The Passion of Infinity generates a historical narrative surrounding the concept of the irrational as a threat which rational culture has made a series of attempts to understand and relieve. It begins with Sophocles’Oedipus , in whom human reason collides with the archaic force of the religious. It then moves through Aristotle’s ethics, psychology and theory of tragedy, which redefine reason’s collapses in moral-psychological rather than religious terms. The book culminates in an extensive reading of Kierkegaard, who, in a critical retrieval of both Greek tragedy and Aristotle, reconceives yet again the nature of reason’s collision with the irrational.