Michel de Certeau’s Metatheory of Mysticism DOMINIK FINKELDE, S .J . 1 . Biography and Context As a philosopher and scholar, Michel de Certeau was part of a Twentieth century intellectual movement—that is, structuralism or rather, post-struc- turalism—which has not always been favorably received by the Catholic intellectual tradition . This term indicates an intellectual path that, beginning from the basic insights of linguistics, phenomenology and structuralist anthro- pology rejects the thesis so strongly anchored in Western metaphysical philosophy that there are universal ideas that determine which of their applica- tions in propositions are correct . Post-structuralists reject the ontological thesis that, strictly speaking, there is something like the universality of a concept that is applied and instantiated in our individual speech acts (for example, and in simplified terms, Plato’s theory of ideas, which promotes this prominently, or Gottlob Frege’s talk of “Thoughts”) . What really exists for post-structuralists are linguistic structures of normativity that are to be interpreted as discourses, in themselves justified by research practices and/or language communities. This leads to an opposition between an objectivist conception of the determinations of contents in the sense of Plato and Frege on the one hand, and on the other, to a position that asserts that there are no objective or metaphysical or meta-lin- guistic boundaries of objectivity in determining the content of terms and their references . This raises questions that lead us directly into Michel de Certeau’s structuralist field of research. These concern inquiries such as: to what extent fields of knowledge of a particular time period are shaped by discursive-lin- guistic patterns of order in which subjects living in these forms of order emerge as quasi-anonymous forms of power in discourse?1 Structuralism assumes with Marx that humans themselves do not determine the base and superstructure of human society, but rather that humans are more or less explicitly the effect of socio-political and economic memes and thus ultimately certain discourses . Discourses of varied formations of normativity shape—again meant in a strongly reductive way—what people think and what people are, not the other way around . This structuralist view—according to which, subjects appear less as autonomous entities but more as a secondary, though not positivistically and eliminatively derivable, effects of discourse—Certeau adopts in three fields of research in which he published significant analyses: in sociology, with his 1 In contrast to “traditional” understandings of historical events, history for structuralists is not led by rules nor does it follow teleological processes . Rather, history is formed fundamentally through constant changes and new organizations of different practices and contingent historical events . 122 DOMINIK FINKELDE, S .J . important book The Practice of Everyday Life;2 in the field of historiography, where among other things he critically examined the criterion of objectivity in historical science, with his work The Writing of History;3 and as an expert in the mysticism of the 16th and 17th centuries exemplified in his booksThe Mystic Fable and The Possession at Loudun .4 The following remarks will deal with Certeau in this last area, as an expert of the mystical subject on the threshold between the late Middle Ages and the early Modern period . The reason for this is to due to the fact that this last area of expertise has proven to be the most distinctive of Certeau’s areas of research . This is supported by his publications and the fact that in 1984 he was appointed director of the prestigious École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris . He was head of the Department of Christian Mysticism there until his death . Unfortunately, Certeau was unable to hold on to this appointment that came at the height of his career for very long, as he died of cancer two years later in 1986 . Instead of a chronological commentary on the Frenchman’s research on mysticism, the following will approach Certeau’s thinking in the area of mysticism from an analysis of a seemingly insignificant lecture entitled, “The Institution of Rot .”5 Certeau first delivered the lecture in 1977 at the annual meeting of the École Freudienne in Lille . The text, published a year later, contains groundbreaking motifs for Certeau’s exploratory grasp of mysticism . The lecture stands out because it reveals the basic ideas of Certeau’s psychoan- alytically shaped subjectivist philosophy . This latter approach allows Certeau to work through the issues that it addresses in the company of contemporaries like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who also found great affinity with the psychoanalytic philosophy of Jacques lacan. Certeau was one of the founding members of the École Freudienne de Paris, founded by Lacan in 1964, and numerous aspects of psychoanalytic subjectivism shape his structuralist and psychoanalytic approach to mysticism . These elements will repeatedly provide a philosophically structuralist hermeneutic in the following remarks . In his lecture, “The Institution of Rot,” Certeau is less concerned with analyzing mysticism by an exegetical interpretation of Christian texts than he is in other studies—particularly in his most famous and most commented upon work, The Mystic Fable . Instead, his 1977 lecture deals with the question of what causes the human psyche to reach, or rather fall into, the mystical state . 2 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Calif .: University of California Press, 1992) . 3 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, translated by Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) . 4 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols ., translated by Michael B . Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 & 2015); Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, translated by Michael B . Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) . 5 Michel de Certeau, “The Institution of Rot,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 35-46 . .