Part 8: What to Do About Too Much Aboutness

VIII: The Icon’s Immanent failure to Represent the Transcendent 

In the history of religions, the representation of the sacred has caused violent controversy. Lacan’s object of the Real can be Object-Cause-of-Desire, anxiety, or wonder, which are the affects of the counter-object of Marion’s Counter-Experience. These affects are produced by the undeterminable hermeneutics of Saturated Phenomena and illuminate why representations of the sacred has been over-wrought with extreme emotions and deeds. The split between the Roman and the Eastern Church was partially about the use of iconography in worship. As artistic expression within the Church became more specialized and skilled, the concern arose that its purpose of facilitating worship was being undermined by the beauty and sublimity of the art itself. The Western Church’s emphasis on ostentatious adornment and verisimilitude in representation worked through a rough logic of resemblance to the divine rather than the sort of analogical logic of intentional non-resemblance that developed as a reaction to the Western Church of Eastern Iconography. Because the Western tradition's art was so sumptuous and intricate, it seemed to reify the divine with such skilled extravagance that the Eastern Church came to think of this sort of ostentatious representation as idolatrous, a charge which the Western Church vehemently denied. The Eastern Church’s Iconographic Theology was developed as a reaction to what it saw as the Western Church’s decadence. The Eastern Icon formed an analogy with the divine that contained within it an explicit denial of verisimilitude to obviate any idolatrous, direct identification of the divine.  

Idolatry was of particular concern to the Eastern Church because of its proximity to Islamic Theology, which famously forbad any representation of the divine whatsoever. Within Islam not only is any visual representation of God strictly forbidden, but ways of speaking about God are also tightly regulated. The “99 Names of Allah” include both the affirmation of Allah’s essence, or divine character, and a warning against the identification of Allah’s names with Allah as His essence is beyond knowing. Although Aquinas was a part of the Western Church, his theology of the analogical knowledge of God’s attributes was directly informed by his interaction with the thought of such Islamic scholars as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). The riotous movement to destroy idolatrous art came from within Orthodox Theology itself but was intensified by an acute awareness of Islamic piety.  

Many Eastern Churches saw their entire, art collections ransacked and burned in the Iconoclastic Controversies of the 8^th and 9^th centuries mostly within the Byzantine Empire. The subsequent reforms within the Eastern Church concerning religious art held that it should not appear too elaborate, or realistic as to take the worshippers’ attentions away from God and onto the artist’s representation. The movement of the worshippers’ attentions was to be first towards the Icon and then upwards toward heaven, rather than further into the beauty or sublimity of icon itself. The Western Church held that the beauty and sublimity worked into the art by the highly skilled artisan manifested the presence of the divine within the attention of the worshipper, but the Eastern Church felt that too much beauty and sublimity kept the worshipper’s attention on the art itself and away from the divine. The lack of verisimilitude within Eastern Iconography was articulated as “otherworldly,” by its practitioners because it was supposed to focus the worshipper’s attention on the transcendent.  

The long, flat faces of the figures of icons were purposefully articulated as “alien” to not resemble human faces, but this is the non-resemblance of the “Uncanny Valley,” which is a non-resemblance that is close to, but not quite human, so that the relation between the immanent and the transcendent was one in which the immanent pointed to the transcendent. The Icon as a signifier prevented the signifier replacing what it was meant to signify, which was the danger with the Western Church’s insistence that the signifier could manifest the presence of the divine without the idolatrous claim to be divine in-itself. Iconographic Theology is an articulation of making present through the unresolved double negation of analogy in line with Aquinas’s, “God is not, not a Rock.” The Icon does “not, not” resemble the divine. The Icon resembles the human-being, but in an uncanny way. The haunting uncanniness of the “otherworldly” faces of icons is created by their long, flat features that do not resemble human faces. This “alien” non-resemblance negates the resemblance of the concept of the human being, which is like the particular difference negating the abstract resemblance of the concept. Because this non-resemblance is not resolved by the double-negative, it continues to haunt the Icon as its excessive particularity. This excessive particularity is the irreducible ambiguity that forms the object of the Real or the counter-object of Counter-Experience. The Icon’s concrete form presents both what can be conceptualized as human plus what cannot as the divine. What is divine in the human is its non-resemblance to the concept of the human. Non-resemblance is the alien presence of the object of the Real that haunts the human as the subject of desire. The subject of desire is the unresolvable ambiguity of the Non-Relation between the representation of desire and desire’s absolute resistance to representation. The Object-Cause-of-Desire is formed out of the excessive particularity of the subject of desire that cannot be resolved by concepts. The Icon resists Imaginary, self-referential concepts of the divine by building symbolic failure into the signifier. 

