rigorous separation between theory and practice. Have we not wished, even in the most scientifically advanced milieus, to avoid this old dualistic approach? Is Wiebe forgetting all the critiques of presumably objective, scientific, purely theoretical understanding abstracted from practice? Insight into the inescapable practical presuppositions of all theoretical knowledge lent some of its most essential and seminal impulses to the movement of cognitive science from its founding moments. However, Wiebe is determined to pursue the other, indeed the opposite possibility—that of radically separating scientific theory from all types of humanly conditioned practice. Without proving theoretically that theory and practice are in fact separate, one can simply impose such a discipline on oneself in the belief that it, and it alone, can attain the results that one desires most. This is not a truth so much as a life-decision made in the conviction and belief (or faith!) that it is right and good and will be proved to be so by the results over time. This may be a respectable position for Donald Wiebe to take personally, but he has not on these grounds proved that anyone else should take such a position or that, objectively speaking, theology and other practically oriented studies have any less right to a place in the university than hard science.

THE AMPHIBOLY OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION: FROM PRESOCRATICS TO PRESENT POSITIONS

To study religion merely as behavior is to miss the point entirely of what religion means to those who practice it. Just doing certain things is not religious; the properly religious element comes about only in and with the in-

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tention. To this extent, Wiebe is not really studying religion at all, not what practitioners anyway understand by that term in confessing or avowing their “religious” intents and purposes. But then religion perhaps, in Wiebe’s view, does not exist, in any case not as what its practitioners believe and intend it to be. He believes their intention turned to a transcendent divinity to be completely unfounded. Yet still he wishes to seriously study their behavior. Wiebe is claiming that religious beliefs are simply human intentional states like any others and that they can be studied b­ ehavioristically. The assumptions of such an enterprise have been heavily criticized, and for a long time, in the philosophical backlash against behaviorism, just as the imperialistic implications of the exaltation of Western science and civilization have been thoroughly critiqued and even morally censured as politically incorrect and abhorrent. Wiebe wants to try to stand up to such criticisms, and certainly it has become far too easy for those assuming a moral high ground aloof from the complexities and paradoxes of history to blame and shame the West as more wicked than the rest. Still, colleagues of Wiebe such as Slingerland and Robert N. McCauley would prefer to take a more purely pragmatic approach. They do not claim superior truth for science, but simply maintain that it is our best hypothesis insofar as it works. Wiebe, in his passionate opposition to theology at the university, goes an extra inch, which turns out to take him over the edge of a precipice. It is at this point that his position becomes peculiarly interesting and revelatory for me. Wiebe is, in effect, the priest of a religion of science. He was the dean of a faculty of divinity for many years at Trinity College in Toronto, so the fact that a relic of repudiated theology shows through in his advocacy and championing of science is, after all, not so surprising. However, he prefers to begin explaining his own conversion to science by reference to the pre-Socratics. In fact, our respective readings of the pre-Socratics are symptomatic of the subtle, yet momentous, difference between us. I emphasize (for example, in Poetry and Apocalypse, 56–57) that for the pre-Socratics scientific knowledge is still a form of theological revelation. For Thales, “all things are full of gods” (πάντα πλήρη θεῶν) (Aristotle, De Anima 411a7), while for Heraclitus, logos is a transcendent principle with a claim to authoritatively judge the opinions of humans: “We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most people live as if each of them had a private intelligence of their own” (τοῦ λόγου δ› ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν).55

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Parmenides, on the other hand, attempts clearly to separate the conceptual from the nonconceptual, Being from non-Being, and to banish the latter so as to create a field for unambiguous conceptual operation of the logos.56 Yet even he frames his pursuit of logos as a journey to the presence of the goddess Diké (Justice) (De natura, frag. 1). Wiebe and I both like to take the inaugural moment of philosophy in the pre-Socratics as a moment peculiarly laden with significance in intellectual history and attempt to understand it in terms of our global visions. What I emphasize is that the logos is still theological revelation, even while, at the same time, it opens the field of nature for scientific enquiry. The logos is a world-transcending and -norming power that binds all together, all individuals with one another and with the cosmos as a whole. Wiebe’s ideas, in contrast, are based on the action of taking the objective insight of reason into things as they are present in nature and separating such knowledge from everything else, elevating it to a kind of culture-transcendent autonomy and absoluteness. Wiebe claims that this is what the pre-Socratics did and that their doing so has guided Western science and civilization ever since. Wiebe’s ideas are based on the Ionians but generally ignore the Pythagoreans and other currents that also flow into Plato and Aristotle and shape the Western intellectual tradition, including science, as Francis Cornford, in the text Wiebe holds up as source, so lucidly presents it.57 Wiebe portrays the crucial movement of science that begins in Ionia as that of valuing knowing for its own sake alone. He considers it to be adhering to pure fact without value, even though such science itself entails a decision as to what to value and an ordering of everything that we do and can do to one end—scientific knowledge—an end that Wiebe then exalts above all others. Maybe something unique can be achieved by this singling out and valuing of one type of activity and cognition, cutting it off from ethics and politics and from every other supplementary context. But I address to Wiebe a challenge to define the context in which this act of selection for science alone, which he recommends, is valid. He believes that it has some kind of culture-transcendent value: it is to be recognized as in some sense an absolute. He presents it as adhering simply to the way things are and not a choice or a value or preference. Even if this is so, however, it is so within a certain context and framework, and that is what Wiebe is taking for granted. He can claim his absolute, if he likes: I will accord him

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that as his right. It is his right to have a religion and to confess his faith in science. If he declares the right of science alone to determine true and ­authentic knowledge, he has in effect made it into a type of religion. He should then acknowledge it as such. Instead, he demands that everyone else, too, accept this outlook as simply the way things are, really and objectively. In doing so, he risks making science not only a religion, but an intolerant one. Wiebe feels that science gives us the kind of knowledge that simply as a matter of fact is true and incomparably superior to every other kind of claim to knowing, and to such an extent that the other disciplines should simply be banished from the research university altogether as not worthy of the name of knowledge. What are the bases for this recognition of the superiority of science, if not simply a confession of personal faith? Wiebe thinks that science objectively demonstrates its superiority. But we have to ask him to define where and how, for what purposes and in what contexts, and in relation to what ends and purposes? Attributing to science simply a blanket superiority is much more akin to a religious gesture of blind faith in scientific reason as a god. Its “superiority” is only valid and meaningful relative to certain chosen purposes and in certain pragmatic contexts. As to the West’s supposedly natural and historical superiority (which Wiebe courageously asserts), there are many ways (including technology) in which “the West” at present, from its historical core and origin in Europe, is at risk of falling precipitously behind other areas of the world. Precisely this reversal arguably obtains in the Chinese context in which we convened to converse at the Macao symposium. Here such declarations take on an air of desperate acts to conjure magically what is (at least unconsciously) slipping from our grasp at this very moment of the historical decline of the West and the rise of China. The Chinese context suggests, for example, that traditional healing arts that comprise so-called Chinese medicine are not necessarily to be considered inferior to Western medicine. The encounter and debate with cognitive science is especially fascinating in pointing up two different ways of interpreting science. Science can, on the one hand, be taken as necessarily based on disenchantment. According to this view, science gives the “real” explanation and does away with the myths that can carry conviction only in pre-scientific culture. In this case, the humanities have nothing more to say to us about reality. Science alone assumes that task and dictates the only valid methods of investigation. But

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to take this approach is to become enamored of our own self-reflectively constructed explanations as crystallized in the form of science and to forget what science has been responding to in the unsoundable depths of its own historically evolving being. Such a fascination with one’s own reflected image is what humanities tradition warns against as a constant tendency and danger of naïve, selfdeceiving humanity. Such is the burden of the Narcissus myth and again of the biblical story of the Fall from the garden of Eden. Milton’s interpretation of the myth in Paradise Lost, for one, makes this moral especially explicit and programmatic. Science and its discoveries can work to enhance our appreciation of the wonder of the universe in which we live—or they can be used to deny that there is anything besides mechanical clockwork to contemplate. While in a certain popular conception science affirms certain, proven truths, science can also analyze and dismantle the pretensions of propositional knowledge to definitive explanations. Cognitive science from its early stages with Lakoff and Johnson, in fact, aimed to do exactly that. Wiebe’s scientific study of religion exalts and isolates science from the rest of human activities on the pretext that it transcends culture. This is the technique of framing (again, Heidegger’s Gestell ) that has been so effective throughout Western history since the Greeks in lending power to thought and technology by cutting them off from relation not only to surrounding contiguous cultural practices but also from the All of the as yet unobjectified, unrepresented world—or from nature itself. Science creates the ability to manipulate things, even though the “things” it conceives are not actual reality, but rather artificial constructs. This is what conceptual thought essentially does. This is also its limit and what obliges us to search for and adopt further methods, such as those explored in religion and in the humanities generally, of relating ourselves to the real as a whole—and thereby also to ourselves.

CONTRADICTIONS OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE REGARDED AS UNIVERSAL, AS CONCEPTUAL, AND AS WESTERN

Three points can be retained in conclusion from this debate exhibiting the ambiguous potential of cognitive science. They all hinge on giving its due

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to the all-too-easily neglected dimension of the nonconceptualizable that remains beyond the grasp of cognition and yet conditions and pervades it from without. 1. This chapter has shown cognitive science to have ambiguous and even a contradictory valence and potential when it is brought into relation with the coordinates of a humanities-based understanding of human knowing. Cognitive science universalizes scientific rationality and seems to claim hegemony for it over other forms of knowing. At the same time, cognitive science undermines propositional knowing and brings out knowing’s basis in a pre-conceptual know-how that is contaminated with emotion. This gives recognition implicitly to inevitable unknowing as lying at the sources of all knowing. 2. In its aspiration to universality, thought, including conceptual thought (and consequently science), has to maintain a relationship with the inconceivable in order to avoid the oppressive totalitarianism of the concept that cuts itself off from the all and becomes an All in its own right—in effect, a kind of idol.58 Cognitive science has the potential to puncture and diffuse such totalitarian pretensions of the concept. But it is also susceptible to the temptation to become itself an apotheosis of such totalization of conceptual thought and to make the concept itself a jealous God that will tolerate no other gods beside it. Cognitive science opens this dimension of the possibility of unlimited knowing and unknowing, where the very destiny of all our thought is at stake, depending on how we manage the power that the concept procures for us. Does cognitive science, then, aim to impose its concept as a universal framework and foundation, or is it breaking down all such concepts and opening the field of interdisciplinary discourse to the full range and variety of imaginative interventions? In order to be whole, we have to relate to the nonconceptualizable because all our concepts come from somewhere and are rooted beyond themselves—whether this be in what is then conceived of as the unconscious, or the body, or the divine. Our concepts come from something or rather from nothing—no thing that they can grasp. It is rather a non-thing that they can only forever grasp after. This acknowledgment is tantamount to recognizing the limits of reflection and particularly of self-reflection. 3. In understanding universality non-conceptually and non-­ cognitively—as precisely beyond the limits of the concept—universality as

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unconceived by negative theology in the West meets up with the universality of Nature in ancient traditions of Chinese thought. The cognitive, I submit, understands itself best by keeping in touch with this relation to what is beyond it: by this means, cognition remains cognizant of its own limits. I have written from a standpoint far outside the paradigm of cognitivism, but I hope to have made a point that can be relevant to its reflections, especially in discerning what it stands in relation to and what concerns the enabling conditions for the application of its methodology. A sense of this unsayable “nothing,” of what is nonconceptualizable (what I call the apophatic) can, after all, be perfectly realistic. It can orient us to an absolute that remains outside our grasp, the “real,” so to speak—and that keeps our concepts open and always cognizant of their insufficiency vis-à-vis the inexhaustibility of experience and its sources, since the latter can never be fully saturated by our concepts.

C O N C L U D I N G E L U C I D AT I O N On the Extension and Intension of “Apophasis”

The term “apophasis” is employed throughout this book in sometimes sweeping ways that are liable to give pause to some, particularly to those who have more narrowly delimited notions or projects of their own. My approach eschews the canons of set definitions used for proceeding deductively from stable premises. Apophasis, as I understand it, is much more appropriately about elucidating why such methodical approaches, if pushed to their limits, inevitably generate their own self-contradictions. Apophasis “is” about the indefinable and undelimitable par excellence. The “is” occurs here between scare quotes as a reminder that apophasis as such is not at all. Only our commitment to letting the apophatic be always more (or less) than or beyond our understanding lets it register with us in the first place. This builds a dimension of critical self-reflection into our apprehension of the apophatic—which shows up always only in and through our own ­limits. In Kantian terms, this would be a “transcendental” knowing of conditions and limits of the possibility of knowing, albeit a transcendental knowing turned self-reflexively and self-subversively on itself so as to critically dissolve—rather than establish—boundaries of a secure framework for certain knowing. The apophatic cannot as such be known. Instead, it invades knowing, breaking in upon and breaking open its circumscription, thereby producing a knowing of unknowing. 365

366  Concluding Elucidation

In order to give a somewhat more detailed characterization of my sense and use of the term “apophatic,” I will engage with one recent critique of my work that turns specifically on this issue of divergent understandings of what apophasis is and entails. The critic concerned, like many, points to the interdependence of apophasis and kataphasis.1 He himself discusses apophasis from a position that can be defined kataphatically (affirmatively), and definitions are by nature delimiting and categorizing. Certainly, the spirit of an apophatic universalism such as I propose leans more toward indistinct envisioning of an implicit whole than to affirmation of discrete, articulable categories. The apophaticism I advocate does not exclude fine discrimination of subtle differences, but they are never the final word. Words cannot adequately encompass any absolute truth such as is embraced rather in love and in kenotic release—including the release of language, with all its distinctions, in exemplary forms of apophatic mysticism. What is final is not a word at all but rather what occurs where the word “breaks off” (as Stefan George’s “Das Wort” puts it). This means that the divisive, categorical discrimination and limits imposed on thought by language are suspended. Picking up on a position first broached in the Introduction, in the section titled “Apophatic Belief and the Dialogue among Faiths and NonFaiths,” this Concluding Elucidation aims to illuminate how and why apophasis, in my employment of the notion, implicates a kind of faith that is at the same time a form of apostasy with regard to whatever fixed formula of faith—or defined form of belief—might be provisionally embraced. The universality of faith in the apophatic grows from, but consumes and dissolves, its own particular formulations—the forms in which it grows and matures and, in the end, dies. This peculiarly self-transforming, self-­ consuming nature of apophasis in my discourse and conception has proven difficult to grasp and hence calls for elucidation. This Concluding Elucidation adumbrates the reasons why I employ the term “apophasis” as, in principle, unlimited in extension and as unconditioned and even absolute in intension. It therewith qualifies apophasis as always pushing against the limits of intelligibility. It is, then, still not so much a straightforward declaration of the meaning of my notion of apophasis as, instead, a dialectical intervention—or application—occasioned by the need to define this notion by giving indications concerning its dif-

Concluding Elucidation  367

ference from alternative conceptions. Placing this issue in focus at the end of the book is meant to be helpful for readers still puzzling (as any genuine enigma demands) over my extended use of the term. The term “apophasis,” for me, is in theory unlimited and undelimitable, even though the practical exigencies of any discourse whatever impose certain heuristic limits. In this respect, “apophasis” is actually exemplary of any and every term. Nonetheless, “apophasis” is a term particularly apt for revealing this pervasive predicament of discourse. “Apophasis” has this emi­ nent role in rational reflection on discourse as a form of expression of belief. It works analogously in this regard to the way the word “God” works in numerous and diverse discourses of religion. The word “apophasis,” accordingly, does not operate on the same plane as other words (at least as they are ordinarily used following their senses as defined in the dictionary). It is not an item ranged alongside others, with a specific, differentiated function of its own. It is, instead, a term that points to the hole in the middle of all terms and of all the discourses made out of them. Its function is not simply to serve as a term within discourse but, instead, to call discourse as a whole into question and to expose its limits over against something else that discourse cannot encompass or render. This renders the term “apophasis” frustrating for more analytically inclined approaches, which to my mind inevitably reduce it to the known—to certain familiar operations of discourse that we can master. Admittedly, apophasis presupposes kataphasis—yet not as the discourse that founds or grounds it, but rather as the discourse that it inevitably unfounds and ungrounds. It seems to me that Knepper loses sight of the fact that kataphasis cannot definitively establish or ground apophasis, not at least if we have anything like an adequate and appropriate understanding of apophasis in its discourse-shattering purport. Kataphasis is undone and torn apart by apophasis. Kataphasis is necessary for apophasis, but it is not a foundation left standing intact. To acknowledge the interdependence of apophasis and kataphasis does not give us any stable handle on apophasis, as if that tied apophasis down to something objective and determinable that needs to be taken into account and that could serve us as a basic principle. The domain of “world religions” as a recognized field of anthropological research seems to serve this purpose for Knepper.

