Glossolalia 5:2 (May 2013): 51-70. THE MYSTIC SURRENDER TO THE OTHER—HOSTING WITH/IN A SELF
UNDONE:
MODES OF HOSPITALITY IN THE MYSTICISMS OF ANGELA DI FOLIGNO AND GEORGES BATAILLE
BY ATTICUS ZAVALETTA
O unknown nothingness! O unknown nothingness!1
Out of a dying mouth, the mystic Angela di Foligno is said to have cried these words,
ones which would prove her last. They are recorded in the work written by a scribe, Brother
Arnaldo, to whom Angela reticently narrated her life of communion with God. The Blessed
Angela di Foligno was a Christian mystic and Franciscan tertiary who lived in the second half of
the thirteenth century (1248-1309). Very little is known about her life but enough can be
inferred from the experiences she related to Brother Arnaldo, who wrote and preserved them, to
construct a basic outline of her life. Angela married in 1268 and had children, and up until her
conversion in 1285, it seems that she lived a very comfortable and traditional life common to
someone of her station and circumstance, although Angela would come to regard that life as
having been mired in sin. Around 1285 she had a conversion experience in which St. Francis
appeared to her in a vision. Her husband and children died shortly thereafter, and she sought
out Brother Arnaldo, a Franciscan friar, to serve as her confessor. They met together regularly,
and it was during these sessions that Brother Arnaldo began to describe Angela's mystical
experiences. Later on, Angela would attract disciples of her own, and she would go on to
establish a community that she set up to be unenclosed so that the sisters could dedicate their
lives to works of charity in the world.2 Her descriptions of her fervent encounters with God are visceral, physical, and surprising, and continue to resonate with spiritual seekers.
An eerie prophecy of what awaits after the death of her body, Angela’s last words also
define the most prominent features of her spiritual life. Moving from the spiritual desolation of
her early and middle adult life to her radical experience of repentance and conversion and
finally to profound spiritual uncertainty, The Book of Blessed Angela presents a mysticism that
problematizes given modern conceptions of the self, the divine, and the other. The power of the
Book to trouble self and other is generated in various ways. Some of the most effective are
Angela’s use of the personal pronoun, her strange logic of possession and dispossession, the
language she employs to speak (or not speak) the divine, and the alternative spatiality in which
the movements of the mystic and the divine other are mapped. Additionally, there emerges a
tremendous, at times disturbing, obsession with and utilization of bodily suffering that upsets
notions of bodily integrity and identification.3 Nearly seven centuries old, Angela’s text poses difficult and engaging questions that have not diminished in their import, even as their bearer
recedes irreversibly in time.
Reading Angela’s works alongside the 20th century ecstatic mysticism of Georges Bataille laid out in his Inner Experience, and considering the two mystics through the lens of Jacques
Derrida’s thinking on hospitality, will serve to articulate the ways in which Angela’s hosting of
the divine involves a risk to—and possible sacrifice of—her subjectivity. This paper will seek to
read Angela as engaging in a mysticism that prepares the mystic to host the radically other (as
divine) by utilizing the topography of a sensual body to undergo divine penetration and by
employing the metaphors of night and darkness to hurl the self beyond the terms of being and
possession. I will put the images of hosting, enclosure, and welcome in Angela in conversation
with Bataille’s notions of unstable ipseity, spilling, and dissipation. Going further, I aim to
interrogate who or what it is that hosts the other in the mystical practices of Angela and Bataille,
asking especially how it happens.
3 A very recent pathologization of a certain relation to the body has been dubbed Bodily Identity Integrity
Misgivings
Georges Bataille goes to the medieval mystics to think about the possibilities of a
mystical experience without God, one that could undo the ipse that nervously grasps what
surrounds it with knowledge. Submitting himself to an experience that consists in going to the
end of his being, Bataille writes Inner Experience, a text that is partly occupied by his
theorizations of inner experience, but which also vividly records his own attempts to enter into
inner experience. In the place of the dogmatism he views as operative in traditional mysticisms,
Bataille proposes non-knowledge as the principle of experience. Inner experience, says Bataille,
means “a voyage to the end of the possible of man.”4 That voyage will arrest ipse in its desire to be everything, and lay it bare to non-knowledge. Describing his experience in inner experience,
he says, “I know then that I know nothing. As ipse I wanted to be everything (through
knowledge) and I fall into anguish: the occasion of this anguish is my non-knowledge, nonsense
beyond hope.”5 Mystical rapture can occur after the anguish if ipse “abandons itself” together with its “knowledge,” and “gives itself up to non-knowledge . . .”6 In Bataille’s account, the “rupture of all ‘possible’” emerges as definitive of the new mysticism. That rupture in and of the
possible witnesses ipse losing its “I-ness”: its ability to possess, its knowledge, and, hence, its
very self. Bataille is giving himself up.