Whatever iconographic representation lacks in verisimilitude and ostentatiousness, it lacks nothing in skill or deliberation. Eastern Orthodox Iconography is a good example of how restrictions can enhance expression and how limits do not reduce aboutness but can increase it. What makes Eastern Iconography distinctive is the use of traditional materials and techniques, the insistence on simplicity and symbolic expressions within the work, the use of reverse perspective to put the worshipper on the same plane as the Icon, and the stylized way in which the Icon’s face is depicted. The faces of the figures are intentionally kept abstract to prevent the worshipper from identifying with the face too much. This abstraction is often described as “other-worldly” because the intent is that the worshipper does not focus on the figure itself, but on the spiritual realm to which the icon is supposed to point. What is often noticed about the faces are their long noses and the lack of complex dimensionality produced by simple geometric shading. The deliberately unrealistic look of the icon is a practiced simplicity with theological implication. 

Apophatic Theology had already begun to develop within some theological circles of the Church before the Iconoclastic Controverses in such thinkers as Plotinus (3^rd c. CE), who was not a Christian, but who was extremely influential on Christian thought; Gregory of Nyssa (4^th c. CE), who was a central thinker in the Eastern Tradition; and the Pseudo-Dionysius (late 5^th / early 6^th c. CE), who is often credited with the first full articulation of Apophatic Theology. Apophatic Theology claimed that the way to God was through a denial of all representations of God. This “Via Negativa” was more radical even than the implicit negation of identity inherent in Aquinas’s analogical knowledge of God because its austerity was the clearing away of all representation until there was no longer any mediation between God and the subjectivity that approached Him. However, there is a strange relationship between mediation and the immediate in mystical ecstasy. The icon is the exempla gratis of this relationship because its role as mediator shows how Apophatic Theology works. The Icon as mediator of the divine must undermine its own mediation to facilitate the immediacy of mystical contemplation. The icon centers the attention of the worshipper on itself only to push this attention away in an act of self-denial that the more realistic and elaborate productions of the Western Church cannot perform. 

Ecstatic union with the Godhead was the total dissolution of the subject / object distinction that the practitioners of the Via Negativa sought. Only the darkness of “the Dark Night of the Soul” could paradoxically “contain” God. St. John of the Cross called the Dark Night “Dark” because of its lack of familiar representations to orient the practitioner on her journey there. This is the same lack built into the Icon’s rejection of verisimilitude. Iconography Theology built off some of the concepts within Apophatic Theology. This theology articulated to avoid idolatry later became another wedge in the final split between the Roman and the Byzantine Church in the Great Schism of 1054 C.E. The Western Church continued to fund and develop its art to be evermore intricate, ornate and “realistic.” It saw this focus on skill and verisimilitude as a sign of piety and fervent devotion to God. In contrast, the Eastern Church’s theology of Iconography involved two essential movements, the first of which sought to represent what cannot be represented as an “other-worldly” presence in this world. The second movement was a negation of representation through the iconic representation itself, so that the worshipper could be lifted from this world to the next through the symbolic failure internal to the icon. It was the absence of this second internal negation that, from the Eastern Church’s viewpoint, resulted in the idolatry of the West.  

The first movement was the same as the Western Church’s in that both used the image to center the worshiper’s attention on the sacred by providing a focal point. But the deliberately sparse, or underdone techniques, of Byzantine iconography did not pull the worshipper’s attention into the art itself, so in a second crucial movement of a practiced lack-of-verisimilitude, which was the negation internal to the icon, the worshippers’ attention was pushed onto the higher reality that the icon was meant to represent analogically. The icon’s “other worldliness” is the failure of its face to realistically represent a human face, which is something like the “Uncanny Valley” effect of being close but not quite right.  

