If You Could Naught Yourself For An Instant: Meister Eckhart and The Mystical Unconscious

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If you Could Naught Yourself for an Instant: Meister Eckhart and the Mystical
Unconscious
Article in Medieval Mystical Theology · May 2015

DOI: 10.1179/2046572615Z.00000000030
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medieval mystical theology, Vol. 24 No. 1, May 2015, 23–44
If you Could Naught Yourself for an

Instant: Meister Eckhart and the
Mystical Unconscious
Arianne Conty
American University of Sharjah, UAE
This article sets out to articulate Meister Eckhart’s understanding of subjectivity

as split between a possessive self and a detached ground of the soul. Because
identifying with one necessarily entails relinquishing the other, Eckhart tells his
listeners to abandon the possessive soul that wills and knows in favour of an
empty soul that is inhabited by God. But this God cannot be known, desired,
or understood, since the cogito has already abandoned the site of subjectivity
to make room for God. So God as well is split, between what the word God
signifies to the cogito in the world of linguistic dualities, and a nameless
apophatic God beyond all knowing. This article will set out to compare
Eckhart’s understanding of this split subject with that of psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan, who similarly speaks of the subject as split between a thinking
self and a self that is only where it is not thinking. Because Lacan explicitly
adopts apophatic techniques to explain the subject’s relation to an Other
that he calls ‘the Obscure God’, his strategy will be shown to overlap in signifi-
cant ways with the way Eckhart’s mystical subject relates to the divine.
keywords Meister Eckhart, Jacques Lacan, subjectivity, detachment, uncon-

scious, apophatic
‘There is nothing so unknown to the soul as herself.’
Meister Eckhart
Detachment
The detached soul
By calling for the soul to ‘naught itself for an instant’, in order to find the ‘strange and
desert place’1 of oneness with God, Meister Eckhart’s mystical vision is one of self-
abandonment, a desertion that constitutes an apophatic ontology that he calls
1
Both of these citations are from Sermon 28, Ego elegi vos de mundo, cited in Meister Eckhart, (vol. 1, Sermon 17),
1979, p. 144.
© The Eckhart Society 2015 DOI 10.1179/2046572615Z.00000000030

24 ARIANNE CONTY
detachment (Abgeschiedenheit).2 Eckhart tirelessly tells his listener: ‘go completely out
of yourself’.3 Though he uses many metaphors for this desertion, they all portray this
single movement of departure or evasion, leaving the ground of the soul as empty as, to
use his own words, a vacuum or a void. He tells us in Sermon 15 that ‘anyone who had
so forsaken himself, he would truly be given back to himself’.4 In The Book of Bene-
dictus, he uses the term virgin or free (ledic) to reiterate this same theme, and in his
Councils on Discernment he focuses on the idea of emptiness:
What is an empty spirit?
An empty spirit is one that is confused by nothing, attached to nothing, has not attached
its best to any fixed way of acting, and has no concern whatever in anything for its own
gain, for it is all sunk deep down into God’s dearest will and has forsaken its own.5
In Sermon 52 he privileges the concept of poverty (Armut), and specifies that the
soul must become poor of will, of knowledge, and of possessions: ‘A poor man
wants nothing, and knows nothing, and has nothing’.6 A man who is poor of will
must be poor even of the will to do God’s will, for true poverty is to will nothing:
So long as a man has this as his will, that he wants to fulfil God’s dearest will, he has not
the poverty about which we want to talk. Such a person has a will with which he wants
to fulfil God’s will, and that is not true poverty. For if a person wants really to have
poverty, he ought to be as free of his own created will as he was when he did not
exist. For I tell you by the truth that is eternal, so long as you have a will to fulfil
God’s will, and a longing for God and for eternity, then you are not poor; for a poor
man is one who has a will and longing for nothing.7
2
Reiner Schürmann clarifies the meaning of detachment in the following way:
Abegescheidenheit, in modern German Abgeschiedenheit, is formed from the prefix ab- that indicates a separation
(abetuon: to undo something; abekêre: turning away, apostasy), and the verb scheiden or gescheiden. In its tran-
sitive form, this verb means “to isolate,” “to split,” “to separate,” and in its intransitive form “to go away,” “to die.”
In the allusive thought of Meister Eckhart, the word Abegescheidenheit, “detachment” or “renunciation,” and the
verbs of deliverance, evoke a soul [esprit] that is progressing toward a state of dispossession [en voie de déposses-
sion] toward all exteriority capable of disturbing its serenity. Schürmann, R., 1972, p. 160.
John Caputo adds the following helpful comments:
Meister Eckhart used the Middle High German word abegescheidenheit as a translation of abstractus, that which
is “drawn away” and “removed from” matter and the conditions of matter […] He also uses it to translate separ-
atus; thus “separate substance” (substantia separate) – a substance which exists separately from matter – is ren-
dered by Eckhart as der abgeschiedene Geist. Meister Eckhart also gives this word a distinctively “mystical” sense
as well, which is the meaning it bears in this treatise. Here Abgeschiedenheit means the state of having cut off one’s
affection from everything created and creaturely, from the “world” and the “self.” It is a condition of “purity” from
created things, from “attachment” to them. It does not refer to a physical or spatial separation but to a detachment
of the “heart” from worldly goods”. Caputo, J., 1986, p. 11.
3
Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, 1981, sermon 5b, p. 184. Also: ‘Those
who have wholly gone out of themselves […]’ (6, p. 185), ‘[…] and forsake himself and keep nothing for himself’ (15,
p. 189), ‘Whoever had so gone out of himself would be given back again to himself, more his own […]’ (15, p. 190),
‘And anyone who had so gone out would come back home far more noble than he went out’. (ibid.), ‘I say the same
about the man who has annihilated himself in himself […]’ (48, p. 197), ‘but he must pour all of it fruitfully into the
man who has abandoned himself for God […] (ibid.), etc. […]’.
4
Sermon 15, Homo quidam nobilis abiit in regionem longinquam. Translation: A Certain Noble Man Went to a Foreign
Land. Cited in Eckhart, M., 1981, p. 189.
5
Councils on Discernment, 2, cited in Eckhart, M., 1981, p. 248.
6
Sermon 52, Beati paupers spiritu. Translation: Blessed are the Poor in Spirit, cited in Eckhart, M., 1981, p. 199.
7
Sermon 52, ibid., p. 200.
IF YOU COULD NAUGHT YOURSELF FOR AN INSTANT 25
Opposing other mystics who focus upon desire in order to reach union with
God, Eckhart clearly states that desire and will as well as all forms of conscious
seeking only draw the soul away from God. ‘The more one seeks you, the less
one finds you. You should so seek him that you find him nowhere. If you do
not seek him, then you will find him’.8 Eckhart’s understanding of the renuncia-
tion of all desire, even that of the striving for holiness, was considered heretical
by his inquisitors, who list it as article eight of the Papal Bull. Its stark, apophatic
beauty reads as follows: ‘Those who are not desiring possessions, or honors, or
gain, or internal devotion, or holiness, or reward or the kingdom of heaven,
but who have renounced all this, even what is theirs, these people pay honour
to God’.9
Free of will and desire, a poor soul must also be free of knowledge, even that of
knowing God, for so long as it knows something, the soul is separate from God.
Because knowledge entails a knower and a known, it remains within the lie of
language, the duality of the created order, and hence is inadequate to communicate
true being:
Rather, he should be so free [ledic=empty] of knowing that he does not know or experi-
ence or grasp that God lives in him. For when man was established in God’s everlasting
being, there was no different life in him. What was living there was himself. So I say that
a man should be set as free of his own knowing as he was when he was not. [Der mensche
also ledic sol stân sînes eigenen wizzenes, al ser tete, dô er niht enwas].10
And finally, the most intimate poverty entails becoming poor of all possessing,
even of possessing a place, a site wherein God can do his will. So long as God
must enter the soul to do his work, that soul remains distinct from God. The
most intimate poverty, then, means voiding the self of all purposive intentionality
and of all identification, so that the ‘I’ of individuation can only be spoken
by God:
Poverty of spirit is for a man to keep so free of God and of all his works that if God
wishes to work in the soul, he himself is the place in which he wants to work; and
that he will gladly do. For if he finds a man so poor as this, then God performs his
own work […] and so God is his own worker in himself. Thus in this poverty man
pursues that everlasting being which he was and which he is now and which he will ever-
more remain.11
Free of willing, knowing and possessing, the soul, we might assume, has been
made powerless, a passive receptacle to receive God’s grace. But this is not what
happens to Eckhart’s dispossessed soul. Rather, the detached soul becomes all
powerful, functioning like a vacuum to suck God in. Thus, Eckhart’s extraordinary
8
9
Cited in ibid., p. 79.
10
Sermon 52, ibid., p. 200. De Libera notes on this passage that the translation loses the polysemy of the niht enwas
which could also be rendered ‘[…] free of his own knowing as when he was nothing’.
11
26 ARIANNE CONTY
understanding of detachment gives it power even over God.12 In his treatise On

