Oxford March 2017
Cloud of the Impossible: Darkening Horizons, Deepening Entanglements
Catherine Keller
I realize what the title of this conversation—with its darkening cloud, its
deepening entanglement—must sound like : a US citizen’s despair—and in the
darkening gloom of our trumped democracy an appeal in a brexited context for
solidarity, as the authoritarian nationalism spreads internationally. Those are resonances
and relevancies I will not altogether avoid—especially as regarding the actual book, the
Cloud of the Impossible, they involve an aggressive Islamophobia and mounting climate
change denialism. However, let us start altgoether elsewhere, with the actual origin of
the titular phrase.
“And the more that cloud of impossibility is recognized as obscure and
impossible, the more truly the necessity shines forth and the less veiled it
appears and draws near.” Cusa De Visio Dei 1453
He may not have known of the cloud of—unknowing, the anonymous British
14th century text in this mystical linege.
Gregory of Nyssa 4th c:
When therefore Moses grew in knowledge, he declared that he had seen God in
the darkness, that is, that he had then come to know that what is divine is
beyond all knowledge and comprephension, for the text says: Moses approached
the dark cloud where God was. . “the seeing that consists in not seeing”…
So from this exegesis billows the whole lineage called negative theology, the notknowing, the not-seeing: a negativity that pits itself against theological positivisim. The
apophatic. The unsaying. Via pseudo Dionysius..Eckhart… to Cusa.
But then please note that the entire tradition of the dark cloud is emanating from the
original exodus metaphor…..the crowd waits at the foot of Sinai “while Moses drew
near to the dark cloud where God was.“ EX 20:21 .
And I hope that you will realize today that the apophatic maneuvre is not just a
mystification and introversion of the great trope of liberation; but that in ways still to be
seen-- the needs of the crowd and deep darkness of the cloud have not ceased to fold
into each other—at least in the theological perspective of a ecoincidentia oppositorum
that I came to call apophatic entanglement.
Cusa’s negative theology of the coincidence of opposites in 1440 had of course
included the coinciding of speech and the unspeakable, affirmation and its dependence,
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if it is not to be idolatry, on negation. It led him later to his visio dei—a meditation on an
icon, and so God as perspective, on our seeing God seeing us seeing, seeing all creatures
who are seeing the seeing itself, so that “the being of a creature is equally your seeing
and your being seen”. This observor is not independent of the observed: this divinity is
therefore moving as we move, not as an unmoved mover-- but moved by our
movements, like the eye of an icon. A radical perspectivalism in which if you look at
God with a loving face you find yourself looked upon with love; that is a human gaze;
the eagle finds an eagle’s face agzing back at it, the lion a lion’s. So here you sense the
radicality, entangled in the new painterly art of perspective. And yet unlike Renaissance
humanism, Cusa as we will see later, is not just casually nonanthropocentric. In his
perspectivalism he takes up an old etyology of theos as the root of theoria, to observe, to
see: God then is not here object seen or subject seeing but the very seeeing; the
perspective. So we might say: as theologians we God is not the object of our vision but
the perspective by which we view our world. This God-perspective then yields further,
for Cusa, a God who as at once moved and moving is not merely creating but created.
And here the anticipation of Whitehead a half millennium later had startled me,
as process theologians had not yet perceived it: for Whitehead “it is as true to say that
God creates the world as that the world creates God.“ …Of course never from nothing:
process theology presumes no creatio ex nihilo, but returns to the biblical creation,
which is from the chaos, the oceanic deep, the tehom. I had written Face of the Deep
obsessing upon the alternative of a creatio ex profundis:. For in the perspectival
relationalism God’s eternity coincides with God’s becomingness, God’s transcendence
coincides with God’s immanent entanglement in all the interdepenent becomings of the
world. Of course process theology is not known for its negative theology-it makes strong
new affirmations. But note that Whitehead does not claim to be uttering the truth about
God—as true to say that…. And similarly, but in an incomparable context, Cusa does not
say that God is moved, is created; but does say that God can as truly be said to be
creatable as created, to be moved as to be moving. But he always rigorously unsays such
saying, for God remains knowably only in our unknowing. This is the docta ignorantia.
