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And the more that cloud of impossibility is recognized as obscure and impossible, the more truly the necessity shines forth. —NICHOLAS OF CUSA, DE VISIONE DEI
At the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify us. — É D O U A R D G L I S S A N T, T H E P O E T I C S O F R E L AT I O N
P L AY I N G F R E N C H H O R N for the school musical—it was The Man of La Man-
cha, and I was fourteen—I fumbled the high C. On the stage Don Quixote was belting out the climax of “The Impossible Dream.” Few in the auditorium would have noticed my tremble. But that cracked C may have betrayed an early resistance to the whole drama of “the impossible”—and an inability to let it go. So here I am, in another millennium, still trying to crack open the im/possible. Aren’t we all? What relationship that matters doesn’t twist us to the faltering edge of possibility? Desire and fear blur together. What future comes before us unclouded? Still, had not “that cloud of impossibility” floated before me later in the voice of a fifteenth-century meditation, I might have eluded the theme. By our own epoch, in an altogether different voice, the “experience of the impossible” had reached a high pitch of theory: a climactic deconstruction. Why wouldn’t it? In
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our age impossibility has gone planetary. It has metastasized politically, economically, and—with deepening rumbles of apocalypse—ecologically. Dream, in German Traum, becomes trauma. Faith in the right outcome fades. Yet an answering planetarity of social movements, a great convulsiveness of gender, sex, race, class, species, keeps materializing against the odds. Echoing still from the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre: “another world is possible.” Possible, not probable. The hope haunts, lacking the determinism of progress or the guarantee of providence. We have been warned against the very notion of possibility: “to go there where it is possible,” writes Jacques Derrida, “is to be already there and to paralyze oneself in the in-decision of the non-event.”1 If we are already there, there is nowhere to go. And possibility often signifies this predictable presence of the already known: a smoothly determinate Aristotelian possibility. Hence passion directs itself to “the impossible.” But is there a danger that such a wan notion of the possible, degraded to a mere foil for the theatrics of impossibility, proves all the more paralyzing? This might be my cracked C speaking: but might such a tack not abandon us—all too predictably—to an impossible dream, tilting quixotically with rival notions? When big shifts do occur, the great exodoi, the collapse of an apartheid, a wall, impossibility suddenly yields to actuality. But does this not happen only by way of the actually possible? Does it happen without the enigmatic persistence of those who attend, but do not know, the possible? Who mind what may after the fact prove to have been possible to enact? In other words might some fumble, some crack in the impossible itself, disclose some other kind of possibility? Fortunately Derrida wavers at this very edge, just as he is reflecting, not for the first time, on so-called negative theology. He hails in this late text the “more than impossible, the most impossible possible.”2 Fleetingly he affirms what long ago Nicholas of Cusa (in his own late text) offered as a nickname for God: posse ipsum, possibility itself. Another relation to possibility suggests itself. And with it—if the present text has anything to say about it—another possibility of relation itself. We—a “we” I mean invitationally, not presumptively—find ourselves already pushed to a precarious threshold of language, and not for the first time. The cloud of the impossible materialized long ago, right at that crumbly edge, in a kind of speech unspeaking itself. It is speech as the most knowing, indeed erudite, sort of nonknowing. But of what? Of “that which to all humans, even to the most learned philosophers, seems wholly inaccessible and impossible.”3 Thus Cusa,
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speaking of the cloud, precipitates a fresh event of the speech that unspeaks itself, of what had been called negative or apophatic theology—from its start a millennium earlier an intensively philosophical operation. It was never separable from its contrasting kataphasis, its eloquent affirmations. Such a theology performs its negations for the sake of the most positive relations possible. This nonknowing is to its alternative knowing as im/possibility—the most impossible possible—is to its possibility. But the seeming impossibles of, say, the fifteenth-century Cusa may appear alien to the dreams and nightmares of the twenty-first. We might say now, amidst necessities and indeterminacies he could not foresee, that the more “that cloud of impossibility is recognized as obscure and impossible,”4 the better we may face what is actually possible. And what becomes possible, let alone knowable, except what comes into relation? Entangling us in whatever we do know and much of what we don’t, the cloud of our relations—or is it a crowd?