(PDF) Religion and Representation

2 Religion and Rep Religion and Representation william franke and chance woods In recent years the topic of religion and representation has generated a great deal of scholarly interest. Given the capaciousness of the material, it helps to draw attention to those representative works which have appeared in the most advanced fields across Europe, the United States, and Asia. This review traces the emergence of idiosyncratic discussions of religion and represen- tation in the domains of contemporary theology, critical theory, analytic and Continental philosophy, and literary studies. The chapter is divided into two sections: 1. Philosophical Debates about Religion and Representation is written by Chance Woods and reviews books by Silvia Jonas, Agata Wilczek, and Richard H. Jones; 2. Religious Belief and the Cultural Limits of Representation is written by William Franke, reviews books by Ingolf U. Dalferth, Markus Gabriel, and Longxi Zhang. 1. Philosophical Debates about Religion and Representation Religious culture, praxis, and speculation make visible the vectors of human existence. Of crucial importance here is the problem of representation. Within the sphere of religion, representation is a ‘problem’ primarily be- cause such a term is often used in a wide-ranging manner to encapsulate issues pertaining to divinity (e.g. the representation of God in art or icon- ography) as well as to human culture itself. Indeed, any given culture re- presents its religious dimensions in seemingly endless forms and iterations. Even the overt dismissal of religion, as is common in currently growing expressions of popular atheism, come to re-present the various religions they purport to critique and to repudiate. (It is noteworthy that in many popular bookstores today, the ‘Atheist Section’ is almost always on the last shelf of the ‘Religion’ or ‘Religious Studies’ section.) More to the point, religion, as it has been classically understood, is also invested in dramatizing or The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, ! The English Association (2017) All rights reserved. For permissions, please email:

doi:10.1093/ywcct/mbx002 2 | Religion and Representation demarcating the limits of representation in other noteworthy ways. For example, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have historically instituted prohibitions against idolatrous representations of God. Similarly, today much controversy has arisen over artistic depictions of Islam and its founding prophet Muhammad in European media. What all of this makes clear is that religious representation insinuates itself into every aspect of human culture, whether pious or secular. Moreover, the problem of representation gets to the core of a perennial issue within religious speculation: the limits of representation. Religions, and philosophical expressions of religious doctrine, have historically explored the limits of representation through theorizations of what cannot be said (either about divinity or an experience of a divine presence through mystical rapture or elation). Theologians and philosophers have had various terms to charac- terize these theories about the limits of representation, including the apo- phatic, the ineffable, the non-communicable, and the non-discursive. The academic study of religious culture has taken many forms and pro- ceeded along different methodologies. Perhaps the most well-established methods include those of analytic philosophy, critical theory (which can include ‘Continental’ Philosophy in contradistinction to the ‘analytical’ style of the UK and the USA), and trans-cultural comparative philosophy. In 2016, the most representative exemplars of these respective approaches include those of Silvia Jonas, Agata Wilczek, and Richard H. Jones. In her book, Ineffability and its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy, Jonas takes a self-consciously analytical approach to the ques- tions of ineffability. She avers that the analytic method, which makes precise linguistic expressions based on formal logic the only viable form of philoso- phy, constitutes the best means of exploring the implications of ineffability (or what cannot be said or re-presented). From the outset, Jonas is quick to address the seeming paradox of how a method privileging propositional language can be used to explore the possibility of non-propositional realities (pp. 2–3), though her efforts to alleviate this tension remain largely unsuc- cessful. Her book aims for a ‘comprehensive’ (p. 2) theory of ineffability, paradoxical as that sounds, and heuristically outlines four accounts of ineffa- bility to survey: ineffable properties and objects; ineffable propositions; ineffable content (concrete or abstract entities); and ineffable knowledge. Chapters are dedicated to each of these categories, preceded by an intro- ductory chapter as well as a chapter on terminology. In section 1.4 of the Introduction, Jonas gives ‘A Brief History of Ineffability’ (pp. 10–22). This section of the introduction is worth under- scoring. First, as Jonas notes several times throughout her study, the notion Religion and Representation | 3 of ineffability has a well-established track record in the traditions of reflec- tion, cultural production, and religious praxis. Second, any study which notes the history of the topic under investigation must by necessity be se- lective, though, as exemplified in this book, one’s narration of the history can dictate how one comes to engage the topic itself. Jonas lists as integral to her own history of ineffability the following philosophers and literary writers: Gorgias, Lao Tse, Plotinus, Aquinas, Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Adorno, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Huxley, Beckett, and Celan (p. 10). This list includes many crucial thinkers who have theorized the idea of ineffability along very different lines. However, as is made clear in the full study, Jonas has omitted very pivotal figures, many of whom within single identifiable traditions (e.g. Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Postmodernism), that would have provided needed nuance to her definitions and terms. These figures include Plato (especially his Parmenides), the Neoplatonist Damascius (perhaps the most radical of pagan theorists of ineffability), the Christian Neoplatonist Pseudo- Dionysius the Areopagite, various Kabbalistic thinkers, and several so-called postmodern writers such as Jean-Luc Marion. The second chapter, ‘Terminology’, makes clear the analytic method Jonas wishes to employ by giving precise, even perhaps overly-determined, defin- itions of her philosophical terms. This definitional framework includes six key terms: ‘content’, ‘representations’, ‘experience’, ‘truth/truth-bearers’, ‘ex- pression/expressibility’, and ‘ineffability’ (p. 27). While the extreme efforts to clarify usage of these terms is helpful, the overall impact appears more akin to pettifogging given the varying complexity of ineffability within religious traditions. Importantly, she defines ‘Representations’ as ‘content-bearing mental entities entertained by individuals’ and suggests that they ‘can be propositional as well as non-propositional in form and are, by assumption, always truth-apt’ (p. 32). Such a definition of ‘Representations’ elides crucial differences in how the term has been used even by the catalogue of thinkers Jonas addresses in the introduction. In many respects, this has far-reaching implications for the efficacy of the whole study, viz. that Jonas’ approach to the complicated notion of ineffability appears remarkably detached from cul- tural practice and larger conceptions of metaphysics. Chapters Three through Five argue at length that there is no robust metaphysical account of ineffable properties, objects, propositions, or con- tents, yet Jonas wishes to defend in Chapters Six and Seven the view that there is such a thing as ‘ineffable knowledge’, which is ineffable principally because it cannot be communicated between subjects. Ineffable knowledge, on this account, includes ordinary and extraordinary phenomenal 4 | Religion and Representation experiences of art, religion, and philosophy. Jonas has employed the analyt- ical method impressively in demonstrating how we can nuance differences between describability, expressibility, and