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What is a “Catholic” novel? How does it relate to the intersection between literary theory and theology? What forms of dialogue can religious and secular critics enjoy? And what role can Graham Greene play in the discussion? This book analyses the fiction of Greene in a radically new manner by considering in depth its form and content, which rests on the oppositions between secularism and religion, Sampson challenges these distinctions by arguing that Greene has a dramatic contribution to add to their methodological premises, and, especially, the imaginative and interpretative statuses of literature and Catholicism. Inclusive of Greene’s contribution are different critical and religious impulses that are present throughout the investigative tenors that his work invokes. Chapters on Greene’s four “Catholic” novels and two of his “post-Catholic” novels are complemented by a fresh and vital insight into the critical importance of his non-fiction. The study paints an image of an inviting yet beguilingly complex literary figure, and within new and significant perspectives on the growing importance of the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Greene is shown to be central to groups who have until now been largely neglected in literary debate.

Can poetry, even a deeply philosophical poetry, articulate something about love that philosophy itself cannot? The Form of Love argues that it can. In close readings of seven “metaphysical” poems, this book shows how figures ranging from John Donne to Emily Dickinson use poetic form to turn philosophy to new ends, transforming its concern to know truth about love into concern to create virtual experiences of love. These poems create strange loves made in, rather than through, the forms—the devices, structures and forces particular to verse—where they appear. Tracing how poems think, this book argues, requires an intimate form of reading: close—from one perspective, even too close—attention to and thinking with the text. In The Form of Love, Kuzner reads as closely as possible in order to consider as seriously as possible how poetry thinks of love otherwise than other fields: how poems do not complete philosophy or compete with it, and how poetry and philosophy instead can enter into a relation that is itself like love.

An analysis that focuses on the metapsychological dimension of queer theorizations will demonstrate why, in spite of how bold and emancipatory key queer formulations might initially seem, the field maintains an uninterrogated reliance on erotophobic psychological conventions that ultimately reproduces an erotophobic relationship to sexuality. Homo Psyche introduces metapsychology as a new dimension of analysis that zeroes in on the underlying psychological assumptions that determine contemporary critical thought. Such an intervention deepens current debates about the future of queer studies by demonstrating how the field’s systematic neglect of metapsychology as a necessary and independent realm of ideology ultimately enforces the complicity of queer studies with psychological conventions that are fundamentally erotophobic and therefore inimical to queer theory’s radical and ethical project. Homo Psyche therefore introduces a break with the current configuration of traditional psychoanalysis as the presumptive and undisputed foundation for radical psycho-sexual theorizations. In order to elaborate a critical alternative, the French theoretician Jean Laplanche (1924–2012) will be introduced. In order to rigorously articulate and defend the centrality of sexuality to psychic life, Laplanche insisted on “new foundations for psychoanalysis” that radically departed from existing Freudian and Lacanian models of the mind. This study conducts a purposive survey of six major theoretical concepts, through the lens of six eminent individual critics who represent exemplary, influential, and authoritative developments of them: Eve Sedgwick on “hermeneutics,” Leo Bersani on “sex,” Jane Gallop on “violation,” Lee Edelman on “radicalism,” Judith Butler on “gender,” and Lauren Berlant on “relationality.”

The personal is not political, even if politics marks it and, in many cases, determines it. Infrapolitics seeks to understand conditions of existence that are not reducible to political life and that exceed any definition of world bound to political determinations. It seeks to mobilize an exteriority without which politics could only be business or administration, that is, oppression. It demands a change in seeing and an everyday practice that subtracts from political totalization in the name of a new production of desire, of a new emancipation, and of a conception of experience that can breach the general captivation of life. Infrapolitics thinks of itself as both a general critique of the political apparatus and as an imperative horizon for existential self-understanding. It understands the intense politicity of its gesture while at the same time claiming an enabling distance from politics. It is a form of thought aiming to provide content for a form of life. It offers a new theoretical practice for concrete existence. This book provides a genealogy of the notion and places it within contemporary philosophical reflection, examining its deployment in the wake of postphenomenology and deconstruction, Lacanian analysis, the principle of anarchy, and an egalitarian symbolization of social life.

Five hundred years before “Jabberwocky” and Tender Buttons, writers were already preoccupied with the question of nonsense. But even as the prevalence in medieval texts of gibberish, babble, birdsong, and allusions to bare voice has come increasingly into view in recent years, an impression persists that these phenomena are exceptions that prove the rule of the period’s theologically motivated commitment to the kernel of meaning as over against the shell of the mere letter. This book shows that, to the contrary, the foundational object of study of medieval linguistic thought was vox non-significativa, the utterance insofar as it means nothing whatsoever, and that this fact was not lost on medieval writers of various kinds. In a series of close and unorthodox readings of works by Priscian, Boethius, Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, it inquires into the way that a number of fourteenth-century writers recognized possibilities inherent in the traditional accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity and transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of non-signification. Retrieving a premodern hermeneutics of obscurity in order to provide materials for an archeology of the category of the literary, Medieval Nonsense shows how these medieval linguistic textbooks, mystical treatises, and poems were engineered in such a way as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to focus on the extinguishing of sense that occurs in the encounter with language itself.