Enfleshing Aesthetics: Theological Anthropology in M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom and Mayra Rivera’s Poetics of the Flesh

Abstract

ABSTRACTTo contend with the racist scaling of bodies seems to tend toward the ontological and metaphysical. Counter-strategies entail engagement with the predominant framework – i.e., with its categories of being and its grounds of analysis – however, much subjected to critique and deconstruction. Shawn Copeland and Mayra Rivera both identify and accept this “risk” in their theological projects. I argue that, although each does it with differing relative emphases, their political theologies trade upon an alternation between practical and poetical modes of critical reflection – the one is more negative and formal, the other is more positive and material; and this unitary alternation is what staves off failure in ideology and foundationalism. I furthermore suggest that the practical-poetical alternation I describe represents a contemporary politicization of the aesthetical.