Cloud of the Impossible ― Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement

What generates the cloud of the impossible is what becomes possible in the very face of what appears to be impossible, whether it be radical democracy or the reversal of climate change. The experience of the impossible peaked at the end of the last century -- politically, sexually, economically, and ecologically. The dream of progress became the trauma of reality, and confidence in better outcomes waned. Yet the connectivity and collectivity of social movements, of the fragile, unlikely webs of an alternative notion of existence, keep materializing -- a haunting hope, dense in relationships, suggesting a more convivial, relational world.

Catherine Keller brings process, feminist, and ecological theologies into conversation with continental philosophy, the quantum entanglements of a "participatory universe," and the writings of Walt Whitman, Alfred North Whitehead, and Judith Butler to develop a "theopoetics" for all relations. Global movements, personal embroilments, and the inextricable relationship of humans and nonhumans -- these phenomena, in their unsettling togetherness, are exceeding our capacities to know, grasp, and manage. By staging a series of encounters between the relational and the apophatic, the inseparable and the nonknowable, Keller shows what can be born from negative entanglement.

Catherine Keller is professor of constructive theology at Drew University. Her work interweaves postmodern hermeneutics with process cosmology, poststructuralist philosophy, and an evolving feminist cosmopolitics. At once constructive and deconstructive in approach, it engages questions of ecological, social, and spiritual interdependence within an irreducible indeterminacy. Among her many books are The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming and Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation.