The Tempest throws us into the midst of a world of tragic repetition, in which usurpation, oppression, and the drive for mastery repeat themselves again and again. The chapter argues that it also offers a precious, if tenuous, escape from tragic history, by calling for a politics of humble disappointment. This tentative path runs through abjuration or negation. The play consistently stages violent and intrusive spectacles that break the characters (and the audience) out of their initial subject positions and into a more outward-looking mode. Such interruptions connect to the tradition of negative theology, in which poorness or nothingness “is the ultimate state of receptivity” (Meister Eckhart). They offer a breath of air from outside the masterful self, a sliver of distance from the tragic past. In particular, the play institutes a theatrical form of collectivity through the isle’s inclusive dramatic “air”. It draws us, as well as the sovereign figure of Prospero, into a broader dramatic life-force or “intersubjective phenomenology” (Schalkwyk). Indeed, in the Epilogue, the sovereign power is subject to the many; subject to audience’s judgment, pleasure, and approval. It is this recognition of mutual need (Plato) that opens the vision of a renewed political community.

The book looks to the creative potential of experiences of failure, haunting, estrangement, impasse, or dream in Shakespeare. The focus is not just on what the plays represent but on what they do and how they inspire and unsettle the political imaginations of their audiences. The Introduction sets out the intellectual heritage underpinning this approach, including the tradition of negative theology and subsequent philosophies of the negative (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Badiou). It thereby establishes a negative political theology that challenges the official (or positive) political theology that sacralises power. By outlining “the disruptive spirit of negativity”, it shifts critical focus from the mimetic to the affective and opens new and more nuanced readings. The approach builds on the work of critics such as Annabel Patterson, Andrew Hadfield, and Chris Fitter, who have highlighted the anti-monarchical or popular political forces at play during the period. In the via negativia, however, it explores a very different origin and mode of egalitarianism. It focuses on the way negativity and unsettlement imaginatively transform political thought and relations. Shakespeare’s drama opens up visions of something other, including radical experiences of the “perhaps” or “what if”, that deepen the audience’s political thought.

Hamlet is thrown into a state of uncertainty about the eternal. Indeed, his famed “delay” is a response to the thought of eternity. He is given “pause” by imagining “what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”. The eternal is the “rub”. The chapter tackles this obscure rub by turning to Soren Kierkegaard, who references Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in his Philosophical Fragments. Resurrection, for Kierkegaard, is a movement through non-being to being. Negativity here plays a critical role. To be “born again”, the learner must “become[] nothing and yet … not [be] annihilated”. Hamlet’s struggle with the eternal opens him to an expansive view of humanity that goes beyond Claudius’s will to power or Laertes’s customary honour. It brings him to a new political vision, outside the violent and reductive dynastic politics of Denmark. Hamlet seeks what would seem impossible within revenge tragedy: the incalculable. The “eternal” is here used in an inclusive sense to show how the obscure but liberating thought of the timeless or untimely allows ideas of justice, charity, equality, and forgiveness to enter the play. The eternal suggests an imaginary perspective that negates our current preoccupations and political economies.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

Moving from the recently changed landscape in literary theory, in which the distinction between sacred and secular literature blurs, this book demonstrates that Dante’s Vita nuova harbors enormous potential for responding creatively to the cultural and intellectual crises of our times. Our “post-truth” era can rediscover the deeper meaning of truth as a poetic interpretation of what in the Middle Ages could still be understood as theological revelation. Dante’s “little book” makes startlingly clear how theology is crucial to the continuing intelligibility and viability of the humanities. Meant here is especially negative theology, or theology as (negated by) poetry. Theology, qua negative, is the knowing of our own unknowing of divinity – or of whatever it is that most deeply bonds us together as humans and grants us our very existence together with everything else. Dante’s hybrid of lyric poetry and autobiographical prose in his “little book” shows how the language of theology, like that of poetry, is grounded in the ineffability of human existence itself. This recognition is the beginning of the critique of all ideology as, in effect, idolatry. On this basis, a possibility of salvation through and for humanities tradition and theological revelation alike is projected from Dante’s work into our contemporary times.

The profoundly theoretical approach to language on the part of the modistae resulted in the “speculative grammar” that is reflected in Dante’s representation of a deep structure of language. At this level, language is “one in all” (“una in tutti”), yet this underlying condition of unity is not as such articulable. Dante envisages ultimately a unity beyond language altogether. Dante cannot represent God as such, but he can imitate God’s art by a total artifice that absorbs matter into its own creation of form. This hyper-artificiality of Dante’s writing makes images revelations not of anything that is as such but of an unlimited indeterminate power of creation that performs in the image of God. It works on a necessarily negative logic. God is “seen” negatively, or is understood (by Dante in heaven) through the invisible divinity’s being manifest analogically in an infinite process of mediation that then dissolves and so points back to its invisible source. This is allowed to occur by Dante’s making the linguistic, and specifically written, medium itself his object of contemplation – in effect, the visio Dei. God can be given to experience only through mediations, specifically through their infinity, and Dante’s vision of divinity in the mediations of language says as much. In some sense, Dante suggests, his vision of the medium (writing) gives rise to an immediate vision of the divine. This paradox is explored and illuminated through the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and through art theory and the anthropology of images. Contemporary art historians and theorists have meditated deeply on the role of images in making absence present. Through emphasizing the writtenness of his vision of God in Paradise, Dante is already bringing out into the open what particularly Didi-Huberman and Jean-Claude Schmitt, as well as Hans Belting, emphasize about images as making absence present. They glimpse the unlimitedness of this absence, moreover, sometimes even in its theological implications and connotations. This realization of absence can become a kind of enactment of divinity, an incarnation in mental experience, and even in an aesthetic medium, of God. Metaphysical reality is thus made to appear through the image. A theologization of the presencing of absence through the image can surely be discerned in Dante’s “scenography” in the Heaven of Jove.

