Between Angela and Actaeon: Dislocation more

Between Angela and Actaeon: Dislocation Nicola Masciandaro and Anna Klosowska T HIS ESSAY IS ENCHANTED with sanctity in a heterodox sense, as a state of being outré, out of the way, surprised, surprising. We want to see a naked sanctity, the saint denuded of doctrinal dress, a kind of holiness we cannot properly look upon. In order to achieve this vision, to produce the appearance of what is not given to gaze at directly, our essay works by a kind of hermeneutic triangulation, taking aim at a space between and within a saint and a transgressor of the sacred: Angela of Foligno (d. 1309) and Actaeon. Distant, Angela and Actaeon are yet next to each other in fascinating ways related to language, body, presence, vision, and metamorphosis. Like two stars in a constellation, they are close in separation, far apart only to appear impossibly proximate. Most conspicuously, Angela and Actaeon are corporeally near in nakedness and disintegration. Where Angela strips herself to stand naked before the cross, Actaeon is rendered animally nude by mutation into a stag. Where Actaeon is torn apart by his hounds after seeing a goddess, Angela’s limbs are separated when God enters and withdraws from her body. The where of these conjunctions, the unwitnessable place they reveal, is an unseeable state of identity between transgression and sanctity. We call this secret locale dislocation. Our method is at once that of mega- and anti-cultural studies. A little theoretical genealogy: in a 1967 interview occasioned by the success of The Order of Things, Michel Foucault sketches the trajectory from his training in Husserlian phenomenology (“meaning which already envelops and invests us before we start to open our eyes and speak”) to the focus, via Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot on the one hand, and the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Georges Dumézil on the other, on the “formal conditions which can cause meaning to appear.”1 Foucault dates that transition in his thinking to 1950-55, and he reflects on its consequences: new historical approaches that we might today categorize as “post-humanist.” Paradoxically, he groups these innovative historical approaches with the Annales school’s focus on microhistory and history of institutions, exemplified by Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel. Foucault invites us to acknowledge the infinitely complex reality of history by turning our attention away from the dialectic man/institution or cause/effect to other modalities: a-causal relations, or the contemporaneity of phenomena. When we read Foucault’s list of © L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2010), pp. 91–105 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR possible historical relations “of a logical type” including not only contemporaneity (opposed to the expected historical causality and linearity) but also “implication, exclusion, transformation” (Foucault 92), we foresee Gilles Deleuze’s move away from dualities and triads and towards a theorization of multiplicities, sympathies, and assemblages that not only multiplies categories but also proceeds through new modalities: pick-up and bricolage. In the figures of Angela and Actaeon, we read sanctity as existing simultaneously inside culture’s interstices and beyond/against culture as such. We would locate sanctity as a Lyotardian sublime, a “beyond within” culture.2 Our thesis, which we uphold without laboring to prove, is that sanctity is original culture, the hidden aberrant-authentic center of cultus, a hardly discoverable displaced site where the ancient touches the avant-garde, in other words an avant-avant-garde that is paradoxically primordial. Dislocation is a sacred being out of place: not being in another or improper place, but being out of place itself. Dislocation is a rare exponent of the way a body is always both precisely what is in place and a place in and of itself. The body is dislocation’s instrument and intimate container. Tracking dislocation also calls for a dislocated method, a sylvan wandering that allows itself to become lost enough to find what cannot be deliberately traced. In describing the specificity of Paul Klee’s paintings in the interview already cited, Foucault says that Klee took from the surface of the world a whole series of figures which had value as signs, and […] orchestrated them within pictorial space while leaving them their form and structure as signs […] while preserving their mode of being as signs […] making them function at the same time in such a way as no longer to have any meaning (Foucault 98). Our essay would preserve Angela’s and Actaeon’s mode of being as signs by seeing them as free from meaning, unloosed from signification. Now they can be stars in a constellation, still but no longer stars. Angela and Actaeon evoke, as a third star, the secretive deer-like self-dismembering saints of Sufi tradition. As Annemarie Schimmel explains, such temporary dismemberment appears as a radically corporeal expression of the dhikr or recollection of God, a literal falling to pieces in the presence of the divine: In the increased proximity brought about by the dhikr of the heart the seeker becomes, eventually, completely heart; every limb of his is a heart recollecting God […]. We may place here the grotesque stories told about several Sufis of India. Their limbs became separated from them during the dhikr and recollected God each in its own