VISION-IN-BLACK Not-Seeing Not-Being

Seeing Seeing the unseen Seeing what is not

Vision in (what no one sees, (what no one is,
(movement, where no one sees): where no one is):
exposure) THEORIA DESERT
Being Being the unseen Being what is not
Black in (what no one sees, (what no one is,
(dwelling, where no one is): where no one is):
enclosure) HIDING UNION

Secret: No Light Has Ever Seen the Black Universe

Nicola Masciandaro

[E]very visible and invisible creature can be called a theophany, that

is, a divine apparition. For . . . the more secretly it is understood, the
closer it is seen to approach the divine brilliance. Hence the inaccessible
brilliance of the celestial powers is often called by theology “Darkness.”

– John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon1

. . . almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they

called it colour at all.
– H. P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space

1 “[O]mnis visibilis, et invisibilis creatura Theophania i.e. divina

apparition potest appellari; . . . siquidem . . .in quantum occultus
intelligitur, in tantum divinae claritati appropinquare videtur. Proinde a
Theologia coelestium virtutum, inaccessibilis claritas saepe nominator
tenebrositas” (De divisione naturae, [Monasterii Guestphalorum:
Aschendorff, 1838], III.19). Laruelle’s Du noir univers was first published
in La Décision philosophique 5 (1988): 107-112. An English translation
by Miguel Abreu, “Of Black Universe in the Human Foundations of
Color,” was published in the catalogue Hyun Soo Choi: Seven Large-Scale
Paintings (New York: Thread Waxing Space, 1991): 2-4.

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This work, a commentary on seven statements from François Laruelle’s geopathic domain for the mystical by plunging the sublime into an
Du noir univers: dans les fondations humaines de la couleur, proceeds in abyss of neo-medieval alpine terror: “this Cyclopean maze of squared,
the form of commentary because commentary is the way of speaking curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable
according to secret (i.e. secret itself, without definite or indefinite refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark,
article, neither singular nor plural, the true object of the mystical objective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a
subject, who is named by Dionysius in the Mystical Theology as “neither material basis after all . . . Of course, the phantom had been twisted and
oneself nor someone else”).2 Commentary alone clarifies secret because exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source did not
it knows how properly to stray, is familiar with the way of staying and contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even more
wandering away in what is truly spoken, which is the only method of hideous and menacing than its distant image.”5 So Dionysius similarly
touching truth: with its own shadow. Commentator and mystic share an understands that the infinitely-attributed nature of God, the One who
umbral identity. Each is located in the negativity of intimate otherness, “has every shape and structure, and yet is formless and beautyless,”6
in the non-reflective blackness of the text’s shadow where truth speaks is superiorly figured in unseemly forms of negation and unlikeness,
without talking, in the freedom and self-abandonment of being it. for these alone at once properly conceal the truth of this nature and
“Gloss this if you wish,” writes Marguerite Porete, “or if you can. If you provide authentic or do-it-yourself access to it: “the wise men of God . . .
cannot, you are not of this kind; but if you are of this kind, it will be honor the dissimilar shape so that the divine things remain inaccessible
opened to you. You would already be profoundly annihilated if you had to the profane and so that all those with a real wish to see the sacred
the means by which you could hear it, for otherwise I would not say imagery may not dwell on the types as true. . . . I myself might not
it.”3 Spoken within the immanent beyond or present al di là of mystic have been stirred . . . to my current inquiry . . . had I not been troubled
identity, commentary’s non-linear boundary refuses the interminably [extorqueret, twisted away] by the deformed imagery . . . My mind was
human correlational conflation of horizon with the limit of vision and not permitted to dwell on imagery so inadequate, but was provoked to
dynamically establishes the one thinking within the speculative reality get behind the material show, to get accustomed to the idea of going
of essential mirage. Essential mirage is the space of vision beyond the beyond appearances to those upliftings which are not of this world
visible by means of visibility’s inherent deceitfulness. It is the real [in supermundanas altitudines, into supramundane altitudes].”7 What
illusion that consists in seeing through the fraud of givenness according worshippers and atheists (twin opposites of the true, practical mystic)
to the very twist of the given. Just as a mirage phenomenon may bring self-constitutively ignore is the radically immanent identity between
within seeing something outside of one’s line of sight—allowing, for the cataphatic intensity of the this-worldly sublime and the apophatic
instance, a mountain beyond the horizon to appear above it—so extensity of the otherworldly divine—a khoric-tehomic8 ‘third’ identity
essential mirage is a shadowing forth of the Real beyond thought via
thought’s own distortion and dislocation.4 The principle is demonstrated 5 H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (New York: Modern
in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, a text that charts a new Library, 2005), 43.
6 Divine Names, 824B.
2 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid 7 Celestial Hierarchy, 145B. Latin text cited from Patrologia Latina
(New York: Paulist Press, 1987), Mystical Theology, 1001A. 122: 1014.
3 Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Ellen L. 8 “And there is a third nature, which is space [chōra] and is eternal,
Babinsky (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), Chapter 111. and admits not of destruction and provides a home for all created things,
4 I capitalize real in order to signify the absolute reality of the real and is apprehended when all sense is absent, by a kind of spurious
itself, the real real, or divinely real. reason, and is hardly real—which we, beholding as in a dream, say of all
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that always remains weirdly recognizable from beyond the explicable hidden silence.”10 The mountain of God’s throne seen by Hildegard of
parameters of recognition. “If I were not, God would not be either. I am Bingen at the beginning of Scivias: “I saw a great mountain the color
the cause of God’s being God: if I were not, then God would not be God. of iron, and enthroned on it One of such great glory that it blinded my
But you do not need to know this,” says Meister Eckhart.9 Commentary sight. On each side of him there extended a soft shadow, like a wing of
is a way of staying open to this third I, this endless (k)not. Capable of wondrous breadth and length. Before him, at the foot of the mountain,
continually twisting the text towards the superior purposeless truth stood an image full of eyes on all sides, in which, because of those eyes,
of what you do not need to know, of deforming its meaning into the I could discern no human form.”11 The mountain of spiritual experience
unnamable presence of the pure absence of falsehood, the impossible whose summit is divine union, identified by John of the Cross at the
plenitudinous thing that overflowingly fills illusion and fiction when beginning of The Ascent of Mount Carmel: “the summit of the mount—
they are seen through, commentary is an art of producing and mapping that high state of perfection we here call union of a soul with God . .
essential mirages, of mystically opening secret by means of a text’s . The darkness and trials, spiritual and temporal, that fortunate souls
truest distortions. ordinarily undergo on their way to the high state of perfection are so
Why comment on this text? For millennia the thought-horizon numerous and profound that human science cannot understand them
of reality has confronted the mystic in the form of a dark mountain, adequately. Nor does experience of them equip one to explain them.
a site of vision and ascent into the absolute, transhuman secret. The Only those who suffer them will know what this experience is like, but
mountain of anagogical elevation invoked by Dionysius at the beginning they won’t be able to describe it.”12 The dark mountain, location of the
of the Mystical Theology: “Lead us beyond unknowing and light up to truest light, is the traditional form of the ultimate end, the all in all,
the highest peak of mystic scripture where the mysteries of God’s Word seen at the beginning. It is the essential mirage of God, the real illusion
lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a that appears within the definitive and decisional moment when one
starts to move or turn into divine Reality, as dramatized in the opening
of the Divine Comedy, in which the wayfarer shows how the path to
existence that it must of necessity be in some place and occupy a space, the illumined summit passes through hell: “A te convien tenere altro
but that what is neither in heaven nor in earth has no existence. Of these vïaggio” (Inferno 1.91) [you need to take another way], the ancient poet
and other things of the same kind, relating to the true and waking reality tells him.13 The way up the mountain, a place of indescribable exposure
of nature, we have only this dreamlike sense, and we are unable to cast and dislocation, is not the one you want and not the way you think it is.
off sleep and determine the truth about them” (Plato, Timaeus 52b, my
Thomas Vaughn writes, in the Lumen de Lumine: “There is a Mountain
emphasis, cited from The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton
situated in the midst of the earth or center of the world, which is both
and Huntingdon Cairns [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961],
1178–79). “If we discern a third space of beginning–neither pure origin small and great. It is soft, also above measure hard and stony. It is far off
nor nihilist flux–its difference translates into another interstitial space:
that between the self-presence of a changeless Being who somehow 10 Mystical Theology, 997A.
suddenly (back then) created; and the pure Nonbeing out of which 11 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columbia Hart and
that creation was summoned, and toward which its fluency falls. That Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 67.
alternative milieu, neither being nor nonbeing, will signify the site of 12 John of the Cross, The Collected Works, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh
becoming as genesis: the topos of the Deep” (Catherine Keller, Face of and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington: Institute of Carmelite Studies,
the Deep: A Theology of Becoming [New York: Routledge, 2003], 12). 1991), 113-5,
9 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, trans. Maurice O’C. 13 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton
Walshe (New York: Herder & Herder, 2009), Sermon 87. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
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and near at hand . . . In it are hidden the most ample treasures, which
the world is not able to value . . . To this Mountain you shall go in a
certain night—when it comes—most long and most dark . . . insist upon
the way that leads to the Mountain, but ask not of any man where the
way lies.”14 This is simultaneously the way you alone—as an irreparable
individuation of Reality—must go and precisely the way you—as a
fundamental non-entity, a so-and-so you are afraid not to be—cannot.
“To come to be what you are not you must go by a way in which you
are not.”15 These days—if you will permit me to pretend to give weight
to the mass delusion that is the historical present—the dark mountain
is exploded and transposed onto the cosmic abyss, a putatively
post-hierarchical domain whose hyper-alpine dimensions remain
fundamentally obscure. It is no longer the image of a dark mountain that
haunts the thought-horizon of Reality, but an omnipresent dimensional
blackness that is at the same time a sheer impenetrable blankness, the
vision of something whose presence is nothing other than the form
of its own non-visibility. All around us the general darkness of the
observable universe understood via Olbers’s paradox coincides weirdly
with the singular negative mirage of the black hole. Here the world’s
summit, the untouchable touchpoint or threshold between the lived
ephemeral present and the ultimate Reality that lies beyond, appears
everywhere and nowhere, beckoning lightlessly in a space whose
negative, astrophobic affect renders absolute enclosure and infinite
exposure indistinguishable. Correlatively, human consciousness is now
strangely dis-directed, incessantly following its own most wayward
and worried advice: be someone, be yourself! Indeed, the whole visible
material realm is itself currently installed as the very summit of being,
a bright (yet actually how dim) peak (less than 1% of the measurable
universe) positioned atop a mountainous cosmic mass of dark energy
and matter—the backdrop of interminable collective fantasies, both
humanist and nihilist, daydreams of a geocentric non-entity: the human
and/or post-human we. Now I am confronted with black as a necessary
object of contemplation, an inarguable index of Reality. The horizon of

