Untold Truths, Unspeakable Bodies Theopoetics a Negative 无尽的真理，说不出的尸体theopoetics负.docVIP

The Cloud of the Impossible Feminist Theology, Cosmology and Cusa Catherine Keller—for Harvard March 22, 2007 I’m grateful to Marty Cohen for including me in this mysterious conversation he’s been hosting on the negative capability. Odd, the passionate feeling of recognition stimulated by a single subordinate clause, set off by casual dashes in a letter dashed off to a brother: I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. The very offhandedness, the indirection of the thought and the humility of its medium: an informal letter, not even a poem. Yet the citation only works because the poet happens to be a great one, reflecting unselfconsciously on what makes great poetry. And we pass it around feeling like he is also our brother in this capability. This series unfurls in an epoch of undiminished irritability. Of course the reach after fact and reason--themselves quite different, indeed often opposed, modes of thought, as Whitehead in Science and the Modern World makes clear. Empiricism had to fight free of reason, in the form of the rationalism of medieval theology. Yet both were grasping after certainties; and these days an irritable atheism lays claim to reason over and against the doubt-free claim of fundamentalism to facts. Irritation, unlike true anger, stops conversation, expressing annoyance at something that is not even worth my attention, something beneath contempt, not worthy of debate. Irritation is a persistent infection of intimacy, isn’t it: those we would take for granted annoy us when they manifest inconvenient differences. In a quite bodily way, irritation nips potential contradictions in the bud. But the irritations most intimate to my own interests would not lie in the mirror play of atheism and fundamentalism. The forms of certainty of progressive and particularly feminist theology have been crucial to our progress--and p