For Marion the Catholic Eucharist operated according to the logic of Iconographic Theology. The Eucharist formed an analogy of contradiction relating “visibility” to “invisibility” according to the iconographic logic of non-resemblance. The invisible is made visible by its non-resemblance to the visible, which is its symbolic failure. The Host is the bread in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and this Host hosts the Real as a ritual visualization of the invisible because of the way its mundanity resists concepts of the sacred in the register of the Real. The specific way in which the bread resists concepts of the sacred is the concrete form that the Object-Small-a takes in the Host, which is the form of the particular deformation of symbolic representation presented by the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The mundanity of bread is the excessive particularity that forms the object of the Real from the irresolvable ambiguity of the difference between its resemblance to bread and its non-resemblance to, or difference from, concepts of the divine. Lacan’s object of the Real and Marion’s counter-object are differentiated from the “more than enough intuition for the intention,” which is the disjunction between the intention and what cannot be indented, or the Non-Relation between the Symbolic and the Real. The counter-object of Counter-Experience presents this disjunction, or presents the Non-Relation, as the “undeterminable hermeneutics” of the “over-proximal affects” of “too much givenness,” which are the defined but indeterminate affects of desire, anxiety, and wonder. Therefore, the Host is the Object-Small-a, or the counter-object, that defines the Counter-Experience of Saturated Phenomena. The Host does not resemble concepts of the divine, or more generally of the sacred, but it continually differentiates new concepts of both in the Non-Relation between its Symbolic resemblance to and its Real difference from the sacrificial Body of God. The Real’s difference forms the Object-Small-a from its resistance to symbolization, which is visible, or audible, as symbolic failure. When Jesus chose bread and wine to be his body and blood for his disciples, the disjunction between the bread and his body must have been striking, but this was certainly the striking ambiguity of contradiction that Jesus indented as the unintentional, ambiguous invisibility made visible without reducing its invisibility.  

The Sacrament of the Eucharist recreates the last meal that Jesus had with his disciples before he was crucified. The New Testament reports that during this “Last Supper” Jesus held up the Passover bread that they were sharing and said, “This is my Body.” For Marion Jesus was using the bread iconographically to make the “invisible visible.” For Lacan the invisible becomes visible as a warped Symbolic that forms the object of the Real from the warping itself. The Icon, as a deliberately failed representation, makes the invisible visible in a similar way. In the iconographic logic of presenting the body of Christ analogically “as” unleavened bread, the contradiction of the unresolved, double negation is made visible by the visible incongruity of bread presented as a body. Marion pointed out how calling bread “a body” contains the same skillful self-negation as an icon does because bread does not resemble a body just as an artfully, artless icon does not resemble a human being, except in the Uncanny Valley sort of way. The skillfully orchestrated, symbolic failure of the Eucharist is the failure of the “Host” to identify God, which would make it an idol. As an icon it presents the sacred mystery of Christ’s mystical body as an irreducible mystery rather than as a concept. The difference between the invisible made visible, so that it is no longer invisible but an identifiable object, and the invisible made visible analogically “as” the invisible, is the preservation of the unresolved double negation within Marion’s phrase “visible invisibility” in the latter formulation. Visible invisibility presents the irreducible ambiguity of the object of the Real “as” the “undeterminable hermeneutics” that are in the Host more than the Host. The invisible does not become visible in the straightforward way that rational analysis deduces an object that cannot be directly seen and brings it to light via logical inference. The invisible becomes visible “as” the impenetrable darkness outside of subjectivity within subjectivity without reducing the darkness of the outside’s invisibility, which is the defining indeterminacy that the Eucharist h21osts.  