14 Thomas Vaughn, Works of Thomas Vaughn, ed. Arthur Edward

Waite (Kessinger, 1992), 261.
15 John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, 111.
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the universe is black—black is the horizon of the universe. The necessity
of black as present term of mystic thought is composed of its substantial
negativity and imperceptible positivity, according to which, in a purely
non-arbitrary way, it is no less ‘out there’ than ‘in here’, equally internal
and external to consciousness. Black is its own image and thus fulfills
the criterion of intellectual vision as given by Augustine: “the third kind
[of vision] . . . touches on things which do not have any images that
are like them without actually being what they are.”16 One does not see
black without seeing black itself. There is no being without black. Black
is the matter of theory. For mysticism, the discourse of humans who
cannot live without secret and want to die awake, black is the universal
essential mirage of the current age. In a world where the geologic and
elemental domain recedes and melts into spectra, like the meteorite
in Lovecraft’s tale, black is the present place where the primordially
novel—something “from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature
as we know it”—emerges, something whose obscurity is at once the
veil of an unknown clarity—”this new glow was something definite and
distinct, and appeared to shoot up from the black pit like a softened ray
from a searchlight”—and the bewildering vista of even deeper black,
the unimaginably intimate vision of something “whose mere existence
stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws
open before our frenzied eyes.”17 Or, in the words of Isaiah, “Secretum
meum mihi, secretum meum mihi, vae mihi” (Isaiah 24:16) [My secret
to myself, my secret to myself, woe is me].

III.1 Le noir univers est l’opacité du réel ou la « couleur » qui

le rend invisible.
The black universe is the opacity of the real or the “color”
that renders it invisible.