This paper considers the question of whether it is possible to say anything positive about God. The usual reason for answering yes is that God must be a person to be a perfect being. I investigate this claim by defining personhood in terms of knowledge and will. After looking at the theologies of Maimonides, Kant, and Cohen, I conclude that while we can say positive things about God, we must sacrifice a certain amount of conceptual rigor to do so.

Jean’s Rose, like that of Guillaume de Lorris, is a site of hermeneutic resistance that defies analysis and univocity. The second author in particular uses the integumentum to cultivate an unsettling relationship to University learning, somewhere between the popularisation of academic science and the desire to transgress and to digress. The romance’s final pages, when the pilgrim sets out on the road to paradise and when obscenity and soteriology become inextricably entangled, reveal the importance of hermeneutic negativity in Jean de Meun’s writing, echoing Reason’s oxymoronic speech on love and Genius’s doctrine of natural generation. Drawing on the Augustinian idea of interior speech in search of divine union and the spiritual inheritance of Neoplatonic and Cistercian negative theology, the end of the romance delights in subverting the paradigms of negative mysticism as much as it enjoys revelling in the artful obscenity of the pilgrim’s penetration of the ‘sanctuary’ of the Rose. This chapter investigates the workings of such negativity, which tests language by continually upending meaning and the pilgrim’s quest itself, leading to the destabilizing chaos of a paradoxical Rose-non-Rose.

The chapter lays out the argument of the book: that Joyce’s texts elaborate a set of problems posed by Ignatius Loyola, working these problems into new approaches to narration, hermeneutics, and irony. It also situates this argument in wider contexts of Joyce studies, current theories of reading, negative theology, and the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein.

This chapter argues that my account of hope offers an alternative to indeterminacy and dogma. Commentators such as John Caputo and Jean-Luc Marion claim that deconstruction and negative theology are incompatible; as they observe, Dionysius affirms Christian commitment while Derrida does not. In my reading, however, deconstruction and negative theology affirm a hope that is identical in kind, though not in content. Although Derrida and Dionysius express different hopes, they both construe hope as a discipline that incorporates self-critique. Through hope, it is possible to affirm particular beliefs and practices while acknowledging that every commitment is radically uncertain.

This chapter argues that a negative political theology helps to address the problem posed by the persistence of the sacred. Giorgio Agamben argues that, whether it derives from religious worship or national identity, reverence for the sacred functions to neutralize resistance. My account of hope indicates on the contrary that a concern for transcendence can intensify critique. Rather than affirming the sacred uncritically or disavowing it altogether, communities can acknowledge the special significance of particular texts and traditions while maintaining an ethical discipline that loosens their authority. Some political movements find it difficult to combine critique of the status quo with concrete proposals, but hope offers a way to affirm particular policies while subjecting them to ongoing critique.

This chapter argues that it is both impossible and unnecessary to exclude religion from secular politics. Martin Hägglund claims that deconstruction entails a radical atheism, but Derrida suggests that political commitments are formally indistinguishable from religious faith insofar as they are both directed toward the unforeseeable future. Much as Dionysius orients himself toward an unknowable God, Derrida affirms a justice that is radically elusive. Political theorists such as Mark Lilla argue that religion and politics should be strictly separated, but my account of hope indicates that they are inseparable. Where secularism and theocracy both promise an impossible clarity, atheism and Christian thought share an uncertain hope.

This chapter draws upon my reading of Derrida and Dionysius to develop an account of a hope that incorporates critique. I argue that, although it is difficult, it is possible to maintain the uncertain affirmation that I describe in the first two chapters through hope. Where Albert Camus claims that hope posits a confidence that distracts from life here and now, Derrida and Dionysius describe a hope that claims no assurance concerning what is to come. Rather than projecting desire onto a fantasized future, a self-critical hope energizes efforts to improve the present. In my view, hope is a practice, not the conclusion of a proof; it depends upon decision, which inevitably goes beyond the evidence. For this reason, it cannot guarantee a good result, but that does not mean that it must be abandoned. On the contrary, hope is a resolute desire that endures vulnerability.

This chapter argues that, like deconstruction, Christian thought inhabits the tension between negativity and affirmation. Where commentators such as Stathis Gourgouris claim that religion asserts a certainty that excludes critique, negative theology unsettles every claim to represent the divine. Dionysius the Areopagite argues that Christian discourse must be simultaneously affirmed and negated. Although this seems like simple contradiction on the level of logic, it becomes the means of ethical transformation when enacted in time. Negative theology constitutes a discursive practice that destabilizes the self through continual self-critique. Insofar as it continues to affirm Christian practices that are directed toward an unknowable God, negative theology models a hope that persists despite its uncertainty.