Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

by Catherine Keller

The experience of the impossible churns up in our epoch whenever a collective dream turns to trauma: politically, sexually, economically, and with a certain ultimacy, ecologically. Out of an ancient theological lineage, the figure of the cloud comes to convey possibility in the face of the impossible. An old mystical nonknowing of God now hosts a current knowledge of uncertainty, of indeterminate and interdependent outcomes, possibly catastrophic. Yet the connectivity and collectivity of social movements, of the fragile, unlikely webs of an alternative notion of existence, keep materializing--a haunting hope, densely entangled, suggesting a more convivial, relational world.

Catherine Keller brings process, feminist, and ecopolitical theologies into transdisciplinary conversation with continental philosophy, the quantum entanglements of a "participatory universe," and the writings of Nicholas of Cusa, Walt Whitman, A. N. Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler, to develop a "theopoetics of nonseparable difference." Global movements, personal embroilments, religious diversity, the inextricable relations of humans and nonhumans--these phenomena, in their unsettling togetherness, are exceeding our capacity to know and manage. By staging a series of encounters between the nonseparable and the nonknowable, Keller shows what can be born from our cloudiest entanglement.

Genres: Theology, Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Academic, Ecology

408 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 2014

About the author

Catherine Keller practices theology as a relation between ancient hints of ultimacy and current matters of urgency. As the George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University, she teaches courses in process, political, and ecological theology. She has all along mobilized, within and beyond Christian conversation, the transdisciplinary potential of feminist, philosophical and pluralist intersections with religion.

Her most recent books invite at once contemplative and social embodiments of our entangled difference: Cloud of the Impossible: *Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement* (2014), *Intercarnations: On the Possibility of Theology* (2017), and *Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public* (2018).

Since the start of the millennium she has served as executive director of the annual Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium. These events have yielded 12 anthologies, mostly published by Fordham University Press; they include *Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and the New Materialisms* (coedited with Mary Jane Rubenstein); *Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation* (coedited with Laurel Schneider); *Common Goods: Economy, Ecology, and Political Theology* (coedited with Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre and Elías Ortega-Aponte); and *Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discourse.*

Twitter: @Prof_Keller

Reviews

[Stephanie Berbec · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this one last night. I hope to get my hands on a hard copy soon for re-reading. It’s a loaded book, incredibly poetic, and heavily influenced by Nicholas of Cusa, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Judith Butler, covering topics such as apophatic theology, panentheism, ecopolitical theology, quantum theory, planetary entanglement, climate change, dreams, trauma, mysticism, transreligious solidarity and a theology of multiplicity. I haven’t been as moved or impressed by an academic book in a while as I was by this one. It’s one that I found myself saying ‘yes!’ to all throughout, both affirming of and resonating deeply with the trajectory of my own theology in more recent years.

[Carl Holmes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Message is good. Uses pretty heady and heavy language more than necessary, but once you understand the message if comes together.