While Bataille admires aspects of mystical experience and is intrigued particularly by
Angela’s use of suffering and darkness in her encounters with the divine,7 traditional mystical experience is ultimately a failure for him—first, because it is guarded by God, and second,
because it is informed by dogma, or “dogmatic servitude.” The prison house from which Bataille
wants to escape is “project.” He states succinctly that, “The realm of morality is the realm of
4 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans., Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1988), 7.
5 Bataille, Inner Experience, 53. 6 Ibid., 53.
7 See especially “The Seventh Supplementary Step” of The Memorial, where Angela expounds on “the
project.”8 Morality—which includes within it belief, faith, hope, and knowledge—operates from “existing values” that “limit the possible,” and can only interrupt flights to the limit.9 Of his text on inner experience, he exclaims, “I formed the project to escape from project!”10 And because he sees the realm of project as disavowing the possibility of the impossible, that is, of
non-knowledge, his misgivings about the ability of mystical experience still attached to God to go to
the end of being are serious. In the opening pages of Inner Experience, Bataille points to God as
a tyrant governing experience. Therefore, he says, the moment at which he might have said, “I
have seen God” is the instant in which the “inconceivable unknown” would be “subjugated.”11 What had been “wildly free” before Bataille, who was in turn “wild and free” before the
unknown, would become a “dead object,” choked by knowledge.12 When an appeal to God is made, the categories of understanding that structure and order the perception of the real—that
tame the unknown—are automatically inscribed in experience. For Bataille, the experience of
the questioning of that which “man knows of being” is negated when God is summoned.13 Yet Bataille’s accusations of medieval mysticism as enamored with project and dogma do
not hold entirely true for Angela’s mysticism.14 In fact, Angela’s experiences of the divine complicate Bataille’s mysticism without God in a few ways. Bataille’s insistence that ipse must
disappear is questioned by Angela’s use of an “I” not fixed in a position, nor one undergoing
disintegration, but, rather, one engaging in repetition. Additionally, Angela’s profession of the
faith and certainty that precede her experience of the divine visitor challenges Bataille’s view
that both certainty and possession must be relinquished, and forces us to ask in what it is that
possession consists, or how it is that possession, or the certainty that would ground it, can
prepare the way for dispossession. In part, the differences between Angela and Bataille stem
8Ibid., 136. 9Ibid., 7. 10Ibid., 59. 11 Ibid., 4.
12 Bataille, Inner Experience, 4. 13Ibid., 4.
from a larger difference in the focal points of their texts. While Angela is concerned primarily
with the visitation of God, Bataille’s attention is cast toward ipse’s undermining. I would like to
read Angela and Bataille, then, as offering varying takes of the self in mystical ecstasy, that is, of
ipse, or the soul, giving itself, being given up—whether it will be a breach that invites the other
in, or an emptying and a rushing forth to the other—to an experience of what is utterly foreign to
it.
Some Uses of the Image
A mystical practice that Angela and Bataille share is the meditation on an image that
depicts another undergoing severe suffering. It is in the seventh step of Angela’s “Memorial,”15 that, we are told, she is first “given the grace” to behold “the cross on which I saw Christ who
had died for us.”16 She is gripped by the image of Christ on the cross. And the Book always returns, if at times intermittently, to the sign of the cross. She prays to be given a sure sign that
she will always have the Passion of Christ in her memory. There is a time when no excess of
representation can satiate her desire for proximity to the cross: to its image, to Christ’s mental
suffering, to his pierced and stretched body, to the grief felt by others at Christ’s death, even to
the bits of Christ’s flesh that she imagines to have been driven into the wood. She wants to
witness ever more of the Passion, more than any other saint has witnessed, and even pleads for a
crucifixion worse than the one Christ himself suffered. The suffering in the figure of the
crucified God-man that Angela shares is not only physical but profoundly emotional and
psychological as well. When the image of Christ’s Passion appears in The Book, it is always
accompanied by intense emotion and psychic pain. Grief (Christ’s suffering), horror (she
realizes her own vileness and unworthiness), desire (to be tormented, to be crucified, to die the
most gruesome death)—are all states that her meditation on the Passion induces.
