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       “From within the shelter of a juridical and formalist rationalism, we similarly construct ourselves an image of the world and of society where all difficulties are subject to an artificial logic, and we do not realize that the universe is no longer composed of the objects of which we speak.”

        Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

Upon returning from New York, Lévi-Strauss hesitated. Would he choose a new field? Oceania was conceivable. Would he provide a sequel to The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that could contend with some of the more complex structures evoked in the dissertation? Such a project would have been a link in a chain capable of connecting to our own civil organizations, and its aim would have been sociological. Elaborated over a dozen years, his choice was entirely different, and the nature and consequences of this decision are still poorly understood today. It is true that there was no place for it in the geography of fieldwork, nor was there one to be found on the map of acquired knowledges and disciplinary practices.

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A late morning in May 1999––the grassy area around the emergency ward where visitors had been waiting in little groups is now empty and burned by the sun, while the narrow hallway of the prefabricated ER building is packed with patients and their families waiting their turn to be received by the psychiatrist on call. Roqiya arrives late, escorted by her father. Cutting across the thick line of patients, she approaches the head nurse at the reception counter and demands to see "her doctor, " Dr. N. The head nurse tells her that she'll have to come back another day, she doesn't have an appointment in "post-cure," and she doesn't seem to be in need of urgent care. Her father comes up to the counter to plead; he looks old and exhausted, says that they have come from far away, have traveled since dawn in a long-distance bus. A nurse recognizes the young woman: She's been hospitalized here before. She comes from the backcountry, a village next to Sidi Slimane, in the Gharb region; a familiar face. By complete chance Dr. N. happens to be walking through the hallway; I am with him, and we are in the middle of talking. He sees her. "An old patient, " he tells me. "She's come a long distance; we can't send her back."

I

Much later, this text is written in the margin of her sayings, on that day and many other days, over the span of the several months I met with her, her psychiatrist, and her family, on the grounds of that hospital in Morocco. It is written in the interstices of her recitations, recollections, and silences, in the hiatuses of the biographical, medical, and juridical narratives that were and could be told of her, attempting to register in the writing, as well as in the analytic reflection, as a form of listening and of response, the impact of her presence and her absence, and the enigma of what she calls her madness.

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On March 29, 1984, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) was officially inducted into the French Academy as a new "Immortal." He had resigned as the president of Senegal four years before, in 1980, and had returned to what he had always considered to be his real life, that of a poet. In the inaugural speech he gave to welcome the Senegalese among the members of the Academy, Edgar Faure saluted him as a kind of poet-philosopher-king in the following words:

        [You are one of those who think that poets, because they are visionaries, are suited to lead peoples' destinies in times of mutation, when the movement of History is so fast that the only way to go along is to precede it.]

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In this essay I wish to explore the relationship between angst and abandonment (Gelassenheit) in the speculative mystic thought that harks back to Meister Eckhart, comes to fruition in the experience of baroque mysticism––especially in authors like Jean Joseph Surin––and more generally returns in a secularized or postsecularized form in contemporary Heideggerian philosophy. Common to the speculative form of mystic experience is the awareness that existence––nature as a whole––must be lived in light of loss and mourning. "The mournful has the feeling that it is known comprehensively by the unknowable. To be named––even if the name giver is god-like and saintly––perhaps always brings with it a presentment of mourning.” This experience of mourning brings the question of salvation down to the level of the history of the subject.

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"We're splinters & mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes," wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary. We should pause over the two terms neatly joined by Woolf’s ampersand, for they suggest different, perhaps antithetical, ways of thinking about the self. A mosaic, after all, is precisely an arrangement of "splinters," an assembly of fragments into a new totality or consistency. Today we might see in that difference an index of contrasting aspects of Woolf's own writing-identity: stylistic innovation on the one hand, personal fragmentation on the other. But Woolf's sense, at least in her diary note, of the difference between an outdated "whole" self and a modern fragmentary one is not an anxious but an enthusiastic, almost jubilant one. The demise of the "monolithic" Victorian ego was, in her eyes, something to be celebrated, for it corresponded to a liberation from the "ill-fitting vestments" of nineteenth-century prose, with its conventional structures of plot, character, and "plausibility" tailor-made to constrict or misrepresent reality and falsify the "myriad impressions" of the human psyche.

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The major contribution of recent recognition literature to debates about the political status of difference is its argument that the political subject is not empty and universal but raced, classed, and gendered. Much of this literature works from a theory of subjectivity that draws on Hegel's response in the Phenomenology of Spirit to Fichte's theory of subjectivity and develops a politics concomitant with it. While different readings of Hegel's argument have produced conflicting analyses of and prescriptions for recognition politics, the literature shares a reliance on Hegel's text to ground the claim that political recognition of difference has an impact on subject formation.

Discussions of difference and politics have gone through several terminological shifts. In the 1980s liberal versus communitarian disputes engaged the problem through the relationship between individuals and communities. While this language yielded in the 1990s to that of claims made on the basis of "culture" and "identity," the critical problem of politically recognizable difference remained more or less unchanged.

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A Sea Change in Modern Culture

The year 1922 marks an important date in Western culture: in that year Doctor Hans Prinzhorn published Bildnerei der Geister kranken––translated into English as Artistry of the Mentally III––in which he reproduced and analyzed 187 of the more than five thousand paintings, drawings, and carvings he had collected from various asylums in and around Heidelberg, mostly from patients diagnosed as schizophrenic. While psychiatrists before him had occasionally published paintings and drawings of their patients, analyzing them for purposes of psychiatric diagnosis, Prinzhorn found that he could not identify the mental disorders of inmates from the types of images they made. Prinzhorn had first gotten a degree in art history before becoming a psychiatrist; in his study of the works he had collected, he identified six basic drives or urges that give rise to image making: an expressive urge, the urge to play, an ornamental urge, an ordering tendency, a tendency to imitate, and the need for symbols. These six instinctual drives are not concerned with survival and socialization, but with expression and creativity, which are, he concluded, innate to human nature.

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