No/Thing: Medieval Art and Apophasis
Sponsoring Organization(s)
International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA)
Organizer Name
Alexa Sand
Organizer Affiliation
Utah State Univ.
Presider Name
Alexa Sand
Paper Title 1
Empty Spaces
Presenter 1 Name
Elina Gertsman
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Case Western Reserve Univ.
Paper Title 2
The Vercelli Roll: The No-Thing That It Is and the Thing It Might Be
Presenter 2 Name
Evan Gatti
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Elon Univ.
Paper Title 3
"Farai un vers de dreyt nien": Guillaume IX, Troubadour Caskets, and the Apophasis of Courtly Love
Presenter 3 Name
Anne F. Harris
Presenter 3 Affiliation
DePauw Univ.
Paper Title 4
The “Fascinating Presence of Absences” in the Vita of Hedwig of Silesia
Presenter 4 Name
Jacqueline E. Jung
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Yale Univ.
Start Date
10-5-2014 3:30 PM
Session Location
Bernhard 210
Description
“We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.” John Scot Erigena, writing of the nature of the divine, struck at the troubling aporia at the center of religion; to borrow the words of another, much more recent sage, there is no there there. This problem was not limited to medieval Christianity – Islam and Judaism also struggled to reconcile the non-thing-ness of the divine other with the created world. Thing theory – which is not as its name suggests so much concerned with cultural artifacts and their social meanings as it is with the places of slippage and failure of thing-ness and meaning – has some strong parallels to the negative theology by which such thinkers as Erigena, Wasil ibn Ata, and Maimonides sought understanding of the divine; in thing theory, as in medieval apophasis, the sites of unknowing or unknowability exercise their gravitational force. The four papers that make up this panel deal respectively with aesthetic, material, poetic, and performative aspects of nothingness in medieval artistic contexts.
Alexa K. Sand
No/Thing: Medieval Art and Apophasis
Bernhard 210
“We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.” John Scot Erigena, writing of the nature of the divine, struck at the troubling aporia at the center of religion; to borrow the words of another, much more recent sage, there is no there there. This problem was not limited to medieval Christianity – Islam and Judaism also struggled to reconcile the non-thing-ness of the divine other with the created world. Thing theory – which is not as its name suggests so much concerned with cultural artifacts and their social meanings as it is with the places of slippage and failure of thing-ness and meaning – has some strong parallels to the negative theology by which such thinkers as Erigena, Wasil ibn Ata, and Maimonides sought understanding of the divine; in thing theory, as in medieval apophasis, the sites of unknowing or unknowability exercise their gravitational force. The four papers that make up this panel deal respectively with aesthetic, material, poetic, and performative aspects of nothingness in medieval artistic contexts.
Alexa K. Sand