The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa

By Johannes Hoff

Recovers a 15th-century thinker’s original insights for theology and philosophy today

Societies today, says Johannes Hoff, are characterized by their inability to reconcile seemingly black-and-white scientific rationality with the ambiguity of postmodern pop culture. In the face of this crisis, his book The Analogical Turn recovers the fifteenth-century thinker Nicholas of Cusa’s alternative vision of modernity to develop a fresh perspective on the challenges of our time.

In contrast to his mainstream contemporaries, Cusa’s appreciation of individuality, creativity, and scientific precision was deeply rooted in the analogical rationality of the Middle Ages. He revived and transformed the tradition of scientific realism in a manner that now, retrospectively, offers new insights into the “completely ordinary chaos” of postmodern everyday life.

Hoff’s original study offers a new vision of the history of modernity and the related secularization narrative, a deconstruction of the basic assumptions of postmodernism, and an unfolding of a liturgically grounded concept of common-sense realism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Nov 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781467439022

Johannes Hoff

Johannes Hoff is professor of systematic theology atHeythrop College in the University of London.

Book preview

INDEX

Preface and Acknowledgments

Our modern understanding of science and culture builds on two key concepts: that of subjective autonomy, which suggests we are all, by nature, able to determine ourselves; and a representationalist concept of space, which implies that the world we inhabit can be fully represented by a mathematically generated picture of the world such as a computer-generated 3D animation. The theoretical formulation of these concepts can be traced back to Discourse on the Method by René Descartes, which was published, together with his Optics and Geometry, in 1637. However, both concepts had emerged two hundred years earlier after architect Filippo Brunelleschi’s public demonstrations of linear perspective in Florence in 1425. Thus the modern concepts of science and culture were not invented by scientists, but were in fact the outcome of an artistic vision of space and autonomy. This explains why the accompanying vision of scientific realism was successful despite its counterintuitive presuppositions and mathematical flaws.

In 1435 Leon Battista Alberti provided what is assumed to be the first theoretical account of the principles that stood behind Brunelleschi’s experiments. This account built on Biagio Pelacani da Parma’s mathematization of visual space, with which Alberti had become familiar while attending the lectures of Biagio’s disciple, Prosdocimus de’ Beldomandis in Padua. Nicholas of Cusa may have met Alberti at these lectures, and he certainly made his acquaintance later, at the Florentine Stammtisch¹ of Cusa’s close friend Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, at which Brunelleschi was also present. Already in his first philosophical book, De docta ignorantia (1440-42), we see Cusa developing a philosophically more rigorous account of the early modern mathematization of space, one that avoids the simplifications of Alberti. In fact this account displays amazing similarities to the liturgical vision of space in the North Burgundy paintings by artists such as Jan van Eyck. Even more significant, however, is a little book that Cusa sent to the monks at the Monastery of Tegernsee in 1453, entitled On the Vision of God. This book includes (avant la lettre) a comprehensive deconstruction of Alberti’s concepts of space, perspectivity, and subjective autonomy.

My book outlines the significance of this scientific and artistic controversy for philosophical theology today. It sets out to recover Nicholas of Cusa’s response to the upheavals of early modernity, and in doing so, develops a fresh perspective on the challenges of our late modern world.

Globalized, modern societies are characterized by their inability to reconcile the seemingly black and white univocity of scientific rationality with the ambiguous equivocity of post-modern pop culture. It can be argued — as indeed, this book will do — that this impasse originated in the early Renaissance. But that is only the first half of the story that needs to be told, since Nicholas of Cusa developed also an alternative vision of the age to come. In contrast to his mainstream contemporaries, his appreciation of individual subjectivity and scientific rationality was deeply rooted in the analogical rationality of the Middle Ages, making him relevant for our time. Cusa revived and transformed the analogical middle way of the Middle Ages in a manner which now, retrospectively, offers new insights into the completely ordinary chaos of post-modern life, and the crisis of a scientific culture which has become blind to its constitutional limitations. He discovered a way to circumvent the foundationalist rationality of later eras, and developed a mystagogical approach to the infinity of God rooted in context-sensitive, spiritual, and liturgical practices. Hence, Cusa offers an alternative modernity that enables us to recover the Pre-modern middle path between univocity and equivocity without losing sight of the emancipatory legacy of the modern age.