—seems to offer itself as the condition of our every possibility. We know nothing beyond our relations. Alfred North Whitehead cut to the quick a century ago: “If anything out of relationship, then complete ignorance as to it.”5 So we hope here not for complete knowledge but for an incomplete ignorance. Such an ignorance does not close in on itself in defeat or exhaustion. It finds in the limits, ruptures, and fogbanks of consciousness new relations to—anything that matters. And what is con-sciousness, anyway, but, first of all, a knowing-with, materially resistant to our formidable attempts to fix its objects firmly out there where we can master them? Thus the Caribbean thinker Édouard Glissant could forge his poetics of relation from the following strangely hopeful decolonial condition: “the consciousness of Relation became widespread, including both the collective and the individual. We ‘know’ that the Other is within us and affects how we evolve as well as the bulk of our conceptions and the development of our sensibility.”6 We “know” what we know only with the irony of apophasis, of a language open to its own undoing. It would put scare quotes all over this text if it could. The relations are always too many, too much, dreamy or traumatic, enigmatic or incalculable, impossible to encompass. In the perspective of this book and of its cloud, we—“we”— do evolve, we develop, we select. But we do so in this “consciousness of Relation,” this knowing-together, that only knows itself as entangled in the complicated histories, bodies, indeterminate collectives, human and otherwise, that enfold us. They exceed
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our knowing backward or forward in time, outward or inward in space. And from these endless enfoldings we each unfold—here, now, and differently. Amidst this connectivity that crowds, that clouds, what can we learn? If Glissant was right, if a relational consciousness is spreading—can it retain, clarify, intensify its democratizing forcefield? “We’re all connected” was a ditty of Bell Telephone even before cell phones or Internet. And now the cloud also signifies a smooth network of connected computers. In view of a global economy enmeshing the planetary ecology—shall we abandon relation itself to cliché and commodification? Or might we instead expose and differentiate its incongruent collectives, its insidious deformities, its rhizomatic multitudes? With what priorities of perspective do you, here, now, cut through the relations overcrowding or beclouding the possible? With what wisdom, for what ethics, in the name of which truth, for the sake of which others, which Other? Is this why the question of God—“God”—arises always again: to name an impossibility? To break open its possibility? Of course at any moment that Other “within us” may turn impatiently imperious—and rip right out of all the tangles. Indeed God may be the main name of an Absolute absolved from and so ordering all relations pyramidally. Today a dominant form of Christianity partners with the Pharaohs of global capital. Or to the contrary, the God-word may stir exodus from unjust relation: the column of cloud going before the terrified multitude. We may denounce the deified betrayals. But will we liberate ourselves from the ancestral trope of liberation? We may deconstruct the mystifications of ignorance that keep a collective under control. But will we ignore the folding of our relations—good, ill, or ambiguous—into whatever mysteriously exceeds our knowing? I wager that traces of God will continue to inflect our relation to that pressing excess that comes within us and before us—even when it goes silent and unnamed, even when it is distributed amidst all those others permeating, populating, and eluding us. (Pascal in an age of ecological indeterminacy might wager not on God’s existence but on ours.) One may then keep weeding out the traces, imagining a final exodus from all religion. Of course “after theism” or “after the death of God,” after so many names and so many unnamings, so many disappointments, so many dullings and dyings, what we nickname God must seem obscure
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and impossible. That does not mean It will ever have been captured by the names of what has died. So one might resist the bipolar impatience—Nature versus Supernature! God yes or no! One might grant some experimental time, some cloud space, to theology well-practiced in self-critical mindfulness, in “learned ignorance” (Cusa), in ecofeminist, genderqueer, divinanimal subversion or “divine multiplicity” (Laurel Schneider). Would this mean “the autodeconstruction of Christianity” ( Jean-Luc Nancy)? And “what would theology be and do among the damned and damaged,” asks Sharon Betcher, “in the winter of the worn-out and wrecked relics of commodity capitalism?”7 In its most affirmative intercarnations, beyond every Christian anathema, would it find itself close to the apophatic “God after God” of Richard Kearney’s “anatheism”? “It is only,” he writes, “if one concedes that one knows virtually nothing about God that one can begin to recover the presence of holiness in the flesh of ordinary existence.”8 The flesh of such possible theologies and such live potentialities comes suffused with every manner of “negative capability”—as Keats famously captured it in a letter to his brother: the capacity “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”9