ineffability. However, arguably she has merely relocated the ground of the debate from a metaphysical sphere to a subjectivist one. This remains perplexing because the book seeks to give a metaphysical account of ineffability, and yet Jonas has not addressed those previous works (e.g. Plato’s Parmenides) that make ineffability the end-prod- uct of robust metaphysical speculation. She even includes within her sub- jectivist account of ‘ineffable knowledge’ the philosophical example of what she terms ‘idealism’. The reasoning here seems to be that there are many thinkers (such as Kant and Hegel) who adhere to something like an idealist philosophy, but that such a philosophy remains inexpressible because it gets compromised by the very language it uses to describe the mind and the material world. Here again, Jonas could have learned from thinkers such as the late-antique Neoplatonist Damascius, for whom ineffability and the no- tional limits of representation are the apt conclusions of metaphysical argu- mentation about Being. Jonas stresses the importance of religious experience (typified in the example of Teresa of Avila and other ‘mystics’) to substan- tiate her demonstration of ineffable knowledge, but to do this she relies on the attenuated notion of ‘self-acquaintance’ (cf. pp. 166–81) that only moves the goal post when trying to aim for a precise encapsulation of what ineffa- bility accomplishes in religion. Metaphysics by definition is a comprehensive account of reality stemming from first principles, and by extension this entails an inter-subjective mode of exchange. Jonas’ emphasis on ineffable knowledge contained within subjectivist perspectives makes such a meta- physical endeavour seemingly impossible, even if an understanding of these ineffable states is understood in the most precise manner possible to the analytic method. Put another way, ineffability is not something which ‘has’ a metaphysics, but is perhaps better described as a ‘condition’ that results from robust metaphysical speculation (as Plotinus, whom Jonas cites but does not sufficiently engage, demonstrates). While the analytical method proves extremely useful in parsing specific terms related to religious representation (and the limits thereof), the various forms of critical theory and Continental Philosophy have established them- selves as the speculative grounds where alterity, phenomenology, and polit- ical culture are the governing concerns. In Beyond the Limits of Language: Apophasis and Transgression in Contemporary Theoretical Discourse, Agata Wilczek provides a helpful overview of critically theoretical views of apo- phaticism and negative theology as engaged by figures such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Kevin Hart. Wilczek sets the stage for her Religion and Representation | 5 analysis by noting that studies of apophaticism and the limits of representa- tion have enjoyed a remarkable surge in scholarly interest, and she notes that what is conventionally termed postmodern philosophy finds itself often wrestling with the same issues of ineffability that were previously taken as the sole provenance of theological debates. Wilczek succeeds admirably in revealing the points of contact between theology and contemporary philosophy. She astutely notes: ‘Despite numer- ous attempts to delimit it, apophasis remains recalcitrant to all definition. As the experience of the unsayable, it resists any effort of speech to articulate it; all that can be said about it fails to attain anything like it ‘‘essence’’’ (p. 17). Here we discern the palpable differences between Wilczek’s and Jonas’ re- spective approaches. Indeed, as Wilczek demonstrates frequently, critical theory and Continental Philosophy have proven themselves better suited to appreciate the slipperiness of apophasis than analytical philosophy. The latter’s exacting definitions miss the various speculative ‘thrusts’ (p. 21) of apophasis, which, as Wilczek explains, often come ‘to mean the negation of language in the face of what exceeds its possibilities of representation’ (p. 17). Because Wilczek is very aware of how apophatic thinking has evolved over time from Plato to Wittgenstein and beyond, she makes clear the purpose of her study: ‘the goal which is given precedence over all-encom- passing exposition of diffuse presence of apophasis as an influential element in postmodern culture is to demonstrate that apophasis is not merely a discourse on propositional language restricted to one theological tradition nor is it essential only to contemporary thought, but should be viewed as something central to all thought and action which search for a responsible way to address the other’ (p. 22). In this sense, Wilczek’s method is expan- sionist rather than reductionist (as typified in Jonas’ monograph). Wilczek takes Derrida as her point of departure in discussing how apophasis, and the limits of representation generally, come bear on questions of alterity and inter-human existence. The first chapter explores the relationship between Derridean decon- struction and negative theology, especially as it pertains to Derrida’s self- conscious goal of searching for a new kind of language that eschews hierarchy and domination. In her survey of Derrida’s wide-ranging articulations of deconstruction, Wilczek notes that such a critical prerogative was susceptible of a religious or theological application almost from the beginning. If de- construction can meaningfully be described as an exploration of language and its capabilities for establishing totalizing forms of meaning, then its preoccu- pation with the limits of linguistic representation resonate deeply with theo- logical apophaticism. Indeed, Wilczek deftly recapitulates the so-called 6 | Religion and Representation ‘religious turn’ and ‘linguistic turn’ in contemporary postmodern philoso- phy, both of which converge in analyses of apophatic theology. In canvassing the reception of Derrida’s work in recent studies by figures such as Kevin Hart, Mark C. Taylor, and John Caputo, Wilczek demonstrates the polyva- lence of apophaticism for critical theory. Wilczek also extrapolates from the work of these thinkers an important point about Derrida’s project: ‘Derrida’s reading of negative theology is neither a hostile critique nor a deferential and unequivocally enthusiastic reappraisal of negative theology but an attempt to explore radical plurality and heterogeneity of via negativa in order to re-conceptualize it in an alternative way’ (p. 61). For Wilczek, Derrida’s reading of negative theology generates an extremely important principle of representation: non-identity. In Chapter Two, Wilczek explores that she terms the ‘dialogical mode’, which she takes to be central to the Derridean view of language as per- formative. The historical tradition of apophatic theology allows Derrida to pioneer a new, non-logocentric theory of language that resists onto-theo- logical constructions of divinity and personhood. Wilczek focuses on the dramatized dialogue between speakers in Derrida’s ‘Sauf le nom’, writing: ‘The deconstructive speaker expresses his doubts about the apophatic intu- ition of language, the ideal possibility of dispensing with language and any representation altogether in the mystical ascent, in the passage beyond the intelligible itself, which aims toward absolute rarefication of signs, figures, symbols, toward silent union with the ineffable. Instead, he emphasizes that apophasis itself takes place within language and can never be disengaged from it’ (p. 86). Derrida’s reading of the apophatic tradition allows him to tran- scend what he views as the limitations of that tradition. Developing this insight in Chapter Three, Wilczek then explores the idea of ‘linguistic si- lence’ as a link between God and language (cf. pp. 99–100). Wilczek con- ceptualizes silence as a ‘modality of speech’ (p. 100), and more importantly she demonstrates that deconstruction and negative theology, despite Derrida’s overtures on the linkage, have an important affinity in exploring silence as an important dimension of human culture and religious representation. ‘Transgression’ becomes the governing topos of Chapter Four, in which Wilczek traces the influence of negative theology in the works of Maurice Blanchot and George Bataille. Important for our purposes here is Wilczek’s remark