The Decolonial Abyss

Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins

An Yountae

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780823273096
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The Decolonial Abyss probes the ethico-political possibility harbored in Western philosophical and theological thought for addressing the collective experience of suffering, socio-political trauma, and colonial violence. In order to do so, it builds a constructive and coherent thematization of the somewhat obscurely defined and underexplored mystical figure of the abyss as it occurs in Neoplatonic mysticism, German Idealism, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy.The central question An Yountae raises is, How do we mediate the mystical abyss of theology/philosophy and the abyss of socio-political trauma engulfing the colonial subject? What would theopoetics look like in the context where poetics is the means of resistance and survival? This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the abyss as the dialectical process in which the self's dispossession before the encounter with its own finitude is followed by the rediscovery or reconstruction of the self.

1. Situating the Self in the Abyss

Since its inception in the Neoplatonic tradition, the abyss points primarily to the gap between the world and the radically transcendent God. At the same time, the abyss also denotes the internal crack within the self, that is, the irrevocable inner gap splitting the self. As David Coe tells us, for Augustine, the abyss was “related to the inwardness of man’s soul, to his freedom to choose his own concerns, and to his openness to the possibilities before him.”1 This gap is not pertinent only to the human soul or self. It also indicates the inner fissure within Godself, that is the hiddenness of God from Godself, as Luther would say, or the groundlessness (Ungrund) inscribed in God before God emerges as Godself (Boehme and Schelling).

The Oxford English Dictionary defines abyss as the bottomless chasm that bears a direct association with the primal formless chaos and the subterranean source of water in ancient Hebrew cosmology. Its archaic form, abysm, was borrowed from the Old French abisme, which means a very deep hole. While the Latin root of abisme is the vulgar term abismus, it was later replaced by the late Latin abyssus, which comes from the Greek word abyssos, signifying bottomlessness (a = without, byssos = bottom), the unfathomed, boundless, and great deep.2 However, the abyss has often been conflated with the void or nothing, and these two concepts need to be distinguished from each other. The OED defines void as an adjective indicating vacancy, the state of being unoccupied (either by a person or by any other visible content), empty, lacking, destitute of, and deprived of. The notion of the void plays an important role in shaping ancient Greek cosmology through the debates among the atomists in pre-Socratic philosophy. Represented by Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, the atomists viewed the universe as composed of being and nonbeing, that is, body and void.3 For the atomists, the void can mean both the “space” of emptiness and emptiness itself. But void does not simply denote the “unoccupied space” separating bodies. Rather, for Epicurus, the term refers to “intangible substance” (ἀναφὴς φύσις, anaphes phusis) “surrounding the distinct, constantly moving atoms,”4 without which “bodies would not have anywhere to be or to move through as they are observed to move.”5 The Latin etymological root of void, vacuus, also means the state of being empty, occupied, and nothingness. In this sense, void is close to nothing, the state of having no part, share, or quantity of a thing. If nothing points to the null state of existence, whether a person or a thing/matter, void presumes a previously occupied or filled state, if not an expectation of presence. While nothing can be free of value and affect, void may imply a sense of intense frustration caused by an unexpected or unforeseeable emptiness. Contrastingly, abyss indicates a sense of indeterminacy in which the rigid boundary between the finite and the infinite, presence and absence, no longer holds.

The often puzzling relation or overlap between abyss and void finds its theological ground in the very first chapter of Genesis. The long-standing tradition of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) has, for millennia, dominated the popular theological imagination with its interpretation of the tohu-vabohu (formless and void) state of precreation as “nothing.” Denouncing Western theology’s negligence of, or rather deep-seated aversion to, darkness/chaos, the interstitial tehom of Genesis 1:2, Catherine Keller helps us distinguish tehom as the abyss, the primal chaos of creation, from the notion of the void as mere nothing: “A churning, complicated darkness was wedged right between the two verses . . . ‘in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’ and ‘God said: let there be light . . .’ This interstitial darkness refuses to disappear. It refuses to appear as nothing, as vacuum, as mere absence.”6 Despite the dominant theology’s consistent attempts to nullify it, the abyss, Keller tells us, survives.7

The polysemic nature of the abyss figures prominently in the long history of mystical literature. If Pizarnik’s abyss points unidirectionally at absence, or what Grace Jantzen calls the “nihilistic abyss,” the long history of the Western mystical tradition testifies to the more complex meaning of the term, which often associates bottomlessness with an overwhelming ravishment .8 The sixteenth-century French mystic Francois-Louis Blosius describes the abyss as a space of unfathomable potential in which the ecstatic experience of the union with the divine takes place:

