The Decolonial Abyss

This book probes the ethico-political possibility harbored in the Western philosophical and theological thought for addressing the collective experience of suffering, socio-political trauma, and colonial violence. To this end, it rethinks the mystical figure of the abyss in philosophical and theological literature by rethinking its meaning from a wider, socio-political perspective. Theologically, the abyss denotes the blurring of boundaries between creaturely finitude and divine potency as reflected in the writings of certain Neoplatonic and medieval mystics. The book carves the channel of a constructive conversation by examining the ethico-political meaning of the abyss as the book locates its trace within the trajectory of continental philosophy by way of Schelling and Hegel. With the end of exploring an emergent socio-political meaning of the abyss beyond the Eurocentric vision, it further extends the conversation to the twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean decolonial thinkers who employ the trope of the abyss in order to articulate the historical/political trauma. By reading the abyss as an all-pervading ontological groundlessness of being that involves an insurmountable material and political devastation, this book re-invents a new idiom for articulating the ethico-political possibility that the mystical thought opens up for the historically marginalized communities.