Introduction

Abstract

After analysing how self-emptying has traditionally been construed in theological and philosophical discourses, the introduction argues that recovering the interconnection between immanence and self-emptying fundamentally transforms our conception of both terms. Specifically, it suggests disentangling immanence from its association with the secular world or the human subject. It goes on to lay out the basic elements for a new ethical paradigm of self-emptying, understood through the works of Eckhart, Hegel and Bataille—one that stands in contrast to Levinas’s ethics of the Other and to Foucault’s ethics of self-cultivation. It concludes with a methodological statement arguing for the necessity of reading between historical periods and across traditional disciplinary divides erected between philosophical and theological discourses.