How hope becomes concrete

Abstract

Over the last year, many of us have found our hope to be tested. In this context, I think theorical reflection can clarify the resilience required to acknowledge and address the challenges we face, both personal and political. Because that is the aim of my book, I am grateful for these responses from four readers whose work I admire. Although their comments diverge in important ways, they constellate around a question that I see as central: how does hope become concrete? In her contribution to this symposium Sanchez (2021, 337) writes that, on its own, theological discourse “is an empty cloth without bodies to wear it.” As her own research shows, theoretical texts address real people, and they can be taken up in new ways to inform particular lives (Sanchez 2019). My book focuses on two figures, Jacques Derrida and Dionysius the Areopagite, whose work is famously abstruse. Despite their reputation, I was drawn to both authors because they helped me to better understand my own life and that of the communities I care about. In my experience, disappointment sometimes hits hard, and yet people somehow persist. Through Dionysius and Derrida, I found tools to illuminate this persistence, which holds hopes while acknowledging the possibility of loss. As Sanchez points out, in the time since my book appeared the prevalence of loss has become painfully apparent. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread suffering, and it has shattered established patterns of normalcy. Against this background, Sanchez agrees that hope should take negativity seriously, but she presses me to say more about the rituals through which hope is cultivated. I think Sanchez is right that communal practices are indispensable. Whereas the first half of my book presents hope as an ethical discipline, the later chapters argue that the personal practice of hope is also political. In my view, hope enables the receptivity and resilience through which genuine community is possible, and the bonds established in this way nurture hope in turn. Although relationship with others is always a risk, hope is the discipline that empowers people to pursue desires that are vulnerable to disappointment. For this reason, it is the precondition for mutual care and political mobilization. For me, the reciprocal relation between individual hope and communal action became particularly clear through the isolation imposed by COVID-19. DuringMelbourne’s long lockdowns, my neighbor would walk by the windowofmy homemost afternoons, and his daughters would tell mewhat they did that day at school. Although it was a lonely time, this quiet ritual sustainedmy ability to persist, and that