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Knepper undertakes to “contextualize” apophasis by kataphasis, whereas I aim to acknowledge the apophatic as the uncontextualizable par excellence. Knepper emphasizes that apophasis can be spoken about at all only relative to kataphatic contents, which is true, and yet I discern in apophasis a dimension of something that cannot be spoken about, something that absolutely resists being relativized by discourse. What that might be cannot be said and so is not as such susceptible to being subjected to philosophical analysis. Its resistance to such analysis may, in some contexts, be its only positive mode of manifestation. It can, nevertheless, be recognized in operation as a powerful presence. Classic touchstone texts of apophatic thinking have persistently witnessed to and acknowledged this (see On What Cannot Be Said, vols. 1 and 2). Indeed, a kataphatic discourse is necessary for an academic discipline with introductory ground-level courses such as “Apophasis 101,” as invoked by Knepper, but apophasis, in many if not all of its illustrious (and also often dark, enigmatic) practitioners, proves not to mind or abide within such disciplinary boundaries. Attunement to the apophatic requires unlearning more than mastering of basic principles, and there can be no standard introductory course to teach one how to unlearn. Paradoxically, of course, many a Zen master offers just such object lessons in unlearning. Daoist mystics, Brahmans, and Sufis, too, are likely to offer something comparable—its inherent impossibility notwithstanding! Even if we wish to grant or postulate, with Knepper, that negation “only ever removes that which affirmation states,” still that is not the whole story. The whole is, in any case, not just a story (not just what can be stated in whatever words), but also something immeasurably more. My project attempts—impossibly, indeed it only “aspires”—to focus on that immeasurably more rather than only on the discourses accreting around it. I grant, however, that this is a matter of focus and aspiration rather than of substantially different contents. It is a matter of belief and projection, not of objective facts or ascertainable truths. Naturally, some (those who refuse such belief ) will be committed to denying that the object of such aspiration exists at all. It exists in manifest, worldly ways only to the extent that someone believes in it and lives in and through such belief and projection beyond determinate concepts. I should add that to believe, as I understand it, means also to doubt. One doubts what one only believes, yet one nevertheless believes it and can

Concluding Elucidation  369

even do so as a means of seeking illuminating insight. Such an (anti) method is crystallized in the classic credo ut intelligam (“I believe in order to understand”) formulation of St. Anselm. This confession recognizes that the regimes of willing and of knowing are not neatly separable but, instead, condition one another always already—from before either can be defined discretely and emerge as itself. We might choose to limit ourselves and our interests to just what appears in discourse as objective content. A certain analytic logic says that whatever does not objectively appear and manifest itself cannot interest us or even be anything at all. Knepper quotes Stephen Katz to the effect that “an ineffability that is nothing at all is nothing at all; it cannot be similar or different to anything.” This echoes, at least faintly, the well-known Wittgensteinian maxim: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent” (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen) (Tractatus 7). While apparently comforting a certain logical positivism, however, Wittgenstein also lets it be understood that what we must remain silent about is precisely what matters most. The Ockham’s razor type of appropriation of Wittgenstein’s thinking actually runs counter to its inextricable mystical strain. We are often urged (as by logical positivism in the style of A. J. Ayer) to limit ourselves to talking only about what has specifiable content and is culturally and linguistically determinable. This would presumably spare us inane attempts to speak about the apophatic directly. We can speak about anything only to the extent that it acts and manifests itself visibly or verbally. However, in the case of apophasis, these may not be its only options or resources. Mystical yearnings and aspirations and their intentional objects are not necessarily accessible in this way. Yet, even if we limit apophasis to what is manifest in some presumably positive, verbal form, and thus admit its necessary involvement with kataphasis, still that does not make kataphasis the whole story either. Instead, kataphasis is only the part of the intertwining of the manifest and the hidden that appears and is expressed. Kataphatic affirmation leaves out the part of the whole that drives expression without being itself manifest as such. The absolutes projected by belief cannot be analyzed as such, but only in terms of the belief systems that they foster and their manifest expressions. So far, I take it, Knepper and I agree. The problem for Knepper is not that I compare different cultures in their approaches to ineffability (he does

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exactly the same) but that I do so from a position of some (indefinable) kind of belief in ineffability. This embrace of an equivocally “religious” form of projection or “aspiration” runs counter to his presumable (undeclared) belief in scholarly objectivity and perhaps philosophical ­neutrality. The “nothing that can be said,” which drives various apophatic traditions from within, is indeed nothing when you step outside of them all. The purely philosophical analyst wants not to believe in any of these traditions, but just to analyze the positive forms of language that they produce. This stance achieved by stepping outside of belief, however, is itself a movement based on certain beliefs that demand themselves, in turn, to be subjected to examination and critique. The merely positive and objective content that is left once one steps outside of the belief systems that aim at something ineffable is not what is most worth evaluating in them; it is not the soul of the beliefs in question, however interesting its various articulations and its colorfully diverse forms and figures might be. Only believing in the ineffable in one way or another can give its content any real and vital meaning. Thus, the ineffability produced by this stepping outside belief and intending nothing as actually real but, instead, only recognizing different ­linguistic configurations as relative to context has no sovereign right to be acclaimed as the superior decoding of the true meaning of the other ineffabilities. The philosopher’s abstraction from—or rather suspension of—all particularized, existentially committed belief in ineffability, in effect, has produced another absolute, even if a philosophically skeptical one. It is based on a negation of what is believed in religious systems oriented toward “something” (or “nothing”) that they acknowledge as eminently real and ineffable. That something/nothing has to be taken together with the forms of expression that it fosters, rather than being separated from them by analysis, in order not to fall into the void of Katz’s “nothing at all.” I take a position of believing in the ineffable, even while at the same time not believing in any express form of it. Knepper evidently (whether consciously or not) takes this believing on my part to mean that I posit one ineffability into which I assimilate all other “ineffabilities” without due regard for their extremely significant differences. (I quote Knepper’s substantifying locution “ineffabilities,” whereas really we are talking only about various expressions and conceptions of ineffability.) Indeed, for Aristotle and

Concluding Elucidation  371

for the analytic logic he bequeaths, to affirm that something is, as a substance, is to affirm that it is one (Metaphysics VII). This, then, might explain why Knepper taxes me with amalgamating all “ineffabilities” into one and misrecognizing their immense cultural differences in aim and scope—as well as in linguistic mode and in their very conception of the claim of ineffability. He presumably thinks that he is neutral and avoids positing any actual or existing ineffability and, instead, objectively analyzes various forms of representing things called “ineffable” in different senses in diverse cultures. It may be granted that he does not postulate any particular ineffability thematically as a presupposition of his own discourse. But his own unavowed ultimate or absolute is there, nonetheless, as the unspoken and unspeakable premise of his thinking and analysis. Being critically conscious of our own thinking entails eventually becoming aware of where we are de facto presupposing belief in something absolute or universal. Such belief, I submit, belongs to the nature of thinking as such. The project of a philosophical analysis of religion, too, for all its neutrality, is trying to state something true absolutely about religion—or at least to make objectively valid statements about specific religions. It is, in this respect, comparable to the different religious or non-religious approaches to ineffability that it compares and does not stand above them as a meta-discourse. Philosophy’s own ineffable belief is not thematized as a transcendent divinity or an inaccessible secret but consists rather in its claim to discern, in a generally valid (and to this extent, in principle, context-­free) way, the truth about various enunciations concerning ineffability in relation to their respective contexts. There are indeed many fascinating resonances and parallels between different cultures when they reach toward the limits of language. It would be a great pity not to allow ourselves to contemplate them. In fact, investigating them is what Knepper’s (and Leah Kalmanson’s) project, the “Comparison Project,” is all about. This project is in some ways an extension of Robert Neville’s Comparative Religious Ideas Project, which produced three volumes (The Human Condition, Ultimate Realities, and Religious Truth) published in 2001 by SUNY Press. This sort of comparative work goes back further to the University of Chicago Divinity School’s “Towards a Comparative Philosophy of Religions Project.” Scholars have

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been c­ omparing cultures and their different religious visions for quite some time. Something about such comparison manages to sustain interest. Not that we can adequately say exactly what it is! But might this last comparison of mine perhaps again provoke Knepper’s objection to an undifferentiated lumping together of different approaches that ignores the extremely different types of ineffability? In any case, it is hardly more guilty in this respect than is dismissing “perennialism for postmoderns” in the name of “critical scholarship” (as Knepper does at the end of his review). Of course, this is a gesture that might well expect fairly widespread assent in the academy today. Still, we must ask, What is missed by it? Apophasis, for me, in the end, is about critiquing exclusionary gestures and practices. Exclusion is a condition of determinate sense, but apophasis aspires beyond sense. In my vision and approach to it, something in apophasis remains recalcitrant to the usual methods of critical scholarship. The vision and approach of Apophatic Paths (in an “aspirational” register that Knepper accurately identifies in his critique) need to be excluded in order to define apophasis as a strict academic discipline geared to differentiating and demarcating distinct forms of culture. The apophatic vocation, in my understanding, entails calling such definitions and their exclusions into question. Apophasis is about the indefinable that confounds categorical logic, and it starts self-reflectively from its own indefinability. Of course, this places apophasis as an academic discipline into contradiction and conflict with the very principle of an academic discipline. It renders impossible teaching the basic precepts of “Apophatics 101.” That might be grounds for its dismissal. But, at the same time, such an inherent contradictoriness in its discourse can also constitute a motive for the unique and incomparable interest of apophasis. It can be “crucial” to a selfsacrificial, kenotic vocation of apophasis—to apophasis as a matter of unfixable, mobile commitment and belief beyond objective analysis (as if analysis were even possible in abstraction from all belief ). Knepper wants to compare discourses because that is all that can be compared—at least publicly and demonstrably. I want to look beyond discourse to what it aspires toward, and I find that many even very radically different traditions are comparable in this aspiration. This aspiration, in its own intention, is not reducible to anything objectively given and cannot

Concluding Elucidation  373

be proven: it is stated in order to move us toward an experience of what cannot be stated. Such an approach works at the edge of what is objectively definable and academically acceptable and exposes a certain arbitrariness of disciplinary limits and definitions, since they too are based on what are, in certain respects, hidden aspirations. Therefore, it cannot help but make academic authority uncomfortable.

APPENDIX Analytic Table of Contents

Preface: Position, Purpose, and Structure of the Work ix Acknowledgments xi

Part I: Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic Chapter 1. Introduction: Apophatic Thinking and Its Applications; Between Exhaustion and Explosion The Present Predicament of Apophatics The Relevance of Apophatic Thought to Universalist Aspirations Today Theological Origins of Apophaticism Apophaticism as Universal Applied Philosophy Apophaticism as First Philosophy—or a Universal Philosophy of Religion Apophatic Belief and the Dialogue among Faiths and Non-Faiths The Universality of What Is Not Chapter 2. Outbound Reflection: Unsaying Theology in the Name of All State of the Art—Apophatic Thinking at Present 374

3 6 8 12 14 18 20 24 27 27

Appendix  375

Three Ways to Unsay Theology 29 The Universality of Apophatic Thinking in Our Postmodern 32 Moment Keller’s Cloud of the Impossible: Apophasis and the Ontological 33 Question Apologies for Theology 33 Perspectivisim and Exemplarism 37 Keller’s Apophatic Relationalism 39 Wolfson’s Giving beyond the Gift: Unsaying of Unsaying Itself 42 Wolfson’s Jewish Radicalization of Postmodernism 43 Wolfson’s Jewish Heideggerianism 46 Theological or Theomaniacal Imagination 48 Philosophy and Imagination’s Role in Knowing 51 Overcoming Philosophical Idolatry: The Roles of Theology 53 and Poetry Phenomenology beyond Theology, Apophasis beyond 53 Atheology Immanence and Apophasis 55 Comparison within the Optics of A Philosophy of the Unsayable 57 The Difference between Wolfson and Keller: Separative 57 versus Relational Transcendence Inviolable Separateness versus Cosmic Entanglement 59 External Relation versus Participation: The Necessity of 61 A/theism Opposites Meet: The Separate Is Unsayably Related 64 Toward a Poetic Perspective 65 Unsaying Theology for the Sake of Metaphor or True Myth 68

Part II: The New Apophatic Universalism Chapter 3. Apophatic Mysticism as Practical Philosophy: Nicholas 73 of Cusa and the Applications of Ignorance Critical Orientation to Cusanus Revival in Context of 73 Apophatic Trends of Thought Cusanus’s Ambivalent Relation to Modernity 74

376  Appendix

The Vanishing Point and the Bypassing of Real Experience 78 in Diverse Domains Self-Reflective Narcissism of the Modern Age Turned to the 83 Art of Contemplation of Divinity Analogical (Un)knowing of Limits through Art 87 Pragmatic Making as Analogical Contemplation 89 Liturgical Pre-Reflexive Knowing 92 The Apophatic as the Non aliud and as Possest 93 From Self-Reflection to Apophasis 97 The Paradox of Individuation and Actual Infinity 98 Self-Reflective Vision of the Whole: Intellectus versus Ratio 102 Chapter 4. Contemporary Atheist Philosophers and St. Paul’s Revolutionary Political Theology: A Genealogy of the New Universalism Paul’s All (Pan) Beyond Definable Distinctions Revolutionary Universality: Badiou and Žižek Agamben’s Apophatic Universality: Dividing Difference The Poetico-Political Breaking Open of the Universal to a New Order Difference as Absolute and Empty—or Indefinable

107

107 110 115 119 123

Part III: Comparative Philosophies of Culture Chapter 5. Cosmopolitan Conviviality and Negative Theology: Europe’s Vocation to Universalism Europe’s Vocation to Cosmopolitan Universalism The Negativity of Identity: From Negative Theology to Conviviality via Theory The New Apophatic Universalism as Co-Giftedness and Wound Dis-Enclosure of Radical Cosmic Commun(icat)ion Deconstructive Negative Theology, Nihilism, and Christianity

129 130 136 140 143 149

Chapter 6. Except Asia: Agamben’s Logic of Exception and Its 154 Apophatic Roots and Offshoots From the Apophatic Logic of Sovereignty to Negative Theology 154

Appendix  377

Negative Theology in Agamben’s Homo sacer Project Language and the Apophatic Agamben’s Method and Apophatic Theology Contemporary Apophatic Applications: From Theology to Politics Modern Incarnations of Biopolitics in Light of the Apophatic Logic of Exception Breakdown of Constitutive Differences and Slide toward Indistinction Universality East and West

160 162 163 167 170 173 177

Part IV: Cross-Cultural and Transhistorical Interdisciplinarity Chapter 7. Liberal Arts Education Worldwide Unlimited Inc.: 183 The Unspeakable Basis of Comparative Humanities Introduction 183 The Humanities as Involved Knowing 186 Human Encounter and the Unknown 191 The Imperative of De-Specialization in the Humanities 193 Meeting of East and West as Catalyst to Global Humanities 196 Education Conclusion 200 Chapter 8. Apophasis and the Axial Age: Transcendent Origins of Critical Consciousness Tension toward Transcendence: The Critical Paradox of the Axial Age Robert Bellah’s Evolutionary Approach to Unitive Experience Blind Evolution versus Vision in the Evolution of Critical Consciousness The Question of Theoria and Its Religious Meaning The Body and Symbolic Expression of the Transcendent Theology and Transcendence Habermas and Philosophical Universalism: The Model of the Axial Age

201 201 208 212 215 219 221 225

378  Appendix

Part V: Emergences in Literary and Cultural Theory Chapter 9. The Canon Question and the Value of Theory: Toward a New (Non)Concept of Universality The Attack against the Canon and against Literature The Attack against Theory and Its Self-Critical Reconfiguration Theory of Canonicity as Communicability, or Apophatic Universality Chapter 10. World Literature: A Means or a Menace to the Encounter with the Other? A Benjaminian Horizon for the Question concerning World Literature Defense of the Apophatic as Necessary for Discovering Our Common Humanity Some Virtues of Vagueness against Calamitous Clarity Conceptual Universals versus Common Humanity Cultural Universals Confronting Absolute Difference Self-Critique as a Path to the Transcendent and Universal The Space of Literature as Matrix for an Apophatic Approach The Apophatic Calling from the Space of World Literature Becoming World Literature as a Process of Self-Disappropriation The Negative-Theological Notion of Pure Language/Literature The Return of One’s Own as World Literature

237 237 244 252

254 254 259 263 267 269 271 273 275 278 280 283

Part VI: Critical Consciousness and Cognitive Science Chapter 11. Postmodern Identity Politics and the Social Tyranny of the Definable Competing Genealogies of Identity Claims and Their Biblical Sources Competing Claims and Rights of Individuals The Indefinably Common and Incommensurable

291 294 299 307

Appendix  379

Chapter 12. Cognitive Universality between Science and the Humanities Figuring the Limits of Scientific Explanation Nondualistic Difference and the Limits of Explanation Humanities and the Human Grounds of Science Empirical Research, Reflexivity, and the Limits of Scientific Objectivity Consilience and Scientific Reductionism The Diverse Motives and Matrices of Human Knowing From Language as Prison House to Language as the Un-Housing of Being Science and (Negative) Theology as Parallel Free Forms of Critical Thinking The Amphiboly of Science and Religion: From Pre-Socratics to Present Positions Contradictions of Cognitive Science Regarded as Universal, as Conceptual, and as Western Concluding Elucidation: On the Extension and Intension of “Apophasis”

315 322 329 332 338 341 347 349 353 358 362

365

Appendix: Analytic Table of Contents 374 Notes 380 Index 421

NOTES

Chapter One.  Introduction 1.  Makau Mutua, “Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights,” Harvard International Law Journal 42, no. 1 (2001): 201–45. 2.  Timothy D. Knepper and Leah E. Kalmanson, eds., Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017), offers rich samplings of such inquiry. 3.  Wesley J. Wildman, Effing the Ineffable: Existential Mumblings at the Limits of Language (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), announces this step beyond sheer, mute ineffability in its title and works through American pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and continental philosophical theology in order to explore various types of effusion expressing (or “effing”) human experiences of “ultimacy.” Timothy Knepper, Ends of Philosophy of Religion: Telos and Terminus (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), in contrast, attempts to liberate historical study of world religions from philosophical theology, whether analytic or continental. 4.  Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000); J. Aaron Simmons and Bruce Ellis Benson, The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 5.  Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, eds., Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 6.  Jeffrey L. Kosky, Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity—Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

380

Notes to Pages 7–20  381 7.  Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Catherine Keller, in Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), conjugates this current of criticism with apophatic theo-political perspectives. 8.  Barbara Cassin, Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Paris: Seuil/Robert, 2004); Heinz Wismann, Penser entre les langages (Paris: Albin Michel, 2012). 9.  Recent examples evincing this wide scope include Agat Wilczek, Beyond the Limits of Language: Apophasis and Transgression in Contemporary Theoretical Discourse (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), and Joyce Wexler, Violence without God: The Rhetorical Despair of Twentieth-Century Writers (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 10.  A macroscopic index is Guy Ankerl, Global Communication without Universal Civilization, vol. 1, Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western (Geneva: INU Press, 2000). 11.  David B. Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986). 12.  For a concise reading of philosophy as essentially religion throughout Western intellectual history, see Karl Albert, Philosophie als Religion (Sankt Augustin: Gardez! Verlag, 2002), and for some provocative proposals, see Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 13.  Nick Trakakis, The End of Philosophy of Religion (London: Continuum, 2008), signals an afterlife for philosophy of religion—after its end as an analytic enterprise pretending to scientificity—in “explicitly narrative and literary approaches” (2). 14.  A thorough sociological analysis is offered by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter: Religion in der modernen Kultur (Munich: Beck, 2004). 15.  Bradley B. Onishi, The Sacrality of the Secular: Postmodern Philosophy of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 16.  Michel Serres, L’Incandescent (Paris: Pommier, 2003), particularly “Accès à l’universel,” 173–333. 17.  Inspired by Kierkegaard, the existential philosophy of Miguel de Unamuno exemplarily articulates the priority of belief (for him in the soul’s immor­ tality) over positive knowing in Spanish and universal philosophy. See, especially, The Tragic Sense of Life (Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, 1912). 18.  Jacques Derrida (in one of his voices) makes this remark about negative theology, along with the remark that it maybe does not exist at all, in Derrida, Sauf le nom (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 45, 47.