The Church proclaims Christ’s crucified body as its defining victory by visualizing its invisibility “as” the visible Host, which holds together the contradiction of a victorious failure. The victory of the failure does not reduce the failure but presents it as the irreducible ambiguity of symbolic failure, which is the Host as Object-Cause-of-Desire, anxiety and wonder. The failure of Christ’s body on the cross is presented as a successful ritual sacrifice in the Eucharist because it purports to be God’s sacrifice of Himself “as” His Son. God’s dead body becomes the life-giving bread that defines the victorious resurrection of the invisible “Mystical Body of Christ” as the visible Community of the Holy Spirit, which is the Church itself. Marion objected to the Church’s use of “Real Presence” as a theological description of the “consecrated” Host because the term “real” is derived from the Latin word “res,” which meant “thing” or “object.” He thought that the Eucharist should not be “reified,” a term also derived from the Latin “res,” because the Eucharist should not be made into a “thing” or objectified through reification. However, the terminology of “Real Presence” may have something to do with the Eucharist after all if this wording is considered through the lens of Lacan’s Real. The Real is presented by the symbolic failure of Bread “as” the body of God sacrificed and consumed by the Church. The invisible Real is the absence of the divine made visible through the present, symbolic failure of the Eucharist. The lower case “r,” real body of Christ crucified on the cross becomes the Real Mystical Body of the Church “as” it is sacrifice and consumed in Communion. 

It may be worthwhile noting that the Eucharist as Marion’s phenomenological study of it presents it follows the general theological movement of the so-called “Radical Theology” at the heart of “Christian Atheism.” Thomas Altizer’s Radical Theology was a dialectical movement from an omnipotent, absent, and invisible God “on the throne” negated through self-emptying into an impotent, crucified man. The self-negation of God is then made present by the Community of the Holy Spirit when they gather to commemorate the Death of God. The invisible, absent God is made visible “as” the Church. His death and resurrection “as” the Holy Spirit is the unresolved double negation of the undead God. God’s abdication of the throne is the self-emptying (Kenosis) described by Paul in Philippians 2:7, in which God emptied Himself of Himself to take on the human form of a “servant.” Human suffering and death are made holy when the Holy suffers and dies as a human.  

The Deuteronomic curse for anyone “who hangs from a tree,” became Paul’s notion of how redemption worked in his letter to the Galatian. For Paul Jesus took on this curse to redeem humanity from the curse of its sin, or primordial fallen condition. The curse of the cross becomes the blessing of humanity’s cursed nature in a similar manner that symbolic failure becomes the means for conceiving what resists symbolization absolutely. For Lacan humanity’s curse was called, “Subjective Destitution,” which was to be directly in the gap of the Non-Relation between the Symbolic and the Real. Destitution is the primary affect of being without relation to the concepts and the social connections of symbolic mediation. For Zizek’s it is Jesus’s embrace of Subjective Destitution on the cross that put him in solidarity with humanity’s constitutive destitution. The salvation offered by Jesus’s subjective destitution is not the elimination of suffering and death, but the establishment of a community of those whose sufferings and deaths are connected to each other's by the suffering and death of God. The productive contradictions held together by the double negation of Radical Theology’s dialectic are many of the same theological contradictions of traditional Christianity, such as: strength in weakness, victory in failure, and life in death. God’s death is the life of the Holy Spirit, which is the breath of the Church. God’s suffering and death redeems human suffering and death by entering them through self-emptying, which is like Being’s negation into becoming through self-relating negativity, or the One emptying its oneness into multiplicity, or as Zizek has put it by, “The One failing to be at one with itself.”  

Subjective Destitution is redeemed in the same way in Christian Atheism as it is in Christian Mysticism’s notion of the “Dark Night of the Soul. The Dark Night of the Soul has long been a sacred experience of suffering for the mystic. It is commonly said of the Dark Night that it is in its darkness, when one feels furthest from God, that He is closest. The Dark Night’s darkness presences an absence through the dialectical negation of the negativity of absence, so analogically its darkness is “as” light. The radical negativity of the Dark Night is negated by God’s weakness, which is His absence from the “Throne of Power.” Radical Theology shows how this mystical reversal can be true. It was when Jesus called out from the cross as one abandoned by God, “My God, why have you forsaken me,” that he was closest to humanity in its own abandonment by God. The negativity of abandonment at the heart of Subjective Destitution is negated by the productive contradiction at the heart of the community held together by the negativity of abandonment. But this is not a negation into total positivity, but rather a negation of negation that remains unresolved as the community constituted by individual destitution, or a community constituted by the irresolvable contradiction of the Non-Relation.   