“So in all faces the face of faces is seen veiled and in enigma.” And that face
appears only where there is no notion of a face. Where is this? “This cloud,, mist,
darkness or ignorance into which whoever seeks your face enters when one leaps
beyond every knowledge and concept…”
“And while one is in that darkness, which is a cloud, if one then knows one is in
a cloud, one knows one has come near the face of the sun. For that cloud in one’s eye
originates from the exceeding brightness of the light of the sun.” Thus the cloud
perspective continues his coincidentia oppositorum.
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It arises for him in facing contradictory tensions in our own thinking—points of
high pressure that cannot be resolved by simply rejecting one term or its opposite: like
the orthodox unmoved mover, creator, pure act, -- and the impossibly moved, creatable,
receptivity of what he will close to his death call posse ipsum, pure possibility. Nicholas
of Cusa did not at any point perform a pious acceptance of mystery—which is after
usually a way of mystifying orthodox contradictions; he invites a risky entrance into the
roiling darkness, a courage of transgressive complexification. Only so might a luminous
insight break through, might a third place spring momentarily open. “Hence, I
experience how necessary it is for me to enter into the cloud and to admit the coincidence
of opposites, above all capacity for reason, and to seek there the truth where
impossibility confronts me.”[99] So clearly I got socked into this cloud of the impossible. In
its perspectival relationalism it echoed the process theology that already made great
sense to me.
In Cusa’s period the only powerful positivism was still that of christian
orthodoxy. The negative theological strategy did not challenge unquestionable truths
about God with atheism, nihilism or an indifferent agnosticism but rather with with a
rigorously theological agnosis—the docta ignorantia.
Over half a millennium later, theology is certainly still haunted by Christian
positivisms, moralist, doctrinal and fundamentalist. But the more serious positivism that
confronts us is of the secularist variety, which has known for a century or so—that there
is positively no God. Such secularism presumes that faith means certainty, that is why
people want it ( Der Spiegel: Eine Gewissheit vermitteln, die keiner Begrunding bedarf.”—on
the dangerous return of religion.) So the positivisms mirror each other, with fereocious
certainty. And on both sides they clumsily cling to the connection to Christianity of the
vulgar new right wing secular face of US power.
While I am on magazines: old Tom Altizer has me on his email list and
forwarded the Time Magazine anniversary article from [not half a millennium but] half
a century ago April 8 1966: Is God Dead? It brought back memories of me bumping into
this at the drugstore at 13….Is God dead? the question at once shocked and shaped me .
And it feels as old to me as many friends’ evangelical youth feels to them. As a real
question it emits the brilliant darkness. As a rhetorical question --it energizes secular
positivism and its own neon certainties.
So I hope that the Cloud of the Impossible offers a contemplative space
hospitable to thinkers in doubt about what is called God and God’s existence--and to
thinkers in doubt about God’s death or inexistence ….It means to host a theology in
which uncertainty is not overcome but becomes capability!
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The negative capability….when we are “capable of being in uncertainty, mystery doubt,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats in DW The Step Back
… This apophatic strategy is an ancient and I hope refreshing step back—healing
perhaps of the irritability that circulates within our own uncertainties theological and
secular…
And so my book received with gratitude the gift of Derrida’s curiosity about
negative theology, which became less irritable as time went by // In the earlier How to
Avoid Speaking he exposes the implication of negative theology in the classical
essentialism that it might be thought—with its not-being, not-one—to have itself
exceeded. He does not congratulate the tradition for its radicality , in its movement
beyond essentialism, hyperousia. Instead he mistranslates “beyond essence” as “hyperessentialism.” The language used to move beyond being is reduced to an inflation of being.
One must ask if the essentialization is being performed less by the ancient text than by
the Derridean reading. And yet even as he denies deconstructive street cred to those
mystics he cannot let them go. Surely he can only here be mimicking, at once teasing and
honoring, Dionysius’ “not some kind of Being, No!”