382  Notes to Pages 21–25 19.  Lieven Boeve, “Negative Theology and Theological Hermeneutics: The Particularity of Naming God,” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 3, no. 2 (2006): 11. 20.  John Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Universe, 2nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005). Pluralism is his theme also in his contributions to Hick and Paul F. Knitter, eds., The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987). 21.  Hence my alignment with the counterperspectives to Hick’s offered in Gavin D’Costa, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990). 22.  Kenneth Rose, Pluralism: The Future of Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), brings just such apophatic insight to bear on interreligious reflection. 23.  Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 24.  Jean-Luc Nancy, La Déclosion: Déconstruction du christianisme, vol. 1 (Paris: Galilée, 2005). 25.  Gianni Vattimo, Dopo la cristianità: Per un cristianesimo non religioso (Milan: Garzanti, 2002), trans. Luca D’Isanto as After Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 26.  Ward Blanton, Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 27.  Émile Durkheim, Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912), trans. Karen E. Fields as The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1975). 28.  Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1905), trans. Talcot Parsons as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ed. Richard Swedberg (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 2009). 29.  Marcel Detienne, Comparer l’incomparable (Paris: Seuil, 2000), trans. Janet Lloyd as Comparing the Incomparable (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 30.  François Jullien, Un Sage est sans idée, ou l’autre de la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 31.  I argue this in William Franke, Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018). 32.  Mark Alizart, Informatique céleste (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017). 33.  Antonio Spadaro, Cyberteologia: Pensare il cristianesimo al tempo della rete (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2012), trans. Maria Way as Cybertheology: Thinking Christianity in the Era of the Internet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

Notes to Pages 25–31  383 34.  See, especially, Thomas Carlson, “Religion and the Time of Creation: Placing ‘the Human’ in Techno-scientific and Theological Context,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 826–42. 35.  William Desmond, The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

Chapter Two.  Outbound Reflection 1.  For the undercommon, see Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses,” Social Text 79, vol. 22, no. 2 (2004): 101–15. 2.  Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 3.  William Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). I lay out the apocalyptic basis for an apophatic philosophy and poetics in Franke, Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pt. 1, “A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language.” 4. The issue is approached obliquely from a number of angles in Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes, eds., Elliot R. Wolfson: Poetic Thinking (Leiden: Brill, 2015), e.g., 24. 5.  Thomas Carlson, The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and the Creation of the Human (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 6.  Hent de Vries, Theologie im Pianissimo & zwischen Rationalität und Dekonstruktion: Zur Aktualität der Denkfiguren Adornos und Levinas (Kampen, Nether­lands: J. H. Kok, 1989), trans. Geoffrey Hale as Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). De Vries hails from a much larger cohort of Dutch scholars who produced, for example, Isle N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds., Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 7.  William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

384  Notes to Pages 31–42 8.  Most recently in Wesley J. Wildman, Effing the Ineffable: Existential Mumblings at the Limits of Language (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018). 9.  Of their works, I would single out especially William Desmond, The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Alois Halbmayr and Gregor Maria Hoff, eds., Negative Theologie Heute? Zum aktuellen Stellungwert einer umstrittenen Tradition (Freiburg-Basel-Wien: Herder, 2008); Ingolf U. Dalferth, Transzendenz und säkulare Welt: Lebensorientierung an letzter Gegenwart (Tübingen: Mohr ­Siebeck, 2015). 10.  Barbara Cassin, Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2004), and Heinz Wismann, Penser entre les langages (2012). Their work finds echoes in Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013). 11.  For bibliographical references, I defer to William Franke, Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), and David Chai, Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019). 12.  Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). 13.  Another vast field of research that stands out in this regard is psychoanalysis. See David Henderson, Apophatic Elements in the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis: Pseudo-Dionysius and C. J. Jung (London: Routledge, 2014). 14. Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, 262. 15.  Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1992). 16.  Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003). 17.  Michel de Certeau, La fable mystique, I: XVIe–XVIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), trans. Michael B. Smith as The Mystic Fable, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 18.  Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 82. 19.  John D. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982). 20.  Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, eds., Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 21.  This is already emphasized by Dominique Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Combas: L’Eclat, 1991). In English, see Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).

Notes to Pages 42–66  385 22. Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift, 227. 23.  Several of his books, including Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), turn on making the invisible visible. 24.  Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Unknow Thyself: Apophaticism, Deconstruction, and Theology after Ontotheology,” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 (2001): ­387–417. 25.  See Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’athéisme, essence des monothéismes,” Entretien avec Jérôme-Alexandre Nielsberg, Les Lettres françaises, n.s. 15 (May 24, 2005), on the appearance of La Déclosion. 26.  See “Transcending Transcendence,” in Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream, 23–41. 27.  “On Imagination & Narrative in Jewish Thought: An Interview with Eliot Wolfson,” 14, http://tjjt.cjs.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/12 /Interview-on-Imagination-Narrative-Elliot-Wolfson.pdf. 28.  Franz Rosenzweig, “Note on Anthropomorphisms,” in Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, Gesammelte Schriften (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1984), 741, cited by Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift, 32. 29.  Rosenzweig, “Das neue Denken,” Zweistromland, 156, cited by Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift, 29–30. 30.  Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 29. 31.  Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992 [1961]), 25. 32.  Jacques Derrida, “Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas,” in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 117–228. 33.  Ironically, Wolfson seems to have borrowed the term “theolatry” from Keller. See Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream, 27. 34.  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie (1801), trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf as The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977). 35.  I translate from Levinas, Totalité et infini, 75. 36. Ibid. 37.  Ibid., 76. 38. Ibid. 39.  Ibid., 77. 40.  Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976–), 65:4.

386  Notes to Pages 66–76 41. Heidegger’s Seyn (instead of the standard Sein) is translated as “beyng” in order to avoid hypostatizing being and, instead, return it to its event character as be-ing. See, further, Daniela Vallage-Neu, “Poietic Saying,” in Companion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, ed. Charles Scott et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 66–80. 42.  Donald Phillip Verene, The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), offers instructive object lessons in this type of Vichian thinking.

Chapter Three.  Apophatic Mysticism as Practical Philosophy 1.  Its broad ramifications register, for example, in Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), which takes Cusanus as a central inspiration (see especially chapter 3). John Milbank’s biting critique of modernity, for instance, in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), also illustrates Cusanus’s growing importance for revisionary approaches to modern theology. 2.  Johannes Hoff, The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013). 3.  Michel de Certeau, “The Gaze of Nicholas of Cusa,” Diacritics 17, no. 3 (1987): 2–38. 4.  Highly illuminating on Cusanus’s De visione Dei are Louis Dupré, “The Mystical Theology of Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei,” and Clyde Lee Miller, “God’s Presence, Some Cusan Proposals,” in Nicholas Cusanus on Christ and the Church: Essays in Memory of Chandler McCuskey Brooks for the American Cusanus Society, ed. Gerald Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 205–20 and 241–49, respectively. 5.  Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: L’eucharistie et l’église au moyen âge (Paris: Aubier, 1944), esp. 221–47, trans. Gemma Simmonds as Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 6.  Epistula ad Nicolaum Bononiensem, n. 26. Cusanus’s texts are cited from the editions available online at http://www.cusanus-portal.de/, with paragraph numbers (n.) and chapter numbers, where applicable, and with my own translations, unless otherwise indicated. 7.  Erwin Panofsky, “Die Perspektive als ‘Symbolische Form’” (1927), in Aufsätze und Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen (Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1980).

Notes to Pages 76–84  387 8.  Claus-Artur Scheier, “Albertis Narziß und der ‘Cartesianismus’ von ‘De pictura,’” in “Videre et videri coincident”: Theorien des Sehens in der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts, ed. Wolfgang Christian Schneider, Harald Schwaetzer, et al. (Münster: Aschendorff, 2011), 67–80. 9.  Hans Belting, Florenz und Bagdad: Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks (Munich: Beck, 2008), trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider as Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). See, further, Charles, H. Carman, Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus: Toward an Epistemology of Vision for Italian Renaissance Art and Culture (London: Routledge, 2016). 10.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), and Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). 11.  De Visione Dei, Praefatio, n. 1–4. “I send to your love the painting I was able to acquire holding the all-seeing figure that I call the icon of God” (quam habere potui, caritati vestrae mitto tabellam figuram cuncta videntis tenentem, quam eiconam dei appello). 12. Hoff, Analogical Turn, 51. 13.  Ibid., 52. 14.  Similar theses are broached in detail in Inigo Bocken and Tilman Borsche, eds., Kann das Denken malen? Philosophie und Malerei in der Renaissance (Munich: Paderborn, 2010). 15.  Marco Böhlandt, Verborgene Zahl—Verborgener Gott. Mathematik und Naturwissen im Denken des Nicolaus Cusanus (1401–1464) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2009), 137–42. 16.  The economic implications of modern epistemology are pursued further in interestingly analogous terms by Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 17. Belting, Florenz und Bagdad, 190–202, 104–13. 18.  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik, 3 vols. (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1962). 19.  See, especially, Giacomo Leopardi, Operette morali, bilingual ed., ed. Giovanni Cecchetti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 20. Hoff, Analogical Turn, 85. 21.  Johannes Hoff, Kontingenz, Berührung, Überschreitung: Zur philosophischen Propädeutik christlicher Mystik nach Nikolaus von Kues (Munich: Karl Albert, 2007), 388–404. 22. Belting, Florenz und Bagdad, 240–46. 23.  Martin Heidegger, Das Zeitalter des Weltbildes (1938), in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950).

388  Notes to Pages 84–93 24.  See, especially, Martin Heidegger, “Brief über den Humanismus” (1947), in Über den Humanismus (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000). 25.  Johannes Hoff, Spiritualität und Sprachverlust: Theologie nach Foucault und Derrida (Munich: Paderborn, 1999). 26. Hoff, Analogical Turn, 121. 27.  Cf. Dupré, “The Mystical Theology of Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei,” 213–17. 28. Cusanus, Directio speculantis seu de li non aliud, chap. XXII, n. 103. Cf. also Trialogus de possest, n. 2, where Cusanus explains this in relation to Romans 1:20. 29. Cusanus, De visione Dei, chap. X, n. 40. 30.  See Werner Beierwaltes, Visio facialis: Sehen ins Angesicht. Zur Coincidenz des endlichen und unendlichen Blicks bei Cusanus (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaft, 1988). Essays in Schneider et al., eds., “Videre et videri coincident,” probe this seeing the invisible by invisibly being seen further. 31.  Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Werke, ed. Josef Quint (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1936–), 1:201; English translation in Bernard McGinn, “Seeing and Not Seeing: Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei in the History of Western Mysticism,” in Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance, ed. Peter. J. Casarella (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 37. 32.  See, for example, De visione Dei, chap. XIII. 33.  De visione Dei, chap. XVI, n. 68 (in Hopkins translation, XVII, n. 72). The endlessness of desire is expressed similarly by Dante in Convivio IV.11, but without the same acceptance of incompleteness. 34.  McGinn, “Seeing and Not Seeing,” 43. 35.  Robert C. Miner, Truth in the Making: Creative Knowledge in Theology and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2003), 34. 36.  Ernst Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Leipzig: Teubner, 1927). 37.  Giuseppe Mazzotta, Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), and Charles Trinkhaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 2 vols. 38. Hoff, Analogical Turn, 13. 39. Cusanus, De beryllo, n. 7; Dialogus de ludo globi, chap. II, n. 114. 40. Hoff, Analogical Turn, 21. 41.  Ibid., 22. 42. Ibid. 43.  Ibid., 24.

Notes to Pages 93–107  389 44.  Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 45.  See also de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 221–47, 259–60. 46.  Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); John Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 47. Giorgio Agamben, La potenza del pensiero: Saggi e conferenze (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 2005). Agamben’s 1993 essay “Bartleby or Contingency” appears as the final chapter. 48.  Werner Beierwaltes, Visio Absoluta: Reflexion als Grundzug des göttlichen Prinzips bei Nicolaus Cusanus (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1978), traces this dialectic from its Neoplatonic roots in Proclus to Cusanus. 49. Miner, Truth in the Making, 23–24, develops this account. 50.  Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 187–99, 217–25. 51.  Georg Cantor, Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannigfaltigkeitslehre (Foundation of a General Theory of Aggregates) (1883). See, further, “On the Theory of the Transfinite: Correspondence of Georg Cantor and J. B. Cardinal Frenzelin (1885– 86). Afterword by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.,” Fidelio 3, no. 3 (1994): 97–110. 52. Hoff, Analogical Turn, 167. 53.  Ibid., 168. 54.  Ibid., 154. 55.  Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Minuit, 1968). 56. Cusanus, Idiota de sapientia, book I, n. 6. A similar argument is found already in De docta ignorantia, book I, chap. 2, n. 5: Maximum itaque absolutum unum est. 57.  A concise guide to this issue and to research on it is found in Anne Debora Föttinger, Der menschliche Geist als eine “Grenze ohne Grenze”: Zur Erkenntnismetaphysik des Nikolaus von Kues (Munich: GRIN, 2008). 58. Cusanus, Idiota de sapientia, book I, n. 9.

Chapter Four.  Contemporary Atheist Philosophers and St. Paul’s Revolutionary Political Theology 1.  An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Saint Paul among the ­Theorists: A Genealogy of the New Universalism,” in Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, ed. Mark Knight (New York: Routledge, 2016), 146–55. With permission.

390  Notes to Pages 107–114 2.  Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan, ed., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), registers numerous important shiftings of this horizon. 3.  There are now numerous discussions of this critical tradition and cultural heritage. My own comprehensive construction of it can be found in William Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, 2 vols. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 4.  The extensive range of these approaches can be gauged from Hent de Vries and Ward Blanton, eds., Paul and the Philosophers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), and Peter Frick, ed., Paul in the Grip of the Philosophers: The Apostle and Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013). 5.  Bible quotations are from the Authorized Version (1611) checked against and corrected by The Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (New York: United Bible ­Societies, 1968). 6.  Subtly reading Romans 9–11, Jacob Taubes, Die politische Theologie des Paulus, ed. Aleida Assmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1993), trans. Dana Hollander as The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), elaborates on Paul’s vision of God’s strategy to make the Jews jealous and thereby bring them into the arc of salvation together with the Gentiles. 7.  This is the title of the English translation by Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). Quotations here are translated directly from ­Badiou, Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). 8.  Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 9.  John Caputo, “Postcards from Paul: Subtraction versus Grafting,” introduction to Saint Paul among the Philosophers, ed. John D. Caputo and Linda ­Martín Alcoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 22. 10.  See especially F. W. J. von Schelling and Slavoj Žižek, The Abyss of ­Freedom/Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 11.  Slavoj Žižek, “The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity,” in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 20. 12.  Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute—or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000). 13.  Slavoj Žižek, “From Job to Christ: A Paulinian Reading of Chesterton,” in Caputo and Alcoff, eds., St. Paul among the Philosophers, 44.

Notes to Pages 115–123  391 14.  Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ. 15.  I translate directly from Giorgio Agamben, Il tempo che resta: Un commento alla lettera ai Romani (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), trans. Patricia ­Dailey as The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 16. Agamben, Il tempo che resta, 43–46. 17.  Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’inoubliable et l’inespéré (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2000), in contrast, develops a theistic and salvific approach to this problematic of the unforgettable. 18. Agamben, Il tempo che resta, 52–53. 19.  Ibid., 56. 20.  Agamben’s misreading of Badiou and his unjustified rejection of the ­latter’s “universalism” is brought out by Dominik Finkelde, Politische Eschatologie nach Paulus: Badiou-Agamben-Žižek-Santner (Vienna: Verlag Turia + Kant, 2007), 44–48. 21. Agamben, Il tempo che resta, 77–84. 22.  Ibid., 82. 23.  John Freccero, “The Significance of Terza rima,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 258–74. 24.  On Badiou’s thinking of the actual infinite, see Frederiek Depoortere, ­Badiou and Theology (London: Continuum, 2009), and Adam S. Miller, Badiou, Marion, and Saint Paul: Immanent Grace (London: Continuum, 2008). Miller, “Re-Thinking Infinity: On Alain Badiou’s Being & Event,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 8, no. 1 (2006): 121–27, offers an epitome. 25. For some interesting applications of this vocabulary, see Calvin O. Schrag, “Transcendence and Transversality,” in Transcendence and Beyond: A Postmodern Inquiry, ed. John Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), chapter 11. 26.  A powerful and original diagnosis of this predicament is José Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de las masas (Barcelona: Espasa Libros, 2010 [1929]), trans. ­Anthony Kerrigan as The Revolt of the Masses, ed. Kenneth Moore (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985). 27.  Benjamin H. Dunning, Christ without Adam: Subjectivity and Sexual Difference in the Philosophers’ Paul (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), parses the intricate complexities of this issue. 28.  Pauline theology’s potential for revealing revolutionary truth concerning economics is sounded in Ward Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), and in John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek, Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy

392  Notes to Pages 123–130 and the Future of Christian Theology, ed. Creston Davis (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2010). 29.  See Andrew W. Hass, “Hegel and the Negation of the Apophatic,” in Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy, ed. Nahum Brown and J. Aaron Simmons (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 131–62. 30.  See Daniel Boyarin, “St. Paul among the Antiphilosphers; or, Saul among the Sophists,” in Caputo and Alcoff, eds., St. Paul among the Philosophers, 109–41. 31. Badiou, Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme, 107. 32.  Dale B. Martin, “The Promise of Teleology, the Constraints of Epistemology, and Universal Vision in Paul,” in Caputo and Alcoff, eds., St. Paul among the Philosophers, 95 (italics original). 33.  Ibid., 94. 34.  Gianni Vattimo, “Per un cristianesimo non religioso,” in Cos’è la religione oggi?, ed. Giovanni Floramo, Emilio Gentili, and Gianni Vattimo (Milan: ETS, 2005), 43–61. 35.  I develop a broader version of this argument in William Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), pt. II.