16 Augustine, On Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New

City Press, 2002), 12.6.15.
17 H. P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space, in The Fiction: Complete
and Unabridged (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008), 610, 616.
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This is the primary definition of the black universe in this text. The use is a kind of thought that is present in the human simply by virtue of
of italics for the term (and not the article) both highlights the logical its event, an awareness-birth that bounds animally through its own
procedure of positive naming and distinguishes the name from the advent and provides the dreamless dream space wherein man’s eyes
semantically proximate senses it can be confused with, namely: 1) are opened, the black universe is the waking revelation of universe
the black universe as the literal material cosmos (universe which is seen according to the Real, the blind vision through whose open eyes
generally black); 2) the black universe as the universal set of blackness universe itself is shown to be a ‘color’ in an analogical sense, namely, an
(universe of black itself); 3) the black universe as a dark subset of ontological blackness or truly existent appearance that demonstrates
the universe (universe that is other than not black). Independent of Reality’s invisibility. Black universe is the substance of an analogy that
the definite article yet proper it, the black universe is not this or that may be clarified thus: Black is to color as universe is to the Real. Black is
black universe, but the universe in its blackness in a sense that at once the color that is not (color). Universe is the real that is not (real). Here
includes, exceeds, and perfects what we think ‘universe’ signifies. the positivity and priority of opacity becomes evident. Just as opacity
Essential to the formulation is its exposure of ignorance as to what we is the condition of thought that discloses universe in the first place, so
mean when we use the word universe (the unbounded place we find is it the ‘means’ whereby thought touches its universal object, seeing at
ourselves in? the infinity of reality? the present sum of all actuality once (and as if endlessly for the first time) that it is and that it cannot
and possibility?). The idea of the black universe isolates the profound, be seen. As black is literally a mystical or hidden color, the color seen
truthful stupidity at the center of the concept of universe, its obscure where there is no color to be seen, black universe is the mystical, in the
glow, and refocuses it into a definite illumination, a dark intelligible sense of an eclipse of what by that that reveals the universal Real: “Not
ray. In Part I, this visionary stupidity is identified in explicitly khoric how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”18 Equally internal and
terms, recalling the “spurious reasoning” (logismo tini notho) by external, present in all three levels of vision (corporeal, imaginative,
which Socrates says we perceive without sense the “third nature” of intellectual) and in all three universal worlds (gross, subtle, mental),
eternal space, “beholding [it] as in a dream” (oneiropolumen blepontes): black universe is analogous to the divine image, following Eriugena:
“L’Univers est une pensée opaque et solitaire qui a déjà bondi dans les “the Divine likeness in the human mind is most clearly discerned when
yeux clos de l’homme comme l’espace d’un rêve sans rêve” (I.10) [The it is only known that it is, and not known what it is . . . what it is is
Universe is an opaque and solitary thought, which has already leapt denied in in it [negatur in ea quid esse], and only that it is is affirmed.
through man’s shut eyes as the space of a dream without dreaming]. Nor is this unreasonable. For if it were known to be something, then at
The proper definition of the black universe in III.1 represents and once it would be limited by some definition, and thereby would cease to
expresses the objective realization of the truth of the dreamy khoric be a complete expression of the image of its Creator, Who is absolutely
universe-thought, the disclosure of the non-transparency of the noetic unlimited and contained within no definition, because He is infinite,
sense of universe as the non-transparency of the Real itself, that is, the superessential beyond all that may be said or comprehended.”19 Black
absolutely ineradicable radically immanent universal truth that is by
definition beyond and foreclosed to thought. These two definitions— 18 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. C.K.
the definition of the universe as an opaque, solitary thought and the Ogden (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), 6.44.
definition of the black universe as the opacity of the real—translate, 19 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon (De Divisione Naturae), eds. I.
across the space traced by the shift from opaqueness as adjectival P. Sheldon-Williams and Édouard A. Jeauneau, trans. John. J. O’Meara, 4
property to nominal thing, between the sleep of mere conscious being vols. (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1999-2009), IV.73.
Thomas A. Carlson explicates Eriugena’s understanding of the imago
to the wakefulness of knowledge or science. Where the universe
Dei in relation to the theophanic principle that the “created world . . . is
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universe is the place where mystical truth begins, or as the text later more literally, that any light that is has not seen black universe. Black
terms it, “la posture même de la science . . . ou son inherence au réel” universe is the world of vision, the dark domain wherein seeing sees
[the posture itself of science . . . or its inherence to the real] (III.12-IV.1). itself. Black itself is the non-transparent and totally evident event of
The fact of black, a perfect vision of what is not there, reflects universe vision. Alternately, the statement does not mean that an unthinkable
as the Illusion that sustains Reality. light, a light beyond light will not see the black universe. Indeed the
past-tense is conspicuously formed—a reversed echo of “And the light
shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John
1:5)—so as to open that possibility and simultaneously foreclose it as
III.2 Aucune lumière n’a jamais vu le noir univers. possibility per se, that is, to deny the event all virtuality as if it were
No light has ever seen the black universe. in store somewhere in the universe. Nothing is in store for you. Black
universe is not something that is there for you to see. The mystic is
Thought and the Real touch only in black, the color of vision itself. the one who exits the real stupidity of correlational captivation and
Black universe is the mystical domain of their secret sameness, a hyper- says openly and with infinite curiosity to the world: What are you
intimacy that no illumination can penetrate. “The eye with which I see doing here? There is nothing to see! No illumination will reveal black
God is the same eye with which God sees me.”20 Being the opacity of universe to you. You yourself alone (in a secret manner of speaking) are
the real, the substance of its invisibility, the black universe itself is not the singular unthinkable light that sees black universe, that is, the light
seen through light, is not sighted, imagined, or known. Secret is seen beyond light that is nothing other than your own blackening. All you—
only to itself and through itself and for itself. Black universe is the non- the philosopher—have done (and covertly do now) is play in the dark.
illuminated auto-medium of secret. If secret were something that has We bring little lights to black universe and with the shadows cast by
been illuminated, it would be not be secret. This does not signify that our own forms think to have illuminated it. Thought does not illuminate
the black universe cannot be seen, or that you will never see it. It means the Real, but projects its own real shadow upon what it cannot see. No
precisely that black universe is always and only seen lightlessly, and light has ever seen black universe because its blackness composes the
substantiality of darkness, is grounded in the principle that darkness is
the vision of God—in both senses of the word” (The Indiscrete Image: not the absence or privation of light, but light’s own body, the means of
Infinitude and Creation of the Human [Chicago: University of Chicago its existence. Light is only in darkness. “Where there is sunshine, there
Press, 2008], 94). Here we may understand the relation between the
is shadow. Standing in the shade, we can observe the sunshine. In this
darkness of the imago Dei and black universe in terms of intensive
way Light is known through Darkness . . . The ‘Is-ness’ or the Existence
negation in the Dionysian sense, that is, negation not as the opposite
of affirmation, but as that which produces or brings into presence the of Light is Darkness . . . That is, Darkness is the body of the ‘Is-ness’
real that is beyond affirmation and denial. The created world is a vision of Light.”21 As the ‘color’ black is the reflection of light’s blindness to
of God in the mode of eclipse, a divine revelation via the miraculous itself, the impossibility of vision’s autonomous self-illumination, black
absence of the divine. As Agamben says, “what is properly divine is universe is the mirror in which thought sees its identity with the Real by
that the world does not reveal God” (The Coming Community, trans. seeing nothing. Black universe is the dark body of the Real. Stop looking.
Michael Hardt [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], Stand in black universe, and see. “Nigra sum, sed formosa” (Song of
90)—a statement that only makes sense if understood as positively Songs 1:4) [I am black, but beautiful]. The beauty of black is the form
participating in own intensive negation, namely: ‘what is properly
divine is that the world does not not reveal God’. 21 Meher Baba, Infinite Intelligence (North Myrtle Beach, SC:
20 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, Sermon 57. Sheriar Foundation, 2005), 383.
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of vision, the incredible delight of being seen by the Invisible, as John
the Cross expresses in commentary on this line: “For though of myself
I am dark, he so frequently fixed his eyes on me, after having looked at
me the first time, that he was not satisfied until he had espoused me to
himself and brought me to the inner chamber of his love.”22

III.3: Noir est antérieur à l’absence de lumière, que cette

absence soit l’ombre où elle s’éteint, qu’elle soit son néant
ou son positif contraire. Le noir univers n’est pas une lumière
négative.
Black is anterior to the absence of light, whether this
absence be the shadows that extinguish it, whether it be it
nothingness or its positive opposite. The black universe is not
a negative light.

The black text pronounces (what was implicit above) and we feel the
truth of it: there is more to black than the dialectical opposition light
defines it by. There rests the difference between black and darkness.
Darkness is a property of black, but black is not darkness. Shadow,
nothingness, void look black and black is something before shadow,

22 John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle, 33.7. This representation

of the perfective process as black’s becoming more and more beautiful
in being seen God may be compared to Meher Baba’s description of
perfection as a kind of impossible ‘mixing’ process of the Infinite and
the finite: “Perfection does not belong to God as God, nor does it belong
to man as man. We get perfection when man becomes God or when God
becomes man . . . If by the Infinite we mean that which is opposed to the
finite, or that which is away from the finite, and necessarily other than
the finite, that Infinite is already limited by its being unable to assert
itself in and through the finite. In other words. Perfection cannot belong
to such an Infinite. The Infinite, therefore, has to discover its unlimited
life in and through the finite without getting limited by this process .
. . Thus we have perfection when the Infinite transcends its limits and
realizes its infinity, or when the Infinite gives up its supposed aloofness
and becomes man” (Discourses I.119-20).
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nothingness, void, where the dual sense of ‘before’ captures exactly the
structure of immanence as anteriority of the apparent. The question to
pose here is: How do we know the truth of this? What is the necessity of
black’s anteriority to light’s absence? Answer: recognize the non-
reductive significance of tautology and know black’s anteriority via
black itself, in the being-black of black. In seeing black, we see that it
has always been there. This may be elaborated by saying that black, via
whatever quality by which you wish to describe it (all-ness, none-ness,
obscure purity, transparent filthiness . . . ) has absolutely everything to
do with light (lux) and nothing at all to do with lumination (lumen)—
the latter being the form of light proper to transparent bodies and the
former being the form of light proper to opaque bodies, the form of
light itself, which is unseen.23 It is only the definitional thought of black,
the attempt to shine light on it, to see it as a thing, that paints black into
privative relation to light. It is true that black is what is seen in the
absence of light. But black is not that absence. Black is its own presence,
not the presence of the absence of light. Black is the opposite of white,
not of the light. That black appears in light’s absence, that it exists in the
space of light’s negation, has nothing to do with opposition. Light itself
is ‘black’, in the sense of having no color. Now we can understand the
significance of the double negation openly buried in the expression: the
black universe is not a negative light. The formulation beautifully
highlights the problem of apogogic truth (absurdity of the absurdity,
demonstration via double negation) and the question of tautology to
which it is logically tied (double negation, contradiction, law of the
excluded middle are forms of tautology, X=X). It addresses the question
of double negation as already answered in color. Does black universe’s
not being a negative light mean that black is a positive light? Obviously
not. Does it mean that it is not a positive light. No. The statement opens
black without determination as the space of something obscurely non-
negative, a positive unlight, a negative non-dark, a color that is light
itself before all shining, an accident that is the very substance of

23 The lux/lumen distinction is elegantly explained by Alexander

R. Galloway in “What is a Hermeneutic Light?,” Leper Creativity:
Cyclonopedia Symposium, eds. Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, and
Eugene Thacker (New York: punctum books, 2012), 159-72.
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luminous void, even the unglimpsed light of what Eriugena calls “that to remain, nevertheless, within himself.”28 Black universe is the primal
invisible mystical earth and the dark intelligible abyss” [mystica illa medium of love. Or, black universe is the color (of) the universal
terra invisibilis ipsaque tenebrosa abyssus intellectualis], the domain continuum, the differential unity of the All whose most obvious actual
of the primordial causes of all visible things, which is “perceived by no inexorable expression is gravity, the occult bond of individual bodies
intellect except that which formed it in the beginning.”24 Like the divine whose unitary movement confounds the separateness of forces:
image, this domain is “known only [as to] that it is, but not understood “Pondus meum, amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror” [My love is my
(as to) what it is” and Eriugena’s words read like a description of weight; wheresover I am carried, I am carried by it].29 The legibility of
Laurelle’s vision, particularly with respect to black as “prior to light,” the mystery of movement as tracing of the universal continuum
the “transcendental darkness, into which [man] never entered and from translates back into the text’s opening definition of universe as “la
which he will never leave,” and black as colors’ “ultimate degree of passion intérieure du Lointain” [the inner passion for the Remote] (I.2)
reality, that which prevents their final dissolution into the mixtures of and forward into the final figure of the rocket as becoming “sujet de
light.”25 “[T]he primordial causes,” Eriugena writes, “are simple and l’Univers et présentes en chaque point du Lointain” [subject of the
entirely lacking in any composition. For there is in them the inexpressible Universe and present at every point of the Remote] (IV.9). The continuous
unity and the indivisible and incomposite harmony universally remoteness of movement, at each point a negation and affirmation of
surpassing the combination of similar and dissimilar parts.”26 These place via a somewhere that is neither place nor not place, is a ‘going by
“principal causes . . . both proceed into the things of which they are the the way in which one is not’ that testifies to the continuum as what is
causes and at the same time do not depart from their Principle . . . logically conceivable only in negation as the difference or non-identity
remaining in themselves invisibly by being eternally concealed in the between X and ¬¬X. Their equation is the basis for the apogogic or
darkness of their excellence, [they] do not cease to appear by being indirect proof, which Kant notes “can produce certainty, to be sure, but
brought forth into the light.”27 The invisible mystical earth is the hidden never comprehensibility of the truth in regard to its connection with
universal place that provides—in the literal sense of a before-seeing— the grounds of its possibility,” calling it “more of an emergency aid than
the omnipresent hidden ocular hinge which articulates the ecstatic a procedure which satisfies the aims of reason.”30 It is valid only within
union between all things and the placeless Reality. The dark intelligible closed, finite systems, in “sciences where it is impossible to erroneously
abyss is the originally blackened nature, the simple-most ur-immanence substitute the subjective for the objective.”31 And that is precisely what
through which divinity remains in being by staying beyond it. As black is, a literal theory or vision—all-at-once corporeal, phantasmatic,
Dionysius says, “the very cause of the universe . . . is also carried outside and intellectual—where this impossibility is impossible, not only in the
of himself in the loving care he has for everything . . . and is enticed way weak blind sense that seeing black is a substitution of subjective for
from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all objective (a sense that would confine black to a relative perceptuality),
things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity but in the stronger dazzling sense that seeing black is itself the pure
objectivity of vision into which consciousness is cosmically inserted:
24 Eriugena, Periphyseon, II.551A. On luminous void see Eugene
Thacker, After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 91-5. 28 Divine Names, 712B.
NB: “Suhrawardī’s ontology of luminosity . . . renders irrelevant the 29 Augustine, Confessions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident” (94). Press, 1950), 13.9.
25 See II.11, 13, III.9. 30 Kant, A789-90/B817-18.
26 Eriugena, Periphyseon, 550C. 31 Anthony Winterbourne, The Ideal and the Real: An Outline of
27 Eriugena, Periphyseon, 552A. Kant’s Theory of Space, Time and Mathematical Construction, 117.
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“Noir n’est pas seulement ce que l’homme voit dans l’homme, il est la The unspeakable and absolute self-evident consistency of black—black
seule « couleur » inséparable de l’étendue hyperintelligible de l’Univers” is so very black—is the total indifference of these opposed
(II.5) [Black is not merely what man sees in man, it is the only “color” inconsistencies, the substantial image of the Reality who needs no
inseparable from the hyper-intelligible expanse of the Universe]. In the identity and no revelation. “The black tablet of vision, I hold dear for the
procedure of apophatic mysticism (negating what is not God), the sake / That to the soul, it is a book of the picture of the dark mole of
indeterminacy of the apogogic, the gap between X and ¬¬X, is figured in Thine.”36 As a form of essential difference between X and ¬¬X, black is
the recognition that the negation of the not-God does not produce God the negative color, the non-color that grounds the spectral continuum
but leads only to the place of God and that a further negative leap or founds the fact that between any two colors there is a third. Black is
beyond the opposites conditions divine illumination, which transcends the inherent differential of color, the visible infinite minimum or open
both objective subjectivity and logical binarism, realizing a truth that, secret of color that is its continuum, its existence. And as a form of the
as Dionysius says in the Mystical Theology, is “beyond assertion and incommensurable truth of X=X, black is the singular perfect color, the
denial.” “Here,” he continues, “being neither oneself nor someone else, super-color identical with color itself. Black is color’s own self-evident
one is supremely united by a completely unknowing inactivity of all truth or nameless proper name, the openly secret word of color that
knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.”32 speaks the without-and-beyond-itself fact of its vibrational being. In
Essential to this deployment of the negative is the principle, contra sum, the non-negativity of black universe means that black universe is
Aristotle, that negation is not the opposite of assertion, but the assertion the body of secret in the sense of the mysterious identity of not-light
of what is beyond it, a term of intensification that negatively indicates and not-not-light, the universion or one-turning of these two dimensions
what is in excess of the positive, such that “one might even say that of black: the full or visible black of night (not-light, what remains when
nonbeing itself longs for the Good which is above being. Repelling being, you remove light) and the empty or invisible black of void (not-not-
it struggles to find rest in the Good which transcends all being, in the light, what remains when you remove not-light). Black universe is the
sense of a denial of all things.”33 The topos of black universe is where the
Real beyond assertion and denial appears. Black’s positive negativity—
not a negative light—is logically equivalent to the radical positivity of mysticism corrects the ontological reading of the tetragrammaton
tautology, the fact that X=X is a truth in inexhaustible excess of its from the Vulgate: “Ego sum qui sum” (Exodus 3:14). As Thomas Gallus
redundancy, whether the excess is thought privatively, as in the Lacanian notes, in commentary on Mystical Theology 1.3, “Take care lest one of
the unbelieving or the inexperienced should hear those secrets. I mean
denial of tautology—“there is no tautology [because] it is in the very
people who firmly depend upon natural reasons or the love of existent
status of A that there is inscribed that A cannot be A”34—or
things, thinking that there is nothing above being—understood as the
superessentially as in the name of God: “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14).35 subject of metaphysics and containing both created and uncreated
realities, according to their opinion. And this they have from the
32 1001A, 1048B. word that is spoken in Exodus, I am who am. But this was spoken so
33 Divine Names 697A. “Now we should not conclude that the that he might offer himself in a first understanding to us as a kind of
negations are simply the opposites of the affirmations, but rather that reminder, that he might count himself to have being along with us, he
the cause of all is considerably prior to this” (Mystical Theology 100B). who was completely above being” (Mystical Theology: The Glosses by
“In it is nonbeing really an excess of being” (Divine Names 697A). Thomas Gallus and the Commentary of Robert Grosseteste on De Mystica
34 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IX, Identification 1961-2, Theologia, ed. and trans. James McEvoy [Paris: Peeters, 2003], 25).
trans. Cormac Gallagher (unpublished), Seminar IV. 36 Hafiz of Shiraz, The Divan, tr. H. Wilberforce Clarke (London:
35 It is important to remember at this point that Dionysian Octagon Press, 1974), 86.3.
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pure incomposition wherein the “manifold evolving universe arises
from the mixing of the one Reality and ‘Nothing’.”37

III.4 Noir est le Radical des couleurs, ce qui n’a jamais été
couleur ou attribut d’une couleur, l’émotion qui saisit l’homme
affecté par une couleur.
Black is the Radical of color, what never was a color nor the
attribute of a color, the emotion seizing man when affected
by a color.

