Weird Mysticism Philosophical Horror and The Mystical Text 2020949120 9781683932871 9781683932888
Weird Mysticism Philosophical Horror and The Mystical Text 2020949120 9781683932871 9781683932888
Weird Mysticism Philosophical Horror and The Mystical Text 2020949120 9781683932871 9781683932888
Weird Mysticism
Critical Conversations in Horror Studies
General Editor: Dawn Keetley, Lehigh University
Publishing cutting-edge research that is accessible to both general and academic audi-
ences, this series takes on important critical conversations about horror. The series offers a
broad scope of scholarly inquiry. Not only do its books examine a range of media includ-
ing film, television, and literature, but its publications also consider a variety of historical
eras extending into the contemporary moment and reaching as far back as the origins of
horror itself.
Weird Mysticism: Philosophical Horror and the Mystical Text, by Brad Bumgartner
Copyright © 2020. Lehigh University Press. All rights reserved.
Weird Mysticism
Philosophical Horror
and the Mystical Text
Brad Baumgartner
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Contents
v
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Introduction
The Path to Nowhere
the margins. Thus critics are now faced with the unique opportunity to
partake in radical forms of knowledge production that seek freedom
from hegemonic discourses. The potentiality of the speculative to usher
in new modes of thought that, while harkening back to spiritual dis-
courses of the Middle Ages, also advance a radicalization of reality—not
only social conceptions of “reality” but an opening up of divine Reality—
becomes the explicit focus of this book.
Despite much excellent work on mysticism, literature, and philosophy
in their respective fields, scholars have not yet fully explored the impor-
tance of viewing these traditions in an interdisciplinary context. Our
analysis will move against the grain of research which relegates them to
all-too-typical historical or social contexts without opening up lines of
discourse to other fields of study. Moving alongside recent interdiscipli-
nary scholarship that speculatively reconsiders the way one might under-
stand reality and our relationship (or lack thereof) to it—as in Eugene
Thacker’s work on “the horror of philosophy”—this book investigates the
possibility and necessity of considering these three distinct and histori-
1
2 Introduction
another when analyzed, the long tradition of “the weird” becomes this
modern mysticism’s sanctues divinae, or divine sanctuary, blurring the
boundaries between horror and philosophy, materialism and mysticism.
By electing this method, subsequent chapters will explore how Ligotti,
Bataille, and Cioran are based firmly both within and without the medie-
val mystical tradition, engaging the infinity of the beyond in its irredu-
cibly individual character at the absolute limits of human thought while
managing to make the beyond a theoretical priority. In so doing, we will
also strive to reveal the contingent and irreducibly textual dimension to
these works, which, on the one hand, denies the purely mystical experi-
ence by linking it to writing and genre and, on the other hand, transcends
this textual dimension vis-à-vis the mode of mystical auto-commentary.
Unlike traditional mystics, horror writers do not seek union with the
divine. Through an analysis of Thomas Ligotti’s horror fiction, in chapter
2, “Thomas Ligotti: The Poetics of Darkness,” we instead show how hor-
ror fiction deploys apophatic techniques in order to describe negatively
the indescribable. In so doing, this chapter will consider Ligotti’s horror
4 Introduction
crisis, and mysticism. Though many may read Cioran’s work as pessimis-
tic and incomplete, we will argue that these are important features in his
work: they are the textual remnants of a rigorous—albeit subtractive—
process of un-making oneself and the world via a practical mysticism of
intense, pessimistic mindfulness. Cioran challenges systematic philo-
sophical discourse to present a series of meontological dictums that allow
readers to come into a mystical awareness of their complicity in the hor-
rors of existence. For Cioran, horror is tied directly to existence, a para-
dox that is as much cosmic as it is human. In opposition to identifying
with oneself as oneself, his fragments and aphorisms position readers in a
marginal space between being and non-being. Cioran’s work forms a
bridge between mysticism and non-philosophical thinking as it forms a
way to recuperate what is lost in one’s existence through what is para-
doxically gained vis-à-vis non-existence.
The afterword, “The Mystical Death of the Speculative Critic,” returns
to the question of ethics—or lack thereof—that is raised toward the end
of chapter 4. In a concise reflection connecting the question of ethics to
The Path to Nowhere 5
the notion of mystical death, we will note that there are limits to both
criticism and weird mysticism. As a literary mode, weird mysticism often
utilizes the identifiable narrative technique of mystical auto-commentary,
yet it can also be considered a genre of writing, or category of literary
composition (i.e., the mystical text). But we will also posit that these
limits might be overcome by focusing on how performing an “apophatic
weird criticism” of this sort is a kind of mystical death in and of itself,
wherein the apophatic critic annihilates herself via weird criticism. Thus
we will posit just how a mystical death as such (i.e., the mystical death of
the weird critic) might add to future research on the nexus of mysticism,
pessimism, and horror by being a form of criticism that becomes what it
describes, potentially speculatively opening thought to a limitlessness
un-inhered by its own anarcho-mystical liberation via the mystical death
of the one-who-thinks.
And, finally, a quick note on the aims of the critical reading method
deployed throughout this book. The weird mysticism(s) found herein
might also be said to cast a kind of shadow, or better yet, a “cloud of
unknowing,” to borrow a key phrase from the medieval text, over their
reading publics. Haziness ensues, as is the cloud’s wont, and readers are
left to find their way through the haze. To recuperate formal analyses
from the works of Ligotti, Bataille, and Cioran, then, the critical reading
method and/or mode of criticism deployed in this book seeks a hand in
operationalizing the darkness, if you will, to pierce the cloud in its utmost
anarcho-mystical capacity to essentially, but not without critical rigor, see
what happens.
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ONE
Piercing the Cosmological Horizon
7
8 Chapter 1
gestures toward in his book Bataille’s Peak (2007), wherein he writes that
Georges Bataille was unable “to separate entirely materialism from a
‘weird mysticism’” (208). Aside from deploying the term in a content
note on Bataille’s relation to the work of Giordano Bruno, Stoekl does not
go on to define the term. Nor does he perhaps hope that it imbues his
remarkable book with anything more than a passing significance. We will
briefly return to Stoekl’s reading of Bataille in chapter 3, but for now let it
suffice to say that his deployment of the term evokes an insightful mo-
ment that merits some further consideration. What comes to mind when
one thinks of a “weird mysticism”? Obviously, the modifier “weird”
seeks to signify a superlative or at least different level of strangeness. But
is not mysticism itself sufficiently strange? If the term serves to qualify or
typify, and with one adjectival swipe of the pen ushers mysticism into a
new generic realm, then perhaps this point of departure is also a semantic
juncture, an opportunity to unite and contextualize mysticism within an
entirely different tradition altogether, what is commonly referred to as
“the weird.”
Piercing the Cosmological Horizon 9
sence). This ‘presence realized in absence,’ this aporia, has its discursive
analogue in the aporetic moment thought through by negative theology”
(viii). Thus, if we combine the two terms, with individuation as the ulti-
mate “weird” on the one side, and the particularly negative theological
understanding of mysticism, emphasized by Kessler and Shephard as
being the “presence realized in absence” of God on the other, then we
find in this merging a kind of weird individuation that is specific to the
living out of a mystical life.
To recap, by placing emphasis on the term “weird” as “becoming,”
individuation being the ultimate weird, and by subsequently individuat-
ing vis-à-vis the life of the mystic (i.e., via the apophatic or negative
theological aporia of presence through absence), then we find in the
merging of these two terms an etymological ground for “weird mysti-
cism.” For the sake of this book, then, let us posit the term weird mysticism
as a portmanteau term with which we seek to describe a writerly impetus
to wander through the auto-blackening landscape of negativity in order
to fully become oneself through one’s own negation. Our interest in “the
10 Chapter 1
mystical. As such, the act of writing, the heart of weird mysticism, be-
comes an ontological hesitation that blurs the boundary between self and
world, creating a third space which opens to the abyss.
What will not be argued in this book is that the mystical and weird
traditions are—or do—the same thing. But they are strange bedfellows—
sharing tropes in the double sense of “motif” and also having a certain
affinity for changing or “turning” in the Classical sense (trope, from the
Greek trapein, “to turn”)—and will be analyzed as such. By teasing out
relations among them, we will argue that each concept at once attracts
and negates the other, divulging a relation that takes place in contradic-
tion. In this way, Ligotti, Bataille, and Cioran’s texts are neither purely
weird nor mystical, but rather accelerate to its unknowable brink what
happens at the very contradictory point of encounter between them. Just
as Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Kierkegaard’s Fear
and Trembling, notes the realm of contradiction between the “knight of
faith,” who is completely able to embrace life, and the “knight of resigna-
tion,” who resides in a place of terrible alienation, we too, as readers of
Piercing the Cosmological Horizon 11
these texts, must dwell in that realm. But, as weird readers, we will find
that the realm of contradiction, even in its terrible alienation, is also be-
neficent, for its own very being unhinges the nature of constraint and
inverts what holds us down into the very manner of its opposite, mystical
liberation.
Now that we have defined this portmanteau term, we can sketch an
anatomy of weird mysticism that attempts to account for the paradox to
which Allan Stoekl refers to above in which he notices in Bataille a writer-
ly wavering between materiality and mysticism. 5 To do this, we must
first acknowledge weird mysticism’s shadow-like, inherently palpable or
textual dimension, its weird materiality, if you will, by localizing its mode
of production, writing. The act of writing does indeed have an irredu-
cibly textual dimension to it and corresponds to a writing process or the
acts and behaviors that correspond to a text’s composition and corollary
dissemination to a writing public via different media. With this said, the
material dimension mentioned here is ultimately problematized when it
comes into view with mysticism. On the one hand, mystical texts would
not exist without their materiality as texts. On the other hand, mysticism
itself is contingent on and yet obliterates relations on the material plane.
A fine example of this paradox is perhaps one’s own living, breathing
self. Embodiment, the conundrum which holds the mystic away from
and yet spurs union with the divine, is the ultimate and inevitable para-
dox for the mystic. And individuation, perhaps best expressed via the
words of H. P. Lovecraft’s terribly lonely Outsider when he remarks,
“Such a lot the gods gave to me—to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the
barren, the broken” (“The Outsider” 43), serves as the ultimate weird, the
baffling process whereby one becomes oneself. Hence this book will seek
mainly to account for writing’s essential non-locality, or rather, the way in
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will force that side of the rainstick to fall to that one side, becoming
vertical or nearly vertical. But let us now imagine what is on the opposite
end of the rainstick. On the opposite side of the rainstick is thus the
opposite of affective pain. Let us call it joy. So, no matter how far down
the weight of pain holds one side of the rainstick down, the other side
will simultaneously experience, in equal measure, the exact opposite of
pain, or pain’s negative, joy.
Thus, if we take this rainstick as a metaphor for the economy between
being and human affect, then the more pain one experiences in one’s life
equals the more joy they are actually capable of experiencing by being
negatively. The experience of joy corresponds to the content and form of
the opposite of pain. 6 Hence, understanding the horror of life is actually
its profound mystical beauty and Truth; to realize that one is suffering by
being oneself is to realize the opposite joy that one can undo oneself. Or,
as Lispector’s narrator G. H. puts it, “Painstakingly not-being, I was
proving to myself that—that I was” (24). The mystical paradox of this
formulation is that the mystic can and will experience both extreme sides
Piercing the Cosmological Horizon 13
of the rainstick yet does so in such a way that she does not identify with
either joy or pain, but rather becomes the hand in the middle which holds
the rainstick itself, the impossible hinge through which a soft balance is
not only possible but transcends its own possibility/non-possibility. 7 As
Giorgio Agamben says of the single factical root of sorrow and joy: “The
root of all pure joy and sadness is that the world is as it is” (The Coming
Community 90). Here Agamben provides an ontological correlative to be-
ing negatively vis-à-vis his notion of “whatever-being.” His emphasis on
being in touch with the root, as opposed to being trapped by the opposi-
tion, denotes a negative mode of praxis which serves as the root of being
negatively.
ject to the great power of her strong nature, to content her. And that life
is miserable beyond all that the human heart can bear. (75)
Keeping in mind our rainstick formulation, Hadewijch emphasizes a
kind of spiritual pessimism in which divine Love remains unsatisfied or,
rather, is satisfied only through its non-satisfaction. The life of Love is
one filled with terror/horror, a life in which Love must be done without
in order to realize divine union with Love. In this way, existence itself
becomes ineffable. Hadewijch, who stresses the importance of non-ecstat-
ic states, teaches that a life lived negatively in divine horror is the same
life which, in the spiritual realm, fills one with Love. This aporia, or
radical contradiction, is essential to a spiritual life lived in (i.e., without)
Love. Hence weakness, which unveils strength’s nothingness, is true
strength, while terror and horror, or the miserable life lived via a non-
ecstatic mysticism, paradoxically sharpen one’s spiritual faculties. 9
The example of Hadewijch’s love poetry is indicative of a lived horror
which replaces Love’s fulfillment with its absence, thereby insisting on
the “frightening life” wanted by Love. Her love poetry is slightly more
existential and thus less semantically apophatic than mystics such as
Marguerite Porete or Meister Eckhart, who replace actual lived horror
with its divine unsaying. However, writing is an important and invari-
ably necessary component for each of them. As Amy Hollywood points
out, “Hadewijch, Porete, and Eckhart each (re)enact through their writing
the experience of divine presence and absence and attempt to engender
such experience in their readers” (Sensible Ecstasy 98). Their writings rep-
resent a central problematic found in traditional mysticism, which is the
impossibility of human language to describe union with the divine. The
attempt to attain God-consciousness is largely an ineffable matter, and
typically one has not the words to describe what is or constitutes God.
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love my nothingness, love being a nothingness. I must love with that part
of the soul which is on the other side of the curtain, for the part of the
soul which is perceptible to consciousness cannot love nothingness. It has
a horror of it. Though it may think it loves nothingness, what it really
loves is something other than nothingness” (111). Weil speaks here of an
inverse horror, the horror that persists in the face of loving something
other than imperceptible nothingness.
In Gravity and Grace, Weil’s conception of God revolves around two
key terms. Gravity is the fundamental law that draws human beings
away from God through the act of creation. Grace is that which “de-
creates” us; it is an act of humility on the part of God that allows human
beings to find Him again. For Weil, the act of seeking God requires keno-
sis, or “self-emptying,” a process wherein one must accept all the
wounds of life, all emptiness, in order to receive grace and thereby gain
union with God. Bernard McGinn notes, “In a more modern vein . . . Weil
has expressed it thus: ‘Contact with human creatures is given us through
the sense of presence. Contact with God is us through the sense of ab-
sence. Compared with this absence, presence becomes more absent that
absence’” (xix). One might think a thing and its opposite much in the
same way one might think of the negative of a photograph: the positive
image is revealed as we normally would see it, whereas the negative
image contains the total inversion of the positive one. Weil’s apophatic
mysticism of decreation works via this series of negations. Framed in this
way, the rhetorical Neoplatonic distanciations Weil makes between crea-
turely being and God are particular to her use of apophatic logic. Our
brief analysis of the horror/terror of mysticism will be more fully ex-
plored in coming chapters. But for now, let if suffice to say that the
mystical potency of apophatic logic lies not in what it recuperates from
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edge, following E. M. Cioran in The Trouble with Being Born (1973), that we
ourselves may well have invited—or be—the very monster that lurks in
the room: “A monster, however horrible, secretly attracts us, pursues us,
haunts us. He represents, enlarged, our advantages and our miseries, he
proclaims us, he is our standard-bearer” (105). One cannot be no one
without first being someone, and we are thus tied to our own fallible
human natures. Only by contemplatively working through these faulty
human natures, by removing them via moving backwardly out of them,
can humans get to a place, which is a non-place, where to unknow one-
self is to move through oneself. Our failures, it seems, are the first and only
place to begin. Understood in this way, to think the unhuman is an essen-
tially humanistic—perhaps even an ethical—endeavor.
Oddly enough, then, apophatic thinking and being negatively make
one more fully human in the sense that this more fully human being
brings one, as no one, closer to what Quentin Meillassoux calls “the great
outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which
18 Chapter 1
was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own
givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are
thinking of it or not” (7). Thinking no one in part means to restore oneself
back to the pre-dialectical realm of self-knowledge, which is the space of
the pure observation of thinking without taking action or attributing con-
sequences to one’s thoughts. The further one individuates the more one-
self one becomes, which is often baffling, bewildering. There is also an
inherent link here to the dialectical relationship between reading and
writing, both of which are quite similar to this process of individuation.
Moreover, Nicola Masciandaro sees the problem of individuation as
such: “As though foreign to it, absolutely foreign. I am not an alien, but
something stranger still, an insider whose essence is to actually be a
virtual absolute outsider. The hellishly real impossibility that you are you
is the true stupidity according to which the absolute is alone thinkable”
(“Absolute Secrecy: On the Infinity of Individuation”). Put yet another
way, the horror of individuation becomes one’s negative call to spiritual
awakening, a call to greatness which is actually the paradoxical call for
self-dissolution.
Hence the horror with which one is plagued, that contemplative hor-
ror which prescribes the death of the self as individuation’s own auto-
fulfilling rite of passage, is the same and the earnest horror that actually
brings one closer to accessing the absolute via their own negation. In this
way, one can only think the absolute through the impossible conduit of
horror itself: individuation is the perplexing instrument with which hor-
ror operationalizes and through which one becomes oneself. The horror
of individuation, the horror of becoming oneself by leaving one’s self,
then, suggests a revelatory or epiphanic nature via its own doubleness.
For the real horror is always reserved for those who remain ignorant of
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this mystical horror; who stay themselves without ever experiencing the
intensity and corollary contentment of not being, or unknowing, them-
selves. This notion bridges with what Masciandaro in Sufficient Unto the
Day calls “apophatic humanism,” what “holds, has always held, the fu-
ture of humanism: unknowing” (111), which is also to say, that unknow-
ing is the only way for human beings to become fully human. Keeping
this in mind, the epidemic horror of the masses, those who resist mysti-
cally becoming what they always already are via unknowing who and
what they think they are but fail to see or ignore in order stay themselves,
becomes the real horror of the world.
The central task of negation is a practical one and yet often derided as
merely pessimistic. But what if pessimism is the true form of optimism,
the strange non-delight in coming to know absolutely nothing; that, in a
world with absolutely no hope, 12 there is actually nothing that can harm
anyone? (Rather like writing itself.) To understand this point is to know
that when (and only when) one has absolutely no expectations, never
expects anything from anyone, then, and only then, can one expect every-
Piercing the Cosmological Horizon 19
methods—they are, in a way, getting weird, in the same way that Theodor
Adorno might say we need to think musically. In this way, negativity vis-
à-vis weird mysticism becomes a radical sub- or anti-culture of thought, a
mode of thought that negates itself as thinking. To get to Reality, so-
called, the weird mystic thinks by unthinking. In other words, it repre-
sents what a Westernized version of “martyring the self to get to Self”
might look like.
Negativity, as such, is important to theory because it speculatively
cultivates a mode of unthinking through which the human being un-
delivers oneself to oneself and comes closer to thinking a world not-
according-to-us. As we will see, there are several ways that the logic of
negativity is deployed to achieve such ends, namely three schools of
thought that hold a close relation to one another—and sometimes over-
lap—on this front: the weird, apophatic mysticism, and philosophical
pessimism. These three negative pathways ultimately become mystical
roads to nowhere, to being negatively. But this is not to say that they are
20 Chapter 1
NOTES
1. This question correlates to another key problematic that is central to this book,
which, following Eugene Thacker in In the Dust of this Planet, is: “How does one go
about thinking the unthinkable?” (48).
2. Benjamin Noys opens The Persistence of the Negative (2012), his original and
incisive critique of the state of contemporary continental theory, by challenging the
affinity of present-day theory to rely on affirmation in ontological and political dis-
courses of resistance. Noys challenges affirmative thinking by revealing the often
overlooked and essential, if not essentially paradoxical, productivity that remains la-
tent until it is realized and released through the “labor of the negative.” According to
this critique, then, there is a sense that returning to or ultimately revealing the current
of the negative will allow theory to make its way back to its political vocation. Though
we will not delve into particularly political analyses herein, this book shares a passion
in helping to reorient contemporary critical theory to negative thinking.
3. Moreover, in her erudite work Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development
of Spiritual Consciousness (1911), Evelyn Underhill writes, “In mysticism that love of
truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual
sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher
guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the discon-
certing language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence
whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram —impersonal and unat-
tainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive” (23).
