William Zeng
William Zeng is a second-year English Literary Studies PhD student at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Broadly, he is interested in literary theory and post-structuralism. At the moment, he is curious about the term “theory”: why so many literary studies departments in the United States turned to it in the 70’s, and what this turn consisted of — a productive (mis)reading of earlier twentieth-century French philosophy?
There does not seem to be much happiness going around these days. Crises of every kind, from economic to environmental to political, haunt every newspaper headline and every post on X (formerly Twitter). And for better or worse, this sentiment is nothing new. The Ancient Greeks had already perceived that life was suffering. If one prefers a more modern perspective, look no further than the melancholic musings of Adorno: “There is no right life in the wrong one” (Minima Moralia, aphorism 18). And yet, is it possible to transform this overabundant misery into something else? Simon Critchley’s latest book, Mysticism, explores several topics—the titular concept among them—but what motivates the writing of the book is an answer to this very question. Through his engagement with a vast range of thinkers, mysticism becomes a way of living counter to a suffocating atmosphere of melancholy, “a journey, an itinerary, that takes us from a condition of dereliction and woe to a state of weal” (40).
Provisionally, we can say that the book is primarily composed of three parts, but to discuss only these parts is to miss all the moments in which Mysticism intentionally departs from this all-too-convenient structure. Before we even get to the first part, which is a historical overview of the term mysticism, Critchley has already written in several styles and raised several concerns not immediately related to mysticism. He begins with a fairy tale-like prologue that alludes to the COVID-19 pandemic, offers a commentary on that melancholy pervading contemporary society, and gives a brief biography of sixteen mystics. Later, in part two, he interrupts his close reading of Julian of Norwich with an excursus on a contemporary historian, Caroline Bynum, and after part three, he concludes with a confession, reflecting on his own life and philosophical works through the years. Black and white photos and illustrations spanning entire pages are interspersed throughout all of this, further breaking up the flow of the text. It is as if an adequate approach to mysticism requires an accompanying formal experimentation or departure from the usual ways of organizing text. Critchley himself hints at such by describing the first part as having “jumped around between texts, as befits the tradition of fragments which characterizes mysticism” (114). One must write differently in order to “befit” the elusive concept that is mysticism.
There are already two mysticisms at play in the first part of the book. Critchley first contests an existing definition of the term, one that anachronistically functions to dismiss several historical figures in order to preserve a philosophical tradition that privileges rational thought. This dominant philosophical prejudice reduces mysticism to a subjective or psychological horizon; it is something passively experienced like a hallucination or an overactive imagination. Mystics are in turn nothing more than “charlatan fanatics,” or those who give into these irrational experiences of mysticism (40). Drawing on the works of Bernard McGinn, a contemporary American theologian, and Michel de Certeau, a French priest and theorist, Critchley counters with a definition of mysticism as not just passive experience but active practice. He writes at length: mysticism is “a style, a set of practices, a way of acting that is self-authorizing,” “a practical matter, a matter of organizing one’s life around a set of practices which are ritually organized,” and “about doing, about the repetition of deeds” (77-79).
Critchley’s style in this first part, the fragmentary jumping around between thinkers from Dionysius to Eckhart to Bataille, is then necessary to reveal what this mystical practice consists of. Mystical texts are fragmentary because they “point negatively to what exceeds the power of the statement, the realm of propositional truth. They enact a collapsing of words, language somehow falling in on itself” (91). Whereas philosophy begins with a presupposed wholeness, the affirmation of universal propositions before proceeding systematically toward particulars, mysticism as practice begins with the negation of particulars, an abstraction away from what is immediately knowable to our senses. The fragmentary mystical text enacts this negation and thus brings about an emptying of or detachment from the self. This resulting absence, Critchley writes, is simultaneously indistinguishable from presence; nothingness transforms seamlessly into that which exceeds the truths of philosophical reason.
But can the self really disappear? And how does nothing become something? The second part of the book is a close reading of works by four writers: Anne Carson, Julian of Norwich, Annie Dillard, and T. S. Eliot. Carson’s essay, Decreation, introduces a guiding contradiction that frames the following close readings. Mystical writing seeks to negate the self, but, like any act of writing, requires and calls attention to this very self. This contradiction proceeds to take on multiple forms. In Julian of Norwich’s texts, we encounter a “paradox of matter” where “we must both see and see through all material things in order to see what she really wants us to see, which is not given to sight” (153). Dillard and Eliot, in The Holy Firm and Four Quartets respectively, raise similar problems by writing about the relations between emanence and immanence, and between “that which is in time and that which is out of time” (235). But throughout all of this, we do not seem to get any closer to a solution. Critchley’s answer to all of these paradoxes remains ambiguous: these writers “are doomed to fail…successfully” (205).
Perhaps we can find a more satisfying resolution to the contradictions of mystical writing by considering form once again. Critchley notes that Julian of Norwich does not write in a linear fashion, as if moving neatly from paradox to resolution, but in a circular fashion, “in a repeated and ever-widening, ever-deepening gyration” (129). Already, this style suggests that we are not meant to solve or decisively escape from paradox, but to preserve and constantly return to it. Critchley’s mysticism is after all an ongoing practice, rather than some experience of pure nothingness that we can reach and then remain in once and for all. His close readings in this part further extend this understanding of mysticism, for mysticism as practice implies also a reading practice, a “hermeneutical technique” (244). If mysticism refers solely to an experience, then the writings of mystics occupy a degraded position, where they merely reflect or record that experience. But if we embrace an expanded view of mysticism as practice, then mystical writing becomes part of that practice, a “ritual” that endlessly produces mystical experience (173).
In the third and final part of the book, Critchley circles back to a central provocation of his. The prevalent understanding of the term mysticism solely as experience marks a containment or reduction carried out by a dominant philosophical tradition seeking to preserve itself, but what if, Critchley suggests, we tell a different story about mysticism? As it turns out, this story spills over to transform our understanding of several other concepts. Mysticism as practice implies a way of reading that does not treat texts as merely windows into or confirmations of an objective reality out there, but as something profoundly transformative. Interestingly, Critchley seems to even hint at a rhetorical dimension to mysticism, where “its authority lies in its capacity to bring others in” (244). Further, when we free mysticism from its confinement as a fringe religious experience, we suddenly find it in a wide variety of aesthetic experiences, from Moby-Dick to James Joyce to punk rock. Critchley thus concludes the part with a heartfelt ode to the joys of listening to music.
While sadness is a prevailing sentiment today, this problem persists not due to a lack of solutions. As sadness prevails, we find at the same time a proliferation of techniques for managing this sadness, from self-help books to juice cleanses. Critchley himself lists several trending practices: “hot yoga, ceaseless meditation, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise, and compulsive devotion to routine” (87). We cannot help but wonder whether this compulsion towards generating more and more solutions for our sadness is perhaps part of the problem. The turn to aesthetic experience later in the text further raises eyebrows, as other thinkers like Fredric Jameson have taken issue with this exact tendency in society towards aestheticization. So, if Mysticism is written in response to this pervasive melancholy, attempting to recover some lost ecstatic experience, then how is this work different from the already existing, but commodified and ineffective, solutions to our predicament? To answer this question, we might return to the ambiguous status of the self throughout the text. Unlike juice cleanses or hot yoga, which remain devoted above all to the body, mysticism as a practice is oriented forever towards negation, so that it can make room for something wholly other than the self: “We do not coincide with ourselves” (88).
JOURNAL OF THE FIRST OUTERNATIONAL 