Don Quixote’s Impossible Quest for the Absolute in Literature

This book offers a reading particularly of Part II of Don Quixote embedded in a philosophical reflection on the revelation of religious truth in and through literature. It absorbs and reconciles the religious reading of Miguel de Unamuno and the secular reading of José Ortega y Gasset, Spain’s two outstanding philosophical luminaries. Both thinkers based their entire philosophies and their analyses of the Spanish national character and destiny on their interpretations of the Quixote. Negative theology deploys critical reason that is critical of reason itself and opens toward an unfathomable (un)ground of All. It performs a synthesis of the secularizing and sacralizing tendencies that are both sublimely operative in the text of the Quixote. It enables the Quixote to emerge in its fully parodic and paradoxical vitality, which other interpretations governed by one paradigm or the other can access only partially. Spanish baroque mysticism and contemporary post-secular thought are made to converge in highlighting the blessed, even sacred, donation that literature like Don Quixote preserves and transmits as our most precious and saving cultural heritage.