4. We will try to take due care when speaking about the literary genre of weird
fiction, specifically in the next chapter on Thomas Ligotti.
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accepts this division as absolute and says, ‘There is the world and here am I,’ will
never be able to get over into the phenomenal world with his ideas. But the facts are as
follows. I look at the phenomenal world and see it everywhere incomplete and lacking
something. But I myself, with my whole existence, once came out of the very same
universe of which the world of percepts is also part. Now I look inside myself, and
what this enables me to see is just what is missing in the phenomenal world. I must
put together again with my own effort the wholeness that was split in two by my ego’s
appearance on the scene. My effort re-establishes reality.”
9. Cf. “The same woman who can sink in abysmal fruition is immediately placed
again in herself: the human being truly dies in God, but not in order, as human being,
to come to its end. One who experiences the blessed ‘feeling that surpasses all things’
is sent back into the world with impressionable senses and sharpened spiritual pow-
ers—‘pure man like myself,’ says Jesus in Visions” (Paul Mommaers, “Preface” xvi).
10. On the different forms of life found in H. P. Lovecraft’s stories, see Eugene
Thacker’s section entitled “Supernatural Horror as the Paradigm of Life” in After Life.
11. Thacker notes that “the third type of life described in Lovecraft’s stories is not a
monster in [the] traditional sense. The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share
the same reality with the human beings who encounter them” (After Life 23).
12. Keeping in mind the motif of walking through Hell as the only way to Paradise,
this notion of abandoning hope has an explicitly Dantean significance. Cf. “O ye who
enter, every hope resign” (Inferno 18).
13. Cf. Cioran in “The Mockery of a New Life”: Nailed to ourselves, we lack the
capacity of leaving the path inscribed in the innateness of our despair” (A Short History
of Decay 46).
14. In the Preface to Inner Experience, Bataille references Nietzsche in Ecce Homo:
“the ideal of a human, super-human well-being and benevolence will often appear inhuman”
(xxxi).
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TWO
Thomas Ligotti
The Poetics of Darkness
ALL IS UNREAL
“We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror” (Noctuary 17),
writes Lucian Dregler, the young philosopher who appears as the protag-
onist in Thomas Ligotti’s short story “The Medusa,” a sinister tale first
published in the winter 1991 edition of Fantasy Tales. Dregler’s scholarly
work focuses on the Greek mythological figure of the Medusa, the mon-
ster that, when directly gazed upon, turns her onlooker to stone. Reflect-
ing on the ontological implications for such an onlooker, a part he himself
will fatefully come to play, his work attempts to explicate the plight of
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one who has strayed “along the pathway to the void” only to be frozen in
time and space (Noctuary 35). The story is infused with literary tech-
niques associated with “weird fiction” 1 and operates as a repository for
several complex philosophical concepts. As such, “The Medusa” delves
into the multifarious and obscure world of dreamers, those oft-mad-
dened wanderers of new dimensions and fates beyond the human world.
Dregler’s obsessive search works literally, leading him from the intellec-
tual rigors of academic writing to the halls of decrepit basements and
abandoned rooms, and metaphorically, equating the toils of his quintes-
sentially modern existential predicament as the effect of an obscure fate.
Ligotti terms this fate macabre unreality (Noctuary 12)—foremost a condi-
tion in which one’s fate is auto-possessed by the horror of being itself, an
impending doom forever enshrouded in mystery. This auto-possession,
which connects to the idea of petrification displayed in the mythology of
the Medusa, is exemplified in a gesture by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who
writes in The Phenomenology of Perception of a philosophical “freezing of
25
26 Chapter 2
being” (63). Initially Dregler seeks the origin of the Medusa via move-
ment, taking walks around the city in an effort to stumble upon her in
some way, yet this search soon gives way to petrification. In the end, it is
not Dregler’s will that leads him to find the Medusa, but rather a freezing
of his being as he comes face to face with his own contingent macabre
unreality. The horror in this story thus exemplifies, following Eugene
Thacker, “the moment of frozen thought, the enigmatic stillness of every-
thing except the furtive, lurking revelation of a limit” (Tentacles 111), the
mysterious (non-)cosmogenesis of a void coming to know itself that
looms just beyond the point of his own comprehension.
As he walks the streets in search of the Medusa, Dregler is what we
will call a flâneur of the unreal. 2 He is a figure whose being-in-the-world is
intoxicated with idling about his own horizon: “For in the mind the Me-
dusa fascinates much more than she appalls, and haunts us just this side
of petrification. On the other side is the unthinkable, the unheard-of, that-
which-should-not-be: hence, the Real” (Ligotti, Noctuary 36). On this side
of the non-human boundary, Dregler hides from horror only in the heart
of horror, which is to say that as a being whose own being obstructs
access to the unthinkable world, and, as such, resides in a world-for-us,
Dregler “evokes the world-without-us as a limit . . . a ‘negative philoso-
phy’” (Thacker 9). Dregler’s horror is represented not by his fear of the
unknown but rather the horror of failing to properly think it: a world
without him.
A connection can be drawn here to the traditional, mystical intoler-
ability of being someone, which is imperative for self-annihilation. In the
early fourteenth-century mystical text The Mirror of Simple Souls, for ex-
ample, Marguerite Porete emphasizes a particular coincidentia oppositorum
in which the wretched soul must become nothing in order to return to
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the real to its eternal significance” (Shoaf 197). And secondly, there is the
emblematic position of stone as a rudimentary form of being. Dregler’s
horror narrative can also be viewed a kind of allegorical story which
stonily exposes the passage of consciousness to an impossible cosmic
origin point.
Traditionally speaking, narrative works well as a medium to
transcribe the relationship between fiction and philosophy because it cu-
rates an inherently dialogic model between being and thinking. In other
words, narrative fiction preserves a larger narrative of communication
between the acts of reading and writing, setting a precedent for both
creating and interpreting the world-for-us. “In the act of reading,” Paul
Ricoeur writes, “the receiver plays with the narrative constraints, brings
about gaps, takes part in the combat between the novel and the anti-
novel, and enjoys the pleasure that Roland Barthes calls the pleasure of
the text” (77). When construed in this way, the acts of reading and writ-
ing that take place in narrative fiction become corollary to the philosophic
acts of “hermeneutics,” or interpretation, and “ontology,” the study of
being, or the transcription of what is-ness consists of and how it is so.
Insofar as narrative fiction is a kind of storytelling which relays certain
events that happen in life, it aims to meaningfully communicate experi-
ence to others. In this way, communication can be understood as the
“glue” or adhesive that binds the self-world correlation.
Horror fiction, in particular, adds a new element to this narrative
process, however, because it problematizes the relation between being
and thinking. In doing so, horror fiction dissolves the communicative
glue and deteriorates the method of adhesion of the self-world correla-
tion. By narrativizing philosophical concepts, the character of Lucien
Dregler becomes suggestive as an allegory for the modern philosopher
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leads him to an inhuman, albeit absolute, unity with the Medusa on that
side of petrification? Those who remain on this side of the border are, to
borrow a term from Ligotti, human puppets. But puppetry as such, we can
argue, is the analog to a weird mysticism that has no true subject or
object.
As readers who confront characters that are devoid of speech, aban-
doned, and emblematic of a grotesque kenosis, 9 or self-emptying, in
which “there are no people, nothing at all like that” (Ligotti, “I Have a
Special Plan for This World”), we are predisposed to the same “macabre
unreality.” And yet Dregler’s warning against mysticism is actually the
invocation of a negative mysticism, which is also a necessity of mysticism
itself, that mysticism negates itself as mysticism. Hence Ligotti takes liter-
ary steps to obscure mystically the distinction between self and world.
He writes about a fictional world superimposed onto an occulted world,
but it is an occulted world whose hiddenness is its very manner of sus-
pension. Enshrouded in a darkness that not only blackens but, through
blackening, becomes luminous, Ligotti’s short stories hold a close relation
to medieval darkness mysticism.
This chapter will consider Ligottian horror fiction through the lens of
the tradition of darkness mysticism to propose that the fiction holds a
relation to the mystical. By identifying this link, we also will suggest that
readers can find, through his peculiar logic of negation, an implicit com-
mentary on the horror of reality, which, put another way, is the paradoxi-
cal horror of realizing humanity’s immanent alienation from the universe
and its absolute unreality. 10 In other words, for Ligotti, absolute unreality
serves as the modern analog to the medieval mystic’s “divine” or God-
consciousness. For Ligotti, reality, like his horror fiction, is oneiric—“the
Gnostic nightmare par excellence” (Tibet, 115)—and uncanny—“a sibling
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ON SELF-SUBVERSION
scribe (1991), Noctuary (1994), My Work is Not Yet Done (2002), Teatro Grot-
tesco (2006), and a work of non-fiction entitled The Conspiracy of the Hu-
man Race (2010), a pessimistic work of pulp philosophy which proffers a
horrifying vision of reality. It is for the “extreme darkness of his philo-
sophical vision” (Cardin, “Liminal Terror” 85), dutifully expressed in his
writing as nightmarish and eccentric commentaries on reality, that he has
become known. And yet, paradoxically, for a long time, what was known
of him among his admirers was quite little.
At a time when the traditional novel reigns supreme, he shuns it in
favor of the short story narrative, giving his readers glimpses into an
extreme logic of negation, discoursing on a darkness which acts as both a
trope and a mode that permeates his work. Ligotti holds deep pessimistic
convictions and deploys the short story narrative to develop commentar-
ies on reality that are philosophically bent. Ligotti’s short stories do not
fit into the conventional narratives that often circumscribe the corpus of
twentieth-century horror fiction or even the subgenre of “weird fiction.”
Like H. P. Lovecraft, Ligotti undermines prevalent modern Western dis-
course in order to present pessimistic narrative theses, which comment
upon the decay of the individual. But whereas Lovecraft’s stylistic break
utilizes the short story to continually reveal the intense realism of the
human being when each narrator is faced with the unknown monstros-
ities of the Outside, Ligotti’s writing style allows his narrators, in a way
that guides readers through weird tales that deviate from even the har-
bingering of Lovecraft, not only to call into question normative visions of
reality but also to rewrite the way his readers are to consider them. Lig-
goti’s version of weird fiction allows him to present a gap between the
thinkable and the unthinkable in which the characters themselves are
representative of this disjunction. He employs a fragmented, or commen-
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yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all, you will be
uplifted to the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything that
is” (“Mystical Theology” 135). Dionysius also negates the opposite of
selfhood, which is especially important for the possibility of eternal indi-
viduality, in the formulation “being neither oneself nor someone else”
(137). This divinely radical individuality is especially important in the
tradition of Western mysticism, as it stresses an essential alienness that
places one, as Meister Eckhart expresses, “before” God. Such alienness is
exposed when one begins to see the self as foreignness, beautifully pro-
fessed by Georges Bataille when he writes that “the essence of myself
arises from this . . . the feeling of my fundamental improbability situates
me in a world where I remain as though foreign to it, absolutely foreign”
(Inner Experience 69).
Dionysius’s writings emphasized the Neoplatonic doctrines of the
unity of God and of privative evil and endeavored to show how to ac-
count for knowledge of God. In The Divine Names, Dionysius delineates
two primary ways to know God. The affirmative way validates attributes
of the divine, while the negative way knows through “unknowing”:
The most divine knowledge of God is
one which knows through unknowing
in the unity beyond intellect
when the intellect stands away from beings
and then stands away from itself,
it is united to the more than resplendent rays,
and is then and there illumined
by the inscrutable depths of wisdom. (66–67)
Via such mystical utterances, Dionysius practices the negative way to
know God to poetically deny any predication of God’s characteristics that
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form. This negative discourse, the semantic analog to mystical union with
the great blackness, summons him into the great blackness—“now he was
with them,” writes Ligotti (147). Thus, he is not so much third party, a
conduit for union between the voice in the bones and the eternal black-
ness. Rather, he semantically partakes in his own stuttering union with
eternal blackness. 25 The fragmented discourse, as a failure of speech, be-
comes the site of apophatic perversion: despite its effort, the shattered,
disembodied voice of the bones can only deliver the pact between bones
(the body) and blackness (the eternal) via short utterances, failures of
speech that impossibly hope to comprehend their own formulation.
If Ligotti’s brand of horror fiction is, as we argue here, a form of
linguistic trauma, or, rather, if in this description of mystical union with
eternal blackness we find a failure of speech, then what readers find in
such discourse is an apophatic a-theology. But to make this claim, we
must first arrive at an etymological explanation of what a “negative
theology” means. Denys Turner notes,
If we attend to the Greek etymology of the word theology, then a
curious state of linguistic affairs results from its combination with the
word apophatic. For theology means “discourse about God” or “divine
discourse,” so the expression “apophatic theology” ought to mean
something like: “that speech about God which is a failure of speech.”
And, though more than a little paradoxical . . . this definition rather
precisely captures the Dionysian understanding of it. (20)
On the contrary, for us, the expression of an apophatic atheology would
mean something like: “that speech about the absence of God which is a
failure of speech.” In this way, the Ligottian discourse on blackness seeks
to blacken absolutely.
Albeit strange, Ligotti’s narrative focus on attaining union with an
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sense of the negativity of all religious experience with the pursuit of some
goal of achieving negative experiences” (259). Turner ultimately agrees
with Michel de Certeau that John was historically positioned at a juncture
between the late medieval and the early modern, and thus is not fully
reliant on “an experientialist mystical epistemology such as is found in
John-Joseph Surin (1600-1655)” that would characterize many of the early
modern mystics (226). Experientialism “abhors the experiential vacuum
of the apophatic, rushing to fill it with the plenum of the psychologistic”
(Turner 259). In the case of Jean-Joseph Surin, perhaps most famously
known for his decades-long demonic possession, his interior self would
episodically enter into states of bliss. To a large degree, John’s writings
evacuate this kind of interior experience utilizing a non-experientialist
method perfected by apophatic mystics that indicates human reason’s
ignorance of the divine through intonations of incomprehensibility.
Turner notes that John’s mystical writings
46 Chapter 2
John’s metaphor of the spiritual “dark night,” but a way of using the
theme of purgative contemplation to present a mystical way of viewing
modern selfhood as a concept that is intrinsically flawed. Each author
posits a type of self-emptying, 31 though each type varies in terms of
method and object.
For John of the Cross, purgative contemplation, “which causes in [the]
soul the negation of herself and of everything” (The Dark Night of the Soul
7), is a kind of self-emptying, an obscure “dark night” in which the soul
detaches from all illusions that are not God. It is this metaphysical act of
contemplation as an act of freakishness that Ligotti provides readers with
a model of the modern self as one traumatized. Ligotti writes that Ascro-
bius’s freakish qualities “emerged from his intensely contemplative na-
ture. ‘He had incredible powers available to him,’ said the doctor. ‘He
might even have cured himself of his diseased physical condition; who
can say? But all of his powers of contemplation, all of those incessant
meditations that took place in his high backstreet house, were directed
Thomas Ligotti 47
really real, within the framework of oblivious selves that have always
already been emptied. “The human phenomenon is but the sum of dense-
ly coiled layers of illusion,” writes the narrative voice in the Ligotti’s
poem “I Have a Special Plan for this World,” “each of which winds itself
upon the supreme insanity that there are persons of any kind, when all
there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade
about in an endless dream” (Qtd. in “Unplug Yourself”). Optimists may
find his opining to be discouraging, but this antagonism indicates that
the latent terrors of darkness have some basis in the communal experi-
ence of life they choose to live among them. It is a signal that the logic of
negation sees into an aspect of modern living that other logics cannot see.
That the dark night does not subside is indicative of the horror of reality,
a failure of the world’s truth and the real’s consistency.
This negative logic persists throughout Noctuary’s third section enti-
tled “Notebook of the Night,” provided that this section itself deviates
from the first two in the way of form. “Notebook of the Night” is com-
posed of nineteen vignette pieces—short, diary-like entries that are inter-
thematically woven together through abyssal darkness and humanity’s
alienation from the universe in itself. Emblematically speaking, this for-
mal deviation is a blackening in itself. It productively problematizes a
failure in narrative logic of the collection as a whole: through its frag-
mented meanderings, this section promises to reveal failures of the
world’s truth—or, put another way, it will reveal that the world-for-us is
only ever relatively true—and of the real’s consistency.
“The beauty of black is the form of vision,” writes Nicola Mascianda-
ro, “the incredible delight of being seen by the Invisible, as John the Cross
expresses in commentary on this line: ‘For though of myself I am dark, he
so frequently fixed his eyes on me, after having looked at me the first
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time, that he was not satisfied until he had espoused me to himself and
brought me to the inner chamber of his love’” (8). Framed in this way,
what we find in Ligotti’s tales is a black universe that is at once mystically
beautiful and horrifying: absorption into the beauty of black comes by
way of the obliteration of narrative form, when narrative logic does not
illuminate the dark but only enters into light’s darkness, thought’s shad-
ow-upon-return.
Take, for example, “One May Be Dreaming.” This short vignette-like
piece in “Notebook of the Night” gives readers a snapshot glimpse into
the obscure and oneiric state of being of the narrator: “my present state is
without reality. . . . I know there is nothing beyond those lights. . . .
Should I venture there I would fall straight into an absolute darkness”
(162). Bewildered by his own unreality, the narrator remains at the brink
of thinking the light’s beyond. His Oneness with absolute darkness is
limited by the obscure beyondness of the light, one that may or may not
be as real as he thinks himself to be. Oneirism is the ontological medium
he uses to intuit this limitation. He sits, seen by the invisible unreality,
Thomas Ligotti 51
pondering whether to venture into the absolute darkness, but only ca-
pable of narrating his present state as being mediated by his dying
dreams. Here, a connection can be made to Edmund Burke’s discussion
of “obscurity” in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757), especially his understanding of dread and
night, which he insightfully locates in religion. He asks readers to consid-
er “how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how
much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear
ideas, affect minds. . . . The policy has been the same in many cases of
religion” (41). Liggoti’s universe, it seems, is the dying out of a living
contradiction between a darkness mysticism of the world-for-us and the
thinking of a world-without-us, in which the Meillaisouxian “great out-
doors,” as a limit threshold—the great indoors—is experienced as hypno-
gogic hallucination. If it goes unrecognized, this limit threshold manifests
as claustrophobic alienation from absolute unreality.
Recalling the example of “One May Be Dreaming,” we are able to
recall the characters in the aforementioned short story “The Tsalal.” At
story’s end, they are said to have “had attained the stripped bone of
being, the last layer of an existence . . . without nature or essence: the void
of the blackness no one had ever seen” (Noctuary 109). It follows that this
passage on blackness is an attempt to speak about the characters’ attain-
ing consciousness of a void “without nature or essence,” one that is high-
ly reminiscent of Masicandaro’s description of “black universe”:
We bring little lights to black universe and with the shadows cast by
our own forms think to have illuminated it. Thought does not illumi-
nate the Real, but projects its own real shadow upon what it cannot see.
No light has ever seen black universe because its blackness composes
the substantiality of darkness, is grounded in the principle that dark-
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ness is not the absence or privation of light, but light’s own body, the
means of its existence. Light is only in darkness. (7)
Put simply, the narrative logic of “The Tsalal” can bring readers only so
close to an illuminated understanding of the “void of the blackness no
one would ever see.” Ultimately, Ligotti’s description endeavors to com-
municate an experience that is essentially incommunicable. The narrative
knowingly fails to illuminate the mystical nature of the void in which
these characters are said to attain “the stripped bone of being,” but, on
the other hand, it does successfully serve as an “experiential feedback” of
that which is mystical (Turner 245).
As one can see, the perplexity of Ligotti’s black universe grows more
pronounced when it is aligned with a sense of mystery or illusion. His
short piece “The Eternal Mirage” certainly suggests that he grasps clearly
the speculative essence of black, namely, that is identically out there and
inside whoever sees it: “Black is without opposite: even light, which tries
to turn it into its opposite, fails in the face of the rigor of its secret,” writes
52 Chapter 2
François Laruelle, “Only the secret sees into the secret, like Black in
Black” (“On the Black Universe” 106–07). In “The Eternal Mirage,” Ligot-
ti metaphorically describes the cartography of a universe where “illu-
sions struggle with illusions,” where blackness spreads above and below
into “an endless ebony plateau,” where “one may see the flickering of . . .
luminous motes, quivering bodies held captive in the unbroken web of
blackness” (Noctuary 195). He writes of this infinite space that “a dimen-
sion has died, annihilating depth and leaving behind only a lustrous
image which seems to float far and wide upon the infinite surface of a
black ocean. And it is said that this ocean is itself merely a starry phan-
tasm glimpsed in certain eyes . . . eyes that are like two stars shining deep
in a black mirror” (196). For the wanderers of this place, Ligotti’s black
universe paradoxically evokes a form of vision, where sight is the site of
the mirage itself, a blackening of vision of a “lustrous image” which
shines into a black sea of infinity. The mirror image that this blackness
provides occurs beyond the depth of human vision, a blackening that
points to its own taking place, dually serving as a third thing that reflects
its own secret meaning-formation.