This publication builds on my previous books, in German, on Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Michel de Certeau, Spiritualität und Sprachverlust (1999), and on Nicholas of Cusa, Kontingenz, Berührung, Überschreitung (2007). These publications had two aims: first, to retrieve the unity of spiritual practice and science found both in post-modern philosophers such as Foucault and in Pre-modern concepts of rationality; second, to develop a more continental approach to the recent Ressourcement movement of Anglophone theology, starting from a discourse analytic reading of Nicholas of Cusa.

After completing these publications, I began teaching in the UK, which explains the genesis of this new book on Cusa insofar as it develops a new approach to Cusa’s writings that leaves the continental and particularly the German tradition of modern theology behind. In an interview with the religion editor of the London Times Literary Supplement, Rupert Shortt, Rowan Williams recalls the moment when the gap between the cutting edge of Anglophone post-liberalism and the liberal mainstream of my home country started to become visible:

When The Myth of God Incarnate appeared in 1977, I think many people felt that this was about as far as a particular kind of rational revisionism could go. So it was one of those moments when people did begin to turn towards other sources. . . . We shared a sense that we need to get ourselves out of this rather narrow and oddly cozy liberal environment into a slightly intellectually more rigorous, spiritually more challenging — and even alarming — world.²

Faced with the extreme liberalism of John Hick, Anglophone theology started to rediscover its roots in the past and to build bridges between the Western and the Eastern tradition of Christian Orthodoxy, following the paradigm of the Oxford movement and the French Ressourcement theology of twentieth century. Moreover, it learned to treat the dogmatic tradition not as an add-on to the secular knowledge of our time, but as the hermeneutical key to a philosophical understanding of the world as a whole. Nothing like this happened in Germany, since no similar event has forced the successors of Barth, Bultmann, and Rahner to turn towards other sources. The radical liberalism of English-speaking theology of the 1970s and ’80s had no impact on German theology; indeed, it might be argued that the Kantian layout of Hick’s account of the inconceivability of God prevented him from becoming significant, given the rigorous Kantian education German systematic theologians normally receive. The attachment to Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, and their more or less sophisticated philosophical and theological offshoots,³ enabled German theologians to cultivate a certain level of intellectual rigor without feeling the need to get out of the narrow and cozy environment of the liberal post-war era.

This does not mean that Germans agree about the significance of the Kantian revolution. Disputed since the first generation of Kant’s successors (e.g., Maimon, Reinhold, Schiller, and Fichte), the significance of Kant is to be found on the level of the questions he dared to ask rather than the level of the responses he provided. Nevertheless, his philosophy became the mandatory yardstick to be applied to every intellectual contribution of public significance claiming to solve the problems Kant was not able to solve alone; this has not changed to this day.

In the pre-war years, appreciation for this tradition flowed from a more or less uninhibited sense of national superiority. It united thinkers as diverse as Heinrich Rickert, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, Bruno Bauch, Arnold Gehlen, and Jürgen Habermas’s teacher Erich Rothacker. After the war, the first generation of the Frankfurt School of philosophy reluctantly drew a line that led from Kant, Fichte, and Hegel to the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, this did not prevent Kant from reappearing soon as the foundation of a new intellectual and political consensus that celebrated the achievements of the modern history of freedom and progress. Under the guidance of Kant’s Frankfurt School rehabilitator, Jürgen Habermas, Kant’s account of the finitude of human reason came to be seen as the shield that protects European civilization from relapsing into the barbarisms of the past. Undisputed even in the Catholic tradition, at least since Karl Rahner, the legacy of Kant provided the intellectual resources of a re-education program for both secularized and ecclesial scholars in line with the Kantian principles of autonomy and sense of duty.