Angela’s reflection on the malnourished, lacerated, bleeding body of Christ corresponds
15 The Book of the Blessed Angela of Foligno, or the Libro, as it is commonly known, is made up of two
parts: the “Memorial,” which chronicles the many stages of her spiritual journey, and the “Instructions,” whose focus is the spiritual formation of her followers.
to Bataille’s meditation on the photograph of another man in extreme physical agony, a horrific
image that he claims pulls him out to the other. Like many mystics will do with the image of the
Passion, Bataille takes an object upon which he can meditate to propel his experience, but his
use of the image stands in stark contrast to traditional mysticism. In her provocative study,
Amy Hollywood notes that while Angela’s “image of Christ on the cross is analogous to the
cut-apart body of a torture victim on which Bataille meditates,” there is an important difference
between Angela’s contemplation of Christ’s wounded body and Bataille’s on the slashed and torn
other: Bataille’s method is devoid of a salvific function.17 The suffering as such is what is important for Bataille, not who is undergoing it nor who will be redeemed because of it—it is the
experience that is paramount. For him, the imposition of a meaning-giving narrative of
redemption diminishes the real suffering of the other that, as it turns out, could just as well have
been any other. With his refusal to find in the suffering other any hope of redemption, Bataille’s
use of mysticism radically departs from the tradition. Further, Bataille declines even to supply
the suffering of the other with meaning at all. To insert a narrative that would explain it, or to
appeal to a salvific function of that suffering, would, for Bataille, only undermine the actual
suffering of the other, and defang the real anguish of existence. The experience he describes is
his anguish-ridden confrontation with “the sole truth of man,” that is, the affirmation of
humanity as “a supplication without response.”18 No redemption is possible here.
While Angela does recognize in Christ’s suffering a redemption of humanity, her
emphasis is not on this aspect of the cross. When Angela tells of God’s presence that comes to
her through suffering and identification, and this is especially true in the later stages of Angela’s
life, she does not linger for long over the purpose of Christ’s suffering. It is not at all obvious
that Angela’s focus there is on the redemption; rather, an unequal allocation of text space
between redemption and the bare fact of suffering suggests that Angela’s attention is fixed on
17 Amy Hollywood. Sensible Ecstasy: mysticism, sexual difference, and the demands of history. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002,73.
Christ’s affliction, and not on its function. For Bataille, there is no reconciliation awaiting ipse
at the other end of inner experience; Angela, on the other hand, looks forward to reconciliation
in the promise of an eternal oneness with God. But while a belief in salvation undergirds
Angela’s mysticism, it is not so overly determining as to render her experiences contrary to or
incompatible with what Bataille intuits in the “end of the possible of man.” For this end would
be, in Bataille’s terms, the loss of knowledge and possession, and this is exactly the predicament
in which Angela, despite her Christianity, frequently finds herself. Angela’s experiences push
beyond the meaning given to Christ on the cross. Knowledge, possession, and ipseity are
undercut when, for instance, Angela attests to not knowing whether “she was in her body or out
of it,” to being able neither to “think of nor see anything except God,” and to the inability of her
soul to comprehend itself.19 Arguably, then, Angela and Bataille take the “I” to a similar place, or, better, a non-space. There is another difference between Angela and Bataille which I would
like to attend to. It lies in the destiny of the other represented in the image: God, the other, does
not, as the object does for Bataille, dissolve for Angela.
Truly Other?