In his fiction, Ligotti uses several terms to qualify such blackness. Of
note are the adjectives he chooses to conjoin to the nouns—shining dark-
ness to lustrous blackness—which become the mystical analog to the “lu-
minous darkness” described by Dionysius the Areopagite. 35 The corol-
lary is a form of vision that is brought into its double being, a mutated
mirror that corresponds to the formless nigredo of its own image. We can
suggest that what Ligotti sees in this mirror is the essential paradigm of
weird fiction, “an amazement at the monumentally macabre unreality of
life [when awakened] to the weird—just as the man awakens in the per-
petual hell of his brief story,” he writes, and “reaches out into the un-
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known thing in the darkness. Now, even without his eyeglasses, he can
truly see” (Noctuary 14). To see without sight is to cast one’s own thought
shadow into the black universe. Only the mystic is capable to see the
black mirror’s reflection.
According to Masciandaro, only the mystic is capable to behold black
universe, for the mystic is the one who is light’s unintelligible nigredo. In
his essay “Secret: No Light Has Ever Seen the Black Universe,” he writes,
The mystic is the one who exits the real stupidity of correlational capti-
vation and says openly and with infinite curiosity to the world: What
are you doing here? There is nothing to see! No illumination will reveal
black universe to you. You yourself alone (in a secret manner of speak-
ing) are the singular unthinkable light that sees black universe, that is,
the light beyond light that is nothing other than your own blackening.
All you—the philosopher—have done (and covertly do now) is play in
the dark. (7)
Thomas Ligotti 53
“NOUMINOUS LIFE”
divine force. One key element of the numinous that Otto goes to some
length to describe is the feeling that arises when one comes in contact
with the numinous, what he calls “creature consciousness,” the feeling of
utter “nothingness before an overpowering, absolute might of some
kind” (10). Later in the book, during his analysis of the “mysterium tre-
mendem,” Otto suggests that the numinous has a quality of “religious”
or “daemonic dread” as “it first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something
uncanny,’ ‘eerie,’ or ‘weird’” (14). These eerie and uncanny feelings were
felt by early human beings as a sense of religious awe and are akin to the
uncanny feelings derived from “the weird” itself, especially while read-
ing weird tales. Ligotti himself states that “artistic invocations of horror
are most successful when the phenomena they depict call up the uncan-
ny . . . [and are] genuinely threatening from both the outside and from
within” (Conspiracy 90). In this way, horror becomes a third thing, a site
of synthesis between the supernatural and the uncanny that blurs the
boundary between what is human and what is the “beyond” or “wholly
other” (Otto 29).
Thomas Ligotti 55
places in which there is a “sense of divinity,” noting that “we never have
such feelings in our cities. . . . This is why so much is atoned for in
wintertime, when a numinous death descends on those chosen lands of
our globe” (Noctuary 119). Dr. Haxhausen’s reflection upon the sense of
divinity to be found in ruined places allows for us a moment of critical
pause. What kind of life exists in a holy place of ruin? Or, to put it
another way, what is the relation that exists at the liminal point of en-
counter between what is holy and what is horrific? To help discern what
kinds of boundaries are being crossed, a concept of life is needed that
speaks to living contradictions and accounts for the ontological contra-
dictions that Ligottian horror fiction poses to a view of Life.
In “Nine Disputio on the Horror of Theology,” Thacker proposes that
if indeed “horror is a way of thinking the unthinkable, and the limits of
our place within that world, then really the specter that haunts horror is
not death but indeed life” (In the Dust 99). According to Thacker, “A
nouminous life would have to articulate a conceptual space that is neither
that which is lived outside of discourse (the gothic ‘numinous’), nor that
56 Chapter 2
which is reasoned within discourse and yet unlived (the Kantian antimo-
nies)” (112). Rather than to favor a binary concept of life, Thacker names
the strange affinity between the thinking of the world as unthinkable and
the living of a life that is unlivable. Thacker thereby curates a concept of
the horror of “a life-after-life,” a nouminous life that “elicits a noumenal
horror that is the horror of a life that indifferently lives on” (112). Recall-
ing this discussion by Thacker, Ligotti’s notion of “beings born undead”
comes to mind and is suggestive of a life that indifferently lives on: “We
are aberrations—beings born undead, neither one thing or another, or
two things at once . . . uncanny things that have nothing to do with the
rest of creation, horrors that poison the world by sowing our madness
everywhere we go, glutting daylight and darkness with incorporeal ob-
scenities” (Conspiracy 222). The short vignette-like pieces we have been
analyzing from the final section of Noctuary, ones that take place in a
universe replete with life that indifferently lives on with beings born
undead, exhibit these attributes of the nouminous.
Perhaps the most convincing example is found in “The Mocking Mys-
tery,” a short piece in “Notebook of the Night” where readers find a
description of a world that has been battered by an atrocious movement
of the cosmos, where mystery reigns and all is cast in shadow. This place
of ruin, “where ultimate knowledge [has been] denied,” is the dwelling
place for the necropolis of Ligottian universe, where some devote them-
selves to worshipping “the ruined state, consecrating earthly objects that
in their decrepitude have attained a divine status” (Ligotti, Noctuary 189).
Because characters are enmeshed in a nouminous life, what readers en-
counter is not the experience of noumenal horror, but more so the horror
of the atmosphere created when such a nouminous life is (un)lived. Such
an atmosphere persists in a third space both within the “discourse on
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NOTES
1. By “weird fiction” we explicitly mean the literary genre that appeared in the
early twentieth century which joined fiction, myth, and horror with scientific and
technological conjecture. This type of writing was inclined to be driven by the prolife-
ration of speculative ideas, rather than plot-driven, though many of the stories share
similar literary tropes like supernaturalism, horror, and the return of ancient forms of
life.
2. Walter Benjamin offers a definition of the flâneur in which this quintessentially
modern practice of strolling spectatorship is accompanied by illusions: “The flâneur
Copyright © 2020. Lehigh University Press. All rights reserved.
plays the role of scout in the marketplace. As such, he is also the explorer of the crowd.
Within the man who abandons himself to it, the crowd inspires a sort of drunkenness,
one accompanied by very specific illusions: the man flatters himself that, on seeing a
passerby swept along by the crowd, he has accurately classified him, seen straight
through to the innermost recesses of his soul — all on the basis of his external appear-
ance” (21). The crux of Benjamin’s interest in the flâneur is its narrative possibilities,
exemplified both by the Arcades Project and by Lois Aragon’s Paris Peasent. Lucian
Dregler’s metaphysical flâneury, proffered through our metaphor of drunkenness,
inverts the illusion toward the outermost recesses of his own horizon. Let us also note
that the crux of Benjamin’s interest in the flâneur is its narrative possibilities, exem-
plified both by the Arcades Project and by Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926).
3. The specific meaning and history of the term “hauntological” in critical dis-
course is worthy of note here. The term originally stems from Jacques Derrida’s 1993
book, Spectres of Marx, in which he uses it to describe the question of ghosts, or rather,
the “effectivity or presence of a specter” (10). Derrida uses the term to refer to a
peculiar quality that is “neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralizes. It
does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or to the essence
of life or death,” taking “this category to be irreducible, and first of Two decades later,
Mark Fisher, in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures,
points to the failure to catch ground beyond its use as a “puncept” or “successor to
58 Chapter 2
previous concepts of Derrida’s such as the trace and différance, citing “Derrida’s
circumlocutions” as a “disintensifying influence” (17). Fisher argues that, rather than
taking hauntology as an opposition between “some attempt to revive the supernatu-
ral” or “just as a figure of speech,” it would be more beneficial to “think of hauntology
as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural,
but as that which acts without (physically) existing” (18).
4. Lovecraft’s definition of the weird tale as particularly atmospheric in nature, as
Roger Luckhurt’s notes, “built on the Old English meaning of wyrd as a supernal force
or agency that determines events—a distinctly northern sense of malign fates waiting
to cross your destiny, like the ‘weird sisters’ in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It only really
began to be associated with the uncanny and supernatural in Romantic and Victorian
literature.”
5. In this innovative study, Brian Willems utilizes an experience he terms the
“Zug effect” in order to show how science fiction can paradoxically represent non-
correlationist worlds (6). Furthermore, he argues that Meillassoux’s tripartite concept
of Type 1-3 of worlds is quite useful, but does need some revamping. So he focuses on
a wide range of science fiction literature including Neil Gaiman and China Mieville, as
well as other speculative realist figures such as Graham Harman and Jane Bennet, in
order to proffer an encompassing view of science fiction that ascribes more truth and
value to the lives of non-human objects and resists anthropomorphism.
6. In “Introduction: Old and New Weird,” Benjamin Noys and Timothy S. Mur-
phy propose and develop a distinction and periodization of the “Old Weird” versus
the “New Weird.” They write that the “Old Weird can be dated between 1880 and
1940, and the term is explicitly articulated with the founding of the pulp magazine
Weird Tales in March 1923. . . . Lovecraft both defined a previous canon of weird
fiction, in writers like Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, and Algernon Blackwood, and
stimulated a number of younger writers to engage with the weird, including Clark
Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, and Robert Bloch” (118).
7. Take, as an account of the dream-like transcendence from life to the Outside,
this line from Lovecraft’s “The Green Meadow” (1927), originally written in 1918/19
and inspired by a dream had by Winifred V. Jackson: “everything about me, even life
and death, was illusory; . . . I had overleaped the bounds of mortality and corporeal
entity, becoming a free, detached thing” (Eldritch Tales 224). For Ligotti, any subjective
experience of the world is always already dream-like and illusory; there is no en-
trance, no exit, and no transcending this state.
8. In contrast to the Old Weird mentioned previously, Noys and Murphy note that
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the “New Weird, a term M. John Harrison coined in 2003 (Davies 2010, 6), emerged
comparatively recently and was established primarily with the fiction and criticism of
Miéville. We can, however, trace the New Weird back to the 1980s fiction of Clive
Barker and especially Thomas Ligotti. Ligotti succeeded in avoiding the pastiche and
repetition that had tended to dominate post-Lovecraftian weird fiction and formulated
a new and desolate conception of a fundamentally chaotic universe. This ability to
rework Lovecraft beyond the limits of homage is also observable in Michel Houelle-
becq, Brian Evenson, and other writers of New Weird. Therefore we could define the
New Weird as a period from the 1980s to the present that gained its most explicit
articulation in the 2000s” (118–19).
9. John Clute’s use of the Swedenborgian term “vastation,” an emptying state of
spiritual regeneration—as detailed in The Darkening Garden (2006)—is also relevant
here, considering it is a prior application of religious mystical thought to weird fiction.
For Clute, “vastation” is a “consequence of a measurable change in the relationship of
the sufferer to the world story. It is an emotion linked to the story of the world at those
moments when that story threatens to overwhelm us, or when its incoherence or
coherence becomes mercilessly visible” (John Clute, “The Darkening Garden: Vasta-
tion,” Weird Fiction Review, November 6, 2012, https://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/11/
vastation/).
Thomas Ligotti 59
10. Here the teachings of Italian esotericist Massimo Scaligero are useful to keep in
mind, as he situates this notion of human alienation from unreality around the theme
of anthroposophic inversion. For Scaligero, if one can get beyond the illusion that the
outer world is the real world, then unreality, when taken on its inversion and internal-
ized, becomes the essential power of individuation. He writes that “it is the world that
escapes one all the more when one believes one loves or suffers, or craves or hates,
because it is in the feeling states and in the instincts that the abstractness of the world,
in other words its unreality has become an inner power, a thirst for life reflectively
pictured mentally and thought: which is to say, taken on in its inversion.”
11. Cf. “The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich‘
[‘homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’] the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to
conclude that what is 'uncanny' is frightening precisely because it is not known and
familiar” (Freud 122).
12. This passage suggests a distortion of the Buddhist concept of Dharmakāya. One
of the three Buddha bodies, dharmakāya proposes that there is a state of immanent
immortality beyond all that is and is not, beyond all concepts. For Ligotti, this state
would be one of terror.
13. Ben Woodard identifies a clear distinction between the two writers’ brands of
weird fiction: “Whereas Lovecraft’s weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal
depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti’s existential horror focuses on the awful
proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of
representation” (4).
14. In stark contrast to the narrative conventions of the novel, which traditionally
rely on length and totality to describe life, the short, fragmentary form of Ligotti’s
stories communicates the ultimate condition of ontological dissonance that genre hor-
ror sees in the world. This brevity evokes, as we will discuss in the following, a
corollary readerly terror that focuses on life’s shortness.
15. Speculation like this that hinges upon the alternating dialectic of the real and
the unreal is reminiscent of Lovecraft’s constant use of the unreliable narrator. In “The
Tomb” (1917), Lovecraft famously writes that “men of broader intellect know that
there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as
they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through
which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority
condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of
obvious empiricism” (93).
16. In the thirteenth-century mystical text The Journey of the Mind into God, Saint
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Bonaventure notes that, “we may behold God in the mirror of visible creation, not
only by considering creatures as vestiges of God, but also by seeing Him in them; for
He is present in them in His essence, His power, and His presence” (11).
17. Such radical rejections of classical thought may be the result of horror’s preoc-
cupation with taboo interstices where cultural and linguistic systems fall apart. For
instance, horror critic Stephen Prince, following Edmund Leach, notes a similar col-
lapsing of self and world in body horror films such as David Cronenberg’s The Fly
(1986). He writes that “bodily products are universally tabooed because they are both
‘me and not me,’ confounding the initial boundary relation of self and world” (122).
18. In this story, we can posit that Ligotti uses art as a “medium of contingency,” to
follow the phrase used by Robin Mackay.
19. Here we are reminded of Wittgenstein’s seventh basic proposition from the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”
(108).
20. At present, it might do us well to note that historically there has been a discrep-
ancy between the kind of opaque and inescapable oneirism that Ligotti posits and
what we could call a “willed oneirism.” The latter is perhaps best exemplified in the
Samurai text Hagakure: “It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you
have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a
dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this” (82).
60 Chapter 2
have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving
behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter. All free matter, whether on plane-
tary surfaces or in interstellar space, will have decayed, eradicating any remnants of
life based in protons and chemistry, and erasing every vestige of sentience—irrespec-
tive of its physical basis. Finally, in a state cosmologists call ‘asymptopia,’ the stellar
corpses littering the empty universe will evaporate into a brief hailstorm of elemen-
tary particles. Atoms themselves will cease to exist. Only the implacable gravitational
expansion will continue, driven by the currently inexplicable force called ‘dark ener-
gy,’ which will keep pushing the extinguished universe deeper and deeper into an
eternal and unfathomable blackness” (228).
28. The acclaimed historian Bernard McGinn notes that “many mystics from Dio-
nysius on have insisted that it is the consciousness of God as negation, which is a form
of the absence of God, that is the core of the mystic’s journey. The author of The Cloud
of Unknowing speaks of this with particular power: ‘Leave aside this everywhere and
this everything, in exchange for this nowhere and this nothing. . . . A man’s affection is
remarkably changed in the spiritual experience of this nothing when it is achieved
nowhere. . . . It seems to him, sometimes, in his labor, that to look upon it is to look
into hell’” (xix).
29. This knowing that unknows has mastery so great,
should any sage oppose
Thomas Ligotti 61
characters in Ligottian horror fiction also reside in mysterious darkness but, contrary
to Moses’s experience of transcendence, vis-à-vis a non-experience with the divine,
these characters hold non-experiences with the unreal.
36. In this way, Ligotti can be said to have heeded Matsuo Bashō’s maxim: “Do not
follow in the footsteps of the old masters. Seek what they sought.”
37. This notion can be said to be a sibling term to what Denys Turner in The
Darkness of God intuitively calls “apophatic anthropology.” He notes that Meister Eck-
hart’s metaphors of “‘the fortress of the soul,’ ‘the ground of the soul,’ a refuge of the
spirit,’ ‘a silence,’ ‘a desert’ . . . are metaphors of what might be called ‘apophatic
anthropology,’ as if to say there is something unknowable about the self, as much as,
in more familiar terms, of an ‘apophatic theology,’ for which God is unknowable”
(140).
38. Cf. “And we may loiter among those in paradise, this is the great news I bring
to you tonight. We may take our place among the puppets” (Noctuary 122).
39. This enactment is also similarly expressed through the analogy of the texture of
the human body. Dylan Trigg insightfully indicates the essential relation between the
inhumanity of the body and the non-experience of spiritual depersonalization once
expressed in a letter by French poet Stéphane Mallarmé: “I have seen the frost that
coats the human body. Its texture is smooth and changes in the light. Over time, the
frost develops cracks and falls to the earth, in the process revealing the inhumanity of
62 Chapter 2
the body we grow inadvertently attached to. In a letter, I once read how the body can
decompose and yet remain present, leaving the residue of a ghost in its wake: ‘I am
now depersonalized; I am no longer Mallarmé, but simply a means whereby the
spiritual universe can become visible and can develop through what was once me.’”
We can appropriate Mallarmé’s (non-)experience of the body by way of analogy to this
non-experience of reading, in which the depersonalization of the reading experience
becomes the shepherding apparatus of the world-without-us.
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THREE
Georges Bataille
Opening Up the Infinite
The latter half of the twentieth century came to know Georges Bataille’s
heterogeneous thought mainly through the careful scrutiny of leading
French intellectuals and theorists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, those
gathered in the school of critical theory commonly known as post-struc-
turalism. Philippe Sollers considered Bataille the “godfather” of the Tel
Quel circle who greatly inspired an ensuing generation of French thinkers
including Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kris-
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teva (Holsinger 2). Michel Foucault regarded Bataille as one of the lead-
ing thinkers of the twentieth century. And yet Denis Hollier writes that
“there is something anachronistic in associating Bataille, a writer who
died even before people started to talk about structuralism, with post-
structuralism” (Against Architecture iv). Although the initial association
might be anachronistic, the reason for his careful treatment by post-struc-
turalists is clear: Bataille is a writer who writhes against the confines of
syntax and language, struggling always to free himself from the limits of
discourse. Bataille writes that “th[e] movement of my thought which
flees from me—not only can I not avoid it, but there is no moment no
secret that doesn’t animate me. Thus I speak—everything in me gives
itself to others” (Inner Experience 128–29). And the fact that he articulates
this about his thought and writing, that he articulates himself, gives him
a certain translatability and “sell factor” among those who become his
explicators. Bataille’s thought manifests through the event horizon of an
authorial black hole, one relentlessly absorbing and eviscerating the con-
63
64 Chapter 3
the case that to base our analysis of Bataille’s work purely within the
scope of “the linguistic turn” in philosophy, we would be committing a
sin of omission.
Although Bataille has attracted more attention from those affiliated
with the linguistic turn, there are several contemporary scholars who
locate Bataille’s work within the context of traditional mysticism as well
as within the more recent “speculative turn” in philosophy. In his inno-
vative book The Premodern Condition (2005), for example, Bruce Holsinger
reveals Bataille’s intellectual interest with hermeneutic practices and
texts of the Middle Ages. Other scholars such as Peter Tracey Connor,
Amy Hollywood, and Allan Stoekl each demonstrate how Bataille’s infat-
uation with paradox is in fact linked to a preoccupation with studying
medieval and non-Western mysticisms. There is a growing consensus
among these scholars on the fundamental importance of his mystical
writings, a paradigm in which Bataille’s eroticism of thought is contin-
gent on a pursuit of immanence.
Georges Bataille 65
bend itself, the fate of its medieval lineage becomes severed from itself. In
this context, then, what we mean by “weird mysticism” is that Bataille
deploys mystical writing to wander far beyond discourse (as mystic, to
find experience in itself and, as writer, in the sense of a achieving a
discourse beyond discourse), but that these modes are also failures, or
willed perversions, of traditional mysticism.
