Description
"Recovery narratives usually progress over time, restoring or recuperating something that has been lost. That we speak of recovery as a journey out of illness and toward health evinces this progressive function. The story of recovery this book tells asks the reader to think rather differently. Drawing on the complex interplay between modern philosophy and premodern theology, Impossible Recovery explores the possibility of recovering a (post)modern theory of wellbeing from a medieval devotional text. The result is a story of simultaneous absence and presence-of the collapse of past and present-a paradox of mystical proportions which may not be resolved by straightforward thinking. The book combines literary, philosophical, and theological approaches to offer a new theory of recovery through a sustained reading of fourteenth-century theologian Julian of Norwich's (1343-1416) A Revelation of Love in conversation with post-Heideggerian phenomenology. The first known book to be authored by a woman in the English language, it details Julian's experience of dying and the series of divine "showings" that followed, providing a stoic yet remarkably optimistic vision for her own recovery and the recovery of humanity from our own existential condition. In response to the phenomena of Julian's account, Impossible Recovery theorizes recovery as never complete-as an ongoing existential project, which can be initiated through the fracturing moments of illness or a sustained contemplative practice. By positioning Julian in dialogue with modern thinkers it crafts a nuanced, philosophically minded reading of the medieval text for the present day, opening it up in provocative and enlivening ways. This is a reading of Julian for and through our times, about what it means to live, die, and become well"--