Bataille’s meditative gaze fixes on the image of a torture scene: his photograph captures
the flaying of a man whose limbs have just been chopped off. He describes how the other in the
photograph which has served as a springboard to launch ipse to the end of being recedes:
There is no longer subject-object, but a “yawning gap” between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, there is communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the other have lost their separate existence. The questions of the subject, its will to know are suppressed: the subject is no longer there . . . no answer remains possible.20
Both the one and the other disappear in the gap in which subject and object, knower, and
known, are dissolved. Here, there is communication with the other, but it happens without the
preposition indispensable for modes of relating that ipse has been bred to cultivate: “to.”
“Communication” is preceded by the “rushing forth” of ipse’s innards, and occurs when there is
no object for the subject and no subject for the object. As he annuls the separation between
subject and object, Bataille is thrusting ipse to an experience beyond being where it no longer
exists (as itself).21
Bataille’s photograph has its function for him not as a representation of an other—divine
or human—but rather as “the projected image through which the subject experiences his or her
own dissolution.”22 In this sense, Bataille is still himself even as he moves toward ipse’s dissolution. “The object in experience,” he says, “is the image of the subject.”23 Does the projection of ipse onto the image of the suffering other cause the otherness of the photograph to
deteriorate into the same? The language that Bataille uses in Inner Experience to designate self
and other is most often not self and other but subject and object. Mostly referring to the point
on which the subject meditates as object, and, much less frequently, as a person, Bataille’s
diction avows his emphasis on the ipse.
A way into what for Bataille is truly other might be accessed through the same—through
“I”-ipse. If Bataille’s ipse dissolves (along with the object, or other), how does ipseity fare in
Angela’s mysticism? How does it engage with the other? I see Angela as pausing at the abrupt
dissolution that Bataille advocates so that she can prolong the experience, with her body
emerging as one primary vehicle through which she becomes able to meet, or host, the divine.
Certainty in Dis/possession?
Throughout the Works, Angela claims to possess her experiences. And yet there is much
in the narratives of her experience of leaving herself and transforming into God that suggests
that Angela is no longer Angela proper, just as the “I” for Bataille is no longer “I” when it enters
into ecstasy and communication: alternately, we see Angela leaving her self, becoming
incomprehensible to herself, and being filled with God so fully that she perceives only his
presence. Angela regularly mourns the homecoming that follows her elevations as if wishing to
remain absconded from the “I” she is when not in communication with the divine. When she is
being “lifted up in God,” she admits with sadness that her soul then “cannot fix itself in this
state, for when this happens the soul immediately returns to itself.” 24 Yet while she laments her soul’s return, she is also often sure to achieve sure knowledge and certainty. For instance,
before she immerses herself in God “as if dead,” which would consist in an almost complete, if
temporary, divestment of ipseity, she says her certainty is “far greater than any” she has ever
experienced.25 She continues: “I immersed myself in him as if dead but with a wonderful certainty that he was making me come alive.”26 Here, Bataille would object and oppose inner experience, where there is no certainty and certainly no possession, to the mysticism he sees as
chained to dogma. In ipse’s dissipation, a loss of possession occurs; even its very possibility is
eliminated. As Bataille has shown, knowledge is ipse’s manner of possessing everything—of
enfolding every horizon into itself—and for him, the main function of the “I” is to participate in
this violent siege by knowledge. How can there be certainty without the ipse whose presence
would prohibit the communication with the other (as divine) that Angela experiences? It seems
that Bataille’s account cannot, then, be an accurate description of the function of Angela’s
certainty. Perhaps her experience defies comparison here because the “I” in it operates in ways
that inner experience does not explore. It is not that Angela is laying siege to the outside. On
the contrary, her “wonderful certainty” is what has allowed her to die and abandon herself in
total vulnerability to the presence of the other.27 It could be said that while Bataille overtly seeks dissolution, and Angela's longing is only for communion, both mysticisms share a common
destination for the subject of experience: both Bataille's ipse and Angela's “I” are left in rupture.
Angela appeals to faith and certainty at the particularly crucial moments: when standing
at the threshold of divine visitation or immediately after she has experienced the event. At first
24 Di Foligno, The Complete Works, 174-5. 25Ibid., 174.
glance, it would seem as if she secures certainty in order to be assured that she will have a self to
return to from the beyond of her encounter with God. But this certainty that frequently pins
itself to selfhood in Angela does not play a normative role. A significant aspect of Angela’s
mysticism is repetition, demonstrated in the very structure of her Book. Although the text
chronicles “steps” that appear to move in a linear fashion, time and again, Angela tells us that
each experience is more than any before, that her joy exceeds any she has ever known, or that
her suffering is beyond what she had thought possible. While each experience is unique,
repetitions of God’s penetration and her return to her self abound. Angela will immerse herself
in God “as if dead” with the certainty that he is making her “come alive” because it is only with
the certainty of her existence that Angela can perform a repetition (with a difference) of her
experiences of the divine.28 If she were no longer able to return to ipse, Angela would not be able to perpetually engage in mystical experience.