Detachment, Eckhart writes:
[…] and yet I praise detachment above all love. First, because the best thing about love is
that it compels [twinge] me to love God, yet detachment compels God to love me [Daz
abgeschiedenheit twinge got suo mir] […] And I prove that detachment compels God to
come to me in this way; it is because everything longs to achieve its own natural place.
Now God’s own natural place is unity and purity, and that comes from detachment.
Therefore God must of necessity give himself to a heart that has detachment […].13
He repeats this theme in his Sermons as well, showing detachment to be synon-

ymous with the self-abandon we have already noted. Thus, in Sermon 48 we read:
I say the same about the man who has annihilated himself in himself and in God and in
all created things […] God must pour out the whole of himself with all his might so
totally into every man who has utterly abandoned himself that God withholds
nothing of his being or his nature or his entire divinity […].14
Detachment gains this power by being associated by Eckhart with nothingness or

the void.15 ‘Now detachment approaches so closely to nothingness that there can be
nothing between perfect detachment and nothingness’.16 As he explains in Sermon
59, the power of the void is analogous to his understanding of a vacuum: ‘You
should know, God cannot leave anything void or unfilled, God and nature cannot
endure that anything should be empty or void’.17 Just as nature abhors a vacuum,
then, and just as each entity must of necessity find itself in its natural habitat accord-
ing to Aristotle’s theory of the sedes naturalis, so God cannot help but fill the void,
and is ‘compelled’ (twinge) to withhold nothing of himself, to pour himself into the
empty soul of the annihilated subject. Once so filled, the alterity that constitutes the
detached soul is God.
12
As Eckhart explained in his defence, this idea was not new to him, for his predecessor as Dominican Chair at the Uni-
versity of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, said something similar in his Summa Theologica:
Divine will [volonté] has a necessary relationship with divine goodness, which is its proper object; God thus
necessarily wills [veut] to be His goodness. God wills objects other than Himself, on the other hand, in so far
as he orients them toward His goodness as towards a goal. God willing something other than Himself is not
necessary from an absolute point of view. Yet it is necessary by supposition; for supposing that He so wills it,
God cannot not will [car à supposer qu’il veuille, Dieu ne peut pas ne pas vouloir]. Summa Theologica, I,
q. 19, a. Quoted in Shürmann, R., 1972, p. 156.
13
Eckhart, M., 1981, p. 286. The authenticity of “On Detachment” is not assured. See the article by Jos Quint “Das
Echtheitsproblem des Traktats “von abgeschiedenheit” Fr. Pfeiffer, Meister Eckhart, Traktat Nr. IX, S. 483–493″ in
La mystique rhénane: Colloque de Strasbourg, 1963, pp. 39–57.
14
Sermon 48, Ein meister sprichet. Translation: A Master Speaks, cited in Eckhart, M., 1981, p. 197.
15
M. Enders explains the correlation between detachment and the void as follows:
The fact that detachment is found in pure nothingness [néant] is absolutely similar [semblable] to the fact that it is
found at the highest point [au plus haut], because it is only in nothingness, i.e. in what is not, but can be, deter-
mined, that God can and must act without limits according to His will. This is why God acts within man’s heart
only to the extent of his sensibility, which attains its climax in quasi-nothingness, in the lack of determination of
the detached heart. Cited in Enders, M., 1996, pp. 14–15.
16
On Detachment, Eckhart, M., 1981, p. 286.
17
Sermon 59: Et cum factus esset Jesus annorum duodecim […] ‘Wisse! Gott kann nichts leer noch unausgefüllt lassen;
Gott und die Natur können nicht dulden, dass irgend etwas unausgefüllt oder leer sei’. Deutsche Predigten und Traktate,
1963, p. 436.
The philosopher B. Mojsisch confirms this reading of the detached soul as having
power over God owing to its originary untouched nature. God, in Mojsisch’s under-
standing, exists only in relation to creation, and thus lacks this originary unity. He
writes:
For Eckhart, God is God only when He is in relation with the created. The ground of the
soul, however, is uncreated. In this way, it has, for Eckhart, priority over God; for God is
found in relation with something other, in this case the created, while the ground of the
soul is found only in relation with itself. God is thus for Eckhart, in relation to the
ground of the soul, something derived rather than original. The ground of the soul is
more original, because it is in relation with nothing foreign.18
It is true that Eckhart’s writing often confirms this interpretation, particularly in

his later sermons, influenced by a Neoplatonic return to a Unity prior to all differ-
entiation, including that of the Trinity. A good example can be found in Sermon
52, where we read:
A great authority says that his breaking through [durchbrechen] is nobler than his
flowing out [ûzfluzen]; and that is true. When I flowed out from God, all things said:
‘God is’. And this cannot make me blessed, for with this I acknowledge that I am a crea-
ture. But in the breaking-through, when I come to be free [ledic=empty] of will of myself
and of God’s will and of all his works and of God himself, then I am above all created
things, and I am neither God nor creature, but I am what I was and what I shall remain,
now and eternally.19
Here indeed, the ‘breaking through’ (durchbrechen) appears to be a return to the

origin of the soul before it became differentiated cogito, an anarchic state prior to
both God and creature. And again in Sermon 28:
There is something that transcends the created being of the soul […] It is a strange and
desert place, and is rather nameless than possessed of a name, and is more unknown than
it is known. If you could naught yourself for an instant, indeed I say less than an instant,
you would possess all that this is in itself. But as long as you mind yourself or any thing at
all, you know no more of God than my mouth knows of colour or my eye of taste: so
little do you know or discern what God is.20
According to this reading, when man no longer has a self, an ‘I’, he no longer has
God. It is the opposition between the two that brings God and creatures into being.
The ‘eternal depths’ of their common origin cannot be found from the bias of this
created division. Both creatures and God must thus be given up to reach the
‘nothing’ of their ‘empty being’. But, as Alain de Libera explains, this double loss
‘that liberates God from the soul at the same time as it liberates the soul from
God, shows that the destiny of the soul is not to abandon itself to God in order to
get free of itself, but rather to get free of Him in order to ‘abandon Him to
18
Mojsisch, B., 1996, pp. 18–30, p. 21.
19
Sermon 52, Eckhart, M., 1981, p. 203.
20
Sermon 28, Eckhart, M., 1979, p. 144.
28 ARIANNE CONTY
Himself’’.21 In other words, if the ‘breaking through’, is often understood in terms