The sense of black’s radicality, as simultaneously the root and the

extremity of color, is already clear. What calls for commentary is the
relation between this radicality and the emotion of color, which is now
addressed as simultaneously the emotion of specific color and the
emotion of color itself. The relation implies two meanings for black
emotion: 1) the feeling of other-than-color at color’s root; 2) the feeling
of other-than-color at color’s intensity. The seizure of black emotion is
consciousness passing like a current between these poles. On the side
of the object, black emotion is the affect of seeing that the thing itself,
all that one does not see, is black. Here black is the unseen of the seen.
On the side of the subject, black emotion is the affect of seeing that the
image, all that one does see, is black. Here black is the seen of the unseen.
In one direction black is the not-revealed of a color, the vision of there
being more to see. In the other direction black is the only-revealed of a
color, the vision of there being nothing seen. This epilectic emotion is a
blackout, not a blackout of vision, but a witnessing of the blackout that
vision is: the passionate suspension of vision within the endlessness of
its never having been or actual impossibility. It is absolutely important,
therefore, that the text says “a color,” signifying the complicity of black
emotion with specificity, individuation, presence, facticity. This shows
black is the index of color and the ecstatic character of black emotion,
in the sense of an experience that refers to the impossibility of its own

37 Meher Baba, Discourses, 3 vols. (San Francisco: Sufism

Reoriented, 1967), I.45.
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taking place, following Bataille: “THE OBJECT OF ECSTASY IS THE
ABSENCE OF AN OUTSIDE ANSWER. THE INEXPLICABLE PRESENCE
OF MAN IS THE ANSWER THE WILL GIVES ITSELF, SUSPENDED IN THE
VOID OF UNKNOWABLE NIGHT.”38 Seeing in black universe reveals the
cosmo-deictic dimension of vision, the fact that vision, far from being
captured by the putative idiotic passivity of seeing—‘I am just looking’—
is in every moment an unimaginably projective and fundamentally
impossible event of photography realized upon the infinite negative
of individuated existence. Black, the color that is not one, exposes this
fact—a blinding flash of the Real—according to the same logic outlined
in Agamben’s reading (via Hegel) of indication: “[T]he significance of
the This is, in reality, a Not-this that it contains; that is, an essential
negativity. . . . The problem of being—the supreme metaphysical
problem—emerges from the very beginning as inseparable from the
problem of the significance of the demonstrative pronoun, and for this
reason it is always already connected with the field of indication . . . Deixis,
or indication . . . is the category within which language refers to its own
taking place.”39 What explains this experience of indication as universal
crux, the ontological experientia crucis? What renders it a passion?40 For
Bataille it is the will, a “desire to be everything”41 that finds only itself,
impurely and incommensurably, within the cosmic night. Or I can say
that the blackness of the will to itself, the opacity of its own reality, is the
cosmic night of facticity, the radical darkness of universe being as it is.
As Agabmen says: “The root of all pure joy and sadness is that the world
is as it is.”42 The equivalence between this passion of extreme indication
and the emotion which is color’s radical is beautifully legible within