In this risk and in this opening, what is called theology will pose its own im/possibilities. Only so may it open the way of another relation to possibility itself— posse ipsum. This book will consider how the cloud surrounding what we say about “God” here enfolds the entire crowd of our relations. In other words the ancient via negativa now offers its mystical unsaying, which is a nonknowing of God, to the uncertainty that infects our knowing of anything that is not God. The manifold of social movements, the multiplicity of religious or spiritual identifications, the queering of identities, the tangled planetarity of human and nonhuman bodies: these in their unsettling togetherness will exceed our capacities ever altogether to know or manage them. In their unspeakable excesses they press for new possibilities of flourishing. So I do not find it unrelated that in the same time, in the very neighborhood of these earthbound interactions, the ancient speech of the
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unspeakable is emitting new resonances: of something “more than impossible,” infini, unfinished. A book, however, demands some responsible finitude—a speakable finish. The task before us will be to stage a series of encounters between the relational and the apophatic or, to paraphrase, between the nonseparable and the nonknowable. Many of these encounters will take place as readings of nontheistic texts, requiring little God-talk. But the series will nonetheless unfold chapter by chapter as the pulses and queries of a theology constructing itself even now. Relationality and apophasis, however, do not simply jibe. Indeed as discourses they may careen toward mutual contradiction. Or they may lay back in cool incommensurability. Of course along the way there have been crossovers between the negativity of unsaying God and the negation of unjust world relations, between the infinite eros of mysticism and the earthy loves of any relational theology. Yet, on the whole, the recent theological movements in which responsible relation comes to the fore bear almost no resemblance to the apophatic tradition, with its ancient Neoplatonic sources. Relational theologies philosophically align—however explicitly—with a Whiteheadian process ontology, affirmative of the indeterminate becomings of our interlinked materialities, far sooner than with any strand of negative theology. With the latter, the mystical atmosphere of an initiatory elite, of detachment from bodies and crowds, never altogether dissipates. And the deconstructed subjects and objects of the cloudy unknowing may drift into a haze of dispassionate transcendence. So we cannot in the present project escape tensions between the contemplative apophasis and the urgent evolution of more liberatory movements of race, gender, sex, ability, class, ecology. As relational theologies, these on their end are tempted toward a conveniently transparent subject—and, in its image, a revised, erotically charged, justice-empowering but perhaps all too knowable God. Without those revisions, however, this book, this author, would not be possible. Let alone actual. They have given voice to this speaking woman whose silence would otherwise have been compulsory rather than contemplative. Like crowds of others. Yet without the crossover, the chiasmus, to the apophatic, theology turns for many of us incredible. And the knowable knots of traumatized relation then do not open into the plenitude—or is it planetude?—of entanglement. This subject and her matter would lose heart before the metastases of the impossible.
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How shall we think the relation, then, between the nonseparability encoded in entanglement and the nonknowing minded by apophasis? How do they fold in and out of each other? The response that unfolds through the chapters of this book will take the form of what I will call apophatic entanglement. It signifies the perspective of a possibility and the possibility of a perspective that come to light in the dark zones of relation itself. This is not the darkness of evil, but of the deep variegations of nonknowing that it may do ill to ignore or to manipulate. The perspective of apophatic entanglement springs open just there where knowledge, which happens only in and as relation, exposes its own knowable uncertainty. Epistemology here folds in and out of ontology. The Cloud of the Impossible hopes to demonstrate, billowingly, that these relations that materialize as selves and as collectives, the relations that crowd, that differ and matter, come also apophatically entangled in and as theology. For at a certain point the darkness—just where it turns theological, beyond all light supremacism—begins to glow: “in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.”10 Thus the sixth-century Pseudo-Dionysius situates the discourse that can properly be called negative theology. But the enigma of the dark and shining cloud precedes the theology, as we shall see. It can be said to precipitate its possibility. And I suspect that it does so again, improbably, differently, now.