At this juncture, then, it is necessary to pinpoint a particular mode of
writing that Bataille utilizes (and then abandons) in wartime texts such as
Guilty or Inner Experience, which we will call the “epigrammatic frag-
ment” or “confessional utterance.” In her fascinating study of mysticism
in twentieth-century thinkers, Amy Hollywood claims that although Ba-
taille is not exactly a mystic in the strict historical sense of the term, one
can see, especially in his texts from the late 1930s and 1940s, a deep
interest in the writings of Christian and non-Western mysticisms. She
identifies Bataille’s writing within the context of several medieval women
mystics, especially the work of Angela of Foligno and Mechthild of Mag-
deburg, who wrote in the confessional mode initiated by Augustine, but
whose “radical differences between the nature of their experience and
that of Augustine lead them to a different set of writing and rhetorical
practices” (Sensible Ecstasy 101). Bataille’s writings during World War II
share with texts like Mechthild’s The Flowing Light of the Godhead a “varie-
ty of genres” that are “fragmentary in form” (102). Surviving at the limi-
nal point where states of ecstasy and anguish encounter each other at the
limits of the human, 3 Bataille’s fragmentary confessions allow a monadic
self to wander through bewildering paths and into sovereign inner expe-
rience. At the heart of this sovereignty sits the horror of its ineffability,
the written remnants of an unspeakable reality capable only of being
transcribed by appropriating and then exploiting mystical confessional
discourse through fragmentary writing techniques. 4
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Let us take, for example, Inner Experience, the first part of his tripartite
work the Summa Atheologica, in which Bataille writes that “despair, impa-
tience, horror at myself, in time delivered me—even while I was trying
sometimes to find once again the bewildering path of ecstasy, sometimes
to be done with it, to go resolutely to bed, to sleep” (127). The inner
experience Bataille describes is marked by an ontological but also an
impossible desire to describe that which is unequivocally ineffable. Not
only does this mean mystical ecstasy in itself, but also the fact of losing
himself on a wandering path, one he must traverse to get there, becoming
bewildered, weird. 5
Just as in Lovecraftian horror, ineffability is of course one of the long-
standing tenets of a mystical experience with the divine, constantly desta-
bilizing the mystic at the level of the Word, of language, distilling the
experience itself into a non-experience which cannot be quantified, clas-
sified, or spoken of in any kind of formal way. Attending to the issue of
ineffability, Leslie Boldt observes that Bataille’s texts
68 Chapter 3
perhaps esteems telos over chance, trying to situate the ineffable experi-
ence Bataille attempts to describe is symptomatic of a rationalistic or
correlational desire to make meaning out of an irreverent chaos. But
against this readership (and in good stead), one may view Bataille
through a negative logic. His texts are, of course, working very hard not
to be pinned down, violating systematic rules across the board. In the
sense of a negative logic, Bataille’s writing practice, not altogether a tradi-
tional mysticism and not entirely a weird fiction, enters into the genre as
a bastard. And like all “bastards,” he confounds and offends as a simple
material presence that proclaims at once a link to the sacred lineage and
to desire.
In light of this generic bastardization, one which claims no lineage to
God or master, if we were to try a hand at condensing into a sentence
Bataille’s approach to transcribing thought—marked by heterology, erot-
icism, excess, non-knowledge, a-theology—we might say that it is to
write the self, unfolding ceaselessly and (un)knowingly to its brink: “I
70 Chapter 3
can know that I am a point, a wave lost in other waves,” writes Bataille,
“laugh at myself, at the comedy of ‘originality’ that I remain; I at the same
time can only say to myself: I am alone, bitter” (Inner Experience 129). As
such, his writing, in its constant states of paradox and negativity, seems
to recapitulate the excess it describes. Showing a strong distaste for the
organic, Bataille’s writing opts out of wholeness toward a much more
radical form of cultural production that utilizes ruptures, breaks, and
excesses as a means to simultaneously maintain and perturb itself. “The
sovereignty described in Inner Experience,” writes Leslie Anne Boldt, “is
in no way subordinate to or revealed through discourse, but rather arises
out of the moment of its rupture” (x). With this, one can see that the
ineffable is in fact better approached through radical, fragmentary writ-
ing techniques rather than those that cling to orthodoxy. The anarcho-
mystical thrust of such writing thus sets the stage for its weirdness, its
wandering about or becoming-something-other-than-itself. For example,
when Bataille writes that “one cannot speak of the knowledge of which
God has of himself if not by negations—suffocating negations—images of
tongues cut out. Now one abuses oneself in this way, one passes from one
level to the other: suffocation, silence are dependent upon experience and
not on discourse” (Inner Experience 107), he emphasizes, like the confes-
sional mystics before him, the inability of the intellect to know God
through positive logic. And yet he also goes on to stress that to extend the
limits of infinite knowledge within oneself, one must exploit non-discur-
sive modes of knowledge.
Relying on, bending, and then going beyond models derived from the
medieval Christian female mystics, for example, Bataille utilizes a nega-
tive mode of communication whereby inner experience becomes a
“weird” perversion of mysticism, but one capable of pure communica-
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tion. In The Dark Gaze, Kevin Hart explains that “Bataille insists that mys-
tical ecstasy is a limiting of inner experience: the quest for the unknown is
subjugated to what is already known. Even Saint John of the Cross and
Saint Theresa of Avila, both of whom valued intellectual visions over the
more consoling sensual visions, fall short of inner experience” (30).
As one can see, it is not easy to locate Bataille within a political, theo-
logical, or literary framework. But it is possible to trace the trajectory of
his shifting interests. After his focus shifted from the theory and practice
of building radical communities like Acéphale and the College of Sociolo-
gy in the late 1930s, 8 Bataille returned to the book as his primary medium
during the onslaught of World War II. The book is a paradoxical entity
for Bataille and will remain so throughout the course of his life. This
notion is evidenced early in the 1940s by his three-part opus consisting of
Inner Experience (1943), Guilty (1944), and On Nietzsche (1945). These three
texts came to be known under the moniker of the La Somme athéologique or
Summa Atheologica. The Summa Atheologica directly parallels and mocks
the title of the famous thirteenth-century theological text called Summa
Georges Bataille 71
then rescinds) not artistic expression but rather the rigorous interplay of a
mystical failure of language and an impossible ontological desire to think
a world without limits.
The non-experiences described in the fragmentary, purposefully dis-
ordered, and virtually automatically written meditations in the Summa
Atheologica are ones that touch, as Benjamin Noys notes,
on the impossible. For Bataille the impossible is not an object of experi-
ence to be meditated on, like a contemplation of the void, but the pos-
sibility of the experience as well: “In this sense, the inner experience is
throughout an experience of the impossible (the impossible being both
that which we experience and that which constitutes the experience)”
(IE, 26). The impossibility of this experience and the difficulty of de-
scribing it without reducing it to a form of knowledge relate it to
Nietzsche’s transcriptions of his experiences. (Georges Bataille 48)
The impossible is double, then, and also deictic. Double because when it
is transcribed it serves as the negative index to the experience that it tries
to describe; deictic because this negative index points to its own taking
place. Thus, the impossible is not a “form of knowledge,” but rather the
praxis of a weird mysticism vis-à-vis the modality of textuality.
Ceaselessly inaccessible, as it points to its own taking place, Bataille’s
weird meanderings become hauntological phantoms that at once help to
advance the transcription of his thought and yet negate its very grasp-
ability. As we will soon see, Bataille’s weird mysticism is not only found
in the Summa Atheologica, the wartime collection of texts that at times
resemble quasi-journals, but also in his fiction and poetry. Writing during
and after the high modernist era, Bataille’s later work, especially his poet-
ry, tends to deviate from high modernist European discourse. While Ba-
taille’s writings are decidedly “anti-generic,” to borrow again the term
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from Amy Hollywood, if pressed to do so, we could say that his poetry
and fiction echo modernist experiments with representation, notably the
fractured narrative. However, aside from this formal feature, Bataille is
anathema to high modernist ideals. After the break with André Breton,
Bataille’s work staunchly repudiates any celebration of the human. More-
over, he does not revel in the commercialization of art or intellect, imitate
prose aesthetic styles, or tend to displace ideas or emotions onto simple
descriptions of actions or objects. Rather, the concept of expression will
ultimately be replaced with that of self-negation.
Bataille enters this book in the liminal space between a necessary fic-
tion and a traditional mysticism. We will further examine Bataille’s weird
mysticism in the remaining three sections. The first is an analysis of the
intersection of Bataille’s work and traditional mysticism—an analysis of
Bataille’s “weird” writing practice, one that evokes terror and horror, in
relation to “the night of an absent God” as we consider his experimental
work called The Impossible. In the next section we will engage with his
Georges Bataille 75
Aside from its odd narrative style and fragmented structure, perhaps the
most distinctive feature about Georges Bataille’s The Impossible (1962), an
experimental three-part work of prose, poetry, and commentary, is the
dizzying experience of reading it. In the book’s first section, “A Story of
Rats,” the narrator obsessively seeks an ecstatic experience that exists just
beyond the point of his own self-knowledge. This sacred experience re-
veals itself in rupture, in the alternating gap between what can be sensed
and not-sensed, between God and not-God. In one focal scene toward the
end of the story, the narrator recalls a dinner he had the day before with
his girlfriend, B., and B.’s father, a monsignor. As he does so, he provides
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readers with an esoteric commentary on the dinner itself. What one not
prone to thinking to the limits of thought might deem an ordinary din-
ner, the narrator sees as a vertiginous pull toward the abyss, speculating,
These moments of intoxication when we defy everything, when, the
anchor raised, we go merrily towards the abyss, with no more thought
for the inevitable fall that for the limits given in the beginning, are the
only ones when we are completely free of the ground (of laws). . . .
Not only does this drunken dinner serve as a gateway into ecstatic expe-
rience, but it also serves as a commentary on the sense-less nature of
what happens at the limits of thought (what the narrator calls philoso-
phy), the rapturous, negative moment when thought itself dissolves. Be-
ing a cross-genre book that intratextually weaves together these motifs
into a fractured narrative and then undercuts its own constituent parts
via characters that continually perform their own self-negation, The Im-
possible is a notable example of how Bataille deploys a mode of writing
that not only produces a text but also indicates its own taking place. In
other words, what he terms “the impossible” is, dialectically, a literary
artifact (product) and a mode of writing (producer). It is also, perhaps
most importantly, a self-dissolving experience that occurs at the very
limits of the human, unveiling to the anguished subject the ecstatic move-
ment of a liberating horror that comes at the moment of ego-death.
This section invites us to think about the heaviness of such a liberating
horror. In the preface to the second edition of The Impossible, Bataille
offers readers a powerful passage which helps to contextualize the autho-
rial impetus to writing “A Story of Rats.” He writes that “these evoca-
tions have a painful heaviness about them. This heaviness may be tied to
the fact that at times horror had a real presence in my life. It may be too
that, even when reached in fiction, horror alone still enabled me to escape
the empty feeling of untruth” (9). Avid readers of books are sure to ap-
preciate the nature of a preface. Typically, a preface is written by an
author in order to introduce the book, to give background information on
how the idea of the book was conceived, and, by way of an anecdote or
other personal marker, to give thanks to those whom may have helped
along the way. Readers familiar with the work of Georges Bataille will
recognize the intoxicatingly heavy tone of his brief preface to The Impos-
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tween the two terms in regard to their affective timbre. “Terror and Hor-
ror are so far opposite,” writes Radcliffe, “that the first expands the soul,
and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts,
freezes and nearly annihilates them. . . . And where lies the difference
between horror and terror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity that ac-
company the first, respecting the dreading evil?” (315). By centralizing
the focus to the emotional responses experienced by readers rather than
just noting stylistic or thematic conventions, Radcliffe marks an impor-
tant shift in the Gothic genre. The experience of reading Gothic literature
thus took on two distinctive traits (which, not uncharacteristic of the
early nineteenth century, were also features characteristic of the soul).
Terror leads to a kind of sublime “obscurity,” whereas horror “freezes
and nearly annihilates.” Critic Stephen Bruhm argues that “terror situates
us within the social world, while horror freezes us within the self” (Gothic
Bodies 37). In chapter 2, we formulated that horror is, following Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, not a freezing of the self but more so a “freezing of be-
78 Chapter 3
texts disclose to readers the macabre presence of what we could call the
weird-for-us, a double beyond wherein the terror of the affective and the
horror of the immensity congregate for us. If horror as such is for-us, it is
essentially human, but only in the sense that it is encapsulates that nega-
tive moment when the human realizes they cannot comprehend the gaps
between oneself and the limits of oneself—leaving one in darkness. This
notion of being in intellectual darkness is echoed in a now famous quota-
tion by H. P. Lovecraft. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft’s narrator
states that “the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of
the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of
ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that
we should voyage far” (139). With its indefatigable emphasis on the in-
ability of the mind to correlate its contents, this quotation, like Bataillean
apophatic horror, offers an anti-correlationist reference point for specu-
lating on questions concerning the limits of human thought.
Recalling once again the example from “The King of the Wood,” we
are reminded that it is “the horrible grandeur of God [that] heralds the
absence in which man is stripped bare” (104), one in which human beings
are paradoxically alienated by God’s own summit. In other words, Batail-
lean incomprehension of the Lovecraftian sort is evoked from the play of
doubling between the self and the divine. Hence this absence also indi-
cates that man is himself this absent God. This negative mirror image, show-
casing one’s absolute divinity at the limits of oneself, shows not what one
is but the horror that one is, evocative of an endless abyss that simultane-
ously exists as oneself and just beyond the horizon of one’s own self-knowl-
edge. This immanent gap is characteristic of a more divine or “sacred”
exchange that the human being is capable of but is more often than not
horrified by, wholly unable to grasp or experience. In Theory of Religion
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the belief in a God which, like the other narcotics, was to ensure that
our presence be recuperated. Strange hypocrisy! We kill God in our
neglect of the sacred, in our devotion to project, yet we sustain our
belief in Him in our fear of oblivion. (“Translator’s Introduction” xii)
Bataille’s work thus seeks a communal re-incarnation of the sacred, tak-
ing us into that very oblivion, to replace this privative (or lost) sacredness
by resituating the human being within the immanence of sacred, within
very context of the death of God. As such, ontological and mystical con-
cerns are paradoxically (un)bolstered by evocations of the impossible,
placing the human being at her very limits with the intent of causing a
total loss of self, for one cannot reach the non-place 13 of sovereignty
without facing the terror before the absence of God.
We can conclude from this call for an absent God that, no matter how
well readers succeed in generating meaning from the text, they are in fact
incapable of knowing fully the mystical experience that produced the so-
called content of the text. 14 Bataillean horror can thus be properly called
ineffable, unveiling through the written text a failure on behalf of speech
to adequately describe or reckon his mystical experience. It is a horror
which tries to express the inexpressibility of a limit-experience in which
affect and ontology excessively collide. However, and contradictorily so,
this failure is also its true strength, for in losing himself at the limit of
himself, Bataille sees that which was never seen.
As we have noted, Bataille’s weird mysticism evokes perverse actual-
izations which demonstrate that a denuded view of the self, one freed of
ego-laden clichés, needs to be constantly reinvented and practiced. Ordi-
nary language fails when it comes to conveying the limit-experience of
the human, so he opts for an ontologically inventive and semantic union
with the beyond. Offering up intense melodramas of self only to ulti-
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mately reject and annihilate them, Bataille repeatedly invents new meth-
ods to discourse about the ineffable, formulating cosmic modes of
thought that blur the distinction between self and world, helping us to
think through, not dwell in, the divisions among affect, intellect, and on-
tology. In the next section, then, we will identify yet another way in
which Bataille draws upon and yet reworks mystical discourse, namely
through his highly nuanced and negatively indexed practice of writing
poetry.
Although many of Bataille’s readers may be more familiar with his con-
troversial novels like The Story of the Eye (1928) and Blue of Noon (1957) or
his more theoretical writings like The Accursed Share (1949), his poetry
serves as a remarkable textual repository 15 for many of his mystical ideas.
Poetry is a part of Bataille’s désoeuvre 16 that deserves our attention be-
Georges Bataille 83
taille writes in his poem entitled “Solitude,” “my ass soils the altar cloth”
(Collected Poems 48). More than this, Bataille’s poetry expresses a deeply
mystical sensibility 17 buttressed by a deep commitment to kenotic (or
self-forgetting) writing techniques as well as the motifs of darkness and
nothingness used by medieval darkness mystics. For example, in “Le
Vide,” the third section of his poem entitled “L’Archangélique,” Bataille
links together several recurring themes in his poetry—immensity, death,
the acephalic, night, the void—that are enigmatically woven into the
poem and etch a personal gateway to mystical self-subversion. The origi-
nal poem’s mystical locus appears at the point where the sonic texture of
the French form attempts to perform the impossible task of penetrating
the very divine darkness it describes before crumbling under the weight
of its own impossibility. “Le Vide” (“The Void”) is indicative of this
relationship between unknowing and the bounds of language (and, ac-
cordingly, between translation and the limits of retaining form), whereby
even sonic finesse meets its own inevitable subversion. As such, the
84 Chapter 3
speaker of the poem ventures, “then I will have made a void / in your
abandoned head” (Spitzer 82), 18 a proclamation that announces the evac-
uation of not only (presumably) Bataille’s, but also his readers’, skulls.
In another place in Bataille, a lone poem in L’expérience intérieure
found amid a series of fragmentary passages on the absence of God, we
read, “Spectre en larmes / ô Dieu mort / oeil cave” (132). 19 The scant form
of the poem in its original French reveals that there is no conventional
structure. Rather, Bataille’s poetry often works by setting up series of
paratactic relations in which disparate images and fragments are placed
side by side. These half-thoughts, ideas that cannot be penned down,
present a problem to readers who hope to wander their way through
such an abyssal semantic landscape, one very loosely held together
through the paratactic syntax. Being the speaker of the poem thus be-
comes a complicated position for Bataille to occupy and remain critical—
or even aware of—because the juxtaposed fragments concoct a poetic
language of unsaying that is essentially pointing to its own taking place.
These sorts of deictic conjunctions add to the poem’s stark weirdness. In
this poem, Bataille presents readers with a conundrum as he pursues a
dead God and eventually comes undone. Readers get a liminal view of
the self as its isolated being unwinds into the boundless sphere of the
impossible.
These examples taken from Bataille’s poetry are intended to show that
his thought is often transcribed and dissolved through spasmodic fits of
syntax and epigrams devoid of positive logic. Aside from the critical-
creative aspect of this notion, his interest in poetry can also be traced to
his personal life. Historically speaking, Bataille’s writing life was cata-
lyzed when, during the German occupation of France in 1940, Bataille
formed a deep intellectual friendship with Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot’s
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through madness to find some semblance of order. “The very fact of the
poem’s existence on the page,” writes Orr, “is proof of its efficacy of survi-
val, proof that the poet succeeded in ordering his or her disorder (if only
briefly); proof a person could take on the thematic disorder of that partic-
ular poem (even the theme of madness) and order it” (83). Put simply,
had the poet failed in their attempt to restabilize the self the poem would
not exist. Thus, a corollary relation that can be drawn between survival
and madness is existence and non-existence. It follows from Orr’s argu-
ment, then, that poetry is an antidote. Only a mode of writing that puts
the writer on the side of existence can lead to transformation and self-
awareness, to severance from madness.
Nevertheless, for Georges Bataille, poetry stems from a particularly
dizzying movement from what is known into what is unknown. Bataille
himself states that “we are only totally laid bare by proceeding without
trickery to the unknown. It is the measure of the unknown which lends to
the experience of God—or of the poetic—their great authority. But the
unknown demands in the end sovereignty without partition” (Inner Expe-
86 Chapter 3
emptiness, he plunges into death: “so I won’t know anything / more than
these tears” (107). 23 This poem is unquestionably anti-mimetic, a represen-
tational void. As such, what is at stake is the poetic corollary to a practiced
nothingness wherein fragmented language attempts to perform the noth-
ingness it describes. The notion of a practiced nothingness is perhaps best
expressed by the medieval French mystic Marguerite Porete when she
writes in The Mirror of Simple Souls that “the best I can tell you is that if
you understand perfectly your nothingness you will do nothing, and this
nothingness will give you everything” (115). Paradoxically, it is because
Bataille is a writer that his attempt to “do nothing” becomes a praxis of
doing (or writing) nothing.
While reading Bataille’s mystical poetry, there is a tendency for the
reader to lose track of line and stanza. One reason for this type of disasso-
ciation is that the speaker of the poem is willfully trying to lose himself.
Whereas most modern poetry is usually concerned with evoking or con-
templating a subjective “I,” Bataille’s poems work to obliterate subjectiv-
88 Chapter 3
enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It’s really
not my fault” (Robb 79–80). Readers familiar with Bataille’s désoeuvre will
note the inherent similarities between them.