This paradoxical phenomenon not only explains the increasing gap between Anglophone and German theology, but also why this book could not have been written had I still been living in Germany. By the time of my 1999 monograph on Derrida and Foucault, I had already entered what my then academic mentor Michel Eckhart called in his preface an uncharted path. Only fourteen years earlier, Jürgen Habermas had made his suspicions about the philosophical upheaval on the French side of the river Rhine well known. According to Habermas, post-modernists like Derrida and Foucault displayed the unmistakable signs of a neo-conservative, if not proto-Fascist, resistance to the emancipatory legacy of Kantian enlightenment tradition.⁴ Habermas’s warning was heeded; it soured the German reception of French post-modernist thought for almost twenty years. My first monograph was nevertheless benevolently received, perhaps because it demonstrated that Derrida and Foucault perceived themselves as heirs of the Kantian enlightenment project. Habermas’s later reconciliation with Derrida confirmed this assessment.

My second monograph also traversed difficult paths in that it aimed to show that Nicholas of Cusa was not (as the majority of German Cusa scholars after Ernst Cassirer tended to assume) a forerunner of Kant and the tradition of German idealism.⁵ However, because of my unbroken faith in the French arm of continental philosophy, I committed myself in this book to a methodological restriction that makes it seem, retrospectively, a transitional argument. In accordance with Derrida’s and Foucault’s radicalized version of Husserl’s epoché, I bracketed considerations on the meaning or value of symbol systems; even Cusa’s account of our natural desire for the good had to be sacrificed in order to make sure that my approach to his writings was not affected by dogmatic prejudgments that do not meet the requirements of an unbiased reconstruction of his language game. As the Dutch Cusa scholar Inigo Bocken put it in his illuminating review of my monograph:

Hoff seems to leave the volitive aspects of Cusanus’s epistemology out of his analysis. The argumentation to do so is too weak, in comparison with the level of reflection we meet in the other parts of the book. This is a point with some importance insofar as the unity of will and discourse belongs to the centre of the problem of modernity. However, the style of the book is such that one feels invited to discuss further on problems like these.⁶

This criticism was spot on. However, the reason I was unable to integrate Cusa’s ontology of will and desire into my reconstruction of Cusa’s epistemology was that my own approach to his writings was still too epistemological. In the introductory part of my book, I quoted the first sentence of the first chapter of Cusa’s magnum opus De docta ignorantia: There is present in all things a natural desire to exist in the best manner in which the condition of each thing’s nature permits this. It would have been easy to explain, as I had done earlier, why sentences like these are fundamental for Cusa’s mystagogy.⁷ However, within the methodological framework of Husserl’s and Derrida’s epoché, the assumption that every creature has a natural bias toward the good would only have been justifiable as a dogmatic prejudice of Cusa’s philosophy. Hence, it would have required me to commit the worst crime a radical Kantian in the sense of Derrida and Foucault could ever commit, namely to revert . . . to an infinitist dogmatism in pre-Kantian style, one which does not pose the question of responsibility for its own finite philosophical discourse.⁸

The present volume will respond to Bocken’s impression that this was a weakness of my previous book. However, it will not attempt to integrate the volitional aspects of Cusa’s philosophy into an analysis of his epistemology, but will, rather, reject the Kantian concept of epistemology tout court. This takes me back to the time when I moved to the UK and began collaborating with my friend and colleague Simon Oliver in Lampeter University. This collaboration, together with the inspiring seminars we organized for our post-graduate distance-learning students in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, changed my perception of arguably the most important philosopher of all times, Thomas Aquinas.