Chapter Five.  Cosmopolitan Conviviality and Negative Theology 1.  The ideas developed in this chapter were originally presented extemporaneously at the international conference Interrogating Cosmopolitan Conviviality: New Dimensions of the European in Literature held at the University of Bamberg on May 24–25, 2012. My thanks are due especially to the organizers, Christoph Houswitschka and Federico Fabris. Earlier versions of the essay appeared as “Cosmopolitan Conviviality and Negative Theology: Europe’s Vocation to Universalism,” The Journal of European Studies 44, no. 1 (2014): 30–49, and as “The New Apophatic Universalism: Deconstructive Critical Theories and Open Togetherness in the European Tradition,” Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy 21 (2014): 86–101. 2.  I trace the trajectory of apophatic tradition from its ancient origins to its postmodern avatars in William Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), vol. 1, Classical Formulations; vol. 2, Modern and Contemporary Transformations. 3.  See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis, eds., Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic (New York: Columbia

Notes to Pages 130–134  393 University Press, 2011), and Andrew W. Hass, Hegel and the Art of Negation: Negativity, Creativity, and Contemporary Thought (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013). 4.  Andrew W. Hass, “Hegel and the Negation of the Apophatic,” 131–61, and Nahum Brown, “Is Hegel an Apophatic Thinker?,” 107–29, in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy and Negative Theology: Sounding the Unsayable, ed. Nahum Brown and J. Aaron Simmons (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 5.  Merold Westphal, “Hegel’s Theory of the Concept,” in Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). I deal with this issue in detail in ­chapter II, section ii of Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). 6.  Mark Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), offers a probing treatment of the turning upon and against Hegel particularly by French postmodern thinkers influenced by the interpretations of Hegel developed by Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard 1947), and Jean Hyppolite, Genèse et structure de la “Phénoménologie de l’esprit” de Hegel (Paris: Aubier, 1946). Taylor emphasizes Hegel’s ultimate reduction of difference to identity through the doctrine of “the identity of identity and difference.” 7.  Rémi Brague, Europe, la voie romaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 8.  Of course, classical studies today (with comparative classicism, global classicism, and postclassicism) are doing everything possible to reverse the traditional focus on Greece and Rome. Still, the vehemence of the protest animating this revisionism testifies to the power of the vision being contested. 9.  Sandra Toenies Keating, “Revisiting the Charge of Taḥrīf: The Question of Supersessionism in Early Islam and the Qurʾān,” Nicholas of Cusa and Islam: Polemic and Dialogue in the late Middle Ages, eds. Ian Christopher Levy, Rita GeorgeTvrtković, and Donald F. Duclow (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 202–17, qualifies, yet strongly confirms, the type of view represented by Brague in light of recent scholarship, which too often wishes to downplay the ascendency of theological convictions in Islam’s origins. 10. Brague, Europe, la voie romaine, 143. 11.  Ibid., 143–44. 12.  Ibid., 184; cf. 186–87. 13.  Ibid., 36. 14.  Denis Guénoun, Hypothèses sur l’Europe: Un essai de philosophie (Paris: Editions Circé, 2000), trans. Christine Irizarry as About Europe: Philosophical ­Hypotheses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 15.  See, for instance, Peter Trawny, Heidegger und Hölderlin oder Der Europäische Morgen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), 10, for this thesis typical of German Hellenism as crystallized especially by Hegel. See, further,

394  Notes to Pages 134–139 Martin Heidegger, “Europa und die deutsche Philosophie,” in Europa und die Philosophie, ed. Hans-Helmut Gander (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993). 16.  A. H. Armstrong, “The Escape of the One: An Investigation of Some Possibilities of Apophatic Theology Imperfectly Realised in the West,” in Plotinian and Christian Studies (London: Variorum Reprints, 1979), 87. 17.  For the development of this critical penchant from Neoplatonism to contemporary critical theory, see Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said, vols. 1 and 2. 18.  Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. from Hebrew by Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 19.  I pursue this in William Franke, “Damascius. Of the Ineffable: Aporetics of the Notion of an Absolute Principle,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 12, no. 1 (2004): 111–31. 20.  I expound this interpretation in William Franke, “The Secondariness of Virgilian Epic and Its Unprecedented Originality,” in The Revelation of Imagination: From Homer and the Bible through Virgil and Augustine to Dante (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 165–73. 21.  Jean-Luc Nancy, Déconstruction du christianisme, vol. 1, La Déclosion (Paris: Galilée, 2005); vol. 2, L’Adoration (Paris: Galilée, 2010). 22.  Tellingly, and as a historical inscription of this ambiguity, University of Heidelberg missionary theologian Theo Sundermeier has had a leading role in ­giving “Konvivialität” (conviviality) its contemporary currency. See Sundermeier, Den Fremden verstehen: Eine praktische Hermeneutik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996). 23.  Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia Uni-

versity Press, 2005), xv.

24.  For a reconstruction of this tradition, see Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said, 1:49–61, on Plotinus. 25.  Ulrich Beck, Der kosmopolitische Blick oder: Krieg ist Frieden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 250. 26.  Ibid., 253. 27.  The issues are posed acutely in John Rajchman, ed., The Identity in Question (New York: Routledge, 1995). Especially influential is Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Some critical revisions can be found in Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); and in Linda Martín Alcoff, Michael Hames-García, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M. L. Moya, eds., Identity Politics Reconsidered: Future of Minority Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 28.  Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 1944), trans. E. Jephcott as Dialectic of

Notes to Pages 139–142  395 Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. G. S. Noerr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 29.  Eduardo Mendieta, ed., The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers (New York: Routledge, 2005). 30.  Cf. Gilroy’s planetary conviviality, in Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, pt. 1, “The Planet,” 29–83. 31.  Jay L. Garfield, ed., The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 32.  On this topic, see, for example, Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), esp. chap. 2: “‘Nous’ et les ‘Autres’ (We and the Others): Is Universalism Ethnocentric?,” 24–49. Further indicative references are available in Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 33.  This perspective is developed with panache by Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 34.  Landmarks of this realization include Hent de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), and Hans Blumenberg, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit, ed. A. Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007). 35.  Bonnie Honig, “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home,” in Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, 257. 36.  Crucial source texts include Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts” (1780), in Lessings Werke (Salzburg: Bergland-Buch, 1964), and Johann Georg Hamann, KONSOMPAS: Fragmente einer apokryphischen Sibylle über apokalyptische Mysterien, in Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Josef Nadler (Vienna: Herder, 1949–57). For an overview, see Max Seckler, Aufklärung und Offenbarung in Christlicher Glaube in moderner Gesellschaft, ed. Franz Böckle (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1980), 21:5–78. 37.  François Jullien suggestively explores this vocabulary in Jullien, De l’universel: De l’uniforme, du commun et du dialogue entre les cultures (Paris: Fayard, 2008). Thinking the common is crucial also to the project of Jean-Luc Nancy, conspicuously in Nancy, L’Adoration. Nancy highlights it already in the “Ouverture” of La Déclosion. 38.  Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bände, ed. Beda Allemann et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 3:186. 39.  The wound motif in Celan is examined most exhaustively by Ralf Willms, Das Motiv der Wunde im lyrischen Werk von Paul Celan: Historisch-systematische ­Untersuchungen zur Poetik des Opfers (Munich: AVM Verlag, 2011).

396  Notes to Pages 143–151 40.  Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2. English translation by Michael Hamburger in The Poems of Paul Celan (New York: Persea Books, 1995), 232–33. 41.  This recurrent Derridean formula is placed on display, for example, in the title of the final chapter of Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1993). 42.  Jacques Derrida, Sauf le nom (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 106. The mutual implication of democracy and deconstruction is explored from a variety of critical perspectives in Marie-Louise Mallet, ed., La démocratie à venir: Autour de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2004). 43. Novalis, Fragmente und Studien 1797–1798, in Novalis Werke, ed. Gerhard Schulz (München: C. H. Beck, 2001), #71, 401. 44. Novalis, Blutenstaub: Fragmente (1797–98), Sprüche 6: “Sich Begreifen,” https://www.textlog.de/23594.html. 45. Novalis, Neue Fragmente (1800/02): Traktat vom Licht #2120, http://art-bin.com/art/olicht.html. 46.  See Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung (Philosophy of Revelation), excerpted in Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said, 2:64–73. 47.  G. W. F. Hegel, Frühe Schriften, in Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 1:234–36. 48. The potential of Enlightenment, especially in German tradition (Aufklärung), also to embrace the new religious impulses directed to an indefinable Other is demonstrated by Johann Gottfried Herder in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784). See Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, “Herder und die christliche Europaidee der Neuzeit—Erbe und Impuls,” in Geist und Religion der Neutzeit (Saarbrücken-Scheidt: Dadder, 1991), 417–57. 49. One intense, focused encounter with apophatic thought is Giorgio Agamben, with Monica Ferrando, La ragazza indicibile: Mito e mistero di Kore (Milan: Electa, 2010). More expansive are his discussion of Damascius in Agamben, Idea della prosa (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1985), and Agamben, L’uomo senza contenuto (Milan: Rizzoli, 1970). 50.  Peter Sloterdijk, Falls Europa erwacht: Gedanken zum Programm einer Weltmacht am Ende des Zeitalters ihrer politischen Absence (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). 51.  Massimo Cacciari, Geo-Filosofia dell’Europa (Milan: Adelphi, 1994). 52.  Paul Valéry, “La crise de l’esprit,” Variété 1 (1924). 53. Sloterdijk, Falls Europa erwacht, 28, 30. 54.  Ibid., 27, 32. 55.  Ibid., 27, 34. 56.  Ibid., 50–53. 57.  Ibid., 58–60.

Notes to Pages 151–159  397 58.  See Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider, eds., Encounter between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World through the Word (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 59.  See, in addition, Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), and Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), chap. 3, “The Politics of Truth, or, Alain Badiou as a Reader of St. Paul,” 127–70. 60.  Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser und Rolf Tiedemann, vol. I/2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 690–708, and James R. Martel, Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (New York: Routledge, 2012).

Chapter Six.  Except Asia 1.  An early version of this chapter was presented at the International Conference, Except Asia: Agamben’s Work in Transcultural Perspective, at National Taiwan Normal University in June 2013 and appears, along with other papers from the conference, in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 41, no. 2 (2015): 95–120. 2.  Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda (Turin: Einaudi, 1995). Throughout I translate directly from the Italian. The citations of Agamben, unless otherwise attributed, are from this volume. This first volume of what became the Homo sacer series will generally be cited in the following simply as Homo sacer, while later volumes will be designated with their titles and series numbers. 3.  Agamben, however, does not follow Schmitt in the latter’s conservative conclusions. In Stato di eccezione, Homo sacer II, 1 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), Agamben develops his analysis to include an extended critique of Schmitt. 4.  Dominique Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Combas: L’Eclat, 1991). 5.  For selected translations from these and other relevant authors, see Domi­ nique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 6.  I treat the classic controversies concerning univocity that devolve from Duns Scotus in Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable, 215, and more extensively in Franke, Self-Reflection: Dante’s “Paradiso” and the Origins of Modern Thought, part II (forthcoming). 7. Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda, 95.

398  Notes to Pages 160–173 8.  I excavate and reconstruct this tradition historically and theoretically in William Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, vol. 1, Classical Formulations; vol. 2, Modern and Contemporary Transformations. 9.  The later volumes of the Homo sacer series, in particular Il Regno e la Gloria: Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo, Homo sacer II, 2 (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2007), and Altissima povertà: Regola e forma di vita nel monachesimo (Vicenza: Neri Pozzo, 2011), have pursued his analysis onto a programmatically theological terrain, thus confirming this intuition gathered from the early volumes alone. Colby Dickinson, Agamben and Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2011), and Colby Dickinson and Adam Kotsko, Agamben’s Coming Philosophy: Finding a New Use for Theology (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), luminously explore these ramifications in exquisite detail. 10. Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda, 12. 11.  He is comparable here to Jacques Derrida in Force de loi: Le “fondement mystique de l’autorité” (Paris: Galilée, 1994). 12. Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda, 94. 13.  Ibid., 21. 14. Ibid. 15.  Ibid., 22, 22, 25. 16.  Giorgio Agamben, Il sacramento del linguaggio: Archeologia del giuramento, Homo sacer II, 3 (Rome: Laterza, 2008). 17.  Giorgio Agamben, Segnatura rerum: Sul metodo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008), trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell as The Signature of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone, 2009). 18. Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria, 16. 19.  See, for example, Eckhart’s Sermons or “Predigten,” 7, 42, and 48, in Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1936–), and Cusanus, Dialogue on the Hiddenness of God (Dialogus de Deo abscondito). 20. Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda, 79. 21.  Ibid., 98. 22.  Ibid., 101. 23. Ibid. 24.  Ibid., 9, 12. 25.  Ibid., 13. 26. Ibid. 27. Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda, 121, sec. 6.3. 28. Gianni Vattimo, Nichilismo e emancipazione: Etica, politica, diritto (Milan: Garzanti, 2003).

Notes to Pages 175–185  399 29.  David Burrell, “The Christian Distinction Celebrated and Expanded,” in The Truthful and the Good: Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski, ed. John R. Drummond and James G. Hart (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 191–206. 30. Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda, 206, 207. 31.  Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997; originally, 1957) 32. Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda, 194–95. 33.  Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967). 34. Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda, 33. 35.  Ibid., 36, 38. 36.  Giorgio Agamben, La potenza del pensiero: Saggi e conferenze (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 2005), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen as Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 243–71. 37.  Agamben, “Bartleby o della contingenza,” in Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, La formula della creazione (Macerata: Quodlibet, 1993). 38. Agamben, Il sacramento del linguaggio: Archeologia del giuramento, 16. 39.  Giorgio Agamben, Idea della prosa (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1985), 12. 40.  François Jullien, De l’universel: De l’uniforme, du commun et du dialogue entre les cultures (Paris: Fayard, 2008).

Chapter Seven.  Liberal Arts Education Worldwide Unlimited Inc. 1.  This chapter originated as a keynote address for the symposium Liberal Arts in the Age of Globalization marking the Tenth Anniversary Celebration of Underwood International College, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea, October 28, 2015. I thank Professor Anthony Adler for his formal response. Much of the content was subsequently adapted to serve as an inaugural address for the new School of Foreign Studies at Capitol University of Economics and Business in Beijing, China, May 26, 2016. 2.  I owe this experience to my position as professor and head of the Philosophy and Religious Studies Programme at the University of Macao from 2013 to 2016. I was also visiting associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong in 2005–6 and was hired there as professor of European studies in 2012, but took up duties in Macao instead. 3.  The Yonsei University anniversary symposium (see note 1, above) addressed specifically the issue of specialization in the humanities. 4.  Pausanias records the inscription γνώθι σεαυτόν (gnothi seauton) in his second-century A.D. Description of Greece (X.24.1).

400  Notes to Pages 185–199 5.  The term “imaginaire” is used by French critics such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan not just as an adjective but as a substantive designating the cultural construction of a world through symbols and images. 6.  The more standard translation of this title as The Reduction of the Arts to Theology (Zachary Hayes, 1996; Sister Emma Thérèse Healy, 1956) falls under the domination of a scientific conception of knowledge as reduction by abstraction. 7.  Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” The Hibbert Journal 46, no. 1 (1947), is a classic statement championing this medieval model of education and advocating for its modern adaptation and revival. 8.  Alex Garland’s 2015 science fiction film Ex Machina recycles this myth, which is ever-present in popular culture. 9.  I develop this parallel further in “Eastern and Western Apophatic Paths between Post-Modern Secularity and Pre-Modern Divinity,” Tamkang Review: A Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, originally a keynote speech for the conference “Between Humanity and Divinity: In Literature, Art, Religion and Culture” of the Taiwan Association of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies (TACMRS), National Chi Nan University, Taiwan, October 19, 2018. 10.  An International Summit Dialogue and Forum, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University, October 16–17, 2015. 11.  This event in August 2019 was sponsored by the Princeton Postclassicism Network in collaboration with Global Antiquity: A Humanities Council Global Initiative, Princeton University. I am indebted for this invitation especially to Andrew Hui, Brook Holmes, and Martin Kern. 12.  Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed., A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895 (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1895). 13.  Ernest Fenollosa, “The Coming Fusion of East and West,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 98 (1898): 115–22. 14.  Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 15.  Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Great Civilized Conversation: Education for a World Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Anthony Yu, Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 16.  See essays on these works in Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). The Hanjung mallok as “Memoires Written in Silence” prove particularly pertinent to the apophatic theme. 17.  In this apophatic vein of comparative philosophy and religion, see Timothy D. Knepper and Leah E. Kalmanson, eds., Ineffability: An Exercise in Compara­

Notes to Pages 199–203  401 tive Philosophy of Religion (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017). Specifically, the comparison between Daoist and Western approaches to unknowing that frames the present chapter receives expert treatment in Louis Komjathy, “‘Names Are the Guest of Reality’: Apophasis, Mysticism, and Soteriology in Daoist Perspective,” 59–94. 18.  Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Munich: Piper, 1949), trans. Michael Bullock as The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1953). For multiple perspectives on the current relevance of this topic, see Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). 19.  Alfredo P. Co, Across the Ancient Philosophical World: Essays in Comparative Philosophy (Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015).

