Desiring Possibility: Trans Figuration, “As If,” and the Holy Fool

Modern thinkers have turned time and again to the writings of medieval Christian mystics to explore how these texts disrupt sedimented theological beliefs, overcome gender-based restrictions, and offer new ways of being in the world. Niklaus Largier’s most recent book, Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses, reframes these engagements by focusing on how mystics “reinvent and reconfigure the realms of sensation, affect, imagination, and thought” through practices of figuration (4).In this expansive text, Largier offers both an analysis of such practices in medieval mystical writing and an exploration of the resonances these texts have with modern forms of aesthetic experience. The scope of Largier’s project is wide-ranging. With sources spanning from late antiquity to the present, he searches for insight into practices of figuration in the writings of Henry Suso, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Saint Francis of Assisi, Jacob Böhme, Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, Erich Auerbach, J. Cameron Carter, Robert Musil, Georges Bataille, and many others. However, the goal of this sweeping project is not to chart a contiguous genealogy of figuration but rather to point to moments of “suspension and dispossession where the world takes shape ‘otherwise’” (17). This emphasis on the otherwise or as Largier would have it, “possibility,” is the driving force of his book and my primary site of engagement with the text.

The promise of disruption, reinvention, and an “otherwise” world enabled through practices of figuration has captivated the imagination of many feminist, queer, and transgender writers. Given the most recent spate of trans antagonistic legislation, conservative judicial rulings, and racialized violence in the U.S, Largier’s claim that figuration can “undo seemingly stable, gendered, racialized, and other normative orders” offers an important avenue of hope (4). This essay explores that glimmer of hope from the seemingly counterintuitive vantage point of negative affect. In what follows, I focus on two aspects of the disruptive and reinventive force of figuration: the amplification of affective sensibilities and the figure of the holy fool. I begin by examining how Mechthild of Magdeburg’s mystical dereliction enabled a unique affective paradigm grounded in lovesickness and negativity that resonates with contemporary feminist and queer writing on relationality. Then building on the mystic’s strategic deployment of sancta simplicitas or the holy fool motif, I turn to a consideration of how the holy fool’s parodic practice enables queer and trans worldmaking. Although these two avenues of inquiry are not directly linked in Largier’s writing, they speak to the ways disruption and reinvention work in tangent through practices of figuration. Both strategies challenge sedimented notions of the normative order, authoritative exegesis, and subjugating and subject forming power in hopes of creating new possibilities.

For Largier, mystics open new realms of possibility because their writing intentionally “dramatizes perception and the production of meaning” in hopes of creating “different spaces of living” (3). Take, for example, 13^th century Beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg’s text, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. In his treatment of this text, Largier acknowledges the various ways it has been read in the past (experiential, pathological, hermeneutical) but prefers to focus on how the text “practices forms of transgression that, in turn, can be seen as both generating and reflecting on new types of gendered subjectivity” (153). Although the very existence of Mechthild’s text, written at a time when women were largely excluded from dominant forms of knowledge production, offers a clear example of her resistance to gendered norms, the type of possibility Largier is interested in can be more clearly seen in Mechthild’s reconfiguration of the affective constellations of estrangement and lovesickness. This reconfiguration exemplifies what Largier terms affective generative experimentation. Mechthild utilizes the paradigm of lovesickness to renegotiate the relational constraints between herself and the divine by developing an emotional template capable of incorporating both the presence and absence of her beloved. This is necessary because although her book is framed as an account of her betrothal to Christ, her current location (on earth) results in a romance plagued by separation and longing. Mechthild dramatizes this longing as a form of lovesickness and reweaves her melancholic affect into a tale of desire and intimacy ungoverned by the logic of repair. As the text progresses, she amplifies her lovesickness by establishing a practice of affective meditation designed to intimately link her to Christ despite their separation. She writes, “After this came constant estrangement from God and enveloped the soul so completely that the blessed soul said: ‘Welcome very blessed Estrangement. Fortunate I am that I was born—that you, Lady, shall now be my chambermaid, for you bring me unusual joy and incomprehensible marvels and unbearable delight as well’” (154). Describing her estrangement from the divine Mechthild portrays herself as sinking further and further into the depths of darkness while simultaneously sinking deeper into the divine. Reflecting on this paradox, she muses, “But the deeper I sink, the sweeter I drink” (156). Far from floundering in an unlivable space of negativity or straining toward the unattainable promise of repair, Mechthild’s text introduces the possibility of alternate affective experimentation by foregrounding relationality at the threshold of the unbearable.

Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s coauthored text, Sex, or the Unbearable, embarks on a corresponding discussion of sex, negativity, and relationality. At the outset, they suggest that sex, conceptualized broadly as a site of encounter, offers the possibility of relational and affective innovation because it threatens us with unbearable confrontations. This is true insofar as sex “raises the possibility of confronting our limit in ourselves or in another, of being inundated psychically or emotionally” (vii). Rather than avoiding the negative affect that permeates such encounters, Berlant and Edelman find value in the tension and uncertainty that characterizes so much of relationality. This interest in negativity stems from a desire to offer a serious consideration of “the possibility of a life not governed by the logic of repair;” a logic that seeks to recuperate negative affect and the fractured self through fantasies of sovereignty (xv). Much like Mechthild’s experiences of estrangement and intimacy with the divine, these encounters have the potential to move one beyond the mundane and usher in new affective experiences. This type of relational figuration committed to staying with negativity offers an answer to a question Berlant poses in Desire/Love where they ask, “Where are the social infrastructures through which people can reimagine their relation to intimacy and the life building organized around it in ways that are as yet uninevitable or unimaginable” (111-112). For Edelman, Berlant, and Mechthild embracing negative affect and the unbearable offers a means of breaking free from normative scripts of love and relationality and opens the possibility of different forms of sociality. However, turning away from socially recognizable forms of desire also inevitably exposes one to accusations of madness or foolishness.