of the reditus or Neoplatonic return, this return is not that of the soul to its ground,
but rather the return of God to the very ground that was thus vacated.
Thus, though Mojsisch’s interpretation can be justified, it is also misleading. Just
as Eckhart describes two souls, an intentional self who must ‘nought himself’,
‘forsake himself’, ‘go completely out of himself’, and the ground of the soul that
is thus left empty, he similarly seeks to differentiate a relational God, reified in
terms of the limitations of the cogito, from the ground of God that can be known
only by God himself: ‘The immeasurable God who is in the soul is the one who com-
prehends the god who is immeasurable’.22 Eckhart qualifies the ground of the soul,
using metaphors or else differential adjectives to set it apart from the possessive soul
(‘innermost soul’, ‘ground of the soul’, ‘spark’, ‘castle’, ‘virgin wife’, ‘sprout’,
‘silent middle’, ‘quiet desert’ […]). These two souls cannot cohabit the same site,
and Eckhart’s sermons set out to help the seeker to relinquish the latter in order
to uncover the former.23 In other words, the ‘innermost soul’ becomes the centre
of man only when he has emptied himself of all notions of selfhood as constituted
in cognition. Since knowing God as God knows himself can occur only when the
emptying of the soul has taken place, it entails a God dispossessed of his attributes
just as the soul is dispossessed of hers. Eckhart uses the same linguistic strategy to
differentiate two notions of God, calling the ground of God ‘One’, ‘Wasteland’,
‘Nothing’ (Niht), and ‘Godhead’, (Gotheit) to distinguish God from ‘God’, but
he warns against reifying even these words into yet another construction of the
thinking self.
Detached God
It is only once we have understood these two souls and these two Gods and how they
relate to Meister Eckhart’s exegesis of language and reification that we can attempt
to interpret Eckhart’s well-known prayer ‘to God that we may be free from God’. As
Michael Sells has shown,24 it is not without importance that many translations of
Eckhart have surrounded the second God of this famous phrase with quotation
marks. This effectively sets apart a ‘real’, ‘transcendent’ God (that we know as
real and transcendent) from a reified word for God, as if somehow without the cita-
tion marks, God were a word exempt from the duality of signifier and signified. That
is, in line with certain medieval authors, these translators interpret Eckhart as dis-
tinguishing between ‘God-as-he-is-in-himself’ and ‘God-as-he-is-in-creatures’. Yet,
this reading misses Eckhart’s point entirely. Rather, it is because we are created
beings that there is a God, for it can be a God only for us: ‘And if I did not exist,
21
De Libera’s explanation is in reference to an apocryphal sermon whose authorship remains questionable. De Libera,
1984, pp. 244–45.
22
Sermon 84, Puella Surge, cited in Eckhart, M., 1986, p. 336.
23
B. Mojsisch calls these two selves the ‘pseudo-self’ and ‘self’ [‘pseudo-moi’ and ‘moi’]. See Mojsisch, B., 1996, p. 20.
24
At the opening of his book Mystical Languages of Unsaying (1994), on page one, Michael Sells writes for instance,
after quoting Eckhart’s phrase in question:
Such interpolations and the widespread acceptance they have received are indicative of a pervasive modern
dis-ease with the kind of mystical language composed by Eckhart. Without editorial and hermeneutical alteration,
the actual words of Eckhart’s prayer to God to be free of God are inconsistent with modern and postmodern con-
structions of the monotheistic tradition and the medieval mind.
God would also not exist. That God is God, of that I am a cause; if I did not exist,
God too would not be God. There is no need to understand this’.25 Let us resituate
Eckhart’s prayer to be free of God into the context of Sermon 52 to clarify his
argument:
When I stood in my first cause, I then had no God, and then I was my own cause.
I wanted nothing, I longed for nothing, for I was an empty being […] and so I
stood, empty of God and of everything. But when I went out from my own free
will and received my created being, then I had a God, for before there were any
creatures, God was not God, but he was what he was. But when creatures came to
be and received their created being, then God was not God in himself, but he was
God in the creatures.
Now I say that God, so far as he is God, is not the perfect end of created beings. The
least of these beings possesses in God as much as he possesses. If it could be that a fly
had reason and could with its reason seek out the eternal depths of the divine being
from which it issued, I say that God, with all that he has as he is God, could
not fulfill or satisfy the fly. So therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of
God […].26
If the Papal Bull erred in taking certain citations out of their context, as we have
just done, we must now be careful to reintegrate their meaning into the context of
Eckhart’s philosophy of language, for the Papal Bull, focusing as it did on the appar-
ent quietism27 of his ideas, misunderstood the radicality of Eckhart’s argument, for
the thought of God as an ens, as a linguistic sign that enters into the duality of the
signifier and the signified was abhorrent to him. As Eckhart puts it in Sermon 53,
‘All creatures want to utter God […] they all want to utter God, and yet he
remains unuttered’.28 As Eckhart will incessantly warn with an unparallelled apo-
phatic rigor, this does not mean that one ought to pray to God as esse, being, nor
even as esse absconditum, for this would simply transform being into a thing that
is as an object of thought. Any definition of God re-installs the duality between
self and God and the reifications that it presupposes.
God is an impossibility for thought and cannot be reached by means of the intel-
lect (God is always ‘God’), there is nothing to be done, and this nothing [Niht] is
what the word God hides.29 Thus, what was seen as a heretical correspondence
between the soul and God is again misplaced, in that ‘naked nothingness’ is
beyond predication. To speak of God even as One is thus to remain within the
flowing-out, to reify God as something. Eckhart is careful to exclude this danger-
ous possibility: ‘And if God is neither Goodness, nor Being, nor Truth, nor
One, what is he then? He is nothing of nothing [Er ist nihtes niht], neither this
25
Sermon 52, cited in Eckhart, M., 1981, p. 203. Translation modified (I have removed the citation marks from God).
26
Sermon 52, cited in Eckhart, M., 1981, p. 200.
27
The ‘breaking through’ is neither avoidance of works nor seclusion from the world, as the charge of quietism implied.
One has only to read Sermon 86, in which he gives superiority to busy Martha over contemplative Mary to understand
that this is far from Eckhart’s intention.
28
29
‘Then how should I love God?’ […] You should love him as he is a non-God, a nonspirit, a nonperson, a nonimage,
but as he is a pure, unmixed, bright “One”, separated from all duality; and in that One we should eternally sink down,
out of “something” into “nothing”’. Sermon 83, Eckhart, M., 1981, p. 208.
30 ARIANNE CONTY
nor that’.30 According to Eckhart, we must discover God as did Saint Paul when
he underwent his conversion experience, which he describes in Sermon 71 as
follows: ‘When he got up from the ground, with eyes open he saw nothing, and
the nothing was God’.31
That is, Eckhart attempts to separate God as word and concept from an unknown
God who comes to light only through apophasis. The aporia created by critiquing all
of language within language is negative theology properly named,32 and its language
game is at the heart of Eckhart’s sermons:
The last end of being is the darkness or the unknownness of the hidden divinity, in which
this light shines that the darkness does not comprehend. Therefore Moses said, ‘He who
is sent me’ (ex. 3:14), he who is without name, who is a denial of all names and who
never acquired a name; and therefore the prophet said: ‘Truly you are the hidden
God’ (Is. 45:15).33
Eckhart’s apophatic struggle keeps alive this alternation of kataphasis and