Chapter Eight.  Apophasis and the Axial Age 1.  Some particularly significant samples of such study have been gathered into Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). 2.  Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). 3.  Karl Jaspers, Vom Usprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Zürich: Artemis-­ Verlag, 1949), trans. Michael Bullock as The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953). 4.  Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, 20. 5.  A useful overview is provided by Eric Ziolkowski, “Axial Age Theorizing and the Comparative Study of Religion and Literature,” in “China and the West in Dialogue,” ed. David Jasper and Wang Hai, special issue, Literature and Theology 28, no. 2 (2014): 131. 6.  Johann Arnason, “The Axial Age and Its Interpreters: Reopening a Debate,” in Axial Civilizations and World History, ed. Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 31–32. 7.  Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), and Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton, 2000). 8.  Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, The Origins and Diversity of the Axial Age Civilizations, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 3. See, further, Eisenstadt, “Innerweltliche Transzendenz und die Strukturierung der Welt: Max Webers Studie über China und die Gestalt der Chinesischen Zivilisation,” in Max Webers

402  Notes to Pages 203–210 Studie über Konfuzianismus und Taoismus: Interpretation und Kritik, ed. Wolfgang Schluchter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983). 9.  Benjamin I. Schwartz, “The Age of Transcendence,” Daedalus 104, no. 2 (1975): 3. Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Fault of the Greeks,” 9–19, in ibid. See, further, Schwartz’s The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 10.  Hans Joas, “The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse,” in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 12. 11.  Charles Taylor, “What Was the Axial Age Revolution?,” in Bellah and Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 30–46. 12.  Ibid., 31, 34. 13.  Ibid., 42, 41, 37. 14.  Ibid., 38. 15.  Joas, “The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse,” in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 16. 16.  Ibid., 23. 17.  Björn Wittrock, in Axial Civilizations and World History, ed. Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock, 108. 18.  Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, “The Axial Conundrum between Transcendental Visions and Vicissitudes of Their Institutionalizations,” in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 277. 19.  Ibid., 278. 20.  Ibid., 279. 21.  On apophatic transcendence as interlocked with its immanent expressions, see Nahum Brown and William Franke, eds., Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), beginning with Brown’s introduction. 22. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 3–4. 23.  Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Brook Ziporyn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), 21. 24. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 9. 25.  Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 299 (Burke’s italics), cited by Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 613. 26. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 4. 27.  Ibid., 41. 28.  Ibid., 13, 19, 19. 29. Ibid., 12, 12–13.

Notes to Pages 210–222  403 30.  Ibid., 18. 31.  See Eric Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 32. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 55. 33.  Ibid., 101. 34.  Ibid., 10. 35.  This programmatic, manifesto essay appeared as Robert Bellah, “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?,” European Journal of Sociology 46, no. 1 (2005): ­69–89, and is substantially integrated into Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 265–82. 36.  Gananath Obeyesekere, “The Buddha’s Meditative Trance: Visionary Knowledge, Aphoristic Thinking, and Axial Age Rationality in Early Buddhism,” in Bellah and Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 126. 37.  Richard Madsen, “The Future of Transcendence,” in Bellah and Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 452. 38.  Ibid., 442, 441. 39.  Most succinctly, Alain Badiou, “Eight Theses on the Universal” (“Huit Thèses sur l’Universel”), http://www.lacan.com/baduniversel.htm. 40. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 454. 41.  Ibid., 463. 42.  José Casanova, “Religion, the Axial Age, and Secular Modernity in Bellah’s Theory of Religious Evolution,” in Bellah and Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 213. 43.  Ibid., 212. 44. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 198. 45.  Matthias Jung, “Embodiment, Transcendence, and Contingency: Anthropological Features of the Axial Age,” in Bellah and Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 83. 46.  Ibid., 80. 47.  Ibid., 86. 48.  Ibid., 91. 49.  Ibid., 93. 50.  The inescapable anthropomorphism of analogy and its apophatic implications are developed in detail also by Wesley J. Wildman, In Our Own Image: Anthropomorphism, Apophaticism, and Ultimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 51.  Jung, “Embodiment, Transcendence, and Contingency,” 99. 52.  Ingolf U. Dalferth, “The Idea of Transcendence,” in Bellah and Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 148.

404  Notes to Pages 222–234 53.  Ibid., 153 54.  Ibid., 162. 55.  Ibid., 163 56.  Ibid., 165, 166. 57.  Ibid., 167. 58.  Ibid., 170, 171, 171. 59.  Ibid., 172, 173–75, 173, 174. 60.  Jürgen Habermas, “Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt,” in Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt: Eine Diskussion mit Jürgen Habermas, ed. Michael Reder and Josef Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), trans. Ciaran Cronin as An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). Page references are to the German edition of this essay, which I translate directly. 61.  Habermas, “Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt,” 28. 62.  William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David W. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 39. 63.  “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 1:235. An English translation is available in The European Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 2 (1995): 199–200. 64. Traherne, Christian Ethicks IV, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets /thomas-traherne. 65.  Habermas, “Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt,” 28. 66.  Ibid., 35. 67.  Ibid., 36. 68.  Zhuangzi, trans. Ziporyn, chap. 22, 90. 69.  Jürgen Habermas, “Glauben and Wissen: Friedenspreisrede (2001),” in Zeitdiagnosen: Zwölf Essays 1980–2001 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). 70.  Ibid., 104. 71.  Habermas, “Eine Replik,” Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt, 97–98. 72.  Jürgen Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion: Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 9. 73.  Rita Felski’s “postcritical reading,” in Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), could be read as a broadening of this chapter’s argument concerning critical consciousness, demonstrating critique’s openness and beholdenness to beliefs of all sorts. In effect, Felski brings out the ­dialectic of critique that exposes its limits and calls for a critique of critique, but she is critical of (118, 149–50) and struggles against (192) this idea, too! Like any articulated idea, it has its limits.

Notes to Pages 237–241  405

Chapter Nine.  The Canon Question and the Value of Theory 1.  An early redaction of this chapter appears under the same title in The Canonical Debate Today: Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries, ed. Liviu Papadima, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 55–71. 2.  For historical sketches, see Gottfried Willems, “Der Weg ins Offene als Sackgasse: Zur jüngsten Kanon-Debatte und zur Lage der Literaturwissenschaft,” in Begründungen und Funktionen des Kanons: Beiträge aus der Literatur- und Kunstwissenschaft, Philosophie und Theologie, ed. Gerhard R. Kaiser and Stefan Matuschek (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2001); and Max Grosse, “Kanon ohne Theorie? Der Dialog als Problem der Renaissance-Poetik,” in Kanon und Theorie, ed. Maria Moog-Grünewald (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1997). 3.  Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Soul of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). J. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). David Bromwich, “Canon ­Bashing,” Dissent 35 (1988): 479–81. 4.  Erik Grimm, “Bloom’s Battles: Zur historischen Entfaltung der KanonDebatte in den USA,” in Literarische Kanonbildung. Text + Kritik. Zeitschrift für Literatur, SONDERBAND, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: R. Boorberg, 2002); and Jan Gorak, ed., Canon vs. Culture: Reflections on the Current Debate (New York: Garland, 2001). See contributions to South Atlantic Quarterly 89, no. 1 (1990), special issue, “The Politics of Liberal Education,” ed. Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, for the backlash against conservative defenses of the canon, especially by Bloom and by William J. Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984). 5.  Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 15–46. 6.  Frank Kermode, Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon, ed. Robert Alter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 7.  Richard Ohmann, “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960–75,” in Politics of Letters (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987). 8.  Barbara Hernstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 9. Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: ­Minuit, 1979). 10.  Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” The Massachusetts Review 18, no. 4 (1977): 782–94.

406  Notes to Pages 241–249 11.  Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Lillian Robinson, In the Canon’s Mouth: Dispatches from the Culture Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 12.  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Taban Lo Liyong, and Henry Owuor-Anymba, “On the Abolition of the English Department,” in Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, Politics (London: Heinemann, 1972). 13.  E. Dean Kolbas, Critical Theory and the Literary Canon (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 2. 14.  John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 15.  René Wellek, The Attack on Literature and Other Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 5. 16. Wellek, The Attack on Literature, 7. 17.  Simone Winko, “Literatur-Kanon als invisible hand-Phänomen,” in Arnold, ed., Literarische Kanonbildung, 285–600. 18.  Most illuminating here are Hubert Cancik, “Kanon, Ritus, Ritual—­ Religionsgeschichtliche Anmerkungen zu einem literaturwissenschaftlichen Diskurs,” in Moog-Grünewald, ed., Kanon und Theorie, 1–21; and Michael Trowitzsch, “Der biblische Kanon,” in Kaiser and Matuschek, eds., Begründungen und Funktionen des Kanons, 43–54. 19.  Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 11–31. More broadly, fifty voices critical of aspects of theory from within critical theory itself can be heard in Daphne Patai and Wilfrido Corral, eds., Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 20.  Stanley Fish, “Consequences,” in Mitchell, ed., Against Theory, 106–31. 21.  René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972). Roland Barthes, Le Degrée zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953). 22.  Elizabeth Beaumont Bissel, The Question of Literature: The Place of the Literary in Contemporary Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), gathers together a number of suggestive essays on this topic. 23.  Gerald Graff, “Taking Cover in Coverage,” in Critical Reasoning in Contemporary Culture, ed. Richard A. Talaska (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), chap. 9. 24.  Knapp and Michaels, “Against Theory,” 30. 25. Ibid. 26.  Italo Calvino, Perché leggere i classici? (Milan: Mondadori, 1991), trans. Martin McLaughlin as Why Read the Classics? (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999).

Notes to Pages 249–254  407 27.  Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 271. 28.  Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1955). 29.  Homi Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990). 30.  Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 67–79. 31.  Henry Louis Gates, “Talking Black: Critical Signs of the Times,” in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 71– 86. bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990) 23–32. 32.  Cornell West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). 33.  This vibrant character of canon is captured by Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 34.  Cept resonates, for example, with inceptis for things begun new by ­cutting with the past, and with Latin suffixes –cise, –cis, –cide for “cut.” 35. For some suggestive examples, see Marco Formisano and Christina Shuttle­worth Kraus, eds., Marginality, Canonicity, Passion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 36.  Constanze Güthenke and Brooke Holmes, “Hyperinclusivity, Hypercanonicity, and the Future of the Field,” in Formisano and Kraus, Marginality, Canonicity, Passion, 57–75. I am adapting here language applied by the authors to individual academic researchers and their mutually exclusive disciplines particularly in classical studies.

Chapter Ten.  World Literature 1.  Material from this chapter was originally presented at the International Summit Dialogue and Forum on World Literature (“What Is World Literature? Tension between the Local and the Universal”) hosted by Beijing Normal University in October 2015. An earlier version appears in Tensions in World Literature: ­Between the Local and the Universal, ed. Weigui Fang (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 113–46, and is translated into Chinese by Gao Wenchun in Sixiang yu fangfa: difangxing yu pushixing zhijian de shijie wenxue (思想與方法：地方性與 普世性之間的世界文學), ed. Fang Weigui (方維規) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2017), 78–102.

408  Notes to Pages 254–263 2.  David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Longxi Zhang, Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 3. Laozi, Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1963). Chinese text in James Legge, The Texts of Taoism, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1891/ London: Humphry Milford, 1891), http://ctext.org/dao-de-jing. 4.  Walter Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV/1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 9–21, trans. Harry Zohn as “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 69–82. I translate, however, directly from the German. 5.  Cf. Paul de Man, “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” in The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 87. 6.  Zhang is quoted from the conference manual “What Is World Literature? Tension between the Local and the Universal: An International Summit Dialogue and Forum, School of Chinese Language and Literature,” Beijing Normal University, October 16–17, 2015, 5. I am responding also to his books as cited below. Most recently, he treats the subject in the four concluding chapters of Longxi Zhang, From Comparison to World Literature (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015). 7.  Such emphases emerge in Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, eds., Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 8.  Compare Amador Vega, Arte y santidad: Cuatro lecciones de estética apofática (Pamplona: Universidad Pública de Navarra, 2005), and Jeffrey L. Kosky, Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity—Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 9.  Maurice Blanchot, “La littérature et le droit à la mort,” in Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), trans. Lydia Davis as “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays by Maurice Blanchot, ed. P. Adams Sitney (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981). 10.  Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), trans. Oscar Burge as The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 11.  Longxi Zhang, Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 11. 12.  Zhuangzi, end of chap. 22, trans. Victor Mair (New York: Bantam, 1994), 222.

Notes to Pages 263–269  409 13.  This image is pivotal in the Zhuangzi, for example, in 2:16 in Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Brook Ziporyn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009). 14. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 5. 15.  Ibid., 4. 16.  Damrosch here picks up on the provocative suggestions concerning “distant reading” of Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68, and Moretti, “More Conjectures,” New Left Review 20 (2003). Reprinted in his Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013). 17. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 300. 18.  Cf. Julia Kristeva, Étranger à nous-mêmes (Paris: Fayard, 1988). 19.  This is likewise the leading chef d’accusation of Jean-François Billeter against François Jullien’s exoticization of China in Billeter, Contre François Jullien (Paris: Éditions Allia, 2006). 20.  Freedom is so understood by a certain strand of apophatic tradition summed up in classics such as Pico de la Mirandola, De dignitate hominis oratio (1486), and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809). 21.  Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant) (1943), works this out in phenomenological detail keyed to a rich repertoire of experiences of human relationality and informed throughout by a keen literary sensibility. 22.  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 23.  Edward Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 24.  Marcel Danesi, Lingua, metafora, concetto: Vico e la linguistica cognitiva (Bari: Edizioni dal Sud, 2001). In English, see Marcel Danesi, Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1993). 25.  Robert Neville, The Tao and the Daimon: Segments of a Religious Inquiry (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982), 112–13, appeals to Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of a “vague hypothesis” in order to resolve apparently conflicting religious claims. 26.  See Jan Assmann, “Translating Gods: Religion as a Factor of Cultural (Un)Translatability,” 24–36, and Sanford Budick, “Crises of Alterity: Cultural Untranslatability and the Experience of Secondary Otherness,” 1–24, both in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). More generally, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Vom Wort zum Begriff: Die Aufgabe der Hermeneutik als

410  Notes to Pages 269–275 Philosophie,” in Gadamer Lesebuch, ed. Jean Grondin (Stuttgart: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 100–110. 27. Zhang, Mighty Opposites, 8. 28.  William Franke, “Nothingness and the Aspiration to Universality in the Poetic ‘Making’ of Sense: An Essay in Comparative East-West Poetics,” Asian Philosophy: An International Journal of the Philosophical Traditions of the East 26, no. 3 (2016): 1–24. 29.  In this regard, an important complement to Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”) is the companion essay Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 314–32, originally “Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen” (1916), in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), vol. 2, pt. 1, 140–57. 30. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 5. 31.  The issue is debated from various angles of approach, and my position is staked out, in Nahum Brown and William Franke, eds., Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy (London: Palgrave, 2016). 32.  Much current discussion of the historical emergence of the transcendent and universal ideals in the Axial Age, baptized as such by Karl Jaspers (Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, 1949), is gathered in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). See chapter 8 in this book. 33. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 135. 34.  Ibid., 287. 35.  Ibid., 288. 36.  Ibid., 110. 37.  Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). 38.  William Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, 2 vols. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). 39.  William Franke, Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018). 40.  Compare Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), on the distinctiveness of a literary way of thinking through desire, particularly chap. 1, “The Motive for Metaphor.” 41.  Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 23 and chap. 3.

Notes to Pages 276–285  411 42.  He develops this connection in Martin Kern, “Ends and Beginnings of World Literature,” Poetica 49 (2017/18): 1–31, which for its emphases on the “experience of otherness” and “linguistic transcendence” proves to be a valuable ally to my purpose and mission in this chapter. 43.  For the last, see David Burrell, “The Christian Distinction Celebrated and Expanded,” in The Truthful and the Good: Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski, ed. John R. Drummond and James G. Hart (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 191–206. 44.  A sophisticated and fascinating approach to the theological logic of incommensurability or “transcendence” is worked out by Ingolf U. Dalferth, Transzendenz und säkulare Welt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015). 45.  Cf. the remark by Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), “Einleitung,” 70, that to draw limits is already to place oneself beyond them. 46.  Benjamin states this explicitly in his definition of the task of the translator: “It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work” (Jene reine Sprache, die in fremde gebannt ist, in der eigenen zu erlösen, die im Werk gefangene in der Umdichtung zu befreien, ist die Aufgabe des Übersetzers) (“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” 19). 47.  “Die wahre Übersetzung ist durchscheinend, sie verdeckt nicht das Original, steht ihm nicht im Licht, sondern läßt die reine Sprache, wie verstärkt durch ihr eigenes Medium, nur um so voller aufs Original fallen” (Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” 18). 48.  Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” 21. 49.  Ibid., 19–20. 50.  Proposition 6 of the title essay “Perché leggere i classici” of Calvino’s Perché leggere i classici (Milan: Mondadori, 1991), translated in The Uses of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986). 51.  D. J. Moores, The Ecstatic Poetic Tradition: A Critical Study from the Ancients through Rumi, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson and Tagore (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014); chap. 7, “The Body Ecstatic: Walt Whitman,” reviews this critical heritage. Crucial here is George Hutchinson, The Ecstatic Whitman: Literary Shamanism and the Crisis of the Union (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986). 52.  See Whitman, “The Bible as Poetry” (1883), and his manifesto Whitman, “Democratic Vistas” (1871); and see Johann Georg Hamann, “Aesthetica in nuce,” in Schriften zur Sprache, ed. J. Simon (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 105. 53.  See particularly Bernadette Malinowski, “Das Heilige sei mein Wort”: ­Paradigmen prophetischer Dichtung von Klopstock bis Whitman (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2002), 401–3.

412  Notes to Pages 285–295 54.  Leaves of Grass (poem 383), final “Death-Bed” edition, 1891–92 (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892), http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174745. 55.  See particularly Dennis Renner, “Tradition for a Time of Crisis: Whitman’s Prophetic Stance,” in Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature, ed. Jan Wojcik and Raymond-Jean Frontain (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 119–30.