/
/ .. in Sauf le Nom he yields to admiration for the entire lineage. He had been
musing on the Pseudo-Dionysian legacy, and also on an Augustinian sense of confession
beforehand, as it streams toward the protagonist of the essay, the Baroque Silesius. "The
most impossible is possible.” Thus Silesius. Derrida now concedes in negative theology
something "strangely familiar to the experience of what is called deconstruction… the
very experience of the (impossible) possibility of the impossible . . ."1 When he translates
it “hyperimpossibility” (as a compliment) he can only be mimicking his earlier
accusation of hyperessentialism. The hyper-impossible is the “more than impossible,
possible because more impossible than the impossible.”2 But now Derrida gets the
radicality of this tradition: “whence the courage and the dissidence, potential or actual,
of these masters (think of Eckhart), whence the persecution they suffered at times,
whence their passion, whence this scent of heresy, these trials, this subversive
marginality of the apophatic current in the history of theology and of the Church."3 [can
shorten the foregoing]. And then late, published posthumously, Derrida fleetingly
claims Cusa’s posse ipsum: , he calls upon “a theological vein, in the work of Bohme,
Derrida, Sauf le nom, 43. KN: [chk …] "Die uberunmoglichste ist moglich.” [43f]
Need to add? So would the hyperousia, not signify also more than being, not-being
because more being than Being?
3Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 71
1
2
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Bruno, Nicholas of Cusa, that defines God not as being... but as “perhaps.” 4 posse
ipsum, Really it is Cusa, from whom Bruno gets it. I was surprised, accustomed to
Derrida ignoring this particular vein (as too metaphysical).5 “According to a potentiality
or a dynamis, a posse they call it—the word is theirs—a posse that no longer depends on
the metaphysical definition of the possible.”6
Posse ipsum, “possibility itself,” or just—may be-- was Cusa’s final favorite name
for God. It appears as the possibility which is the ability—realized, actualized, by the
creature: “What child or youth does not know Posse Itself, since each says one can eat, one
can run, or one can speak?”7 God does not intervene to act for us—names that which
makes actualization, action, possible. Affirmatively speaking. And negatively: think then
again of the negative capability, a capax, an empowerment of possibility possible only in
facing the impossible—entering into its cloud.
Living with the impossibility of theology itself: in most contexts—academic and
cultural-- outside of the church.-- I have come to treasure the strategic transdisciplinarity
of the apophatic maneuvre for secular and indeed postsecular environments.Jack
Caputo and Richard Kearney are friends in this cloudy conversation And at a deeper
level, its meditation on the impossible keeps theology itself possible for me. It keeps me
speaking into the unspeakable— theological and inviting; or political, ecological and
unbearable.
So then the point of theology is not just theology, any more than the point of God
is just God: the Godperspective opens into everything else: into all that lives and moves
and has its becoming in God, panentheos..so that, we once learned, God might be all
in…So then how does the revivification of the cloud actually serve—the crowding
world?
My cloud exercise picked up upon two constitutive western trajectories,
involving two very different crowds: one terribly human; the other also vatly
nonhuman.
The first tracked a thousand year crusade, beginning in 1094 with Pope Urban II.
Upon the consent of the gathered multitude to work for peace in the "provinces" of what
would become Europe, the Pope calls them to put that truce to work against the Turks
Jacques Derrida, “Deconstructions: The Im-possible,” in French Theory in America, eds.
Sylvere Lotringer and Sande Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2001), 31. The Late Derrida [ perhaps
encouraged by Richard Kearney’s Cusan God Who May Be, his own late “more than impossible.” ]
5 despite surely knowing Cusa through his teacher Condillac, who wrote a book on him,
6“… , a posse that is ‘before’ being and that no longer is what a dominant tradition in
philosophy calls the possible .” [31fta] Or to be precise, we will insist, on the classical metaphysics.
That subversive “vein” is no less “metaphysical.”
7 Cusa, 295.
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and Arabs: “Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now
fight in a proper way against the barbarians.”8 The Pope's speech may count as the
prototype of unity through enmity..