apophasis, of being and nothingness.34 This dialectic cannot be definitively
resolved but only repeated infinitely in the ‘flowing out’ and ‘breaking
through’, of continual birth and annihilation. The truth of Being, then, can
only be encountered in what Lacan calls the ‘army of metaphors’ that trace
this absence in the symbolic order, rendering it present as ‘innermost spark’,
‘desert’, or ‘Wasteland’.
There is thus a perfect symmetry between a known and an unknowable God, and
a known and an unknowable subject. Just as Eckhart differentiates God from the
Wasteland, the Nothing, or the Godhead, he also describes the soul as divided
between a possessive, knowing self, and an unnamable soul. Coming to know
God as God knows himself requires the desertion of the volitional soul in order to
expose the innermost soul that is revealed in its absence as just this absence.
There can therefore be no ‘experience’ of God in detachment, for there is no one
to do the experiencing but God himself. The ‘nothing’ or ‘wasteland’ that is God,
and the ‘quiet desert’ or ‘silent middle’ that is the soul, are one and the same for
Eckhart, for the human being is constituted by an absolute Alterity that is its own
most identity. 35
30
Sermon 23, cited in de Libera, A., 1984, p. 285.
31
Sermon 71, Surrexit autem Saulus de terra… (Paul Rose from the Ground…), cited in Eckhart, M., 1986, p. 320.
32
Pierre Hadot writes: ‘This extension of apophaticism can be explained by the very condition of human language,
which comes up against insuperable limits if it wants to express by means of language what is expressed in language:
Apophaticism is a sign, a figure, of the inexpressible mystery of existence’. Hadot, P., 2002, p. 239.
33
34
How can God be both being and nothingness? We should remember that Sartre’s existential understanding of this
phrase is taken from Heidegger, and Heidegger was greatly influenced by Eckhart, so it may be no exaggeration to under-
stand the istikheit or Being of beings for Heidegger as defined by its ek-static nature, as being marked by the void. If only
God is, and God is not individuated, then it is only by voiding all individuation that we can speak the truth in uttering the
“I” in our own name. See, for instance, John D. Caputo, 1986; Barbara Dallepezze, 2009; Holger Helting, 1997; Jurgen
Wagner, 1995.
35
Michel de Certeau, who was a historian of mysticism, a Jesuit priest and a founding member of Lacan’s Ecole Freu-
dienne, clarifies Eckhart’s position in the following way: ‘[T]o the question “Who are you?’, mystical discourse answers
with another question: ‘Who else lives in you?’, ‘To whom do you speak?’. Reminiscent of the alterity of Meister
Eckhart’s soul, mystical discourse answers: ‘You are the other of yourself’. Cited in de Certeau, 1982, pp. 271–72.
Alterity
I is another
If the only way to escape the lie of subjectivity is to be God, one could speak the truth
only by uttering Rimbaud’s phrase, ‘I is another’, or even the phrase for which
Islamic mystic Hallaj was tortured to death: ‘I am God’. Eckhart comes quite
close to this when he writes, for instance, ‘God and I are one’, and this equivalency
constituted nine of the 28 condemned phrases on the Papal Bull responsible for
excommunicating Eckhart from the church.36 Following are a few examples from
his German sermons that did not find their way onto the Papal Bull:
Sermon 52: ‘For in this breaking-through I receive that God and I are one’.37
Sermon 6: ‘God and I, we are one’.38
Sermon 15: ‘This man lives now in utter freedom and a pure nakedness, for there is
nothing that he must make subject to himself or that he must acquire, be it little or
much, for everything that is God’s own is his own’.39
Sermon 15: ‘[…] in the ground of the soul, where God’s ground and the soul’s
ground are one ground’.40
36
In particular, articles 9–14 and 20–22 equate man with God:
9: Recently I considered whether there was anything I would take or ask from God. I shall take careful thought
about this, because if I were accepting anything from God, I should be subject to him or below him as a servant or
slave, and he in giving would be as a master. We shall not be so in life everlasting.
10: We shall all be transformed totally into God and changed into him. In the same way, when in the sacrament
bread is changed into Christ’s body, I am so changed into him that he makes me his one existence, and not just
similar. By the living God it is true that there is no distinction there.
11: Whatever God the Father gave to his Only-Begotten Son in human nature, he gave all this to me. I except
nothing, neither union, nor sanctity; but he gave the whole to me, just as he did to him.
12: Whatever holy scripture says of Christ, all that is also true of every good and divine man.
20: That the good man is the Only-Begotten Son of God.
21: The noble man is that Only-Begotten Son of God whom the Father generates from all eternity.
22: The Father gives birth to me his Son and the same Son. Everything that God performs is one; therefore he gives
me, his Son, birth without any distinction.
Cited in Eckhart, M., 1981, pp. 79–80.
The popularity of Eckhart’s teaching to Dominican nuns in Strasbourg and, it is thought, as master of advanced
students in Cologne, brought about his downfall. The Franciscan archbishop of Cologne, Henry of Virneburg
ordered an inquisitional process. Though Eckhart made a public protestation of his innocence in the Dominican
church at Cologne in 1327, the sentence pronounced his works heretical. Eckhart issued a ‘Vindicatory Docu-
ment’ showing how the isolated phrases that were condemned had misinterpreted his intentions and misunder-
stood his use of rhetoric, in particular his use of the ‘to the extent that […]’ formulation. He then appealed the
decision to the Holy See and set off to Avignon to await his trial. The trial under Pope John XXII, and then Ben-
edict XII did not reverse the findings of the Cologne inquisition, but Eckhart died before the announcement of the
verdict in March, 1329. Theologians are fairly unanimous in thinking that Eckhart was wrongly condemned, but
a formal request to rehabilitate him within the Church has gone unanswered by the Popes. The last request dates
from the 30 March, 1992, when the Master of the Dominican Order (Fr. Damian Byrne) asked Cardinal Ratzinger
for a letter of rehabilitation or at least ‘a word of appraisal of his doctrine’. His letter has not yet received a
response.
37
Sermon 52: ‘daz ich unde Got einz sîn’, and again in the same sermon, ‘God and I are one’. Cited in Eckhart, M.,
1981, p. 203.
38
39
Eckhart, 15, ibid., p. 190.
40
Eckhart, 15, ibid., p. 192.
32 ARIANNE CONTY
If, for Eckhart, the ‘I’ can only be God, and all conceptions of self-hood are erro-
neous and to be overcome,41 it is because for Eckhart there can be only one
subject, only one ‘I’ who ‘is’, namely God. Inspired, as were other Rhenish theolo-
gians, by the God of Exodus who tells Moses ‘I am what I am’, Eckhart associates
being with God’s identity as ‘I’.42 It is God’s being (esse) that is beyond comprehen-
sion and in this he differentiates himself from Pseudo-Dionysius, for whom God is
beyond being. Following Thomas Aquinas’ interpretation of Pseudo-Dionysius,
Eckhart understands God’s ineffability as being derived from His nature as esse
absconditum. As only God is, only God has an ego, an ‘I’: ‘‘Ego’, the word ‘I’
belongs to no one save God alone in his oneness’.43
The ‘I’ can refer only to an ego that is undivided, that is alone in an ontological
and ineffable solitude. There can be no alterity, no dialectic where there is an ‘I’,
for only where there is a ‘me’ or a ‘you’ is there duality. If, according to Eckhart’s
Platonic example, all that is white shares in whiteness itself, so the soul can claim
being only by sharing in God’s esse. In other words, the soul is only by giving up
all individuality and becoming other to itself. 44 The human subject, then, as consti-
tuted by reflection as a self-conscious ‘I’ is nothing in and of itself, for in order to be
in truth, it can only be God, for God is all there is:
‘I’, that means in the first place God’s is-ness [istikeit], the fact that God alone is, for all
things are in God and from Him, since outside of Him and without Him nothing truly is:
41
Denys Turner, 1995, p. 184, aptly describes this possessive self as the central hindrance to reaching God:
[…] But at the root of all other possessiveness is the ultimately possessive desire to be a self: the desire that there
should be at my centre not that unnameable abyss into which, as into a vacuum, the nameless godhead is inevi-
tably drawn, but an identity I can own, an identity which is defined by my ownership of it. That is the ultimately
destructive form that attachment can take, for it is an attachment which seeks to infill that nothingness with
images of self and with ‘ways’ to God.
John Caputo, 1996, p. 120, similarly writes:
The ‘self’ is the principle of evil in the soul, and the way to union with God is to suppress the desires of the self.
Eckhart is both philosophically and mystically pre-Cartesian. He wants to surrender the self to God in his mystical
theory just as he wants to subordinate consciousness to reality in his metaphysics. In either case it is the presence
of the ego cogito which conceals true being.
42
De Libera, A., 1984, p. 247: ‘Celui qui est, le Dieu de l’Exode, est, pour Eckhart comme pour tous ses confrères
rhénans, celui qui est l’être-Lui-même, en un mot “Je”’.
43
Sermon 28, ‘“Ego” daz wort “ich”, enist nieman eigen dan got aleine in sîner einicheit’ (DW 2:68.4–5), cited in
McGinn, B., 2001, p. 138.
44
Lévinas proposes a reversal opposite to that of Eckhart, by rejecting the nominative ‘I’ for the accusative ‘me’, pre-
cisely because its truth is derived from its being called into being by an Other. For Lévinas, the subject is subjected to the
other pre-ontologically, precisely because ‘called’ into being by alterity. The subject ‘is’ then, as the obligation to
respond, and this response carries a pre-ontic ‘response-ability’. Though both thinkers understand being as given by
the other, Eckhart calls for the identity of caller and called in an interior return to an undifferentiated state prior to cre-
ation, while Lévinas’ call is from without and demands of the subject a recognition of radical alterity in the face of the
other that cannot be sublated. Though for both, the subject is constituted from without, Lévinas is wary of mysticism
precisely because it seeks a union that abolished the boundaries necessary for an ethics founded upon agape and not
eros. This difference might represent a difference between Jewish and Christian spirituality, in that the chasm
between God and man is unbreachable in Judaism, whereas mediation and identity between the two is achieved in
the figure of Jesus Christ for Christians. In order to find our essential liberty for Eckhart, we must separate ourselves
from our ‘accidental nature’. As de Libera and Zum Brunn explain, ‘“to want” to be different and to erect this difference
into an absolute is what Scripture calls “the old man, the earthly man, the exterior man, man the enemy, man the slave.”
It is by means of this prejudice against the One and the universal that Meister Eckhart defines idolatry and injustice […]’.
De Libera, A., and Zum Brunn, E., 1984, p. 67. Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology can be seen as an attempt to enact a
compromise between these two positions.
all creatures are worthless and a mere nothing compared with God. Therefore, what they
are in truth they are in God, and thus God alone is in truth. And therefore the word ‘I’
means the is-ness [istikeit] of divine truth, for it is the proof of one is. It thus testifies that
He alone is.45
Eckhart’s understanding of istikeit or is-ness reverses the Cartesian conception of