Like Rimbaud, Bataille often opts for the filthy and scatological in
effort to describe what happens to the human being at the limits of the
possible and emphasizes excessive inner vision. In the poem entitled
“Night is my Nudity,” for example, Bataille articulates his desires for
sexual ecstasy by aligning them with polymorphously perverse images,
losing himself in the nudity of the night. Deploying a series of uni-direc-
tional speech acts, he intends to describe the experience of being en-
grossed in a divine stupor where he wishes “To vomit living / Oh my
failure / Ecstasy which sleepens me” (Spitzer 119). 24 What are readers to
make of the scattered, dissociative rhythm of this poem as it interrupts
any kind of flow? The line breaks happen in offbeat places, evoking in the
speaker a sort of stutter. Consequently, the reader must stumble intellec-
tually while reading to make any sense of the speaker’s desire to blur the
Georges Bataille 89
distinction between subject and object for a universe filled with dead
concepts.
The structural gaps and sonic dissonances employed by Bataille hold
a negative pedagogical power, instructing readers to think about non-
thinking; he opts for a self-dissolving structure that points to its own
incomprehension, all the while dis-engaging the reader. The poem also
upholds the death-like plane of immanence that a Bataillean reading ex-
perience often evokes. In the night, his nudity, Bataille hurls himself
among the dead. His impassioned poetry echoes similar musings in The
Impossible, where he writes that that “poetry’s luster reveals itself outside
the moments which it reaches in a deathlike disorder” (161). “But Bataille
is tricky,” Spitzer writes, for
in the “Preface” to the second edition of L’Impossible, he writes this
about achieving the impossible: “Indeed I think that in my sense my
narratives clearly attain the impossible.” But then, later on, he seemingly
contradicts himself, refusing to let the reader believe he made it as far
as he had previously implied, in any sense: “I approach poetry: but
only to miss it.”
Thus spoke Bataille. But why? (xiii)
Spitzer thus poses an essential question—why would Bataille knowingly
deploy a mode of writing with the intention to get beyond it? This would
initially seem to be a counterintuitive move. And yet, when situated
within the context of medieval mysticism, perhaps it is not.
Recently there is evidence to suggest that at the heart of this question
exists the paradox of Bataille’s poetic thought which, beginning from the
space of the mystical, seeks the plane of non-existence. Eugene Thacker
observes a close relation between Bataille’s mystical thought and that of
John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic whom we ana-
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limits of the human in this night and what exists in the fringe space
between the poem’s simultaneous formulation as both a form and a
mode—its mystical content and this content’s evocation—one that blurs
the correlation between self and world, and between world and world.
This fringe space expands infinitely, is the inexhaustible space of inhu-
man horror, one taking place in the night of the absence of God, an
immense and cosmic negativity in which Bataille himself dissolves from
without.
Georges Bataille writes that happiness can only be truly known, albeit
transfigured, in what he calls “the dark halo of sorrow”: “The doubt born
of great sorrows cannot help but illuminate whose who enjoy—who can
fully know happiness only transfigured, in the dark halo of sorrow” (The
Impossible 116). Similarly, Giorgio Agamben, renowned thinker of com-
92 Chapter 3
munity, negativity, and politics, offers a theory of the halo which ascribes
it as a liminal zone in which “possibility and reality, potentiality and
actuality, become indistinguishable” (“Halos” 56,6). The notion of the
dark halo is thus aligned with the notion of a very particular kind of
sorrow, a solitary nigredo entrusted to mystical individuation. In this
concluding section, we will look at Bataille’s notion of the dark halo to
consider the importance of mystical sorrow on the creation of his weird
mysticism and just how this reflection seeks to illustrate and complicate
our analyses in the preceding sections. As such, the concept of mystical
sorrow will show us striving and yet struggling to theorize the dark halo
of sorrow, as it obfuscates and expands the margins of weird mysticism
itself. Locating instances of mystical sorrow deployed in his texts, we will
attempt to demonstrate how Bataille conceives the individuating dynam-
ics of mystical sorrow and especially how this conception relates to other
texts on the subject, including those written by the medieval author of
The Cloud of Unknowing and nineteenth-century spiritual philosopher
Søren Kierkegaard. The mystical text, as such, can be thought by high-
lighting how literary histories of authorial experimentation act profound-
ly to transfigure individual consciousness.
In Literature and Evil (1957), Bataille notes the essential relation be-
tween modern literature and mysticism in his chapter on Emily Brontë.
“Literature,” writes Bataille, “is not so much cognate with the content of
religion as it is with the content of mysticism. Similarly, mysticism is
closer to the truth than I can possibly say” (26). Bataille’s description of
mysticism focuses on solitary mystical states associated with medieval
darkness mysticism 26 in which the primacy of the incommunicability of
the mystical experience is central. For Bataille, the circumstances under
which such solitary mystical states arise are similar to the annihilating
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sorrow to show that what Bataille ultimately sorrows over is the very fact
of his existence. In fact, Bataille’s overwhelming melancholy is uncannily
similar to the definition of sorrow found in the late medieval mystical
text The Cloud of Unknowing. Masciandaro writes that “the Cloud defines
ultimate sorrow as sorrow over the fact of oneself: ‘Alle men han mater of
sorrow, but most specyaly he felith mater of sorrow that wote and felith
that he is. Alle other sorowes be unto this in comparison bot as it were
gamen to ernest’” (“Eros as Cosmic Sorrow” 60). According to the author
of the Cloud’s definition, the condition of ultimate sorrow is thus corollar-
ily located within the blurred division between affect and ontology, with-
in the anguished experience of being oneself. All other forms of sorrow
stem from and are minor in comparison to the very fact that one is.
Similar claims on the necessity of defining sorrow as the sorrow over
the fact of oneself are made by Bataille in his text entitled “Problems of
Surrealism.” In this essay, which characterizes the experience of being
oneself as both “insignificant to the point of horror” and “eternal,” in
contrast to a positive identification which would uphold being oneself as
a beneficent and temporal quality, Bataille conceives ultimate sorrow as
the horror that, both insignificant and infinite, is himself, writing,
this is so tortuous that I am sure people will consider my evidence
stupid. To consider oneself an ordinary person . . . in a word, to be
aware of the gutter, not without the light-heartedness and thoughtless-
ness of the newcomer, being insignificant to the point of horror, with-
out the benefit of horror, finally knowing oneself as eternal—in the
eternity of each instant—without hope, pondering pain and the night
of all the dead, becoming the monster of whom monstrosity is familiar,
for sweetness and purity fuse with spite—spite with sweetness—this is
the fate of the silent being, who adds only his tomb to infinite life, on
the immense oblivion of what he already is. (The Absence of Myth 98–99)
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mystical sorrow is the type of sorrow that breaks a lot of so-called mod-
ern rules of affectivity.
One way to account for the ambivalent power of sorrow in Bataille is
to show how sorrow and horror function together in a liminal space that
muddles the dichotomy between human affect and ontology into a dizzy-
ing experience largely characterized by such auto-bewildering ambigu-
ity. One interesting example comes in the form of the “dark halo of sor-
row,” a point of convergence between horror and sorrow. In The Impos-
sible, Bataille writes,
The doubt born of great sorrows cannot help but illuminate those who
enjoy—who can fully know happiness only transfigured, in the dark
halo of sorrow. So that reason cannot resolve the ambiguity: extreme
happiness is possible only at the moment I doubt it will last; it changes
on the contrary into heaviness, from the moment I’m certain of it. Thus
we can live sensibly only in a state of ambiguity. There is never a clear-
cut difference, for that matter, between sorrow and joy: the awareness
of sorrow on the prowl is always present, and even in horror the
awareness of possible joy is not entirely suppressed: it is this awareness
that adds dizzily to the pain, but by the same token it is what enables
one to endure torments. (116)
For Bataille, sorrow becomes a liminal space in which several complex
categories of individual consciousness are obliterated. Literalizing the
content of his phrases, the monsignor’s non-discourse becomes suffused
with the same ambiguity as his temporal state of being. In other words,
editorializing and qualifying phrases at once point to the horror of ambi-
guity and ambiguize the horror he has over his sorrow. This is the weird
disparity between the existential intensity of self-knowledge—realizing
that one is and being saddened by it—versus the ambiguity of affective
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language, that the very obscurity of negative affect necessitates and en-
genders an indeterminate and abstruse use of language. There is also an
extraordinary profundity to the monsignor’s lamentations, marking the
level of insight he actually has into his impoverished existence even in a
state characterized by confusion and torment. Noting with a qualifying
phrase that “the awareness of sorrow on the prowl is always present,” he
ambiguously shifts between ideas and concepts, knitting them together
through percolating layers of discourse that, to follow Masicandaro, blur
the boundaries between being and affect. Moreover, we find an ambiva-
lent locality (his affect) and universality (the awareness of his horror) to
the monsignor’s description of sorrow, as he relates it to a “dark halo.”
Exactly what role, then, does the halo play in this context?
Traced throughout the corpus of occult literature, the halo shapes and
constitutes several key aspects of esoteric initiation. In his highly re-
garded work entitled Initiation into Hermetics (1956), Franz Bardon,
deemed as one of the greatest adepts of the twentieth century, locates the
Georges Bataille 97
for a black halo, the Void is an inverted dream in which we are engulfed”
(Decay 52). In is not our intention here to conflate the notions of darkness
and blackness, as each holds a phenomenal relation to one another and
yet are different. However, the intuitive relation between darkness and
blackness is of note, for in Cioran the “thirst for a black halo” is contin-
gent on “the illusion of reaching the limits of darkness.” Thus, the dark
halo can ultimately be thought of, following the precept of darkness as a
divine abyss, as an interminable zone of unthinkability. For Bataille, the
horror of this unthinkability is not primarily what saddens him. Rather, it
is to know that his own being serves him indexically as an abyssic pit that
simultaneously points to and acts as his sadness. In this interminable
zone of unthinkability being and affect are forever confused, serving as
the torrential emphasis of his self-confusion but also as an impetus to
mystical self-subversion.
Our aim in this section has been to examine how changes in the affec-
tive-ontological structure of the self (as a construct and hinge of power
relations) has been produced and corollarily annihilated through the ex-
Georges Bataille 99
NOTES
1. From the Greek para, “beside, near, from, against, contrary to,” the term “para-
academia” in this sense refers to the recent rise in blogs, theory-fiction, commentary,
and open-access publishing that runs “alongside” or goes “beyond” traditional aca-
demic forms and practices. Para-academics tend to feel at home when creating dis-
courses that deviate from or threaten academic norms, often finding repose in obscure
mediums and modes of writing. Black metal theory, for example, is a form of para-
academia that formally blurs the boundaries between heavy metal music and theoreti-
cal discourse.
2. In “The Weird: A Dis/Orientation,” Roger Luckhurst states that “another way
to understand this veering of the weird is to think about it as a mode that offers a
formal rendition of perversity” (1051). The notion of the weird as a harbinger and/or as
a rendition of “the perverse” will make itself known on multiple occasions in this
book.
3. We can add here the limits of the “humanistic” as well, which was one of the
cruces of his disdain for Breton’s Surrealist tendency and his interest in experimental
sociology and anthropology.
4. Along with bewilderment, the ineffable is one of the defining characteristics of
apophatic language. Ineffability evokes the subsequent trauma done to speech by the
divine. Bataille’s notion of the impossible thus subverts mystical discourse: it trans-
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mutes the trauma/failure of speech into a mode that paradoxically does what it de-
scribes.
5. This mode of confessional writing is bewildering indeed and, in a sense, un-
anchors itself from the text, often resulting in a stupefying play of language which has
no recourse to its readers’ intentions or of potentially extracting something formal
from it.
6. Cf. Michel Surya on Georges Bataille: “It is not only the absence of God that
tortures, but the Impossibility into which desire falls once God has gone” (302–03).
7. And here we have a connection to post-structuralism. Language is precisely
that which is unthinkable yet thinks.
8. Michèle H. Richman, in her study of the College of Sociology, states that “in its
Bataillian version, modification of the individual’s inner economy within collective
forms of expenditure leads to intensified communication also qualified as sacred” (14).
These concentrated forms of communal experience served a dual purpose for Bataille.
First, the sacred dispelled the focus on the individual reveries of surrealism, and
secondly, it served as a corollary to his early writing life in Documents and the Encyclo-
paedia Acephalica, where constant expansions of key terms—heterology, baseness, ex-
cess, eroticism—were not only theorized but practiced.
9. In fact, it calls to mind an anecdote used by Thomas Ligotti when he defines
“macabre unreality,” a term we deployed in chapter 2. In it, he likens the quintessen-
100 Chapter 3
tial horror tale to that of the man who, lying in bed, reaches out his hand to place his
glasses on the end table, only for the glasses to be taken by a set of hands he didn’t
know were there. For our purposes here, we can say that the horror experienced by
this man is double: not only finding out that this figure is in the room, but also
realizing how long it has been there—perhaps all along (the longevity of his life).
10. Here we can recall a passage in “The Call of Cthulhu” when the infamous
Necronomicon is quoted: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange
aeons even death may die.” As Roger Luckhurst notes, the weird is full of “fake books,
fake libraries and fake traditions,” that is, of pseudobiblia like the Necronomicon, an
imaginary book which now does exist as a book, and has done so since at least 1969”
(“The Weird” 1048).
11. The play of doubling becomes an essential feature of Bataille’s heterogeneous
thought, as is stems from ruptures within his logic of negativity. Noting a key passage
from Inner Experience, Fred Botting and Scott Wilson write that “the dynamic momen-
tum of negativity is neither contained in a productive system of thought nor expanded
in exhaustion. It remains at play in a ‘double movement’ of action and questioning or
contestation, in which the one is endlessly opposed to the other in a continual ‘ruptur-
ing and disequilibrium of the system’” (“Introduction,” The Bataille Reader 15).
12. In Literature and Evil (1957), Bataille notes his affinity for the work of nineteenth-
century French poet Charles Baudelaire. Bataille equates Baudelaire’s poetic genius
with the uncompromisingly unique experience of horror and ecstasy, two concepts
that form the basis for much of Bataille’s own work: “As a child I [Baudelaire] felt in
my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life” (46).
13. As Amy Hollywood makes clear, Bataille calls this nonplace “the impossible”
(80).
14. On this point, is can be noted that the significance of the text is in its very
textuality, its paradoxically expressive inertness. The materiality of the inscripted
word on the page is something Bataille found horrifying, too. After all, it is the white-
ness derived from rot or the signification derived from the annulment of whiteness.
15. The term “repository” is used with slight hesitation here knowing well, follow-
ing Denis Hollier in Against Architecture, that Bataille was aggressive toward architec-
tural metaphors because of their “anthropomorphism” and that the human form is
“embedded in architecture” (xi–xii). However, we can position our use of the word
repository within what we will call an archi-texture, which clarifies more fully both the
(inter- and intra-)textual and essentially textural (or compositional) qualities of Ba-
taille’s writing.
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16. It is a désoeuvre, note Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, “in the sense that its
negativity is unemployed, in the service of nothing and no one” (“Introduction,”
Bataille Reader 4).
17. Cf. “Poetry is sacred in so far as it is nothing. The truth of modern poetry is to
have deprived poetry of substance” (The Absence of Myth 100).
18. The original French reads: “alors j’aurai fait le vide / dans ta tête abandonee”
(L’Archangélique 91).
19. Cf. “Ghost in tears / O dead God / hollow eye” (Inner Experience 103).
20. Hector Kollias maintains that Blanchot’s use of literary language gives us “what
Blanchot calls ‘the existence before the day,’ the existence of things before they became
things, of a world before it was constituted into a world, dust which permeates with-
out being visible and color that is not illumination” (qtd. in Hill 127). Thomas’s world
is pre-dialectical, a world before the world takes place.
21. The translators of this short piece on Rimbaud, Mark Spitzer and Emmanuelle
Pourroy, emphasize that it was found in Bataille’s notes. What he refers to in the
quotation, then, is the last section of his book The Impossible called “The Oresteia.”
22. Cf. Bataille writes: “Poetry is not a knowledge of oneself, and even less the
experience of a remote possible (of that which, before, was not) but rather the simple
evocation through words of inaccessible possibilities” (Bataille Reader 111).
Georges Bataille 101
23. This latter half of the poem is also evocative of a mystical sorrow that we
explored much more deeply in the earlier section where we recalled a quintessential
characteristic of the medieval mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing in which the ulti-
mate sorrow is a sorrow over the fact of one’s very existence.
24. The original French of “La nuit est ma nudité” reads: “mon envie de vomir en
vie / ô ma faillite / extase qui me dort” (L’Archangélique 115).
25. According to Greek mythology, Orestes took to murdering his mother. This
story of madness was one that Bataille knew well, and it had also been rewritten by his
then rival Jean-Paul Sartre. Stuart Kendall notes that “Bataille explained in a letter to
Jean Lescure, ‘Poetry contents itself with evoking Orestes, one must be Orestes . . .
become the man who questions nature, the pure questioning of everything as a com-
pletion of man’” (169). The poems and commentaries in The Oresteia are insightful if
not obscure examples of Bataille’s dual critique and reappropriation of poetry at that
time.
26. One example is when the narrator of Bataille’s “A Story of Rats” enters into
darkness, saying “I entered into this darkness where, ever since, I plunge deeper every
hour and lose myself a little more” (44). This quotation can be thought to echo Saint
Bonaventure’s call in the thirteenth-century mystical text entitled The Journey of the
Mind to God, to “let us then die, and enter into this darkness” (39).
27. Cf. “Thus we say that man must be so poor that he is not and has no place
wherein God could act. Where man still preserves some place in himself, he preserves
distinction. This is why I pray to God to rid me of God, for my essential being is above
God insofar as we comprehend God as the principle of creatures” (214).
28. It also is worth remarking that in Sontag’s case, as Leland Poague notes, melan-
choly can be contextualized within a “specifically feminine form of modernism” (xlii).
In the afterword, we will make the claim that weird mysticism seems to be situated
within a particular type of modernity, one that is fairly masculine and Eurocentric.
Further study of the genre would perhaps take care to extend its scope to include other
forms, including more feminine ones.
29. In “Problems of Surrealism,” he also states that “there can be nothing sacred.
The sacred cannot be a thing. The instant alone is sacred, which is nothing (is not a
thing)” (99).
30. Cf. Bataille in On Nietzsche: “Anguish in me contests the possible. To an obscure
desire it opposes an impossible obscurity.”
31. At another point in The Impossible, we read, “a while ago I wept—or, dry-eyed,
accepted the disgust; now day is breaking and the feeling of possible sorrow exhilar-
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ates me: life stretches within me like a song modulated from the throat of a soprano”
(18).
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FOUR
E. M. Cioran
The Horror of Being Oneself
close relation to the notion of “failed mysticism” and that, against its
relegation to the margins of philosophy and despite its futility, what the
scholarly world actually needs—and secretly, even if unknowingly, begs
for—is more pessimism.
It is difficult to explain the intense and acerbic nature of his pessi-
mism, especially given the complicated character of his personal, politi-
cal, and intellectual lives. In fact, we will leave the vast intricacies of that
ardent task to his past and future biographers, as that continues to re-
main a project in and of itself. In his book Pessimism (2006), Joshua Foa
Dienstag constellates Cioran, along with Albert Camus and Miguel de
Unamuno, under the heading of “existential pessimism.” According to
Dienstag, existential pessimists “reconstitute the issues that preoccupied
the earlier pessimists (the burden of temporality, the dearth of happiness,
the futility of striving, boredom, and many others) by focusing on the life
conditions of the modern individual” (119). Keeping the profundity of
Cioran’s work in mind, we can begin by speaking with care about two
particular points regarding Cioran’s life without reducing them to the
The Horror of Being Oneself 105
the two books are connected in a desire for spiritual revolution, a dis-
course of the far right that is typically ignored or downplayed by its
opponents. Manea continues: “As a master of paradox and therefore an
‘anti’ thinker, a fighter against canons and standards, common sense and
common taste, Cioran always followed his stubborn ‘anti’-ness as an im-
perative, even when it was not of real spiritual relevance but frivolous
self-indulgence” (xi–xii). Over the course of his life, Cioran will continue
to vacillate between the depths of spiritual ordeal and the fettering deba-
cle of selfhood: “On the frontiers of the self: ‘What I have suffered, what I
am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I’” (All Gall 103). It is
important to note that Romania serves as a geographical and temporal
ruin for Cioran, the disastrous receptacle of political upheaval; but it is
also ruinous, ensconcing this dire past, a path from nothing that deviated
to nowhere, deep within his memory.
