A theological aesthetics of resistance: Vincent van Gogh as reader of Dostoevsky

The perspective adopted in this paper is that of political spirituality, in the sense that the intersection between religion and politics mutually produces the insertion of elements from one field into the other in order to create ethical resistance. In this context, the archeology of theological knowledge aims to map how theology constitutes fields for genealogies of both power and ethics. Ethics represents a social practice in which poetics and arts represent discursive and aesthetic practices that are an opening of a space that does not need to be authorized by the established order of reality, a seed of possibility in the cracks of the walls of impossibility that creates bridges for hope. The apparently impossible unfolds not only as contestation but, potentially in culture, as an emergence of the impossible that dwells first in desire. It is the beginning of a new social learning and the engine of a new collective intelligence through empathy for the pain of an era. In this sense, theological criticism can emerge through a new sensibility concerning the suffering of a time—before theological enunciations, through the theological aesthetics of resistance.