In foregrounding the irreducibility of the figural and exploring the tension between figural effects and hermeneutical gestures of appropriation further, the interventions of Davis, De Lisle, Libby, and Napolitano draw attention to political urgencies that Figures of Possibility addresses only obliquely. I am tempted to speak of a politics not of interpellation and discursive negotiation but of social and cosmopoetic imagination where the norms of the former implode. This, I think after reading the four suggestive interventions, is indeed the challenge of post-secular ‘political theology’—not a theology turned into politics (as in the secularization of theological concepts), nor a grounding of politics in theology (as in the so-called return of religion in its many guises), nor a critique of theology as it persists in powerful hierarchies, but a shift where, against the narrowness of a “logic of repair” and beyond the norms of meaning, in a reimagination of mystical theology the “possibility of different forms of sociality” (Libby) appears. This includes, and it seems important to think along this line, the dimensions of a-sociality, of non-community, that is, of community not conceived along the lines of inclusion and exclusion—again, according to modes of interpellation—but of figural formation where distance and dereliction, playfulness, madness, and foolishness, are as important as commonalities. That said, this allusion to a necessary displacement of political theology does not exclude an eschatological horizon of plenitude and flourishing (and a convergence of nature and grace), but it transfers it into a sphere of concrete encounters outside the teleological structures of temporal fulfillment.
Inspired by the four interventions, I want to draw attention to the expansive nature of these concrete encounters that, in each instance—made to think with Thoreau, Adaire and Aizurea, Prado, and Foucault—, emphasize a collapse of the distinction between immanence and transcendence, and the extension in time, the affirmation of temporal and spatial expansiveness that is characteristic in all the examples the four interlocutors introduce and discuss. ‘Collapse,’ at least at a first glance, might come across as the wrong word, since it implies the momentary, the instantaneous. Instead, we have to think of a slow, dramatic, dreamlike, paradoxical collapse that keeps both poles still alive while exposing them to a critical drama and imaginative overload. This, the four interventions made me aware of, is to be taken at its full weight with each moment of tension between figural effects, forms of assimilation, and of appropriation—and the reiteration of this very structure in play.
Speaking of figures playing “in relation to one another without the ligature of meaning,” Robert Davis draws attention to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and its “progressive absorption in the concrete forms of sensation that the book chronicles.” In conversation with an image I borrow from Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Davis beautifully portrays Thoreau’s subtle engagement with perception, observation, experimental study, and reflection that turns the frozen surface into what “transforms his self-perception.”
Davis also adds a level of complexity I have hitherto missed, namely the conjunction of “seduction by the very surfaces he originally sought to penetrate” with the moments of exceeding oneself on one side, the art of the surveyor who is charting a territory that makes him akin to an “augur” on the other. Thoreau’s goal of prospecting “for Transcendentalist symbols”—moving away from metaphysical speculation—thus turns into another form of speculation where the notion of symbol undergoes a shift. The term ‘seduction’ draws attention to it as a version of speaking about the moments where the surveyor turns augur. Seduction in surveying is neither contemplative detachment nor detached observation but a very “moment of rebirth that is as physical as it is spiritual” (Davis). It is a form of speculation insofar as it lends depth to the surface, not in penetrating it but in opening a space for the resonance that the concrete encounters produce; and in charting maps and diagrams (Thoreau measuring the lake and its depths) that configure a picture that is similar to the constellation of celestial signs. Here, and Davis is right to point out that I might refute allegory sometimes too straightforwardly (he does not say it that directly), allegory and symbol enter into a fascinating conversation.
The Transcendentalist symbol—the ice in this case—undermines all gestures of abstraction and subjection when it brings a transporting quality into view. The ice turns into symbol when it affects perception, asking for observation and description, then for a transfiguration of the observer and their self-perception. Sometimes I wonder whether ‘absorption,’ a word I tend to use in this context, does justice to the process that the term ‘seduction’ implies. Davis, portraying Thoreau who engages his own observations, makes aware of a quality of the world and the things in the world that, as Libby points out, is too flat and caught short when we think of it in notions of agency alone. The ice, as figure, does indeed ‘act,’ but speaking of it—with Thoreau—as a ‘symbol’ emphasizes that it does not act out of its own but with an energy or grace that flows through it and that, becoming figure, shapes sensation, affect, and thought. Obviously, we have to think of this not in terms of transcendence and immanence but of an animation that pervades the world and ourselves.