Along with other Romanian intellectuals including Mircea Eliade and
Julius Evola, at this time Cioran was involved in a broader narrative
which viewed Romania as a kind of spiritual/intellectual crucible. Exca-
106 E. M. Cioran
vating the ruins of the past, then, is an underlying impetus to his work
done in Romania. But his excavation will bear little in the way of finding
new remains in France. His first French book, A Short History of Decay
(1949), was to be a work of sustained poetic aphorisms that survive with-
in the tradition of the “nihilism of the great sophists” (Petreu 234). 4 In it,
the leitmotif of ruination finds cognizant expression. In “The Mockery of
a ‘New Life,’” for instance, Cioran writes,
It is because all men who cast a glance over their past ruins imagine—
in order to avoid the ruins to come—that it is in their power to recom-
mence something radically new. They make themselves a solemn
promise, waiting for a miracle which would extricate them from the
average abyss into which fate has plunged them. But nothing hap-
pens . . . I have known no new life which was not illusory and compro-
mised at its roots. (Decay 68)
To comment upon the misguided logic of all men who believe it is in their
power to recreate themselves is suggestive of a contained critique of the
failure of the human will to impose any teleological command onto one’s
life. In other words, Cioran casts into suspicion the metaphysical notion
that creating a new life free of egoism and illusion without fated exposure
to one’s own abyss is possible at all. The skepticism of change represent-
ed in this example recognizes a level of psychological inauthenticity
within a person who believes themselves capable of leaving behind their
own fateful abyss and insists that the underlying conditions that would
enable one to start anew are in fact null and void.
In contrast to cultivating a life formed from a radical newness, Cioran
opted to accept his fate, to continue his unique and obsessive skepticism
in a manner that accentuated, rather than quelled, the personal torments
of alienation, and yet allowed him, like a good clown-cum-pessimist, to
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more than an object . . . I gorge myself on all the drugs of solitude; those
of the world were too weak for me to forget it” (7). If to posit such an
Anti-Prophet is also to deploy a rhetorical strategy of mystical writing
that radically heaves the “self” into annihilation, prioritizing solitude in
lieu of differentiating himself 5 in a world or a community of others, then
he also sounds strangely like Meister Eckhart, who says, “I will tell you
what I think of people: I try to forget myself and everyone.” In fact,
following the first proposition—there is no E. M. Cioran who self-iden-
tifies—the thrust of Cioran’s own existence, like that of the Anti-Prophet,
tends to gravitate toward absolute non-identification with himself as
himself or anyone else, which echoes the Pseudo-Dionysian mystical
understanding of being “neither oneself nor someone else” (“Mystical
Theology” 137).
Keeping in mind that Cioran, a particularly non-religious thinker who
would have abhorred the title of being a “mystic,” adopts the mystical
precept of non-identification with oneself or others, he becomes of in-
creasing interest to us here. It also marks an important shift in the way
Cioran began to view himself as a writer and philosopher. Ilinca Zarifo-
pol-Johnston writes, “By 1949, when the French book he started compos-
ing in 1947 appears, as Précis de decomposition, he has cast off both his
Romanian language and identity, and yielded to a long-cherished obses-
sion: not to be a Frenchman, but to be a man from nowhere” (134). His
obsession with non-identification allows him to existentially create a ver-
sion of himself that is both everywhere and nowhere, molding, to follow
Petreu, into a “wandering sophist,” 6 an itinerant stray with no map,
nothing to lose or to gain.
In one way, Cioran’s writerly conjunction of mystical brevity and self-
naughting wanderlust mirrors Angelus Silesius’s Cherubinic Wanderer,
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ence 69). 7 Following this logic of negation, the notion of “being a man
from nowhere” comes into new light. It is the point at which, against
Dienstag’s diagnosis of Cioran as primarily an “existential pessimist,” we
can call him, more acutely, to follow Thacker’s formulation, a “cosmic
pessimist.” Doubly weird, the fate of his own individuation has stopped
this nomad in his tracks. Though not entirely a bad thing to be lost, for
there is nowhere to go in the Cioranian universe, and yet not necessarily
free, or trying to flee, for the weight of the wandering causes him despair,
a question is to be raised about the ontological position of this weird mys-
tic. If Cioran is a cosmic pessimist who comes from nowhere, is not going
anywhere, and has expunged his past, then, ontologically speaking, ex-
actly how and where does Cioran exist? And is this space human at all?
With this question, we have just sketched an outline for the second
proposition referred to earlier, that the liminal ontological position from
which Cioran writes is not of this world. Hence Cioran’s writing self may
actually exist in a space of horror that is essentially un-human, which is
another way of saying, fully human, in the sense of someone who keeps
his eyes open in astonishment to the fact that he, anything, is happening
in the first place. Camelia Elias suggests that the density of Cioran’s
writing marks the “experience of a continuous space . . . punctured by
interruptions that mark some degree of skepticism and uncertainty as to
one’s state of mind—am I sad or am I not?—the role of the subjunctive is
nonetheless to reestablish a relation to the continuous dimension” (58).
The dimension to which Elias refers is essentially horrible. Hence, to
further clarify how Cioran’s ontological positioning as a writer can be
based in and on, but not of this world, we need to show that this position
is essentially derived from and contingent on the space of horror. To
illuminate this point, let us take, for example, when he writes in All Gall is
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Divided (1952), “Except for the dilation of self, that fruit of total paralysis,
what remedy for crises of annihilation, asphyxiation in the void, the hor-
ror of being no more than a soul in a gob of spirit” (23). This “horror of
being no more than a soul in a gob of spirit,” then, is the secret pessimal
recognition of being a canceled-out self in between existence and non-
existence. As such, his epigrams become auto-commentaries which allow
him to experience the divine horror of this essentially voidic space while
simultaneously thinking and writing about it.
Put another way, this mystical experience of not-being-anywhere,
where one finds oneself not-oneself in the no-where of non-existence, is
the negative mode of being everything. In “Advantages of Exile,” Cioran
writes that “it is not easy to be nowhere, when no external condition
obliges you to do so. Even the mystic attains his askesis only at the cost of
monstrous efforts. To extricate yourself to the world—what a labor of
abolition!” (Temptation 76). The mystical insight of this apophatic formu-
lation is beautifully laid forth in The Cloud of Unknowing, in which the
author writes, “Leave aside this everywhere and this everything, in ex-
The Horror of Being Oneself 109
change for this nowhere and this nothing” (252). Horror essentially and
counter-intuitively enables Cioran to mystically dwell in the non-sense,
in the nowhere/nothing which is really everywhere/everything, to remain
still in the space where one does not yet exist.
This formulation echoes, quite uncannily so, 8 Julia Kristeva’s discus-
sion of horror in relation to abjection. In Powers of Horror (1982), Kristeva
presents readers with a critical treatise on the “abject,” a term used to
describe the space of horror, of “radical exclusion,” drawing us “towards
the place where meaning collapses” (2). She writes,
A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it
might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as
radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, ei-
ther. A “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of
meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which
crushes me. On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality
that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are
my safeguards. (2)
If we are to accept that the ontological positioning of Cioran’s verse, to
follow Kristeva’s discussion of abjection, flows from the edge of non-
existence, then we can go one step further to identify not who—for he has
denied himself a self—but how Cioran “is” (which is really another way
of saying what he is not): a me-ontological nomad who, via an inhuman
mysticism, wanders beyond being. Thus, the liminal space of Cioranian
horror can be defined not only by what is, but also by what is not, which
is another way of saying that it concerns itself with a small branch of
philosophy called meontology, the study of non-being. 9
Abjection, thus construed, is this haunto-physiological site which, cor-
poreally situated between bios and life, factically opens a wormhole to
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the Outside. That is to say, the abjection actualized via the facticity of the
body thus renders the Outside insidiously inside, an Inside-out where in
the fallen deject, weirdly enough, becomes bodhisattva personified, a
holy figure or saint. As such, following Quentin Meillassoux, facticity is
the path to the absolute. 10 Facticity is fundamentally connected to dis-
gust, to negative affect (disgust, of course, is located in your own body).
For Cioran, the “you” is the reader. The fable, so to speak, is always about
the reader, about you. Mystical texts often address you, and if not, then
the reader ought to question who, exactly, is being addressed. The issue
of address (of literary form) is always already lurking inside the text,
opening to the reader.
The in-humanness of horror becomes a trope in Cioran’s fragmented
work, in which the horror of being oneself in this world becomes deictic
fodder, the material to propel a self-abnegating mode of writing against
the bearing out of that to which it refers. In one example, Cioran posits a
paradigm for what Eugene Thacker calls the “world-without-us,” as he
110 E. M. Cioran
a stray, “The one for whom the abject exists is the a deject who places
(himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays in-
stead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing” (8). The
parenthetical relegation of the pronoun “himself” in this quotation indi-
cates a demotion of the deject’s subjectivity to a place neither outside nor
to the hither side of being, but rather to a third space that conflates and
usurps its own autonomy. In this passage, the pronoun “himself” is a
mere anti-moniker, one not joined to another object, but to its own divis-
ibility, hence, the phantom signature of an ontological nomad. She con-
tinues,
Instead of sounding himself as to his “being,” he does so concerning
his place: “Where am I?” instead of “Who am I?” For the space that
encloses the deject, the excluded, is never one, not homogenous, nor tota-
lizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. A deviser of
territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his
universe whose fluid confines—for they are constituted of a non-object,
the abject—constantly question his solidarity and impel him to start
The Horror of Being Oneself 111
lies in the fact that his auto-abnegating sensibilities, ones that deepen his
disgust for the world and disclose to him the irreparable conditions of
facticity, seem so sincere:
I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that
mine is the only real existence. If I had to choose between the world and
me, I would reject the world, its lights and laws, unafraid to glide alone
in absolute nothingness. Although life for me is torture, I cannot re-
nounce it, because I do not believe in the absolute values in whose
name I would sacrifice myself. If I were totally sincere, I would say that
I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer
probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself
without reason. (On the Heights of Despair 33)
Insofar as self-abnegation can hold a quality of sincerity—vis-à-vis not
wanting anything from anyone, even oneself—Cioran holds it. He detests
not only the world, but also himself, or at least that inner ego-laden
phantasm that goes so far to call itself a self, professing, with exacting
112 E. M. Cioran
hilistic impressions, the content of which are surveyed in the text itself
which sustains its own thetic and readerly negation. Hence, the malady
that will not heal is formally structured into the fragment. Readers of
Cioran are confronted with themselves as the symptomatic existential
expression of a malady that will not heal, which is another way of saying
that the facticity of sickness is the paradigm of existence. In order to
eschew such sickness, the answer is simple: one simply need not exist. In
A Short History of Decay, for example, Cioran writes,
How long must I have been telling myself: I loathe this life idolize. The
nullity of our deleriums makes us all so many gods subject to an insip-
id fatality. Why rebel any longer against the symmetry of this world
where chaos itself can only be a system of disorders? Our fate being to
rot with the continents and the stars, we drag on, like resigned sick
men, and to the end of time, the curiosity of a denouement that is
foreseen, frightful and vain. (181)
This cryptic passage reveals what is not so simple, however, and that is
our true plight, through which we play out our lives lived in systematic
disorder. Rather than to rebel against this disordered system, one would
do better to accept one’s fate, “to rot” with the cosmos and continue to
“drag on, like resigned sick men.” This is an intense thought, but one
which Cioran thoroughly defends. Zilla Gabrielle Cahn writes that “we
must defend ourselves against our healers . . . even if we die for it . . .
[and] preserve our sickness and our sins,’ because for Cioran, who never
tired of repeating it, lucidity came only in sickness” (374). “He wished to
counter the human ‘temptation to exist,’ the ever-present and irrepress-
ible life-urge which makes us dupes to an indifferent universe,” Cahn
continues, because for Cioran, “it is not human despair that is in danger,
but human optimism” (374). In this way, we will argue, Cioran deploys
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the pessimal notion of lucidity sickness to reveal the ways in which opti-
mism has worked to heighten human naiveté rather than to dispel it.
On this central point, Cioran’s stance can be contrasted to that of
Friedrich Nietzsche, the indomitable pessimist, who, on the notion of
sickness, deviates quite a bit, viewing it not as an immanent ontological
aberration, but rather as an emancipatory spur. Both philosophers see
sickness as a requisite part of existence, yet whereas Cioran views it
within an unrelenting pessimism, Nietzsche affords it an opportunity for
personal growth. In the Preface to Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche
writes, “And, speaking seriously, [sickness] is a radical cure for all pessi-
mism (the well-known disease of old idealists and falsehood mongers) to
become ill after the manner of these free spirits, to remain ill a good
while, and then grow well (I mean ‘better’) for a still longer period” (11).
Here Nietzsche begins to outline a rather curious element of his thought,
that of the “free spirit,” an ideal individual who steps out of sickness and
“draws near to life . . . grateful to his wandering, his austerity and self-
116 E. M. Cioran
tence’s profundity 20 might be gained from sickness and how this con-
demnation shapes the possibility for the conditions to achieve a kind of
negative aletheia, a disclosure of the illusions by which we unknowingly
live.
hinges upon this sense of vacuity, which, said another way, is that vacu-
ity becomes instructive via the pessimal mode of detachment: “When you
imagine you have reached a certain degree of detachment,” Cioran
writes, “you regard as histrionic all zealots, including the founders of
religions. But doesn’t detachment, to have a histrionics of its own? If
actions are mummery, the very refusal of action is one as well. Yet a
noble mummery” (116). This detachment, pessimism’s “noble mum-
mery,” also indicates a relation to twentieth-century mystic Simone
Weil’s notion of detachment. Weil writes, “The reality of the world is the
result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer into
things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only percep-
tible through total detachment. . . . Attachment is a manufacturer of illu-
sions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached” (Gravity and Grace
14). Against the logic of Christian mystical detachment exhibited by Weil,
but for a logic of pessimistic detachment in which one refuses all action,
we find in Cioran a double refusal of the worst, one which negates, to
118 E. M. Cioran
follow Thacker, the for-us (human action) and the in-itself (Weil’s inde-
pendent reality). This is the sense in which Cioranian pessimism is really
a failed mysticism.
In another example, Cioran becomes what he describes, as he invokes
a poetics of deixis that points back to himself as a failed mystic. In The
Temptation to Exist, he writes,
Upon myself I am only too aware of the stigmata of my time: I cannot
leave God in peace; along with the snobs, I entertain myself by repeat-
ing that He is dead, as if that had any meaning. . . . When Nothingness
invades me and, according to an Oriental [sic] formula, I attain the
“vacuity of the void,” it so happens that, crushed by an extremity, I fall
back on God, if only out of a desire to trample my doubts underfoot, to
contradict myself and, multiplying my frissons, to seek in Him a stimu-
lant. The experience of the Void is the unbeliever’s mystic temptation,
his possibility for prayer, his moment of plenitude. At our limits, a God
appears, or something that serves his turn. (120–21)
Again “vacuity” comes into play, this time as kind of voidic attainment.
The Cioranian paradox of this passage is that it is marked by the inter-
play of existential crisis and spiritual ordeal. Cioran reflects that his non-
engagements with the void lead him to his own “mystic temptation.” In
other words, he treads that same mystical territory of bewildered un-
knowing, even while atheistically distancing himself from it.
Trained in the pessimistic tradition, Cioran studied the great German
pessimists Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Oswald Spen-
gler. Whereas Schopenhauer’s pessimism held an affinity for Eastern
mysticism and Nietzsche’s pessimism had moments of mystical clarity,
Cioran, as we noted, sees mysticism as a failure, but one that, as it strips
away the mystics’ material attachments, is capable of deepening their
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other words, to extol existence as the very worst is also to index it via its
very negativity. This strategy is akin to an ontological argument for futil-
ity via futility, whereby readers are provided with epigrammatic analy-
ses of being’s worstness via the very renunciations of being these analy-
ses seek to reject. In this way, Cioran’s writings exile him from both
philosophy and mysticism. At this point, then, it may be helpful to raise a
further question about Cioran’s textual strategy: If everything is eventu-
ally negated via its own futility, then why write at all?
In “Foreshortened Confession,” a short autobiographical essay writ-
ten toward the end of his career, Cioran comes close to providing his
readers with a theory of writing. In an intense fit of extimacy, he notes, “I
write in order not to take action, to avoid a crisis. Expression is relief, the
indirect revenge of one who cannot endure shame and who rebels in
words against his kind, against himself” (Anathemas 248). As such, his
writings are performative, in the sense that they describe existence and
then call that existence into a conceptual annihilation. They comprehend
what Thomas Ligotti calls existence’s “malignant uselessness” and then
120 E. M. Cioran
cism, and subsequently calls philosophy into its own kind of mystical
annihilation.
In “Dealing with the Mystics,” a short essay in The Temptation to Exist
(1956), Cioran writes,
Contrary to [the] abstract, false void of the philosophers, the mystics’
nothingness glistens with plenitude: delight out of this world, dis-
charge of duration, a luminous annihilation beyond the limits of
thought. . . . Here the mind is suspended, reflection abolished and, with
it, the logic of disarray. If we could, after the example of the mystics,
pass beyond the evidence, beyond the impasse which proceeds from it,
if we could become that dazzled, divine errantry, if we could, like
them, reascend to the true nothingness! (155)
In this passage, Cioran problematizes philosophy’s relation to itself via
an invocation of the mystic’s notion of nothingness. In so doing, he illus-
trates pessimism’s departure from mainstream philosophy and pessi-
mism’s corollary ability to show philosophy its own shortcomings. He
The Horror of Being Oneself 121
also outlines several important tenets that are germane to the relation
between pessimism and mysticism.
By attesting to the fact that philosophy fails in its attempts to access
Void, he identifies a principal issue in the history of Western philosophy
since the time of Immanuel Kant. Kant’s philosophy posits a subject-
object model of knowledge that refutes the potential for knowing a nou-
menal realm beyond human access. According to Kant, it is not the hu-
man mind that conforms to objects, but rather objects that conform to the
human mind. While this Kantian explanation is on one level precise, it
stresses the primacy of human beings to think only the correlation be-
tween subject and object and as such relegates access to the absolute to
something outside of human thought. Cioran suggests that mysticism
offers an important counter-narrative to this emphasis on subject/object
correlation, or what Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism,” 25 by see-
ing the predicament of the mystics as an experimental tool by which to
rethink how to access the absolute, as well as opening up a rupture to
show a gap in philosophical discourse on the nature of non-human real-
ity. What can initially be seen as his criticism of the mystics also paradox-
ically becomes a validation of them, one that secretly illustrates the pri-
macy of their ability to think beyond the correlation between self and
world but also blurs the division between world and world. However,
Cioran remains skeptical of mysticism; whether the mystic, despite time
and the individuation of herself, succeeds in accessing the absolute is a
question implicit to Cioran’s discussion of the figure of the failed mystic.
“The failed mystic,” Cioran writes, “is the one who cannot cast off all
temporal ties. Caught between mysticism and history, he wanders for-
ever in the no-man’s-land connecting this world to the other” (Tears 67).
As we discovered in the introduction to this chapter, Cioran is a stray, a
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When your sight has become good enough to see the bottom in the
dark well of your being and knowing, you may also see in its mirror
the distant constellations of future cultures. Do you think this kind of
life with this kind of goal is too arduous, too bereft of all comforts?
Then you have not yet learned that no honey is sweeter than that of
knowledge, and that the hanging clouds of sadness must serve you as
your udder, from which you will squeeze the milk to refresh yourself.
(175)
The Cartesian emphasis on “no honey is sweeter than that of knowledge”
serves Nietzsche’s free spirit, the philosopher who sees the truths in a
culture defunct of meaning, in a way that transmutes sadness into a kind
of antidote (Faber xxxiii). Cioran’s post-Nietzschean pessimism, howev-
er, is grounded in his fidelity to the notion that existence is a bile enter-
prise replete with no possibility for repair, offering a “no saying to the
worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in
here or out there” (Thacker, “Cosmic Pessimism” 68).