The unifying medieval islamophobia of our civilization…might seem to have
disappeared, to have lost relevance. Only to burst out again in time for the new
millennium…declaration of a new crusade…
I needn’t have worried that my Crusade, Capital and Cosmopolis would soon lose
relevance.. the crowds of immigrants roll steadily in from their ravaged nations,
attempting exodus; they are met increasingly, as with our new and unconstitutional
Muslim Ban, as invading Muslim hoarde. Of course its racialization of the other is not
restricted to Muslims.
and so Hannah Arendt’s warning Seeds of a Fascist International”------- “In this
enterprise, [far more dangerous than a mere underground movement of purely German
character,] fascism will find highly useful the racist ideology which in the past was
developed only by National Socialism. It is already becoming obvious that colonial
problems will remain unsolved, and that, as a result, the conflicts between white and
colored peoples, i.e., the so-called racial conflicts, will become even more acute.
Furthermore, competition between the imperialistic nations will remain a feature of the
international scene. In this context the fascists, who even in their German version never
identified the master race with any nationality but spoke of "Aryans" generally, could
easily make them- selves the protagonists of a unified White Supremacy strategy[
capable of out-bidding any group not unconditionally advocating equal rights for all
peoples. ] Eerily, this is written already in 1945 ..
……….
She could not have predicted the renewal of the old religious antagonism as key
to this white supremacism. A bit of ancestral aid, then, from the midway point…when
Cusa in 1453 could be expected to reinforce the new wave of not unjustified
islamophobia of his time…The Ottomans had just conquered Constantinople and
terminated Byzantium.—which he had personally visited on a great ecumenical mission.
And instead he wrote within 3 months De Pace Fides: to cut to the cloudy quick:
“Therefore it is you, the giver of life and being, who seem to be sought in the different
rite by different ways and are named with different names, because as you are you
remain unknown and ineffable to all.” [250]
Cited in Medieval Worlds: A Sourcebook, eds. Roberta Anderson and Dominic Aidan
Bellenger (New York: Routledge, 2003), 90.
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……….So there you hear an apophatic strategy for a quite unprecedented religious
pluralism…anticipating what today in comparative theology appears as a relational
pluralism—an entanglement of our differences.
The other more concretely relevant chapter is called the Broken Touch.
Again we head to the Near East; but the crowds begin with an older crowd of
immigrants—the scary enemies of Pergamon, the Greek settlement in Turkey…fierce
tribal barbarians with blonde dreadlocks—the Galatians…
migrants from northern europe…defeat celebrated in the Altar of Pergamon…Berlin
visit..
They are represented in terms of the old myth of the defeat by the Olympians of
the “children of Gaia.”
Shocked….what, the enmity of our civilization against the earth and the earth-identified
tribes begins--so early!
The problem of religious multiplicity that feeds Islamophobia has been powerfully
linked in this century by Jurgen Moltmann to an ecologially viable future: “The Gaia
Theory ends the anthropocentrism of the modern world and opens the way to a
democratic incorporation of the human species in the whole life [Gesamtleben] of the
earth system.“
… if that human world lives and survives only within the “nature of the earth,” he
argues, then “Gaia becomes the universal space for the world religions.”9 He has long tied
theology to ecosocial justice. But he now pronounces the Gaia hypothesis the beginning
of the “democratic incorporation of the human species in the whole life of the earth
system.”
Fortunately for the hypothesis of an apophatically entangled planet, Moltmann
had drawn upon the Gaia hypothesis in an earlier essay on Giordano Bruno. He lifts up
Bruno’s vision of an earth organically integrated within an infinite cosmos. He insists
that Bruno’s amplification of Cusa’s mystical cosmology, routinely dismissed as
pantheism, be respectfully reread as panentheism, not for the sake of process theology
but of an environmentally jeopardized but still democratically inviting Gaia. Moltmann
elaborates: “The so-called great world religions will only prove themselves to be ‘world
religions,’ when they become earth religions and understand humanity as an integrated
part of the planet earth.”10
Another Bruno, Latour, also has, with trepidation embraced the Gaia hypothesis
in his Giffords: “Obviously, at such a juncture, what would be needed is a multiplicity of
9
Moltmann 26
Moltmann, 27.