The writings of the outstanding Cusa scholar Rudolph Haubst (1913-92) had already made me realize that Aquinas was the touchstone, who would allow me, with Cusa’s help, to meet the challenge of overcoming the liberal tradition of German theology. But it was the conversation with Simon that really helped me to understand the core of Aquinas’s way of thinking, namely his philosophical account of the primacy of the act of being. Together with a series of extraordinarily productive discussions with Simon’s friend and former academic mentor John Milbank, accompanied by a re-reading of Henri de Lubac’s reconstruction of the symbolic realist ontology of the Middle Ages, this change of perspective enabled me to reconstruct Cusa’s ontology of desire without reverting to an infinitist dogmatism.

I have summarized the outcome of this research in a short essay on "Certeau’s (Mis-)Reading of Corpus Mysticum and the Legacy of Henri de Lubac"⁹ and in a longer study under the title Mystagogy beyond Onto-Theology: Looking Back to Post-modernity with Nicholas of Cusa,¹⁰ in which I developed a concept of doxological reduction that radicalizes the phenomenological epoché of late modern philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida. The first drafts of the present volume included reprints of these essays. However, thanks to my research leave during 2011, granted by the new Trinity Saint David University of Wales, it became clear that these essays were but preliminary studies. For this reason my book will no longer discuss Cusa’s method of doxological reduction but simply apply it. I would like to express my sincere and heartfelt gratitude to Simon Oliver, John Milbank, and my Lampeter colleagues for encouraging and enabling me to carry out this project. Thank you also to Conor Cunningham, who happily picked up John’s suggestion to include this publication in Eerdmans’s Interventions series.

In many respects, this research project has provided me with the opportunity to clarify my position within the spectrum of contemporary theology. Unlike my earlier work on Cusa, this book focuses not only on Cusa but also on the rise and the fall of our modern understanding of science and culture as a whole. However, the methodological approach I have employed to perform this task is again indebted to Immanuel Kant, although this might seem paradoxical at first sight. I am happy to confirm the assessment of John Milbank, Simon Oliver, and G. K. Chesterton that Kant’s account of science and culture requires us to twist our mind and take things for granted that no one would normally dare believe whilst in his right mind. However, Neo-Kantian philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky were not deluded when they considered the Kantian revolution to be more than the brainchild of a powerful individual. There is, indeed, something profoundly wrong with the Kantian tradition of modern philosophy, but Kant was not the initiator of a philosophical school alongside others of equal significance; his philosophical revolution was the logical conclusion of a long development. I do not hesitate to offer the hypothesis that, whenever the all-crushing (Alleszermalmer) critic of metaphysics went wrong, it could be taken as a reliable sign that something had gone wrong in the history of modern science and culture as a whole.

Hence, this book will deviate from the Neo-Kantian genealogy of the emergence of the modern age only insofar as it does not interpret the Kantian revolution as the outcome of an inescapable historical fate. Nothing justifies the assumption of Ernst Cassirer — which informed his ingenious (mis-)reading of Nicholas of Cusa — that every paradigm-shifting artistic or philosophical mind of the early Renaissance can be interpreted as a forerunner of Kant and the modern philosophy of subjectivity. On the contrary, the central thesis of this book is twofold: first, that Kant’s primary achievement was a brilliantly succinct summary of the late medieval and early modern decline of Christian learning, but no more than this; and second, that Cusa’s encounter with Alberti in the first half of the fifteenth century marked the critical moment when an alternative version of modernity was still possible. Even Martin Heidegger’s attempt to overcome the modern Age of the World Picture went wrong in proposing that the emergence of Western nihilism was an inescapable fate that originated in Plato and Aristotle. On the contrary, it originated in early modernity, and it would have been possible, in principle at least, to avoid this fate.