P R E C A P I T U L AT I O N The cloud seems to drift spaciously before us. But its temporality is deceptive: our entangling relations may move too fast or too far. So let me try to summarize in advance how the present contemplation is structured, how this cloud forms its own template. In this book it performs a series of variations on the theme of apophatic entanglement. Each chapter unfolds a set of creaturely relations to an excess that enfolds them; each chapter, like each creature, envelopes what precedes it in order to develop it differently. Folding itself (to ply, as in Latin pli, French plier, or German falten, the root of “faltering”) emerges as a theme of negative theology. This happens historically when Cusa names God the infinite—the not-bounded and so not-known—inasmuch as it enfolds (complicans) and unfolds (explicans) the boundless manifold of the universe. Haunted by this
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language, the book passes through three parts: Complications, Explications, and Implications. The three chapters of the first part explore the specific theological traditions that in their interweaving form a lineage—though no party line—for an apophatically entangled theology. In the first chapter we confront the conflict that verges on contradiction between the two families of discourse indispensable to the present project. The former, as noted earlier, registers our mutual participation as creatures and as constellations of creatures, the relationality that forms and deforms us all. Relational theologies, specifically in their process, feminist, and ecological versions, developed in close and irritable intersectionality with the liberation traditions. None idealize relationality; all recognize the variant ambiguity of our entangled conditions. For the knots that bind us may tighten oppressively; they may thwart rather than foster the democratic unfolding of a becoming planet. Then the vital complication gets hidden, the interdependence sliced into the gross asymmetries of independence and dependence. In the meantime, the tangled relations within and among emergent social identities have also imported the political essentialisms of the left into the prophetic theologies, inhibiting needed coalitions of the multitude, the 99 percent, and, if you add the nonhumans, the whole planetary crowd of imperiled creatures. At that point the contrasting register of theology, that of the ancient apophatic negations, may only seem to deepen and mystify the founding hierarchies. And so-called negative theology, as a current possibility, evinces internal tensions of its own. It is not within theology proper but within continental philosophy, in its own recent engagement of theological themes, that the ancient apophatic practice has reappeared in strength. Poststructuralism has at certain cloudy edges become famously entranced with the apophatic. It has given it new life. It is especially in Derrida’s later meditations on the apophatic that the im-possible opens into its radical possibility. Yet deconstruction cannot be identified with negative theology, which remains, after all, theology, indeed a theology indebted to the Neoplatonic One—of which poststructuralism is having none. Deconstruction is heir to the legacy of the death of God, the God of ontotheology whose Being is that One. Nonetheless it is through this aporetic involvement of philosophy that negative theology represents now an active possibility. If the apophatic is for the most
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part still registering only indirectly, or through a Thomist sublimation, upon theology proper, the present book takes up the difficulty and the potentiality of a direct (if never quite proper) encounter. And so the doubling of tensions—of a deconstructive apophasis and a prophetic relationalism—forms for the book a mobile chiasmus: a co-incident of opposites. Offering a selective genealogy of negative theology, chapter 2 pursues a historical itinerary of clouds. It begins in the Sinaitic wilderness, where we also spot a rabbinic rendering of the opaque cloud as Presence, Shekhinah, Herself. From there we track the tradition of the brilliant darkness up to the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing. This ancestry of speculative mysticism, wrapped in strands of Neoplatonic apophasis from Gregory of Nyssa on, then moves in chapter 3 to Nicholas of Cusa. Here his docta ignorantia unfolds fresh names for the unnameable. (It bequeaths one of them to this part: the complication, the folding together of the universe in the apophatic infinite.) Then comes the dramatic Cusan swerve into an affirmative cosmology of the manifold material world as the very explicans of the complicans. It yields the fundamental oscillation or mantra of this book: enfold, unfold. Part 2 examines certain layered explications—scientific, philosophical, and poetic—by which our ontological entanglement comes to matter. To go materially all the way