10
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engagements and a proliferation of manners to behave as humans on Earth. This would
be the only way to cope with what the multiple loops traced by the instruments of
science reveal of the narrative complexity and entanglement of Gaia.”11
I stress always, with Cusa and Deleuze, that the multiplicity unfolds its pli,
fold—its members engage their others as already constituent of themselves. Not one
with them but entangled. Religious multiplicity in its intersections with human diversity
is itself always already multiplied incalculably by the nonhumans who compose and
surround us…So indeed what is needed is an intensification of local planetary
engagements. Theologians have some practice at such impossibly broad and locally
embodied narratives. Scientists do as well. So then in what is less of a nonsequitur than I
would wish: let me claim that in the calculably apocalyptic time of climate change the
failure of science and religion to collaborate writes a narrative of doom.
A. N. Whitehead had realized in the 20’s, without predicting global warming,
that our civilization’s science/ religion, fact/value, matter/spirit dualism was not long
survivable. A few theologians heeded the warning; process theology has been indelibly
ecological; John Cobb wrote Is It Too Late? in 1969. Whitehead had been inspired by the
emergence of quantum physics to write his new cosmology of events—in which every
individual, human and otherwise, is a becoming occasion of interrelation. Created and
creating. Even the quantum. Even God. God cannot fix our irresponsibility for us; that is
up to us. All things possible in God? Yes, but possibilities only get actualized through
creaturely agency. Which is always a multiply entangled agency. Entanglement here has
a deep quantum history; Cloud of the Impossible has a chapter on the metaphor of
quantum entanglement and its spooky action at a distance—the quantum
superpositionality lends empirical glimpses of the radical interconnectivity of the
universe. It is what Whitehead could almost see when he named as civilizational habit
the “fallacy of simple location.”
…
Cusa I argued anticipated metaphysically the spooky physical immediacy of
cosmic interlinkage. He is as far as I can tell the first Christian to theorize the contraction
of the boundless macrocosm within each bounded microcosm: “each is in each and all
are in all.” And therefore God is in all and all in God. This Renaissance panentheism is
offered as a rigorous deployment of the docta ignorantia. To enacapsulate how NOT
antiscientific is this apophasis, consider that the mindful ignorance had also led him to
infer a century before Copernicus, who read him, that no body, including the earth, is
fixed at the center of the universe, because said universe lacks a circumference, being
infinite.) For example.
11
Latour, Gifford Lectures. Not yet published.
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In other words the alternative to the mindful ignorance is of course not
knowledge but a willful ignorance presented as certainty and currently parading as
“alternative facts.”
Cusa theorized the vast multitude of differences that constitute the earth as a
cosmic body, as entangled within the incomprehensible, illimited vastness of the
universe itself—the theocosmic way not taken by modernity. Whitehead offered a
dynamic cosmology of becoming as an alternative to the reductive schizophrenia of
modernity. (Not as alternative to facts. )
=====
If God is possibility itself—ever calling for materialization--what is posse now?
Now: as converging populisms feed off the deep islamophobia, pulling in right wing
masculinist autocracies fired up by toxic extractionist economies. The ncessary climate
change denialism is supported relentlessly by the US religious right, with its controlling
omnipotence, its now full Schittian political theology of sovereign exceptionalism. The
children of Gaia are—without exception, however they vote or do not vote-- in trouble.
Where the religion infinite growth and selective anti-science does not hold sway,
a fearful uncertainty as to a viable earth future is mounting rapidly; and with it the
danger of paralysis in response. I recognize cobbling this talk together that my main
theological tropes over 2 decades all address this fear: the counter apocalypse, the face of
the deep, the cloud of the impossible. These books meditate respectively on the omega,
the alpha and their nebulous nonlinear entanglement. They serve as just one set of tools
that may help in just some christian tinged cntexts to engage whatever chaos we face as
expressive of the ongoing creation itself –as the Joycian/Deleuzian chaosmos--and so as
graced with some creative potentiality—; or, in the case of the apocalypse, read in its
prophetic legacy, in an exodus from fundamentalist versions, there occurs catastrophe
but no end of the world—apokalypsis signifies disclosure not closure; and as I have been
sharing, of course, the unspeakably dreadful impossible may yield to the possibility
hidden within the darkly luminous cloud….
The mystical cloud offers for those who will enter it the contemplative space of a
theologically entangled hospitality. Its indeterminacy may precipitate uncertainty as
active possibility. If we seek a new alliance for the for the barely speakable hope of a new
planetary conviviality, it is as an opening into a more densely crowded entanglement
than any philoophical deconstruction or theological construction can quite fully think.