way. This experience is known from Shamanism, but was apparently not rare among later Sufis, mainly in the Subcontinent.3 92 SPRING 2010 NICOLA MASCIANDARO AND ANNA KLOSOWSKA In the Indian tradition, such saints are known as ghous. They may, for instance, dismantle themselves before bedtime, removing limbs, and reassemble at waking time.4 Catching sight of such a saint when disassembled can be dangerous. In a reprisal of the Diana and Actaeon or Zeus and Semele story, a curious disciple who observes dismembering loses vision completely.5 This ability to remove one’s limbs is also proximate to a particularly animal way of being. Ghous-like saints are shy, difficult to contact, secretive like deer whose graceful gait theirs recalls (Donkin 27-28). Like other masts, individuals fragmented by intense spiritual experience, they are prone to nakedness (Donkin 218). So dislocation is intelligible on a continuum with nakedness, as its next and natural intensification. Masts generally are prone to intense engagements with an attribute, object or substance, a relation that elevates what would ordinarily be a mere accessory to the intensity of assemblage. Such engagements, or laminations, are cemented by the fact that many do not wear clothing, so that the object of attachment, like dismembering, is also intelligible as an intensified nakedness. For instance, “a mast who loved oil […] used to pour it all over his body,” while another had an assortment of iron chains, wires, locks, old bones, and other odds and ends attached all over his body. From the sackcloth about his waist were suspended some sickles and several bundles, and over his shoulder he carried a crowbar (sabbal): hence his name (Donkin 315, 298). The naming both confirms and reflects the importance of the object-mast assemblage, the living person’s lamination with the inanimate dimension: The name Châchâ was given him because, in his fondness for tea (cha), he used to call out “Cha, cha,” (tea, tea), whenever he wanted it. A great deal of tea, instead of being swallowed, would spill over his clothes, and also—heaven knows how—over his hat, and the latter was encrusted with stale tea and sugar, and stuck irremovably to his scalp (Donkin 87). Ovid’s accounts of metamorphoses, which are always also stories of naming, contemplate man-animal or man-plant assemblages of similar intensity. The sections that follow place Ovid’s version of the Actaeon and Diana legend into dislocated conversation with Angela’s mystical texts. Like the extreme self-exposures of the God-mad, Angela and Actaeon embody a transgressively intensified interiority. Angela’s dislocation communicates at once her intimacy with the omnipresent and the pain of the impossible withdrawal of its presence from her body. In a proportional way, Actaeon’s disjoining death, interpreted by Giordano Bruno as his becoming-divine, expresses both the violence of his illicit glimpsing of the goddess and his attainment of a transVOL. 50, NO. 1 93 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR human state. As a constellation, the three examples here cited (Angela, ghous, Actaeon) chart a kind of typology for mystical dislocation as something always towards and yet already beyond its more extreme and finalizing Orphic form: an interior, ambivalently psychic/physical dislocation (Angela); an iterable, naturalized, private bodily dismemberment (ghous); a hyper-interiorized absolute dismemberment (Actaeon). Disarticulation also expresses itself in the loss of the ability, but not the desire, to speak. Angela and Actaeon intersect in uncanny ways in relation to voice and vision. During her first dislocating experience of the divine, Angela’s “screams were so choked up in [her] throat that the words were unintelligible.”6 During his death Actaeon screams through a stag’s body a sound that a stag could not make: “me miserum!” dicturus erat: vox nulla secuta est./ Ingemuit: vox illa fuit, lacrimaeque per ora/ non sua fluxerunt; mens tantum pristina mansit (3: 202-03: “poor me!” he would have said: no voice came out. He moaned: it was his voice, tears flew down the face, not his own; only the mind remained as before). Intensely willing but deprived of speech, the two are disarticulated in both senses of the word. Exploring the significance between these and other separated instances of mystical dislocation, our essay searches for dislocation’s life, the creative potentiality of being out of place. Angela Secretum meum mihi. Lo secreto mio a me. My secret is for me. No one was more accustomed [consuevit] to saying this than Angela of Foligno.7 So reports the anonymous writer of her Instructions, emphasizing at once the inexpressibility of Angela’s spiritual status and the difficulty with which she discussed it: “For the total state of her soul is so beyond description that we can hardly stammer [balbutire] anything about it […]. It seemed to her a kind of blasphemy to try to express the inexpressible” (Angela 248). What does Angela know when she says lo secreto mio a me? What is the special gravity between her soul/body and these words? Who speaks them? Let us not ask after Angela’s secret, question it as something to be retrospectively unsealed. For what faces me, what I first respect about it, is that it is a secret to and for herself, a dative self, possessing its secret as a gift: hers, but given to her, still secret. This is exactly what the habit of these words figures, the remaining secret of the secret which is of the essence of secrecy