subjectivity that the modern world has come to take for granted, one in which it is
the human subject’s thinking ‘I’ that dictates being over and beyond all relationality
to others, what de Libera calls ‘the fiction of the me’.46 For Eckhart, thinking of God
necessarily entails being separate from God, and hence bereft of being, since all
thinking betrays human individuation and hence separation from the being of
God. One can become a subject only by realizing that one’s thinking and one’s
being cannot be coterminous, for there where one is thinking, one is not. Rather
than testifying to what sets the human soul apart, the ‘I’ comes to mean the end
of all subjective separateness as constructed by thought and language, and the
internalization of alterity as union with God.47 The soul becomes ‘I’ then, only
when it has given up all thinking, all distinction, everything that differentiates
‘Conrad’ from ‘Henry’. As de Libera points out, ‘I’ means nothing other than
what Eckhart calls ‘the naked purity of the being of God that he is in himself’.48
To reach this ‘naked purity’ the soul must sacrifice or ‘escape’ from the notion of
identity as something constructed by thinking and convert to what de Libera calls
‘a transpersonal interiority of being’.49 Eckhart writes:
You ought to sink down [entsinken] out of all your your-ness [dînesheit], and flow into
his his-ness [istikeit], and your ‘yours’ and his ‘his’ ought to become one ‘mine’, so com-
pletely that you with him perceive forever his uncreated is-ness, and his nothingness, for
which there is no name [ungewordene istikeit unde sîeungenanten nihtheit].50
Just as the soul’s purest prayer begs God to be free of God, the soul finds God only
by losing God, when it no longer knows what it has found. Union is thus perhaps not
the best term to explain Eckhart’s goal, for union implies the uniting of two who
become one. There is no coincidentia oppositorum, for there is nothing to unite.
For Eckhart, the unity of being is unknown to the thinking self, and where the
self is thinking, there God is not. Once it has fled itself as cogito, as volo, the
45
Sermon 77, Ecce mitto angelum meum, cited in Eckhart, M., 1979, as Sermon 49, vol. 2, pp. 38–39.
46
De Libera, A., 1984, p. 262.
47
‘“I” […] means that God is unseparated from all things, for God is in all things and is more inwardly (istiger) in them
than they are in themselves’. Sermon 77, Ecce mitto angelum meum, Walshe, opus cité, Sermon 49, vol. 2, pg. 39. Reiner
Schürmann cites a similar theme from the sermon Iusti vivent in aeternum: ‘If the nature of God is my nature, then divine
being is my being. God is more intimately present (istiger) to all creatures than the creature is to itself ([…] Do ist got
istiger allen crêatûren denne die creature ir selber ist […]).’ Cited in Schürmann, R., 1972, p. 333.
48
Sermon 77, de Libera, A., 1984, p. 241.
49
De Libera, 1984, p. 241.
50
Sermon 83: Renovamini spiritu (Ep. 4: 23), English translation from Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, 1981,
p. 207, German from Schürmann, 1972, p. 334. Note that where Walshe translated istikeit as ‘is-ness’ Edmund Colledge
has translated the term with a possessive pronoun as ‘his-ness’. Schürman explains the important terms istikeit as
follows: ‘The third group of words, istic and isticheit or istikeit, derived from the verb sîn, refers even more exclusively
to God. Master Eckhart calls the pure being without determination of the deity istikeit […]’. Schürmann cites the follow-
ing example from Eckhart when, commenting on Saint Paul, he affirmed that Paul ‘abandoned God for God; in this way
God remained as he is present (istic) to himself, not received or given, but in the presence (isticheit) that God is in
himself’. Cited on pp. 333–34.
34 ARIANNE CONTY
soul’s identity resides where the thinking ego cannot go, in an alterity marked by
unknowing. Yet, just as Yeats told us in his poem The Winding Stair, ‘I’m looking
for the face I had before the world was made’, so Eckhart indicates our provenance
from something foreign to us as ego cogito. Our rational ego identity depends upon
language that itself testifies to creation and the manifestation of plurality and duality
that it entails. Only once it has fled itself as cogito, can the human soul find itself in
an originary Being that lacks nothing, for it is a plenary nothingness. Thus, for
Eckhart, the soul must recognize its truth as residing where the ego cannot go, in
an alterity marked by unknowing. In the ‘innermost soul’ all will and all knowledge
have ‘flowed out’, and all that is left is a void, a void that is inhabited by an alterity
that cannot be known by the ego.
Think therefore I am not

