Abstract
The epigraphs above, taken from the work of three of the most influential contemporary philosophers and cultural critics, share a preoccupation with the void or empty place as a foundational given of any ontology. Throughout each theorist’s work the constitutive void appears under different names and conceptual frameworks. For Žižek, it is often used interchangeably with the Lacanian real as well as the elusive objet a; for Agamben it is intrinsic to the sovereign exception or homo sacer; for Badiou it derives from the principles of naive and axiomatic set theory, in which the null or empty set founds any set theoretic multiple. It is the project of this book to determine to what extent this contemporary preoccupation with ontological voids, empty sets, and anomic spaces can help illuminate the religious aspects of the work of some key seventeenth-century religious writers, including John Donne, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and Thomas Traherne.
If then, the problem of traditional (premodern) art was how to fill in the sublime Void of the Thing (pure Place) with an adequately beautiful object—how to succeed in elevating an ordinary object to the dignity of a Thing—the problem of modern art is, in a way, the opposite (and much more desperate) one: one can no longer count on the Void of the (Sacred) Place being there, offering itself to be occupied by human artefacts, so the task is to sustain the Place as such, to make sure that this Place itself will “take place”—in other words, the problem is no longer that of horror vacui, of filling in the Void, but rather, that of creating the Void in the first place. 1
—Slavoj Žižek
The aim of this investigation—in the urgency of the state of exception “in which we live”—was to bring to light the fiction that governs this arcanum imperii [secret of power] par excellence of our time. What the “ark” of power contains at its center is the state of exception—but this is essentially an empty space, in which a human action with no relation to law stands before a norm with no relation to life. 2
—Giorgio Agamben
Philosophy and psychoanalysis elaborate the same question. What is the thinkable relationship between truth and the void? The crux of the problem is the localization of the void. Philosophy and psychoanalysis agree that truth is separation; that the real is irreducible or, as Lacan says, unsymbolizable; that truth is different to knowledge, and that truth thus only occurs under condition of the void.3
— Alain Badiou
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Notes
Slavoj Zižek, The Fragile Absolute, or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?(London: Verso, 2000), 26–27.
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 86.
Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2004), 86.
Zižek draws on Lacan’s theory of sublimation, according to which an object elevated to the dignity of das Ding is rendered sublime: “What the objects, in their given positivity, are masking is not some other, more substantial order of objects, but simply the void, the emptiness, of what they are filling out. We must remember that there is nothing intrinsically sublime in a sublime object—according to Lacan, a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object, which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place of what he calls das Ding, the impossible-real object of desire.” Ž ižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 194. The most comprehensive comparison of Ž ižek’s use of the concept of the sublime with the Kantian sublime aesthetic can be found in George Hartley, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), esp. chs. 1 and 2.
R. V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan (London: D. S. Brewer, 2000). This is the most comprehensive reassessment of seventeenthcentury Protestant poetics. For an earlier re-evaluation of the Protestant consensus, see Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 4. For a good summary and reassessment of Strier’s important work, especially in relation to Donne’s poetry, see Ronald Corthell, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 28–29.
On early modern accounts of the nature of void space, see Edward Grant, Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Slavoj Zižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2003), 78.
Eric L. Santner, The Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 47.
Ibid., 37.
Ibid., 82.
Ibid., 27.
Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 15.
Ibid., 22–23.
Cited in Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge: Massachusets Institute of Technology Press, 2003), 47–48.
Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 8. For more on Lacan’s notion of jouissance, see Jacques Lacan, On Jouissance, in On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), passim chapter 1. See also Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan (New York: Routledge Press, 2001), 159–60.
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2002), 25.
Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 102.
Ibid., 118.
Ibid., 95. It is precisely on the ontological status of void space that Badiou departs from Lacan, who has influenced Badiou’s metaphysics to a certain extent. For Badiou, the void is an ontological first principle, the very ground of being. Lacan, on Badiou’s interpretation, would not accept any association between void space and being qua being: “For Lacan… the void is not on the side of being. This, I think, is a crucial point of conflict. Let us say that philosophy localizes the void as condition of truth on the side of being qua being, while psychoanalysis localizes the void in the Subject, for the Subject is what disappears in the gap between two signifiers…. For Lacan, if the void is on the side of being, this means that thought is also on the side of being, because thought is precisely the exercise of separation.” Badiou, Infinite Thought, 87. For more on Badiou’s critique of Lacan, especially regarding theories of subjectivity, see Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 431–35.
The most developed Lacanian account of Freud’s myth of the primal horde can be found in Slavoj Ž ižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), passim chapter 6.
See Suzanne Barnard, “Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other Jouissance,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). Cited in Santner, On Creaturely Life, 198.
See Kenneth Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, eds. Slavoj Ž ižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 57.
See Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), passim chapter 5.
See Slavoj Ž ižek, The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000), passim chapter 6. 39. See Gary Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005).
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 29.
See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1992), 93–146. For Laclau’s more recent reflections on the relationship between master signifiers and hegemony, see Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), passim chapter 3; and Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, eds. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Ž ižek (London: Verso, 2000), 182–212.
Carl Schmitt directly links the advent of the sovereign exception to sixteenth-century politics, especially the writings of Jean Bodin. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), passim chapter 5.
In an important essay on Schmitt’s decisionism and early modern politics, Victoria Kahn argues that Schmitt’s account of political exceptionalism overlooks instances in which the sovereign might actually “fake” states of emergency. Since this seems to have been the case under Jacobean and Caroline politics—Charles’ false claim, for example, that pirates were threatening the British coastline—Kahn concludes that Schmitt’s theory inadequately explains seventeenth-century examples of the sovereign exception. In the spirit of Ž ižek’s critique of ideologies, I would argue instead that to “fake” an exception only reinforces the numinous aspect of the sovereign’s power, thereby enhancing the “surplus animation” that it inspires in subjects. See Victoria Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision,” in Representations 83:1 (2003), 67–96, esp. 70.
For an excellent survey of the distinction between absolute and ordained power, see William J. Courtenay, Capacity and Volition: A History of the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power (Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina, 1990).
Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 162.
Cited in J. K. Mozley, The Impassibility of God: A Survey of Christian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 61.
Ibid., 122.
Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (San Francisco: Harper Collins Press, 1991), 30.
Ibid., 32.
See Graham Ward, “Suffering and Incarnation,” in Suffering Religion, eds. Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson (London: Routledge Press, 2002), 171. On divine pathos in early modern Cabbalistic writings, see in the same volume, Elliot R. Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Mythology,” 101–62.
On divine pathos, see also A. J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
The best recent assessment of negative theology in relation to philosophy can be found in Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), esp. 119–57, which provides a comprehensive gloss on Angelus Silesius’s Cherubimic Wanderer.
Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutot, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, and Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 68.
For more on Derrida and negative theology, see John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., God, The Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); and Graham Ward, “Deconstructive Theology,” in the Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 76–91. For an earlier poststructuralist study of religion, see Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 46–47.
Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 135.
Ibid., 136.
Ibid., 143.
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Cefalu, P. (2007). Introduction. In: English Renaissance Literature and Contemporary Theory:. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607491_1
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