38 George Bataille, The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott
Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 45.
39 Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity,
K E Pinkhaus and M Hardt (trans), University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1991, pp. 14, 16-7, 25.
40 Cf. “
41 Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone (San Francisco:
Lapis Press, 1988), xxxii.
42 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, tr. Michael Hardt
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 90.
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Anaxagoras’s color-inflected cosmology and his proof of the blackness of blackness and the intensest vibrancy of a color is the passion of being
of snow. For Anaxagoras, the cosmos is an eternal mixture of everything secret, or, the feeling of the infinity of individuation whose ideal blind
with everything whose apparent becoming does not substantially alter projection is the philosophical mirage of the thing-in-itself, that is, the
its original indifferentiation: “All things were together, unlimited both in object of what Nietzsche, who saw through it, calls “the biggest fable of
amount and in smallness, for the small, too, was unlimited. And because all . . . the fable of knowledge.”49
all things were together, nothing was evident.”43 The inherently hidden
or inevident reality of the all-in-all remains without diminishment
inside every differentiation: “black is in white and white is in black.”44
At the same time, the visible does present the invisible eternal mix: III.5: À la différence du noir objectivé dans le spectre, Noir
“appearances are a sight of the unseen.”45 This is demonstrated in the s’est déjà manifesté avant toute opération de manifestation.
mixing of colors: “For should we take two colours, black and white, C’est la vision-en-Noir.
and then slowly pour one into the other drop by drop, sight will not As opposed to the black objectified in the spectrum, Black is
be able to determine the gradual changes, although in nature they are already manifested, before any process of manifestation. This
real.”46 We observe not reality but something unreal that is according to is vision-in-Black.
it. This is dramatized in Anaxagoras’s proof of the blackness of snow,
which nicely previews the fact that snow is indeed black in the infrared Being manifest before the objectivity of seeing, vision-in-Black is
spectrum: “snow is frozen water, water is black, and therefore snow
quality in things, but an extrinsic denomination, or, as Thomas Hobbes
is black.”47 Anaxagoras’s view thus touches the general radical sense
says, a phantasm. 2) Therefore, color is nothing not being perceived
of black as the paradoxical unseen of sight, an unseen identifiable by us. 3) Blackness is not so much a color, as the privation of color, or
as the ineradicable omnipresent mix of the Real, its perfect eternal [seu] we say that we see something black, when we see nothing. 4)
auto-confusion. Leibniz saw this and elaborated upon Anaxagoras’s All opaque things in themselves are black, by hypotheses 2 together
argument as a literal illustration of black’s radicality, arguing from the with 3. Therefore, also snow. Anaxagoras, however, so that his paradox
phantasmatic staus of color that “all opaque things in themselves are should be more remarkable, would take as the basis of his discussion
black.”48 Finding oneself at the very interface between the invisible root especially what is held to be the whitest” (G. W. Leibniz, “A Conjecture
Why It Seems That Anaxagoras Could Have Said That Snow Is Black,
43 Anaxagoras of Clazomeane: Fragments and Testimonia, trans. for Jacob Thomasius in a Letter Sent 16 February 1666,” trans. Donald
Patricia Curd (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), B1. Rutherford [2004], http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/
44 Anaxagoras of Clazomeane, B10. rutherford/Leibniz/anaxagoras.htm).
45 Anaxagoras of Clazomeane, B21A. 49 “The biggest fable of all is the fable of knowledge. One would
46 Anaxagoras of Clazomeane, B21. like to know what things-in-themselves are; but behold, there are no
47 Anaxagoras of Clazomeane, A97. “The source of all references to things-in-themselves! But even supposing there were an in-itself, an
black water—not merely that of Anaxagoras(B)—must be the highly unconditioned thing, it would for that very reason be unknowable!
poetic and dramatic Homeric allusion to a pack of blood-sated wolves Something unconditioned cannot be known; otherwise it would not be
drinking from ‘the surface of the black water from a dusky spring’ (Iliad, unconditioned! . . . A ‘thing-in-itself’ just as perverse as a ‘sense-in-itself,’
XVI, 161)” (J. L. Benson, Greek Color Theory and the Four Elements: a ‘meaning-in-itself. There are no ‘facts-in-themselves,’ for a sense must
A Cosmological Interpretation [Amherst: University of Massachusetts always be projected into them before there can be ‘facts’” (Nietzsche,
Amherst Libraries, 2000], 24). The Will to Power, trans. Kaufman and Hollingdale [New York: Random
48 “1) All color is an impression on the sensorium, not a certain House, 1967], §555-6.
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describable only topologically, in terms of a there in which one finds abyss that they have the keen awareness of being brought into a place
oneself, a surrounding region through which one moves: mi ritrovai far removed from every creature. They accordingly feel that they have
per una selva oscura (Dante, Inferno 1.2). Description of vision-in- been led into a remarkably deep and vast wilderness unattainable by
Black is a filling out of the landscape marked by the hyphens around any human creature, into an immense unbounded desert, the more
the preposition in (the place of the One) for which topology is neither delightful, savorous, and loving, the deeper, vaster, and more solitary it
allegory of something a-topological nor representation of a given is. They are conscious of being so much more hidden, the more they are
landscape. What is describable of vision-in-Black is something clearer: elevated above every temporal creature.”51
the seeing of place itself, wherein universe is revealed to be actual
allegory, the other-being of the Real. Vision-in-Black names the scene
(from skia, shadow) of mysticism, the shadowy place of extensive non-
difference between the negative darkening of knowledge and the black III.6 Noir est définitivement intérieur à lui-même et à
brilliance of seeing beyond light, the way or method of the “hallucinatory l’homme.
‘science’ of the One.”50 Vision-in-Black is the landscape in which truth Black is entirely interior to itself and to man.
travels securely, where one moves as the limitless in of the Real: secret in
secret. Here is the topological union of mystical movement and dwelling, Black defines a double auto-interiority. On the one hand, black itself,
the paradoxically paradisical way of wilderness wherein exposure and as the color that is not, is interior to itself, endlessly inside itself. Black
dereliction are perfect security and enclosure. The left hyphen, between is the not-color of the color that holds itself entirely or ultimately
vision and in, corresponds to the term of movement and exposure, the within itself and that reserves all color for color’s beyond. Aesthetically,
extensive vector of secret: seeing the unseen (what no one sees, where black’s self-interiority corresponds both to the sense of black’s spatial
no one sees) [theoria] and seeing what is not (what no one is, where no depth and to the sense of black’s color-potentiality, the perception of
one is) [desert]. The right hyphen, between in and Black, corresponds to all colors as hiddenly in and emergent from black, as emblematized
the intensive vector of secret, dwelling and enclosure: being the unseen
(what no one sees, where no one is [hiding] and being what is not (what 51 John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, 2.16.3-2.17.6. “It
no one is, where no one is) [union]. This double movement of secret is was about the dawning or daybreak when, tired with a tedious solitude
described by John of the Cross: “in darkness the soul not only avoids and those pensive thoughts which attend it, after much loss and more
labour, I suddenly fell asleep. Here then the day was no sooner born
going astray but advances rapidly . . . To reach an new an unknown land
but strangled. I was reduced to a night of a more deep tincture than
and journey along unknown roads, travelers cannot be guided by their
that which I had formerly spent. My fancy placed me in a region of
own knowledge . . . the soul, too, when it advances, walks in darkness inexpressible obscurity, and—as I thought—more than natural, but
and unknowing . . . persons who tread this road . . . are unable to without any terrors. I was in a firm, even temper and, though without
describe it. They feel great repugnance in speaking about it, especially encouragements, not only resolute but well pleased. I moved every way
when the contemplation is so simple that they are hardly aware of it . for discoveries but was still entertained with darkness and silence; and
. . Not for this reason alone do we call mystical wisdom ‘secret’ . . . but I thought myself translated to the land of desolation” (Thomas Vaughn,
also because it has the characteristic effect of hiding the soul within Works of Thomas Vaughn, 243). “[S]he remained unknown to all and the
itself . . . this mystical wisdom occasionally so engulfs souls in its secret more hidden she was, the more she was known to God alone. This is why
Isaiah boasted, when he said, ‘My secret to myself, my secret to myself’
50 François Laruelle, Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des (Is. 24:16)” (Thomas de Cantimpré, The Life of Christina the Astonishing,
contemporains (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), 63. trans. Margot H. King and David Wiljer [Toronto: Peregrina, 2002], 25).
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in the cauda pavonis [peacock’s tail], the alchemical stage between
nigredo and albedo when the colors appear.52 On the other hand, black
is the self-interiority of man himself, as the text states earlier, “Noir
n’est pas dans l’objet ou dans le Monde, il est ce que l’homme voit dans
l’homme, et ce dans quoi l’homme voit l’homme” (II.4) [Black is not in
the object or the World, it is what man sees in man, and the way (that in
which) man sees man]. The interior of man is the space that his being
encompasses and fills, the in which of his esse: “Un noir phénoménal
remplit entièrement l’essence de l’homme” (II.14) [A phenomenal
blackness entirely fills the essence of man]. The identity of these two
forms of interiority, the singleness of their doubleness, is named in the
text’s singularly asyntactic line, “Solitude de l’homme-sans-horizon qui
voit le Noir dans le Noir” (II.6) [Solitude of the man-without-horizon
who sees Black in Black]. The non-omissive elision of verbal being, the
sheer non-presence of any is, here signifies the superessentiality or
being-beyond-being of secret, the horizonless ‘negation of the negation’
or ‘third’ domain that is the infinite with of the alone with the Alone.
Black in Black signifies the convertible mutual interpenetration of the
black interior of man (the individuated alone) and black universe or
the opacity of the horizonless Real (the universal Alone). The identity
of this irresolvably double auto-interiority of man and black is the
truly limitless solitude or lonely pan-explosion of place wherein all is
within without collapse. The definitive or limitless interiority of black
is the meta-place of the One-in-One which remains the “unknown of
philosophy,” its constitutive eclipse.53 As Laruelle writes in Mystique non-
philosophique, “The identity of the with (the One with the One, God with
God) is the true ‘mystical’ content of philosophy, its ‘black box’.”54 The
whole process of non-philosophy as mysticism or non-philosophical
mysticism is thinkable as an unfinishable theoretical exposure (as

52 See Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 141-2.
53 François Laruelle, Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, trans. Taylor
Adkins (n.p., 2009), 86.
54 “L’identité de l’avec (l’Un avec l’Un, Dieu avec Dieu) est le vrai
contenu ‘mystique’ de la philosophique, sa ‘boite noire’” (Laruelle,
Mystique non-philosophique, 60).
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opposed to the philosophical photo which claims to capture its object)
of the movement seized in Plotinus’s last words, “phuge monou pros
monon” (Enneads 6.9.11) [the flight of the alone to the Alone]. Negating
philosophy’s decisional closing of the Real’s foreclosure to thought,
the operative fact of philosophy as the “organon . . . [or] a priori form
which, giving us the World, forecloses the mystical experience which
intrinsically constitutes humans,”55 non-philosophical mysticism offers
the way of turning the transcendent vector of flight from World to
One into the most radical immanence without reduction whatsoever,
of truing World to One via unbounded or non-decisional translation
of the meaning of Plotinus’s pros from ‘to/toward’ to ‘with’, which it
may also signify, as in the beginning of the gospel of John: “kai o logos
pros ton theon” (1:1) [and the word was with God]—translatable also
as ‘face-to-face’ or ‘at home with’. Non-philosophical mysticism is the
speculative labor of theorying the archaic One to phoenix-like death
from within, of seeing through the hallucination of philosophy, its
“simulation of immanence by auto-reflexive interiority [la simulation
de l’immanence par l’interiorité auto-réflexive],” and opening forever
“the true immanence or identity . . . rejected in the shadows of the black
box [la veritable immanence ou identité . . . rejetée dans les ténèbres de
la boîte noire].”56 Seeing within the universal interiority of immanent
black, man speaks with his ownmost solitary voice—“interior intimo
meo et superior summo meo” [more interior than my innermost and
higher than my highest”57—the words of the famous Sufi hadith, “I was
a hidden treasure who loved to be known.” Elaborating upon this line,
Ibn Arabi writes: “The Reality wanted . . . to see His own Essence . . . For
the seeing of a thing, itself by itself, is not the same as its seeing itself
in another, as it were in a mirror.”58 Black, non-reflective and doubly
interior, is the mirror itself, the place of the seeing and being seen of the
Invisible One.59

