Dancing with Care in Wild Spaces: Olthuis, Hagglund's Committed Atheism, and the Embodied Ethic

In my writings on the ethics of care and embodied empathy, I have argued that psychoanalysis—particularly if it is to remain humane—must not shy away from the difficult, “messy” dimensions of what it means to care. Indeed, my “cyborgian” approach to care posits that our identities and responsibilities are always already interwoven with multiple systems—biological, technological, social—demanding a form of care that is relational, embodied, and open to unpredictability. In this post, I’d like to bring those themes into dialogue with Jim (James) Olthuis’s Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Love and place them alongside Martin Hägglund’s “radical atheism.” I will also draw on James K. A. Smith where helpful. Finally, I want to connect these reflections to my critique of deconstruction in Let Us Not Forget the Clinic and raise a pointed question: What does a discourse of care lose when we flatten love, risk, and embodied engagement in service of a purely anti-metaphysical position?

Olthuis and the “Wild Spaces” of Relational Love

Jim Olthuis’s Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Love develops a vibrant and playful vision of love as a dynamic, open-ended, and relational process. He speaks of “wild spaces” as those uncharted territories in which relationships and ethical responsibilities cannot be prescribed by neat, purely theoretical grids or reductive conceptual frames. Love, in Olthuis’s view, is “wild” precisely because it calls for creative risk, vulnerability, and an ongoing improvisation—much like a dance.

Embodied Love: The notion of dance is important for Olthuis because it insists on embodiment. In dancing with another, we adapt to shifting rhythms, bodily presence, and shared space. This chimes with my emphasis on the embodied dimension of care: we do not care from a distance, but with our bodies, in close quarters with other living beings who challenge and enrich us.
Relational Holism: Olthuis emphasizes that love and care do not occur in isolated fragments but within a web of interdependent relationships. This resonates strongly with my cyborgian ethic of care in which no subject is a standalone entity. Whether we speak of daily technology, social structures, or the dynamics of the unconscious, the other is always already in us, forming us, and re-forming us.
Spiritual (or Transcendent) Resonance: While Olthuis writes as a Christian theologian, his emphasis on open-ended, improvisational love has much in common with secular or postmodern concerns—namely, the desire to avoid rigid dogmatism. At the same time, Olthuis is unafraid of speaking of God or transcendence, seeing them not as dogmatic constraints but rather as a wellspring of compassion that deepens our capacity for relational vulnerability.

In these “wild spaces,” love becomes a practice—not an abstract principle—that can transform us ethically. It entails a willingness to “step into” messy realities of care, rather than staying sheltered behind a theoretical or “masterful” position.

Contrasting with Hägglund’s Radical Atheism

Martin Hägglund’s project—often grouped under the title “radical atheism”—is best known for reading Derrida and other continental philosophers through a staunchly secular lens. Hägglund emphasizes our finite, mortal condition as the fundamental horizon for ethical and existential reflection. By centering finitude, he attempts to deconstruct notions of transcendence or metaphysical “beyond” in ways that highlight the urgent now of human life.

Common Ground: In principle, there could be some commonality with Olthuis insofar as both see the present, embodied reality as the urgent locus for ethical action. Neither relocates ethical impetus in a far-off heaven.
Key Difference—Transcendence vs. Immanence: However, Olthuis’s sense of the “divine dance” or the transcendent dimension of love contrasts sharply with Hägglund’s closure to any such notion. For Hägglund, any metaphysical or theological claims risk diluting the radical emphasis on mortal life, even if they are cast in relational terms.
Risk of Abstraction: In my view, radical atheism can drift—paradoxically—into its own form of abstraction. By vigilantly guarding against “divine illusions” or “the metaphysical,” it sometimes reduces love and care to an almost impersonal drive for existential authenticity. What may be lost is the transformative quality of love that invites surrender, hope, and even “excess”—dimensions my own psychoanalytic ethic recognizes in the messy interplay of the unconscious and the relational field.

Thus, while Hägglund’s critique of metaphysics keeps us attentive to the fragility of the here-and-now, it risks closing off precisely the wildness that Olthuis seeks—those leaps in love that defy strict rational calculus.

The Support of James K. A. Smith: Desiring, Loving Creatures

James K. A. Smith, a philosopher and theologian with postmodern leanings, can be helpful in supporting Olthuis’s approach (Smith was Olthuis's student). In books like Desiring the Kingdom, Smith argues that humans are not primarily “thinking things” but “loving animals,” shaped by rhythms, liturgies, and embodied practices. This emphasis on desire, love, and embodied ritual parallels Olthuis’s metaphor of dance.

