Conclusion

The conclusion is an alternate, and somewhat more original, account of the book’s aims—more “readable” in many ways and synthetic in its incorporation of others’ valuable insights. There would be no conclusion such as the one presented here without the “hard work” of the first three chapters. Its focal point is accordingly to be found in the development of a “material spirituality” lodged within the potentiality of the human being—something that is never severed from the possibility of encounter with an O/other, even if such an encounter continuously fails to be recorded in words—examined here through the concrete dynamics found in the practices of writing and publishing. Though the conclusion could certainly “stand alone” from the rest of the work, it achieves its “fuller” sense in light of what came before it, and, in this sense, points beyond the merely theoretical and toward that creative and spiritual dimension of human existence we have been pining for all along, which pushes the boundaries of both philosophy and theology more than just a little bit, and which may only be graspable through the failures of our representations.

Aesthetics among the Metaphysical Ruins

The second chapter attends more directly to the legacy of Celan’s poetry as his work is critiqued and appropriated by both Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe—two thinkers whose studies of Celan have become essential reading for comprehending the nature of his poetics. The chapter disentangles their uses of Celan in order to locate a hope for new subjectivities in the face of the repeated failures of language and artistic representations alike. The concept of “failure” moves to the center stage of this book and assists us in comprehending why our failures to genuinely represent anything (e.g., ourselves, others, the divine) may be the only possible way that we can convey an authentic presence. At the same time, this insight also begins to reformulate the terms upon which we have traditionally understood religious thought and identity. At this point, the work of the American poet Adrienne Rich is engaged in order to somewhat illuminate the directions in which poetry and faith might possibly be headed as they also intersect and interweave with one another, the very coordinates of the “theo-poetic” that has gained so much currency as of late.

The Logic of the “As If” and the (Non)existence of God

The first chapter explores Jacques Derrida’s rich reworking of the Kantian regulative principle of the as if in order to point toward certain potential movements of the as such in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, and Paul Celan, as well as the various mystical traditions which Derrida himself took up on occasion. By taking this precise path and yet staying open to Derrida’s critique of any possible presentation as such beyond the as if, this chapter shows how Derrida’s work ultimately also points toward an encounter with the O/other as such, beyond the as if, though within language, very much within its failures—which is, in the end, the only real way to fully respect the encounter at all. In such fashion, an ethical imperative appears within the event of encounter, one that does not seek to reduce the singularity of the O/other’s presence before us to a regulative ideal as if to go beyond what has been (re)presented to us, but rather that which embraces what cannot be represented, bringing philosophy, politics, and religion to the threshold of a mystical-ethical imperative that we must take very seriously.

Introduction

This chapter introduces The Spiritual and Creative Failures of Representation: On Poetry, Theology and the Potential of the Human Being with a passage from Paul Celan’s Atemwende. In doing so, the intimate link between language and oppression, vast and complicated as it may be, and tangled up with movements of fear and structural injustice, are placed in front of the reader, introducing them to the occasion of reflection that this book will dwell within. Its trajectory is forecast in the summary of chapters, wherein the path is mapped ahead of time, from Derrida’s reworking of the “as if,” through the challenges of failure in the face of the theo-political, and wonders in the shadow of Agamben’s “atheology,” before entreating us to rest not in our failed representations, but precisely in that place in which all representations fail.

On Language and Its Profanation

The third chapter, in many ways, extends this trajectory of thought into a dialogue with the work of the Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben. Beginning with his characterization of a “scission” within language that posits philosophy as that which can know its object without possessing it and poetry as that which can possess it without knowing it, this chapter demonstrates how his earlier work on poetry maintains a necessary correlation with his later philosophical and theo-political writings. In this context, I explore his development of a poetic “atheology” that is a sort of materialist metaphysics, the potential last refuge of meaning in an otherwise nihilistic world—one that contains dire implications for the fields of poetry, philosophy, and theology. The establishment of poetry as a last refuge of meaning over and against the “destruction of experience” in the modern era is a bold claim to be sure, expressing Agamben’s attempt to reformulate the possibility for meaning to emerge beyond its inscription in language, as well as the conditions under which theology could be understood as a profane endeavor that tries to speak to this situation of human existence.