that Blanchot’s philosophy and reading of the mystical tradition make clear an important insight: ‘despite language proving its own defeat and impossibility of representation, it still in its very failure serves to perform what it cannot articulate’ (p. 128). Blanchot’s views of language predispose Religion and Representation | 7 him to view literature as the space of human articulation where the impact of apophasis is most legible, albeit as traces of absence or non-totalizing drama- tizations of presence. The idiom of transgression is central to Wilczek’s theory of representation because literature in particular can be dynamic in its own self-subverting (i.e. transgressive) practice. Chapter Five ventures toward a concluding view that inner experience is central to questions of transcendence and transgression. Wilczek suggests that apophatic mystics such as Meister Eckhart exemplify the power of inner experience to transgress against established norms of orthodox thought and pre-determined subjectivity: ‘All the pretensions to get a straightforward access to a literal truth, while remaining within the enclosed order of rep- resentation, become undermined with apophatic writings, which project themselves outside any regimes of representation’ (pp. 173–4). Wilczek’s supreme accomplishment is showing once again how the twentieth-century insights of figures, such as Derrida and Blanchot, recalibrate authentic in- sights from the apophatic tradition on the limits of representation for both religious practice and secular life. If both Jonas and Wilczek demonstrate the trans-historical character of apophatic thinking in Western theology and philosophy, Richard H. Jones goes even further in tracing the trans-cultural importance of ineffability. In his book, Philosophy of Mysticism: Raids on the Ineffable, Jones unites aspects of the analytic philosophy of religion with nuanced coverage of issues frequently viewed as common across Western and Eastern religions. He specifically chooses as his heuristic focus a philosophy of mysticism (as opposed to a phil- osophy of the unsayable or to a postmodern theory of language), which for him is a wide enough conception to encapsulate theories of ineffability, physical mystical experiences, and mystical pretensions to absolute meta- physical truth. The value of this approach inheres in its nuanced separation of discrete aspects of religious praxis as well as in its subtle demarcations between specific metaphysical suppositions. In the brief preface to his study, Jones positions himself methodologically in relation to the analytic philosophy of religion as well as what he terms ‘postmodernist’ views of religious experience. Jones’ impressive study is the first of such a scope since William Stace’s seminal studies of mysticism. In Chapter One, Jones provides a typology of mystical experience, differentiating between ‘extrovertive’ and ‘introvertive’ (cf. pp. 12–21). The issues at play here are whether the internal states of various mystics across the spectrum correspond to absolute metaphysical truth-claims, and also whether the external experiences of mystics (e.g. feelings of mystical rapture) correspond to an underlying psychological 8 | Religion and Representation drama (as Stace famously outlined), or to an outside divine source that escapes analysis. Jones skillfully shows the complexities and difficulties for the modern (western) philosopher in understanding what exactly is being represented in the texts of various mystics. The perennial problem of reli- gious studies resurfaces: are the experiences of mystics narrated in their texts always commensurate with the actual experiences themselves? This problem is explored further in Chapter Two’s investigation of the possible connections between knowledge and mystical experience. Many traditions, east and west, would lead the modern researcher to believe that there are profound epi- stemic issues at play in mystical experience, the foremost being the possi- bility of non-traditional forms of knowing. The dispute, Jones remarks, ‘comes down to whether we give more weight to what the mystics say or to what philosophers say about the nature of other experiences’ (p. 69). The strong claim that mystical knowledge does not exist in a philosoph- ically transparent manner leads Chapter Three. In this respect, Jones differs markedly from Jonas’ concluding view that there is such a thing as ineffable knowledge that is incommunicable. For Jones, the examples of mystical experience ranging from Christianity to Buddhism and Hinduism, are far too different for ‘mystical experiences to guarantee their own cognivity’ (p. 117). He admits that mystics may have a genuine experience of some tran- scendent reality, but he also maintains that the mystics themselves are not the sole guarantors of meaning in these cases because they are not exploring the metaphysical truths in a discursive manner fitting only for philosophy. In rejecting forms of mystical knowledge, Jones continues in Chapter Four to critique another paradigm of analysis: naturalistic accounts of mys- tical and religious experience. Even if philosophers cannot rely on mystics to safeguard, substantiate, or dramatize absolute metaphysical truths, they equally cannot rely on modern cognitive science to explain away these truth claims either. Jones writes, ‘merely identifying the bases in the body that permit mystical experiences will not determine whether the experiences are insights, and so it does not provide a stronger empirical case for either side of this philosophical dispute’ (p. 169). Chapters Five and Six integrate the insights of the previous chapters by addressing specifically the problem of representation and ineffability. After outlining why the ideas of subjectivity and selfhood are integral to any discussion of mystical experience, Jones explains, ‘the mere use of language introduces a mode of awareness foreign to experiencing the reality mystic- ally. When we speak of phenomenal objects, we merely rearrange the con- tent of our ordinary awareness-the state of awareness remains the same’ (p. 206). Jones attempts to alleviate much of the conceptual ambiguity Religion and Representation | 9 circulating around the problem of ineffability by formulating what he calls the ‘mirror theory of language’: ‘The problem is not that language neces- sarily differentiates items, but the implicit assumption that grammatical status dictates the ontic status of the referents’ (p. 210). Crucially, this method rejects absolute ineffability for the more hermeneutically challenging and rewarding venture of interpreting the language of mystics differently than other phenomena. Moreover, Jones concludes that the endeavour of making mystical language intelligible to philosophical analysis, does not com- promise the initial insights of mystics if we initially acknowledge the differ- ences in how language is used, and subsequently understood. Jones finally turns to mysticism’s relationship with science, rationality, and morality in Chapters Seven through Nine, wherein he makes the strong claim that mys- tical experiences do not entail heightened moral behaviour. The ultimate importance of Jones’ study for the question of religion and representation, can be found in his refusal to accept John Hick’s thesis that the experiences of various mystics, across the cultural spectrum, refer to the same Ground or the Real. For Jones, this stance cannot be acceptable to a modern philosopher for several important reasons. First, it has been demon- strated that the cultural particularities of mystics vary to a far too great extent to be collapsible into one another. Given the mirror theory of lan- guage, the specific articulations of different mystical experiences will be inflected with a wide array of particular referents that are untranslatable. This only adds another interpretative layer to the problem of ineffability. If metaphysical insights are inexpressible tout court, they are not made any more intelligible by assimilation to other cultural examples of mysticism. Second, the scientist, the philosopher, and the non-mystical religious be- liever, all must acknowledge they are representing their understanding of mystical experiences through analytical categories, and not the insights of those experiences themselves. Jones is to be commended for establishing clear parameters for accepting how forms of mystical experience are represented: in the minds of the mystics themselves, in the theories of scientific demonstration, in the con- straints of religious orthodoxy, and the criteria of modern philosophy. Jones establishes a fruitful way of acknowledging how we are always implicated in the endeavour of re-presenting mystical experience, just as mystics them- selves are implicated in re-presenting their own experiences through the attenuated medium of language. The incisive studies of Jonas, Wilczek, and Jones make clear that the topic of religion and representation necessarily involves discussions of related issues pertaining to cultural studies, philosophical analysis, and theological 10 | Religion and Representation speculation. More importantly, these studies hold in common the underlying premise that any modern academic study of religion and representation must take seriously the limits of representation broadly conceived. In this respect, it is important to attend to specific issues in recent debates about the nature of existence, the question of transcendence, and the larger insinuation of these problems of thought into world literature. 