The World as Mystic-World
François Laruelle
In Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des contemporains (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), p.205-208.
The World as Mystic-World
1 )The Symptom
The first, still philosophical phase of the constitution of the mystic-world is the co-belonging or “blend” of philosophizability and Christian mysticism under the authority of philosophizability.
The material of mystic-fiction is the “World” but comprised as 1) a concept broadened by tendential fusions of two opposites where one is always philosophy as the form-world or philosophizability (fusion of Cosmos or wisdom and madness, philosophy and the World, philosophy and mysticism, God and the World, etc.), then 2) as the Transcendental Identity of this concept or a hypothesis determined and cloned by the human vision-in-One. Let us first examine the first, philosophical, phase of the concept of the mystic-world.
We call mystic-world the traditional and dominant mysticism of the philosophical and Christian style as it is accumulated in culture and history including giving a new form of the World or a new form-world (its philosophizability), the lived and thought blend of the philosophical thesis and theological dogma dosed varyingly. For example, the “causa sui” (Eckhart) ties philosophy to its fundamental kernel (the One aimed for through epekeina), the dialecticization of this structure (the One as double negation producing its reality) and finally a specifically Christian interpretation as God or the Deity with the lived experiences attached to this dialectic. Hating a certain “World,” religious lived experiences which are gripped by Christic experience are integrated, like philosophy, in a broader experience of the World as potentially philosophizable. Hence the expressions that we use: “mystic-world,” “God-world,” “Christ-world,” which designate historico-systematic entities in the auto-encompassing and sufficient style. The mystical possibilities of the New Testament have been reaped by philosophical sufficiency in its most secret jouissance, the jouissance of the Real, having become the jouissance of God. This is not a flat identity but a structure of “fusion” that is always differential and tendential where the terms are definitively inseparable and distinct. Then how do we present the World outside of its complex content? The old mysticism is a certain onto-logic of this mode of existence that is the World, not a simple cosmology or a cosmopolitics but an experience of man insofar as they transcend on this mode for religious reasons.
Without being identical to one another, philosophy and mysticism therefore nourish and interpenetrate each other. Their “superior” convertibility more concretely repeats the convertibility of Being and the One, and produces an eternal present like an absolute Other. The mystics’ obsessions, which are not really detached from the World (from philosophy) or that detach themselves from it inadequately, is to be the contemporary of oneself or their birth, the double of oneself or God, the absolute converted, convertible with God, Superior Resemblance. For us, Men-in-person, this point of transcendental coincidence, illusion and hallucination has become a new Hell through philosophy, the vicious circle has become an evil genius. It is in this already somewhat heretical way that we inherit from mysticism and treat it in view of a new experience of the World, God and Christ under the condition of Man as “Separated One.” How do we conquer this state in which we have always been since the beginnings, conjugating in the subject an effective hallucination and their intelligibility within a unique suspension?
2) The Theorem
The second, non-philosophical phase is the extension and transformation of intra-philosophical concepts of the World into the first name of the “thought-world” or “mystic-world.” This is the object of a transcendental theorem that is deduced from Man-in-person. The theorem suppresses the particularity of these concepts which are henceforth without intra-worldly reference and constitutive of mystic-fiction.
Let us examine the concept of the mystic-world in more detail, in its intrinsic formation, and in its determination by Man-in-person under the form of a theorem.
How has the World become “the-World”? Because of philosophy, and only by it. This is the first degree of its philosophizability. Let us now assume that along with things we add not one particular philosophy as its condition, not such and such philosophical postulate, but philosophy-as-a-whole [la philosophie] in its invariant essence. The World then becomes really universal (in the philosophical sense which is the reflection of philosophy-as-a-whole over itself) and, such that it is included in a mysticism, no longer can any one particular doctrine still determine, critique and explain it under this form, just concretely illustrate it. This powerlessness therefore does not depend on a new, mystical or Christian use of the philosophical apparatus. Like philosophy, with other nuances, traditional mysticism intends to reject representative diversity, the World as representation. However, this is a very narrow and very partial definition of the World whose concept must rather include the totality of philosophical conditions of its thought and not only a part of its structure or a particular doctrine. As for Christianity, it does not fundamentally modify the concept of the World from this “extensional” and structural perspective even if it enriches its experience of new affects bound to its “creation” and dependency on God. In the spirit of mystic-fiction indeed, the immediate object of philosophy (the World) always has the interior form of philosophy, with the philosophical apparatus being enriched by the supplement of Christic experience that is assumed to bear or reinforce the dimension of the Real. This blend is the element which allows philosophy to supersede itself with its own means, to rise to the challenge of divine weight. And it allows mysticism to conceptualize its ends, degrees, stages and the type of Real to which it aspires. For us, here and now, this blend is an indissociable whole, the only concrete where philosophy, theory, predication, theology, and the desire for unition are inseparable moments. The World is now the mystic-world: the knot of the ontological, the theological, and the mystical, obviously under its still sufficient form, such that it can be admitted naively or, contrarily, suspended and rendered intelligible. From the perspective of sufficiency, what ties this ensemble is again philosophy in its duplicity that it divides and turns itself back upon its varying heterogenous dimensions.
Therefore, it is not as an always re-dividable and interpretable knot from one of its parts, as the Idea of everything susceptible to a particular interpretation, or as the Whole integrating a multiplicity of moments, but as the Undivided Identity (of) this knot or (of) this Whole that the new conjuncture appears that only the heretics or the Future ones can perceive. The subject elaborated by the future mysticism is nothing other than the Real-Transcendental Identity, the clone (of) the philosophico-mystical blend or what we will call the unified theory of mysticism and philosophy, and a unified theory in general relates a blend that claims to sufficiently think itself by itself through a cause-of-the-last-Identity that practically determines this theory as a formalism.
To explain this “broadened” and “complexified” World therefore takes a qualitatively, otherwise universal mystical theory (through its real determination) than philosophy itself. It takes the uni-versality of Identity, such that it does not result from a complement or an extension of philosophical university, but that it has an entirely other origin, that it results from heresy as the Human Identity capable of determining (for…) the transcendent universality of philosophy. The ensemble of the particular philosophical postulates, with the general postulate of the auto-position of the Real that gathers them, must desert the cause and the subject of future mysticism for which it is hampered and particular, and pass from the side of its “object,” from the field of properties that it exploits as symptoms and models. Hence, it is more than an extension or a universalization of the World, more than an extension of these specular objects that were philosophy and mysticism. To reprise our quantum model, they pass from the semi-visible state through their intrinsically invisible being-determined.
Philosophy has always been overseen by a becoming-opinion, contaminated from within and without by the traps of language and sophistry. Its conjuncture demonstrates a bit more this congenital vice gradually from its announced immersion into the order of universal communication. However, this is but one supplementary opinion such that this statement or thesis is not theoretically validated by a formalism. Only one conception of the Real as immanence and indivisibility subtracted from philosophy without remainder, not determinable by the Logos, can determine the thought to pose as decidable (obviously under these new conditions) the small equation philosophy = opinion (or the superior form of opinion), the great equation philosophy = World, and the greatest equation still, philosophy = Hell.
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