In a vision of the suffering of Christ’s soul in which Angela, too, suffers, she merges with
God: “from two there was made one.” This took place, she explains, when she could not will
“anything except as he himself willed.” And yet, just one sentence after her agency has been
taken away, she claims that she “possessed God” “fully.”29 The possession of a horizon by faith and certainty that seemed unequivocal in Angela turns out to be neither possession nor
dispossession: Angela’s mysticism puts each term into question once it is affirmed. Indeed, even
in a passage in which Angela affirms her soul’s possession of God, she says the soul is filled to
the “fullness of its capacity” and that, so that it will be able to hold all God “wishes to place in it,”
God “expands the soul.”30 Where her soul was not capable of receiving the visit, it was stretched and expanded, pushed beyond its capacity.31 In other words, it is not only that Angela’s
28Angela says that her mystical elevations were never the same experience. Brother Arnaldo says, “She
also added that there were almost always new ones, so that what she experienced in one, she did not experience in another, for there was almost always something new or different about each one” (206).
29Ibid., 181. 30Ibid., 223.
31 But if God first enters Angela’s soul to fill, expand, stretch, and push it, to then be received, then it
possession (of self or the experience) is put into question in the moments when she avows her
possession of the experience (or the certainty she has that Angela will still be there after the
vision), but that her language, too, in refusing a coherent subject or defined object that could
enact possession or undergo dispossession, troubles the very logic of those possibilities.
Failed Enclosures
Angela’s is a text in which the body and soul of the mystic are continually threatened in
their claims to unity because Angela has recruited them as gestural acts in a transformational
process of hospitality, which has no end or satisfactory culmination, in the same way that Angela
is kept in a kind of spiritual interstice, never in just one state but between them all: the
experience of being, of-non-being, of merging, of having God, of being had by God. This back
and forth movement of hospitality evinced so well by Angela has been described by Derrida as
hospitality's “apparently aporetic paralysis”:
[H]ospitality always in some way does the opposite of what it pretends to do and immobilizes itself on the threshold of itself, on the threshold which it re-marks and constitutes, on itself in short, on both its phenomenon and its essence… this apparently aporetic paralysis on the threshold “is” . . . what must be overcome (it is the impossibility which must be overcome where it is possible to become impossible. It is necessary to do the impossible. If there is hospitality, the impossible must be done), this “is” being in order that, beyond hospitality, hospitality may come to pass. Hospitality can only take place beyond hospitality, in deciding to let it come, overcoming the hospitality that paralyzes itself on the threshold which it is.32
The mystic knows that in order to offer hospitality to the divine, she must embody this
contradiction. Often, Angela is hardly recognizable as a coherent and enclosed self. God enters
and overwhelms her ipseity, and this is why she speaks of returning to herself when the
experience is over. Yet, when discussing the ways in which spiritual persons can be deceived,
Angela says that the soul should respect its own boundaries. She wants the soul to “know how to
preserve that which belongs to it, and to render to God what belongs to God” so that it can
has already entered. Perhaps what accomplishes the expansion Angela beholds is what Derrida names, “the other in me.”
32 Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Morlock, ANGELAKI Journal of the
“preserve its integrity” and “not overstep” its limits.33 Such glaring equivocality in Angela’s language causes terms to slip and concepts to tremble, so that she is finally unable to say what
the self is, where it is, what it houses, or what lies outside of it. At one moment, her soul is
dispossessed, in the very next, it is what possesses; here her body opens and her soul melts in
the coming of the divine presence into her, and there, she insists on retaining the soul’s integrity
and limits; within the same experience, even, Angela is in God at the same time that God is in
her.
The treatment of Angela’s body also calls possession into question and stages a scene for
a loss of self, effected via its identification with the body. In both the “Memorial” and the
“Instructions,” the possession of Angela’s body is ambiguous: at times, Angela’s body appears
unproblematically her own; and at others, the language she elects to refer to her body evinces a
deep ambivalence about the possession of that body. Further, it is most usually as a suffering
body that Angela’s body appears in the text. Brother Arnaldo tells us that Angela’s whole body
was implicated in suffering: “I heard her say that there was not one part of her body which had
not suffered horribly.”34 For Angela, suffering is inextricable from an experience of the divine and necessary to it. Suffering appears in the Book as both physical and psychical: there are the
pains she feels as if she were stretched on the cross, and the dreadful night that submerges her.
Yet even when relating the torments of her soul, Angela resorts to physical metaphors to explain
it. We are told that Angela could find no other comparison for the torments of her soul than that
of “a man hanged by the neck who, with his hands tied behind him and his eyes blindfolded,
remains dangling on the gallows and yet lives, with no help, no support, no remedy, swinging in
the empty air.”35 It is not only Angela’s overt reliance on physicality to explain psychic suffering that is important, but the extreme vulnerability and defenselessness of the body revealed in an
image like this is also a significant aspect of Angela’s mysticism. “Dangling” in agony, Angela’s
33Ibid., 194.
body is not only in miserable distress, but, in its utter vulnerability, seems to be asking for
further violence and abjection—to be overcome, violated.
Angela’s Book unveils beneath its skin a disorganized body—that at times appears in
shambles—one not fully enclosed in or as itself. The experience of pain is the most frequent
prompt for Angela’s body to become unhinged from its center and scatter: in contexts of
penance and suffering, as well as in joy, Angela often refers to “every member of my body.”36 Her diction produces a tentative disruption in ideas of wholeness and fragmentation: that she
speaks of her body in terms of various “members” is odd, but she also indicates them, with the
prepositional phrase initiated by the “of,” as being part of her body, which is purportedly a
larger entity that envelops the/her members. The notion of “enclosing” has resonances with
Bataille’s understanding of being. For him, being turns on its ability to enclose elements, to
generate a whole. He says, “there is no being without ‘ipseity.’ Without ‘ipseity’, a simple
element (an electron) encloses nothing.”37 Without this function of ipseity, elements would
become nomadic, or at least separate, as Angela’s “members” do when she punishes them for
their sins.
Why this dispersion of her physical body? As if a whole body might resist too strongly
the experience she so intensely desires, Angela’s “members” are not fully integrated as one body.
Angela multiplies the opportunities for bodily suffering and penance: she finds sin in different
members, as if they were autonomous agents, or little children she must scold. These new
occasions for penance complicate Angela's own ipseity. In times like these, Angela’s body
becomes not quite her own, but an object which helps her purge herself of her self—yet it is still
her body and in this way, it is that to which she can return, there for her to use to open herself to
be filled, traversed by darkness, enveloped, and penetrated by God’s presence at once. Serving
her as something which can undergo penance, Angela’s body emerges as that which can, in and
36 Ibid., 175.
through penance, come to be identified with Christ, and, further, in its dispossession, what could
welcome the penetration of the divine.
Taking In The Other
When Angela tries tentatively to express the unspeakability of God, it’s as if she naturally
resorts to repetitive mumbling to say that which cannot be said. “There is absolutely nothing
that can be said about this experience,” she says,
for no words can be found or invented to express or explain it; no expansion of thought or mind can possibly reach to those things, they are so far beyond everything—for there is nothing which can explain God. I repeat there is absolutely nothing which can explain God. Christ’s faithful one affirmed with utmost certitude and wanted it understood that there is absolutely nothing which can explain God.38
In this passage—within the scope of two sentences—Angela has uttered “nothing” three times,
and insisted that Brother Arnaldo repeat it again for her. She is not content to say, merely,
“nothing.” For Derrida, it is not only that the other comes to a host—hôte in French—who
cannot offer it enough hospitality, but from a beyond that disempowers the efforts of discursive
strategies.39 Angela’s text is riddled with nothing’s and admissions of linguistic impotence precisely because it stands in front of this beyond. In her efforts to host the divine, Angela—
battling aphasia—of necessity becomes apophatic. But Angela’s saying of God’s divinity that is
so inaccurate and incomplete as to constitute “blasphemy” is also, in its failure, a testament to
the ultimate alterity of the divine.
