Mystical Foundations ‑Dailey
By Patricia Dailey | Published on February 8, 2022
Both marginal micro-literatures and mysticism offer themselves as a modus loquendi a way of speaking, and a modus agenda (a way of acting) that comments upon or speaks to a center and speaks it otherwise. It translates the space of a center (a logos or a law) into a way of speaking. In this way, mysticism is related to a poetics, but its space is not literally, that of the center/margin of textual space. Rather, the institutionality that produces the apparatus of spatial distributions is put into question. Mysticism redistributes the authority of the center into a different topography. It works by means of the reinvention of spatial authority and, especially with women mystics, the rendering spatial of an interiorized embodiment.
Michel de Certeau reminds us that is only starting with the seventeenth century that mysticism becomes a noun in and of itself (la mystique) – and that beforehand mysticism (i.e. the mystical) was only used as an adjective that modified something else and could alter or affect all the forms of knowing and objects according to a religious world. He notes that the rendering-substantive of the term in the first half of the 17th century is the sign of a cutting (a découpage) or a splitting operative (on a broader scale) at the level of knowledge and of happenings (faits) or facts. From that moment on, a space begins to delimit a mode of experience, a genre of discourse, a region of knowing. At the same time the word mysticism appears, it constitutes itself in a space apart. It circumscribes or discerns isolatable happenings (faits) — extraordinary events; mysticism begins to become more socially pronounced as a category, and it becomes co-extensive with a form of knowing. When we speak of mysticism before this cut and this formalization of a kind of knowledge, we refer to a kind of way of speaking and an affective modality of knowing that is still, so to speak, both within and outside a larger cultural practice. The fact of “mysticism’s” adjectival status, that “mystical” is, in the Middle Ages, one designation in a mode of approaching divinity gives us a different sense of its status, not yet partitioned off in the same culturally recognized way.
A “mystical” way of approaching divinity has something to do, as we know well, with a form of proximity: of sensing the proximity of the divine. The sacred is not only to be found in sacraments, in the precinct of the corpus mysticum (the mystical body of ecclesia, the virtual community of worshippers). Rather, the mystery of the sacred is transposed into the terms of an experience: an ecstatic experience of a limit. The centrality of “authority” decenters its subject. This borderline (decentering) experience –is also of the body: of a borderline body. It is “here” at this border crossing that mysticism touches on the poetic. How does the “poetics” of mysticism relate to the recording of this experience? To its immemorabilty? To its inscribing something that cannot be appropriated, recorded, or spoken for? To its opening up that blank space (on a page, for example), of an open secret or a space for the other? An aletory space that may be wounding (as Derrida speaks of the hedgehog)?
In any case, to return to the question of the “space” of poetic experience, we have veered off the page. What strikes me with the idea of micro-literatures is that there is some relation of margin to center at play that works in the logic of a poetics, of a decentered authority. And that this can also teach us something about the space of the literary, so to speak.
We will not be keeping to the path of mysticism as our only via, but we will think about its commonalities, rather than its exceptionality…