For when, through love, the soul goes beyond all works of the intellect and all images in the mind . . . it flows into God. . . . The loving soul, as I have said, flows out of itself, and completely swoons away; and, as if brought to nothing, it sinks down into the abyss of the divine love, where, dead to itself, it lives in God, knowing nothing, feeling nothing, save only the love that it experiences. It loses itself in the infinite solitude and darkness of the Godhead; but so to lose itself is rather to find itself.9

Although this mystical union signals unfathomable abundance, it is first characterized by infinite solitude and darkness. Plunging into the abyss thus involves facing the negative experience of loss, which is followed by the rewarding realization of the self’s truth, that finding the self in God (union with God) necessarily involves the loss of the self.10 In this sense, the abyss indicates double movement: loss and discovery; dissolution of the self followed by replenishment of the self. It signifies both lack and abundance.

The imagery of the abyss as overwhelming plentitude and bliss figures perhaps most prominently in the writings of the thirteenth-century Belgian mystic and poet Hadewijch. The main theme of Hadewijch’s poetry is love between the lover (herself) and her object (God); the poems are filled with the joys and frustrations of longing for her object of love. Thus it is not surprising that she associates the abyss with love: “O Beloved, why has love not sufficiently overwhelmed you and engulfed you in her abyss? Alas! when Love is so sweet, why do you not fall deep into her? And why do you not touch God deeply enough in the abyss of his Nature, which is so unfathomable?”11 As the unfathomable depth of and within love, the abyss is the indefinite possibility of renewal in love:

My soul melts away

In the Madness of Love

The abyss into which she hurls me

Is deeper than the sea

For Love’s new deep abyss

Renews my wound.12

At times hinting at a positive meaning, at times signifying the negative, the abyss implies both, and neither. It is the space or state of ultimate indeterminacy. But this is not a static space or state in which one is perpetually trapped in-between. My reading suggests that the one who encounters the abyss is the self in its movement or “passage.” In other words, the abyss is inseparably connected to what I call the movement of passage, that is, the self’s passage into and out of the abyss: from loss to possibility, from finitude to infinity. Meanwhile, the trope of the abyss has long been popular in the philosophical and literary traditions. This is because the figure of the abyss creates mystical repercussions in a wide range of contexts in which the finitude of human existence is experienced. The trope of the abyss employed by novelists and philosophers, for instance, resonates with that employed by theologians.

The Philosophical investigation of the abyss shares a similar concern or ground with theology. In both cases, the abyss indicates the indeterminate—if not finite—structure of being, the precariousness of the human epistemological and ontological foundation. What sparks my interest, then, is the use of this trope to describe the concrete sociopolitical situation of human existence that is “the lived experience” of the body. The Brazilian ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara uses the trope of the abyss to describe the vulnerable matrix of our existence, where systematic, everyday evil and good are “inextricably present and commingled in our own bodies.”13 Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel also uses the trope of the abyss when narrating the horrifying experience of deportation to the concentration camp: “We were still trembling, and with every screech of the wheels, we felt the abyss opening beneath us. Unable to still our anguish, we tried to reassure each other.”14 I wonder, here, about the intriguing connection between the mystical experience and the experience of suffering born at this juncture. The common ground that these two different experiences share in the space of groundlessness is perhaps the failure of language to name the overwhelming nature of this indeterminacy. But in another context the abyss also becomes the womb of creative potential, as it bears witness to the resilient spirit that strives to speak the unspeakable. What lies at the intersection between the desperate attempt to name the unnameable name of God and the desperate attempt to express the agony born in the context of traumatic suffering and violence? The existential chasm of the colonized subject, the “ontological quandary” of the colonized, has surprising resonances with the trope of the abyss in the long tradition of theological and philosophical inquiry into the finitude of the self and its relation to the divine. These resonances are the central theme of the current project.

The trope of the abyss has often expressed the historical pain of the colonial wound that many decolonial thinkers have struggled to articulate. Looking at the tradition of Afro-Caribbean decolonial thought in particular, we find in the writings of the French-Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant the figure of the abyss merging with the historical reality of colonialism, particularly the historical memory of the traumatic middle passage. Capturing the experience and the meaning of the middle passage, Glissant writes, “Experience of the abyss lies inside and outside the abyss. The torment of those who never escaped it; straight from the belly of the slave ship into the violent belly of the ocean depths they went. But their ordeal did not die; it quickened into this continuous/discontinuous thing; the panic of the new land, the haunting of the former land, finally the alliance with the imposed land, suffered and redeemed. The unconscious memory of the abyss served as the alluvium for these metamorphoses.”15 The abyss conveys the unspeakable: both the unspeakable pain of the colonial wound and the unspeakable state of the self who lives in the suspended present, awaiting for the unforeseeable future to unfold. Despite horror, the abyss of the middle passage beckons toward the future. Trauma opens possibility: “This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange.”16

Another French Martinican thinker, the psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, also links the abyss to the reality of colonial violence and political devastation. Commenting on the violence of the French militia in Algeria, he writes: “But isn’t the colonial status the organized enslavement of an entire people? The Algerian Revolution is precisely the living challenge to this enslavement and this abyss.”17 What does such a political rendition of the abyss say about the apolitical reading of the mystical abyss? Do these two radically different readings and uses not share a common ground at all? Why a separation between the mystical and the political in the first place? What happens when we reconcile the mystical depth of the abyss with the political potential lurking in it?