as something held or worn within oneself. This is the original and ongoing repetition of what cannot be repeated: “Secretum meum mihi, secretum meum mihi” (My secret for myself, my secret for myself (Isaiah 24:16). As habit strengthens and intensifies through the impression of every repetition, so 94 SPRING 2010 NICOLA MASCIANDARO AND ANNA KLOSOWSKA secrecy stays itself by being more secret. Francis of Assisi’s hesitant revelation of his seraphic vision similarly unveils a secret secret: Although the holy man used to say on other occasions: “My secret is for myself,” he was moved by Illuminato’s words. Then, with much fear, he recounted the vision in detail, adding that the one who had appeared to him had told him some things which he would never disclose to any person as long as he lived.8 A real secret’s revelation opens into deeper, more authentic secrecy. Secrecy subsists as an ecstatic auto-repetition, a revealing of itself within itself whereby every exposure shows a more profound hiddenness. In this, secrecy belongs to the original structure of world as divine ekstasis, or the equivalent, of God as the original secret of the world: “what is properly divine is that the world does not reveal God.”9 We emphasize that to clarify the factical, mystical significance: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”10 The divine nature of secrecy is that a secret remains a secret, that it is without or is its own place: “God […] has not place. For He is His own place.”11 As Derrida perceives, “A secret doesn’t belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place [chez soi].”12 The remaining secret of a secret is not static, but generative and productive, the source of the paradoxical repetition whereby what is secret is self-compelled to perpetuation via revelation of itself as secret. To reveal is to re-veil, a dialectic which is displayed in the Arabic word sirr (secret, revelation): The most commonly employed Arabic word for “secret,” sirr has contrary meanings: “something concealed, or supressed” as well as “a thing that is made manifest or disclosed.” This contrariness in semantics is suggestive of a kind of dialectic of the secret: a secret is not a secret until it is disclosed to someone, so secrecy invites revelation, and this disclosure, in turn, necessitates concealment.13 A real secret cannot not reveal itself: “I was like a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known; so I created the world that I might be known.”14 And it cannot not re-veil itself: “the very cause of the universe […] is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself.”15 Secrecy is a language that articulates the amorous order of being as absolute. It is a heart-wise way of speaking the indescribable identity of beginning and end, the oneness between the union of soul and God and the original severing or bi-location of being into lover and beloved: “He prevented the real secret from being known, namely that He is the essential Self of things. He conceals it by otherness, which is you.”16 Therefore, let us VOL. 50, NO. 1 95 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR instead ask before Angela’s secret, in its always-early presence as secret, the place where it also possesses her. For here we have already perceived something significant: that a secret is constituted by something’s belonging to an inaccessible elsewhere, that having a secret means being able to be there (where the secret is), that belonging to a secret is a special kind of dislocation. That is what it means to possess a secret, to belong to it, to stay with it across impassible distance by having it inside a space within oneself that is entirely out of place. Secrecy, as expressed by its etymology, is a topological severing and a severed topology, a place of disjoining and a disjoined place. Secretum, from the substantive of secerno (to set apart, sever, disjoin), signifies both something hidden, concealed, mysterious and a remote, out of the way, solitary location. This essential relation to place explicates secrecy’s radical subjectivity, the sense in which an authentic secret, as opposed to something merely occluded, is exactly something that cannot be communicated or produced, something that, forever remaining in the place of itself, can only be pointed toward: “All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively. What is secret never has total objectivity.”17 Hence the hermetic text’s mode of instruction: giving directions to its secret for those who already know it. But what forever remains in/as its own place, par excellence, is place itself, as indicated by Aristotle’s definition of place as “non-portable vessel” and “innermost boundary of what contains” (Physics 212a).18 Secrecy thus communicates something essential about place per se: its incommunicability. More deeply, secrecy is itself a local relation or topological communion with the incommunicable, not a dialogue within, but a whispering through, place. Like the foundational but unseen fissure within the wall shared only by Ovid’s lovers, the space of secrecy splits or disjoins place, opening a way for holding the non-portable, possessing the non-possessable: “the word secret ‘originates with the sifting of grain, whose purpose is to separate […] the good from the bad. This separation is effected by a hole, an orifice.’”19 This structure resonates with our tendency to speak of bearing, harboring or carrying secrets and with secret places of childhood, places proverbially “still within us” because they were never properly anywhere else. Conspicuous here is a deep collapse of the distinction between the object and its location, proportional to secretum’s semantic confounding of the difference between a secret and a secret place. Secrecy remains an epistemic category, but only by virtue of being built from knowledge of an object whose nature and meaning are fundamentally overtaken, like an ancient overgrown ruin, by 96 SPRING 2010 NICOLA MASCIANDARO AND ANNA KLOSOWSKA the place of knowing it. A secret overcomes the immobility of place. Secrecy is like inverted or inside-out place: the outermost boundary of what contains, something way out there or beyond the sky, and a portable non-vessel, a highly keepable container preciously holding something at once everything and almost nothing other than itself, like a little reliquary.20 At the limit of this inversion is the self as absolute secret, and as Bachelard says, “absolute casket.” Explaining this phrase, he cites a letter by Mallarmé in which the inner and outer versions of secrecy as inverted place beautifully intersect: “Every man has a secret in him, many die without finding it, and will never find because they are dead […]. I am dead and risen again with the jeweled key of my last spiritual casket. It is up to me now to open it […] and its mystery will emanate in a sky of great beauty” (Bachelard 85). Like the dwellingplace of Diana’s nakedness, secrecy maps a subtle topographical state of identity between internal and external, intimate and wild, private and other, bedroom and forest. Secrecy is the remote, sylvan divine safety Jupiter offers the virgin Io before ravishing her—“if you fear to penetrate alone the hiding places of wild beasts, with a god as your guardian you will securely enter the secrets of the woods [nemorum secreta]”—and the eternally individuated erotic room of mystical union: “each enters with the bridegroom into a secret place for herself, and says, my secret is for me, my secret is for me. The dear and secret presence of the bridegroom [secreta sponsi praesentia] is not given for all to enjoy in one place.”21 Angela’s secret asks us to understand a being-out-of-place that is somehow more place than place itself, a dislocation that is pure home, a fracturing in the edifice of individual being that makes intimate room for the impossible. Angela’s secret divinely synthesizes the double sense of secretum as dislocation. Her being-with-God is a solitary and unseekable place: “In that state I see myself as alone with God […]. God is the one who leads me and elevates me to that state. I do not go to it on my own, for by myself I would not know how to want, desire, or seek it” (Angela 215). And it is a state of indubitable disjoining: the soul then knows that God is truly present […]. When this happens all the members feel a disjointing [disiunctionem], and I wish it to be so. Indeed such is the extreme delight that I feel that I would want to always remain in this state. Furthermore, I hear the bones cracking when they are thus disjointed (Angela 158). It is as if the inexpressible “total state [totus status] of her soul” could be translated as the total state of the secret, a position encompassing one’s joining with a being beyond place and a disjoining within the body that happens to be the place of oneself. This phenomenon is explained by John of the Cross VOL. 50, NO. 1 97 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR via Daniel 10:16, the “hidden word” [verbum absconditum] Eliaz the Temanite hears in Job 4:12-16, Paul’s mystical vision, and Isaiah 24:16: The soul, then, says to the Bridegroom: / Withdraw them [your eyes], Beloved, I am taking flight! […]. The misery of human nature is such in this life that when the communication and knowledge of the Beloved […] is about to be imparted, she cannot receive it save almost at the cost of her life. […] The torment experienced in these rapturous visits is such that no other so disjoins the bones and endangers human nature. […] And indeed, it seems so to the soul in which this happens, that she is being loosed from the flesh and is abandoning the body.22 Eliphaz the Temanite […] says he received it [hidden word] as though by stealth because just as a stolen article is not one’s own, so that secret, from a natural viewpoint, is foreign to humans […]. Thus it was unlawful for him to receive it just as it was unlawful for St. Paul to disclose the secret words he heard [2 Cor. 12:4]. Hence the other prophet twice declared: My secret for myself [Isaiah 24:16]. […] And he adds that all his bones were terrified or disturbed, which amounts to saying that they were shaken and dislocated. He refers here to the great disjuncture of the bones that we said they suffer at this time. Daniel clearly indicates this when he says on seeing the angel: Domine in visione tua dissolutae sunt compages meae (Lord, on seeing you the joints of my bones are loosed).23 As an opening of the self’s secret location (in God), Angela’s dislocation is thus also an opening of the secret of individuation, an unlocking of the haecceity which embodiment holds, a release from the inexplicable fact that one is oneself. If for Levinas “escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-même],”24 Angela’s dislocation is not escape as such, but a satisfaction of the need for escape that does not need to escape: “He draws my soul with great gentleness and he sometimes says to me: ‘You are I and I am you.’ […] When I am in the God-man my soul is alive” (Angela 205). The humandivine oneness of I and you wholly eliminates the we, the false union of collectivity that would hold itself as arbiter over what being alive is: “Even if the whole world were to tell me otherwise, I would laugh it to scorn. Furthermore, I saw the One who is and how he is the being of all creatures” (Angela 215). The means of realizing this non-reductive identity of individual and God, the substance of the intimate in through which Angela lives, is an invisibly visible space within God’s human body, the secretum of its passion: The bones and sinews of his most holy body seemed completely torn out of their natural position; and yet his skin was not broken. […] At the sight of the dislocated limbs and the painful distension of the sinews, she felt herself pierced through even more than she had been at the sight of the open wounds. For the former granted her a deeper insight into the secret of his passion [magis intimabatur animae videntis passionis secretum] […]. The sight […] stirred her to such compassion that when she saw it, all her own joints seemed to cry out with fresh laments (Angela 245). 98 SPRING 2010 NICOLA MASCIANDARO AND ANNA KLOSOWSKA Angela’s secret, like the lovers’ transmural whispering, belongs to the space of a mutual originary fissure in the corporeal material that joins and separates herself and God. And like the poet’s unlocked secret, its disclosure emanates in a sky of beauty: “Angela sees the heavens open [caelum apertum] […] I cannot tell you that I saw something with a bodily form, but he was as he is in heaven, namely, of such an indescribable beauty that I do not know how to describe it to you except as the Beauty and the All Good” (Angela 151). To read Angela’s dislocation is to take part in the problem of writing it. This problem is topological. It concerns, as Michel de Certeau explains, the location of discourse: “Where should I write? That is the question the organization of every mystic text strives to answer: the truth value of the discourse does not depend on the truth value of its propositions, but on the fact of its being in the very place at which the Speaker speaks.”25 Speaking a secret, something about which language must babble (balbutire), Angela’s words are disjointed along with the body that voices them, as dramatized in the scene of her screaming at Assisi: After he had withdrawn, I began to shout and to cry out without any shame: “Love still unknown, why do you leave me?” I could not nor did I scream out any other words than these: “Love still unknown, why? why? why?” Furthermore, these screams were so choked up in my throat [intercludebatur a voce] that the words were unintelligible. Nonetheless what remained with me was a certitude that God, without any doubt, had been speaking to me. As I shouted I wanted to die. It was very painful for me not to die and to go on living. After this experience I felt my joints become dislocated [omnes compagines meae disiungebantur] (Angela 142). This dislocated discourse is not fragmented. Rather, Angela screams language open into a superior wholeness, a wholeness that is not singular, a one which is greater than one. Angela’s word, stretched between the poles of voice, question, certitude, and pain, is not broken. In fact it cannot stop speaking. Like the skin holding together the secret of Christ’s disjointed limbs, her word reveals what is within itself by concealing it, by keeping it secret. In other words Angela’s text (among other wonderful things) overcomes, precisely by entering into impossible struggle with, the original fracture in the logos, the differential fissure between expression and representation, saying and showing.26 Actaeon Angela’s visions are prefigured by the Song of Songs, where the lover, as described by the twelfth-century monk Gilbert of Hoyland, “is often compared to a deer, fleeing the spouse like that quick animal, betraying her with his bounds […] running away through the mountains, he escapes the embrace VOL. 50, NO. 1 99 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR of his beloved, like an errant and flighty deer.”27 The words of the beloved “are sometimes interrupted” because sometimes her lover is with her, and sometimes he flees her: “there is no natural evolution here, but an obvious interruption. The anguish of love is not uniform; so, its language is disconnected […] the abruptly changing words are linked, because they express the order of the feelings” (Imbach and Atucha 270). The lover “is not fooling around or delighting in the bed of concupiscence, but rather she fights […] wounded by charity, not weakness” (Imbach and Atucha 271). Thus, Gilbert glosses the disjointed speech of the Song of Songs as adequate to disordered feelings caused by the lover’s deer-like flight. Glossed in a neo-Platonic and Christian optic as a symbol of purification of the soul through dismembering brought on by love, the classical myth of Actaeon and Diana lends a vengeful causality to the lover’s dislocation. In Metamorphoses 3: 138-253, Ovid foreshadows the dismembering of Acteon in describing time, space, and gestures that precede the deed. The time is noon, a tipping point in the continuum of diurnal progress. Diana’s intimate space is a cave or hiatus, a visible geological rift, but also an intimate invisible one, an infinite ripple of secret topology that is also the topology of secret. In the story’s climax, the torsions of the main figures echo each other: Diana twists and turns, glancing back (in latus obliquum tamen adstitit oraque retro / flexit, 3: 187-88), while Actaeon, surprised by the speed of his own escape from Diana, glimpses a reflection of himself as a deer and freezes, torn between shame and fear (pudor hoc, timor inpedit illud, 3:205). The two impulses are configured as competing spaces: to live in the woods like a deer, or return to his palace? The dogs that dismember Actaeon seize on this hesitation (dum dubitas, videre canes, 3: 206). The story opens at midday, the sun equidistant from either end of its journey (3:144-45). Actaeon describes that not as a balance, but as a rift: the earth exhales noon-time heat, wordlessly eloquent mouths open: (finditque vaporibus arva, 3: 152). Through noontime exhalations, proverbial in Latin, landscape appears as a tissue of fluttering folds. Next comes the cave mouth that harbors Diana and her attendants (hiatus, 3: 162). Filled with cool moisture, opening out, bordered by grassy banks, it prefigures the unspeakably delicious cavities of Diana’s body. The cave appears hyperbolically not unnatural, “not made by art, but by ingenuity of nature imitating art” (arte laboratum nulla: simulaverat artem/ ingenio natura suo, 3: 158-59). A mise en abyme, a system whose insides and outsides prefigure each other, whose solidity is a system of foaming vacuities, the cave is a fold in a tissue of microscopic caves: “[nature] therefore drew out an arch of living pumice and 100 SPRING 2010 NICOLA MASCIANDARO AND ANNA KLOSOWSKA natural tuft [porous stone]” (nam pumice vivo / et levibus tofis nativum duxerat arcum, 3: 159-60). What strangely continuous and infinite porosities, what mutual interpenetrations are necessary to imagine Diana, her cavities suggested but not revealed by her nakedness, bathing in the not artificially natural cave hollowed in the microcosmos of native petrified foam? In a review of Pierre Klossowski’s novels, Foucault poetically evokes Diana: On this deserted earth (which might indeed be rich from this abandonment) we can turn our ears to the words of Hölderlin: Zeichen sind wir, bedeutungslos [we are a sign without signification], and perhaps still beyond, to all those great and fleeting simulacra that made gods sparkle in the rising sun or shine like great silver arches in the heart of the night.28 Although we celebrate the poetry of this passage, we want to distance ourselves from the rupture paradigm Foucault develops: Diana at her bath, the goddess stealing away into the water at the moment in which she offers herself to the gaze, is not only the turning away of the Greek gods; it is the moment in which the intact unity of the divine “reflects its divinity in a virgin body” and thereby doubles into a demon who makes her, at a distance from herself, appear chaste and at the same time offers her to the violence of the Goat. And when divinity ceases to shine in the clearings only to split in two in the appearance where it succumbs while vindicating itself, it leaves the space of myth and enters the time of theologians. The desirable trace of the gods withdraws (and perhaps is lost) in the tabernacle and the ambiguous play of signs (Foucault 82). Deleuze analyzes the same novels by Klossowski in terms of paradox or surface effect versus depth, laughter versus irony, in his Logic of Sense. He defines one kind of paradox as that which “happens at the boundary between things and propositions.”29 Suggesting (against Maurice Blanchot) that this boundary is porous, Deleuze designates it as the breeding ground of logic and dialectic, and as the fulcrum of the evolution of philosophy from Socrates to Cynics to Stoics. For Deleuze, this boundary is also the site of invention of new literary figures, styles, and genres: humor (as opposed to irony) and Lewis Carroll’s surrealism (Deleuze 11). Just as for Angela, whose words are, we’ve suggested, stretched between so many poles—stretched, not broken, riven or fissured—for Deleuze, surface tension is the creative principle. The painful or profoundly pleasurable twisting away while remaining unbroken is thus a shared figure, from medieval mysticism, classical myth, surrealism avant la lettre, to the Deleuzian concept of the relation between body and language. As in Angela of Foligno and Gilbert of Hoyland, Actaeon’s story follows the itinerary from lover’s departure to chiasmatic feelings to broken speech and disjointed limbs. Actaeon’s story can be subsumed within a narrative about the VOL. 50, NO. 1 101 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR closeness between body, eroticism, and representation or discourse: for Foucault, pessimistic (biopolitical); for Deleuze, optimistic. Conversely, some instances of dismembering and naming can effect a distancing from the body. In Anne Rutherford’s “Cinema and Embodied Affect,” an anatomy manual becomes a metaphor for the distancing work of philosophy and cultural studies: Some time ago, suffering an excruciating pressure through my jaw and cranium, I came to believe that the source of the problem lay in the root of my tongue and the way in which the musculature of my tongue was sitting within its cavity in the pharynx. I thought that if I was able to visualise the structure of the muscles around the epiglottis I could find some way to release them, and to this end I went to the classic anatomy text, Gray’s Anatomy. Here I was instructed to first draw the tongue forward and attach it by a stitch to the nose to establish the optimal