Eckhart’s vision is, in this sense, not so far removed from that of psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan when he seeks to undermine the modern autonomous subject by ana-
lyzing the untenability of its supposed source in Descartes. According to Lacan, Des-
cartes’ cogito ergo sum does not reach its intended goal of rational autonomy,
because the fact that he is certain, that is, that he has a clear and distinct idea that
he is doubting and therefore that he is a thinking thing, has a cause exterior to his
thought. Because Descartes has a clear and distinct idea of God,51 and God is the
cause of this idea and thus exterior to this thinking, Descartes is placed in the pos-
ition of not being able to differentiate God from the malin genie, for both can manip-
ulate the real. According to this reading, Descartes’ other is neither clear nor distinct,
and though he cannot think it, it necessarily thinks him. Descartes is unwittingly
saying, as Jean Luc Marion has also pointed out,52 that only an unknown other
can think for him, and thus that he does not think (‘je ne pense pas’).
As Lacan makes clear, Freud also founded his theory upon doubt, and upon an
Other, the Id, that cannot be clearly thought. By doubting its own justifications in
thought, and attributing truth to this absent other, Freud’s cogito knows that the
truth of its being necessarily escapes its understanding. This is the very meaning
of the unconscious. I quote from Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis:
In an exactly analogical way, Freud, there where he doubts […] is assured that a thought
is there, which is unconscious, which means that it is revealed as absent […] For Des-
cartes, in the initial cogito, what the I think aims at to the extent that it swings over
51
‘[…] we can say that if we ignore God, we can have certain knowledge of no other thing’. Descartes, Principes I, 13,
cited in Beyssade, J.-M., 1972, p. 108.
52
Using Descartes’ thought experiment that begins with the cogito being thought (whether by the evil genius or by God
changes little), and thinking only as a response, Marion describes the subject as fundamentally delayed, always arriving
late to the event of its own constitution:
‘I am insofar as originally thought by another thought [pensé par une autre pensée] that always already thinks me,
even if I cannot yet identify its essence or prove its existence. I am already a res cogitans, but only understood as a
thought that someone else thinks, a thinking thought thought by another thinking thought — res cogitans cogitate
[…]. The first thought of the ego is, in fact, not about an object (certain or false), nor about itself, but about the
thought by means of which an Other (or even an alterity [voire un autrui]) thinks it (persuades or fools it). The ego
is thus instituted as originally a posteriori’. Marion, J.-L., 2005, pp. 378–79. Marion discusses this more specifi-
cally in his article ‘The Original Otherness of the Ego: A Rereading of Descartes’s Meditatio II’, 2003, pp. 33–53.
[bascule] to the I am, is the real, but the true remains so far outside that Descartes must
next reassure himself of what, if not an Other who is not a trickster [trompeur] and who,
what is more, can guarantee the foundations of truth simply by his very existence, guar-
antee that his own objective reason contains the necessary structure to grant the dimen-
sion of truth to the real that he has just verified. I can only point to the prodigious
consequences that this placing of the truth into the hands of the Other, here the
perfect God, has had; since truth is the business of this God, no matter what he said,
would have been true, even if he had said that two and two equals five, it would have
been true.53
This moment of truth, when being is dissociated from knowing, forces the subject
to hesitate between a being that does not know, and a knowing that cannot be. By
removing the infamous conjunctive ‘therefore’ from the ontological clause that
follows it, Lacan proposes what he calls the vel, the ‘or’ that separates the two
clauses and reveals the subject to be fundamentally split (subject = $)54. This split
subject, according to psychoanalyst Bruce Fink, ‘consists entirely in the fact a speak-
ing being’s two “parts” or avatars share no common ground: they are radically sep-
arated (the ego or false being requiring a refusal of unconscious thoughts,
unconscious thought having no concern whatsoever for the ego’s fine opinion of
itself)’.55
Thus, from an initial ‘I think or I am’,56 Lacan goes further, developing what can
be transcribed as ‘I am because the other thinks me’. According to psychoanalyst
Gerard Miller, the Lacanian question thus becomes ‘what am I in the desire of the
Other?’.57 The answer, for Lacan, is given in his famous and oft-repeated phrase
‘le désir de l’homme c’est le désir de l’autre’, which can be rendered: ‘Man’s
desire is the desire of/for the other […] which is to say that it is as the Other that
he desires’.58 Bruce Fink explains: ‘The I is not already in the unconscious. It may
be everywhere presupposed there, but it has to be made to appear. It may always
already be there, in some sense, but the essential clinical task is to make it appear
there where it was’.59 The real, then, is the certainty that the ‘I’ will always find
itself where thinking does not go, or in Lacan’s words: ‘The real is here that
which always returns to the same place – to the place where the subject in so far
as it thinks, where the res cogitans, does not meet it’.60
Lacan’s ‘I am because the other thinks me’ corresponds nicely to Eckhart’s soul,
which can be and will only as the other that is God, for as he says, ‘everything that is
God’s own is his own’. The soul is only because it is inhabited by this divine Alterity,
and so long as it is actively thinking, it is not. For Lacan, the ‘I’ and the ‘am’ that
make up the subject can never meet; for Eckhart they can meet only once the I
speaks in the name of a being not its own. For both, this meeting is that of a
53
Lacan, 1990, p. 44–45.
54
Bruce Fink, describes the Lacanian subject as follows: ‘Our first attempt, then, to say what the Lacanian subject is
comes down to the following: the subject is nothing but this very split’. Cited in 1995, p. 45.
55
Ibid., 1995, p. 45.
56
Miller, G., 1987, p. 27.
57
Ibid., 1987, p. 29.
58
Lemaire, A., 1977, p. 261.
59
Fink, B., 1995, p. 68.
60
Lacan, 1990, p. 59.
36 ARIANNE CONTY
present absence, a missed encounter in that the thinking self must be annihilated in
order to ‘be’.
This desire that is both the desire of the ground of the soul as other, which is to say
as God, and of the soul for God, can finally be understood as being one and the
same. In this light, Lacan’s separation of the conscious thinking ego from what
we can call the being of the unconscious would correspond to Eckhart’s seeing the
negation of all volition and intentional consciousness as necessary to ‘breaking
through’ to the ground of the soul. Lacan’s permutation of Descartes’ ‘I think there-
fore I am’ into ‘I am there where I am not thinking’ requires a subject who is capable
of abandoning the thinking ego and its need for self-conscious individuation, in
order to encounter an other Other, that Lacan himself at one point calls ‘the
obscure God’. He can thus be seen as using an apophatic technique to show that
the subject is precisely where it cannot think itself. For both Meister Eckhart and
Lacan, the ‘I’ must associate with this invisible and unthinkable site and learn to
speak in the first person in ‘its’ name. ‘The real is here that which always returns
to the same place — to the place where the subject in so far as it thinks, where
the res cogitans, does not meet it’.61The real, then, is the certainty that the ‘I’ will
always find itself where thinking does not go. To accept this experience as the
moment of truth is what the mystic and the cured psychoanalytic patient share in
common.
That obscure object of desire

Desire of/for the other
Eckhart tells us again and again to become detached, and to cultivate the letting go
or releasement of Gelassenheit, but he never tells us exactly how the soul can be
emptied of autonomous will and intentional knowledge. The question thus
becomes, how exactly are we to achieve this detachment, to decreate our ‘selves’,
if every effort, every desire or intention to do so further mires us in attachments
that replace nothingness with desire and passivity with active ways of seeking
God? This paradox has received attention from scholars, though it has remained,
and perhaps will ever remain, an open aporia. This is the view of Michael Sells,
who resumes the problem in relation to the birth of the Son in the soul as follows:
The son cannot be born in the soul unless the soul becomes empty of its own will and
images, unless it ‘sinks back into nothingness,’ or breaks through to the divine
ground where the soul’s ground and God’s ground are one. On the other hand, how
is it to achieve this state of emptiness? Clearly not through its own works and will,
since the emptiness is precisely an emptiness of works and will.62
Denys Turner frames the problem more generally when he writes:
[…] To desire anything at all, he says, even to be a ‘place’ in which God can work, is to
fail to be the ‘nothing’ in which God alone can work. It is as if desire as such, being a
61
Ibid., 1990, p. 59.
62
Sells, M., 1994, p. 174.
‘something’, constitutes a state of being undetached in itself, and there is no doubt that
his Avignon accusers thought Eckhart had moved too close for comfort to an absolute
‘quietism’ of desire, to an account of detachment as a condition desireless of all
‘means’.63
Can the soul be free of all desire, even desire for detachment? Can there be such a
thing as ‘detached desire’? Can the soul desire nothing, and is this desire to desire
nothing self-defeating?
If there can be a ‘detached desire’ that allows Eckhart’s mystic somehow to desire
detachment, we must then determine who does the desiring and how it escapes func-
tioning as the kataphatic infilling that Eckhart sees as contrary to detachment. That
is, if Turner is correct in seeing Eckhart as innocent of the charge of quietism because
‘to be detached […] is not to be a being without desire’,64 how can this desire be
understood without contradicting Eckhart’s renunciation of will, intentionality,
and even love in the practice of detachment? Let us first take into account
Turner’s position:
But from none of this does it follow that I should not desire detachment in order to
achieve it, even if, necessarily, my desire for it is an undetached desire. For what else
can I do but desire it and pray for it and work for it? The point in logic, therefore,
has no bearing on the process of becoming detached — as if to imply absurdly that
one should not, until detached enough to seek it, seek detachment. The logical point
has a bearing only on what it is to say of someone that she is detached, not on how
an undetached person might or might not set about acquiring detachment.65
Turner seems to evoke a process in which little by little, the mystic who desires
detachment seeks to overcome the obstacles in his or her path until detachment
has been reached. This appears to be a naive reading of Eckhart and leaves us in
the same quandary as those interpreters of Buddhist texts who state that there is a
form of desire with which to seek the cessation of desire. Rather, in the Zen tradition,
realizing that one is already enlightened is often described as ‘sudden enlightenment’
in that it does not entail effort so much as surprise. Thus, the stories of the role of the
koan or the master’s stick in forcing the mind (itself passive) into realizing its true
nature. Now to a certain extent this description seems pertinent to describe Eckhart’s
detached soul, in that the ground of the soul is not a development, the product of a
series of efforts, of desire, or will. Rather it is, for Eckhart, man’s true nature as
‘naked nothingness’, stripped of the accretions of culture and language. In this
reading, realizing the state of detachment is itself achieving the indistinction of the
ground of the soul. It is the very giving up of all efforts that constitutes enlightenment
or Buddha nature, to carry through our comparison.66 And Eckhart’s words, like
63
Turner, D., 1995, p. 179.
64
Ibid., 1995, p. 182.
65
Ibid.
66
The affinities between Eckhart and Zen have not gone without notice. For developed comparative studies, see for
example Vannini, M., 1989; Haas, A., 1998; Suzuki, D.T., 1957/2002; Shürmann, R., 1978; Ueda, S., 1971.
In their studies comparing Zen and Eckhart, both Ueda and Schürmann develop a comparison centered around the
notion of living ‘without a why’. For Ueda, who uses Silesius’ phrase ‘the rose is without a why’ to explain Eckhart’s
thought, Eckhart does not go through to the logical consequences of this idea, as does Zen, for he does not step
beyond the rose, God. Ueda’s distinction makes an interesting contribution to the discussion between Derrida and
38 ARIANNE CONTY
koans, use the paradoxes, contradictions, and aporias of apophatic language in

