The perverted mystic — the curious case of Angelus Silesius
“I am a hill of God, and must myself ascend/That God may then reveal his face to me, my friend.” — Angelus Silesius
“I have already spoken about other people who were not too bad in terms of mysticism, but who were situated instead on the side of the phallic function, Angelus Silesius, for example. Confusing his contemplative eye with the eye with which God looks at him, must, if kept up, partake of perverse jouissance.” (Lacan, 1999, 76/70).
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Lacan makes a very intriguing point in seminar XX, Encore, namely a sexual division along the lines of mysticism and the mystical tradition. Here, we hear that Teresa de Avila is a mystic of feminine jouissance, whereas Angelus Silesius is a mystic on the male side of sexuation. We know, that these two modes of sexuation have nothing to do with biology, it is how the speaking being is caught up in language and how they relate to castration as a fact of the symbolic order. Whereas the male side of sexuation relies on an exception to castration (for example the primordial father, who enjoys all the women), the female side has no exception to castration. There is no “primordial father”, or exception that constitutes the female side. This means, however, paradoxically, that there can be formed no whole on this side, no totality. Its a radical undermining of every kind of totality. To put it in more popular terms: every band of brothers, every male group always function as a group precisely in so far as they can refer to the fantasy of the all-powerful leader. Every man wants to be the Man. Every ordinary man identifies as a man precisely through the reference to the the Man (with all the connotations of this: a real man, the Man as in the phrase, “you have to work for the Man” and so on and so forth). Women are different. They do not form a collective through reference to some primordial father. They have no extraordinary exception. But as such they are much more radical and do not form a closed group. Lacan defines this position as a open-ended set from set theory. We cannot set a boundary (no exception) and this means that that no group can be formed. This is nothing to do with biology. It is a fact of a symbolic castration through language. This is only a rough sketch, as my point more has to do with the productive category of the male mysticism as perversion. What does this mean?
Lacan refers here to Angelius Silesius, the German mystic (1624–1677), much beloved by the late Heidegger. Especially Silesius’ praise about the “rose without why” was used by Heidegger against philosophical metaphysics of “ground” (Leibniz):
“The rose is without why: it blooms because it blooms, It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen.” (Heidegger, 35).
In philosophy everything has to be ‘with sufficient reason”, that is ultimatately explainable (no effect without a cause) and Silesius provided Heidegger with a ressource in thinking outside this metaphysical tradition. Even more so, it becomes especially clear in Silesius how his writing on God enables a critical perspective of the Will, that Heidegger sees as THE problem with modern nihilism. Modern man, with his technology and rationality, tries to master being and the planet, thereby refusing to see, that Being is given to him, that it is only through humble listening to Being that we can avoid the abyss of the will and even what Heidegger calls “primordial Will”. (Urwille). There are many places in Silesius where he points to giving up the will. We can only establish a relation to God, so Silesius, through surrendering any notion of ego or self. If we can capture or understand God, it is by definition not God, but merely our own mirage we capture. God is radically transcendent. In other words, if the rose blossoms without why, we can only come in relation to its blossoming when we give up the question of the “why…”. Silesius writes for example (1.24) in one English translation:
“O man/as long as you are something/while you know, have and cherish/you have not been delivered/believed me of your burden”.
In other words, as long as you are ‘something’, within the human perspective, you can be nothing to God, who is radically transcendent, radically different from human measurements. In other words, any exchange with God for example (like that you sacrifice time being devoted to him in hope of salvation in return) already is proof, that you are not a true believer. You must relinquish rather all that “matters” is worth anything in the symbolic in order to obtain a relationship. To put it a bit paradoxically, the only relationship possible is when you abandon what is (humanely) thought of a relation. As long as you ‘want’ it (with your will) it is not right, you cannot obtain it. That is why Silesius, like Heidegger, all the time emphasise the mood of thankfulness (as Heidegger says, to think is to be thankful), when you thank someone, you are in a relationship of dependence, you receive something. For Heidegger as for Silesius we have to put ourselves in a relationship, that from the outside can only look as passivity (passively receiving the word from God). In reality, a much more “active” effort is required to bring yourself into this ec-static position.
Angelus Silesius does not want to deny that the blooming of the rose has a ground. It blooms because-it blooms. Contrary to this, in order to be in the essential possibilities of their existence, humans must pay attention to what grounds are detenninative for them, and how they are so. But the fragment of Angelus Silesius does not speak about this, indeed because he has something still more concealed in mind. The grounds that essentially determine humans as having a Geschick stem from the essence of grounds. Therefore these grounds are abysmal llll (cf. what is said below about the other tonality of the principle of reason). But blooming happens to the rose inasmuch as it is absorbed in blooming and pays no attention to what, as some other thing-namely, as cause and condition of the blooming-could first bring about this blooming. It does not first need the ground of its blooming to be expressly rendered to it. (Heidegger, 37).
