Subject: Mysticism and animality
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 13:28:46 -0500 (EST)


I was going over Michel De Certeau's _Mystic Fable_ which brought some
thoughts regarding abjection and animality as well as a way of placing
recent whirlygigs, turbulence on the open seas. In the chapters entitled
"A Place To Loose Oneself" Certeau is showing as he says two practices
whose effect is the mystical literature of the sixteenth century: "a
withdrawal (ecstatic) brought about by the seduction of the Other, and a
virtuosity (technical) in making words confess what they are unable to
say." ( _MF_ pg 29). He doesn't say much on this, by this move towards a
"technician's freedom" is part of a longer evolution whose symbol Certeau
says is Ockham. The simple way I think of this evolution is as a
questioning of the
generalization of universals by way of a process of individuation which we
find in the philosophy of Duns Scotus which feeds not only into Heidegger
but also Deleuze who strangely takes it away from its peripatetic or
Aristotelian context and rubs it against neoplatonic currents which is
what Certeau hints at at the end of chapter one (The monastery and the
public square: madness in the crowd (Deleuze's swarm? One thinks of Serres
as well)) when he writes and which I relate to previous threads on Lyotard
and the notion of "nuanced matter": "One could discern in the crowd a
historical homology to "matter" [hyle] in which Plotinus recognized the
nocturnal fringe and "residue" left out of play by the analytical advance
of intelligence -- a shadowy depth of things that would appear to have at
once the function of origin (materia/matter) and of limit (the other) in
the work of distinction, an undetermined area[aoriston] that the mind
fears as its own abjection and fall into nonbeing." (_MF_ pg48) When
Lyotard talks about avant-garde art as the bearing of witness to the
unpresentable and bringing into play of remnants, well, here is an
interpretation. To simulate, play the role of residue so to speak, is to
become idiotic and excremental, an accursed piece of symbolic value: "the
idiot is totally within the unsymbolizable thing that resists meaning. She
takes upon herself the body's most humble functions; she looses herself in
the unassertable (///), below the level of language (///). It is this
NOISE that organizes a space, an intermediate zone whose blurrrred
boundaries is a staging, a theatrics of simulated non-sense that
proliferates the use of masks and simulacra, and tricks of the eye such as
anamorphisis or that found in writing using mise en abyme techniques where
a mirror is placed inside the text that relates the behind the scenes look
on how the text comes to be as the unspoken subject matter of the text. 
Such is the defience of carnivalesque reversal where the low is high and
the high is low. Blur. The effacement (///) of the semantic depth of a
phrase then gives rise to a plastic indicator such as y/our animalistic
scratches (///)? I laugh and barely avoid a bulls horn as I continue to
follow Ariadne's thread now a little deeper within a heterological cthonic
underground burrowing my way with Teresa's silkworm.

Ariosto 




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