This chapter opens the final section of the book in which I identify some promising real legal utopias emerging from social activism against unjust suffering caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, with a special focus on the pandemic and the ecological crises. In this chapter, I focus on the possibility deriving from a spiritual understanding of the dignity of human and other living beings as a source of nonconformism, resistance and struggle in the direst conditions of human suffering. Such an encounter between spirituality and unjust suffering has been at the core of progressive theologies. I propose an ecology of knowledges and practices involving secular knowledges (human rights) and spiritual or religious knowledges (progressive theologies). Progressive theologies have been in the front line of struggles against the radical separation between humanity and subhumanity. The struggle against unjust human suffering is conceived herein as a starting point for a counter-hegemonic reinvention of human rights. In light of the reactionary challenge to human rights, the progressive challenge faces a double task: to question the hegemonic conception of human rights, and to do so in a such a way as to give credibility to a stronger intercultural, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-patriarchal and, in sum, counter-hegemonic conception of human rights. I begin with a radical critique of the conventional understanding of human rights and then present one of the possible paths towards a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights: the meeting point between human rights repertoires and progressive political theologies.

According to Rita Felski, literary studies have for too long been restricted to what Paul Ricoeur famously called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” It should now return to the text itself as a locus not only of power, interest, and domination, but of literary value, inviting engagement intellectually, emotionally, and imaginatively. Via a reading of Wittgenstein’s work on aesthetics, including his conception of aspect-perception, this chapter reflects on Felski’s proposal, arguing that its opposition between suspicion and humanism might be too simple. While Wittgenstein offers a powerful defense of a humanist view according to which a literary text encourages responsiveness to expressive meaning, it is argued that his view can be extended to include meaning constituted in various historical contexts as well. As a result, the text, as Adorno and Said claim, can never escape its dual determination as both worldly and inherently meaningful.

Plutarch’s De audiendis poetis, discussed in Chapter 6, is one of the first testimonies to the resuscitation of apatē as a critical term in the Imperial era. In defending the educational function of poetry, Plutarch is responding to Plato. While Plutarch’s positive view disagrees with Plato’s negative verdict, his argument, as I will argue, is predicated on Plato’s association of immersion with corruption. Plutarch, after acknowledging poetry’s spell, lays out a strongly reflexive mode of reading intended to render the young readers immune to the dangers of absorption. His agenda has been appraised as prefiguring the modern hermeneutics of suspicion, but there are also important differences to be noted. Besides drawing our attention to the role of Plato, De audiendis poetis suggests further reasons for the appeal of apatē in the Imperial era, notably a culture of rhetorical epideixis that put a premium on captivating performances and the socio-political function of literature for the Greek elites in the Roman empire that gave new prominence to its ethical dimension.

The question of how much of our knowledge is owing to pure perception and how much is dependent on interpretive construction animates the ongoing debate between phenomenology and hermeneutics. Recently, phenomenology has taken a “theological turn” and concerned itself with what is imperceptibly lurking within the perceptible. The eternal may be found to be implicit, in this manner, within time. Indeed, Dante’s temporal experience is projected toward an eternity experienced already by Beatrice as beholding the face of God. Just as time can mediate the eternal, so mediation by poetic interpretation can be reversed into an immediacy of perception in Dante’s model of knowledge as revelation. This revelation is incarnate. Dante experiences it in the beauty of Beatrice, which takes him to the very limits of his beatitude. The inextricably lyrical mediation of this revelation does not deliver it over to rhetorical convention and condemn it to narcissistic self-enclosure. Lyric grounded in Dante’s personal life experience becomes a means of encountering a wholly other dimension of existence open without limit. Dante’s lyric epiphany opens him to the world, as crystalized in pilgrims in transit through Florence, as well as in a vertical, transcendent dimension reaching toward the infinite.