Beauty and sublimity, and even horror, are Counter-Experiences because they are experiences that cannot be fully interpolated into the Symbolic. What has failed to be interpolated into the Symbolic is the symbolic failure at the heart of any, excessive aboutness. The remainder of un-interpolated intuition in Counter-Experience has a sort of present absence that is represented analogically as that which is excessive because it cannot be brought into subjectivity through positive representation but through the negative, inversion of counter-representation, or symbolic failure. Each attempt to represent the unrepresentable is an attempt to hold together the contradiction of a positivized negativity without resolution. The Non-Relation between concepts and what does not resemble concepts differentiates the counter-concepts, or the counter-objects, of the phenomena of Counter-Experience, especially the unresolvable affects of desire, anxiety, and wonder that define but do not determine Saturated Phenomena. 

When one comes upon a field of wildflowers, what is in the wildflowers more than the wildflowers must be gotten at indirectly through poetic or mystical speech because it cannot be interpolated into the Symbolic without remainder. There will always be a remainder because artful expressions are born in between the silence and its incontinence, which is how the dialectical Non-Relation, or the differential relation, between the Symbolic and the Real continually generates new speech. The failure built into counter-speech may collapse into silence, but it is also the fount of new speech. What is in the wildflowers more than the wildflowers is the Real, so this mystery cannot be diminished through any amount of speech. In this way although the Real resists symbolization absolutely, it is at the same time a producer of abundant “failed” speech both parapraxis and poetry, in the manner of Beckett’s “fail again, fail better.” When Saturated Phenomena collapse subjectivity into silence, it is because of awe at its excessive volume, which are the defined but indeterminate affects of symbolic failure. The Real is the symbolic failure that gets the Imaginary’s desire to move, specifically the Imaginary's desire to cover-over lack in the Symbolic with symbolic representation, which is how the Non-Relation between the Symbolic and the Real speaks. The field of wildflowers can move from beautiful to sublime when the indeterminate remainder of unrepresented intuition moves in a parallax shift from pleasant to a more intense sense of the vast depths of what is outside of the Symbolic’s grasp, which may be enjoyable but more in the sense of Lacan’s notion of “Jouissance,” or excessive enjoyment.  

Sublimity is an experience of too much openness, or too much indeterminacy. The excess of unrepresented intuition in the sublime is exemplary of any Counter-Experience. Excessive intuition is an indeterminate affection, but it feels a particular way because affects are defined by the Non-Relation between the Symbolic and the Real just like a concept. Affects feel a particular way because their failure to be represented leaves a particular mark on the Symbolic. In this regard affects are the Real to the Symbolic. Affects are represented by the body as the relations of difference among individual percepts. There can be no perception of an individual percept without relating it to another percept under a rule, so the body’s affects are basic concepts. A percept must be related to another percept through at least the most basic concept of difference before it can be felt. Concepts are never too far removed from the body since they produce affects, and affects produce concepts, and affects are basic concepts. Excessive intuition feels a particular way even though its affects are indeterminate because symbolic failure warps the intention as a defined but indeterminate, affective expression of the body.  

No two anxious feelings are the same even though they can both rightly be called “anxious.” Medically determining the identity of a given sickness, may define it to some degree, but it does not determine it. Illness continues to differentiate new affects and new concepts well after a diagnosis has been determined, which is the excess that is meant by the saturation, or the “over-proximity” of affect, in illness’s classification as “Saturated Phenomena” by Marion. Anxiety is about an indeterminate object, but anxiety is defined by the relation of that indeterminate object to the intention, so the indeterminate object differentiates the phenomena of the intention in the same way that the Real differentiates concepts by inverse, or negative, relation to positive representation. Anxiety is the exempla gratis of Saturated Phenomena, and sublimity outlines anxiety’s general structure of an intention that is unintentional. The resemblance of the affect of anxiety in the register of the Real to the concept of anxiety in the register of the Symbolic does not reduce the divergence of its difference from other instances of anxiety. The concept of anxiety intensifies the excessive particularity of difference by relating resemblance to difference in the contrast of definition, which is to differentiate new anxious, affective objects according to the structure of the sublime. The Counter-Experience of sublimity is too much non-resemblance to concepts, which feels like excessive possibilities, or too much indeterminacy. Excessive possibilities can feel exhilarating or terrifying depending on the relations of one’s intention to the sublime’s excessive openness. 

