A Foucault’s Otherwise: A commentary on Niklaus Largier’s Figures of Possibility

I breath out as I read this wondrous book, realizing it is an intellectual abode I longed for. Clearly it will allow for fruitful, interdisciplinary conversations because its charting an otherwise genealogy to an Euro-Atlantic, historical techne of reason. In a nutshell, Largier’s work is a formidable tour de force. Starting with St. Francis and then discussing medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and modernist contributions, it engages with an aesthetic and mystical emergence of a ‘ground of the soul,’ via forms of affective figurations, constellations of the senses, practices of (sacred) texts’ reading, staying and playing with enigmatic emblems. Such emergence points to a beyond of a dual mind. Through a careful reading of multiple forms of intimate language this book shows that aesthetic and theistic experiences animate a different unfolding of Euro-Atlantic reason compared to a secular understanding of histories, thoughts, beliefs, and practices. This work is an invaluable toolbox for both research and methodology within and beyond this otherwise genealogy.

Figures of Possibility shows that affective cognition can be engendered through various forms of contemplative mediation. This affective cognition cannot be simplified into a mosaic of distinct historical ontologies and their related epistemic shifts. By a way of a scholarly yet accessible engagement Largier asserts that a fulfillment of the subject is not a performative nor confessional act, but rather an aesthetic, sensorial exchange with the world, where fulfillment is found in careful attention to mind-body orientation in this exchange. What I do in this piece is to juxtapose this onto-epistemic field that Largier illustrates -rooted in a genealogy that runs from early medieval contemplative practices to early twentieth-century cosmopoetic writing and aesthetic forms – with another genealogy of subjectivity that has been much more influential in the social sciences, rooted instead in the early work of Foucault on confessional powers. By doing this, I encourage social scientists at large to engage with the former moving aside the latter, in effect opening new horizons of analytic possibilities.

Largier’s work revolves around theology and aesthetic of the Figure and figuration, delving into the enigma of the ‘signature of things’ (Agamben 2008). This subjectivity is a complex, exquisite and at times terrorizing process of affective attention in space and time mediated by the materiality of (sacred) texts, symbols, enumerations and a sensorial and tactile apprehension of allegories and emblems. Instead of yearning for ultimate transcendental otherness, this is a theistic reconfiguration of immanent experience, while resisting the impulse for hermeneutic conceptualisations. The aesthetic orientation of figures of possibilities remain fluid, resisting cultural and historical closure.

These figures resonate with a negative theology pointing to forms of life brought forth through an unceasing affective intensity that resists a mimetic imperative of similarity and recognition. Largier posits these figurations are irreducible to reality as we know it, even as we believe we comprehend it. This is also a grammar of sensory volition that has long existed in Euro-Atlantic cosmology in the form of an ontological/epistemological tension akin to exile. This experience of exile then is constituent of ‘western’ imagination by extimacy.

In a previous forum in PTN, I juxtaposed anthropologist Kate Weston’s work, on affective kinship and environmental intimacy in times of increasing planetary toxicity, with Largier’s work on negative theology. Specifically, I focused on his analyses of the work by Master Eckart and his pupil, Henry Suso. Juxtaposing these works I emphasized the central role of undoing in the ongoing process of mystical figuration.  Then I suggested that this undoing serves as a grounding political force of an active, affective dis-imagination of the world (with its toxicity and renewed kinship) [https://politicaltheology.com/immanent-singularity/].

In this brief intervention I want to draw another juxtaposition. This time is of Largier’s work with a 1982 Michel Foucault’s text, the Subject of Power. Largier engages in the concluding part of the book with a later Foucault’s production and relates it to the figure of the holy fool. Largier rightly argues that the holy fool – who reconfigures an experience of the world as an otherwise to its doxa – embodies a non-dual mind-set. This figure inhabits a trans-threshold, neither male or female and both at the same time. Through expressive forms out of sync with state or kingly powers, the holy fool transfigures and rejoices in the world, existing in a liminal, threshold position. Foucault argues that the limit, from which critique is moved to an historical ontology of the subject, can be seen as a threshold (Foucault 1982). This is a reasoning that then Largier connects to the position of the holy fool and its allegorical play.

Regimes of truth and governance through surveillance and pastoral care, as viewed through a Foucauldian lens, have played a central role in anthropology and its understanding of subjectivity (Ortner 2016). This perspective has been highly influential in numerous anthropological works, including those related to regimes of land governance and development, salvation and the gospel of wealth (Murray Li 2007, O’Neill 2010). However, Largier’s analysis offers a refreshing contrapoint to a Foucauldian theory of the subject. Largier’s work exposes a different, a Foucault’s otherwise, potentially having interesting rippling effects in social sciences analyses in need to enlarge their breath on subjectivity, studied within a confessional and pastoral lens.

Foucault’s analysis of power delves into its multifaceted nature, as a complex mean of exercise and capacity of control over creation. Capacity building is one of the rational of governmentality and capaciousness is a power to make and control space, while transforming others, sometime rendering them entirely expendable or unintelligible. However, Largier offers a different perspective, drawing from mystics’ practice of figuration and their intimate language. Instead of focusing on capaciousness and transformation, Largier invites us to pay attention to transfiguration and partaking. If energeia is constitutive of a mystical affective reason, it is so by an active partaking into creation. This is not a process oriented toward self-consciousness and ontological reflexivity.

