Apophatic Anthropology in an Age of Carceral Fragmentation: Abolitionist Possibilities

The American carceral system–from policing and plea bargaining to probation and parole–is a system of personal and communal fragmentation. The paper argues, first, that this is the product of an essentialist carceral anthropology that disproportionately condemns race, gender, and class minorities to preserve the American neoliberal social order. The paper then argues that a Christian apophatic, non-essentialist anthropology destabilizes this carceral system. Apophatic theologians from antiquity to the present insist that humans must be figured with reference to their relation to an infinite divinity. If God is the ground of all things, one's relation to God opens the human to infinite relations to divine, human, and non-human others. This infinite relationality creates abolitionist possibilities, rejecting final decisions about one’s raced, gendered, and classed essence, resisting the neoliberal reduction of infinitely relational beings to self-interested individuals, and challenging attempts to punish wrongdoing through forced removal from communities.