Chapter Eleven.  Postmodern Identity Politics and the Social Tyranny of the Definable 1.  An earlier version of this chapter is part of “Christian Literary Imagination: Seeking Transcendence in an Age of Identity,” ed. Christopher Denny, special issue, Religions 10, no. 8 (2019): 1–15. The chapter was also the basis for a lecture in the series “Lecturas sobre religión y sociedad civil,” at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, January 21, 2020, followed by useful discussion. 2.  Daniel Heller-Roazen, No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming (New York: Zone Books, 2017), places the endless openness to infinity of human identity in a long historical perspective. 3.  I reconstruct this tradition in William Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, vol. 1 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 4.  Thomas Carlson, The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and the Creation of the Human (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), explores the anthropological relevance of John Scott Eriugena and other negative theologians to the argument that humanity is without any definable identity. I treat this motif of negative theologians, including Eriugena, in Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said, 1:181–90. Gregory of Nyssa, also treated in this volume (140–51), develops kindred insights into human infinity and consequent unknowability under the heading of ­“epektasis” or “endless striving.” 5.  Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967); Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). 6.  Jane Flax, Disputed Subjects (London: Routledge, 1993), and bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), count among the innumerable influential representatives of this tendency. 7.  Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 1944), trans. E. Jephcott as Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. G. S. Noerr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

Notes to Pages 295–297  413 8.  Linda Martín Alcoff, Michael Hames-García, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M. L. Moya, eds., Identity Politics Reconsidered: Future of Minority Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Compare also Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 2003), 1–17. 9.  The widespread questioning of aggressive identity politics is given urgent formulation by Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, 2006). 10.  Alcoff et al., eds., Identity Politics Reconsidered, 6. 11.  Ibid., 3. 12.  See Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), and the various contributions to John Caputo and Linda Martín Alcoff, eds., Saint Paul among the Philosophers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), and John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, Creston Davis, with Catherine Pickstock, Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2010). 13.  Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), trans. Ray Brassier as Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); see, esp., chap. 1, “La contemporenéité de Paul,” 5–16. 14.  Giorgio Agamben, Il tempo che resta: Un commento alla lettera ai Romani (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), trans. Patricia Dailey as The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 15.  On Levinas and Adorno, see Hent de Vries, Theologie im Pianissimo & zwischen Rationalität und Dekonstruktion: Die Aktualität der Denkfiguren Adornos und Levinas (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1989), trans. Geoffrey Hale as Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), and Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). On Schelling and Kierkegaard, see Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said, 2:62–83. 16.  Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute—or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000). Eric Santner, The Weight of All Flesh: On The Subject-Matter of Political Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 17.  On Neoplatonism, see chapters on Proclus and Damascius in Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said, 1:75–107. 18.  The classic text here is Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1905), trans. Talcott Parsons as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930).

414  Notes to Pages 298–305 19.  This genealogy is suggestively traced by Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern Atheology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chapter 2, “The Disappearance of the Self.” 20. Jean-Luc Nancy, Déconstruction du christianisme, vol. 2, L’Adoration (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 12, trans. John McKeane as Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). François Jullien, De l’universel, de l’uniforme, du commun et du dialogue entre les cultures (Paris: Fayard, 2008), trans. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski as On the Universal: The Uniform, the Common and Dialogue between Cultures (London: Polity Press, 2014). The topic is taken up by various hands in South Atlantic Quarterly 118, no. 4 (2019), special issue on “The Common,” introduced by Francesco Brancaccio and Carlo Vercellone, “Birth, Death, and Resurrection of the Issue of the Common: A Historical and Theoretical Perspective,” 699–709. 21.  Émile Durkheim, Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912), trans. Karen E. Fields as The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1975). 22.  In general terms, the danger here is that of idolatry such as negative theology has aimed at exposing and critiquing throughout Western and particularly biblically influenced tradition. This long history is reconstructed in M. Halbertal and A. Margalit, Idolatry, trans. from Hebrew by N. Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 23.  Concerns about applying a Western human rights agenda to China, for example, are raised by Anthony C. Yu, “China and the Problem of Human Rights: Ancient Verities and Modern Realities,” in Comparative Journeys: Essays in Literature and Religion East and West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 351– 90. See also Wm. Theodore de Bary, “Confucianism and Human Rights” and “China and the Limits of Liberalism,” in The Great Conversation: Education for a World Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 277–325. See Marina Svensson, Debating Human Rights in China: A Conceptual and Political History (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2002). 24.  Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), 2. See, further, her Rose Sheinberg ­lecture, “Predator Economics, Human Rights, and Indigenous Peoples,” https:// www.law.nyu.edu/news/winona-laduke-delivers-the-20th-annual-sheinberg -lecture. For further perspectives, see Daedalus (Fall 2001), ed., Jack D. Forbes, ­“Indigenous Americans: Spirituality and Echos.” 25.  Compare critical reflections concerning human rights by Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 1:92ff. 26.  Some perverse tendencies of overtly egalitarian ideologies inherited from the Enlightenment are examined by Stephen T. Asma, Against Fairness (Chicago:

Notes to Pages 306–312  415 University of Chicago Press, 2012). Asma champions a different, less calculable ideal of justice against narrow Enlightenment ideas of a positive and demonstrable fairness and equality that ignore the pervasiveness and inescapability of exceptions. This is inevitable where all identitary terms are but fictions. For related reasons, Stanley Fish openly advocates favoritism in articles in the New York Times, e.g., Fish, “Favoritism Is Good,” New York Times, January 7, 2013, http://opinionator .blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/favoritism-is-good. 27.  Bruce Bawer, The Victim’s Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), aims to expose the moral hypocrisy and intellectual bankruptcy of a certain liberal elite. Academics can make privileged careers for themselves by claiming to represent the victims. 28.  Cornel West, “A Genealogy of Modern Racism,” in Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), 49. 29.  Sigmund Freud, Totem und Tabu (1912/13) and Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (1939) in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1950). 30.  Ernesto Laclau, “L’universalisme, le particularisme et la question de l’identité,” La revue du MAUSS 13 (1999): 131–45. There is an English version in John Rajchman, ed., The Identity in Question (New York: Routledge, 1995). It belongs together with Laclau’s rethinking of the relations between universality and particularity in Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996). 31.  Laclau, “L’universalisme, le particularisme et la question de l’identité,” 145. Montserrat Herrero, “Laclau’s Revolutionary Political Theology,” Síntesis: Revista de filosofía 2 (2019): 9–25, suggestively brings out the theological underpinnings of this move, including its implication of a revolutionary “divine violence” such as was theorized by Walter Benjamin (see chapters 10 and 5 preceding). 32.  Laclau, “On the Names of God,” in de Vries and Sullivan, Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 137–47. 33.  Georges Bataille, L’expérience intérieure (Paris: Gallimard, 1943). 34.  Michel de Certeau, La faiblesse de croire (Paris: Seuil, 1987). 35.  See, for example, Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992). 36.  Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 227–28. 37.  Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), trans. E. B. Ashton as Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1973).

416  Notes to Pages 312–316 38.  See Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988 [1921]), trans. William W. Hallo, The Star of Redemption (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); see, esp., sec. 174 on the proper name (“der Eigenname”). 39.  See, for instance, essays in Rajchman, ed., The Identity in Question. 40.  Homi Bhabha, “Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate,” in Rajchman, ed., The Identity in Question, 55. 41.  See, for example, Zygmunt Bauman, “Identity in a Globalizing World,” Social Anthropology 9, no. 2 (2001): 121–29, and Bauman, Identity, ed. Benedetto Vecchi (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). 42.  Catherine Keller, “Rumors of Transcendence: The Movement, State, and Sex of ‘Beyond’”; Sallie McFague, “Intimations of Transcendence: Praise and Compassion”; and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “God the Many-Named: Without Place and Proper Name,” all in John Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., Transcendence and Beyond: A Postmodern Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). See, further, Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1992). 43.  Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977), approaches the feminine gender through negation and its inexhaustible richness. See also ­Irigaray, “Égales à Qui?,” Critique 480 (1987): 420–37. 44.  Luce Irigaray, “Femmes Divines,” Critique 454 (1985): 294–308. An introduction and some excerpts are found in Graham Ward, ed., The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). 45.  I work here particularly from Niklas Luhmann, Einführung in die Systemtheorie (Heidelberg: Carl Auer Verlag, 2002), and Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997). 46.  Niklas Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000).

Chapter Twelve.  Cognitive Universality between Science and the Humanities 1.  William Franke, The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), introduction, “Involved Knowing: On the Poetic Epistemology of the Humanities,” 3–28. 2.  William Franke, Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), particularly chap. 1: “All or Nothing: Nature in Chinese Thought and the Apophatic Occident,” 1–37.

Notes to Pages 317–320  417 3.  Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996). 4.  The immediate context for writing this chapter was a conference, Cognition, Religion, and Science, of the International Association for the History of ­Religions (IAHR), co-sponsored by the Toronto Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion (IASR) and hosted by the University of Macao, Philosophy and Religious Studies Program, January 13–14, 2015. I thank Professor Weigang Chen for inviting me to participate as keynote speaker, without which the engagements worked out in this chapter would never have occurred. 5.  An epitome can be found in Martin Heidegger, “Europa und die deutsche Philosophie,” in Europa und die Philosophie, ed. Hans-Helmut Gander (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993), 31–41. 6.  Edward Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 7.  Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), develops such a theory in terms congenial to and embraced by cognitive scientists. Although skeptical about cognitive science, Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evo­ lution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), deploying Donald’s schema of development by stages, brings together some of the vast and growing literature in evolutionary ­­biology on human cognitive powers as turning on this pivot. 8.  The extension and application of theoretical conceptualization down to our own technological age is outlined by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). 9.  Edward Slingerland, “Body and Mind in Early China: An Integrated Humanities Science Approach,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81 (2013): 38. 10.  Ibid., 23. 11.  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 4. 12.  Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 4. 13.  Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 14.  This point is made even by some of those working within an evolutionary approach to understanding the emergence of religion in human societies. See Jeremy Sherman and Terrence W. Deacon, “Teleology for the Perplexed: How

418  Notes to Pages 321–337 Matter Began to Matter,” Zygon 42 (2007): 823–901. See, further, Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 15.  Daniel L. Everett, Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), brings this “ineffable” side of mind to focus in ways congenial to apophatic thinking. 16. Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, 72. 17.  Ibid., 212. 18.  Ibid., 138. 19.  See, for example, Zhuangzi, chap. 22. See, further, Franke, Apophatic Paths from Europe to China, 126–27. 20. Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, 218. 21.  Ibid., 250. 22.  Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Minuit, 1968). 23.  Developments in chaos theory articulate scientifically this recognition of the inexplicable, the unorderly or chaotic, as underlying every order. See, for example, Katherine N. Hayles, Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 24.  Mark Johnson gives a coherent presentation of the most relevant parts of his overall theory in Johnson, The Body in the Mind, see particularly chap. 6, “Toward a Theory of Imagination,” 139–72. 25.  Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 13. 26.  Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 27.  Cf. Everett, Dark Matter of the Mind. 28.  Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, eds., Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 29. Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, 261. 30.  In addition to his work on classical Chinese thought, including Edward Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), see also his collective project as distilled in Slingerland and Mark Collard, eds., Creating Consilience: ­Integrating Science and the Humanities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 31.  Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 5. 32. Ibid. 33.  I show this in William Franke, “Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 33, no. 2 (2000): 137–54.

Notes to Pages 337–354  419 34.  Donald Phillip Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 35.  Marcel Danesi, Lingua, metafora, concetto: Vico e la linguistica cognitiva (Bari: Edizioni dal Sud, 2001), 22. 36.  Ibid., 124. 37.  Ibid., 125. 38.  Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 26. 39.  For the vast tradition of such knowledge, see Manfred Frank, Selbstbewußtseinstheorien von Fichte bis Sartre (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). 40.  Slingerland and Collard, eds., Creating Consilience, 15. 41.  Ibid., 16. 42.  Franz Kafka, “Das Schweigen der Sirenen,” in Sämtliche Erzählungen, ed. Paul Raabe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1970), 350–51, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, “The Silence of the Sirens,” in The Complete Short Stories (New York: Schocken, 1983), 430–32. 43.  Slingerland and Collard, eds., Creating Consilience, 17. 44. Ibid. 45.  Ibid., 18. 46.  Pertinent discussion is found in Matthew K. Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 47.  I make this argument in the introduction to Franke, The Revelation of Imagination: “Involved Knowing: On the Poetic Epistemology of the Humanities,” 3–28. 48. Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, 78. 49.  This has been stressed by philosophers of science, such as Paul Feyerabend. See in particular Feyerabend, Against Method (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975). 50. Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, 261. 51. These creative processes can be brilliantly illuminated by conceptual blending theory, as Slingerland has usefully demonstrated. A good introduction is Barbara Dancygier, “What Can Blending Do for You,” Language and Literature 15 (2006): 5–15. 52.  Wiebe’s view of the need to ban theology from the research university is articulated in Donald Wiebe, “Alive but Only Barely: Graduate Studies in Religion at the University of Toronto,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 7 (1995): 351–81. See also the rejoinder of Peter Richardson, “Correct, but Only Barely: Donald Wiebe on Religion at the University of Toronto,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 9, no. 3 (1997): 233–47. Wiebe’s extended position is articulated in Wiebe, The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Its intellectual bases are

420  Notes to Pages 354–366 forged in Wiebe, The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought (Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), and Wiebe, Religion and Truth: Towards an Alternative Paradigm for the Study of Religion (The Hague: Mouton, 1981). 53.  See M. Halbertal and A. Margalit, Idolatry, trans. from Hebrew by N. Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 54.  A relatively comprehensive idea of this way of thinking and its range throughout the (Western) humanities can be gathered from William Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, 2 vols. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Wide-ranging applications are pursued in Aaron J. Simmons and Nahum Brown, eds., Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy (London: Palgrave, 2017). 55.  Hermann Diels and Walter Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Zürich: Weidmann, 1951), frag. 2. 56.  Insightful in this regard is Giorgio Colli, La nascita della filosofia (Milan: Adelphi, 2009 [1975]), 87. 57.  Francis McDonald Cornford, Before and after Socrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965 [1932]). See, further, Cornford, Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), and Armand Delatte, Les conceptions de l’enthousiasme chez les philo­ sophes présocratiques (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934). For the mantic and mystic backgrounds of pre-Socratic philosophy, see Wolfram Hogrebe, Echo des Nichtseins (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 23–55. 58.  For deeper discussion of the nature of conceptual thinking and its relation to the All, see Franke, Apophatic Paths from Europe to China, chap. 4, the opening section: “From the Globalism of Nature to the Universality of Thought,” 141–48.

Concluding Elucidation 1.  Timothy Knepper’s critical review of my 2018 book Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders in the Chinese Philosophy and Culture series of the State University of New York Press, edited by Roger Ames, appears on the American Academy of Religion’s website Reading Religion, http://reading religion.org/books/apophatic-paths-europe-china. Knepper’s review appears together with my reply, some of which has been adapted for inclusion within this Concluding Elucidation.

INDEX

Abe, Masao, 31 absolute, 21–22, 194, 270; its relative formulations, 301; presupposed in all thinking, 371; as projection, 368–69; relativization, 292; as risk, 122–23 Achebe, Chinua, 241 adoration, 144–45 Adorno, Theodor, 57, 108, 139, 276, 312 aesthetic value contingent, 241 Agamben, Giorgio, 96–97, 109–10, 115–19, 154–200, 296; as apophatic, 178–79; and “impotentiality,” 176; negative theological method, 165 Alberti, Leon Battista, 76, 77 Albert the Great, 75 Alhazen, 81 All, the, 4, 5, 345; in communication with all, 121; as inchoate, 264; and Infinite, 10; not-All, 109; as Paul’s pan, 107–9; as unlimited relations, 264; as unobjectified, 264 allegorical interpretation, 238 alterity, 85 Altizer, Thomas J. J., 22, 32 American Indian, 301

analogical: unknowing, 87; vision, 86, 321 anamorphic, 108–9, 225 Angelus Silesius, 23, 273 aniconic, 44 Anselm, St., 369 anthropomorphism, 50; via personification, 53 “Apelles, cut of,” 116, 121 apocalyptic prophecy, 285 apophasis: absolute in intension, 366; Asian, 178; aspirational, 368–72; calls discourse into question, 367, 372; as critique of exclusion, 372; as discourse-shattering, 367; elucidation of term, 365–73; needs kataphasis, 260, 366; as kenotic, 372; and modernity, 73; and ­mysticism, 20; and naming, 20; self-consuming, 366; self-critical, 365; self-denying, 13; as unconditioned, 366; as uncontextualizable, 368; ungrounds kataphasis, 367; as universal, 15–16; and ­unlearning, 368; unlimited in ­extension, 366 apophatic: as binding norm, 234; bodies, 42, 334; critique, 355;

421

422  Index apophatic: (cont.) definition of, 9; difference, 174; and difficulty, 14; excess, 16; failure and fission, 65; and language, 162–63; manifest only ­relationally, 261; moment of truth in contradiction, 65; negation, 4; pivot, 263; as poetic, 11, 281; as pre-conceptual, 331; sensibility, 7; thought defined, 123; transcendence, 207, 272, 402n21; as universal, 235, 263, 309 apophaticism, as first philosophy, 18 applications: of apophatic paradigm, ix–x, 14, 28; as singular instances, 29 Apter, Emily, 259 Aquinas, Thomas, 34, 40, 75 Arab cultural transmission, 132–33 Arabian Nights, 283 archeology, of inexistent origin, 165 Aristarchus, 238 Aristotle: on imagination, 51; on logic and its premises, 330; on “one,” 370–71; on poetry’s universality, 264; on theory as disengaged, 215–16 Arnason, Johann, 202 Arnold, Matthew, 240, 242, 249 art: languages of, 67; modern, 81 Asian, as not not Western, 178 Asian apophasis, 178–79 Asian universities, 183–84 Asma, Stephen T., 414n26 atheism, 23; Jewish, 44, 47; as a theism, 56, 331 a/theology, 43 Augustine, 24; and vestiges of Trinity, 85 Axial Age: as age of transcendence, 203; as apophatic, 207–8; and ­institutionalization, 207; its in-

stability, 204; original hypothesis, 202; ­relation to Open and Unknown, 202; as supra-rational, 212–13; and transcendence, 201–9 Ayer, A. J., 369 Badiou, Alain, 100, 109–15, 214, 296; and truth, 124 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 81 ban/bann, as inclusive exclusion, 157–58 bare life, 156, 159, 161, 169–71; like “God,” 159 baroque mysticism, 39 Barth, Karl, 50, 223 Barthes, Roland, 244, 246, 294 Bartleby, 97, 177 Bataille, Georges, 143, 310–11 Batnitzky, Leora, 50 Baudelaire, Charles, 280, 321 Baumann, Zygmunt, 312–13 Bawer, Bruce, 415n27 Beaumarchais, Pierre, 243 beauty, as revelation of real, 82 Beck, Ulrich, 138 behaviorism, 359 being: its call, 84; as relationality, 95 belief: and doubt, 368–69; in ineffability, 370; in nothing, 24–25; as projecting absolutes, 369 Bellah, Robert, 201–18 Belting, Hans, 76, 81 Benedict, Pope, 228 Benedict, St., 145–56 Benjamin, Walter, 152, 234; on ­language and magic, 167; and messianic Marxism, 176; on “pure language,” 254–57; on translation, 280 betweenness, 9, 170, 193; as inter, 199 beyond, 7, 191; beyonding, 209; of ­language, 349–50; of word, 366

