Andrew W. Hass 
Auden’s O [EPUB ebook] 
The Loss of One’s Sovereignty in the Making of Nothing

Finalist for the 2014 American Academy of Religion Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, in the Constructive-Reflective category



In this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary history of ideas, Andrew W. Hass explores the ascendency of the concept of nothing into late modernity. He argues that the rise of the reality of nothing in religion, philosophy, and literature has taken place only against the decline of the concept of One: a shift from a sovereign understanding of the One (unity, universality) toward the ‘figure of the O’—a cipher figure that, as nonentity, is nevertheless determinant of other realities. The figuring of this O culminates in a proliferation of literary expressions of nothingness, void, and absence from 1940 to 1960, but by century’s end, this movement has shifted from linear progression to mutation, whereby religion, theology, philosophy, literature, and other critical modes of thought, such as feminism, merge into a shared, circular activity. The writer W. H. Auden lends his name to this O, his long poetic work
The Sea and the Mirror an exemplary manifestation of its implications. Hass examines this work, along with that of a host of writers, philosophers, and theologians, to trace the revolutionary hermeneutics and creative space of the O, and to provide the reasoning of why nothing is now such a powerful force in the imagination of the twenty-first century, and of how it might move us through and beyond our turbulent times.

Table of Content

Acknowledgments




Epicycle

‘Nothing will come of nothing’

Falsetto

Auden’s Circumlocution



0. Introduction



Giotto’s O

The Binary

The Binary Code

The Binary Code Cracked

The Paradigm

The Paradigm Shift

The Paradigm Rift

The Modern

The Modern Crisis




Part One: From Religion and Philosophy to Artiface



1.  The Sovereignty of One



One’s Punch Line

From the Many, One: The Hebrews

The Nature of One: The Presocratics

The Metaphysics of One: Plato, Aristotle

The Wholly, Plenary One: Plotinus

The Christian One: Paul

The Paradigms of One

One’s Retreat

2. The Revolutions of O



The Romeo Effect

Zero and its History

Ground Zero

Mirror/Speculum/Eye

The Artificer’s Circle

The Hermeneutical Circle

I The Author’s O

Eternal Recurrence




Part Two: Poesis’ Figure — The Making of O



3. Shakespeare’s Eye of the Storm



Lear’s Tragic O

Shakespeare’s Specular O

Caliban’s Negating O



4. Reflections of Auden



W. H. Auden


The Sea and the Mirror



5. The Empty Middle



Originating O (Blanchot)

Historicizing O

Alternate Os of the Middle

The O of Auden

The Erotics of O

Simone de Beauvoir




Part III: Looking After O



6. The Remaking of Philosophy and Religion



Philosophy and Religion: Inside the Perimeter

Negation’s Triumvirate: Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger

Before the Postmodern: Sartre

Through the Postmodern: Derrida, Irigaray

Out of the Postmodern: Badiou

g Od—Postmortem Theology



7. The Future of O?



Auden’s Brecht

The Parabolic Within

Pontius Pilate in the Creed

The Other Rogue

The Rogue Within




Another Epicycle

The Truest O is the Most Feigning

‘Signifying Nothing’



Notes

Bibliography of Cited Works

Index

About the author

Andrew W. Hass is Reader in Critical Religion at the University of Stirling in Scotland. He is the author of
Poetics of Critique: The Interdisciplinarity of Textuality and the coeditor (with David Jasper and Elisabeth Jay) of
The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology.