White Ecstasy

Michel de Certeau, s.j. How can I explain? says Simeon the monk to his visitor, who had come from Panoptie. (Simeon could not have said where this distant land was; he knew only his mountains.) How to describe the exorbitant goal of the millennial marchmany times millennialof travelers who have set out to see God? I am old and I still do not know. Yet our authors talk a lot about it. They tell of marvels that will perhaps seem to you more disturbing than illuminating. According to what they writeI am relating what they themselves have received, so they say, from an ancient tradition that goes back to who knows whothe vision coincides with the disappearance of things seen. They separate what appears to us to be one and the same: the act of seeing and the things that one sees. They claim that the more vision there is, the less there are of things seen; that the one grows to the degree that the other is effaced. We suppose that sight improves as objects are conquered. For them, it is perfected in their loss. To see God is, in the end, to see nothing; it is to see nothing in particular; it is to participate in a universal visibility that no longer is comprised of the cutting out of the individual, multiple, fragmentary, and mobile scenes which make up our perceptions. Perhaps you think that the paradox that opposes seeing and objects seen has an air of trickery about it, and that better vision must in fact necessarily diminish the number of things one does not see. For these authors this makes no difference, because objects are only perceived in distinction from what is invisible. Suppress what you do not see and you suppress what you see as well. Then a great dazzling blindness is created: the extinction of things seen. Seeing is devouring. The things we see are less the emblems of its victories than the limits of its expansion. They protect us, like a skiff whose fragile sides preventbut for how long?its oceanic inundation. Painters know the danger. They play with this fire. You must know artists where you come from who draw a luminous line around certain opaque objects, in the same way that the whiteness of a wave limits the solar omnipotence of the sea at the shore. There are those who combat clarity by throwing down shadows. Yet among painters there are also captives of the passion of seeing; they hand things over to light and lose them there, shipwrecked in visibility. Ultimately, we are all painters, even if we don not construct theaters where this struggle between seeing and things unfolds. Some resist this voracious fascination; others yield to it only for a moment, seized by a vision that no longer knows what it perceives; many hastenunconsciously?toward the ecstasy that will be the end of their world. You seem surprised. It is true, it is terrible to see. Scripture says that one cannot see God without dying. No doubt it means by this that seeing presupposes the annihilation of all things seen. Should I confess to you that I am myself stricken with fear? With age, with the pettiness that old age learns, I become more and more attached to secrets, to stubborn details, to spots of shadow that protect things, and ourselves, from universal transparency. I cling to these miniscule remains of night. The very miseries that old age

multiplies become precious because they slow the course of light. I do not speak of pain because it belongs to no one. It clarifies too much. Suffering dazzles. It is already seeing, just as there are no visionaries but those stripped of self and of things by fascination with the misfortunes that occur. No, I speak of odd intimacies; there in the belly, here in the head, trembling, twitching, deformity, the brute brusqueness of a body unknown to others. Who would dare to surrender them? Who would take them from us? They preserve us from strange retreats. They are our scraps of history, of secret rites, of ruses, and of habits with shadows lurking in the hidden places of the body. But you are too young to know the ways of these clandestine times. Let us return to our authors. They do not mince words. They say they know what it is about: It is a leveling of history, a white eschatology that suppresses and confuses all secrets. To the initial tohu-bohu that preceded all distinction, according to the first chapter of Genesis, they seem to contrast an ultimate obliteration of all things in the universal and confused light of vision. To refer to this they mostly use the verb to see, which names an agent that is always operative. For example, they say: God is Seeing. Hence their way of expressing themselves, which is a little strange to us. As they explain it, the subject and the object of this verb are unstable; they pivot around the verb. We can say, we see God or God sees us. It comes to the same thing. The subject and the object can replace each other, interchangeable and unstable, inhaled by a domineering verb. Who sees? Who is seen? We no longer know. The act alone remains, unbounded, absolute. It fuses subjects seeing and objects seen into itself. How could it be otherwise? The difference between seeing and seen no longer holds if no secret distances seeing from what it sees, if no obscurity serves seeing as a refuge from which to constitute a scene before it, if there is no longer a night from which a representation is detached. Here is what the final bedazzlement would be: an absorption of objects and subjects in the act of seeing. No violence, only the unfolding of presence. Neither fold nor hole. Nothing hidden and thus nothing visible. A light without limits, without difference; neuter, in a sense, and continuous. It is only possible to speak of it in relation to our cherished activities, which are utterly annihilated there. There is no more reading where signs are no longer removed from and deprived of what they indicate. There is no more interpretation if no secret sustains and summons it. There are no more words if no absence founds the waiting that they articulate. Our works are gently engulfed in this silent ecstasy. Without disaster and without noise, simply having become futile, our worldthe immense apparatus born of our obscuritiesends. It is understandable that fear is mingled with fascination for the walkers gone in quest of vision. What foreboding hastens them toward clarity? I am of two minds and cannot really say. Sometimes I have terrible thoughts. I imagine that these pilgrims are searching for something they are certain not to find. And then, voil: one fine day, one blinding day, it happens. If they escape, from that moment on they bear this dazzling death, speechless from having seen without knowing it. Other times I let myself be caught in the desire to seelike everyone, I suppose. I forget the warnings of our authors, for when all is said and done, in writing of this sublime and terrible thing, they protect themselves and they put us on our guard. Thus the inveigling of that which is without us

creeps in, the whiteness that is beyond all division, the ecstasy that kills consciousness and extinguishes all spectacles, an illuminated deatha fortunate shipwreck, as the Ancients said. I have known this in my country, said the visitor at last. The experience you speak of is commonplace there. Everything there is already overcome by clarity. I traveled hoping to find a place, a temple, a hermitage, to house vision. Then my country would immediately be transformed into a land of secrets, simply by being distanced from manifestation. But your misgivings send me back to my shadowless plain. There is no other end of the world.
Translated by Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt and Catrina Hanley