order to force the mind to give itself up.
Turner later qualifies his position and avoids the pitfall of seeking to desire
being without desire by claiming that undetached desire means the desire from the
undifferentiated soul, from the selfless void that constitutes Eckhart’s ground of
the soul:
To be detached is not therefore to be desireless of creation in order to desire only God,
nor is it to desire nothing at all, even God. Rather, it is to desire out of that nothingness of
self and God, so that, from the security of this ‘fortress of the soul’ which nothing created
can enter, we can desire all things with a desire truly divine, because it is desire ‘without
a why’.67
According to Turner’s reading, Eckhart would be telling us to give up all seeking,

all desiring, while at the same time telling us to desire from the place where the ‘I’ is
the ‘I’ of the other, of the Godhead. If it is the case that the subject can desire from
her created or from her uncreated soul, then Eckhart can be understood as positing a
doubling of subjectivity,68 a subject whose res cogitans can never think its own
‘silent middle’, yet who recognizes itself as that part of itself that does not belong
to itself. The ground of the soul, that is, can never be ‘mine’, appropriated by the
possessive cogito. It speaks as ‘I’ in my name, but I can never speak in its name
except by annihilating myself. As Turner says,
That is why, for Eckhart, ‘my’ self is not in the last resort mine at all. And any self which I
can call my own is a false self, a self of possessive imagination. To be a self I must retain
within myself the void and the desert of detachment. To live by detachment is to live
without an explanation, without rationale, namelessly one with the nameless God.69
If it is the ground of the soul that does the desiring, it desires as other, as God. Or
rather, if Turner is right, the ego does not desire, but rather ‘it’ (what Freud will call
the Id) desires in me, as me. Eckhart confirms this interpretation when he states, in
The Book of Benedictus:
For a truly perfect man should be accustomed to regard himself as dead, and his self as
transformed in God, and so supernaturally changed in God’s will that all his blessedness
Marion regarding the status of negative theology, Ueda’s stance seeming to confirm Derrida’s position. Schürmann
focuses on zazen, sitting, the meditational emphasis of Soto Zen, showing how it as well focuses on ‘living without a
why’. His interpretation is more daring than that of Ueda, for he posits Eckhart as following Zen beyond the rose,
that is, beyond God.
Is Meister Eckhart moving beyond the bounds of Christianity proper as Shürmann argues and as often appears to be the
case in his later neoplatonic sermons, or is he simply trying to foster a Christianity that can move beyond treating God as
a reification, as an idol? I believe that Meister Eckhart, like Jean-Luc Marion and Death of God theology, which have
followed in his footsteps, must be understood as attempting to open up the dogmatic boundaries of Christianity, from the
inside, since kenosis and apophatic disontology are intrinsic to understanding Christ’s sacrifice. Though it is true that
Eckhart does not often mention Christ, the important concept of the Birth of the Son in the Soul is one central
example of postulating the need for an empty womb, in order to birth Christ in the soul as an ethical prerogative of
doing his will.
67
Turner, 1995, p. 185 (italics are my own).
68
Huston Smith has a similar intuition in his preface to Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons (1981) when he writes
on page xiv: “So we are divided creatures. A part of ourselves, rarely evident, is continuous with God, while the balance
remains categorically different from him. With which part do we identify?”
69
Turner, D., 1995, p. 184.
consists in knowing nothing of himself or of anything, and in knowing God alone, in

willing and wanting to know nothing but God’s will, and in wanting to know God as
God knows him […].70
Yet how can we realize that it is the radical other, God, who desires in the
soul, as the soul, if all realizations are cognitions of the cogito, which, so long as
it is thinking, obscures this originary alterity and appropriates it as mine? If
Eckhart’s intentional self-shares characteristics with Lacan’s exegesis of the
modern ego, the innermost soul can now be understood as resembling the uncon-
scious mind.71
The obscure God

