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Dogma

Dogma picks up from Spurious by featuring the discussions of two academic philosophers who attempt to reanimate the intellectual world of the thought and literature of modern Europe. This novel reflects my research into the work of Hermann Cohen – his use of the infinitesimal calculus to discuss the existence of God, as well as his account of infinite judgement, a logical classification in which he discovers a positivity prior to standard logical accounts of affirmation and negation. My character, W., relates Cohen’s notion of infinite judgement to what W. calls the ‘non-‘, a prefix which opens the term to which it is attached to the prior positivity that Cohen describes. My characters form an intellectual movement, the eponymous Dogma, in their attempt to search for ‘non-thinking’ and ‘non-religion’. The novel Dogma shows how ‘non-thinking’ and ‘non-religion’ are not to be discovered by purely intellectual means – their Dogma movement leads my characters to consider the work of outsider artists, including the avant-blues ensemble Jandek and the painter Robert Lenkiewicz, and the outsider philosophers, Diogenes and Solomon Maimon. The novel also draws on my research into Hinduism, which is presented as an ‘outsider religion’, when considered in relation to the religions of the Book – my narrative is interwoven with stories and quotations from the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedas, as well as more philosophical explorations of Hinduism.

With reference to its style, the collage-like nature of Dogma, involving jump-cuts between involved philosophical discussion of thinkers from the East and the West, accounts of outsider artists, and a travelogue that takes my characters through the southern states of the USA, allows me to address my topic in an appropriately diverse variety of tones and registers.