This is why it is only the later Heidegger that is interested in Silesius. The late Heidegger is much more interested, than the earlier, in passivity, in “listening to Being”, Dasein is no longer the violent rupture of a resolution (the decision that brings me to a more authentic being), but that of being carried along, of Gelassenheit (releasement) of opening myself up to the voice of Being within me. Being is here not another substance, but precisely Being as pure difference, that provides ontic entities with their historic-metaphysical meaning. In more Christian-medieval tradition (Fénélon), Lacan refers to the difference. Between physical and ecstatic love. In the first, developed by. Aristotle and Thomas de Aquinas, one can only love another if he is my good, so we love God as our supreme Good. Physical does not mean bodily, but something natural, like the love between a bear and its cup (Lacan 75). In the second, ecstatic love, the loving subject enacts a complete self-erasure, a complete dedication to the Other in its alterity, without return, without benefice, whose exemplary case is mystical self-erasure. Lacan goes to the end here: “The peak of the love for God should have been to tell him ‘if this is why will, condemn me’, that is to say the exact opposite of the aspiration to the supreme Good”. Even if there is no mercy from God, even if God were to damn me completely to external suffering, my love for him is so great that I would still completely love him. Here we enter a dimension of alterity within God itself. Because what if God is not simply a supreme Being (without enjoyment), but also one that can enjoy (and since enjoyment presuppose alterity, God enjoying is otherness within God). When we enjoy, we are not thinking, enjoyment eclipses being qua thinking. What is unheard of for Heidegger’s reading of Silesius, but which is pretty clear when you read him, is that Silesius is much more describing the position of perversion, where the subject procures enjoyment of the Other (God). What is really “without a why” is not so much some ineffable Ground, that always withdraws, as in Heidegger’s reading, but precisely enjoyment (enjoyment is always produced as a surplus). To be sure, Silesius describes the radical self-effacement of the mystic, but we can also clearly see a kind of lover’s complaint. (Notice for example the many places, where Silesius writes of complete entwinement, where God is ‘within’ a, like being that the mystic is fully immersed in. We can compare the male mystic to the way he becomes the Gaze of the Other (the instrument through which Good sees). The male perversion is not that of creepy old man watching a young girl (saliva in his mouth…), but rather that of a cold bureaucrat simply fulfilling his duty, but gaining surplus pleasure from following orders. The pervert is someone who excuses himself, who hides behind ‘duty’ and ‘orders’. In terms of the mystic this is the more sophisticated version, but it is still the same structure. His own enjoyment is relinquished in favour of devotion to God, but this devotion itself procures a surplus-enjoyment.
Recall Lacan’s formula: the picture is in my eye, but I am in the picture.” If, in common subjectivist perspectival view, every picture is mine, “in my eye”, while I am not (and by definition cannot be) in the picture, the mystical experience reverts this relation: I am in the picture, that I see, but the picture is not mine, “in my eye”. This is how Lacan’s formula of the male version of the mystical experience should be read: it identifies my gaze with the gaze of the big Other, for in it I see myself directly through the eyes of the big Other. This reliance on the big Other makes the male version of the mystical experience false, in contrast to the feminine version in which the subject identifies her gaze with the small other. (Žižek 2012: 748).
This is precisely what happens in Silesius. Every kind of “subjectivist perspectival view” (my eye) is sacrificed. The self is nothing, completely erased, but as such it begins to function as the gaze of the Other (Silesius often imagines how God ‘comes alive’ in him with his radical self-erasure). This is the basic mystical perversion, perversion is not about some hedonistic self-fulfilment, but instead, when we erase any notion of self, instead becoming a pure instrument of the Other, his living organ. What is ‘fake’ in this? Only that it precisely as such constitutes the Other as “full”. To be sure for the male mystic pervert and perversion in general, the Other needs the pervert, he fills out the lack in the Other, but in this way he also renders the Other ‘perfect’, fully functional. The symptom here is that little bit of ‘extra’ (the surplus-enjoyment that the pervert gets in carrying out his orders…). Imagine a sadistic teacher, that hides behind his duty. He punishes the pupils, but can all the time excuse his punishments as something he ‘has’ to do, because it is for the benefit of the students and the school. What is fake is that “subjectively” he very much enjoys this role, and that he doesn’t have to take responsibility for his own enjoyment, since he is only doing his duty as a conscientious teacher. The symptom is here precisely this enjoyment, since this ‘extra’ is testimony to the fact, that something in the Other is not guaranteed, something produced as a “symptomal torsion” of the system itself, a kind of prosthetic outgrowth of the Other.
It is certainly productive to look at Lacan’s earlier mentioning of Silesius, which already happens in seminar 1. Here the focus is on full speech as compared to the empty “blah-blah” of the patient qua ego. Here full speech is not simply when the subject is able to “symbolise” its history, to render it into the symbolic, but even more, full speech is when a crack opens in the continuity of ego-speak. Full speech is therefore not simply a speech that is fully transparent. It is speech, that precisely “has an edge”, where something is at stake, where the Otherness of the subject shines through. This is taken much further in seminar 20. The early Lacan does not conceive of jouissance in this radical way, as passing through, precisely what is “failing” in the Other. In the early Lacan the Other is full, there is an “Other for the Other”, whereas in the later Lacan, there is no “Other for the Other”, there is only there is only the Other as barred, as inconsistent, as consisting of the missing “binary signifier” (a signifier for Woman). Precisely because of this missing binary signifier, we get the entire terrain of signifiers as a compensation, as ways to try and compensate for what is originally missing in the symbolic order. The two sides of sexuation, are two ways, not of symbolic difference, but of failures of the symbolic, that is of failures of the binary. This is why Silesius, as a male mystic, is also a way of “repressing the very repression of the binary signifier”. To put it simply, in Silesius, one has no need of women, there is only the mystic and the way he serves God as an object.
Bibliography:
Martin Heidegger: the principle of Reason. Indiana University Press. 1991.
Jacques Lacan: Encore. Seminar XX. Norton. 1999.
Slavoj Žižek: Less than Nothing. Verso. 2012.
For some of Angelus Silesius’ poems see for example: https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/online-ebooks/angelus-silesius_alexandrines-from-the-cherubinic-pilgrim_complete-text.html