Mechthild’s text preempts this accusation by framing her rather unorthodox relationship to writing and the divine through the lens of sancta simplicitas or the holy fool. She, like many other female mystics, lays claim to foolishness and simplicity to amplify the divine origin of her revelation. The prologue to Mechthild’s text rehearses this sentiment stating, “Quite often, in fact, almighty God has chosen what is weak in the world to confound what is stronger for its good” (31). This divine preference for weakness reconfigures the inscrutable actions of the mystic as something to be met with wonder and surprise. Largier points to this paradox as he concludes his text with an examination of the holy fool motif in the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He argues that the holy fool is exemplary because he “does not take refuge in the dogmatic teaching about sainthood and contemplation” but rather, “turns in the practice of his life, all things into figures, into concrete moments that evoke suffering and praise, abjection and joy” (239). By embracing a life at “the limits of the possible” the fool is uniquely equipped to expose norms and undo them (238-242). The fool’s refusal to abide by social and political norms exposes the instability and precariousness of what is so often taken as fixed and stable. At times the fool’s foolishness leads them to do odd things like drinking water used to cleanse a leper’s body, using human excrement as cooking fuel, or sitting atop a pole for one’s entire life. At other times, the holy fool might parody social norms by enacting humorously exaggerated imitations of them.

 Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti weaves these ideas of figuration and the fool together through the lens of parody in her text Nomadic Subjects. For Braidotti , figuration is a critical tool for feminist thinkers insofar as it offers a “politically informed account of an alternative subjectivity” (4). She writes that in some cases the figurative mode “functions according to what she has called the philosophy of ‘as if’” (26-27). The “as if” refers to experiences that recall or evoke a different experience in a way that facilitates an unpredictable and often parodic connection between the two events. Building on this concept, Braidotti  explores what the practice of parody and living at the limits of the possible enables today. She writes, “The practice of ‘as if’ is a technique of strategic re-location in order to rescue what we need of the past in order to trace paths of transformation of our lives here and now” (27). What Braidotti  finds empowering in the practice of “as if” is its potential for creating new spaces and alternative forms of agency (28). Essentially, the “as if” acts in a parodic style that throws issues of identity and political subjectivity into relief in hopes of “opening up in-between spaces where alternative forms of political subjectivity can be explored” (28). This practice of creative space making offers an enlivening pathway through stultifying forms of normativity and systemic oppression that characterize so much of contemporary life. Despite Briadatti’s unfortunate reluctance to extend this transformative possibility and in-between space to all subjects, her idea of the parodic “as if” as a site of opening and world-making remains generative.

In the context of contemporary queer and trans world-making, this parodic style appears as a viable alternative to the crushing imposition of hegemonic scripts of desire, love, and, embodiment. A salient example of this parodic style of “as if” world-making can be seen in Cassius Adair and Aren Aizura’s recent article in Transgender Studies Quarterly titled, “‘The Transgender Craze Seducing Our [Sons]”; or, All the Trans Guys Are Just Dating Each Other.” Here Adair and Aizura turn the transphobic logic employed by gender critical feminists on its head through a series of taboo considerations regarding desire, transness, and sex. Parodying Abigail Schrier’s latest trans-antagonistic book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, they ask, “Why shouldn’t transness be transmissible or contagious? Why can’t the erotic be a site for producing trans identity or practices? Why must we accommodate the asexual connotations of transgender when it replaces transsexuality (46)?” Just posing these questions disrupts normative expectations regarding social and political propriety and ushers in new figurations of relational and erotic possibility. By training their gaze on the often uncomfortable, if not unbearable, scenes of masc4masc t4t erotics found in a wide array of writing, pornography, and poetry, Adair and Aizura endeavor to create new trans masc figurations capable of ushering in alternative possibilities and pleasures. 

Adair and Aizura’s almost contemplative attention to masc4masc t4t scenes of desire is employed in hopes of cultivating an “unabashedly sexy theory of transsexual identity formation and political life” to counter anti-trans rhetoric and logics (59). Their fixed attention on trans life cultivates a different kind of knowledge production in line with Largier’s understanding of contemplation and figuration. For Largier, contemplation is not a technique for approaching something “other” but rather a “practice invested in participation and the modification and transformation of sensation, affects, and thought” (64). A commitment to imaginative forms of transformative practice links all the authors cited in this essay. Rather than rehearsing sedimented forms of knowledge or succumbing to the force of familiar affective patterns, Largier’s figures offer possibilities as infinite as the bodies they represent. As he reminds us, “The figure is…the entire actual world in potentia, the world we participate in, emerging as a flow of voices in a multitude of possibilities long before it ‘is’ or ‘means’ anything” (45).