Poetry as a kenotic exercise in José Tolentino Mendonça’s ‘The days of job’

This article explores the intersection of theology, literature and spirituality in José Tolentino Mendonça’s The Days of Job, focusing on poetry as a kenotic exercise of self-emptying (kenosis). By engaging with biblical literature, particularly the Book of Job, Mendonça reimagines poetic language as a space of vulnerability and transformation that resists ideological rigidity and fosters ethical openness. The study explores how Mendonça’s poetics resonates with Michel de Certeau’s heterology, Michel Foucault’s notion of political spirituality, and Giorgio Agamben’s critique of the loss of poiesis in modernity. In dialogue with patristic interpretations of Job (Gregory the Great, Basil of Caesarea) as well as contemporary philosophical readings (Fredric Jameson, Antonio Negri), this work argues that Mendonça’s poetry enacts a theological aesthetics of resistance in which language becomes an instrument of spiritual and ethical reconfiguration. In this framework, poetic expression is not merely an aesthetic exercise, but a radical way of inhabiting suffering, silence and longing, echoing Job’s existential questioning as a source of meaning and creative resilience.