Acute Melancholia and Other Essays deploys spirited and progressive approaches to the study of Christian mysticism and the philosophy of religion. Ideal for novices and experienced scholars alike, the volume makes a forceful case for thinking about religion as both belief and practice, in which traditions marked by change are passed down through generations, laying the groundwork for their own critique. Through a provocative integration of medieval sources and texts by Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Talal Asad, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, this book redefines what it means to engage critically with history and those embedded within it.
Price: $37.00
Pages: 416
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Series: Gender, Theory, and Religion
Publication Date:
15 March 2016
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231156448
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
RELIGION / Sexuality & Gender Studies, RELIGION / Christianity / General, PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Deconstruction, HISTORY / Historiography, RELIGION / Essays, RELIGION / Christian Theology / General, HISTORY / Europe / Medieval, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory
Amy Hollywood's Acute Melancholia and Other Essays is a brilliant and challenging text that asks us all to read religious sources more carefully and productively as we try to fathom the contemporary meaning of critique, the ethical relations that bind us within an unfathomable horizon of loss. Known for her incisive and persuasive work in feminist religious studies, Hollywood takes us into new regions of theory and history by affirming the complex genres in which we think, the pervasive function of ritual within accounts of speech acts and symbolic actions, and the animated histories of metaphor and image. This book prompts us to think critically not only about conceits of the secular that are purified of religious content but also forms of psychoanalysis that discount Freud's writings on religion at a profound cost. The challenge delivered here is to become more capacious thinkers, to attend to ethical demands without a fugitive recourse to the narcissism of imagination, and to encounter the limits of what we can know about what we have lost—or have yet to lose. At that limit emerges an ethical demand that allows us to think beyond the narrow divisions of genre and discipline that stop us from engaging in living thought.
Amy Hollywood is the Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History and the award-winning The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart. She is the coeditor, with Patricia Z. Beckman, of The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Triptych
Part I
1. Acute Melancholia
Part II. History
2. Feminist Studies in Christian Spirituality
3. On Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography
4. Reading as Self-Annihilation: On Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls
Part III. Sexuality
5. Sexual Desire, Divine Desire; Or, Queering the Beguines
6. The Normal, the Queer, and the Middle Ages
7. "That Glorious Slit": Irigaray and the Medieval Devotion to Christ's Side Wound
Part IV. Practice
8. Inside Out: Beatrice of Nazareth and Her Hagiographer
9. Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization
10. Practice, Belief, and Feminist Philosophy of Religion
Part V
11. Love of Neighbor and Love of God: Martha and Mary in the Christian Middle Ages
Notes
Sources
Index
