Diffracting Paradiso: The Stakes of Knowing and Being in Paradise

Abstract

This article proposes a diffractive reading of Paradiso, and in particular of Paradiso 33, in dialogue with Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: on the one hand, as readers of Paradiso, we are asked from the onset to stay within the diffraction created by the pilgrim’s movement through the spheres: our very epistemic engagement with Paradiso is engendered through Dante’s human body. On the other, the essence of the pilgrim’s vision is produced as the human interacts (or rather, intra-acts) with God in the timeless and placeless Empyrean. Diffraction becomes then not only a conceptual tool to understand the entanglement of Dante and God in Paradiso 33 (the content of the canto) but of the formal deployment of its description.