By examining the works of Latin American/Caribbean decolonial thinkers, this book reevaluates questions of selfhood from the standpoint of extreme violence and oppression. Specifically, I reflect upon the experience of subjects whose textures of being are imprinted with the indelible trauma of colonial history. Despite the bursting emergence of academic discourses addressing the worldwide phenomenon of globalization and transnationalism, these discussions present an ambiguous view of the political effects and consequences of the capitalist globalization, as their critique is often conflated with celebration of this universally sweeping force. But more importantly, these contemporary discussions of globalization miss, if not overlook, the crucial connection between modernity and the current regime of globalization, namely coloniality at large. I will in later discuss in more detail the importance of coloniality for the current project by engaging the ideas of the Latin American decolonial philosophers Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo, but suffice it for now to point out one of the many shortcomings that the failure to address coloniality creates: the (re)production of counterglobalization theories grounded in the experience of privileged transnational citizens. The critique of coloniality helps us open our theoretical horizon to the often overlooked reality of many people who live in the extended sociohistorical web of coloniality in the age of globalization. My own experience of being displaced at an early age and growing up in a foreign land (Argentina) not only as a racialized subject but also as an undocumented immigrant in a working-class family informs perhaps my personal perspective on the topic.18

Rethinking the place of the self in the matrix of coloniality allows me to explore the possibility of reconstructing the fragmented sense of the self after traumatic ruins. Over and against a metaphysics that views the self as internally undifferentiated and unchanging, I follow the tradition that views the self as internally incoherent, fractured, contradictory, and always in the process of becoming. By situating the self in the politicized space of neocolonial globalization, I seek to identify it as embodied, that is, as a racialized and gendered category constitutive of the global order of epistemological/ontological hierarchy. I examine the process through which the self emerges from the dialectical tension lurking in the abyss. The emergence of the self entails the movement of passage, from negative to positive, from finite to infinite, from death to life. By passage I do not mean a simple movement of either entering or exiting the abyss. Rather, I imply the whole process of plunging into and reemerging out of the abyss. This is by no means unidirectional and linear, nor does it take place as a one-time event. Passage does not conclude its wayward trajectory once the self emerges out of the depths. There will always be yet another face of the abyss to stare at, hence another movement back into the abyss.

To address questions of the self’s passage through the complex matrix of coloniality, I relocate the movement of passage—as suggested by the metaphysical accounts of both the mystical tradition and the continental tradition of philosophy—in the spatiotemporality of the “middle passage,” and I question the meaning of the abyss, political subjectivity, and spirituality in relation to collective historical trauma. In other words, I rethink the movement of passage from the standpoint of the middle passage. The central question guiding the book will be: How to gather the self after a history of suffering, transportation, discontinuity, slavery, and death? In other words, how is selfhood possible for a colonized subject whose very horizon of existence is breached by the ongoing effects of “coloniality”? What happens when the abyss is not merely a metaphysical figure but a social, historical, and political one that emerges from the terrain marked by coloniality? In what ways and in which directions do theological and political concerns evolve when we relocate the account of the self to the colonial abyss?

The notion of the abyss interweaves three different disciplinary threads constituting this book: theologically, it denotes the blurring boundary between human finitude and divine potency; philosophically, it points to the incompleteness of the self (before “the other”); politically, it bears a wider politico-historical meaning emerging from the history of suffering, the reality of coloniality, and a fragmented sense of collective identity. The many abysses that open up as the book unfolds might seem to point to different types of abysses each time, and indeed the abyss might offer different shapes and meanings in different contexts. However, there is an important continuity among these many abysses, a common element or effect on the self and her passage through it. In other words, the commonality of the diverse abysses in my reading concerns the movement of the self who, dispossessed by its encounter with the abyss, emerges eventually as a reconstructed self. What does this process of remaking the self consist of? How is the newly emerging self different from the preabyssal self? While my reading in the following chapters provide answers to these questions, let me clarify here a few key points that my reading brings up.

The self who is undone in the encounter with the abyss, that i...