This intervention invites readers to consider Largier’s interdisciplinary approach on figuration and theistic immanence, particularly in the light of Foucault’s reflection on Subject and Power and his large influence on Anthropological and Social Sciences studies of power and the willful subject. Napolitano examines mystics and negative theology’s thread of “the ground” in Largier’s work, likening its affective intensity and dynamic of figuration to an otherwise imagination of the political, and its forms of violence.
Resisting the temptation to romanticize the prelapsarian state of affective and sensory innocence before the fall into conceptualization, Largier attends to contemplative practices that open the discursive mind to be interrupted by figuration.
Woodbine’s beautiful narrative is extraordinarily self-aware, and deeply humane. Haskins’ own voice is strong, active, present throughout. I had not planned to read it in one sitting but I literally could not put it down. Only a couple miles northwest of Haskins’ Roxbury, in the mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood of Chestnut Hill near Boston College, there is a totally other religious and cultural world. This is the place of white priests, educated Catholics, lecture halls, and the circuits of urban Catholic power. Particularly in the 1960s and 70s, it might as well have been another planet from Afro-Caribbean Roxbury.
Is it possible to consider an askesis of otherwise imaginaries without falling prey to the ascetic ideal?
All three texts concern lives: the formed life, the deformed life, and a life without a why – a useless life freed from subjection to transcendence.
This intervention invites to think active dis-imagination, in mystical and contemporary traditions, as a grounding political force.