While Foucault empathizes the centrality of (self)consciousness and a confessional ‘giving an account of oneself’ for the state and its forms of governmentality, Largier’s work  highlights mind-body formations in space. This involves arousing the senses, akin to a Benjamin’s constellations and Böhme’s monads. In this framework, history has no hermeneutic closures, and active and sensorial volition relinquishes from such a desire (see here a different view on ‘will’ from Foucault’s). Sensation, dramatization, visualisation, and imagination point to surrendering and relinquishing an ontological history of the subject.

The relation between the text/emblem/allegory and the poesis of their rhetorical apprehension remains unpredictable, constantly shifting partially obscured and undone. While Foucault views potentia as a strategy of power struggles, characterized by antagonistic and agonist relationships that coalesce in regimes of domination, validation of knowledge, and pastoral conduct toward self- consciousness and refusal to submit, Largier alerts us to practices of theopoetic, suspension and surrendering, transfiguration and ontological rupture. Power is here an oblique force that relinquishes into being rather than a refusal to be.

What is important here though, is to inquire into the geo-political and historical conditions of possibilities that allow to denaturalize a mystical techne of reason from one of  its interpretation that, for too long, has been seen as opposed to rational thinking. In a Talal Asad’s spirit, I wish to emphasize the need to constantly de-familiarize received concepts and practices, to attune instead with those embedded in ‘ground up’ forms of life, and for political action and critique. Largier’s work provides anthropologists (and maybe social scientists at large) with a toolbox to focus on forms of life that point to a potential de-familiarization with the world as “we know it,” leading to otherwise political responses. Additionally, Largier’s work may also allow to re-interpret Talal Asad’s one as part of this political and ‘mystical turn’ (especially as it relates to latter reflections on Wittgenstein, Asad 2020).

Secondly, Largier invites us to think with a (Baroque) monad as a ‘theatricalization of emergence ‘within a ‘cosmopoetic of imagination.’ With the help of the work of Böhme and Benjamin, Largier interprets the monad as a ‘particular mirroring of the world as a whole’ transformed into a ‘dramatic cosmic production’ embedded in a permanent crisis (Largier ibid, pg. 192). This prompt us to consider what constitutes ‘reparative labour’ in response to ongoing drama and violence. This aligns well with current work in anthropology of traces and the labour of the negative (Napolitano 2015, Navaro 2020), particularly in the context of spaces and histories marked by genocide and violence.

For instance, consider the case of the mountain range of Musa Dagh across the Syrian/Turkish border. Using a Benjamin-inspired monadic methodology as the study of the ‘tension of the catastrophe in condensed forms,’ the fragmentation of embodied spaces, materialities and narratives, Navaro presents anew a violence associated to (Sunni Turkish) settler expansion over an early 20C pre-diasporic Armenia-inhabited land and architecture (Navaro 2022). Largier’s work here can contribute to broadening this type of analysis by conceptually and pictorially bringing cosmic and human imagining together, in post-secular, opening ways. While keeping the intrinsic violence of settler states at the forefront, we can better appreciate the continuous unfolding of forces, and ‘antagonist combats’ that are perpetually at play within the terrorizing and sensually oriented monadic processes. A monadic process, described as being ‘touched by the world’, unfolds through an ineffable, complex ‘ground of the soul’. The continuous re-shaping of this ‘ground’ partake of both the divine and the human (Largier, pg. 205). Drawing on resonance with the works of Alexander Baumgarten and Johann Herder, Largier  argues  that monadic transfiguration is part of beautiful and terrorizing openness and plasticity constituted through an exchange between the world and the soul.

This book, therefore, presents us with a task: to harness the figurative, aesthetic force of mysticism (as Largier convincingly shows from late antiquity and in continuity with modernist insights inspired, among others, by Auerbach and Musil) as a guide for engaging with what we ‘do not understand’, but we partake into, within, and to better comprehend, current emerging political and subjective formations through social sciences’ ethnographic methods (Napolitano 2007, Seremetakis 2019). Largier’s work focuses on early and modern mystical figurations not only as a means to participate in divine transformation and the expansiveness of confession, but also, I argue, as a means of shedding light on how subjects are not confined to dynamics of willful self-cultivation. They can attune to a movement unfolding within and outside the realms of confession through practices of figuration that are both aesthetic and contemplative. While these practices exist adjacent to, they are not the same as ‘willful’ acts informing Foucault’s view of sovereign and biopolitical governmental life forms rooted in a confessional formation.

It should by now be evident that this book’s invitation is challenging and timely. Just as breathing is central to feminist and black calls for liberation (Crawley 2016  Tremblay 2019), so it is also a medieval and modern mystical apprehension of the world, as enabling, if not a new, a different ground for politics and political imagination. This may well be a grounding to attune to what anthropologists have called an ‘otherwise.’ That is to say, through sensorial and  enfleshed experiences of ‘ensoulment’ with and at the edge of language (Asad 2020)  in an engagement with spaces, land, and subjectivity, of ongoing violence and genocide too. That is why, with the gift of this book’s insights, I breathe out deeply.