In this sense, and only in this sense, the following book will say goodbye to the post-Kantian tradition of continental philosophy and set out to recover the Pre-modern tradition of Christian learning. This being said, I have to express my sincere gratitude to my Kantian teachers, Michael Eckert and Manfred Frank, who enabled me to overcome my attachment to the Kantian tradition without questioning its significance. I am indebted to innumerable personal conversations with Michael and Manfred that took place in the Tübingen Theologische Seminar near the Botanic Garden, in the Philosophische Seminar by the River Neckar opposite the Hölderlinturm, and in numerous pubs in the historic city or its vicinity. It was the admirably sincere Kantian agnosticism of Manfred Frank that awakened me from the post-Kantian slumber of German theology. He convinced me that theologians cannot have the Kantian cake and eat it. So, I have now made up my mind, and it hardly needs to be said that I do not expect my Tübingen friends to agree with everything I have written in this book. We never did agree, and I am confident that they will see this disagreement not as an insult to our friendship but as an expression of my commitment to the craftsmanship of thinking, which they taught me when I was their student.

I have learned in Tübingen that disagreements do not diminish the appreciation and respect that characterizes the habit of philia; and so I am hopeful that this book will be taken in good heart by my British friends, given that it does not simply display a change of sides. In fact, it deviates from the Radical Orthodoxy movement in at least three respects — though this deviation might qualify it as a kind of Ultra-Orthodoxy that moves beyond the idolatrous attachment to the received wisdom of orthodox narratives only where it radicalizes their most elementary iconoclastic features:

1. It fails to support in every respect the assumption that the history of Western nihilism starts with Duns Scotus, though I agree with John Milbank’s thesis that the historical decisions that led to Immanuel Kant’s accomplished nihilism presupposed Duns Scotus’s univocal turn as a conditio sine qua non.

2. It develops an uncompromising iconoclastic account of the Pre-modern tradition of Christian learning, and thus risks exaggerating its apophatic features, for it is still inclined to support the conviction of Kant, Foucault, and Derrida that we must always be ready to question every attachment to finite authorities, including the authorities of narratives.

3. It does not assume that the nihilistic rationality of Western modernity can be simply out-narrated. It rather tends toward the apocalyptic conclusion that the hell of Western nihilism was to a certain extent inescapable and that we do not know the door through which the Messiah will return when the body of Christ will arise again in glorious splendor.¹¹

This apocalyptic conclusion is consistent with my conviction that Foucault was right when he encapsulated the legacy of the Enlightenment tradition in his tenacious commitment to the question: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?¹² Hence, I will conclude this preface by recounting the origin of the leitmotif of this book.

In the second part of this book, I will develop a reading of Nicholas of Cusa that focuses on the coincidence of vision and hearing in his little book On the Vision of God (De visione Dei), and interprets this coincidence as the key to his deconstruction of the narcissistic world that emerged in the fifteenth century. The related reading of a frequently marginalized text is indebted to Michel de Certeau’s reconstruction of Cusa’s concept of social space in his groundbreaking essay The Gaze. However, my decision to focus on this topic was not the outcome of academic considerations. It was actually a former Catholic altar boy who inspired me to adopt this hermeneutic approach, namely the German performance artist, director, and actor Christoph Schlingensief.

Christoph made me realize that our narcissistic obsession with images is the core problem of our time, and he enabled me to see how the coincidence of vision and hearing has to be interpreted if we want to overcome this obsession. The critical aspect of this insight relates to Christoph’s attempts to deconstruct the dangerous death-music of Richard Wagner, which he semi-ironically blamed in his last public performances for the emergence of lung cancer in his body after his Parsifal staging in Bayreuth in 2004.¹³ Christoph enabled me to see how Aquinas’s prioritization of actual over virtual realities translates into a critical perspective on a world obsessed with the illusionary salvation of art and entertainment (in the sense of Wagner’s total work of art).¹⁴

My first attempt to articulate this insight was included in an email to Schlingensief written on the 6th of October 2009 immediately after our first encounter in Berlin, where we had talked for almost a full day about his cancer experience, his narcissistic obsession with images, and his question What happens now with God? (Was ist jetzt mit Gott?).¹⁵ In this email, I had told Christoph that Cusa, in his book of 1453, invited his monastic friends of the Tegernsee Abbey to look at the gaze of an all-seeing icon of Jesus — a gaze directed at each viewer as if at no one else — and then to talk about what they could and could not see. Four days after he had received this email in Berlin, on the occasion of a public performance in the Thalia Theater, Hamburg, Christoph presented his summary of this email to his audience, which will now be published in his posthumous autobiography based on audio-records:

