Most of us work hard to avoid failure, but Colby Dickinson lifts up its benefits when it comes to theology, philosophy, and poetry. In this thought-provoking book, which is part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series, Dickinson explores a fertile paradox: “Perhaps it is the case that the only way to genuinely represent something—poetically, philosophically, politically, or even theologically—is to demonstrate one's failure to represent it” (2). Specifically, Dickinson contends that efforts to articulate truth through theological, philosophical, and poetic writing will indeed fail, but that failure leads us closer to ineffable truths about humanity and the divine that can guide us in a “very fragmented world” in which “authentic presence” is elusive (5). Through failing to represent something, writing can bring us beyond “oppression,” including the oppression of language, and closer to the “thing itself” (2).

Words Fail has three chapters. In the first, Dickinson considers Derrida's appropriation of Kant's “regulative principle” of as if to direct one toward certain as such moments in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, and Paul Celan as well as in mysticism, which Derrida himself sometimes engaged with. This as if/as such move allows one to embrace fruitfully a given proposition as if it were true even while keeping in mind Derrida's caution that there cannot be certitude regarding that proposition. This exploration thus inevitably ends in failure regarding certitude but nevertheless brings one closer to mystical and ethical truth. In the second chapter, Dickinson explains how the reading of Celan through the work of Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe can lead to a reading that defies conclusive interpretations and instead intimates that which is beyond language. Dickinson highlight's Celan's “Nocturnally Pouting,” which speaks of “A word—you know: / a corpse … / [L]et us turn its eye / towards heaven” (30), thus pointing beyond words to the ineffable and divine. Dickinson also draws from the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Adrienne Rich to suggest how this failure may ultimately lead to an evocative intersection of poetry and faith by pointing the reader beyond the linguistic significations in the text. For example, in “Cartographies of Silence,” Rich writes of a “return to the concrete and everlasting world” but then choosing instead “these words, these whispers, conversations / from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green” (47). In the third chapter, Dickinson proposes a unification of Giorgio Agamben's early poetic work with his later philosophical, political, and theological writings that establishes a “poetic atheology” (5) (that nevertheless leads to theology) as the basis for meaning in an otherwise nihilistic world. In the conclusion, Dickinson summarizes the book and concretizes its claims by suggesting how a kind of “material spirituality” rooted in “potentiality” (76) can be experienced and developed through writing and publishing.

Dickinson's book is challenging but easily worth the effort for at least one crucial reason: it reminds readers of the importance of poetry, especially for thinking and writing theologically. Poetry used to be central to American culture, just as theology (and the church) used to be. Both poetry and theology are now still (generally) respected but have lost their centrality. Dickinson shows at least one way that the two are closely related in that they both point us to matters of ultimate importance that transcend our poor power to add or detract. In other words, Dickinson demonstrates how theology and poetry put us readers and writers in touch with the infinite and ineffable, which are at the heart of human existence. Far from being peripheral, then, poetry and theology need to be central in American discourse once again in ways that extend beyond the ill-informed and superficial. In an age of anti-intellectual, materialistic reductionism, theology and poetry together lead readers and writers to the mystical, which is of paramount importance for humans, even to the point of urgency.