Embodied Ritual and Formation: Where Hägglund locates our ethical impetus in finitude alone, Smith (and by extension Olthuis) sees a formative process in which we become the kinds of people capable of radical love. This is not just an intellectual commitment; it is nurtured by communal practices—dances, you might say—that shape our desires.
An ‘Incarnational’ Ethics: Smith’s and Olthuis’s theologies share an incarnational thrust: love is not a disembodied principle but takes on flesh through repeated, communal, vulnerable enactments. This “fleshy” dimension directly links to my own arguments about psychoanalysis and embodied care—just as the clinical encounter is a site of real, intersubjective exchange, so too is the dancing space of love.

“Let Us Not Forget the Clinic”—When Deconstruction Forgets Love

In my piece Let Us Not Forget the Clinic, I critique colleagues who align themselves strictly with deconstruction (and perhaps with the “discourse of the analyst” in a Lacanian sense) yet can sometimes lose sight of the humanness that animates psychoanalytic work. This is not a wholesale rejection of deconstruction; Derridean insights into language, difference, and the impossibility of a final, totalizing ground remain valuable.

However, the problem arises when deconstruction becomes an anti-metaphysical ideology in its own right, turning skepticism about metaphysical claims into a universal suspicion of anything that smacks of love, transcendence, or “excess” beyond the text or signifier. In psychoanalysis, this can manifest as:

Emptied-Out Humanity: A suspicion of love and compassion as mere illusions or rhetorical ploys.
Distance from Embodiment: A rhetorical stance that prioritizes textual or discursive moves over the raw, fleshly reality of the patient’s suffering—or the analyst’s own vulnerable subjectivity.
Loss of Transformative Potential: Deconstruction, unmoored from a loving, embodied ethic, can end up in a cycle of perpetual critique without offering much in the way of relational repair or growth.

Olthuis’s vision of love as a risky, improvisational dance speaks directly to these risks. In a sense, one might say that deconstruction wants to dismantle the stage, the music, and the dancing shoes before allowing the dance to begin, fearful that any attempt at dancing (i.e., meaning, presence, love) will reassert a hidden metaphysics. But if we never dance, we lose precisely what psychoanalysis (and perhaps theology, too) is designed to foster: a new, deeper engagement with both suffering and hope.

Embodied Care: Retaining the Human Dimension

Bringing this all together:

Embodiment: A truly ethical practice—be it psychoanalytic or otherwise—cannot bracket out the body as a site of desire, empathy, and vulnerability. Olthuis’s “dance” reminds us that the body is part of how we love, interpret, and respond ethically.
Wild Spaces of Love and Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic encounters, especially in the clinic, are often wild spaces themselves. They do not follow a linear path or yield easily to universal rules. Every analysand brings a singular history, set of traumas, and potentialities that demand a flexible, loving, and imaginative response.
Beyond Generalized Anti-Metaphysics: While deconstruction and radical atheism offer important correctives to naive metaphysical claims, they risk missing the depth of love’s transformative power. Olthuis and Smith (each in their own way) remind us that human beings are more than just self-sufficient rational animals. We are needy, desiring, loving creatures, deeply molded by embodied interactions that exceed purely cognitive or textual analyses.
Holding Space for the Transcendent (or at least the Excess): Even if one cannot accept a theological grounding for love, Olthuis’s emphasis on an “excess” that outstrips purely finite calculations is crucial. Something in the psychoanalytic process itself—a surprising gesture, an unexpected compassion—suggests that love can open possibilities we did not anticipate. We do not have to name this “God,” but the refusal to consider it at all can render our ethics shallow and purely procedural.

Conclusion: Dancing On

Olthuis’s Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Love is a spirited call to rediscover the generative power of love—of stepping onto the “dance floor” of embodied, relational, sometimes chaotic interaction. In contrast, Hägglund’s radical atheism and certain forms of deconstruction adopt an austerity regarding love, transcendence, or metaphysical “excess,” which can lead to a flattening of the complexities of human care.

My own work on an embodied ethics of care—particularly within psychoanalysis—aims to hold these tensions in balance. We must be critical of claims that reduce ethics to rigid or dogmatic metaphysics, yet we must also resist cynicism or hyper-skepticism toward the messy, fleshy, vulnerable dance of love. If psychoanalysis teaches us anything, it’s that healing, growth, and genuine transformation often occur in the wildest of spaces—where we risk our certainties and open ourselves to the unpredictable beauty of another’s presence. That risk is the very heart of care, and Olthuis helps us remember how to keep dancing, even and especially in spaces that defy our tidy theories.

In short: let us not forget the clinic—and let us not forget the dance. Both remain indispensable if we wish to practice a humane ethics that remembers the body, honors our interdependence, and trusts that love, however “wild,” can help us sustain one another.