How can we manage that with this Narcissism? . . . The monks are required to talk about what they don’t see. If they do that, they discover that the blind spot of their perception is no longer threatening. Because they talk at this moment about themselves, but in a divested manner, which means, on purpose, as Narcissus, but behind that very clearly recognizable as an individual person: embarrassing, shameless, the pure fear. That sounds simple, but it isn’t. The difference between seeing and talking marks the separating line at which the narcissistic trap cracks. You cannot believe what you see. That’s by far too incredible. Faith comes from hearing, says Paul. From hearing, from speaking (sprechen), and first of all from making a slip of the tongue / promising yourself (sich versprechen). No faith without practicing procedures of making a slip of tongue / promising yourself! I promise to you, that there is something to be heard at beyond the visible! But how do you make a slip / promise yourselves? I have to find that out by myself.¹⁶

The last sentence of this quotation was consistent with our personal, electronic, and public¹⁷ conversations in the following months. In Christoph’s last message, written in his schlingenblog on the 7th of August 2010, he returned to the starting point of our first conversations, namely his narcissistic obsession with images, under the title: The Images Vanish Automatically and Paint Over themselves Either Way. To Remember Means: to Forget! (in this case we can quietly and absolutely go to sleep as well). An English translation of his untranslatable, in terms of spelling, deliberately decomposing text, might look like this:

How long was it quiet . . . long quiet. I am coming now, after about 3 weeks, across this last video here. I have deleted it immediately. for whom should that be of interest? may be such video blogs or entries are only of interentr when the anxiety becomes too large, because this little illusion of — but now after shortly 4 weeks it seems to be different. the images (ix) themselves out . . . there is actually no sentimental pain. the buildingsstockx is surprisingly good . . . and now? again another image? . . . more information about new things, which, . . . so actually what? . . . it’s all very superficial and the spelling mistakes are accumulating the things . . . the taupe runfs since tmc onto. the appetite ceases rapidly — BBC-THEKILLINGEK7 . . . (why does no one explain to me meo not why not at least one to my semi-normalerinnen situation this why it makes me only sad piasch and¹⁸

The present book will not try to answer the questions that the aborted last sentence of this blog entry might have left unanswered; but it will include an attempt to do what Christoph requested of me in one of his last emails, namely to find an aesthetic path to Jesus. I am afraid the outcome of this attempt would have been by far too theoretical for Christoph’s taste; but I have tried to stick to our agreement not to take pious shortcuts that would have made him puke.

I have to say thank you too to the Cusanus Research Institute in Trier and its director Walter Andreas Euler, for their hospitality during my research stay in November 2011; and to my longstanding friend Jürgen Maag for his hospitality during my subsequent research stay in Tübingen. I am furthermore incredibly grateful for the support Peter Hampson has provided me in this last writing period by doing the first close reading and giving me his constructive feedback; also for the innumerable conversations with him on related philosophical and psychological issues, including his cognitive-psychological considerations on self-deception and narcissism.

Finally, I want to express my deep gratitude to Kate for her critical intellectual companionship, for bearing with me when I was frequently not in this world whilst writing this book, for suffering the first proofreading of this text, and for trying to straighten out my German syntax. Last, but not least, thank you to Rosie for entering my office and convincing me that there are things on this planet more important than writing books — for example, creatures like Smurfs, Hobbits, and the Annoying Orange.¹⁹

JOHANNES HOFF

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1. The German term Stammtisch, which has been introduced by the Cusa scholar Tom Müller as description for this circle, defies translation. As one of my Lampeter students has put it, "a Stammtisch is a table in the pub where people meet in order to discuss ‘the big questions.’ However, it is debatable if this translation applies to the Florentine Stammtisch."

