ABSTRACT
Self-referentiality is recognized by a millenary theological tradition-and is recognized poetically by Dante-as the key to figuration of the unrepresentable. Dante also unfailingly notes that experience cannot be gathered into his words, that it transcends them and can be fathomed only by those for whom the direct experience of Paradise is reserved. To the extent that it registers in language in the first place, the “wholly other” can only be relatively or negatively so. The theme of joy in creation as transcending time in the eternal shape of the lyric circle traced out by self-reflection in a Void is wrought to its highest pitch of emotional ecstasy and is brought to the furthest speculative reach of its theological significance in this exquisite vignette. A paradoxical logic of God as the “non-other” is worked out in depth and detail by Nicholas of Cusa in De non aliud.
