On the Universality of What Is Not

William Franke

Description

Branching out from his earlier works providing a history and a theory of apophatic thinking, William Franke's newest book pursues applications across a variety of communicative media, historical periods, geographical regions, and academic disciplines—moving from the literary humanities and cultural theory and politics to more empirical fields such as historical anthropology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking is an original philosophical reflection that shows how intransigent deadlocks debated in each of these arenas can be broken through thanks to the uncanny insights of apophatic vision. Leveraging Franke's distinctive method of philosophical, religious, and literary thinking and practice, On the Universality of What Is Not proposes a radically unsettling approach to answering (or suspending) perennial questions of philosophy and religion, as well as to dealing with some of our most pressing dilemmas at present at the university and in the socio-political sphere. In a style of exposition that is as lucid as it is poetic, deep-rooted tensions between alterity and equality in all these areas are exposed and transcended.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Critical Theory
• Movements
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Axial Age
• Criticism
• Epistemology
• Giorgio Agamben

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 31 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268108830
• Langue: English

Extrait

ON THE UNIVERSALITY
OF WHAT IS NOT
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
Library of Congress Control Number:
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 [e-mail]
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 Part I. Thinking Theologically and the Apophatic One Introduction: Apophatic Thinking and Its Applications; Between Exhaustion and Explosion Two Outbound Reflection: Unsaying Theology in the Name of All Part II. The New Apophatic Universalism Three Apophatic Mysticism as Practical Philosophy: Nicholas of Cusa and the Applications of Ignorance 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 Six Except Asia: Agamben’s Logic of Exception and Its Apophatic Roots and Offshoots Part IV. Cross-Cultural and Transhistorical Interdisciplinarity Seven Liberal Arts Education Worldwide Unlimited Inc.: The Unspeakable Basis of Comparative Humanities Eight Apophasis and the Axial Age: Transcendent Origins of Critical Consciousness Part V. Emergences in Literary and Cultural Theory Nine The Canon Question and the Value of Theory: Toward a New (Non)Concept of Universality Ten World Literature: A Means or a Menace to the Encounter with the Other? Part VI. Critical Consciousness and Cognitive Science Eleven Postmodern Identity Politics and the Social Tyranny of the Definable Twelve Cognitive Universality between Science and the Humanities Concluding Elucidation: On the Extension and Intension of “Apophasis” Appendix: Analytic Table of Contents Notes Index
PREFACE
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 intelligible on its own terms. None presupposes prior knowledge of the 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.
Part I

THINKING THEOLOGICALLY AND THE APOPHATIC
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.

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 und