Each chiasmus of our illumining thought shades into its darkness, and brightens
out again as chaosmos. If it is a mindful nonknowing, a docta ignorantia, it might in the
process—as with Derrida’s Sauf le Nom-- save us from the idolatrous certainty of any
name of God and so save the name of God . It holds a space open for theology—but only
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there where theology knows its own precarity. What Philips Clayton called the possible
impossibility of theology lets us mind the specific uncertainty of any relation--when it
matters. When it is shaping the materiality of our shared world. We may then attend
knowingly to the nonknowing into which, at each crisis of relation, our nonseparable
difference plunges us. The truth we then test, the troth we pledge, plies a mindfulness of
our interdependence and at the same time a suffering patience, sometimes even a
pleasure, in its enigmatic excess. I am guessing that right there, in that affect, that being
moved, cracks open some possibility, however minor, that had appeared as the
impossible. Then is activated the ability—posse ipsum—and therefore the response-ability
to transmute a tangled indeterminacy into a vibrant network. Chaos into chaosmos:
unsnarled, but no less entangled.
But the crowding of the planet and the growing impossibility for growing
populations of a convivial co-existence is not a vague metaphor to be mystically
aneasthetized of aestheticized . The crowding now exhibits one great metastasis of the
willful ignorance. For the contemplative practice of the possible impossibilities that
confront us now : is there time? Is there space?
Only perhaps in what the Carribean postcolonial theorist Eduord Glissant
suggested, meditating on dark waters of the middle passage, “in an unknown that does
not terrify us.”12 Terror can now be used to trump democracy everywhere; theology has
often been and can now be an amorously, affectively conspiratorial alternative. With
Donovan it might bring on our animality, our shared terrestrial affectivity, to
unprecedented effect.
[So the practice of an apophatic entanglement begins again. ]
II So it may come as some relief to zoom in more closely on entanglement itself. After all,
this takes us to the innocent little quantum. …in an infinite or infinitesimal crowd,
where each where each atom is as Paul Davies puts it an indistinct cloud…
The EPR experiments that Bell had set out to verify presumed that an object over
there does not care about what you do to another object over here.
Need in text?Thus the Carribean Edouard Glissant, transmuting the ocean of the
middle passage into an im-possibility, opens his “poetics of relation.” The point is always and
only to unfold an actuated ecology, with hospice when necessary, justice on demand, and grace
no matter what.
12
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…the experiments lead us to conclude that an object over there does care about what
you do to another object over here. —BRIAN GREENE
The stone’s 'quantum state' is 'entangled' (this is the technical word) with the
state of the whole Universe. —BERNARD D’ESPAGNAT
…With our physically efficacious minds now integrated into the unfolding of
uncharted and yet-to-be-plumbed potentialities of an intricately interconnected whole,
the responsibility that accompanies the power to decide things on the basis of
one's own thoughts ideas, and judgments is laid upon us.—HENRY STAPP
The vital act is the act of participation. ‘Participator’ is the incontrovertible new
concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term ‘observor’ of
classical theory, the one stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches
what goes on without taking part. It can’t be done, quantum mechanics says.1—
JOHN WHEELER
We are of the universe--there is no inside, no outside. There is only intra-acting
within and as part of the world in its becoming…. If we hold on to the belief that
the world is made of individual entities, it is hard to see how even our best, most
well-intentioned calculations for right action an avoid tearing holes in the
delicate tissue structure of entanglements that the lifeblood of the world runs
through.—KAREN BARAD
Karen Barad and entanglement: requiring a relational ontology.
Meaning we do not preexist our relations…[And you can google how she has been
queering nature itself recently.]
…Where I had always already gone. A theology pummelled and kneaded through an
ontology of constitutive relations. Ontology at this pitch of participatory materialization
is: “not a fusty matter for the bookish” [L 115]….Theology is ready to provide: in the
nexus of process/feminist and ecological theologies…constitutive not extrinsic relations.
We participate in our worlds. In eachother. We are all tangled up.