2. Religious Belief and the Cultural Limits of Representation Religion takes us to the limits of what can be said, represented, and thought. In doing so, it demarcates one of the frontiers of critical and cultural theory. Methodologies of religious knowing, turn on how linguistic signs and cul- tural symbols relate to persons and powers that cannot be rendered fully present in an empirical universe, except indirectly and non-objectively. Although the practice of religion is often verbal and based on language, the intended object of religious experience is ultimately what cannot be properly expressed in language. Something like this was Wittgenstein’s understanding of value discourses in ethics, aesthetics, and religion alike. There are innumerable ways of approaching this religious limit to represen- tation. The second part of this chapter considers some speculative discourses in philosophy of religion and theology, as well as in criticism of literature and the arts, that test and challenge the limits of representation in their relevance particularly to religion and theology. Ingolf U. Dalferth’s Transzendenz und säkulare Welt: Lebensorientierung an lezter Gegenwart (Transcendence and the Secular World: Life-Orientation to Ultimate Presence), gathers together many articles that have appeared separately in order to forge the lineaments of a fundamental theology and theory of religion. Although typically, Roman Catholicism fosters such theologies and theories, this work breathes rather the spirit of evangelical Christianity and brilliantly represents the intellectual strengths and challenges of this approach. Some key pieces of this book are available in English translation in The Presence and Absence of God, ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth (Mohr Siebeck [2009]). Transzendenz und säkulare Welt confronts the most basic issues entailed in Christian belief through original reflections on the nature of signs in relation to action, and on the theory of human decision with reference to a tran- scendent God who is revealed by grace. Dalferth analyses in depth, various modes of negativity and alterity, of possibility and impossibility. He remains lucid, systematic, and rigorous, in dealing with some of the most difficult and complicated theoretical issues in philosophy and theology. But crucial to Religion and Representation | 11 his whole approach, which could be compared in this respect to Karl Barth’s, is that the initiative has to come from God; otherwise, all our human efforts are in vain. The great question of the Other and of its ability to speak to us dom- inates critical theory. Dalferth addresses this issue from the unique culture- critical standpoint of evangelical Christianity. He distinguishes between vari- ous forms of human self-transcendence, whereby humans exceed their own limits, and the transcendence of God. For Dalferth, transcendence is first God’s own self-transcendence in creating an immanent sphere of what is not himself, namely, the world. God then has the prerogative of revealing himself within the immanent sphere that otherwise manifests no sign of him and is in this sense a secular world. Revelation of the transcendent in the immanent is in principle impossible, but God can nevertheless do it. Fundamentally, Dalferth explains how Christian faith responds to God in a way that renders possible what is otherwise impossible for us, worldly beings that we are—namely, an orientation to transcendent reality. His is a reflective, critical discourse about God, but it acknowledges God alone as the source of all such insight and even of such a discourse’s very possibility. This theology is not about human capabilities or human culture—except in maintaining that the transcendence of God can be found only in and through critique of human culture in its orientation to ends that remain within the sphere of worldly immanence. Everything we think and do is in this worldly sphere; everything comes from humans and their creativity—except in the perspective opened by faith, in which the world and life take on a new sense, one given from God. Human forms of self-transcendence, whether aesthetic or ethical or religious, are so many ways of not reaching what Dalferth considers to be the only true and authentic transcendence—the self- transcendence of God. This remarkable book, constituting something like a systematic evangel- ical theology in brief compass and addressed to our particular historical moment, welds together a sociology of secularity and a philosophical theory of transcendence. I say ‘systematic’ not because the book attempts a comprehensive recapitulation of Christian doctrine, but because it offers very rigorously, and consecutively, reasoned discussions of key topics from the theory of action to modal logic in a manner that links these fields into a unified, coherent philosophical vision, of the ultimate ends of human life and existence. The analyses of action and decision, of limits and boundaries, of reason versus belief and the relationship between transcendence and imma- nence, all build on each other to produce a systematic way of understanding exactly what Christian faith calls to and on what basis. Christian faith is 12 | Religion and Representation defined in its uniqueness as a way of existing that makes it no less possible, or pertinent, in today’s globalized secular world than in any previous age. The decision of faith, in this view, is not relative to culture and history. It responds directly to the call of God. Dalferth affirms unequivocally, the priority of transcendence over imma- nence and that there is immanence at all, only because it is granted by God’s creative act of differentiating himself from what he creates. The creation is nothing that has any independent being. God’s making a radical distinction within Transcendence by creating a world that is other than himself, made out of nothing (ex nihilo) rather than out of God or the divine substance, is the origin of a true distinction between transcendence and immanence. This is not any kind of distinction that we are capable of making. God-created immanence emerges in correlation with God’s transcendence. It cannot be made or even verified by human reason. Humans must pass to another register, one of receiving a gift, of receiving even themselves as a gift from an Other whom they know only through the gift of revelation from this Other and through faith in and as the gift to receive it. There is thus no reciprocity at all in this model. Revelation and faith are not matters of examining and accurately representing the world. The world gives no par- ticular sign of anything that is not worldly. Christianity thoroughly disen- chants and secularizes the world. It is predicated on radical difference between God and the world. Dalferth maintains that we destroy the sense of both immanence and transcendence by positing a continuum between them. In spite of being correlative, these terms are not symmetrical for him. They are rather com- plete alternatives: the marked (immanence) and the unmarked (transcend- ence), as Niklas Luhmann would put it. Immanence can be given only within the horizon