2. Rupert Shortt, God’s Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 17; see also Johannes Hoff, German Theology in Contemporary Society, Modern Believing (Special Issue, ed. Johannes Hoff) 50.1 (2009): 2-12.

3. Cf. Johannes Hoff, The Rise and the Fall of the Kantian Paradigm of Modern Theology, in The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition and Universalism, ed. Conor Cunningham and Peter M. Candler (London: SCM Press, 2010), 167-96.

4. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1985).

5. Cf. Josef Wohlmuth, "Nikolaus von Kues und das religiöse Sinnvakuum der Spätmoderne. Versuch einer rezensierenden Annäherung an das Werk Kontingenz, Berührung, Überschreitung (2007) von Johannes Hoff," Theologie der Gegenwart 54 (2013): 63-73; Günter Bader, Rev. Johannes Hoff: Kontingenz, Berührung, Überschreitung. Zur philosophischen Mystik nach Nikolaus von Kues, Freiburg (Verlag Karl Alber), 2007, Theologische Literaturzeitung 134 (2009): 104-6.

6. Inigo Bocken, Rev. Johannes Hoff: Kontingenz, Berührung, Überschreitung. Zur philosophischen Mystik nach Nikolaus von Kues, Freiburg (Verlag Karl Alber), 2007, Bijdragen. International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 69 (2008); 233-35. (See also http://spirin.org/Kontingenz,_Berührung,_Überschreitung.)

7. Johannes Hoff, Theologie nach dem Ende der ‘Postmoderne’. Die Bedeutung Michel Foucaults für die diskursanalytische Grundlegung des Glaubens, in Gottes und des Menschen Tod? Die Theologie vor der Herausforderung Michel Foucaults, ed. Christian Bauer and Michael Hölzl (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald 2003), 79-104.

8. Jacques Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics, in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 79-153, 162.

9. Johannes Hoff, "Mysticism, Ecclesiology and the Body of Christ. Certeau’s (Mis-) Reading of Corpus Mysticum and the Legacy of Henri de Lubac," in Spiritual Spaces: History and Mysticism in Michel de Certeau, ed. Inigo Bocken (Leuven: Peeters, 2013).

10. Johannes Hoff, Mystagogy Beyond Onto-Theology: Looking Back to Post-modernity with Nicholas of Cusa, in A Companion to Nicholas of Cusa, ed. Arne Moritz (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

11. Nicholas of Cusa, Coniectura de ultimis diebus, n. 131.

12. Cf. Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment? in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 32-50.

13. See, for example, Schlingensief ’s ReadyMadeOpera Mea Culpa, which was staged at the Burgtheater in Vienna (http://www.mea-culpa.at/); and his Fluxus-Oratorio A Church of Fear in the Face of the Stranger Inside Me, which was staged at the Ruhrtriennale 2008 (http://www.kirche-der-angst.de/). A posthumously restaged version of this oratorio was eventually awarded with the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2011 (http://www.deutscher-pavillon.org/). As for Schlingensief ’s cancer experience, see also Christoph Schlingensief, So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung (Munich: btb Verlag, 2010).

14. Cf. Johannes Hoff, Life in Abundance. Schlingensief ’s Deconstruction of (Post-) Modernism, in German Pavilion, 2011. 54th International Art Exhibition La Biennale Di Venezia, ed. Susanne Gaensheimer (Venice: Sternberg, 2011), 215-25.

15. http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/schlingensief-im-interview-was-ist-jetzt-mit-gott/1320048.html.

16. Aino Laberenz, ed., Christoph Schlingensief. Ich weiß ich war’s (Munich: KiWi, 2012), 56 (my translation). I am grateful to Stephanie Kratz from KiWi publishers for sending me the manuscript.

17. Schlingensief ’s Zürich experimental staging Sterben lernen! (It’s time that you learn to die!) relates to this conversation (http://schlingenblog.posterous.com/?page=5); see also