Insofar as hope is expressed as an expectation for a better and more fulfilling future, it would seem that hope is an auspicious desire that is necessary for human persistence. Religious and secular traditions share a commitment to practicing hope. Alongside faith and charity, hope is one of the primary virtues within the Christian tradition; and as Jeffrey Stout persuasively argues in Democracy and Tradition, hope is essential for the endurance of an American democratic ethos in the face of increasing discontent. Moreover, a general commitment to a future that departs from the current state of affairs would seem indispensable for populations who have suffered the ravages of capitalism, war, and empire. (Here we might think of the World Social Forum’s slogan, “another world is possible” as an example of the connection between hope, imagination, and resistance.) And yet certain articulations of hope generate concerns about its function in sedimenting the very conditions that foreclose something better. According to an author like Georges Bataille, future-oriented projects might be inescapable for human subjects, yet this tendency to instrumentalize the present for future accumulation undermines the potential for intimacy, ecstasy, and “in the moment” experiences. Similarly, for Calvin Warren, who works within the terrain of Black nihilism, hope for political progress compels Black people to “posit a realization that is never satisfied” (Newheiser, 5). For Warren, political hope invests energy in ideals like progress, betterment, and equality—ideals and sources of inspiration that require, rather than ameliorate, Black suffering. Consequently, hope is anything but an unequivocal good.
In his brilliant and timely text, Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith, David Newheiser works within the difficulties and possibilities of hope through a juxtaposition of Jacques Derrida and Dionysius, or deconstruction and apophatic theology. For Newheiser, hope resides somewhere between optimism and despair, and affirmation and critique. His book provides a third way between triumphant accounts of humanity and history and accounts that dismiss hope as a false assurance in the face of anguish, absurdity, etc. Offering nuanced interpretations of Derrida and Dionysius, Newheiser provides a conception of hope that “acknowledges its uncertainty, sustaining affirmation without sacrificing self-critique” (9). Hope refuses “unjustified confidence” in a world replete with so much agony. Because it acknowledges a gap between the present and the future, hope entails disappointment and “a restless dissatisfaction with the status quo” (9). For Newheiser, hope does not necessarily have to be directed toward an object that can be reasonably achieved; what is more important than the fulfillment of our expectations is the refusal “to give up the struggle simply because the situation is bleak” (16). Hope enables humans to persevere in the face of problems and obstacles that may be immovable.
Commitment and Critique
It is important to linger with the balance between affirmation and negation that the author finds in deconstruction and negative theology. In the background here are the widespread accusations made against critical theory, especially its (putative) unwillingness to offer constructive proposals alongside melancholic diagnoses of the world. In addition, Newheiser has in mind fashionable objections to religion as “antithetical to critique” (40). In response to these qualms, Newheiser’s project challenges the claim that Derridean deconstruction has no room for judgement, affirmation, and determinate commitments and the converse argument that religion does not make a place for uncertainty and indeterminacy. By showing the reader how Derrida and Dionysius both hold affirmation and negation together (as a tension-filled interaction), Newheiser insists that one can “affirm religious commitments in all their particularity while holding these commitments open to transformation” (87). According to the author’s more subtle reading of deconstruction and apophaticism, there is no false choice between dogmatic teleology on the one hand and pure play and undecidability on the other. Newheiser’s conception of hope is marked by something like indeterminate determinacy, which implies that selves require particular practices in order to cultivate a willingness to be surprised and transfigured.
Newheiser offers a very clear and nuanced reading of Derrida’s main ideas. Recall that Derrida’s deconstructive project is expressed through the notion and movement of différance, a stand in for both the differential relationships between signs and the deferral of meaning (due to the primacy of play and mobility over any self-sufficient signifier). This infinite postponement of secured meaning is the result of each moment being a trace of the past and existing in relationship to a future that is not-yet. Presence, as a spatial and temporal modality, is always marked by an absence; meaning is always rendered im/possible by the unstable interactions between signs and concepts. This movement of difference and postponement influences Derrida’s understanding of justice. In opposition to those who associate justice with law and calculation, Derrida infamously focuses on a justice that is always to come (avenir); justice, according to the deconstructionist, has an interruptive and heteronomous quality that cannot be possessed or subordinated to present schemas and patterns of judgement. As Newheiser describes, “It is only by negating particular claims to knowledge that one holds open the possibility for a justice that attends to the other” (27). And yet, as the he points out, Derrida acknowledges that “the realm of calculative judgement is indispensable” (27). Humans live in a world where distinctions and evaluations must be made. Consequently, Derrida accepts a kind of antinomy—justice involves the application of rules and norms and an openness to what cannot be captured by the normative domain.
Apophatic Theology and Deconstruction
Newheiser finds a similar interplay between affirmation and negation in Dionysius’s negative approach to the divine. Apophatic theology responds to the inadequacy of human categories and modes of predication when referring to God. Because there is a radical difference between creator and creature, even negative statements like “God is not…x” cannot grasp or understand God’s transcendence. But similar to Derrida, Dionysius does not call for pure negation when describing the human-divine encounter. As Newheiser describes, “Rather than insisting that theology must cease, Dionysius claims that the structure of creation requires proliferating speech about God” (43). Because God is both the provenance of creation and beyond creation, created beings “point back to God” while remaining unable to comprehend God’s essence. Consequently, apophatic theology entails “speech about God that undoes itself…[or] discourse continually rebuilding and breaking down” (44). Apophatic theology is a discourse that simultaneously attributes qualities to the divine and “unsays” any name ascribed to God. To put it succinctly, “apophasis holds [affirmation and negation] in tension to indicate that there is no grasping God” (45). Consequently, even though Dionysius occasionally insists on a rigid divine order and hierarchy (where every being reflects the divine according to its position in the order of being), Newheiser stresses the provisional and uncertain quality of Dionysius’s commitment to hierarchy. Because God is ultimately unknowable, and because “union with God remains yet to come (60),” Dionysius’s divine hierarchy is not static and calls for development, movement, and revision.
