| abstract | This dissertation proposes a constructive philosophical and theological reading of the boundaries between religious and ethico-political discourse in relation to the collective experience of suffering, socio-political trauma, and colonial violence. By employing the theological and philosophical figure of the "abyss," the dissertation traverses diverse dimensions and contexts in which the self suffers the finitude of being. In conversation with a broad body of theological and philosophical literature, from medieval mysticism to Hegel, from the continental philosophy of religion to Latin American/Caribbean decolonial thought, I seek to extend the register of the theological trope of the "abyss" to a wider socio-political meaning. Theologically, the abyss denotes the blurring of the boundaries between creaturely finitude and divine potency as reflected in the writings of certain Neoplatonic thinkers and medieval mystics. These mystics' radical vision of God and self releases an intriguing theological resonance with modern and contemporary philosophical inquiries into the place of relation to the "Other." In Hegel the abyss becomes an explicit ethical parameter albeit underdeveloped. My reading demonstrates that the trace of abyss in Hegel nevertheless structures his dialectical system. The abyss signals the moment or movement of "passage" from the negative to the positive, through which the shattered self transforms its eroded ground into the condition of a new possibility. In conversation with the postcolonial voices emerging from the global South, I situate the movement of passage in the "middle passage" and interrogate the meaning of abyss, political subjectivity, and spirituality in relation to historical trauma. If I read the abyss as an all-pervading ontological groundlessness of being involving an insurmountable material and political devastation, it is to the end of articulating in a single term both the theological or spiritual quandary and political reality. A conversation between Edouard Glissant's oceanic counter-poetics and contemporary theopoetics (particularly in Catherine Keller's tehomic version) exposes the abyss as the very "womb abyss" out of which shared experiences of loss and suffering give rise to the collective vision of the future and becoming with/in God. |