stretch for examination, and that then, in order to better demonstrate the fibres of the tongue, the organ should be subjected to prolonged boiling. At this moment, as I registered in a flash the image of the cadaver superimposed over my own sentient flesh, I felt a sense of alienation, of dismemberment, familiar not only from other encounters with medical discourse, but also reminiscent of reading philosophical and cultural works.30 And yet the narrative of dismembering, preserving, and parceling out organs is not intrinsically the means to impose that distance. Let us consider, for instance, the ways a sixteenth-century woman from Chalon-sur-Saône, Abigail Mathieu, disposed of her body after death: Abigail […] had her body buried in the chapel with husband number two (which we think was her favorite of five), her heart was buried with husband number one in his chapel, and her entrails were buried in the Ursuline convent that she founded in Chalon. She does say that she can be embalmed, in case all of this dismemberment takes a long time.31 Here, the naming and disposition of preserved, disjointed body parts testify to the affection honoring a preferred husband, or sympathy and intimacy directed towards an institution for women, favorite object of Abigail’s charity. This is a limit instance, where anticipating a posthumous state of the body rearranges linear time into folds where saying touches showing. The folded time allows the sentient body and the dismembered body to touch as well: the body proleptically parceled out by this text will not be sentient, although it will still belong to the person who dictates the terms. In comparing the last two examples we see clearly that the affective intention, not the fact of going through the mental exercise of embalming and disjointing one’s body, amplifies or narrows the feeling of alienation or dismemberment. It is the continuity or the rupture of touching between the affections of the sentient body and the parcels of the embalmed body, that is reflected by either blurring (if there 102 SPRING 2010 NICOLA MASCIANDARO AND ANNA KLOSOWSKA is a continuity) or aggravating (if there is an affective rupture) the distance between thought, speech and body, between representing and showing. As Actaeon surprises her, the goddess rotates on the axis of her spine to look for her arrows (3: 187-88, above), a twist later mirrored by Actaeon when, changed into a stag, he turns his head at the sound of his name, ad nomen caput ille refert (3: 245). These bodily dislocations are like the porous rocks of which Diana’s bathing hiatus is made: frontal and backwards, inside and out, porous geometries of “and + or” instead of “either/or.” They are Moebius strips of torqued bodies and rocky foam repeating ad infinitum the impossible logic of inside-out. Let us call the subject of this essay a constellation, or the astrological sign of dislocation. The phenomena gathered under such a sign would be characterized by a dialetheic logic. Seeing the impossible as inevitable, dialetheic logic departs from classical dialectic by allowing the conjunction “and+or,” instead of either/or. These phenomena—fleeting deer, twisted bodies and dislocated limbs, fervent but inarticulate mumblings, dismemberment—share certain topological characteristics: folding and shimmering, porosity and torque. Instead of linear time, accordion time allows touching of the present and posthumous, continuous across/within the time hiatus. The porous substances are arranged in topologies that duplicate and amplify their inside/outside nature: reliquaries, skin stretched over contorted joints, arches and hiatuses made of solid foam. In accordion time, in the multiply folded place, the saintly contortionists of affect fall, slip, err into ecstasies of dislocation, twisting without rupture and breaking. Together across distance, Angela and Actaeon, the Sufi masts and ghous, enact a heterodox cult of the impossible joining, and like Actaeon, “marveling at such swift speed within himself,” race off in ecstasy, unknown to themselves (fugit Autonoeius heros / et se tam celerum cursu miratur in ipso, 3: 198-99). What holds them together is something altogether other than the stars: fate, the irrational gravity of affect, Angela’s “Love still unknown,” Actaeon who “free of his part of the labor […] errs with uncertain steps through the unknown wood, and enters the sacred grove” (dilata parte laborum / per nemus ignotum non certis passibus errans / pervenit in lucum, 3: 174-76). The secret is the invisible straining and dislocation under the cover of skin, the unaltered mind locked in the hide of a stag, the unity of constellation occluding the stars’ distant and mutually unknowable paths. That secret is both mute, and the only thing we ever say. Brooklyn College and Miami University, Ohio VOL. 50, NO. 1 103 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault, Jeremy R. Carette, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 88. Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Elizabeth Rottenberg, trans. (Stanford: Stanford U P, 1991). Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1975), 173. William Donkin, The Wayfarers (1948) (Myrtle Beach, SC: Sheriar Press, 1988), 218, 225, 234, 262. There is a story about a disciple of Sai Baba of Shirdi (?-1918) who was blinded when he saw his master’s scattered limbs. See Bhau Kalchuri, Lord Meher, 1.76, http://www.lordmeher.org (accessed July 2009). Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, Paul Lachance, trans. (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 142. “More than anyone else I ever knew, she was in the habit of saying: ‘My secret is mine’ [Is 24:16]” (Angela, 248). Latin and Italian (Trivulziana MS) cited from Angela of Foligno, Il Libro della Beata Angela da Foligno, Ludger Thier and Abele Calufetti, eds. (Grottaferrata [Rome]: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1985), Instructiones, 4.13738. Bonaventure, Major Legend of Saint Francis, 13.4, Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short, eds. 3 vols. (New York: New City Press, 2001), 2.633. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Michael Hardt, trans. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), 90. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, C. K. Ogden, trans. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), 6.44. John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, ch.13, Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds. (New York: Scribners, 1899), 9.15. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, David Wills, trans. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), 92. Ruqayya Yasmine Khan, Self and Secrecy in Early Islam (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2008), 25. Enacting its significance, “Ibn ‘Arabi¯ states that he knew this [hadith] to be sound by spiritual unveiling” (Ibn Arabi¯, Divine Sayings, Steven Hirtenstein and Martin Notcutt, trans. [Oxford: Anqa, 2004], 99). Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, 4.13, cited from The Complete Works, Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem, trans. (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 82. Ibn Al-’Arabi¯, The Bezels of Wisdom, R. W. J. Austin, trans. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980), 133. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas, trans. (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 13. “Just, in fact, as the vessel is transportable place, so place is a non-portable vessel” (Aristotle, Physics, 4.4.3, 212b, cited from The Basic Works, Richard McKeon, ed. [New York: Random House, 1941], 277). Ovid, Metamorphoses (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1966), 4.65-68. Gérard Vincent, “The Secrets of History and the Riddle of Identity,” in A History of Private Life, Phillippe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds., 5 vols. [Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1987-1991], 5:163, citing Arnaud Lévy. “Secrets […] configure space heterogeneously. […] Heterogeneous with respect to the topologies and economies of visibility: the secret is never located entirely on the inside or outside, never entirely visible or invisible” (Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005], 10). Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.593-94. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, 23.9, Library of Latin Texts—Series A, http://www.brepolis.net (accessed July 2009). Translations ours. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 104 SPRING 2010 NICOLA MASCIANDARO AND ANNA KLOSOWSKA 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 13.3-4, cited from The Collected Works, Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, trans. [Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991], 521. Spiritual Canticle, 14&15.18-19. Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, Bettina Bergo, trans. (Stanford: Stanford U P, 2003), 55. Michel de Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” The Certeau Reader, Graham Ward, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 199. “The main point is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by propositions—i.e. by language—(and which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown (gezeigt); which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy” (Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters, Brian McGuinness and G. H. von Wright, eds. [Oxford: Blackwell, 1995], 123). “The Aristotelian scission of the ousia […] constitutes the original nucleus of a fracture in the plane of language between showing and saying, indication and signification. This fracture traverses the whole history of metaphysics, and without it, the ontological problem itself cannot be formulated” (Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death, Karen E. Pinkhus, trans. with Michael Hardt [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991], 18). Gilbert of Hoyland, d. 1172, here continues Bernard’s gloss on the Song of Songs: Bernard of Clairvaux, Œuvres completes, P. Dion, trans. (Paris: Vivès, 1867), 5:5, cited by Ruedi Imbach and Iñigo Atucha, eds., Amours plurielles (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 270-71. “The Prose of Actaeon,” originally published as “La Prose d’Actéon,” in La Nouvelle Revue Française, 135 (March 1964): 444-59, in Foucault, Religion and Culture, 82. Foucault comments on Klossowski’s Baphomet (1965), Roberte (1954), and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1959). Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, Constantin V. Boundas, ed., Mark Lester, trans. with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia U P, 1990), 8. Anne Rutherford, “Cinema and Embodied Affect” (2002), in Senses of Cinema, an online journal, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/25/embodied_affect.html, (accessed on July 10, 2009). Kathy Ashley, letter of June 14, 2009. VOL. 50, NO. 1 105