Desire, anxiety, and wonder are experiences of the open indeterminacy of the sublime as “more than enough intuition for the intention,” and it is the relation of contrast between intuition, or affect, and intentional representation that gives them both their affective and conceptual definition. Affects and concepts are often so closely coupled that is impossible to disentangle them. Affects, just like concepts, can be intentional or unintentional depending on whether they are “for” the subject of the intention or not. When there is “more than enough for the intention,” the intention is unintentional. Excessive affect is defined by how it resists the intention because the excess is in the register of the Real and the Ready-to-Hand intention is in the Register of the Symbolic. Kierkegaard’s “Sickness unto Death,” is the unintentional affect of anxiety that haunts the intention unto death just like The Real haunts the Symbolic as symbolic failure. Heidegger’s Being-Towards-Death is defined by this same object, which is the anxiety produced by Dasein’s awareness of death, or Nonbeing, that is always with Dasein as the horizon of its being. Anxiety is the affective counter-object that defines the intention as the unintentional presence of absence when the intention is about the dialectic of presence and absence. The “there” in Dasein as “Being-There" is located where absence meets intentional representation, so that new concepts are differentiated from the unresolved double negation of absence by representation or of representation by the absence. 

When intuition is excessive, the excess is an over-proximal, affective object of undeterminable hermeneutics. The feeling of the sublime is definite but indeterminate aboutness, which is the general form of “undeterminable hermeneutics” as too much hermeneutical openness. Beauty is only beautiful when it is sublime because sublimity is defined by the too-much particularity of over-proximal affects that cannot be reduced by abstract representation. When beauty resembles its concept, it is contained by an abstract identity and is reduced and instrumentalized by that identification, which makes beauty into an equivalency, and therefore exchangeable. However, beauty is only beautiful when it cannot be transacted as if it had economic value.  

Real beauty “contains” what cannot be contained as the excessive aboutness of too much intuition. Therefore, beauty contains darkness that cannot be illuminated by concepts. However, beauty’s darkness, like any Saturated Phenomena, radiates the sublime excess of irreducible ambiguity, which is the irreducible ambiguity given by the unresolved double negation of the dialectic. Darkness is sublime when its “substance” is Super-Saturated with the unusable, because ambiguous, but invaluable, because nonrefundable, excessive particularity of love. The mystic seeks this “Super-Saturated Substance” that the Pseudo-Dionisis saw as God’s uncontainable love by making herself a clearing for the super-saturation of her intention with the unintentional phenomena of the Dark Night. However, the mystic’s Beloved withdraws deep into the depths of its love by making a clearing for its pursuer to fill with the particular speech of her seeking like the poetry of the Bible’s Song of Songs, or of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The mystic’s love, which is her self-emptying, pursues the self-emptying of God, which is God’s love, so that the lover’s find each other as they empty themselves for each other, which is like pouring the particularity of each other’s self-emptying into the clearing that each has made for the other, so that each’s abstract clearing becomes super-saturated with the particularity of the other.  

Zizek has written that love is a “violent,” or even “evil” act of choosing the particular over the abstract. When we chose a lover, it is a rejection of all others. There can be no abstract love for humanity, or the universe, or whatever else because concrete love is excessively particular. Mystical love is like this because the Clearing is an abstract opening for the particularity of the beloved, so that mystical love follows the Hegelian dialectic of the Concrete, in which the Abstract is negated for the Particular. Where the streams of self-emptying meet, is the super-saturation of the silence with novel speech. Divine love is a lure into this fecund, unknowable silence where the deformed speech of irreducible ambiguity is differentiated, and where beauty crosses-over into the horror of the conception of the inconceivable. Mystical love is Being-There when “there” is where the Abstract becomes super-saturated with the Particular as the Concrete, eternal expression of God’s self-emptying love. “The deep calls to the deep” as the continual production of new speech without ever exhausting the mysteries of beauty, the sublime, and horror. 