Bringing the political into view, Valentina Napolitano foregrounds such moments of animation, exchange, attention, and what she calls a “theistic reconfiguration of immanent experience, while resisting the impulse for hermeneutic conceptualizations.” The key mystical and critical gesture of undoing as a “grounding political force of an active, affective dis-imagination of the world,” put in conversation with Foucault’s analysis of the production of subjectivity in regimes of truth and governance, indeed undermines the logic of “capacity building” Foucault analyses. The proposal to set up transfiguration and partaking against “a focus on capaciousness and transformation” not only challenges established modes of self-consciousness and their implicit dualism, but it affirms the primacy of a figural and energetic entanglement with the worlds we are part of. This does not deny the value of Foucault’s socio-historical discourse analysis, nor does it invalidate his take on the productivity of power relations in the constitution of subjects. It does, however, shift the ground on which this analysis is performed, insofar as it takes the rationality of a “mystical techne of reason” and what she calls a “mystical turn” seriously.
As Napolitano points out, this shift liberates the notion of mysticism from suspicions of irrationality and brings its critical force into view. While it consists—bringing us back to the undoing—of gestures of defamiliarization that liberate affective and cognitive partaking, it also frees from the paradigms of interpellation. What comes into view, then, is the irreducible nature of exchange where “the undoing serves as a grounding political force of an active, affective dis-imagination of the world (with its toxicity and renewed kinship)” (Napolitano). In other words, Figures of Possibility foregrounds not theories of subjectivity and power (as much as they have been and are needed), nor genealogical models, but rather forms of “transfiguration and partaking” that also liberate “a mystical techne of reason” from its exile engendered by ‘reason.’
With Napolitano I want to re-emphasize that this entails a type of analysis that, “by conceptually and pictorially bringing cosmic and human imagining together”—in “post-secular, opening ways”—moves beyond flattening ideologies of “self-cultivation” and established discursive distinctions. Something that, I need to add, thinking in consonance with the textual traditions that are at the core of the book (and with Goethe, Lukács, and Benjamin), cannot be done without taking the demonic as part of that cosmic and human imagining into account more thoroughly. I take this—with Mechthild of Magdeburg’s challenge to move “under Lucifer’s tail—” as a task to be done, a needed reflection, a book to be written (Book V, Ch. 4).
It is promising to bring Napolitano’s observations in conversation with C. Libby’s elaboration of a “glimmer of hope” from the “seemingly counterintuitive vantage point of negative affect.” Libby, in focusing first on Mechthild of Magdeburg’s “mystical dereliction,” establishes a link with contemporary feminist and queer writing on relationality. In foregrounding “affective constellations of estrangement and lovesickness,” Libby emphasizes the aspects of Mechthild’s writing that are not governed by a—often all-too facile—“logic of repair” but by elaborate ways of inhabiting a sphere of estrangement where, in a paradoxical enjoyment, the exploration of “relationality at the threshold of the unbearable” turns into the very core of her experimental practice (Libby). What does it mean that the affective experiences that emerge here—mediated and amplified through poetic figuration—are not submitted to an allegoresis (that instantiates a religious doxa) or to what Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman call a “logic of repair”?
Thinking with Mechthild, Libby argues, not only gives us a way of embracing negative affect, suffering, the exile, the distance from the beloved, but a form of life that entails—even builds on—a range of “different forms of sociality.” It is in line with this perspective that the figure of the holy fool in both its abject and parodic function—the saint and the cynic—emerges in a critical position that Rosi Braidotti recently explored. Braidotti does so in terms of an “as if,” a form of parody and of inhabiting liminal positions that opens spaces of experimentation with other and new forms of sociality. Mechthild of Magdeburg’s and Hadewijch of Antwerp’s texts indeed explore and experiment with such spaces, “stultifying forms of normativity” and opening possibilities that are to be compared to “contemporary queer and trans world-making.” Reflecting on the “as if,” which in Braidotti’s version enables parodic distance and exploration but is still bound up with norms and their affirmation, I am tempted to emphasize an antinomian moment here—an antinomian moment that emerges at the core of all so-called mystical traditions.
