Description: Showcases the best in modern medieval and religious scholarship, deploying spirited and progressive approaches to the study of Christian mysticism and the philosophy of religion.
Review Quotes: 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.--Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley