Introduction
“La ‘notte oscura’ di San Juan de la Cruz” by Giorgio Agamben appeared for the first and only time in 1974 as an introduction to Agamben's translation, from Spanish into Italian, of the poems of the sixteenth-century, Spanish mystic San Juan de la Cruz. Out of print, it is cited only rarely by Italian scholars. Almost completely absent from any Anglo-American library collection, it has escaped Agamben's post–Homo Sacer fame abroad, and its existence is practically unknown. Yet this early, heterogeneous, sometimes even wordy piece—Agamben's style is here still far from his later gnomic clarity—deserves new attention today for three reasons: it provides Agamben's early interpretation of mysticism and negative theology through a discussion of San Juan's texts; it traces, in the footnotes, the genealogical relationship between the mystical tradition and modern European philosophy, an implicit cornerstone of Agamben's whole philosophy; and with a sudden turn, it gives a fascinating interpretation of modern European and American poetry as a radicalized and secularized version of mystical theology.
Agamben's reflections in this text focus for the most part on San Juan's mystical theology. This is perhaps Agamben's most explicit confrontation with the mystical tradition, and it is worth noting how early it took place in his career (four years after his first book, The Man without Content [1970], and three years before the book that made him well known in Italy, Stanze [Stanzas; 1977]). What interests Agamben in 1974 about mysticism and will never stop interesting him is San Juan's most basic, revolutionary move: against scholasticism and positive theology, San Juan shows that mystical theology cannot be a science. As Plato claims in “Epistle VII,” a text that Agamben cites here for the first time but that will appear again and again throughout his works (e.g., in Potentialities [27–38] and in What Is Philosophy? [37–90]): “this is absolutely not a communicable discipline like others” (Plato 341c). And this is because the mystical experience for San Juan is not an illumination that leads to knowledge but rather a complete and utter obfuscation and dispossession, a not-knowing. Then, to reach God through such an experience means to reach nothingness, to confront the paradox of “a kind of presence that cannot be distinguished in any way from an absence.” San Juan has here discovered—Agamben claims—the “power of the negative.”
Indeed, in the first part of the introduction, the one more rigorously focused on San Juan, Agamben delivers a whole other “essay” in the footnotes: first by comparing San Juan's idea of the “dark night” to that of “non-reading” in Simone Weil, another great thinker mostly absent from Agamben's works, but on whose political philosophy he had written his dissertation and who makes here a sudden but telling appearance; and then through a long note in which he analyzes Georges Bataille's Hegelian absolutization of San Juan's negative theology. It is in the light of the latter, fascinating comparison that Agamben posits San Juan as a precursor of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his “power of the negative,” the dialectic. Agamben is here tracing, in implicit but very clear terms, a genealogy of nihilism that extends from Pseudo-Dionysus's negative theology, through San Juan, to Hegel, and finally to Bataille. Influenced very strongly by Friedrich Nietzsche and by Martin Heidegger's analysis of nihilism, a constant of Italian twentieth-century philosophy (Heidegger; Cantarano), Agamben returns here to his own discussion of nihilism in L'uomo senza contenuto (The Man without Content), where he had recognized modern art as nihilistic precisely through a reading of Hegel (79–87); at the same time, he looks forward to his understanding of nihilism as the very essence of Western metaphysics in Il linguaggio e la morte (Language and Death; 1982).
This relationship to Agamben's early works becomes even clearer in the second part of the introduction. Here, the article pivots—this time explicitly—toward a discussion of the uncanny proximity between San Juan's mystical experience and the experience of modern European and American poetry. Agamben argues that modern poetry from the first industrial revolution onward has also, as in the case of philosophy in Bataille, become a negative theology of an absolute kind. Poetry has become “a technique for producing ecstasies,” in Ezra Pound's formulation, but he cites in this regard poets such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, Eugenio Montale, T. S. Eliot, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, and Laura Riding. But while mystics still had a holy scripture to which they could refer, a God to whom the ecstasy could lead, modern poetry knows no scripture but itself, no epiphany but that of the text. Lost in a game of linguistic ruins, modern poetry evokes, in various forms, the “ungraspable,” the unnameable—one might say the “unsayable”—which, however, dissolves itself at the same moment in which it is conjured up in the text. Agamben seems to reinterpret here the famous study by Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (The Structure of Modern Poetry [1956]), a classic of European scholarship. Friedrich's main argument was that from Baudelaire onward, modern poetry showed a fundamental tendency toward what he called “leere Transzendenz” (“empty transcendence”), a transcendence without object (61–64; 41–43). But Agamben reads this emptiness ontologically: if in The Man without Content it was modern art that had become “only a negation that negates itself, a self-annihilating nothing” (56), here it is poetry that has absorbed the nihilistic objective of “Western culture.”
For readers of Agamben more familiar with his interventions on poetry and poetic theory, such a claim will sound extreme and almost despairing. Indeed, what this introduction to San Juan's poems shows is an utter ambiguity, in Agamben, about nihilism and one of its original figures: mysticism. As he implies in the conclusion, even in San Juan's “naive language,” something is preserved and left unthought, perhaps precisely the simplicity of a language emptied of its own ecstatic pretentions: language as such. This ambiguity is slowly resolving itself in Agamben's later texts. As he claims, for example, in one of his most recent books, Quando la casa brucia (When the House Burns Down [2020]), “Non si tratta di introdurre nel pensiero la nebulosità della mistica, ma, proprio al contrario, di afferrare per la prima volta che cosa è in gioco nell'esperienza che definiamo con quel nome e che non è in verità nulla di vago” (“The point is not to introduce into thinking the cloud of mysticism but exactly the opposite: to grasp for the first time what is at stake in the experience we recognize by that name, which is, in truth, the opposite of obscure” [85; my trans.]).
The first problem that these poems pose to their reader is that they are presented as “extravagant figures and similes”Footnote 1 in the context of a mystical experience. The author refers to this experience with the words dark night and mystical theology. At various times in his works, San Juan explains what these expressions mean. “The contemplation through which,” we read in The Ascent of Mount Carmel,
the intellect has the highest knowledge of God is called mystical theology, meaning the secret wisdom of God, for it is secret to the very intellect that receives it. For this reason, St. Dionysius calls it a ray of darkness and speaking of it the prophet Baruch says, There is no one who knows her ways nor who could conceive them (Bar. 3.23). To reach union with God the intellect must obviously blind itself to all the paths along which it can travel. Aristotle teaches that just as the sun is total darkness to the eyes of a bat, so the brightest light in God is total darkness to our intellect. And he teaches in addition that the more elevated and clear the things of God, the more unknown and obscure they are to us.Footnote 2
According to San Juan's account, that “experimental knowledge of God,” which should correspond according to popular opinion to the mystical state, not only does not appear as an enlightening but is not, in a proper sense, a knowing. It is not an experience of appropriation or habitus but one of dispossession and alienation; not illumination, but obfuscation; not a marching forward into clarity and riches, but a sinking and running aground into blindness and darkness.Footnote 3
For this reason, San Juan distinguishes mystical (or negative) theology from scholastic (or positive) theology and, in one of the poems translated here, opposes the oxymoron of “knowing without knowing” and of “not understanding by understanding” to the arguments of the sages. For him, there cannot be gnosis (knowledge), a science of mystical truths analogous to positive theology. Actually, he takes so seriously the evangelical teaching, according to which “whosoever will save his life shall lose it,” that he pushes his denuding and expropriating methodology to the point of rejecting every edifying and positive aspect of the Christian doctrine (in the visionary geography of his psycho-cosmic mountain—namely, Mount Carmel—the Christian consuelo [solace] and ciencia [science] lie on the paths of imperfection) and of claiming that, with regards to Christ, we need to imitate the moment of privation, of disgust, of anxiety, and of the lama sabachthani [why hast Thou forsaken me].
One of the most tenacious misunderstandings that weighs on mystical experience—namely, theosophic esoterism (according to which the mystical experience would be a secret science or doctrine)—is thus rejected from the beginning, since “secret wisdom” means, first of all, for San Juan, that “this wisdom is secret to the very intellect that receives it.” On this point, what Plato wrote in the Seventh Letter concerning his philosophical teachings also applies to San Juan: “On this topic, there does not exist, nor will ever exist, any treatise of mine, for this is absolutely not a communicable discipline like others but rather, after many discussions on these issues and after a long living together, it suddenly springs forth in the soul, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and nourishes itself thereafter.”
From this perspective, the symbols that the mystics sometimes use do not appear as ciphers of a secret science, but rather as the imitation of opacity itself, whose proper reading would consist in understanding that no reading of them is possible. And this applies, according to what little we know, to the simple objects that appear in the mysteric initiations of antiquity as much as to the emblems and incongruous metaphors of alchemy, to the ambiguous material density [spessore materico] of gnostic rituals and images as well as to the poetic tropes in which San Juan tries to crystallize his stations through the dark night. Symbols, according to Bachofen's felicitous expression, “rest in themselves”; they are saturated and filled with nothingness and do not refer to any hidden truth.Footnote 4
The paradox of mystical theology is precisely this: that, insofar as it is opacity and integral dispossession, the final experience that it implies is the purely negative one of a kind of presence that cannot be distinguished in any way from an absence; in the proper sense, this experience is not a theology (a science of God), but a theo-alogy [teo-alogia], which reaches a final unknowability, or at least, a knowing but only through darkening and negation. It achieves an appropriation whose object is the Inappropriable itself and that is not possible, therefore, to substantiate in a positive doctrinal habitus, but can only be metaphorized and alluded to through oxymora, catachreses, and other “extravagant figures and similes.”Footnote 5
The central metaphor of San Juan's poetry, that of the “dark night,” alludes precisely to this opaque and negative character of mystical experience. San Juan's model—also regarding this image, as well as the very term “mystical theology”—must be searched for in that unknown genius who, under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, has provided for centuries the starting point to every negative theology and every mystagogy, and whose writings were considered, throughout the Middle Ages, as holy scriptures, and were passed down, through Marsilio Ficino's version, to Renaissance humanism.Footnote 6
San Juan's “dark night” is not, however, only a metaphor but also a camino, an itinerary that, in its gradus, delineates, albeit negatively, a doctrine of the powers of the souls [potenze dell'anima] and a full and articulate psychology. As such, it has two parts: the first corresponds to the sensitive sphere (the night of the senses), and it is a privation and mortification of all the appetites that arise from the five senses, each of which must be darkened in its specific power in order to return to the soul its original nudity. Regarding the second part of this itinerary into the shadows, the night of the spirit, San Juan recovers the Augustinian list of the three powers of the soul (which Saint Augustine considered, in his De Trinitate, as a reflection of the holy Trinity within the human being): intellectus, memoria, voluntas [intellect, memory, will]. To each of these “powers” [potenze] corresponds, for San Juan, a theological virtue: faith to the intellect, hope to memory, charity to the will. But, through a bold overturning of positive theology, the theological virtues are understood by San Juan as powers of obfuscation and negation, and not as instruments of edification: “The three theological virtues all produce a void in the powers of the soul: faith causes void and darkness in the intellect; hope begets a void of every possession in the memory; and charity produces a void and nakedness of every affection and joy in the will” (SMC, II, 6). Exposing themselves to the action of these nullifying virtues, each of the powers of the soul achieves that integral dispossession from its “properties” (apprehensions for the intellect, memories for the power of memory, and passions or affections for the will), in which the experience of the dark night consists.Footnote 7