of transcendence—transcendence alone enables such a differen- tiation—but the reverse is not true. Of course, human inventions or repre- sentations of transcendence are rife, but being only human productions they remain on the worldly side of the divide between true transcendence and immanence. Absolute transcendence can be defined as what must always be presupposed in order to make the distinction between transcendence and immanence. There can be no absolute immanence because any definition of it includes already a relation to transcendence. ‘Only in God, or in the horizon of God, can the difference between immanence and transcendence be made’ (p. 105). Since we can never grasp transcendence objectively but can only orient ourselves to it, the key issue concerning transcendence, is that of from where it is presented and defined. Any culturally and historically embedded approach Religion and Representation | 13 to transcendence, produces a culturally and historically, relative interpret- ation of what transcendence might mean and be. These interpretations and ideas remain in certain respects inextricably immanent to specific contexts. The real question is whether transcendence can somehow present and define itself? Can it give itself to and for human understanding and experience? Can it become present and actual for us as unconditioned—or as the Unconditioned? This might well seem impossible because human receptivity is always, in any case, the condition of any such gift or communication. But this impossibility itself is a phenomenon and state that can be experienced and defined. The experience of impossibility can offer an apophatic basis for approaching what transcends human understanding and definition. In classical Christianity, the Creator transcends the creation, which is wholly contingent. One can speak of a transcendent Difference of the Creator from the creation. However, in a second step, this separation entails totally blending out the Creator from the creation. The creation is without any determinate presence of the Creator within it; ‘creation’ is eventually apprehended as the meaningless, mechanistic universe of empirical science. Christianity has the double role of affirming the total transcendence of God but also of catalyzing apprehension of the autonomy of the world, which becomes a secular domain. At the heart of Dalferth’s book and its analysis of transcendence and immanence, is the thesis that Christianity makes possible and actually realizes, the disenchantment of the world. The difference between godly transcendence and worldly immanence, if it is made by human means and historical institutions (e.g. monasteries or de- claredly lay nation-states), undermines the authentic distinction that only God can make and that can serve for orientation for humans, and their history, towards a truly divine transcendence that they cannot grasp or fathom. Not human forms of horizontal self-transcendence, but only God’s self-transcen- dence, is the absolute transcendence that is decisive for a Christian orientation to living (p. 110). This theological Difference is not a humanly made but a God-enacted truth. It is, first, for God, who, in creating, differentiates himself from an other, the world, which he creates. This real difference between transcendence and immanence can be made only by God himself because it is fundamentally the self-differentiation of the Creator from the creation. The world as a whole as differentiated from God is thereby disenchanted. Nevertheless, God is present in the world; in fact, he is universally present, not just in holy shrines and consecrated sites. Although universally present rather than only in certain phenomena, divine Transcendence is, nevertheless, most concretely present in humans. The divine Transcendence becomes present in immanence particularly 14 | Religion and Representation through the Word. The God/world difference, such as we are able to grasp it, is for humans. God is present for Christian belief in the Incarnation, and then, even in the absence of Jesus on earth, Christ is present in the sacra- ments. The sacraments, unlike other signs, make present what they signify. Material phenomena, by their sacramental use and through the Word, become signs of God’s presence. The secular world is produced by a God who distinguishes himself fully from the world and establishes therein no intrinsic differences between the holy and the profane. A wholly transcendent God implies a wholly immanent world, a secular world. Nevertheless, the absolute transcendence of God allows and even first enables his unlimited presence in the world. God’s transcendence, as understood in Christianity, does not make him remote or unattainable. It is rather the condition of his always greater nearness to and intimacy with the world. His presence then arises from its inner depths, from the roots of its existence, rather than from any position outside or alongside it. Humanity is the place of either perceiving this presence or of not receiv- ing it—by ignorance or refusal. Since God is no longer visible in any worldly form of difference, humanity in its relation to the holy is free and divides into belief and unbelief. At this stage, the theological or Christian difference, asserts Dalferth, can be shown only by its contradiction of innerworldly transcendence. A clear difference between God and world is necessary to avoid idolatry, with respect to God, and robotization of the human. But the absolute Difference of Transcendence and immanence remains God’s alone and is absolutely different from man’s self-transcendence. The crucial point is that Transcendence itself, rather than human self- transcendence, discloses its presence to humans. Humans cannot discover it on their own. Absolute transcendence is not a dimension of immanence; transcendence first freely grants immanence to be at all. A self-transcending of God, in creating an Other, the world, is its condition of possibility. God can transcend the Difference of transcendence and immanence because he creates this Difference. Humanity is finite and cannot transcend the Difference of absolute transcendence but only the finite differences that it makes for itself. As long as transcendence is taken as a concept, or an idea that we can reason about, this radically other dimension remains invisible and is simply missed. It is not experienced as coming to us in the form of a gift of presence that can be received in our immanence because what is impossible for us is, nevertheless, granted us from beyond and above our capabilities. Those who want to hear and know nothing about such an (im)possibility, about the possibility of a (for us) impossible gift that underlies all the Religion and Representation | 15 possibilities that we can accomplish, have a programme of their own for laying down a general basis for knowledge. They are determined that it must be humanly intelligible. Their project is one of human empowerment. Imperative for them is that we be able to establish by our intrinsic capabil- ities (our clear and distinct perceptions) the foundations for our own know- ing. But it is possible, and may in some ways be most human, to imagine doing this not on our own but rather in response to an Other who loves and leads and invites us to the task. The logic here is purely relational. Dalferth emphasizes that ‘transcendence’ designates no object, no-thing, but rather orients life and thinking to what can be called religious experience of the last reality or presence (‘letzte Gegenwart’). Transcendence is a characteristic not of phenomena but of our relation to them. In fact, there is nothing in the world that marks it, nothing from which God can be inferred. Transcendence is the unmarked. In our technically oriented and commanded culture today, there is very little understanding of what it means to believe in God and to live in an orientation to divine presence and final reality. Dalferth offers a masterly account of what this type of belief in itself, purified of extraneous motivations and self-deceptions, would entail; he witnesses to the relationship to God that originates and renders it possible. Although the book is composed largely of separately published articles pieced together, the coherence of the author’s total vision is brought out first and magisterially, in the overarching frame of the book. Marcus Gabriel, in Warum es die Welt nicht gibt (Why the World Does not Exist), discusses in a more purely philosophical vein, fundamental ontological questions entailing our beliefs and orientations to ‘fields of sense’ (Sinnfelder), or contexts of meaning. Gabriel marshals philosophical argu- ments from Western traditions, evoking them without detail but in their essential outlines, against the metaphysical quest to define the world as a whole. This quest is the basic project of modern science. The problem is that it reduces the world to a world-picture, as Martin Heidegger incisively demonstrated in ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’ [1938]). For anything to exist, it must come forth and appear in a field of sense. The existence, then, of everything—the world—would require a compre- hensive all-embracing field of sense. But this is a chimera, since fields of sense do not themselves exist, do not themselves come forth or appear in the field of sense—not, in any case, in the field of sense that would be the definitive context for all appearings, or happenings, or events, that occur in the world. Fields of sense operate instead as an unending series of tran- sitions from one to another in their interlocking and interweaving or 16 | Religion and Representation Verschachtelung (Chinese boxing, one inside the other). The world (or Whole) as such does not exist but rather consists in these configurations of transitions (p. 125). We forget ourselves and our place in the world when we attempt to represent it objectively, or as existing as such. Life is rather a journeying through endless fields of sense (p. 123) imbricated always on further fields of sense. These are mostly well-worn arguments in phenomenological philoso- phy and its critique of scientific objectivity. Yet Gabriel’s book has made something of a sensation. This is, perhaps, due to its remarkably accessible language and to its exposition of basic insights of phenomenological thought more than to highly original views, the iconoclastic gesture of the title notwithstanding. Nevertheless, Gabriel forges his own vocabulary to make these ideas perspicuous in some strikingly novel ways. Gabriel is also a major media phenomenon, achieving unparalleled no- toriety as a philosopher, reportedly the youngest ever to hold a university chair in Germany—taking that Guinness world record away from F.W.J. Schelling. Certainly, no small part of the interest he arouses is due to his sensational status as a prodigy, a Wunderkind. What is most appreciable in highly visible public venues, after all, is image, even more than dialectical dexterity. What I appreciate most about Gabriel’s work is its ease and fluency in moving among diverse domains of philosophy and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). His language is free of jargon—sometimes it is so familiarly colloquial that one wonders if it makes things seem too familiar and obvious. For philosophical thinking of lasting value and significance requires some- thing more, something that is more likely to meet with consternation and lack of immediate resonance in the more superficial types of public forums and communications media. Like Michel Onfrey in France, Gabriel brings philosophy to a level where it can be consumed much like other forms of information. However, at the antipodes from Michel Onfrey, who constantly attacks God and religion, Gabriel is their defender and makes a case for them, in perfectly secular philosophical terms, against the pretensions of science to monopolize the field of knowledge. The question of God, how- ever, comes up in the much broader context of the question of the real as a whole. Already Nietzsche (another phenomenal early bloomer and youthful holder of a university chair) had been acutely and painfully aware that the death of God goes in lockstep with a loss of the real and leads to nihilism. Gabriel’s approach to resolving this problem is in crucial respects an inver- sion of Nietzsche’s. He calls it a ‘New Realism’. Gabriel’s ‘New Realist’ approach to ontology swims with a current that is gaining momentum across scientific disciplines and humanities fields alike. Religion and Representation | 17 The excesses of poststructuralism are contested on all sides today; its sup- posed reduction of the real to a construction in language, following Derrida’s misunderstood motto: ‘il n’y a pas de hors texte’ (‘there is nothing outside the text’), is now typically rejected with impatience, if not indignation. We may agree that Constructivism’s thesis that everything is constructed proves unsustainable, but the New Realism’s counter-thesis, the proclamation that unconstructed facts exist and that we know things in themselves, seems also to posit its object as cut off from some part of the context necessary for its being intelligible. That real facts and things that are not merely constructions exist does not mean that we have unmediated access to them. How can we ignore the cultural filtering and blend out the facts of mental, social, and linguistic construction that are involved in all of our thoughts and statements concerning reality or real things? There may well be something offensive or exaggerated about the metaphysical thesis that all that is consists merely in constructions, but there is also something accurate and true in observing the factors of human shaping and forging in all our articulate and reflective expressions of knowing. ‘Facticity’ itself is grasped by us through a concept that is not simply a natural given but rather a human and cultural fashioning of what we define as facts (see pp. 165–7). To turn reality over to ‘realism’ as a philosophy with a label and a programme, is somewhat paradoxical, when the driving insight is that reality has an existence and structure of its own that is completely independent of our human constructions. However, the standpoint developed by the so- called New Realism affirms the correlativity of subject and object, the sub- ject always being already somehow in the reality that is observed as object. This thread binds together Gabriel’s evolution from a position in continental philosophy associated with Žižek to his reception of Anglo-American cur- rents, notably Hilary Putnam’s thought, and an attempt to mediate between these quite different approaches to philosophizing. Both question the limits of secular, scientific reason and its self-confidence, its pretense of having a definitive monopoly of access to truth and the real world. Gabriel points to an ironic twist in Max Weber’s analysis of the disen- chantment of the universe through modern science and social processes of rationalization. Weber’s famous lecture ‘Science as Profession’ (Wissenschaft als Beruf, 1917) actually emphasizes the lack of any overview, or general understanding, of the processes and technologies on which our daily lives depend in modern times—from airplanes to automobiles to nuclear physics. The notion of a single all-embracing rationality that guides this drive to secularization and social differentiation is an illusion in the light Gabriel’s demonstration that the world—a total order of the real or a last and 18 | Religion and Representation all-encompassing field of sense for all fields of sense—does not exist. This sociological irony is found by Gabriel likewise in Niklas Luhmann’s systems analyses, which belie the assumption that a single continuum of rationality (Rationalitätskontinuum, p. 182), underlies all the different self-differentiating systems that make up society. This assumption reflects an inherited old- European belief in magical powers that was transferred on to science, which is itself exposed ironically thereby as a kind of faith. Science is made into an idol and is used to battle down the (presumably) demonstrably false gods of religion. This scenario is based on an idea of truth proper to a science convinced of its superiority, an idea that Gabriel claims to prove is definitively false. Alongside religion, art is another realm of human consciousness and creativity in which the shortcomings and impasses of a scientistic or natur- alist way of understanding knowledge become evident. Art involves reflec- tion, not just on objects, but on the way they are given to be experienced and are expressed. Poetry expresses not just a state of affairs, fictive or real, but self-reflexively turns attention on how whatever it says is said. It concerns Saying as well as the said, and, in particular, it brings to light the mysterious modes of meeting up that obtain between language and reality. Artworks are reflective fields of sense in which objects appear together with their sense and in endless variations (p. 231). The superlatively significant fact that objects appear in fields of sense becomes visible in works of art. Art can by such means free us from the error of thinking that the world exists. Normally we see only objects. They hide the fields of sense from us against which alone they, nevertheless, are able to appear. Objects thus stand between us and the world and induce us to believe that the world as such exists. Art, however, brings the play of fields of sense into view as consti- tutive of objects and therewith dissolves our illusion that the world exists— that it is itself just another object. On the contrary, an artwork of Abstract Expressionism like Malevitch’s ‘Black Square on White Background’, shows symbolically that every object appears in a field of sense and, thereby, pre- vents the usual world from being presumed to stand behind objects. Malevitch’s artistic technique, which he called Suprematism, empties the world and frees us from the erroneous idea that an all-embracing field of sense exists. For Gabriel, there is and can be no such single order to which all things conform. He emphasizes the infinity of the fields of sense in which any object appears and therewith the infinity of possible views through which it can be apprehended. The good news of Gabriel’s sense-field ontology, with this endless play of perspectives, is that we are free: there is no world that Religion and Representation | 19 constrains our perception and creativity (p. 254). Such is the meaning of being (‘der Sinn von Sein’), in Heidegger’s terms, whom Gabriel persistently evokes. Also like Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy in this respect, Gabriel is a philosopher of sense. The non-existence of the world triggers an explo- sion of sense. Sense is always already there in any objects that emerge anywhere. We cannot escape it. There is nothing behind it or before it that could ground or contain it in a structure that would be the world. The endless proliferation of fields of sense is the only underlying reality that we can know. The reality of things is itself only ever apprehended as sense. Gabriel distinguishes two sorts of religion. One type explains everything by a principle like God or Naturalism, and in these terms the scientific world-view is a religion. This he calls fetishism. The other sort of religion is turned toward the infinite and its ungraspability. These alternatives cor- respond to what I would distinguish as positive and negative theology, or as dogmatic versus apophatic religion. Paralleling such a schema, Gabriel div- ides a closely related book, Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (EdinburghUP [2015]), into two parts: Negative Ontology (Part 1) and Positive Ontology (Part 2). This division repeats the breakdown into apo- phatic and kataphatic theologies that has been fundamental to theological ontology ever since Dionysius the Areopagite’s treatises On Divine Names and Mystical Theology. In fact, Gabriel’s philosophy comes to a recognition of God as part of our normative self-understanding as existing beings. He makes out a case for such recognition with reference especially to Kierkegaard. We require max- imal distance from ourselves in order to avoid the reduction of ourselves to just some specific field of objects and so as to direct us to consider instead, the open field of sense that is essential to our make-up as Geist or spirit. We relate to ourselves through our relations to others, and these relations are potentially unlimited. Since there is no principle that enables us to know the world, we are rather in a state of seeking for knowledge even of ourselves (in Heidegger’s terms, our ‘being’ is ‘an issue for itself’), and this uncircum- scribed field of sense-seeking is what ‘God’ stands for. In this respect, reli- gion is the opposite of an explanation of the world (‘Religion ist das Gegenteil einer Welterklärung’, p. 211) such as science is determined to furnish. Gabriel’s God is anything but an object or Superobject that guar- antees the meaning of life. For him, unquestionably God exists (so do fic- tional persons or entities) but the question remains of which field of sense underwrites this divine existence (‘gibt es Gott natürlich, die Frage ist nur, in welchem Sinnfeld’, p. 208). 20 | Religion and Representation I believe that Gabriel could just as easily and coherently say that of course the world does exist but not as an object: it exists rather as a figure for the All. The question is one of which fields of sense enable us to make what kind of sense of the notion of a world, or of some kind of total ambit of every- thing that appears, even though such a thing cannot itself appear as an object. Yet this does not make such context any the less real. Gabriel’s is a non- objective ontology that maintains, against scientific or naturalistic reduction- ism, the vigorous and consequential existence of what scientific investigation of the empirical object-world cannot discern. The provocation of his book, and more specifically of its title, is to deny the existence of something that is usually taken for granted, namely, the world. But, even more provocatively, his philosophy asserts the existence of God and other non-objects, that philosophers are accustomed to consider as purely articles of belief for those with faith, rather than as legitimate constitutive parts of a philosophical ontology. God’s existence has so often been denied that the greater challenge has become that of understanding how it is possible, philosophically, to conceive of God as existing. Gabriel’s answer is that God exists in the open search of human spirit for knowledge of itself, since such knowledge passes through knowledge of others but never grasps itself as an object or even as a field of sense. God is grasped only non-objectively in the ongoing search for sense that is constitutive of human being. This is an ontology that, I believe, applies equally to God and the world. It is not unprecedented, but is implicit in broad swathes of philosophical and religious tradition and becomes explicit in existential religious philosophies such as Kierkegaard’s. The sense of religion, discussed specifically in Chapter Six of Why the World Does not Exist, comes from recognition of our limits. The history of culture shows our configurations of spirit, human and divine, in the face of the lack of a total explanation of the world. Religion is about the ways in which God does not empirically or objectively exist; on that basis, religion guides the human spirit in its seeking for itself and for its grounding rather through the making of sense. This kind of place for religion would not be enough for Dalferth. Not just recognition of human limits but receptivity to transcendence, to what human spirit can never give itself, is the challenge posed by Dalferth’s theology. Gabriel offers a ‘negative ontology’, Dalferth a positive and revealed theology. Both recognize that their approaches to thinking are grounded in recognition of human limits vis-à-vis, what in history and tradition, has been recognized as the divine. And both lean on the fundamental insights of negative or apophatic theology. They orient themselves by relation to the anti-idolatry traditions at the inception of Religion and Representation | 21 religious critique in the Bible, and in the critique of mythos, by logos at the beginnings of philosophical reflection. In another way, this interface with the unsayable is what is at stake in Longxi Zhang’s From Comparison to World Literature as well. Without doubt, encounter with the intercultural and interreligious, has become one of the crucial aspects of critical theory in our current climate of global transform- ation with the worldwide convulsions it engenders. The intercultural con- stitutes one of the major challenges to many of the projects comprised under the pervasive historical movement that we call globalization. Intercultural contact confronts us with certain tenacious limits and barriers to under- standing and saying. Longxi Zhang has been addressing the problems of representation and its limits in this intercultural perspective for many decades, starting from his landmark book, The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (DukeUP [1992]). He has pursued and developed these important lines of reflection in East-West comparative literature and religion in Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (StanfordUP [1998]); and Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (CornellUP [2005]). In From Comparison to World Literature, Zhang writes at length about Qian Zohngshu (1910–98) as a scholar and writer, whose unmatched mastery in both his own native Chinese traditions and in Western humanities, enabled him to become an outstanding pioneer of world literature. The qualities that Zhang admires and valorizes about this fascinating figure of an earlier generation, whose legacy Zhang carries for- ward, apply equally to Zhang himself. He treats a remarkable range of subjects from both traditions with dexterous detail and in an unrestricted, global perspective. The first three chapters of From Comparison to World Literature lay out the theoretical basis for recognizing comparison as an inescapable modus operandi of thought and language. Zhang emphasizes the necessity of comparison within, as well as between, cultures. This emphasis counters the tendency of highly influential interpreters like François Jullien and Roger Ames, to focus some- what exclusively, or unequally, on the differences between cultures, notably China and the West, with their ‘contrastive method’. Based on the necessity to interpret texts in their own contexts and in terms of their indigenous cultures of origin, the contrastive approach has an effect of isolating cultures and traditions from one another. Zhang, by contrast (and there is some irony here), wishes to bring out human universals and the ability of texts to communicate across cultural divides. This orientation is inherent in the 22 | Religion and Representation project of understanding texts as world literature, which becomes the focus of the three final chapters of Zhang’s book. A solution to, or at least some kind of mediation of, this conflict between comparative and contrastive methods requires us to distinguish between what is and what is not universal in culture. Propositional knowledge and information is formulated in culturally specific terms and needs to be under- stood in its specific cultural-historical context. But there are other levels of communication that may be even more important and that do not depend so much on the differential sense or content of words, as on the contact es- tablished between communicators and on the ability of something, some form of inspiration, to be transmitted into new contexts and to transform them. It is no longer possible to control, certainly not by logical methods that define cognitive content, exactly what is transferred. Instead, an open mode of reference to the infinite and an ongoing generative production of concepts, connects cultures in the dimension that I call ‘apophatic’. Their determinate concepts break down so as to include and become contaminated by what they initially exclude. Zhang rebels against a certain postmodern rejection of comparison in the exaltation of difference without hierarchy that has taken place in the name of ‘deconstruction’, or of other recent methodologies, or ideologies. He tar- gets, in particular, Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (Verso [2013]). He deplores the shallowing out of this type of critique, and he argues that the incommensurability thesis is self-contra- dictory. Indeed, some kind of sameness or commonality between cultures needs always to be presupposed, even in order to be negated in the gesture of pointing up its limits. Zhang points to the tendency to hallow cultural difference, exalting it to the status of a sacred cow and, thereby, forbidding interesting cross-cultural comparisons. Paradoxically, difference, too, can become a self-identical idol standing in the way of the free play of imagin- ation in forging the metaphorical links that make up our world of culture and provide possibilities of limitless connection with other cultures. He calls attention to the ‘complexity of difference’, emphasizing individual differ- ences within cultures that escape generalization. Such internal variations risk being blended out by too sharp a focus on generic cultural difference. Zhang’s banner unfurls under the aegis of ‘comparison’ and often with the motto of ‘affinity’: these terms are not to be obliterated by ‘difference’ and ‘incommensurability’. This approach does, demonstrably, lead Zhang to a very productive practice of comparative study. There are, nevertheless, some far-reaching reasons for caution about comparative method that Zhang tends to pass over Religion and Representation | 23 in silence. The trouble with comparison is that it tends inevitably to objectify what it compares. It turns cultures or traditions, which are dynamic move- ments and evolving trajectories, into the objects of its comparisons. Things generally have to be fixed and defined in order to establish and articulate a comparison. Comparative philosophers have been reaching for alternative models. They have taken recourse to speaking from and within the space between cultures. They have been devising methods of interacting, obliquely, with traditions, and taking up positions in the margins of what remain amorphous bodies of texts without clear definition. They do so in order to avoid the objectifying schematization involved in having an overview of some subject matter that can then be compared, in its globality, to another. By such means, comparison-phobic interpreters aim to avoid any claim to be in control of the field of comparison and to be able to assess it as a whole, producing a panoramic picture. The inevitability of comparison insisted on by Zhang is a fundamental predicament, and we are indebted to him for highlighting it, and for demonstrating its potential fecundity with his own comparative studies. But we also need to pay attention to the limitations and liabilities inherent in the most familiar procedures of comparison. The latter need to be countered by critical and, especially, by self-critical consciousness. The exceptional richness of Zhang’s discourse lies in the range and scope of materials that it brings together in a truly global perspective on literature and culture. Zhang is able to bring out uncanny coincidences and serendip- itous similarities, especially between Chinese and Western literatures, taken in a very broad sense. In this book, he encompasses particularly historical and philosophical, together with imaginative and religious, literature. The in- ternal three chapters (four to six), bring to focus some characteristic features necessary for understanding China in a cross-cultural perspective, disman- tling a number of widely accepted stereotypes, while the concluding four chapters (seven to ten), develop Zhang’s ideal of an emerging world litera- ture and its corresponding poetics and theory. This global approach is what he compellingly envisages as the future horizon of literary study. Of course, it must not be allowed to eclipse or amalgamate local perspectives but should rather, stimulate interaction between them, and even deepen, the apprehen- sion of difference. Books Reviewed Dalferth, Ingolf U. Transzendenz und säkulare Welt: Lebensorientierung an letzter Gegenwart. Mohr Siebeck. [2015] pp. 293. pb ?34 ISBN 9 7831 6153 8360. 24 | Religion and Representation Gabriel, Markus. Why the World Does not Exist. Polity Press. [2015] pp. 200. pb $16.95 ISBN 9 7807 4568 7575 (trans. Gregory S. Moss of Warum es die Welt nicht gibt, Ullstein [2013]). Jonas, Silvia. Ineffability and its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan. [2016] pp. 226. hb $99 ISBN 9 7811 3757 9546. Jones, Richard H. Philosophy of Mysticism: Raids on the Ineffable. State University of New York Press. [2016] pp. 438. hb $95 ISBN 9 7814 3846 1199. Wilczek, Agata. Beyond the Limits of Language: Apophasis and Transgression in Contemporary Theoretical Discourse. Peter Lang. [2016] pp. 195. $58.95 ISBN 9 7836 3167 0286. Zhang, Longxi. From Comparison to World Literature. SUNY Press. [2015] pp. 202. hb $80 ISBN 9 7814 3845 4719.