Index  423 Bhabha, Homi, 250, 312 Bible, 135, 297 biopolitics, 170–73 bíos, 169–71 “Bisclavret,” 173 Blake, William, 52, 226, 321 Blanchot, Maurice, 47, 94, 244, 261, 274; and neuter, 157; and space of literature, 66 Bloch, Ernst, 10, 234 Bloom, Allan, 239 body and brain: as natural and universal, 318; no direct access to, 321, 336, 341; as only selective, 340 body-mind: as basic, 340; as mystery, 320–21; as universal decoding key, 328, 334; as universal structure, 322–23 Böhme, Jakob, 39, 75, 165; and ungrunt, 332 Bonaventure, St., 146, 190–91; and ­theology, 314 Bourdieu, Pierre, 241, and “distinction,” 243 Brague, Rémi, 131–34 bread, “Brot” vs. “pain,” 256 breakdown of constitutive differences, 173–76 Brieskorn, Norbert, 231 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 76 Bromand, Joachim, 7 Bromwich, David, 239 Buber, Martin, 48 Buddha, 214; as visionary, 212 Bultmann, Rudolf, 47 Burke, Kenneth, 209 Butler, Judith, 311 Cacciari, Massimo, 150 Caligula, 155 Calvino, Italo, 249

Camus, Albert, 155, 298 canon: bashing, 239; and class interests, 240; as communicability, 252–53; without definable exclusions, 238; its claim to universal validity, 241; its exemplarism, 242; as mystification, 240; as process, 237; and translation, 283 Cantor, Georg, 100 capitalism, 80, 112 Caputo, John, 42, 44, 47, 96 Carlson, Thomas, 25, 30 Carmelites, 39 Casanova, José, 216–18 Cassin, Barbara, 30 Cassirer, Ernst, 75, 337 causal explanation, its limits, 329–30 Celan, Paul, 142–43 Chai, David, 30 Chaisson, Eric, 210–11 Chesterton, G. K., 113, 114 China: and human rights, 414n23; as other, 327; and wisdom, 23; as world power, 198, 361 Chinese wisdom, as non-oppositional, 161, 178 Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 158 Christian, Barbara, 251 Christianity: and deconstruction, 22; and secularity, 23; and transcendence, 23; universalism, 22, 111, 122; uniqueness of, 21; Christology, as exemplarism, 38 Cixous, Hélène, 313 classical studies, 393n8 classics, 264, canon of, 239; East Asian, 275; Greek, 393; literary, 239, 255, 271, 275; “own,” 278; as sources, 132; of world literature, 283, 284 Clooney, Francis, 30 Cloud of Unknowing, 36

424  Index co-gifted, 142 cognitive linguistics, 267, 333; vs. ­humanities, 5; science, 5 cognitive science: and conceptual thinking, 317; its ambiguity, 262–63; its claim to universality, 318; its objectivism, 340–41; and the nonconceptualizable, 362–64 cognitive universals: as culturally relative, 324–25; and discourse, 324; as discursively mediated, 324–25 Cohen, Hermann, 48–49 coincidence of opposites, 35, 36, 53, 64, 99, 105, 273 common, the, 414n20; as “co-munus,” 142; grounds forced, 267; as nothing, 200; opposed to the uniform, 180 common ground, 9 comparative humanities, 273 comparative literature, 279–80 comparative philosophy, 193 comparative religions, 319, 371–72 concept: Hegelian, 123, 129; as empowering but fragmenting, 316–17; as means of mastery, 268 conceptual blending, 320 connectedness, of all, 63, 64, 185 Connolly, William, 30 Conrad, Joseph, 241 consciousness, its priority, 330 consilience, 332; revised, 341–46, 348–50; as unitary framework, 347 consumer society, 171 contingency: necessary (Monotheistic), 220; semiotic, 221 conviviality, 8, 135, 129–53 Cornford, Francis, 360 cosmic connectedness, 60 cosmopolitanism, 137–38 cosmopolitical, 138, 152–53

“counterpractice,” 28 critical theory, 10, 135; as comprehensive critique of culture, 28 critical thinking: its transcendent origins, 234; at present, 27; and theology, 14 critique: of critique, 404n73; post­ critical, 404n73; and transcendence, 203; as uniting science and negative theology, 354; as unlimited, 160, 355 cultural studies, 138, 252 culture: Arnold’s definition of, 242; as irreducible to concepts, 269 Cusa, Nicholas of, 33, 36, 331–32; as Cusanus, 73; De pace fidei, 11, 33; De visione Dei, 78, 101, 273; and modernity, 73; and the non–other, 85, 93 “cut of Apelles,” 116, 121 Dalferth, Ingolf, 30, 221–24 da Vinci, Leonardo, 79 Damascius, 36, 37, 136, 179, 297, 330 Damrosch, David, 254, 271–72; definition of world literature, 263–64 Danesi, Marcel, 337–38 Dante, 90, 91, 146 Dao, 255 Dao-de-jing, 255, 330 Daoism, 194–95, 260 Deacon, Terrence, 211, 220 death of God, 31, 298 de Bary, Wm. Theodore, 198 de Certeau, Michel, 39, 74, 311 deconstruction, 32, 135; as contaminating theology, 34; as critique, 136 defamiliarization, 266 de Gandillac, Maurice, 73 Deleuze, Giles, 28, 102, 294, 329 de Lubac, Henri, 75

Index  425 Derrida, Jacques, 28, 34, 73, 81, 139, 294; and différance, 276; and negative theology, 6, 144, 381n18; and the Other, 143–44 Descartes, René, 76, 102 Desmond, William, 186 Detienne, Marcel, 23 Deutsche, Eliot, 30 de Vries, Hent, 30 dialogism, 52; with traditions, 22–23 dialogue, interfaith, 9, 20–23 Dickinson, Colby, 398n9 difference, 28, 138, 251–52, 294; Christian, 276, 332–33; as différance, 276; as incommensurable, 102; ­incomprehensible Difference, 277; indefinable, 276; never ultimate, 366; ontological, 276, 279, 332; valorization of, 139; and world ­literature, 254 disability theory, 301–2 disinterestedness, 135 Dionysius, 34, 39–40, 49, 94, 309 disciplinarity, of knowledge, 4 disciplines: dissolution, 24; inter­ disciplines, 193 “dis-enclosure,” 143–49 “disembeddedness,” 203, 214 dividing division, 116–18 divinity: as erotic, 39; as figure for limits of concept of “nature,” 326; as inconceivable, 24; as wholeness of reality, 329 docta ignorantia, 76, 331 Donald, Merlin, 202, 212; and mimetic, mythic, theoretic, 219–20 Duara, Prasenjit, 198 Durkheim, Émile, 22, 210 Eagleton, Terry, 240 Eckhart, Meister, 23, 36, 76, 103, 309; on seeing and being seen, 87

Ein Sof, 50, 58 Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah, 203, 206–7 embeddedness, 203, 214 empirical reality, 336 empirical research, orientation to, 334, 336–37, 338–41 encounter, human, 191 English: breaks into many languages, 284; as common denominator, 270 Enlightenment, 212–13; criticism, 239; dialectic of, 139, 295, 312; ideal of autonomy, 148, 295; as self-­ critical, 312 entanglement, 39; and planetary ­solidarity, 58 epektasis, 38 Epicurus, 329 Eriugena, John Scott, 90, 114 exception: and apophasis, 157; as ­constitutive of law, 159; as double, 159–60; logic of, 170; as negative, 157; power of, 156–57; and sovereignty, 155–61; state of, 171 exceptionalism, 38, 155 excess, 147; of every framework, 347–48 exclusion: as condition of determinate sense, 372; as founding, 176; as ­inclusive, 160, 178 exemplarism, 38 existentialism, 346 explanation: and meaning, 330–31, 333; never total, 342–43; reductive, 342; relative to interests, 338 expressivism, 220–21 Europa (Asian princess), 134 Europe: and appropriation, 133–34; as geographical configuration, 130–31; and its sources, 133; as ­relation to others, 131; and self-­ critique, 134

426  Index evolution: of culture, 202; social, 214; as theological mystery, 333 evolutionary perspective on universality, 218–19 fact/value split and continuum, 335 fairness, 305 faith: as apostasy from fixed belief, 366; dialectic with reason, 232; and disbelief, 19; as element in knowing, 331; faith-reason synthesis, 228; and non-faith, 20–22; and reason, 225–28; as unconditioned belief, 19; universal, 112 Fauconnier, Gilles, 320 Felski, Rita, 404n73 feminism, 313 feminist theological critique, 30, 34, 313 Fenollosa, Ernest, 197–98 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, on imagination as mediator, 51 finite infinite, 39 Fish, Stanley, 245–46 Flash, Kurt, 75 formlessness, 108 Foucault, Michel, 24 Franciscan revolution, 152 freedom: as abyss, 114; and Axial Age, 207; human, 322; through literature, 258; and modernity, 99; and nothingness, 267; of religion in secular state, 234; in Spirit, 146; as undetermined capacity, 293 Freud, Sigmund, and taboo, 168, 308 Führer, 175 fundamentalism, 11 fusion (and skewing) of horizons, 266 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 28, 266; and humanities knowledge, 316 Gates, Henry Louis, 252

Gauchet, Marcel, 22, 145 general education, 190 genius, 346–47 George, Stefan, 366 German idealism, 227 gift, 42, 86; freeing giving from gift and giver, 52 Gilroy, Paul, 137 Girard, René, 246 Glissant, Édouard, 30 global, as entangled with local, 265 globalization, 26, 213; and world literature, 254–55, 259, 275 God, 19; alterity of, 85; Christian God not wholly other, 224; imageless, 49; infinite, 293; known only in relation to creatures, 37; “the last,” 232; as non-appearing, 158; as One, 41, 59; in painting, 78; as relational, 39; “second God,” 91; self-revelation, 224–25; as simplicity, 276; as talk, 47; unknowability, 293 Gödel, Kurt, 100 Goethe, Wolfgang von, 52 Glissant, Édouard, 312 Guénoun, Denis, 134 Guérard, Albert, 271 Guillory, John, 243 Great Seal, 79 Graff, Gerald, 246–47 Habermas, Jürgen, 139, and Axial Age religion, 225–34; and dialectic of Enlightenment, 295–96; makes secularity normative, 229–30; and theology, 225–34; translation into secular terms, 230 Hamann, Johann Georg, 142, 285 Harnack, Adolf von, 298 Hart, Kevin, 44

Index  427 Hegel, 22, 123, 318; and historicism, 229; and immanence, 276; and the postsecular, 130; and System, 276 Heidegger, Martin, 28, 32, 318; and Beiträge, 66, 232; as cutting off from relation to All, 362; on ­forgetting of being, 84; and ­Ge-stell, 83, 347; and Geworfenheit (thrownness), 298; and ­ontological difference, 276; on poetry, 66; and Saying, 66; and unconcealment, 42 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 7 Henry, Michel, 158 Heraclitus, 359 Herder, Johann Gottlieb, 239, 285 hermeneutics, philosophical, 28, 145 Heschel, Abraham, 49, 52 Hick, John, 21 hierarchy, 102 Hirsch, E. D., 239 Hoff, Gregor, 30 Hoff, Johannes, 73 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 271; as translator, 282 Homer, 238–39, 353 homo sacer, as “accursed man,” 155–57, 167–70 hooks, bell, 252 Horace, 132, 238 Horkheimer, Max, 139 Huckelberry Finn, 284 Hugo, Victor, 244 humanism, 149 humanities: vs. cognitive science, 5; as crypto-theology, 354; education, 4, 184–85; and the infinite, 191; integrated with sciences, 334–35; Italian, 317; outside university, 348–49; poetic epistemology of, 315

humanities knowledge: as fundamental, 352; reflexive, 339 human rights, 3; and China, 414n23; critique of, 154, 300; knowing, 339 iconoclasm, extreme, 55 identity: deconstructed, 308; as heuristic construct, 292; its liquidity, 312–13; its negativity, 136, 313; limits of, 297; and nonidentity, 5, 313; of opposites, 30; and politics, 113; relational, 311, 314; self-­ critique of, 311 identity politics, 137, 291–314 idolatry, 30; conceptual, 130, 141, 149; critique of, 135; of the objective, 270 ignorance, 5; as docta ignorantia, 5–6 imaginary, as unreal, 261, 400n5 imagination, 30; in concept formation, 325; and idolatry, 51; Kabbalah, 48; theological, 48; theo­maniacal, 48 immanence: absolute, 53; and ­apophasis, 55–57; critique of, 56; as transcendent, 54 impossibility, of theology, 36 “impotentiality,” 177 incommensurable, 155, 262, 269–70 incommunicable (ein Nicht-­ Mitteilbares), 281 inconceivability, 9 indeterminism, postmodern, 340 indifferentiation, 171; breakdown into, 172; power of, 170; of violence and right, 175 individuality, 101; sacralized in ­modernity, 218 individual worth, 296; as absolute, 297–99; and Protestantism, 297; transferred from God, 298

428  Index individuum ineffabilis est, 266 infinite, the: and undefined, 98; we live from it, 277 infinity: actual, 87, 98–100, 120–21; concretely experienced, 96; no proportion to finite, 94; as representable, 78, 79; of world, 38; and world literature, 277–78 informatics, celestial, 25 intellect: its priority, 99; vs. ratio, 102–6 intercarnation, 44 intercultural, 316; philosophy, 23 invisible hand, 245, 333 Irigaray, Luce, 313 Isaiah, 102 Jakobson, Roman, 294 Jaspers, Karl, 75, 201 Jetztzeit, 152 Joachim of Flores, 145–46, 152 Joas, Hans, 203, 205 Johnson, Elizabeth, 34 Johnson, Mark, 332 Judeo-Christian tradition, revalorized by philosophers, 297 Jullien, François, 23–24, 179–80, 270 Jung, Matthias, 219–20 justice: absolute, 305; natural, 309–10; social, 5 Kabbalah, 30, 43; high or late, 50–51 Kafka’s Ulysses, 344 kalokagathia, 82 Kalmanson, Leah, 371 Kant, Immanuel, 48, 80–81, 90, 296; and aesthetic disinterest, 265–65; aesthetics and religion beyond the concept, 316; on art, 277; and critique, 135; and end-in-oneself, 299; his moral theory, 343; on imagination as conditioning

knowledge, 51; and transcendental critique, 229 Katz, Stephen, 369, 370 Kearney, Richard, 42, 47, 96 Keller, Catherine, 29 Kermode, Frank, 240 Kern, Martin, 275, 276, 279 Kierkegaard, Søren, 60, 85, 276, 297 King Lear, and bare humanity, 266 Kipling, Rudyard, 196 Knapp, Steven, 245 Knapp and Michaels thesis, 249 Knepper, Timothy, 366–72, 380n3 knowing: as being known by, 125; as ­ignorance, 184; involved, 183, 186–87, 350; its human embeddedness, 351; of own limits, 185; personal, 346–47; as relational, 350; valued for its own sake, 360 know thyself, 185 koiné, 14, 28, theory as, 253 Kolbas, E. Dean, 242 Kosky, Jeffrey: Arts of Wonder, 56 Kyoto school, 30 Lacan, Jacques, 25 Laclau, Ernesto, 308–9 Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, 268, 320, 321, 324, 333, 336, 339–40 language: as condition of knowing, 341; intended adequacy to express things, 282; its beyond, 348; its failure, 260; its infinite potential, 282; as necessary to the apophatic, 162–63; as in permanent state of exception, 163; plurality and oneness in intention, 280; poetic, 29; pure, 254–57, 271, 280–82; reconciliation of all, 281–82; and redemption, 282; as sovereign, 358; as within and outside its own order, 162

Index  429 Lascaux, 339 Lauter, Paul, 241 law: exception to, 155; and freedom, 117 layman, 91 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 321 Leopardi, Giacomo, 81 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 141 Levinas, Emmanuel, 18, 108; and ethical absolute, 270; on separateness, 59–61; on transcendence, 59 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 294 liberal arts, 186–91 limitless critique, 137 limits: of critique, 404n73; knowing of, 103; as orienting to the unlimited, 104; recognized and transcended, 88, 274; Schranken vs. Grenzen, 222 literary value, question of, 239 literature: about the inconceivable, 277; and detachment, 278; its eclipse, 66–67; its redemption, 281; and liberation, 257; more fundamental than logic, 275; and nationalism, 271, 275; as “pure,” 257–58, 271, 280; as revolutionary, 243; as source of universality, 277; as transhistorical, 237; as unclassifiable, 277; as unlimited in its relations, 264–65; world, 254–87 liturgical performing, 91; pre-reflexive knowing, 92, 97 liturgical practice, 93 liturgical praise as gnoseological, 92–93 Lossky, Vladimir, 114 logic, as exclusionary, 308 logos: as revelation of being, 84; as transcendent, 359; as universal in narrative of West, 317–18 Lo Li-yong, Taban, 242