If Eckhart’s God is as unthinkable as Freud’s unconscious, it is only through an
awareness of this constitutive absence that expresses our unavowed desire that we
can enter into contact with the other within. Like Eckhart’s ground of the soul,
the unconscious, what Freud calls ‘the core of our being’, (see footnote 71)
desires in us, as us, and must be made to appear through what it unsays. In this
reading, apophatic language can be seen as the means to express the other
(whether God or Id) through the oxymorons, metonymies, and present absences
that it lets appear. This is what Blanchot calls a ‘non-experience’, and Charles Win-
quist describes as the wound of thought. I quote Winquist:
As Freud clearly stated, we can only know the unconscious as it manifests itself in con-
sciousness. For Lacan this occurs in the symbolic order. But, since the unconscious is
what is unthought in thinking, it can manifest itself in the symbolic order only
through lacuna, fissures, gaps, and deformations. The unconscious inscribes a lack in
the symbolic order. It manifests itself in language but is both anticonceptual and unassi-
milable. In this way it is the other of language in language.72
In Seminar XX, Encore, Lacan will choose to use this apophatic language quite
explicitly to describe this absence within, placing his own work among the classics
of the mystical canon, and thereby understanding the goal of psychoanalysis and
mysticism as being equivalent. He writes: ‘These mystical ejaculations are neither
idle gossip nor mere verbiage, in fact they are the best thing you can read – note
70
The Book of “Benedictus”: The Book of Divine Consolation, cited in Eckhart, M., 1981, p. 216, (italics are my own).
71
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud refers to the unconscious, in terms quite similar to those of Meister Eckhart, as
‘the core of our being’ (“Kern unseres Wesens” (SE V, 603). Yet, it is important to note that our discussion of the ways in
which psychoanalysis enters into dialogue with apophatic mysticism does not take into account the fundamental clinical
aspect, and the fact that the ‘other’ is also the cause of symptoms that cause incredible suffering in people’s lives. Nor
have we discussed the unspeakable, repressed, destructive drives that form part of the unconscious, and which, if allowed
to express themselves directly, would not present a pretty sight. By stating that every drive is a death drive, Lacan intends
destruction for destruction’s sake, with no religious sublation in sight. Lacan elaborates on the unconscious in this sense
in his book The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. For a fascinating study of Christian art that addresses the image in the psycho-
analytical and clinical terms of a ‘symptom’, see Didi-Huberman, 2007.
72
Winquist, C., 1998, p. 235. And again: ‘There are experiences that mark discontinuities or ruptures in our thinking in
which the ruptures can be thought as wounds but not thought in themselves. I can think about there being a fissure, but I
do not think the fissure itself. What is present to consciousness is an absence or a deformation such that what is present is
in fact absent. The subject is subjected to what it is not and does not control’. Winquist, C., 1998, p. 232.
40 ARIANNE CONTY
right at the bottom of the page, add the Ecrits of Jacques Lacan, which is of the same
order’.73
If Lacan’s Ecrits is of the same order as mystical writing, it is because Lacan
understands both mysticism and his own work as seeking a possibility of human
experience that can be expressed only when one stands on the side of the ‘not
all’, where a fundamental lack or absence is accepted as constitutive of one’s
being. For Lacan, the woman has traditionally been placed on the side of the
‘not all’ because she has been understood by man as lacking the totality that is sig-
nified by the symbolic function of the phallus. This female role has led the woman
to an experience that is not conditioned by knowing, controlling and possessing,
but that rather surrenders itself to dispossession and unknowing. It is this incom-
pletion experienced by women and mystics that expresses the goal of psychoana-
lysis, in that it acknowledges that we are inhabited by an Other that we cannot
possess and know, that our desire is always a desire for something that is not
present-at-hand, something that is always absent to the cogito and that finds its
source in an unknown and unknowable cause. Indeed, for Lacan, recognizing
the desire of the Other that inhabits us, and recognizing that its desire cannot be
contained by commodified pleasures and rational goals, is precisely what constitu-
tes the psychoanalytic cure. In other words, it is by accepting this empty ground as
what the ‘I’ hides when it tries to speak and to desire in its own name as ego that
one comes to understand the Niht within.74 The mystico-psychoanalytic cure
occurs when rather than obscuring this obscure origin, we can accept it as our
origin and our destination and rejoice in it, or, in Lacan’s terminology, experience
jouissance. This, for Lacan, is what the mystics were able to achieve, for the most
part women, but also men. He writes:
There is a jouissance proper to her and of which she herself may know nothing, except
that she experiences it – that much she does know […] The mystical is by no means that
which is not political. It is something serious, which a few people teach us about, and
most often women or highly gifted people like Saint John of the Cross – since, when
you are male, you don’t have to put yourself on the side of the phallus. You can also
put yourself on the side of not-all. There are men who are just as good as women. It
73
Lacan, J., 1985, p. 147. This discourse places Lacan in a quandary that draws him even closer to the mystics, for the
radical unknowing of the cogito is undermined by his own position as ‘sujet supposé savoir’. The difficulty of reading
Lacan, then, is precisely analogous to that of mystical texts, for he is constantly using both kataphasis and apophasis to
gain and then cross out his own authority. Jacqueline Rose, 1985, footnote 15, p. 50, thus writes:
Much of the difficulty of Lacan’s work stemmed from his attempt to subvert that position from within his own
utterance, to rejoin the place of ‘non-knowledge’ which he designated the unconscious, by the constant slippage
or escape of his speech, and thereby to undercut the very mastery which his own position as speaker (master and
analyst) necessarily constructs. In fact one can carry out the same operation on the statement ‘I do not know’ as
Lacan performed on the utterance ‘I am lying’ […] for, if I do not know, then how come I know enough to know
that I do not know and if I do know that I do not know, then it is not true that I do not know. Lacan was undoubt-
edly trapped in this paradox of his own utterance.
74
In the words of Carolyn Dean, 1992, p. 119: ‘Therefore, the transferential relationship with the Lacanian analyst does
not lead to a “cure” that would suggest the possibility of eliminating blind spots. It leads instead to a recognition of the
unacknowledged desire in the analysand’s demands, to the recognition, that is, of the analysand’s own blind spot’.
Lacan’s cure thus helps the patient to identify his or her ‘I’ with this blind spot, just as Eckhart helps the Christian to
identify with the Niht within, which alone can desire in its own name.
does happen […] they get the idea, they sense that there must be a jouissance which goes
beyond. That is what we call a mystic […].75
Lacan characterizes a mystic as experiencing being not from the totality and pres-
ence of the rational ego, but from the detachment from this grasping, the acceptance
of not knowing, the acknowledgment that being lies beyond the grasp of the cogito.
It is only the experience of unknowing, the experience of the impossible, that can put
us into contact with that which desires in us as the real.
As regards the Hadewijch in question, it is the same for Saint Teresa, - you only have to go
and look at Bernini’s statue in Rome to understand immediately that she’s coming, there
is no doubt about it. And what is her jouissance, her coming from? It is clear that the
essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing
about it.76
The mystic not only does not know, but experiences from an unconscious or
ground of the soul where it, as ‘I’ can only ex-ist, where the subject comes into its
own ek-statically.77 In this sense, the other, whether human or divine, will play
the role of the apophatic God, for it will remain transcendent and ever beyond
our caption in words and concepts. After stating that his own book should be
treated as a mystical text, Lacan concludes:
[…] naturally, you are all going to be convinced that I believe in God. I believe in the
jouissance of the woman in so far as it is something more […] Might not this jouissance,
which one experiences and knows nothing of, be that which puts us on the path of
ex-istence? And why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as supported
by feminine jouissance?78
By describing the unknown other who desires within as the God face, Lacan uses
the apophatic tradition to illustrate a relation to alterity beyond the caption of the
thinking self. He writes in his Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis: ‘[…] in the object
of our desires, we try to find the witness of the presence of the desire of that
Other that I will here call the obscure God’.79 Accepting this obscure God as
obscure is what differentiates the mystical subject from the cogito, which reduces
the other to an object (objet petit a) that can be fully known and named, an
object that is imputed with causation, with having caused our desire. God as trans-
cendental signifier, as the guarantee of our being, and our being known, is apopha-
tically emptied of all signification by Lacan as it was by Meister Eckhart, his ‘brother
in religion’.80 This subject in need of guarantees is opposed by Lacan and Eckhart to
75
Lacan, J., 1985, pp. 146–47.
76
Ibid., p. 147.
77
Bruce Fink comments: ‘All the jouissances that do exist are phallic, but that does not mean there cannot be some jouis-
sances that are not phallic – it is just that they do not exist: they ex-sist. The Other jouissance can only ex-sist, it cannot
exist, for to exist it would have to be spoken’. Fink, B., “Knowledge and Jouissance” 2002, p. 39.
78
Lacan J., 1985, p. 147.
79
Lacan, J., 1990, p. 306.
80
This is how Lacan dedicated his 1932 thesis : ‘To R.P. Marc-François Lacan, Benedictine monk of the Congrégation de
France, my brother in religion’. Cited in de Certeau, M., 1987b, p. 260. From placing his own work alongside mystical
masterpieces and calling the Other ‘the obscure God’, to rehabilitating fallen man by means of language which betrays a
memory of Adam before his Fall into the symbolic, the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Christianity is
42 ARIANNE CONTY
a mystical subjectivity that opens itself to a ‘beyond’ that cannot be circumscribed

and labelled by thought.81
To put this in other words, Eckhart’s subject realizes that its very identity resides in
the unknown ground of the soul when it has abandoned this site to make room for
God. And thus it realizes that its identity is God only as God, and hence beyond all
realizations. Accordingly, the soul can desire only in as much as it is God, that is, it
can desire only from that part of itself that escapes itself in an alterity without
recourse. This Other that desires in it, is seduced by the transparency of the ego:
behind it is always an ‘am not’, an apophasis that ‘breaks through’, betraying the
ungroundedness of a seduction that is desire’s own infinite mise en abyme. So
long as the soul identifies itself with a ‘me’ or ‘mine’ as an autonomous entity,
capable of self-consciousness and representation, the soul will remain alienated
from its true nature. The breaking through allows the soul to recognize the desire
of the other as its own. The psychoanalytic cure then, involves the ability to identify
with the unconscious, before it has been transformed into an ‘ideal I’ by means of
language. As Bruce Fink explains, ‘The I is not already in the unconscious. It may
be everywhere presupposed there, but it has to be made to appear’.82 Once alien-
ation is overcome through letting go (gelassenheit) of all ‘knowing’, all ‘possessive-
ness’, all thinking, God can finally say ‘I am’ within the soul as the soul. In this light,
if the ground of the soul can be understood as a medieval unconscious, the ‘breaking
through’ can be seen as a mystico-analytic cure.
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In her book Sensible Ecstasy, Amy Hollywood explains this difference as follows:
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Notes on contributor
Correspondence to: Arianne Conty. Email: aconty@aus.edu
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Article in Medieval Mystical Theology · May 2015

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If you Could Naught Yourself for an

This article sets out to articulate Meister Eckhart’s understanding of subjectivity

keywords Meister Eckhart, Jacques Lacan, subjectivity, detachment, uncon-

© The Eckhart Society 2015 DOI 10.1179/2046572615Z.00000000030

understanding of detachment gives it power even over God.12 In his treatise On

He repeats this theme in his Sermons as well, showing detachment to be synon-

Detachment gains this power by being associated by Eckhart with nothingness or

It is true that Eckhart’s writing often confirms this interpretation, particularly in

Here indeed, the ‘breaking through’ (durchbrechen) appears to be a return to the

Himself’’.21 In other words, if the ‘breaking through’, is often understood in terms

Eckhart’s apophatic struggle keeps alive this alternation of kataphasis and

20: That the good man is the Only-Begotten Son of God.

Eckhart’s understanding of istikeit or is-ness reverses the Cartesian conception of

Think therefore I am not

That obscure object of desire

koans, use the paradoxes, contradictions, and aporias of apophatic language in

According to Turner’s reading, Eckhart would be telling us to give up all seeking,

consists in knowing nothing of himself or of anything, and in knowing God alone, in

The obscure God

a mystical subjectivity that opens itself to a ‘beyond’ that cannot be circumscribed

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