Dante and the Sense of Transgression

William Franke is Professor of Comparative Literature and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University, USA. He is an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Fellow, a previous Fulbright University of Salzburg Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and his published books include Dante's Interpretive Journey and Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language.

• Preface \ Introduction: Dante's Implication in the Transgressiveness He Condemns \ Part I: Language and Beyond \ 2. The Linguistic Turn of Transgression in the Paradiso \ 3. At the Limits of Language, or Reading Dante through Blanchot \ 4. The Step/Not Beyond \ 5. The Neuter-Nothing except nuance \ 6. Forgetting and the Limits of Experience-Letargo and the Argo \ 7. Speech-The Vision that is Non-Vision \ 8. Writing-The "Essential Experience" \ 9. The Gaze of Orpheus \ 10. Beatrice and Eurydice \ 11. Blanchot's Dark Gaze and the Experience of Literature as Transgression \ 12. Negative Theology and the Space of Literature-Order beyond Order \ Part II: Authority and Powerlessness (Kenosis) \ 13. Necessary Transgression-Human versus Transcendent Authority \ 14. Dante and the Popes \ 15. Against the Emperor? \ 16. Inevitable Transgression along a Horizontal Axis \ 17. Heterodox Dante andChristianity \ 18. Christianity an Inherently Transgressive Religion? \ Part III: Transgression and Transcendence \ 19. Transgression and the Sacred in Bataille and Foucault \ 20. Transgressionas the Path to God-The Authority of Inner Experience \ 21. Transcendence and the Sense of Transgression \ Appendix: Levinasian Transcendence and the Ethical Vision of the Paradiso \ 1.Prolegomenon on the Sense of Ethics \ 2. Paradiso as the Trace of the Other \ 3. Witnessing to the Transcendent \ 4. Ethical Un-Selfing of Metaphysical Self-Building \ Notes \ Index

Written in elegant and astonishingly readable prose, William Franke's volume gives a lucid portrait of a fundamental question that lies at the heart of Dante's Divine Comedy and has resurfaced in contemporary French philosophical reflection: poetic theology as a radical, transgressive mode of knowledge. In mapping the ground of this fascinating debate, William Franke places Dante at the boundaries of thought and recovers the timeliness of his spiritual vision. This book is a must-read for historians of religion, Dante scholars, literary critics, and adepts of cultural studies.