"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.