…..///
I explored in Cloud how quantum entanglement unveils the unspeakable immensity of
our interconnectedness—and shows it in the equally unfathomable teensiness of the
electron. And now a leading physics theorist and voice of the so called new materialism
writesthis: “even the smallest bits of matter, electrons – infinitesimal point particles with no
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dimensions, no structure – are haunted by, indeed, constituted by, the indeterminate wanderings
of an infinity of possible configurings of …. Entire worlds inside each point; each specifically
configured. Finitude is shot through with infinity…”-- That is Karen Barad, who in her
ontological relationalism had already queered the quantum void. Now, she has outed
herself theologically. She reads Benjamin with the help of Butler, and highlights the
Kabbalistic mysticism that influenced his notion of the messianic now-time. Against the
background of her monumental work on quantum entanglement, Meeting the Universe
Halfway, she draws this inference:
” The messianic – the flashing up of the infinite, an infinity of other times within this time – is
written into the very structure of matter-time-being itself. 63”
Such a relational ontology undermines not just human but organic,
exceptionalism. She too calls upon Benjamin’s ‘weak messianism.’ In the weakest, in the
least, in the shortest of times and spaces, is written this infinity. But in Benjamin also
weakness in its contraction can blast out, in a great burst or birth, like a supernova. To
link the political to the material is to underscore the vulnerability, the precarity, of this
planetary moment. If , Barad continues “… matter has this messianic structure written
into its finitude, no matter how small a piece, this is surely true of all material beings, each
of which is an enormous entangled multitude.“ 68
A political theology of the earth, forged from a theology of entangled difference,
calls upon that very multitude for solidarity—which is to say, for our self-organization
across critical difference. Now listen to what Barad wrote for Drew’s forthcoming
Entangled Worlds volume-- half a year before the election; the physicist turned theorist
now turns prophet:
And perhaps it is this [eternal] link among all living beings, all beings in their
aliveness, this shared transience, and the possibilities for renewal that follow
downfall, that is needed in confronting the rise of fascism in its connections with
late-capitalism, the normativity of state-sanctioned violence against the
oppressed, and the ongoing devastation of the planet and all its inhabitants.
Facing the im/possibilities of living on a damaged planet, where it is impossible
to tease apart political, economic, racist, colonialist, and natural sources of
homelessness (otherwise called “the problem of refugees”), will require multiple
forms of collective praxis willing to risk interrupting the “flow of progress” – not
by bombing the other but by blasting open the continuum of history.
That opening is kin to the original meaning of apokalypsis, not closure but dis/closure,
not terminal catastrophe but collective catalyst.
Westar Spring 2017
Keller, Cloud of the Impossible
And everybody here is a a cloud
And everybody here will evaporate
Cause you came up from the ground…
And everybody here is a crowd
We all walk around with a million faces
Somebody turn the lights out
There is so much more to see
In the darkest places (Cloud Cult)
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Westar Spring 2017
Keller, Cloud of the Impossible
"To The Great Unknown"
Called your name, and you formed out of the emptiness
Called your name, and I swear this time I’ll be my best.
Called your name, and I felt home sweet home.
May you find grace when overtaken by the tempest.
May you find humor in the cynic and the pessimist.
May you find faith in the Great Unknown.
Lay it all down… in a calm, safe space.
And if the dream doesn’t come… ya just wait
We were made to walk through fire in our dance shoes
We were made to sail upon the meteors.
We were made to love the heck out of our bones.
God gave us words, they were “I love you, please, and thank you”.
God gave us thirst, and it’s a hunger for the universe.
Oh, no, no, no. I’ll never let you go.
Sometimes this life’s a lonely road, but you gotta find it on your own.
So build a happy ship, cuz this livin’ is a trip.
You gotta sing the kind of song that you like singing
...to the Great Unknown.
God gave you brains, now don’t go and drown in your own thinkings.
God gave you hands so you could pick up your broken pieces.
God gave you feet so you can find your own way home.
Let’s run away, just know your troubles tend to follow.
Pack your bags, just know that everything here’s borrowed.
The pathmaker is a trickster, so make your own damn road.
Oh, no, no, no. You never were alone.
Sometimes this life’s a lonely road, but you gotta find it on your own.
So build a happy ship, cuz this livin’ is a trip.
You gotta sing the kind of song that you like singing
...to the Great Unknown.
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