For some time, I’ve felt that negativity is a resource for political theology, one that’s often overlooked. Since complacency exerts a gravitational force in politics and religion, my work has sought to develop techniques to disrupt this dynamic. Novelty arrives with a jolt, disrupting the world as we knew it. This experience can be painful, but it also carries a negativity that we need. Living into the future means letting go of what came before.
Revisiting this idea now, I am conscious that the disruption we face is extreme. I recently returned the United States after living ten years in Australia. Although I knew things were bleak, I am astonished by the degree to which American public life has degraded. Wherever it flickers, democracy is fragile and flawed, but here it faces a frontal attack. In the context of compounding crises – political, economic, ecological, etc. – we need to find ways to harness the power of possibility and disruption.
This is why my first book focused on hope. In my view, any hope worth keeping has to reckon with critics who worry that hope pacifies political agency by promising future satisfaction. In response, I argue that hope, properly understood, does not expect a good result. On the contrary, it is a discipline that can be deeply pessimistic. Since hope is necessarily uncertain, it names our capacity to persist without guarantees.
To counter the triumphalism of some ideologues, religious and otherwise, my understanding of hope draws on two thinkers who are famously negative: the medieval theologian, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the deconstructive philosopher Jacques Derrida. Although these two thinkers lived at different times and held different commitments, they both exhibit a negativity that opens the future. In my reading, both of them juxtapose radical critique with florid affirmation.
Dionysius describes this dynamic with a schematic clarity. In the West, they are best known for the argument that every attempt to talk about God must be subject to unsaying (“apophasis” in Greek). Although some assume that mystical silence is solitary and spiritual, Dionysius is a preeminently political thinker. They invented the term hierarchy – Greek for “holy order” or “sacred power” – and the majority of their corpus is taken up by two works on the topic. The central challenge for interpreters of Dionysius is to account for these two poles, apophatic negativity and hierarchical politics.
In contrast to most interpreters, I interpret this tension diachronically. Whereas these two sides of Dionysius’s thought might seem logically incoherent, the contradiction disappears once they are situated in the temporal perspective of an unfolding life. In my reading, Dionysian apophasis is an active practice rather than a static structure. Interpreted in this way, apophasis juxtaposes affirmation and negation in order to keep both in motion. Dionysius does not insist on simple silence, nor do they exempt Christian practice from critique. On the contrary, Dionysius insists that Christians must proliferate speech about God in a provisional mode, affirming their faith through an uncertain hope.
Like Dionysius, Derrida is widely misunderstood, but I find the same tension present in his work. Since both authors hold affirmation and negation in tension, this suggests that an atheist Jew and a medieval monk share a hope that is identical in kind, though not in content. I think this can help us to better understand atheism, religion, and the debate that binds them together. However, my main interest is political. In my reading, Dionysius and Derrida model a negative political theology that is resilient precisely because it embraces negativity.
In the popular imagination, religion tends to oscillate between quietism and theocracy. Where some communities withdraw from the world to focus on spiritual concerns, others subject the public sphere to divine authority. In my view, medieval negative theology models a third alternative, which pursues radical critique while encouraging persistent affirmation. Much as negative theology opens spiritual possibilities through disciplined negativity, negative political theology affirms particular projects in a provisional mode. Through hope, it inhabits the tension between possibility and disruption.
Writing today, in the face of rising authoritarianism, I think there is power in negative political theology.
1) First, because negativity is capacious.
Empirical research indicates that authoritarian political movements are motivated to a significant degree by anxiety at a perceived loss of cultural dominance. In my view, hope names the possibility of accepting anxiety of this kind rather than denying or displacing it. This points to the possibility of processing the volatile emotions that bedevil our politics – a way to acknowledge that the feeling of disruption is real, but it needn’t be displaced onto invented enemies.
At the same time, the negativity I’ve described enables us to engage in political conflict without abandoning the hope for reconciliation. Reading feminist theorists like Joan Wallach Scott, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig has convinced me that conflict is a central task of politics, particularly when vulnerable groups are under threat. With the labor movement in mind as a model, I think we need to mobilize for the purpose of strategic political conflict while continuing to organize a broad coalition.
On an affective level, it is difficult to do both of these things at once, just as it is hard to acknowledge how rapidly a culture can change. In this context, negative political theology can help us to theorize a politics capacious enough to incorporate connection and conflict, sympathy and refusal, appreciation and anger.
2) Second, because negativity is experimental.
As embodied by The Divine Comedy and the Cathedral at Chartres, the negativity of Dionysian theology does not impose pure silence. Instead, it encourages profuse imagination. Something similar is at work in Derrida’s circuitous style, continually interrupting itself, lost in the ecstasy of subordinate clauses. On this model, at a time when it can be difficult to see a way forward, negative political theology frees experimentation with the thought that nothing is final.
This negativity cuts against a politics of nostalgia (which seeks to conserve the imagined glories of the past) and apocalypse (which rejects the world as irredeemably compromised). Although I have learned a great deal from apocalyptic thinkers such as Jacob Taubes, I think they sometimes underestimate the value of small improvements in a broken world. In contrast, negative political theology encourages concrete projects in an experimental mode.
To be sure, it is a small thing to build a bit more affordable housing in Tallahassee while millions are starving in Gaza. And yet, even if the benefit falls far short of the horrors that remain, doing what we can is still worth the sweat. Negative political theology offers one way to face both demands – the importance of reform, however modest it might be, and the urgency of utopian critique.