down, I found it necessary in chapter 4 to risk a transdisciplinary journey through what Einstein named “spooky action at a distance.” Here the simultaneity of enfolding and unfolding reappears as that of an “enfoldment” and “unfoldment” in quantum physics—part of the paradigm-busting problem of “nonlocality,” or what is called entanglement. Fortunately, certain physicists have already made explicit the radical relationality of the quantum level. Henry Stapp announces a “participatory universe.” Karen Barad has launched across the disciplines an indispensable language of “agential intra-activity.” Epistemological uncertainty here morphs into an ontological indeterminacy keyed—from the quantum up—to an ethic of mutual response. As process thought has long worked the affinity between postmodern physics and a relational cosmology, the physics of apophatic entanglement yields to the wider concern of this section: that of the explicatio, the unfolding, of a relational ontology of entangled difference. In chapter 5 we read Deleuze reading Whitehead by way of a Leibnizian “fold.” Here too—in the face of a God-process
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which persists in unfolding—the apophatic is more readable as the indeterminate than as the uncertain, as becoming, rather than enigma. I then tried but failed to subdue Walt Whitman, who demanded a chapter of his own. He plies the human with an extravagant transhuman imaginary of folds physical, animal, vaginal, queer, democratic, terrestrial, astronomical, and impiously divine. In chapter 7 Judith Butler brings to twenty-first-century fruition the implications of her earlier undoing of gender as she makes explicit an ethics of relational ontology. In her influential work these constituent relations emerge only as we “come undone” in a dispossession of the human subject expressive at once of an opaque nonknowing and a work of mourning. I invite attention also to the nonhuman entanglements that continuously undo and revise the human, which happens to be undoing its planet. And so we turn to the more grievous effects of our civilization. Part 3, Implications, examines the theopolitics of two specific planetary complexes. These narratives unfurl certain ethical implications of a globally entangled Western history. In chapter 8 I tell a story of our crusader complex, which at the dawn of the modern can be observed repressing an apophatic alternative to Islamophobia. The complex implicates an old theopolitics in a current economic globalism. At once older and more definitive of our future is the story of another global complex, rooted in a Greco-Roman entanglement, as narrated in the ninth chapter: here an ancient ecophobia comes home to roost. I hope that recognizing its imperial antiquity will help us “face Gaia” (Bruno Latour) while we still can. But the totalizing ignorance, the opposite of the knowledge that knows its incompletion, has grown formidable under late capitalism. Ironically, in the face of global warming, certain climate skeptics now appeal to the literal clouds. As cloud feedbacks represent the “greatest uncertainty” in current climate science, it is hoped that they may—like the chorus of clouds in Aristophanes’ farce— “save us.”11 The theology precipitated by the Cloud of the Impossible will not call upon the clouds, let alone God, to save us. Nor will it save God. Not, at any rate, if salvation is something someone does to another. If, however, saving is the opposite of wasting, “saving the name” might be just good ecology. Why waste every metaphor of our infinite entanglement? Unless we trust in progressive human supersession of the past, we might more honestly unsay and so say differently rather than cleanly
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erase “God.” By a related and reciprocating logic, Whitehead’s poet God “saves whatever can be saved”—not by intervening but by receiving and recycling “what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.”12 It evinces a dark tenderness, even in its failure to fix our world for us. So a constructive apophatic theology yields at last to the question, the questioning, of love. It finds in chapter 10 voice there where theos and logos cancel each others’ unquestionabilities. If in a Pauline epistle appears the “love that surpasses understanding”—the self-implicating, late-biblical form of the apophatic entanglement—it precipitates here no final biblical answer. Love isn’t all we need. But it does deliver narrative resources for an amorous cosmopolitics. In the dark theopoetics of the cloud, might the very fold between our nonknowing and our nonseparability begin to appear as possibility itself, posse ipsum? But what events, what becomings, of planetary solidarity might yet be actually and not just abstractly possible? Possible, that is, to actualize—but perhaps not, even in the face of cataclysm, without a spacetime of contemplation? Dimly, a broken high C echoes the elemental call of the shofar in the wilderness.