When the “as if” moves beyond the hypothetical mode into the space of experimental contemplation, it suspends the normative contexts and turns into what for real transfigures the world and produces new relational, erotic, and cognitive possibilities. These, then, allow for new paths of desire, erotic arousal, and knowledge production in a space that, through this very practice, loses its normative constraints time and again, and call for the abandonment of reductive models of sexualities with their teleological structures. Under these conditions, the “as if” shows itself not as an intellectual hypothesis or a critical tool but as the space where the imagination draws its forms from a horizon of possibilities that has hitherto not been there. The “divine preference for weakness” indeed prefers what is socially not recognizable, what brings about different and new relationalities (like Saint Francis undressing in public or conversing with animals), breaking—Libby references the ‘parodic’ work of Cassius Adair and Aren Aizura here—through a “series of taboo considerations regarding desire, transness, and sex.” What they, similar to Mechthild, offer in their “contemplative attention” are “new figurations of relational and erotic possibilities” and “pleasures” (Libby).
As in Mechthild and Hadewijch, it is somewhat misleading to speak of an ‘embodied’ character of the ‘mystical’ experience here. Instead, the experimental arrangement makes the body and possible bodies emerge anew also in what Emma De Lisle describes in her reference to the Brazilian poet Adélia Prado as “her unabashed love of the carnal, physical world in both its beauty and its suffering.”As De Lisle argues, we find ourselves in a poetic language that produces a “process of striking and partaking,” in what is in fact the contrary of what is often seen as characteristic when mystical experimentation is read as a form of poetic “engagement with allegory or metaphor.” Prado’s work, which I am discovering through De Lisle’s beautiful readings, has been compared to a Franciscan style and implicates the reader in poetic, intricate play. It includes verbal strategies of direction and misdirection, decoy arrangements, logical propositions, devices that establish trust, surprise, wonder, possibly protest—all of it working out an involvement of the reader that breaks with the consolations of the “as or like,” the facile comparison or analogy that could save us easily.
In light of this, what De Lisle observes in her discussion of my reference to Karen Barad’s description of a thunderstorm is of key importance here. I had not argued, not explored precisely enough, that Barad’s anthropomorphic turn comes about after the fact—which is indeed the case in the mimetic assimilation that she produces when she describes the effects of a thunderstorm. While I see this as a moment where we can observe the difficulty of maintaining the tension between the figural and its assimilation (and where, to put it succinctly, Barad in my opinion turns idealist with her notion of agential realism), De Lisle proposes an alternative “record of the interaction between figure and mimetic assimilation.” Focusing on the poem Neopelican (a provocative title, full of allegorical allusion and eschatological suggestion), De Lisle retraces the movements of Prado’s text from conceptualization back to the sensible, the moments when allegoresis sets in, and of drawing attention to the “inability to recreate the figural experience.” It is in this inability where the “exultation” emerges, traced in the experience of being figurally struck, expansive first in that very exultation and then in “the mind’s swift attempt to fill the void of meaning in the experience of the figural, consciously admitted” (De Lisle). This, in turn, leads to the “superimposition of a new image over the figure … still reported as a reaction to the figure’s force, a report of Prado’s own transformed vision serving as preparation for the final transfiguration that closes the poem.”
De Lisle is right when she foregrounds the difference between this procedure and Barad’s conflation of conceptual meaning and the figural event—and, implicitly, my own lack of elaborating this more precisely. Prado’s process, what she both portrays and makes the reader participate in, takes shape as a layering that mirrors not only a perceptual event in its arresting force but the expansiveness of perception and thought in time, ending in a displacement that “is neither metaphorical nor allegorical.”
As Adélia Prado—in De Lisle’s reading, and now in my understanding—shows in her writing, it is both a temptation to think that we are creators, that the figures are agents in themselves, that acknowledging the immanence of agency will save us, and a fact that this means tricking ourselves. Only “a method of disrupting language with figure, desire, and displacement,” a method of abdication and dispossession makes grace available through the figures and does not reconfigure them, positively and normatively, in terms of agents themselves. Nevertheless, it is in this process of figuration and dispossession—explored in Prado’s poems in its complexity—that the imagination participates in the divine that gives itself not in the necessity of natural causality but in the freedom of grace in this world, the concrete, the incarnate. Being struck by the figure, I am thus tempted to say, means being lifted out of the normative natural order into the non-order of grace, or being drawn into the immanence where grace takes over from nature, and nature in the layering of that exchange becomes grace.
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