Ideology and the Art of Reconciliation

Abstract

The final and most complex dimension of moral creativity explored in this book involves the practical formation of shared societies by others in their radical human plurality. Contemporary feminism, discourse ethics, and liberationism have raised the profoundly tragic problem—which as shown by Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, and Pamela Anderson can be illustrated in Sophocles’ character Antigone—of the social participation of those already ideologically marginalized from social participation in the first place. Paul Ricoeur shows that this problem involves a breaking down not just of power or discourse but even more profoundly of the poetic tension between finitude and freedom in power’s “premature syntheses,” to which he responds with a poetics of the practice of hope for a new kingdom of God on earth. It is also necessary, however, to appreciate the fully tragic and poetic depths of the problem of social oppression and transformation as understood by liberationist and feminist theologians such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Jürgen Moltmann, and Sallie McFague. A sufficiently radical poetic hope for human reconciliation can be found, in the end, in the religious impossible possibility for a “New Creation” in which all others participate, as images of their shared primordial Creator, in the ongoing mutual creation of a society ever more inclusive of the full diversity of humanity.