In discoursing on the various ways that God may come into the soul, Angela offers as the
seventh way of God’s coming what she explicitly defines as a granting of hospitality. She is
concerned with granting hospitality to God as “the Pilgrim.” Following the granting of
hospitality to the Pilgrim, upon her “return” to herself, she knows “with the utmost certainty”
38Ibid., 213.
39 Gil Anidjar explains the meaning (and untranslatability) of the hôte in Derrida's reading of hospitality:
“But who or what is the subject of hospitality? To one reading of this question, the French language provides a disarmingly and quantitatively simple answer: the hôte. In French, the hôte is both the one who gives, donne, and the one who receives, reçoit, hospitality. As Derrida argues, however, this
that it is impossible to “say anything at all or come up with any thought about God, his infinite
goodness being so far beyond anything you could possibly say or think.”40 Angela even remarks that God had been uninvited in his visitations, hinting that the soul may not be ready when the
Pilgrim comes. In another manner whereby God enters, the soul is commanded by God to look
at him. As the soul thus turns its eyes to gaze into the divine presence, it suddenly beholds God
inside of itself. It “sees him taking shape within itself and it sees more clearly than a person can
see another person, for the eyes of the soul . . . see a fullness of God” of which Angela professes
to be unable to speak.41 The Pilgrim to whom she offers hospitality is here literally lodged inside of the self, and this divine presence thwarts linguistic mastery in its penetration of Angela’s soul.
In a once-removed instantiation of hospitality to the divine, Angela literally takes in the other
when she drinks the water with which she washes the leper’s feet. While it is possible to read
this action as an assimilation of the other, it could be that Angela is attesting to the purity of the
other, the very paradox of hospitality. A scale from the leper’s legions sticks in Angela’s throat,
resisting digestion. The hôte of hospitality receives the other in the visitation, but does not—and
this is its impossibility—reduce the other to its horizon. Where Bataille fears ipse's
territorialization of the other, for Angela, it is rather that the self is finally unable to enact that
take-over. The self cannot digest the Other.
Hospitality in a Torn Body
When Angela experiences the presence or the withdrawal of God, she endures bodily
breakages and dislodgments as part of that experience. It is both when God is present, causing
her soul to burn, and when God withdraws, eliciting her cries of sorrow, that her joints dislocate.
Pain and mutilation also figure in her experience of the immense presence of God and of her
“nothingness.” The bodily is the medium through which Angela is able to form and
communicate these experiences. Both the metaphor and literalization of her experiences, the
body is recruited to enact her spiritual life in a parallel fashion. Angela opens her self to alterity
in a very literal manner: as the mutilation tears and fragments her physical body, the wounds on
her body open her body to be the body of the hôte. Her bones “crack”;42 her joints “dislocate”;43 her hands are “opened”;44 her soul “melt[s],” “crackles,” and “burns.”45 When in the Sixth Step of the “Memorial” Angela undergoes the torments of “many demons,” her language becomes
homicidal: there, Angela states that she can “hardly refrain from tearing” herself “apart.”46 She beats herself, gives herself “welts,” and applies fire to the three “shameful parts” of her body.47 Her body is pierced and her joints cry out as she experiences Christ’s Passion as her own.48 These and other recurring images of corporeal wounding mirror the perpetual obliteration of
Angela’s self as a process always in motion and never finally complete. And yet it is that
continuous obliteration which avers her transformation into something in communication with
divinity.
As we have seen, Angela carefully maintains the self, if only in remnants, while furiously
ridding herself of it. Retaining a sliver of “Angela” will allow her unendingly to offer hospitality
to the other, God, the “suffering God-man.” Angela’s body and her identity must retain some
coherence: she cannot be extinguished, or finally disengage from her embodied ipseity for good.
While corporeal, she hangs on to a piece of it: her mysticism is animated by this strange
imperative. Her life as a communion with God depends on her use and abuse of her “I.”