For readers, this implicit paradox of the worst holds as its negative
index the possibility for a sorrow experienced in an ultimately pessimal
mode of self-knowledge in which even death itself, in other words, death
as an escape from life, is a disappointment. Death’s disappointment is its
non-possibility for escape, but due to death’s de-actualization as nothing-
ness it necessitates itself as everything. To think of death, then, is to
cultivate a sorrow reared for a mystical meditation on death. Again, as
with Georges Bataille in chapter 3, Marguerite Porete’s words from The
Mirror of Simple Souls, that “the best I can tell you is that if you under-
stand perfectly your nothingness you will do nothing, and this nothing-
ness will give you everything” (115), are especially useful. Her formula-
tion of nothingness as everything is indicated in Cioran’s own formula-
tion on death: “Life is nothing; death, everything. Yet there is nothing
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It is only too legitimate to imagine the moment when life will no longer
be the fashion, when it will fall into desuetude like the moon or tuber-
culosis after the abuses of romanticism: life will then crown the anach-
ronism of the denuded symbols and the unmasked diseases; it will
once again become itself: an ill without prestige, a fatality without lus-
ter . . . the mind itself will give way; it is only an excuse in the void, as
life is only a prejudice. (90)
In order to overcome a life like this, one would have to achieve the im-
possible. As Nick Land states, “Death is the reality of the impossible,
making fictions of us all, and it is only in fiction that we separate our-
selves from it” (171). Thus, to throw off the fiction of existence—“Every-
thing that is engenders, sooner or later, nightmares. Let us try, therefore,
to invent something better than being” (Cioran, Trouble 114)—is to be-
come death, to be given the reality of the impossible. If existence is in-
deed itself a fiction, which, in this context, also means a kind of lie one
tells oneself in order not to rot, the question then becomes: What would
an ontology of life via Cioranian paradox of existence as sorrowful sick-
ness, a non-life that exists at the limit of its own end, which is also to say,
a life that takes place always already in the immanent horror 26 of death,
actually entail?
“By dwelling on the infinity of death,” writes Cioran, “thought man-
ages to use it up, to inspire disgust for it in us, disgust, that negative
superfluity which spares nothing and which, before compromising and
diminishing the prestige of death, shows us the inanity of life” (Decay 12).
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ashes—that man will look toward death’s past, and he himself will be
merely a resurrected being who can no longer live. His “method” will have
cured him of both life and death. (12)
One must totally give themselves up to the decadence of anguish if they
wish to be cured of their fixation on death. Yet, even more fully, if one
can achieve the method of death by meditating on oneself as already dead,
then one will have cured oneself of both life and death. The Cioranian
paradox found in this passage thus posits a speculative threefold ontolo-
gy of life connecting existential anguish, extinction, and the anteriority of
death via resurrection. This mode of writing serves as the glome, or high-
er dimensional analogue, of the commentarial three-sphere woven into
the threefold ontology.
We have done our best in an earlier section of this chapter to outline
several tenets of Cioran’s views of existential anguish. Concerning the
second element of this threefold ontology of life, Ray Brassier’s work,
which primacies the relations among extinction, purposelessness and
pessimism, is instructive. The following quotation could be said to be a
secret speculative commentary on the paradox Cioran lays bare above.
Brassier writes,
Extinction is real yet not empirical, since it is not in the order of experi-
ence . . . it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for
the intelligibility of extinction. Senselessness and purposelessness are
not merely privative; they represent a gain in intelligibility. The cancel-
lation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the
“horror” concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-be-
ing becomes intelligible. Thus, if everything is dead already, this is not
only because extinction disables these possibilities which were taken to
be constitutive of life and existence, but also because the will to know is
driven by the traumatic reality of extinction, and strives to become
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“COSMIC CATACHRESIS”
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“The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others,
of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity,” writes E. M.
Cioran (30), quickly followed by: “Negation never proceeds from reason-
ing but from something much more obscure and old. Arguments come
afterward, to justify and sustain it. Every no arises out of the blood”
(30–31). 27 The central, paradoxical invocation and criticism of mysticism
in Cioran’s work opens up and invites several questions as to the nature
of cosmicity and its relation to human existence. In the two previous
aphorisms, taken in sequential order from his book The Trouble with Being
Born (1973), Cioran describes an invaluable paradox on (being a) human
being. The ideal human being, in his view, is one who is a negation of
oneself, an antediluvian human being who remains bewildered by their
very being. Nietzsche understands the necessity of such antediluvian
thinking when he writes, “Oh, those humans of old! They knew how to
dream and didn’t have to go to sleep first!” Such an understanding points
to the antediluvian human being as the human being par excellence; that
The Horror of Being Oneself 127
is, one who is already awake. However, Cioranian pessimism inverts this
essential awakedness into a “double refusal” or kind of “sleep,” a “no-
saying to the for-us and the in-itself” (Thacker, “Cosmic Pessimism” 68).
Through instantiations of vivisected thought, Cioranian pessimism
begs a crucial question: Why is life so terrifying? To which Cioran might
reply: because individual fear is bound up in a “cosmogonic discomfort”
wherein the notion of where one comes from collides with the bewilder-
ing fact that one is at all: “Every individual discomfort leads back, ulti-
mately, to a cosmogonic discomfort, each of our sensations expiating that
crime of the primordial sensation, by which Being crept out of some-
where” (Trouble 16). Cosmic pessimism’s essential and bulldozic mode of
extolling the worst, the epigram, reveals part by part the vivisected re-
mains of the anatomy of thought at its fringes. These vivisected thoughts,
pinned down by the pen, are, as Camelia Elias notes, “words that take
infinite flight in our gut. . . . If he were still alive, Cioran would call this
point in the anatomical space cosmic catachresis” (58).
In his boiled-down language and staccato-like preciseness, character-
ized by the poetic and piercing insights of pessimism’s unequivocal
worldview of the worst, Cioran’s work traces the vanquished movement
of thought at its fringes. Cioran uses the aphorism 28 to both invoke and
exceed thought itself. The short form’s brevity thus imbues epigrammatic
thought with a kind of cosmic delirium, indicating the perspicacity and
inventiveness of the Cioranian paradox as a paradigm of thought that
links the tropes of existential crisis and spiritual ordeal to cosmic origin
through pessimal metaphors drawn from the language of skepticism: “I
am invited to a colloquium abroad, there being a need, apparently, for
my vacillations. The skeptic-on-duty of a decaying world” (Anathemas
14). As Michael Finkenthal explains, “Skepticism is in a way paralyzing.
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One ends in doubting one’s own doubts” (150). Cioran’s writing enacts a
mode of pessimistic skepticism in which self-scrutiny becomes a circum-
spect, ex post facto vehicle for positing the conditions, traps, and pitfalls
of human existence. In fact, Cioran approaches even the self-reception of
his own writing work through a lens of sardonic self-scrutiny: “Each time
I find myself assigning some importance to things, I incriminate my
mind, I challenge it and suspect it of some weakness, of some depravity. I
try to wrest myself from everything, to raise myself by uprooting myself;
in order to become futile, we must sever our roots, must become meta-
physically alien” (Temptation 119). 29 This formulation of becoming “meta-
physically alien” to oneself and the world is one way in which the cosmic
pessimist defends herself against existence.
In Tears and Saints, for example, Cioran writes, “The creation of man
was a cosmic cataclysm, and its aftershocks have become God’s night-
mares. Man is a paradox of nature, equally removed from it and from
God. The order of things in heaven and on earth has changed ever since
the creation of consciousness. With it, God appeared in his true light as
128 E. M. Cioran
sis” stems from the Greek katakhresthai “to misuse,” from kata- “down”
(here with a sense of “perversion”) + khresthai “to use” (Online Etymology
Dictionary). The cosmically catachrestic movement in the epigram moves
not towards authorial creation but against it, de-creating the autobio-
graphical impetus to self-revelatory 31 writing by severing the autonomy
of its own activity. For Cioran, writing happens in the interstice of doing
nothing, and to do nothing is to say “no,” to refuse the “temptation to
exist” at all costs: “Since day after day I have lived in the company of
Suicide, it would be unjust and ungrateful on my part to denigrate it,”
writes Cioran, “What could be healthier, what could be more natural?
What is neither healthy nor natural is the frantic appetite to exist—a
grave flaw, a flaw par excellence, my flaw” (Anathemas 89). Existence, the
ultimate flaw, the impetus towards penning the reflections seen from a
hidden mirror of what is there (out in the world): “Who, in pitch-dark-
ness, looking into a mirror, has not seen projected there the crimes which
await him?” (All Gall 136). This sort of anti-writing exasperates the scis-
sion between thinking what is and what is reflected to the point where it
liminally collapses upon itself, fusing with what is not. This interplay
between what is, what is reflected, and what is not sets up a series of
pivotal questions on the origin of thought: Is thought produced by the
cosmos or by the human, or vice versa, or both? Cioran writes,
Endlessly to refer to a world where nothing yet stooped to occurrence,
where you anticipated consciousness without desiring it, where, wal-
lowing in the virtual, you rejoiced in the null plenitude of a self anterior
to selfhood. . .
Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what
freedom, what space! (Trouble 22)
In this dimensional space of nothingness, Cioran’s writings begin to look
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like the fated etchings of an a-cosmic other: the words uttered by a cosmic
doppelganger who usurps the illegitimate pangs of authorial creation
through a skepticism of being, paradoxically placing the mode of authori-
al production, writing, in the hands not of a human creator but precisely
within the psycho-spiritual shadow of a pre-dialectical, un-human being,
one that has vanished before it was even given life, birthed: “No fate to
which I could have adjusted myself. I was made to exist before my birth
and after my death,” writes Cioran, “not during my very existence”
(Anathemas 119).
Zarifopol-Johnson writes that in Cioran’s later work “the wound is . . .
hidden from view under writing which has sublimated the martyred
author’s ideal. The bandage—writing—is the wound’s only trace, and the
sufferer, now a master of style, is in control of his agony” (15).
Writing, then, is the phantom penmanship of a cosmically catachrestic
hand. “If we could only reach back before the concept,” writes Cioran,
“could write on a level with the senses, record the infinitesimal variations
130 E. M. Cioran
way.
As such, Cioran’s cosmically catachrestic fragments mirror non-philo-
sophically the literary tidings of Lovecraftian cosmic horror in two ways:
as both a symptom and an antidote. On the one hand, Cioran’s writing
holds a relation to Lovecraft’s awkward style which includes, as Roger
Luckhurst notes, in “The Color Out of Space,” for instance, the “breaking
open of language . . . a logical consequence of trying to describe an abso-
lute otherness, a color for which no human language exists, thus prompt-
ing another convulsion of adjectives to catch the impossible” (The Classic
Horror Stories xx). On this inventive and persistent misuse of language in
Lovecraft’s fictions, Luckhurst continues, describing it as a rhetorical de-
vice “known as catachresis, the deliberate abuse of language . . . that
continually stumbles against the trauma of the unrepresentable Thing,
the shards of the sublime falling back into the debris of his busted sen-
tences” (xx). On the other hand, according to Gary J. Shipley, cosmic
pessimism is “the antidote to Lovecraftian/Thackerian cosmic horror: in
The Horror of Being Oneself 131
relation to the cosmos. And yet it is also the cosmos that produces thought,
is the origin of thought. In this way, the human being could be viewed as
a wound in the cosmos, wherein impossibility comes to know itself only
through madness. 34 By thinking, the cosmic wound remains festering.
But his strange style begins to dismantle the horror of the cosmos, insist-
ing on a subtractive form of radical knowledge un-production that simul-
taneously dismantles as it produces itself. This mode of epigrammatic
non-thinking via indifferent sleep reflects a strategy for non-philosophi-
cal thinking that accounts for an ineffable paradox found in Cioran’s
cosmic pessimism, which, in this case, is a failed mysticism that employs
its own rhetorical shortcomings as its manner of actualization.
Thacker maintains that cosmic pessimism is “a pessimism that is nei-
ther subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a
pessimism of the world-without-us, a pessimism that is first and last
about cosmos” (“Cosmic Pessimism” 68). This formulation is evocative of
an inquiry into the cosmic nature of human horror and bewilderment
that can be inventively applied to Cioran’s views on mysticism, cosmos,
and consciousness. “Mysticism revolves around the passion for ecstasy
and a horror of the void,” Cioran writes, “One cannot know one without
the other. . . . Consciousness dilates beyond the limits of the cosmos”
(Tears and Saints 64). This quotation helps us to situate the notion of
cosmos within the context of consciousness by recognizing how its inter-
change registers a dual dissonance/synthesis between self and world,
world and cosmos.
One’s own consciousness, shrouded in cosmic oblivion, is the dark,
uncanny element that haunts this interchange—consciousness is itself
cosmic. There is also what lurks beyond it, which is really to say within it:
“An anxiety born out of nothing suddenly grows in us and confirms our
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one’s own being as acosmic non-oneness with oneself echoes the famous
Plotinian formulation, phuge monon pros monon (Enneads 6.9.11), usually
translated as “the flight of the alone to the Alone.” 35
If there is a lesson at all to be learned from this doctrine of cosmic
catachresis, it is to erase the “fiction of being” that we constantly entrust
to ourselves, as we dishonestly perpetuate our insideous complicity with
our own births. Being’s fiction is that it masquerades as non-fiction, that
it is the only “reality” that “exists.” But Cioran knows better. He implores
our awakening to it as well. In order to do so, he instantiates in his
readers the requisite seed of inversion to develop a kind of annihilatively
critical and critically annihilative reading of the text, but also a reading of
the very fictive nature of being itself, in order to become the pessimo-
mystical sleuths we were always meant to be. This way of reading, which
is a type of occult sleuthing, a kind of “true detection,” 36 sets the stage to
dismantle the very stage upon which this fiction takes place, as it reverses
the hermeneutic circle, instantiating what could be called the liminal
reading method of crypto-meontology, the hidden study of non-being.
cally utilizes discourse about both being and non-being, Cioran’s margi-
nal status as a chameleon-like figure that moves back and forth between
being and non-being simultaneously relays to readers what does not hap-
pen, that is to say, negatively indexes what happens nowhere.
Pessimism’s connection to mystical discourses of non-being is well-
noted in one of Cioran’s pessimist predecessors, Arthur Schopenhauer,
who held a personal and philosophic affinity for Eastern mysticism and
was strongly influenced by Hindu and Buddhist religious thought.
Though, as Peter Abelson points out, “compared to his worldview, which
is very severe, Buddhism seems almost cheerful” (255), Schopenhauer
agreed that Buddhism’s First Noble Truth, dukkha—a Pali word common-
ly translated as “suffering”—was the basis of human existence. In The
World as Will and Representation (1819), Schopenhauer analyzes several
principles of esoteric origin. His description of the ethics of willessness,
for instance, is worth quoting at length:
136 E. M. Cioran
nowhere, easy enough” (Cioran, Trouble 13). But what does this mean?
How might this negative praxis turn back to the theory of knowledge? If
we are to take Cioran’s vision of existence, a universe with no way out,
seriously, then we must deign to understand the complexity of the ethical
paradox this negative vision brings to light. First, we must learn to dwell
in the horror of being ourselves. If to exist is truly the ultimate condem-
nation, if our own births sever us from the abyssic canal of non-being,
then we must find a way to exist not. If we follow this through, “being
negatively” (23), as Clarice Lispector’s G. H. once called it, becomes the
way to live rightly, which is also to say justly. This is the hidden mystical
life of the marginal figure, the interdimensional chameleon that passes
between being and non-being because they know by un-knowing, be-
cause they owe themselves nothing other than to know that they know
not. In this sense, we might wish, first, to implore a kind of “pessimist
activism,” 42 one compelled by an inverted and introverted courage—not
hope—to be emptied out, to stay and break bread with one’s nothingness.
The Horror of Being Oneself 137
hardship of the individual who cannot fend off her desires via a “final
resignation” in order to free themselves from the “the allurements of
hope” and the false pleasures of the world (379). On the one who is lured
back into such egoism, Schopenhauer continues, “At times, in the hard
experience of our own sufferings or in the vividly recognized sufferings
of others, knowledge of the vanity and bitterness of life comes close to us
who are still enveloped in the veil of Maya” (379).
Cioran is sure to resist the allurements of hope. Yet, in quite another
way, he remains courageous in sense that his work does indeed uncover
what lies underneath Maya’s veil. Through an intense mode of unknow-
ing, a kind of practical mysticism of pessimistic awareness, he points out
the elaborate and illusive fallacies through which human beings live out
their lives. In this way, then, Cioran hovers between the two concepts of
willlessness and egoism, which, in his typical contradictory fashion, is
not surprising. And yet, there is another, a third, view that can be taken,
that is aligned at the point at which authorship and reader reception
comes into play. For just because Cioran does not intend his work to be a
138 E. M. Cioran
the other hand, one finds in Cioran a poetic inversion of Zen, that is, a
non-philosophy, but one profusely committed to writing. Consequently,
it exacerbates Zen’s limit-conditions to the point of failure. That is to say,
his appropriation of Buddhist thought is itself a failure. But failure is
“always essential,” writes Cioran, because it “reveals us to ourselves,
permits us to see ourselves as God sees us” (Trouble 17). For a Zen pessi-
mist, the world does not change, only their perception of it does. It fol-
lows that this shift in perception enables one to attain a level of pessimis-
tic lucidity, a state which neither withdraws from, nor adds to, the
world’s troubles. “One can be proud of what one has done,” writes Cio-
ran, “but one should be much prouder of what one has not done. Such
pride has yet to be invented” (Anathemas 81).
Appeals to non-action raise an important question regarding Cioran’s
work and its relationship to ethics. In Buddhism, one cannot extricate the
epistemological from the ethical, for the ethical is the a priori moment.
Buddha stepped onto the path the moment he recognized that others
suffer and that their suffering is the suffering of self. Earlier we pointed
out that, for Cioran, only in non-being is one capable of not being disap-
pointed. This notion echoes the very crux of Buddhism’s commitment to
compassion. 46 It is precisely in that moment of realization of non-exis-
tence that one recognizes the absolute commitment to others. Here Cio-
ran presents readers with an ethical conundrum. He fails to allot an ethi-
cal imperative for compassion and thus fails to assess the ethical implica-
tions of this thought. Hence, his invocation of Buddhism is indeed a
failure, at least an ethical failure. But being that Cioran’s appeal to non-
action serves as a practical vehicle to auto-negation, returning the practi-
tioner to their rightful inexistence, then his work does provide a fascinat-
ing pivot point for the critical reception of his work to cross back into the
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realm of ethics.
and world, but also refuses what is beyond self and world. No matter
how it comes, his work plants the nightmarish seed of readerly awaken-
ing necessary to properly decipher the fictive nature of being. This way of
reading, which is a type of pessimist sleuthing or true detection, 48 makes
preparation to dismantle the very stage upon which this fiction takes
place, reversing the hermeneutic circle into a self-eating or Ouroboric
one.
Ultimately, Cioran often avoids going into the realm of ethics. His is
an ethics of no one. But this ethics of no one conceals an ethics of the
Other. It models the kind of horror-dwelling it takes to create the condi-
tions of possibility in which other individuals, perhaps his readers, can
enter into the realm of ethics. 49 For to dwell in horror necessarily means
coming to realize, as if out of nowhere, that being oneself is the root cause
of horror in the world. Hence, the critical reception of his work can point
to an ethical encounter, even though he may have found one futile. Put
yet another way, the lack of ethics in Cioran can be negatively indexed as
a pessimal ethical move on his part, which lays the ground (pessum
“downward, to the ground,” from PIE ped-yos) 50 for a form of pessimo-
mystical social anarchism, a world of no ones who commune by their
nothingness.
His readers thus find themselves complicit in an adroit Cioranian par-
adox: that this practice of auto-negation, selflessness via pessimism,
might bear out in a relinquishment of suffering. The question returns:
why read the old curmudgeon Cioran? The courage of the pessimist is to
intuitively recognize that there is no hope and to know that the only kind
of world to be desired is one inhabited by those who exist by the abun-
dance of their nothingness. Zen pessimism speculatively opens itself to a
readership that can dwell in that space on and as its own, a readership,
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tion. . . . The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper
we sink into it. Try as we will to explode it, just when we suppose we
have succeeded, there it is, apparently more self-assured than ever;
whatever we do to destroy it merely augments its strength and solidar-
ity, as such is its vigor and its perversity that it flourishes still more in
affliction than in joy. . . . No man stirs without allying himself to the
multiple, to appearances, to the “I.” To act is to forfeit the absolute.
