As every reader of Lucian knows, he always belongs to something without belonging to it wholly. His relationship to his own Greek identity is undoubtedly the most symbolic instance: although wholly mastering the Greek language, he emphasises his being a barbarian. Lucian’s foreignness is a typical mark of his protean authorial persona throughout his œuvre, producing a constant tension between an inside and an outside as Lucian emphasises his own paradoxical liminality. This chapter discusses six of his texts (True Histories, Scythian, The Hall, On Salaried Posts, Symposium, and Lexiphanes), suggesting that a movement towards the inside and then the outside marks Lucian’s textuality in disparate ways. Depending on the specific narrative context, this movement assumes different meanings (autobiographical, metaphorical, metapoetical, rhetorical) that are often combined with each other, but most importantly produces a fundamental tension between meaning itself and the absence of significance.

Chapter 4 focuses on the sensuous quintet integral to Guru Nanak’s metaphysical thought and praxis. Materially made up of transcendent fibers, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and seeing have the cognitive capacity to take audiences off to limitless territories, or inversely, get them tangled up in messy affairs. They belong to everybody irrespective of race, gender, sexuality, class, politics, or religion, and though they are different modalities, they are a part of the same unitary living body and work together intersensorially and synaesthetically. For Guru Nanak there is no stereotypical hierarchy between “lower” and “higher” senses; the five are equally saturated with ontological, ethical, psychological, and soteriological import and flourish in concert. However, in order to understand their critical role and function, the somatic agents are analyzed separately. Hopefully the positive, progressive Nanakian outlook can cure some of the chronic somatophobic abnormalities prevailing across cultures.

This chapter focuses on mystical experience. It considers especially the late medieval mystical accounts of and about women, which are particularly rich in their experiential and affective dimensions. The chapter shows that mystical experience lives within the tension of uniqueness and exemplarity, setting the individual apart from the community while also often arising out of its shared life and perceived to serve and inspire it. Mystical experience is also characterized by the paradox between extensive practices of preparation and recognizable patterns of experience on the one hand and the sense of the givenness of the experience on the other. Mystical experience is frequently abundant and overwhelming, marked by intense affect and emotion, displayed in bodily fashion, full of rich sensory impressions, and combining suffering and ecstasy, sometimes in the same experience. In all these respects, mystical experience displays a phenomenality of excess and saturation.

This chapter reads Hamlet in the light of debates in early modern animal studies, arguing that it is a play that responds to contemporary religious and philosophical questions about the distinction between humans and animals in its representation of flesh and of death. In particular, it focuses on ideas about the difference between human and animal death, and sees in Hamlet a challenge to the assumption of human immortality, reading human fleshiness – our edibility – as lying at the core of the play’s contemplations. In what is often regarded as Shakespeare’s key exploration of “the human,” the chapter argues that what can be found is a conception of our species that offers a challenge to the anthropocentrism of the early modern period, but also of our own.

In Chapter 6, I introduce hermeneutic phenomenology as a philosophical method relating to the description and interpretative analysis of experience. French phenomenology has become a dialogue partner for theology and religion because of its capacity to accommodate what might be given without appearing as such. For Marion, this opens the possibility of recognising phenomena that signify in excess of or counter to experience, including phenomena of r/Revelation. After sketching Marion's typology of saturated phenomena and considering some of the criticism that has emerged in response, I observe his deepening insight that the phenomenality of the event characterises each of the counter-experiences he describes, and so has a particular importance. If what exceeds intentionality is described in terms of the event rather than as a phenomenon of revelation, we avoid the difficulties of the r/Revelation distinction that Marion draws, and decrease the sense that revelation is being smuggled into phenomenology. I also note that the event is a figure used more broadly in contemporary thought and so enables us to connect Marion’s work with that of others in potentially fruitful dialogue.

J. W. C. Pennington’s 1861 fugitive slave narrative documents a slave master rejecting a purchase offer for an enslaved man’s freedom, “would not receive the price of his pound of flesh,” preferring instead a dead black body as recompense. The verbal ties to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, reveal a textual distortion of the original where Antonio’s whiteness, identified by the playwright in the pound of Antonio’s “fair flesh,” has been rendered invisible through scholarly misreading. Consequently, Shylock struggles against a white-dominant society that denies him legitimacy because he, in early modern anti-Semitic parlance, is “not white as other men.” Since Jews were not allowed to own landed property, the debt bond creates a loophole whereby Shylock envisions a social restructuring that permits him to own whiteness as property and challenge the racially exclusionary principle on which property rights are predicated. Shakespeare’s use of the debt bond lays the historical foundation for the forcibly asserted rights in human property within the later plantation economy where the usurping property (meaning attribute) of whiteness takes substantial root in Western culture.