55 Laruelle, Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, 53.

56 Laruelle, Mystique non-philosophique, 66.
57 Augustine, Confessions, 6.9.
58 Ibn Arabi, The Bezels of Wisdom, trans. R. W. J. Austin (New York:
Paulist Press, 1980), 50.
59 As exemplified in the monastic
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outside of opposition as the infinitely open dual of light.62 Color of a
positively abyssic self-possession, the essence of black is the universe
of uncreated divine freedom and the index of the real secret human
III.7 Noir est sans contraire: même la lumière qui tente de who never was, is not, and never will be “a servant of oneself,”63 who
le transformer en son contraire échoue devant la rigueur de occupies the ‘negative’ unconditioned space which ethics, insofar as it
son secret. Seul le secret voit dans le secret, comme Noir en is bound to the management of second natures (ethos=habit), can only
Noir. see in terms of ontological error: “The just man serves neither God nor
Black is without opposite: even light, which tries to turn it creatures, for he is free, . . . and the closer he is to freedom . . . the
into its opposite, fails in the face of the rigor of its secret. more he is freedom itself. Whatever is created, is not free. . . . There is
Only the secret sees into the secret, like Black in Black. something that transcends the created being of the soul, not in contact
with created things . . . not even an angel has it . . . It is akin to the nature
The rigor of secret is the ruthlessness of the Real, its inexorable of deity, it is one in itself, and has naught in common with anything.”64
inevitable impossibility. Secret will out—only via secret. “You cannot
do better than to place yourself in darkness and unknowing . . . No 62 As Laruelle explains, this true, foreclosed secret holds the
need to call to Him from afar: He can hardly wait for you to open up. human future of mysticism: “L’Un-en-Un n’a pas besoin de l’intellect,
He longs for you a thousand times more than you long for Him: the pas plus d’ailleurs de l’intellect que de l’amour. C’est à cette
condition de l’être-forclos de la vision-en-Un, un secret intrinsèque
opening and the entering are a single act.”60 The oppositeless singularity
et donc intrinsèquement ‘négatif’, sans positivité, insondable à force
of black is (the) body of One without number, the indivisible duality
d’immanence, que le mauvais mystère représentationnel de la mystique
of the non-dual, as seen in the Mirror of Simple Souls: “[S]he is alone peut être éliminé et l’unition devenir l’opération de la connaissance mais
in Love . . . She is the phoenix who is alone; for this Soul is alone in non du Réel. La pratique future renonce à prétendre penser l’Un par
Love who alone is satisfied in her.”61 Far from the superficial concept l’Un, ou avec l’Un, et pense le rapport au mystico-philosophique selon
of secrecy as object of knowledge, and farther still from the banal l’Un, elle expose le Secret qui fait les Humains par axioms et theorems”
aporia of secret (that there is no secret), the secret of black is exactly (Laruelle, Mystique non-philsophique, 61) [The One-in-One has no need
that there is secret, that secret is. Secret is what remains freely and of intellect, no more than of love. It is by this condition of the vision-
impenetrably itself, sits securely above intellectual capture, stays in-One’s being-foreclosed—an intrinsic and thus intrinsically ‘negative’
secret, without positivity, unfathomable by the force of immanence—
60 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, Sermon 4. that mysticism’s bad representational mystery may be eliminated and
61 Marguerite Porete, Mirror for Simple Souls, trans. Ellen L. that becoming-one [unition] may become the work of knowledge, but
Babinsky (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 89. Porete translates the not of the Real. The future practice renounces pretending to think the
principle of monastic solitude (fr. monos alone) beyond the literal. Cf. One by the One, or with the One, and thinks the mystico-philosophical
Anthanasius’s modeling of Mary: “Mary does not desire to be seen by relation according to the One; it exposes the Secret that makes Humans
anyone, but she prayed that God might be her examiner. She did not through axioms and theorems] (Mystique non-philosophique, 61). Note
desire to leave her home. She knew nothing of public places; rather she the significant double sense of this expression: a) thinking according
remained assiduously within her home, living a withdrawn life, like a to One as exposure via axioms and theorems of the Secret that makes
honey bee . . . She prayed to God, alone with the Alone” (De virginitate, humans and b) thinking according to the One as exposure of the Secret
cited in Jean Prou, Walled About With God: The History and Spirituality whereby axioms and theorems make humans.
of Enclosure for Cloistered Nuns, trans. David Hayes [Leominster, UK: 63 Mirror of Simple Souls, Chapter 48, p. 127.
Gracewing, 2005], 33-4). 64 Complete Mystical Works, Sermon 17.
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Secret grounds the absolute asymmetry of the gaze between light and remaining within itself. In tune with the “radical past” of mysticism,
black, the curvature of an incommensurable and anagogic above-within the element of it “which does not pass in being-in-the-Past,”69 the meta-
which is necessarily intangible to the Euclidean optic, as dramatized tautology of Black in Black targets a telos that is neither achievement
in Laruelle’s illustration of immanent heretical struggle, the way of nor consolation, but the intensive infinitization of arriving search, as if
“the radical which . . . thinks and struggles within the strict limits of to find that reality itself is absolutely mystical: “since that which human
the Real without transcendence,” the refusal that “face[s] the Adversary nature seeks and toward which it tends, whether it moves in the right
too closely to not be misconstrued by philosophical opinion and, more or the wrong direction, is infinite and not to be comprehended by
so, ‘intellectual’ opinion.”65 For this refusal, “It would be necessary to any creature, it necessarily follows that its quest is unending and that
reassemble philosophy and religion, theoreticism and terrorism, under therefore it moves forever. And yet although its search is unending, by
a Principle of Arrogance and oppose it to a justified humility. In order some miraculous means it finds what it is seeking for: and again it does
to make out the face of the Adversary, it is necessary to mix with him not find it, for it cannot be found.”70 Black universe is the term of this
and to suffer the extent of his gaze to the point that he believes to have ‘miraculous means’, the secret of secret through which, like blackness
grabbed hold of you. Of the two of you, however, only you [i.e. black] in black, the revealed and the hidden, the given and the foreclosed
know that the gaze is nothing, that you are free from the mirror and intimately open to each across impassible distance. On the one hand
the speculation and that you are just playing with that haunted gaze the secret of secret is the abysmal hiddenness or absolute foreclose
which wants to capture yours.”66 Secret is the solitary auto-seeing to that secret reveals, as shown in Francis of Assisi’s hesitant disclosure of
which all light is blind. Like Black in Black, secret is of the order of his seraphic vision, which only unveils a more secret secret: “Although
an immanent hiddenness, an available inviolable depth: “Il n’y a plus de the holy man used to say on other occasions: “My secret is for myself,” he
secret ou de mystere ‘caché’ telle une boîte noire au cœur de l’Un ou was moved by Illuminato’s words. Then, with much fear, he recounted
de Dieu, en réalité au cœur du Logos. Mais un secret qui reste tel qu’un the vision in detail, adding that the one who had appeared to him had
secret que ne transforme pas sa révélation ‘formelle’ puisqu’il est déjà told him some things which he would never disclose to any person as
révélé. Un révélé-sans-révélation, un secret (de) l’Un déjà donné pour long as he lived.”71 On the other hand, the secret of secret is simply the
le Monde, secret de l’humilité que sa communication n’entame pas” [No given itself, the inexplicable fact of identity, as communicated by Ibn
more is there a secret or a mystery ‘hidden’ like a black box at the heart Arabi: “The secret of the secret: That by which the Real One is isolated
of the One or of God, actually at the heart of the Logos, but a secret that
remains like a secret that does not alter its ‘formal’ revelation because it
69 Laruelle, Future Christ, 18.
is already revealed: a revealed-without-revelation, a secret (of) the One
70 Eriugena, Periphyseon, PL 122:919, translation cited from
already given by the World, a secret of humility that its communication Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through
does not cut into].67 Long identified with earth—“Black is the proper the 12th Century (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 118. Cf. “Seek his face
color of elements in process of transmutation”68—black universe is the always, [Psalm 104.4], let not the finding of the beloved put an end to
presence of the radical openness of secret, the inexhaustibility of its the love-inspired search; but as love grows, so let the search for the
one already found become more intense” (Augustine, Expositions on the
65 François Laruelle, Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Psalms, trans. Maria Boulding, 6 vols. [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press,
Anthony Paul Smith (New York: Continuum, 2010), 17, my italics. 2003], VI.186).
66 Laruelle, Future Christ, 17-8. 71 Bonaventure, Major Legend of Saint Francis, 13.4, Francis of
67 Laruelle, Mystique non-philosophique, 61. Assisi: Early Documents, Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and
68 Aristotle, De Coloribus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 781a. William J. Short, eds. 3 vols. (New York: New City Press, 2001), 2.633.
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from the servant.”72 “He prevented the real secret from being known,
namely that He is the essential Self of things. He conceals it by otherness,
which is you.”73 The place of passage between these two senses of the
secret of secret, the locale of its immanent hiddenness, is the topology
defined in the word secret itself, substantive of the verb secerno (to set
apart, sever, disjoin). Secrecy is dislocation, severed place, topological
severing. Thus at the summit of its literal significance, we find secret
as the universal word written within the interior of the mystic’s self-
dislocating body. For example: the literally falling apart, limb from limb,
of some Indian Sufis in the presence of God74 and the disjointing Angela
of Foligno experiences when God withdraws from her at Assisi and in a
vision of the Crucifixion: “The bones and sinews of his most holy body
seemed completely torn out of their natural position; and yet his skin
was not broken . . . At the sight of the dislocated limbs and the painful
distension of the sinews, she felt herself pierced through even more than
she had been at the sight of the open wounds. For the former granted
her a deeper insight into the secret of his passion [magis intimabatur
animae videntis passionis secretum] . . . The sight . . . stirred her to such
compassion . . . that when she saw it, all her own joints seemed to cry
out with fresh laments.”75 Only the secret sees into the secret.