However faraway that “there” may seem, for the mystic, it is here as the “Near-Far.” The Near-Far can be seen in Blake’s famous lines from the “Auguries of Innocence,” “Heaven in a Wild Flower” and “Eternity in an hour.” Both notions are extensions of such concepts as can be found in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in which the lower term is switched for the higher like “the meek” as the “inheritors of the Earth,” or the beauty of wildflowers surpassing “all of King Solomon’s extravagant wardrobe.” The general concept is that the transcendent is imminent to the Concrete Particular. Jesus’s admonition in Luke 17:21 to stop looking for the time and the place of where and when the Kingdom of God will come and look for it “within,” or “in their midst,” is the direction of the mystic’s practice towards the immanent transcendent of the Near-Far.  

The “deep calls to the deep” in the immanent presence of the unknowable other, or of the unknowable self within as the unconscious. Richard Boothby has written about the anxiety-provoking presence of unknowability within the self and the other as the “Das Ding” first identified by Freud and then expanded upon by Lacan, which eventual became the Object-Cause-of-Desire for Lacan as Boothby has outlined the progression of the concept. Mysticism is a journey taken in the presence of the other within and with others. The Thirteenth Century Islamic Mystic Ibn Arabi’s phrase, “alone with the alone,” captured well the communal aspect of the journey as well as its incommunicable ambiguity. Unless the mystic enters this loneliness, she cannot communicate the incommunicable to herself or to others. The “Long Loneliness,” as Dorthy Day put it, makes a clearing for the inexhaustible mystery within the mystic and within others, so that the revelation of mystery within her self-emptying will be an irreducible mystery and not the identification of a fix or equivalent concept of herself or of others.  

Dorthy Day’s self-emptying was her service to the “ungrateful, undeserving poor,” in her words. Her service could not be transactional because she was giving what she “didn’t have” in the form of her self-emptying to someone “who didn’t want it,” in the form of the “ungrateful” poor. Day’s self-emptying was the emptying of her intentions for the intentions of those whom she served. Their needs were the counter-intention of her intention but not without intention. The poor’s lack of gratitude or even worthiness in Day’s intention enabled her to give without receiving and for them to receive without giving. The unintentional intention of unconditional love is the too much givenness of the excessive aboutness of grace. Unconditional love is misunderstood though if it is thought of as without intention because it is the counter-intention of the excessively particular needs of the other. The need of the other appears in the intention as the Object-Cause-of-Anxiety because it is the stated need of the other plus its irreducible ambiguity. It is the irreducible ambiguity that is the gift of grace exchanged in service. Because service to the other can be defined but not determined, it will always “contain” the irreducible ambiguity of the counter-object of the Real. The presence of irreducible ambiguity in service makes service a journey into the Dark Night. 

All true mysticism is done alone with others, which is why Jewish mysticism is a dialogue. The Talmudic tradition of collected conversations about the Torah among rabbis outlines the practice of communal, Biblical commentary called “Midrash.”  Within the Jewish Mysticism of the Kabbalah (10^th – 16^th C’s), the Zohar (13^th – 14^th C) is Midrash specifically about the mystical meanings behind the Torah as conversations between Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his disciples. The Fourteenth Century communities of female mystics called “the Beguins” lived out the poverty of their dark nights together, but without the sanction of the Church. Mystics like Meister Ekhart (14^th C), the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing (14^th C), John of the Cross (16^th C), and Teresa of Avila (16^th C) were members of religious communities, even though they were each persecuted by the Church. Jesus of Nazareth exemplified this long tradition of gathering to discuss and pray and eat and work together when he taught that, “Wherever two or three are gather under the divine name,” the transcendent is immanent as concrete love.   

Beauty, sublimity, and horror are the defined but indeterminate affects of the counter-object of the Lacanian Real’s Non-Relation to the Symbolic. Marion’s Counter-Experiences are defined but not determined by the Lacanian Object-Cause-of-Desire, anxiety, and wonder. These unintentional objects are differentiated between the individual and the community because they are the singular failure of the subject to be interpolated into the public Symbolic. Even deep into the Dark Night, the mystic is there with the Symbolic, so she is there with the community given to her by the Symbolic. The incommunicable singularity of her journey is the boon that she brings back to her community and to the Symbolic itself as the irreducible ambiguity of her singular speech.