THE NOTION OF THE INTIMATE UNIVERSAL HAS BEEN ON MY MIND for a long time, and made appearances in earlier books like
Is There a Sabbath for Thought? (2005),
God and the Between (2008), and
The Intimate Strangeness of Being (2012). The importance of the notion grew for me with continuing thought and asked for articulation in fuller terms. This I have tried to do in this book. And while it is continuous with prior books and draws from, as well as deepens, some of their resources, it stands as an investigation in its own right. This book as a whole began to shape itself in my mind in response to the encouragement of Creston Davis, who asked me to consider developing further some of the ideas developed in
chapter 4. I did so, and am grateful to him for this, as well as for much appreciated support over many years. I am also thankful to the other editors, Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crokett, and Jeffrey Robbins, for their support in including this book in their worthy series. My thanks also to Cyril O’Regan, Christopher Simpson, and William Francke for their intelligent and generous reading of my manuscript and for helpful responses and suggestions. I also want to warmly thank Wendy Lochner for her indispensable support, and Christine Dunbar for her unfailing help.
Cyril O’Regan helpfully suggested that I include a glossary of terms to aid those perhaps not so familiar with my work. While this glossary might have contained many more entries, I hope it serves a useful purpose.
Material in
chapters 1,
3, and
4 appeared in earlier versions in
“Neither Cosmopolis nor Ghetto: Religion and the Intimate Universal,” in The Future of Political Theology, ed. P. Losonczi, M. Luoma-aho, and A. Singh (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2011), 87–113.
“Doing Justice and the Practice of Philosophy,” Social Justice: Its Theory and Practice, American Catholic Philosophical Association, Proceedings of the ACPA 79:41–59.
“Neither Servility nor Sovereignty: Between Metaphysics and Politics,” in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, ed. Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slovoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 153–82.
These have been significantly rewritten and expanded for this book. I thank the publishers for permission to reprint.
The book is dedicated to the person most intimate to me, Maria.