Lonergan, Bernard, 88 love and freedom, 268 Lucretius, 329, 353 Luhmann, Niklas, 222, 276, 314 Luther, 221 Madsen, Richard, 213 Maimonides, 42; rejection of images, 50, 53 making, as contemplative and theoretical, 89–92 Malinowski, Bernadette, 286 “manner of expression”/“way of meaning” (Art des Meinens), 256, 259, 280 Marie de France, 173 Marion, Jean-Luc, 40, 44, 158 Martin, Dale, 124–25 mathematical images, 97, 103; for ­infinite, 100 matter, as mystery, 328, 331 McCauley, Robert N., 359 McGinn, Bernard, 88 media, and society, 80 mediator, disappearing, 11 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 158; on flesh, 77 messianic: redemption of language, 281; universality and the poem, 119; unsayability, 116 metaphor, 5; apophatic, 65; as basic to thinking, 341; body and brain as, 341; produced by science, 352–53; as true myth, 68 metaphysical, 321 metaphysics, its overcoming, 32 Michaels, Walter Benn, 245 Middle Platonism, 37 Milbank, John, 25, 91, 115 Milton, John, 362 mind/body dualism: continuum, 334; superseded, 329; as universal ­decoding key, 328, 334

430  Index Miner, Robert, 90 Møllgaard, Eske, 30 modernity: an alternative, 73–74, 79; as decadent, 83; and voiding of presence, 80 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 203 monotheism: as equalizer, 262; as ethical, 61–63; separates unconditioned and conditioned, 297 Morrison, Toni, 307 multiculturalism, 3 Munch, Edvard, 298 musulmano, 175 mystery: of being human, 289; of matter, causality, and the world, 328; in the physical, 336; of ­universe, 333, 342–43 mysticism, 20, 263; Heschel’s ­definition of, 52 myth, 5, 209 Nagarjuna, 140, 179 Namelessness, 312 Names of God, 309 naming: apophatic, 20; nameless, 27 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 47, 136, 144–45 narcissism, 74, 81, 83, 85; modern, 74; of science, 361–62 Native American authors, 284 natural, as ideal, 304 nature: as mystery, 326; as otherness, 326–27 negation: double, 116–17, 170; its ­modalities, 4; negated, 95–96, 177; as positive, 7 negative capability, of theology, 33 negative theology, 136–39, 350; as antiidolatry, 163, 414n22; as critique, 354–55; definition of, 293; does not exist, 6; as founding theology, 161–62; and homo sacer, 160–62; needs positive images, 260; not

negative, 7; and postmodernity, 96; and secularism, 228; as selfcritical, 271; its self-dismantling concepts, 331 Negri and Hardt, 111 Neoplatonism, 36–37 Neville, Robert, 371 New Historicism, 252 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 91, 150, 337, 343 Nightingale, Andrea, 215 nihilism, 149–50 nominalist ontology, 95 non aliud, 85, 93–97 non-conceptual, 141, 263–64 nonidentical, 276, 292; as most ­important, 314 nonidentity, 310, 312–13; constitutive, 200; inherent, 139; not-not, 116–17 nonobjective, 356–57 non-oppositional thinking, 355 not-All, 109 nothing: as basis of knowing, 186; as deepest identity, 200; in each ­incommensurable and universal, 267; and relatedness, 199 nothingness: absolute, 56; belief in, 24; constitutive of humanity, 200, 266–67; as nakedness, 26 not-not logic, 178, 296 Novalis, 146–48 Nyssa, Gregory of, 37–38 oath, as performative language, 162 objectivism, 340–41 observable vs. unobservable, 222 Oedipus, 209 Ohmann, Richard, 240 One: as measureless, 104; and will to power, 59 ontology: apophatic, 40; nominalist, 95; relational, 40, 41, 67, 95

Index  431 ontotheology, 40, 43; critique of, 67; its overcoming, 55 openness, 28; infinite, 293; radical, 138, 149; universal, 115, 150; ­unlimited, 122 order, as ordo and taxis, 101 origin: as discursive, 167; thinking from, 17 other: as mystery, 148, 327; as source of everything, 278–79; as transcendent, 42, 276 Otto, Rudolf, 168 Owuor-Anymba, Henry, 242 pan, 109, 118 panentheism, 40 Paracelsus, 164, 165 paradigm, as presupposing own ­inexistence, 164 Parmenides, 360 Parsons, Talcott, 218 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 219 person, as idolatrous image, 43; 51 personhood: as apophatic, 46; as ­constitutive of being human, 57; God beyond personality and ­impersonality, 55 perspective: linear, 74; central, 76, 77 perspectivism, 37–38 phenomenology, as rigorous science, 54; theological turn in, 158 philosophy, comparative, 24 Pickstock, Catherine, 93 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 317 Pindar, 175 pivot, 263 Plato, 214, 215; suspicion of ­imagination, 51 Plotinus, 138 plurality, 28; as implicating divinity, 41 poet, as godless, 47

poetic, 11, 281; language as apocalyptic, 29; need for, 66; theology, 69; use of language, 65 poetry: as critique of concept, 69; as disclosure, 46; prophetic, 197 political order: founded on exclusion, 161; its constitution by contami­ nation of universal through ­particular, 309; and positive ­identities, 294 political theology, 10, 160–61 politics, its origin in life exposed to death, 169 Popper, Karl, 216, 354 positivism, scientific, 6 positivity, of Law, 117 possest, 96–97 postmetaphysical, 232 postmodern, 3, 44; as anti-­ Enlightenment, 295; indeterminacy, 329; as intellectual revolution, 110; theory, 139 Pound, Ezra, and imagism, 197 power, derives always from power of exception, 156–57, 169 pre-conceptual, 332 prelinguistic, 341 pre-propositional, 331, 341 pre-reflexive, 92, 97 presence, voiding of, 80 pre-Socratic philosophy, 358–60; and theological revelation, 359 projection and aspiration, 370 prophetic, 150, 197, 199; axis of negative theology, 10; and Fenollosa, 197; Heschel’s d ­ efinition of, 52 pure language, 254–57, 271, 280–82; as incommunicable (ein NichtMitteilbares), 281; as negative, 281; as redeemed, 257; as untranslatable, 281 pure literature, 280, 281–83

432  Index querelles des anciens et des modernes, 239 Radical Orthodoxy, 25 rationalization, modern, 201 real, the: beyond finite conception, 327, 340, 342, 364; as whole, 362 realism: of identity, 295; representationalist, 79; symbolic, 75, 79 reality: higher or deeper, 208–9; ­relativized, 208 reason: as external to religious belief, 233; intertwined with revelation, 234; its brokenness, 228; its ­defeatism, 231; its self-affirmation, 84; as postmetaphysical, 232 Reder, Michael, 233 reduction: in good sense, 334; to physical, 328 reductionism, scientific, 341–43 reflexivity, 205, 340; and comprehensive knowing, 339; and return to immediacy, 221; and revelation, 211; and transcendence, 211 relating: of all to all, 28, 29, 185, 264; beyond conceptualization, 147; and complexity, 30; to infinite, 191; nonexclusionary, 115; to Open and Unknown, 202; to others, 13, 19; to the Other, 19, 279; ­universally, 33; to the unknowable, 191–92 relation: of exception, 162; inner, of languages, 256; without relation, 94; Trinitarian, 314; and value, 299 relational: language, 35, 38; wholeness, 226, 282 relationality: apophatic, 39; of identity, 311; radical, 64; as universal being, 95 relativism: cultural, 327; postmodern, 328

religion: as behavior, 356, 358–59; comparative, 23; and the inconceivable, 355; as intentional state, 356, 358–59; interested in the nonobjective, 356–57; in public, 233; as relational, 19; as re-ligio, 18, 350; scientifically studied, 353–54 remnant, 116–17 repetition, and eschatology, 47 representation: critique of, 45, 135–36; mythological, of God, 51; in ­Renaissance, 77; of space, 76–77; termination of, 54 revelation: and Axial Age, 205; as depth of reason, 232–34; as discourse, 61; and Enlightenment, 355–56; as existential knowing, 20; God’s self-revelation, 223; in the present, 50; and revolution, 148; of the universal, 25; word as, 168 Rahner, Karl, 223 rhyme, its Christian origins, 120 Ricoeur, Paul, 68 Rickens, Friedo, 230 rights: absolutized, 300; their relativity, 299–300 Rilke, Rainer Maria: Ninth Duino Elegy, 67–68 Robinson, Lillian, 241 “Romanity,” and secondariness, 131–32 Romanticism: and imagination, 51–52; Jena, 148 Rosenzweig, Franz, 25, 43; and idolatry, 49–50; on proper names, 312; on theopathic revelation, 50 Rubenstein, Mary-Jane, 44 Rushdie, Salmon, 284 sacramental, 75 sacred: as everything, 63; as violent, 61 Sanchez, Sonja, 312

Index  433 Santner, Eric, 25 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 222 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 138 saying, poetic, 66 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 60, 148, 297; bloßes Sein, 174 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 52, 233, 266 Schmitt, Carl, 155 Schwartz, Benjamin, 203 science: without absolute access to real, 322; as critique, 354–57; as grounded in humanities wisdom, 315, 332; its authority, 328; its limits, 322–32; its validity relative to context, 360–61; modern, 83; and myth, 210–11; and objectivity, 187, 322; ordered to humanities, 335; and religion, 353; as religion, 359–61; as superior, 361; vertical integration with humanities, 332, 345; Scotus, Duns, 101–2; and degrees of being, 329; and univocity, 229 secular: modernity, 217; reason, 227 secularity, 23, 55–56; and negative ­theology, 228 secularization: Habermas on, 229; as segnatura, 167 seeing and being seen, 86 segnatura, 164, 276; and secularization, 167; as transcendental, 165 self-critique, 45, 271, 355–57; and Europe, 134–36; and identity, 311; unlimited and apophatic, 251 self-reflection: in humanities, 327–28; its limits, 363 self-reflexivity, 85, 199; as defining Axial Age, 205; vs. hyper­ reflexivity, 84–85; as infinite and divine, 87; as unknowing, 91 self-transcendence, 88, 255; as self-­ critical, 271

separateness: through discourse, 59–60; and ethical relation, 57; as ­inviolable, 59; as lack of relation, 41; as necessary for revelation, 61 sestina, 119 signature, 165 Simmel, Georg, 211 singularity, 95, 297; of each individual, 122; and new universality, 112; as nothing, 259 Slingerland, Edward, 267, 318–53; and consilience revised, 341, 348–49; and scientific reduction, 42 Sloterdijk, Peter, 149 Smith, Barbara Hernstein, 240–41 Smith, Robertson, 168 society, power and bonding, 210 Socrates, 4–5, 76, 184 solidarity: stronger in religious communitarianism, 231–32; wounded and as consciousness of lack, 231 sovereignty, 154–75; as defying the gods, 156 space of literature, 273–75, 279 specialist vs. generalist, 272–73 specialization: de-specialization, 194–95; of knowledge, 4; non-­ specialization, 194–95 Spinoza, Baruch, 39, 329 Spivak, Gayatri, 275. 311 St. Paul, 107–25; and unconditioned individual worth, 296 Strauss, Leo, 49 Stroumsa, Guy, 217 subject, as broken open, 121; divided, 121; as intrinsically social, 233; metaphysical, 75 subjective aesthetics, 81 “sublation,” 35 sunyata (emptiness), 210 supersessionism, 393n9

434  Index symbolic activity, 211; anticipates reflection, 219; relation to world, 219–21 taboo, two species of, 168 Taube, Jacob, 118 Taylor, Charles, 203–5, 214 Taylor, Mark C., 25, 32; 55, 57; 393n6 techné and immanence, 80 technology: as dominating planet, 139; as Ge-stell, 83 techno-science, 25 Teresa of Avila, 39 Thales, 359 theism, as idolatry, 43 theolatry, 47, 58 theology: as heuristic, 12; as idolatrous, 43–44; its defense, 34; its overcoming, 47–48; as kenotic, 31; negative, 13–14, 25; as negative ­capacity, 268; as opening all ­discourse infinitely, 166–67; poetic, 69; process, 37, 40; as queen of sciences, 190–91; as ­segnatura, 166; as self-unsaying, 13, 31; speculative, 350; as thinking from origin, 17; and transcendence, 221–25; and ­unsaying, 29 “theomania,” 48, 53 theopathic, 50 theopoiesis, 54 theory: as always also a practice, 248–49; attack against, 244–47; as contemplation of divine, 215; as divorced from practice, 358; from high to politically driven, 123, 148, 250; its ambiguity, 215–16; its concrete life, 248; its protean indeterminacy, 246–47; its self-­questioning, 245; as

negative thinking, 248; and race, 241, 251–52; as self-critical, 248, 250; as self-subverting, 250; as “sight” at a distance, 247; and theology, 245; as transcendence of world, 214–16 thinking: poetic, 68; as ruining what it thinks, 63; as self-negating, 64; speculative, 27–28; as synthetic process, 61; as way of being, 221 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 242 Tillich, Paul, 224, 232 totalitarianism, 171; of concept, 263; of consumer society, 295 Trakakis, Nick, 381n13 transcendence, 23; absolute, 222–23; as apophatic, 207, 272; and Axial Age, 201–8; and the common, 180; and contingency, 220; and criticism, 203; as excess, 147; five paradigms of, 222; folded into ­intimacy, 40; immanent, 54, 223–24; as irrepressible, 271; its purging, 29; radical, 48; as relational, 36; safeguarding, 270; as self-critical, 272; as self-­ transcending, 224; as separative, 36, 41, 57, 64; from within, 24 transcendent: language as, 255; life of work, 258 transcendental: as knowing of conditions of possibility, 365; reverse, 88; seeing world as whole, 226 translation: confers afterlife on work, 258, 282–83; and estrangement, 282; highlights gap with original, 282; projects “one true language,” 255–56; risks of, 278; transcends limits, 280 translator, task of, 280, 281, 411n46 tribalism, 8, 112 Trinity, divine, 85, 101, 314

Index  435 truth: as Christ himself, 125; as pure event, 124, 152; revealed in failure, 11; as singular event, 111 Turner, Mark, 268, 320, 333 Turner, Victor, 209 Turrel, James: installations, 55 Unamuno, Miguel de, 381n17 unconditioned, and literature, 278 unconscious, rooted in body, 334 undercommon, 383n1 unforgettable, 116 uniqueness: as universal, 259, 262; ­violated by identity politics, 303–4 unitive experience, 208; as enactive representation, 210 unity, indefinable, 213 universal: cognitive, 319–20; community, 114; as culturally relative, 324; as incommensurate with yet dependent on particular, 309; as indefinable, 25, 142, 149, 319–20, 347; as indeterminate, 141; as intimate, 25; language rehabilitated, 140; metamorphosed, 141; as quest and as conquest, 136; relatedness, 33; as revolutionary, 110–11, 151–52; as singular, 233; as transcendent, 271, 297 universalism, 30; Christian, 122, 150; of domination and of deconstruction, 136; modern, 122; new, 13, 117, 121, 136, 140–41 universality: always yet-to-be-defined, 273; as apophatic, 141, 208, 263, 309; as communication without restrictions, 252; of concept, 122; as concretely existential, 123; and Eastern cultures, 318–19; as European, 129–30; as inclusive without restrictions, 253; ­­

(in)definition of, 24–25; as koiné, 253; in the making, 238; natural, 318–19; as necessarily lacking, 309; negativity of, 154, 169; new, 253; (non)concept of, 123, 252–53, 263–64; as nothing, 26, 263; as omni­versality, 238; as openness, 24, 115; as performative, 252; in poem, 119; and singularity, 112, 233; true, 121–22; as unknowable, 25 unknowability: of depths of embodi­ ment, 332; of God and humanity, 293 unknowing, 5, 184–85, 191–93, 228, 345; of God, 87, 293; as horizon, 192; of human, 293; as source, 363; as starting point, 192; as superior wisdom, 76; of universal, 25 unmarked, the, 222, 276, 313–14 unnameable, 94 unsayable, 6; as enabling condition of speakable, 104 untranslatable, 255, 281, 282; Whitman as, 285–86 Valéry, Paul, 150 value: culture transcendent, 360; ­infinite of each, 307; literature as source of, 258; relational, 299; transhistorical, 237; use-value, 80 vanishing point, 77–78 Vattimo, Gianni, 22, 135, 145–46; ­dissolution of objectivities, 173 via negativa, 261 Vico, Giambattista, 66–67, 90, 187, 268; and cognitive science, 337–38 Virgil: Aeneid, 136 visio Dei, 74 visionary experience, 212 voluntarism, 99

436  Index Walcott, Dereck, 284, 312 Weber, Max, 22 Weinberg, Steven, 110 Wellek, René, 244 werewolf, 173 West, Cornell, 252, 307 Western thought, as constituted by universal logos, 317–18 Westphal, Merold, 130 Wildman, Wesley J., 380n3 Whitman, Walt, 284–87; as poet of unsayable, 285–86 whole: implicit, 366; more than a story, 368, 369; operative, 227 wholeness, as transcendent and un­ conceptualizable, 226, 282 Wiebe, Donald, 353–58; and pre-­ Socratics, 359–60 will, 99 Wilson, Edward O., 332, 341 Wismann, Heinz, 30 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 277, 333, 369 Wittrock, Björn, 206 Wolfson, Elliot, 29–33, 41–57 world literature, 195, 198, 254–89; and canon, 283; and “detached

engagement,” 265; and detachment, 278–80; Goethe’s Weltliteratur, 254; as one’s own received from others, 283; resists conceptual definition, 274; resists fixed historical appropriation, 284 woundedness: of community, 142; of language, 142–43 writing, 202 Wyschogrod, Edith, 32, 54 Xenophanes, 46 Yu, Anthony, 198 zero, and infinity, 79 Zhang, Longxi, 254, 266, 269–70; against untranslatability, 359–60; and equality, 262–63 Zhuangzi, 195, 208, 260, 261, 327; on equality, 262–63; and notknowing, 228 Žižek, Slavoj, 25, 109–15, 123–24, 297 zoé, 170–72

WILLIAM FRANKE is professor of comparative literature and religious studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including A Philosophy of the ­Unsayable (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014).