At this point, it is worth paying particular attention to the exposition San Juan devotes to the night of memory, since it will be possible to raise the issue, which I believe has never been raised, of the relationship between San Juan's mystical experience and the art of memory [letteratura mnemotecnica], a discipline that cannot be separated from the psychology of his time.Footnote 8
San Juan could not certainly ignore the ars memorativa that the two great Dominican and Franciscan religious orders had promoted. The chapters (SMC, III, 11–15) in which he guides memory through the dark night, “beyond its limits and natural frame, raising it above itself—namely, above all distinct knowledge and apprehensible possession in supreme hope for the incomprehensible God,” can be actually considered as a straightforward manual of the art of memory, but turned upside down; in its thorough articulations, it repeats the mnemotechnic cataloguing of the contents of memory. However, while the ars memorativa aimed at the appropriation and mastering of all memory contents, San Juan's technique is turned, in the opposite direction, towards their expropriation. “The spiritual person,” he writes (SMC, III, 2),
should take this precaution: do not store any objects of hearing, sight, smell, taste, or touch in the memory, but let them immediately fall into oblivion; and attain this, if necessary, with all the industry that others exert in remembering them, so that no trace or figure of them remains in the memory, as if they had never been in the world, leaving the memory free and disencumbered, unattached to any earthly or heavenly consideration, letting it freely lose itself in oblivion. …
But the night of memory is not as opposed to the art of memory, as it might seem at first sight. In Ramon Llull's and Giordano Bruno's magico-mystical interpretation of it, the art of memory did not aim at the mere remembrance of information and memories recorded in the memory. But rather, through the manipulation of appropriate talismanic images and seals, its aim was the ordering and unification of all psychic content in a single harmonic image and global memory, which corresponds to an absolute psychic presence that is no longer exposed to the fragility and dispersion of single memories and single pieces of information. Similarly, the night of memory aims, in a certain sense, at the liberation of memory from those memories and pieces of information that could “distract” it from its proper end. But while the art of memory—from what at least we can sense of its final end—sets as its scope a global appropriation of the self and a strengthening of its psychic presence, the night of memory aims instead at a mystical memory, at a memoria dei (memory of God) that sustains itself on oblivion and does not ground any possession or habitus (habit). San Juan defines this mystical use of memory when he speaks of a type of memory that has been transformed in God—that is to say, one that is no longer a conscious and voluntary disposition of memories, but a sudden and involuntary motion of the memory operated by God: a remembering without remembering that breaks memory and, at the same time, raises it beyond itself. “For this reason,” he writes in SMC, III, 2, “all the operations of the memory in this state are divine. Because since God now possesses the powers of the soul as their complete Lord, through their transformation in him, he himself divinely moves and commands them according to his divine spirit and will.” In this sense, the mystical memory of San Juan is rather more similar to that memoire involontaire and those intermittences du cœur, to which Proust entrusted the evocation of impressions freed from time and the apprehension, in the imponderable moment in which the ecstatic epiphany takes place, of the inaccessible essence of reality.
The second problem that San Juan's poems pose to their reader is that of the particular relationship that ties the modern poetic experience to the “dark night” of the mystical experience. For reasons that it would be impossible to reconstruct in this paper, modern poetry (that is, from the first industrial revolution onward) has been hastily pursuing, but in reverse, the adventurous path that had led, through a centuries-long process of secularization [laicizzazione], from the ritual to literature. Thus, modern poetry has positioned itself, with always more rigor, as the privileged place, if not the only one, for the theophanic experience of the Absolute, coming to conceive of itself as a technique for producing epiphanies, according to the formula that Pound summarized most precisely when he wrote that “great art is made to call forth, or create, an ecstasy.” However, through this mystical tension, modern poetry fatally found itself in the paradoxical situation of having a ritual, but one that is split from any positive mythology, and of having a liturgy, but one to which no definite theology corresponds, something like—to be clear—an absolute negative theology, whose ecstatic experiences cannot lead to any recognizable epiphany of the divine.
