This roundtable aims to rethink the intersections of politics and theology through a poetics of singularity (i.e. how the imaginative expression of a single figure, event, or experience disables or activates collectivities in ways irreducible to human history, agency, and categories of identity). Bringing together scholars of anthropology, religious studies, and literature, it seeks to dis-imagine current versions of politics, universality, and subjectivity by locating the political at the intersection of mystical, environmental, aesthetic, technological, religious, and historical imaginaries.
Linking these entry points is shared interest in how claims to singularity efface difference, but also affirm a radical uniqueness, reifying the exception (i.e. in claims about the singularity of the Holocaust, the figure of the survivor, or death as a limit case). We hope to challenge these forms of categorical stasis by converging on a poetics of singularity and the enfleshed speech acts in which it is performed.