As Newheiser points out, Derrida was suspicious about the negative pretensions of Dionysius and apophatic theology more generally. For Derrida, negative theology secretly affirms a transcendent creator with the corresponding auspicious predicates (God is good, beautiful, all powerful). In other words, the claim that there is an unbridgeable chasm between God and creation still assumes that there is a supreme being on the other side of the abyss. Whereas Derrida refuses to say anything determinate about the avenir, apophatic theologians smuggle in a positive conception of transcendence which minimizes the uncertainty and anguish of the negative. In response to these concerns, powerfully articulated in the debates between Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, Newheiser reminds the reader that Derrida shifted his views on negative theology. Part of this shift pertains to the double meaning of the term hyperousious, a Greek term that Dionysius used when describing the inscrutability of God. On the one hand, hyperousious signifies that which is beyond being; on this definition, God’s being is akin to the being of creation but merely exceeds the names and predicates assigned to God. This sense of the hyper would seem to confirm Derrida’s suspicions insofar as the beyond is limited to the quality of being better than, and supereminent to, creation. The first sense of hyperousious remains wedded to a positive conception of transcendence in a manner that mollifies the encounter with God’s opacity. But in addition to “exceeding” and “better,” the prefix “hyper” can also carry a sense of contrast and violation (97). This sense resonates with Derrida’s conception of justice as an irruption that cannot be anticipated. Newheiser contends that this interplay between the supereminent and the contrastive senses of the prefix “hyper” “encapsulates the apophatic juxtaposition of affirmation and negation that enacts the dispossession of speech” (99). Underscoring this ambiguity in apophaticism brings deconstruction and negative theology closer together in Newheiser’s endeavor to offer a conception of hope that is informed by uncertainty and self-critique.
Persistence and Possibility of Rupture
While Newheiser’s project accomplishes many things, including making an intervention into the religion-secularism debates, I am most struck by the way hope mediates “between false confidence and paralyzing despair” (155). Hope is different than optimism since the former precludes confidence; in fact hope is necessary because of the intractability of conditions that undermine confidence that things are going to work out for the best. Moreover, hope, as the author admits, is “frequently the source of suffering” (154) since our goals and aspirations are constantly being thwarted and disappointed. Similar to faith, hope is often directed toward objects that violate the rules of “rational calculation” and is therefore risky and precarious. And yet hope keeps us open to the unexpected, to the promise of something better, in the midst of conditions that perpetually frustrate determinate investments and expectations. Because of this openness, hope staves off despair (which has its own confidence) or the relief that comes from surrendering to the devastating weight of the world. Hope is a mode of persistence; it enables human subjects to keep going even when prospects for change and improvement seem impossible.
Here is where some critical questions and concerns might be introduced. Throughout the book, Newheiser associates hope with both a Derridean interruption (or an anticipation of what cannot be anticipated by our current discourses and frameworks of meaning) and with a kind of perseverance in the face of bleak conditions. Perhaps the perseverance lies on the more affirmative side of the affirmation-negation interplay while the susceptibility to rupture leans toward the negativity of hope. But what actually is the relationship between “refusing to give up the struggle” or “persisting when things are difficult” and an openness to the second sense of the “hyper” in Dionysius’s writings—that which violates and contrasts with our attachments and habits of Spinoza-like conatus? To put it differently, even as Newheiser holds onto the tension between affirmation and negation, I wonder if the tension needs to be fleshed out a bit more and elaborated on regarding the aim of persistence. I wonder if it is precisely the cultivated desire to persist (in a certain manner) that forecloses the possibility of rupture, abolition, dissolution, and so forth. It may be that a kind of giving up on certain prospects and objects of desire is precisely what is necessary to refuse the violent order of things (even though there is no escaping what is refused). With a nod to the Afro-pessimist, perhaps all we have left is apostasy and a general unwillingness to continue struggling within configurations that feed off the death of certain populations. Furthermore, we should inquire into the difference between revision, which the negative or apophatic moment opens up for Newheiser, and a quasi-messianic interruption, even one that is always yet to come. What else does the apophatic dimension or the undecidable aspect of justice open up alongside revision and self-criticism?
Conclusion: The Necessity of Hope?
After reading Newheiser’s wonderful book a second time, I kept pondering about the content and function of hope in the text and the broader social world. Hope, according to the author, is “consistent with a profound pessimism” (9); it is defined by disappointment, frustration, and uncertainty. As mentioned above, Newheiser notes that while hope has a “positive valence,” it is the source of suffering and unfulfilled expectations. So my concluding question (for Newheiser and myself) is: Why is hope so necessary? Considering the ways in which hope is too often conflated with affirmation and positivity, are there other dispositions that better register the negative, human anguish, and the potential for rupture? Newheiser makes a convincing case about the importance of the tension-filled interplay between affirmation and negation but I wonder if the language of hope can hold onto this tension or if hope-talk inevitably sublates it into something more positive and reassuring. This is a matter that I will continue to wrestle with using Newheiser’s Hope in a Secular Age as a guide and an inspiration.