The thrill of a new divine birth that runs through modern poetry, from the Bacchic evocation of Hölderlin's Brot und Wein to the Dionysian epiphany of Pound's Canto II, never led to any nameable figure of the divine, and all the efforts of the poets to arrive at a new and common mythology have failed. With his new Christology, Hölderlin reached, perhaps, the threshold of a new theophanic announcement, but in the end he remains nonetheless the poet of the “absence of God that helps,” in whose last hymns it is already possible to glimpse the terrifying presence of the angel who imposes death in the first Duino Elegy. In the same way, in Novalis's aspiration for a transfiguration of the world into Fable (in which already Hoffman had seen a demonic component), it is not completely clear whether the nocturnal initiation ritual manages to secure the soteriological mechanism and to give life to a new mythology, or whether it remains, instead, a purely individual, subterranean experience without redemption. Other projects did not reach a better outcome, neither Blake's attempt to reformulate the divine names in the apocalyptic light of the revolution, nor Yeats's announcement of a “second coming,” which was based on Blavatskij's ambiguous theosophical ideology.
The Neos Dionysos [young Dionysus] of modern poetry is not the White Goddess, whose cult Graves identified with the wellspring of poetry (even if this is the goddess that grants the initiation death, infernal kore or Inanna-Salome of the Seven Veils), nor is it any other luminous and nameable divinity (even if under the cover of a senhal). Rather, it is a dark and obfuscating presence, unnameable and ignominious, whose epiphany is necessarily broken up and stuttering, and regarding which it is not even possible to say whether it is a divine apparition or a demonic emblem. As Rilke wrote in a letter to Ilse Jahr, “The abyss between us and God is full of God's darkness, and when one experiences it, he must climb down and howl in it (which is more necessary than crossing over it).”
The fleeting epiphanies, to whose evocation the modern poet entrusts his own craft and salvation, are therefore at best the flickering of an estranged amulet, to which shreds and slags of a cult, whose sense is lost or still to be found, remain hanging for a second (as in the case of Montale). It can take the form of a reduction to the debris and rubble of myths and divine figures belonging to the tradition (as in the late Pound); or a parodic and broken allusion to rituals and symbols deprived of meaning (as in Eliot or in Pound's Mauberley); and, in every case, a summoning of the Ungraspable (be it Baudelaire's and Rimbaud's heavenly-infernal Beauty or Mallarmé's Absolute, be it Rilke's Angel or Celan's “Medusa's head”), which dissolves itself in the same instant in which it shows itself, in the desperate awareness that the poetic epiphany does not have any other content but itself and its own inevitable shipwreck. If this condition of opacity of modern poetry is precisely what grounds the proximity and the relevance [attualità]Footnote 9 of the word that proclaims the “dark night” of mystical experience, it also marks the very limit that divides the two experiences.
Indeed, San Juan's mystical theology still presupposes the existence of a positive theology and of a Holy Scripture, from which it derives its own legitimacy and guarantee. Modern poetry, instead, does not recognize any other holy scripture but itself. For this reason, modern poetry—insofar as it is its own, sole guarantor—has been fatally led to question its own limits and its own adequacy and to search in its own incessant, ironic, and sacrificial self-negation for the only valid guarantee of its own authenticity (Rimbaud's silence and the question of consistency raised by Laura Riding are only the extreme forms of this process). But for San Juan the problem of the adequacy of poetry to the mystical experience could not be posed in these terms precisely because, since poetry at the time had not yet acquired a religious meaning per se and since it had not yet taken on the impossible task of being at the same time the ritual and the guarantee of the theophany, he had never believed in its adequacy. For this reason, San Juan can entrust to poetry a task that transcends it without despairing of it; and this also explains why he does not need to make use of obscure expressions and agudezas [witticisms], which a few years later would guarantee the language of Culteranismo poetry, and why he can instead utilize a relatively naive language, in which one can glimpse an echo of popular songs and of the Castilian coplas and glosas.Footnote b
Apart from a few exceptions, the modern poet cannot regain such a trust in “naive” language except in bad faith. Therefore, the two alternatives available to a translator who seriously wishes to give a modern equivalent of San Juan's experience are either the parody of the text or its reduction to ruins. It has been preferred, for obvious reasons, to limit ourselves to giving nothing more than a reading aid, in parallel to a text in which, perhaps for the first time so explicitly, the experience of poetry fused itself, albeit only in the form of “extravagant figures and similes,” to that of the sovereign theopathic nudity in the transfiguring, nuptial night.