72 Ibn Arabi, al-Istilah al-Sufiyyah, cited in Journal of the Muhyiddin

Ibn Arabi Society III (1984): 52.
73 Ibn Arabi, Bezels of Wisdom, 133.
74 “In the increased proximity brought about by the dhikr
[recollection of God] of the heart the seeker becomes, eventually,
completely heart; every limb of his is a heart recollecting God . . .
We may place here the grotesque stories told about several Sufis of
India. Their limbs became separated from them during the dhikr and
recollected God each in its own way. This experience is known from
Shamanism, but was apparently not rare among later Sufis, mainly in
the Subcontinent” (Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam
[Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975], 173).
75 Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance (New
York: Paulist Press, 1993), 158. Cf. “[T]he soul then knows that God is
truly present . . . When this happens all the members feel a disjointing
[disiunctionem], and I wish it to be so. Indeed such is the extreme
delight that I feel that I would want to always remain in this state.
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To conclude my commentary on these seven lines from Du noir univers,

here are seven theorematic notes whose significance may already be
clear:

1. Black is the dislocation of the universe. Black universe is the

body of secret. Black is the matter of theory.

2. In secret lies the apotheosis or real glorification of problem

(something to be concerned about, to want to figure out), the perfection
of the fact of all problems whatsoever and the pure determination-
in-the-last-instance of there being any problem at all. Whence the
apophatic structure of mystical drunkenness: “And she is inebriated
not only from what she has drunk, but very intoxicated and more than
intoxicated from what she never drinks and nor will ever drink.”76

3. Mysticism, living discourse of the hidden, is the practical (i.e.

paradisical) science of eternally eliminating all problem from within,
from the radically immanent grounds of a vast and terrifyingly true
intuition: that you are the only problem. Or as Laruelle says, “the
heretical struggle is not born from terror or the specular-whole, which
it practically undoes, it is born from the being-separate of man that is
in-Man.”

4. No color is brightened by the addition of black. Likewise, there is

no such thing as an application (corporeal, imaginative, or intellectual)

Furthermore, I hear the bones cracking when they are thus disjointed
(Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, 158). John of the Cross explicates
the phenomenon mystical disjointing in relation to Eliphaz the
Temanite’s experience of hearing of a “hidden word . . . in the horror
of a nocturnal vision” (Job 4:12-3) [verbum absconditum . . . in horror
visionis nocturnae” (Job 4:12-3); see The Spiritual Canticle, 14-15:17-8.
On secrecy and dislocation, see Nicola Masciandaro & Anna Klosowska,
“Between Angela and Actaeon: Dislocation,” L’Esprit Créateur 50 (2010):
91-105.
76 Marguerite Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, 28.
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of mysticism or science of secret to the problem(s) of the world. The 1) That Black is both true and false.
only politics of black universe is black itself. 2) That the One is neither affirmed nor denied.

5. Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus (Psalm 14:1) [The fool Universe is the black celestial rose of the One: a real illusion and illusory
has said in his heart: there is no God]. In other words: one thinks black real that is without why.79 Black universe is your dark night, your secret,
is a color; another thinks that it is not; the real fool (fool of the Real) yours alone.
leaps into black universe and proves that both are wrong.77

6. The non-philosophical joy of black: seeing in oneself the truth

and the falsehood of Paracelsus’s warning, the brilliance of its eclipse:
“He who does know what makes black is the philosophus. He who does
not know this, but only knows that something happens to be black, is
nothing, and can be expected to do nothing but swindle or paint by
means of the color black.”78

7. The space of secret is an intimate expanse between two facts:

77 “[C]an there be any greater delight than to see . . . here and now
before us a vast lake of bubbling pitch, and swimming about in it vast
numbers of serpents, snakes, and lizards and many other kinds of fierce
and fearsome animals, while from the lake comes a plaintive voice [una
voz tristísima]: ‘You, O Knight, whosoever you may be, beholding this
dread lake: if you wish to attain the good hidden beneath these black
waters, you must show the resolve of your dauntless breast and cast
yourself into the midst of the dark, burning liquid [negro y encendido
licor], else you will not be worthy to see the mighty marvels contained in
the seven castles of the seven fairies that lie beneath its murky surface’?
And what of our delight when the knight, almost before the fearful
voice [la voz temerosa] has ceased, without giving his situation a second
thought, without stopping to consider the peril to which he is exposing
himself, or even shedding the burden of his armour, commends himself
to God and to his lady and hurls himself into the boiling lake and, all of
a sudden when he least knows where he is bound, finds himself amidst
flowery meadows, far finer than the Elysian fields themselves?” (Miguel
De Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. John Rutherford [New York: 79 “The rose does have no why; it blossoms without reason,
Penguin, 2000], 456). / Forgetful of itself, oblivious to our vision” (Angelus Silesius, The
78 Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493- Cherubic Wanderer, trans. Maria Shrady [New York: Paulist Press,
1541), Essential Theoretical Writings (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 151. 1986], 54).
86 87