Figures and figural arrangements–a row of houses, a car accident, a view along a street, a first touch of two hands–do not just communicate some feeling or meaning that can be known. They do not just create an atmosphere that can be felt and understood. Instead, figures produce effects and differential intensities that precede and resist all mimetic assimilation in sensation, affect, imagination, and thought. Figure refers to what strikes us and makes us part of it
Largier, 6.
In Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses (2022), the voices of early and medieval Christian authors– Gregory of Nyssa and Origen to Mechthild von Magdeburg, Hugh of Saint Victor, and Henry Suso– speak alongside modern novelists, composers, artists, and philosophers–Joris Karl Huysmans, John Cage, Dan Flavin, Simone Weil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Clarice Lispector and Gilles Deleuze– through Niklaus Largier’s retelling (1). Offering a careful reading of sources through and with attention to their geographic and temporal differences, Largier develops a concept of the “figure” or “figuration,” which has the potential to create what Largier calls “possibility” or, borrowing language from medieval mystics, a participation in “the ungraspable divine” (14).
“Think of the sound of a bird” (6). Think of the handshake in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (6). Think of a good book (6). The figural is, according to Largier quoting Proust, “‘something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation…would not enable’ us ‘to discover’” (6). These–the sound of a bird, the handshake, the good book– as Largier explains, quickly translate into the imaginary world of comparisons and similes that allow their participants “to picture and understand movements and constellations of sensations, affects, and thoughts that follow” (6). Yet what seems central to Largier’s analysis is not just that figures translate to commonly held assumptions about the world that allow us to participate through language, that is, through comparison and simile, with one another through figural interpretations, but that this participation “precedes and underlies the production of comparisons and similes,” in turn reminding that assimilation of sensation and affect is never exhaustive; that the possibilities of the figure always outrun and precede any assignments of meaning or language, even if meaning is assigned forward and backward onto the world (6). This aspect of the figural, as Largier explains, is what makes the figure not only meaningful, distinctive, an event, but also, in acting on its participants, world–altering, with the possibility to “put the entire world and its history in a state of both absorption and suspension: absorption in the figural effects that simultaneously express and disrupt the world, suspension in the possibilities of assimilation that come to nest in the historically shaped textures of it” (6).
The authors of this symposium take–up Largier’s concept of the “figure,” considering the political dimensions of “a sense of possibility” through an exploration of varying philosophical, artistic, and poetic forms. Animating synchronicity between sources that seem otherwise to be separate, allowing curiosity and wonder to emerge out of difference, each is not only informed by Largier’s terms, but written with a kind of sensibility for that which is or could be that Largier invites.
More specifically, in his essay “Dark Figures,” Robert Davis animates Largier’s sense for the figural through a carefully curated selection of images; a spectator absorbed in the movement between light and dance; the vision of the thirteenth-century mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp wherein she is drawn into the form and taste of the Eucharist which is at the same time the bodily embrace of Christ; the annual cycle of seasons reflected in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; ice and bare branches that frame the frozen pond in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris; stars carefully charted by Roman augurs. In the display of figures, Davis invites readers into Largier’s sense of “the figural” in so far as the figural is “prior to” or “before” (or even “beneath”) cognitive thought, animating what Largier calls the “concrete world of figures,” and in so doing offering an essay that is itself, to borrow the words of Davis, an “account of contemplation—a state of deep absorption in the concrete, embodied figures of sensation and affect—that feels both novel and ancient” (Davis quoting Largier 44–45).
In the second essay of the series, “A Foucault’s Otherwise: A Commentary on Niklaus Largier’s Figures of Possibility,” Valentina Napolitano highlights the thread of “the ground” (negative theology) that runs throughout Largier’s book, showing how the affective intensity of negative theology creates an onto/epistemological tension akin to exile alongside contemporary readings of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault.
Like Napolitano, who offers a political possibility of “otherwise” through her reading of twenty–first century philosophy in light of Largier, in the next essay “Desiring Possibility: Trans Figuration, ‘As If,’ and the Holy Fool,” C. Libby builds on the work of Largier by reading contemporary critical queer and trans theory to show how an embrace of alternative forms of sociality has the potential to “usher in new figurations of relational and erotic possibility” through a sensibility attuned to what is possible “…before it ‘is’ or ‘means’ anything” (Libby quoting Largier 45).
Inviting questions around agency as it relates to subjectivity, in the final essay of this series, “‘I Speak with a Throb’: Reading Adélia Prado’s Use of Figure in Response to Niklaus Largier,” Emma De Lisle names an unspoken yet significant shift in Largier’s concept of “the figure” from conduit (in his fourth chapter) to separable entity with singular, determinable agency unto itself (in the sixth chapter). In response to the gap between the ways Largier construes agency of the figure, De Lisle offers Adélia Prado’s poem “Neopelican,” highlighting how Prado’s repeated abdication and reclamation of the sovereign I invites the reader to claim God as agent of the figural by participating in the tradition of radical dispossession that Largier traces through the writings of Thomas of Celano and Henry Suso.
The work of the authors in this symposium is as nuanced, creative, and mindful of historical and literary particularity as Largier’s. It is a great joy to be able to introduce them here.
