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Specters of God
An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination
Published by: Indiana University Press
416 Pages
- eBook
- 9780253063038
- Published: October 2022
$37.99
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In Specters of God, John D. Caputo returns to the original impulse of his work, the "mystical element" in things, here under the name of an "anxious apophatics," as distinct from an "edifying apophatics" anchored in unity with God. In dialogue with Schelling, a new turn for him and the lynchpin of this argument, Caputo addresses the nocturnal powers in being, the specters that haunt our being and bring us up short. The result is an erudite and insightful analysis—in his usual lively and masterful style—of several key "spectral" figures from medieval angelology and Eckhart's Gottheit, through Luther's deus absconditus and Schelling's "Satanology," to the spectralization and virtualization of the world in the "posthuman" age. Arguing that the name of God is not the master name of a super-being who is going to save us but a placeholder for sources deep in our apophatic imaginary, he asks, Has "God" become a (holy) ghost of the past? A passing spectral effect of the ancient harmonies of the spheres? Does radical thinking culminate in a cosmopoetics beyond theism and its theology, in a doxology to the transient glory of the world, whatever it was in the beginning, however eerie its end, world without why?
Acknowledgments
Preface: The Apophatic Imagination
Introduction: Specters of God
1. Theopoetics: A Phenomenological Genesis
Part One: The Ontotheological Imaginary
2. From an Edifying to Anxious Apophatics: Aquinas, Eckhart and Luther
3. Hegel at the Foot of the Cross: Understanding the Death of God
4. Schelling and the Metaphysics of Evil
5. The Philosophical Meaning of Satan
6. Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing at All? Schelling and the End of Idealism
7. Schelling's Either/Or
8. Hegel and Schelling: The Critique and the Scarecrow
Part Two: The Hauntological Imaginary
9. Theism Transcended: The Post-Theism of Paul Tillich
10. Violence and the Unconditional: The Politics of the Apophatic
11. Haunting Tillich: Spectralizing the Ground of Being
12. The Devil is in the Dissemination
Part Three: The Posthuman Imaginary
13. Angelology—Posthuman Style: Would You Rather Be a Cyborg, a Posthuman or an Angel?
14. Ruinology: Why Will There Be Nothing at All, Rather than Something?
15. Axiology: A Mortal God, A World without Why
Conclusion: The Name (of) "God"
Notes
John D. Caputo is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University. His many books include The Weakness of God, The Insistence of God, and Cross and Cosmos.
"Caputo's major and tremulous work of theopoetics is inspired yet haunted by the name "God," a "focus imaginarius of the apophatic imaginary." While charting with his customary lucidity a vast course through thinkers like Aquinas, Luther, Meister Eckhart, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Derrida, Caputo also devotes considerable attention to Schelling, the apophatic alter ego of Hegel. In so doing, Schelling returns from exile and contributes powerful resources to Caputo's unsettling of the theological imaginary."
~Jason M. Wirth, Seattle University, and author of Schelling's Practice of the Wild
"Spooky, how Jack Caputo twists beyond theism and atheism into yet another adventure—impossibly lucid, luminous and ever darkly fun—into the abyss of unknowing. He does not light the way but writes it, drawing us into its glowing shadows, its apophatic philosophy, politics and practice. If there is no way out of this spectral "God", this "world without why," we may thank Specters of God for such haunting hospitality."
~Catherine Keller, George T Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology, Drew University Theological School. Author of Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement
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