(History and Utopia 62–63)
The logic of non-action found in this passage is axiomatic: there is no one
to be; there never was anything to do; there is no way in because there is
no way out. In other words, pessimist non-action resurrects the potential
for ontological insurrection: to accept the inexistent call to be no one,
what Zen refers to as the selfless self, is simply to return one to the full
awareness of their nothingness. Pessimism of this sort claims no mastery
over anything; it is non-mastered through its nirvanic reversal of nirvana,
the renunciation of enlightenment: “‘Children admit no limits to any-
thing’ they always want to see beyond, to see what there is afterward. But
there is no afterward. Nirvana is a limit, the limit. It is liberation, supreme
impasse” (Trouble 175). This pessimistic kōan, a playful but concentrated
gesture of language, gives pause: to desire a way out is a limit. Cioran
does not offer an escape. Rather, he offers us nothing.
Cioran’s writings supply readers with the negative of writing, the
dissemination of the extimacy of his soul. In On the Heights of Despair,
Cioran writes, “My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything
in me: search and you will find out . . . in me anything is possible, for I am
he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will
laugh” (86). This is the mantra of the pessimist, the one who, despite the
ineffable magnitude of suffering in the world, stays put, to see it and feel
it with an intensity that others do not yet possess, so that they might one
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day laugh, to suffer absolutely but not to balk, for in this laughter there is
absolutely nothing over which to suffer. Speaking impossibly, from there,
which is really nowhere, everything is possible, impossibly speaking,
even nothing. Stay put and let Zen pessimism fail you into inexistence.
Worst is not a way out. It is the Way.
NOTES
1. Cf. “The ‘region’ of eternity is that of intensity, which surpasses the measures of
quantity that we employ in time and space. ‘Eternity’ is not a duration of infinite
length; it is the ‘intensity of quality’ which, if compared with time and thus translated
into the language of quantity, is comparable with an infinite duration. . . . Eternal hell
is the state of a soul imprisoned within itself, where the soul has no hope of coming
out. ‘Eternal’ means to say ‘without hope.’ All suicides committed through despera-
tion bear witness to the reality of eternal hell as a state of the soul” (“Meditations on
the Tarot” 180).
The Horror of Being Oneself 143
2. This tenet is consciously and heretically appropriated from the popular Chris-
tian phrase “in, but not of,” which refers to several cross references in the Bible,
including John 8:23: “But he [Christ] continued, ‘You are from below; I am from above.
You are of this world; I am not of this world.’” Thus, this formulation aims to show
that although Cioran’s existential philosophy is based in and on the world, its impetus
stems from a place not of the (human) world, a place, we will soon show, of horror.
3. The task of this chapter is to provide a thematically driven analysis rather than
one inhered by sequential order, but the historicity of Cioran’s writing life is nonethe-
less important.
4. Cioran’s nihilistic oeuvre, infused with sophistical idiosyncrasies concerned
with the nature of non-being and the language of negation, holds a close relation to the
work of Gorgias, the Greek sophist known as “The Nihilist.” In On Non-Existence,
Gorgias developed three successive arguments. He held that nothing at all exists; if
existence is, then humans cannot apprehend it; and if one manages to apprehend
existence, it certainly cannot be communicated.
5. He also writes that “one always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a
name is to claim an exact mode of collapse” (Temptation 34).
6. Cf. Cioran: “I walk across the graveyard. There, under that stone, rests Truth;
nearby lies Beauty; not far, Thoroughness, and on top of a pile of slabs covering
delusions and hypotheses, the mausoleum of the Absolute: here lie the false consola-
tions and the misleading consolations of the soul. High above, quieter than silence,
hovers Error, stopping the wandering sophist dead in his tracks” (qtd. in Petreu 235).
7. Cf. “THE OBJECT OF ECSTASY IS THE ABSENCE OF AN OUTSIDE AN-
SWER. THE INEXPLICABLE PRESENCE OF MAN IS THE ANSWER THE WILL
GIVES ITSELF, SUSPENDED IN THE VOID OF UNKNOWABLE NIGHT” (qtd. in
Bataille Reader 45).
8. Though we should note she was also an immigrant from Eastern Europe.
9. We will return to this question of meontology later in the section entitled “Zen
Pessimism.”
10. Cf. “It remains for us to follow the path of facticity, while taking care to ensure
that its absolutization not lead back to a dogmatic thesis. . . . Our task was to uncover
an absolute that would not be an absolute entity. This is precisely what we obtain by
absolutizing facticity—we do not maintain that a determinate entity exists, but that it
is absolutely necessary that every entity might not exist. . . . There is no reason for
anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able not
to be and/or be able to be other than it is (After Finitude 60).
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11. Cf. “Cioran, unlike Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, or Dostoyevsky, did not want to go
anywhere. He didn’t try to liberate man or bring him back to a ‘right’ path. He consid-
ered with disdain the superman and he had no sympathy for underground men. He
didn’t try to give sense to the non-sensical. He didn’t know, but he didn’t want to
discover” (Finkenthal 147).
12. On the relation between the weird and veering, Roger Luckhurst articulates
that “the weird does necessarily need the apparatus of horror, then: it can manifest in
a waywardness that leaves the reader confounded at the slow mutation of the story
out of one horizon of expectation and into another” (“The Weird” 1050).
13. Cioran’s aphorisms and short essays hold a close relation to the work of Samuel
Beckett, whose modernist literary genius was fueled by minimalist expositions on
nothingness. Cioran’s work could be said to be a partial philosophical counterpart to
the work of Beckett, as the two were familiar with one another’s work, and yet there
remains a stark difference to their aesthetics. Whereas Beckett sometimes utilizes his
medium to invent esoteric mythologies, Ciroan seeks to create a non-mysticism, in
which he seeks to eliminate mystery rather than uncover it.
14. Cioran’s view on poetry is complicated but worthy of note, especially given the
fact that it holds a truthfulness for him that mysticism will not. He believes that
“poetry expresses the essence of what cannot be possessed. . . . The poet would be an
odious deserter of reality if in his flight he failed to take his suffering along. Unlike the
144 E. M. Cioran
mystic or the sage, he cannot escape himself, nor leave the stage of his own obsession”
(A Short History of Decay 98).
15. Here we can invoke Kristeva once again, as she writes, “There looms, within
abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that
seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the
possible, the tolerable, the thinkable . . . the abject has only one quality of the object—
that of being opposed to I” (1).
16. “Whatever puts me at odds with the world is consubstantial with myself. How
little I have learned from experience. My disappointments have always preceded me,”
writes Cioran (Anathemas 79).
17. Cf. Cioran writes: “What is injustice compared to disease? True, we may find it
unjust to be sick. Moreover that is how each of us reacts. . . . Sickness is: nothing more
real than disease. If we call it unjust, we must dare to do as much with Being itself—
we must speak, then, of the injustice of existing” (Trouble 189–90).
18. Bernard Williams identifies several of these systematic philosophers, writing,
“Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel are all on the same side, all believing in one way or
another that the universe or history or the structure of human reason can, when
properly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and human
aspirations” (Shame and Necessity 163).
19. One could speculate that the abortive utility of the Cioranian fragment holds a
close relation to his own biographical and intellectual history. In a 1983 interview with
Jason Weiss, Cioran provides an anecdote about a fit of despair he went through at age
twenty-two, after which his mother remarked that “had I known” he was going to be
so inundated with melancholy, “I would have had an abortion” (9). Cioran adds,
“That made an extraordinary impression on me. It didn’t hurt me, not at all. But later I
said, ‘That was very important. I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?’
Because, in effect, it’s all without substance” (9). Whether or not this experience serves
as an authorial impetus to his choice of the epigram, a mode known for its poetic yet
abrupt endings, is surely debatable. However, the autobiographical argument aside, it
undoubtedly serves an emblematic function.
20. Cf. “Involuntary access to ourselves, sickness compels us, condemns us to
‘profundity.’ The invalid? A metaphysician in spite of himself” (Cioran, All Gall 148).
21. Chapter 2 contains a more in-depth analysis of the nature of unreality in rela-
tion to the work of Thomas Ligotti.
22. Meher Baba continues: “When spiritual experience is described as mystical, one
should not assume that it is something supernatural or entirely beyond the grasp of
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human consciousness. All that is meant is that it is not accessible to the limited human
intellect until the intellect transcends its limits and is illumined by direct realization of
the Infinite. Jesus Christ pointed out the way to spiritual experience when He said,
‘Leave all and follow me.’ This means that man must leave limitations and establish
himself in the infinite life of God. A real spiritual experience involves not only realiza-
tion of the nature of the soul but also a right attitude toward worldly duties. If it loses
a connection with the different phases of life, what we have is neurotic reaction that is
far from being a spiritual experience” (6).
23. On this point, William Kluback notes that Cioranian pessimism is “a melan-
choly that gathers everything into indifference” (21).
24. Eugene Thacker notes that “Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for
its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too
impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about
mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed
mystics (“Cosmic Pessimism”).
25. Correlationism is defined as the view that thought cannot have access to a
reality of things-in-themselves, only to things as they appear to human beings. As the
editors of The Speculative Turn remark, “we only ever have access to the correlation
between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from one
another” (3).
The Horror of Being Oneself 145
26. In A Short History of Decay, Cioran writes that “the ideally lucid, hence ideally
normal, man should have no recourse beyond the nothing that is in him. . . . I can
imagine him saying: ‘Torn from the goal, from all goals, I retain, of my desires and my
displeasures, only their formulas. Having resisted the temptation to conclude, I have
overcome the mind, as I have overcome life itself by the horror of looking for an
answer to it” (7).
27. To a certain degree, we can claim to find in Cioran’s “obscure and old” two
chilling and yet beautifully insightful musings (we shall not go so far as to say they are
allusions) of an intergeneric kind: those which echo the Lovecraftian “Old Ones” (here
that one is an Old One unto oneself) and of Quentin Meillasoux’s exposition of the
“arche-fossil” (i.e., substantiation of what existed before the human being). Picking up
on this line of thought nearly thirty-five years before Meillasoux’s essential text After
Finitude, Cioran writes that “No variety of literary originality is still possible unless we
torture, unless we pulverize language. It proceeds differently if we abide by the ex-
pression of the idea as such. Here we find ourselves in an area where requirements
have not altered since the pre-Socratics” (29).
28. Cf. As Dienstag notes: “Aphorisms and pessimism are fitted to one another”
(Pessimism 227).
29. This sense of becoming metaphysically alien to oneself in order to keep oneself
in check is aphorized in “Tribulations of an Alien,” for example, when Cioran’s Alien
pronounces, “Release me from this shame of actions which makes me perform, every
morning, the farce of resurrection and, every night, that of entombment; in the inter-
val, nothing but this torment in the shroud of ennui. . . . I dream of wanting—and all I
want seems to me worthless. Like a vandal corroded by melancholy, I proceed with-
out a goal, self without a self, toward some unknown corner . . . in order to discover an
abandoned god, a god who is his own atheist, and to fall asleep in the shadow of his
last doubts and his last miracles” (A Short History of Decay 101).
30. Cf. “‘We suffer: the external world begins to exist’ . . . we suffer to excess: it
vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality” (Cioran, All Gall 33).
31. In his later writing, Cioran turns away from, as Zarifopol-Johnson calls it, “self-
revelatory” writing and moves into a highly stylistic mode of writing that is contin-
gent on the individuation of agony.
32. In H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (2004), S. T. Joshi writes that “Cosmicism is at once a
metaphysical position (an awareness of the vastness of the universe in both space and
time), an ethical position (an awareness of the insignificance of human beings within
the realm of the universe), and an aesthetic position (a literary expression of this
Copyright © 2020. Lehigh University Press. All rights reserved.
36. On the coinage and use of this new term in relation to the study of pessimism,
see the release entitled True Detection (2014).
37. . Cf. Cioran in All Gall is Divided: “Thought which liberates itself from all preju-
dice disintegrates, imitating the scattered coherence of the very things it would appre-
hend. With ‘fluid’ ideas we spread ourselves over reality, we espouse it; we do not
explicate it. Thus we pay dearly for the ‘system’ we have not sought” (33).
38. One will note Cioran’s critique of philosophy in The Trouble with Being Born:
“Philosophy is taught only in the agora, in a garden, or at home. The lecture chair is
the grave of philosophy, the death of any living thought, the dais is the mind in
morning” (188).
39. Cf. “A person who has the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophi-
cal system . . . can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he
sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is pos-
sessed” (Meditations on the Tarot 42–43).
40. Cioran’s early work, for instance, survives within the tradition of the “nihilism
of the great sophists” (Petreu 234), and, infused with sophistical idiosyncrasies con-
cerned with the nature of non-being and the language of negation, holds a close
relation to the work of Gorgias.
41. “Once we appeal to our most intimate selves,” Cioran writes, “we become
unconscious of our own gaps. . . . ‘Self-knowledge’? A contradiction in terms” (Trouble
35).
42. Cf. “No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist
activism” (Thacker, “Cosmic Pessimism” 66).
43. As we will see, this state of mind is a state of no-mind, a self-realized nothing-
ness as opposed to mere apathy or passive nihilism.
44. The usage of this term throughout the chapter can be thought of as a philoso-
phy of undoing and is not to be confused with the non-standard philosophy of
François Laruelle,
45. As Cioran sees it, “In this ‘great dormitory,’ as one Taoist text calls the universe,
nightmare is the sole method of lucidity” (All Gall 19).
46. In Dialogues with Scientists and Sages (1986), Renée Weber remarks that ultimate
reality in Buddhism is a state that, similar to Kant’s “noumenon,” is “beyond human
language and thought.” “It is from this level of wholeness,” she continues, “that true
compassion derives. Compassion—the central ethical value of Buddhism—is therefore
no mere emotion but rather a force that lies embedded in reality itself” (129).
47. Cf. Cioran: “If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return
Copyright © 2020. Lehigh University Press. All rights reserved.
to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis—the dream
of every consciousness sick of itself” (Trouble 212).
48. On the coinage and use of this new term in relation to the study of pessimism,
see True Detection (2014).
49. A Nietzschean move of this sort would thus view utter futility as essentially
productive (i.e., in a world with absolutely no hope, there is nothing that can harm
anyone any longer).
50. “Pejorative.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed August 30, 2015.
51. Cf. the Wu Xin Lun (On No Mind): “It is as if one were to see to the end of the
day, and still see not, because in the end there was no mind to see. It is as if hearing all
day to the end of day, still one hears not, because in the end there was no mind to hear.
It is as if one feels all day to the end of the day, and yet feels not, because in the end
there was no mind to feel. It is as if one knows all to the end of the day, and still knows
not, because in the end there was no mind to know. For no mind is indeed true mind.
True mind is indeed no mind” (qtd. in Saso 4–5).
52. This paradox, arising ex nihilo in the mind of the Zen pessimist, points to itself
as a double entendre: to ask nothing of anyone, that is, but their nothingness.
Afterword
Toward the Mystical Death of the Speculative Critic
arising from the alternating spheres of authorship and death, stems from
what we could call weird mysticism’s tragedy. Part of this tragedy may
derive from the fact that weird mysticism is ambivalent about ethics. But
we could also argue, by calling upon and then utilizing weird mysti-
cism’s central mode, negativity, as a praxis, that the opposite is in fact
true. On this point, the insightful words of Clarice Lispector come to
mind: “My spectacular and ongoing failure proves that the opposite ex-
ists: success” (A Breath of Life 66). The limit, therefore, might be overcome
by focusing on how performing criticism of this sort is a kind of mystical
death in and of itself, wherein the apophatic critic annihilates herself via a
weird, speculative criticism. Thus, the limit becomes the very method or
practice with which to overcome itself.
Keeping in mind Lispector’s negative logic discussed in chapter 1, let
us surmise that weird mysticism’s failure shares in this same premise. In
this indirect sense, weird mysticism’s tragedy can be directly related to
the notion of mystical death. Although the writers featured in this book
seek to blur the divisions between self/world and world/cosmos, it still
Toward the Mystical Death of the Speculative Critic 149
In these few final words, let us take the leap, then, and proffer, being
that a central tenet of mysticism is the death of self/ego/mind, that, on one
level mystical death is indeed itself quite tragic. The impact of weird
mysticism’s tragedy, mystical death, is that it gives us a context in which
ethics might happen, that is, it uncovers an ethical potentiality emerging
from a space of radical openness without any ideological commitments.
However, against the grain of traditional tragic discourse, the negativity
of mystical death inverts the horrible experience of ego death into an
imperturbable joy. And it is precisely here that our rainstick formulation
from the introduction comes full circle. This readerly joy is horror’s nega-
tive, the condition of possibility for an ethical love that is essentially and
properly human because it is divine. And this joy is divine because it is
also perfectly unhuman, devoid of the human error of being oneself. The
joy, then, contingent on one’s meeting with divine horror in the first
place, is therefore twice removed and yet two times as powerful. Divine
horror eviscerates human error simply by being itself, through the nega-
tivity of love. Weird mysticism must implore the tragic. This is the para-
dox of reaping a mystical death: that it will sow love. And so, we will
conclude, and so it goes, that death begins, which is also to say, ends, in
conversation with Love. 4
NOTES
1. Meher Baba beautifully articulates the notion of mystical death, noting that one
should “die such a death that you will not have to die again. Die, all of you, in the real
sense of the word so that you may live ever after” (“The Silence Begins” 643).
2. In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes contends that “the text needs its
shadow: this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts,
pockets, traces, necessary clouds” (32).
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Index
159
160 Index
Lovecraft, H. P., 16–17; and Bataille, 81; outsider, 11, 18, 107
and Cioran, 130–131; influence on
Ligotti, 30, 40 para-academia, 64, 99n1
Luckhurst, Roger, 66, 99n2, 100n10, paradox: Cioranian, 141; Bataillean, 64,
130, 143n12 73; in Zen, 139; “Moses paradox,”
luminous darkness, 52, 57 61n35; mystical, 11, 12, 13
perversion, 40, 99n2, 128;
madness, 29, 41, 56, 59n15, 73, 86, polymorphous, 88
101n25, 131, 145n34 pessimism, 18; cosmic, 112, 123, 124,
Mainländer, Phillip, 49 127, 131, 132; existential, 29, 47, 49,
malignant uselessness, 49, 120 53; metaphysical, 105; Nietzschean,
Masciandaro, Nicola, 18, 29, 50, 52, 69 115–116; Zen pessimism, 133,
McGinn, Bernard, 9, 15, 26, 60n28 138–142
meaning event, 14 Plotinus, 133, 145n35
Meditations on the Tarot, 20, 142n1, poet-philosopher, 111
146n39 poiesis, 75, 83
Meister Eckhart, 37, 61n37, 92, 107 Porete, Marguerite, 26, 87
Meillassoux, Quentin, 17, 109, 121, post-structuralism: Bataille and, 63–64
125–126, 126, 145n27 principium individuationis, 136
meontology, 109, 133, 134, 135 purgative contemplation, 47, 48, 49
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 25
monster, 17, 23n11, 25, 33, 94 Rabiʿah al-Basri, 150n4
mushin. See no-mind Radcliffe, Ann, 77–78
mystical death, 2, 4, 147 rainstick formulation, 12–13, 150
mystical poetry, 83–75 Richman, Michèle H., 99n8
mystical Love, 13, 14–15, 50, 98, 150, Ricoeur, Paul, 27
150n4 Rimbaud, Arthur, 86, 88
Mystical Theology. See Dionysius the Roudinesco, Élisabeth, 40
Areopagite Rubenstein, Mary-Jane, 11, 38
ruins, 53, 55–56, 64, 105–106
Negarestani, Reza, 19
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negation, 18, 34, 113, 126; logic of, 7, 28, sanctues divinae, 3
37, 48, 108 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 101n25, 112
New Weird, 30, 58n6, 58n8 satori, 139, 140
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 71, 73, 79, 113, Scaligero, Maximo, 59n10
115–116, 123, 133 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 105, 118,
nihilism, 106, 143n4 135–137
no-mind, 108, 134, 146n43 self-dissolution, 76, 95, 148
non-action, 140, 142 self-endurance, 103
non-being. See meontology Sells, Michael T., 14, 38, 87
nouminous life, 54–56 shadow, 51, 56, 60n24, 148; and
Noys, Benjamin, 71, 74; “horror Pseudo-Dionysius, 37, 38
temporis,” 42; “labor of the Shipley, Gary L., 131
negative,” 8, 22n2 sickness : Cioranian understanding of,
112–116; Julian of Norwich, 47;
ontology, 27, 31, 57n3, 82, 125, 134, 135 Ligottian, 46; Nietzschean
Original Mind, 138 understanding of, 116
Orr, Gregory, 85 Sickness Unto Death, 94
Otto, Rudolf, 54–55 Silesius, Angelus, 107
162 Index
163