UC Berkeley

My dissertation challenges the strict boundaries separating medieval mysticism and modern philosophy in order to recover a tradition of thought that is concerned neither with securing the transcendence of God nor establishing an autonomous subject. Rather, it ascribes theoretical primacy to movements of self-emptying (kenosis) that reveal an impersonal immanence of life that precedes the very difference between subject and transcendence. The first chapter centers on the 14th-century mystical theologian Meister Eckhart, who I argue elaborates self-emptying not as a moment that opens the soul to an experience of a transcendent God or to a beatific vision of the celestial after-life (as could be expected of a medieval mystic), but rather in order to articulate a dispossessed and immanent life "without a why." The second chapter argues that Eckhart articulates immanence as absolute, as a process unrestrained by anything outside of itself, through his interpretations of key Christian theological topoi, most centrally those of the divine self-expression in the Word and the birth of the Son. By offering a novel interpretation of Hegel's speculative thought as centering on the movements of self-emptying and externalization (Entäußerung, the rendition of the Greek kenosis), chapters 3 and 4 show how the critique of self-standing subjects no less than the theoretical primacy of transcendence are reactivated in modern philosophical thought. This reading of Hegel's thought mounts a critique of modern philosophy's drive to establish subjects that can labor for and seek to achieve self-certainty and self-transparency. By speculatively re-writing religious language and concepts, I argue, Hegel's thought theorizes the ways in which transcendent ideals are nothing but unachievable abstractions that only maim life lived under them. The final chapter argues that Georges Bataille, in formulating the spiritual and methodological imperative of abandoning all hope, untethers the process of self-emptying from any possibility of recuperation or salvation, and articulates a particularly bleak variant of an ungrounded life. Taken together, I argue, these thinkers provide the theoretical tools for the articulation of a new paradigm for ethics - not an ethics of relation to the Other as formulated by Emmanuel Levinas, nor an ethics centered on the cultivation of the self as proposed by Michel Foucault - but an ethics of self-emptying and dispossession, which affirms the anonymous and impersonal life coursing through all selves, all others, and all disciplines.