When Angela cracks open her body in as many places as possible, she is creating
openings for the presence of God to enter in. This open(ing) body of the mystic recalls Bataille’s
yawning body. In inner experience, ipse is “open, yawning gap, to the unintelligible sky” and
“everything in” him “rushes forth” to finally be “reconciled” in “irreconciliation.” In the
42 Di Foligno, The Complete Works, 87. 43Ibid., 158, 281.
darkness in which Angela is immersed, she says everything becomes unintelligible: somehow,
she sees nothing and she sees everything, but is unable to perceive “anything human, or the
God-man, or anything which has a form.”49 When she is in the darkness, Angela says that there, she is in God and God is in her simultaneously. Angela’s description of God’s relation to the
friars to whom she writes the “Instructions” betrays a fraught ambivalence concerning the
spatiality of the inner-outer. Angela says she sees God “dwelling” in the souls of the friars. Not
only does “divinity dwell in them”; curiously, in the very same moment, God is seen pouring out
his love on the brothers: God both dwells in and pours out.50 Like Bataille’s experience in the night of non-knowledge that Inner Experience strives to relate and initiate, spatiality is folded
over when Angela’s soul unfolds—the inner and outer of the body and ipse lose the sites by and
through which they had been able to signify. At this point, what seems important is not so much
that Angela goes into God or that God comes into Angela. Angela’s soul and body host the
visitation of the divine other in an event in which it is no longer meaningful to point to an inside
or outside of the mystic.
Ipse's Becoming-Impossible
While Bataille’s ipse and Angela’s soul have been shown to differ in their itineraries in
going to the limit of experience, similarities have also been discovered (and some that Bataille
had been unable to discern). But the question of how ipse might be the hôte encountering
alterity lingers. Because Bataille performs a projection of the self onto the image of the other
(the object), it would seem that his other cannot be an absolute other. On the other hand, while
for Bataille, this spectacle of the suffering other operates as a mirror for the subject confronting
it, it is through a projection of the subject onto the object that ipse dissolves. At least two
readings of this practice are then possible. One would view ipse’s projection as frustrating true
hospitality: even the suffering of the other is reduced so as to belong to the subject—that
suffering other could have been me. Another reading would suggest that, if, in the projection,
ipse loses itself, a complete ontological overturning has taken place, and the reduction of the
other’s alterity cannot occur.
Bataille’s ipse as hôte bespeaks a different feature of otherness, another expression of
alterity, than that witnessed in Angela. For in the rupturing of the ontological foundation which
gives ipse meaning as being might be the very experience of alterity in inner experience, one
whose possibility does not emerge from outside, but which is already inscribed in ipse. When
ipse unfolds, then, that other is released, turned-on, and ipse—both itself and not itself in its
dissolution—communicates with it in ecstasy. Perhaps the distinction between the two can be
clarified if we provisionally understand Angela as visited and Bataille as visiting. While Angela
wishes to be overtaken and filled by God, Bataille wants to confront the anguish and terror of the
loss of knowledge and being. But both of these practices rush toward the boundary of the
possible: Angela courts the impossibility of ensconcing an absolute alterity in her body and soul;
Bataille’s flight to the limit of the possible consists in an abandonment to the foreignness of
non-knowledge.
Bataille had seen Angela as not going far enough in experience; but because his reading
cannot finally get beyond the mention of God, he misses the radicality of Angela's mysticism.
Even though the idea of God is indispensable Angela, that idea—the “category of understanding”
that Bataille held was deadly for experience—has not precluded the violent overwhelming of her
“I.” And because non-knowledge implicates the end of any possession ipse might achieve,
Bataille’s inner experience, as much as Angela’s mysticism, can be read as an endeavor in
hospitality. For the very contradiction of hospitality is that the self is called to offer it where it
cannot, and this inability, founding subjectivity, exists because the self is the thing that reduces
to its own the Other who comes from outside of its horizon. Both in Angela’s experiences of the
divine penetrating her soul and in Bataille’s terrifying night of non-knowledge, the self is
hospitality, one that cannot operate without violence to body, soul, and mind, even if it is shown
there as possible only in moments. When ipse divests itself of its function and ground, the
possibility that it has hosted, namely, to empty ipse and forsake it to non-knowledge, is
unleashed. Ipse, impaled on the spiked pinnacle of the impossible, is—gaping—left capable,
perhaps, only of crying out in ecstasy before death, “O unknown nothingness!”
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