Mystical Foundation Research Articles

Desacralized Law: Shakespeare and the Tragedy of Sovereignty

Abstract In the history of Western literary tradition, early modern theatres constituted an important passage for the construction of a different perception of community as well as a different appraisal of legal institutions. In modern playhouses, traditional values were staged, debated, and critiqued. In this paper, I will focus on three Shakespearean tragedies (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet) that provide relevant insights about the way in which power and legal themes were challenged and questioned. In these plays Shakespeare provided a critical view of what we might call the “mystical foundation of authority.” Shakespeare’s theater is the triumph of rule and exception, of order and disorder, of sacred and profane. As I will show, in Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, law is always living on the danger of its eclipse and its suspension: the threshold which separates the legal and the illegal, the legitimate and the illegitimate, is then the result of a narrative process of which Shakespeare’s theater provides perhaps the highest example in Western literary culture.

Hans Nielsen Hauge og mystikken: – ut fra hans autobiografiske tekster

Hans Nielsen Hauge’s view of Christendom was shaped by the state Pietism of the Danish-Norwegian church. As in all Pietism, however, a mystical foundation can also be detected in Hauge’s thought. This was explicitly expressed in his autobiographical texts, which was not unusual in his days. As a mystic he did not consider himself bound by the restrictions imposed by ecclesiastical law on the layman’s sermon (The Conventicle Act). But Hauge and his adherents remained loyal to the state church, and Haugeanism became a Pietistic awakening and pietist movement within the Church of Norway. Their mysticism was ecclesiasticalized, and in this manner the movement came to shape church and cultural life in Norway.

Anthropology of spiritual wayfaring on the basis of Qur'ān and the Sunnah

Spiritual anthropology is among the most important foundations of Islamic ethics and practical mysticism. In the religious tradition, we can outline a specific structure of anthropology in terms of spiritual wayfaring. The reality of the heart, which is the celestial identity of the human being, extends from its divine facet down to its bodily facet, and consists of the psychical and the spiritual regions. Each of these in turn possesses two kinds of soldiers known as characteristical soldiers and two kinds of strata which are levels of the soul. The psychical region is the lower region of the reality of the heart, wherein sensory and psychical inclinations are dominant. It is inhabited by the soldiers of ignorance (junūd al-jahl) and the two strata of the nature (al-ṭab') and the lower-self (al-nafs) or the vegetative and the animal souls respectively. The spiritual region, on the other hand, which is the higher region of the reality of the heart and is directly connected to the Infinite God inhabits the soldiers of intellect (junūd al-'aql) and the two strata of the spirit (rūḥ) and the secret (sirr) or the sanctified and the divine souls respectively.

Of Modern Ruptures: Verovšek's Appeal to a Collective EU Memory

Of Modern Ruptures:Verovšek's Appeal to a Collective EU Memory Richard A. Vogt (bio) Peter J Verovšek. Memory and the Future of Europe: Rupture and Integration in the Wake of Total War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. 240 pp. £80.00 (hc). ISBN: 9781526143105. What began as a reflection upon the role of collective memory in the foundation of the EU project, soon became for Peter J. Verovšek a decade-long exercise in confronting the metacrisis that has been tearing at the Union's solidarity.1 The enlargement of 2004, the failed Constitutional vote of 2005, and the Great Recession all preceded his first written word in 2009. The Eurozone financial crisis continued. And then came the migration crisis, Brexit and a deepening nationalist, far-right movement which made electoral gains in the 2019 European Parliament. In June 2020 (after the book was released) when adding the current crisis of COVID-19 to this list, he reflected that now is not the time for significant EU reform. Better to muddle through, he reasoned, and consider wholesale change at a later date.2 But isn't that the problem that the EU project has had for most of this century: being captive to crisis after crisis? Does this not alert us to the fact that it is a political body fundamentally ill-designed to tackle widespread challenges across its dysmorphic geopolitical body? French right-wing nationalist Marine LePen made this clear at the start of 2019, declaring that she was no longer pushing for a form of Frexit, as she had been doing for years. "I summarize it this way: the European Union is dead," she campaigned. "Long live Europe."3 The discourse around the EU is now one of a metacrisis, and even (by extension) a crisis of liberalism and capitalism, abetted by mainstream media and politicians alike.4 Is this largely because the EU, through incessant territorial expansion and diminishing powers of coercion, has conceded its "mystical foundation of authority" to assume one of a purely economic and legal identity?5 If the compounding treaties of the EU have been seen as the way to anchor the EU's uniquely twentieth-century identity—one that is slowly devolving—then it appears the belief is that the Union a can leap from one that is essentially a legal and economic construct into one that will be a supra-national being. Schengen has become a hallowed doctrine, irrespective of its actual application. Yet, cultures and nations are molded from their myths as much as their history: this is especially true of national grievances and collective memories.6 What the EU project arguably lacks in this regard are more heroic foundational legends that can take precedence over any bureaucratic inconsistencies of origin.7 Yes, there is the appeal to the symbolism of Auschwitz, but at best the EU evokes a roll call of city names that are seen to sign-point its evolution into the present-day Union: Westphalia, Vienna, Versailles, Potsdam, Maastricht and Schengen.8 At worst, the EU is born out of the memories of genocide and total war. To counter this, Verovšek looks toward the great European rupture of 1945, relying on rephrasing the "traumatic events that tear existing narratives of the past asunder," and in doing so allowing "collective memory to act as a resource for social and political change" (12).9 [End Page 421] This short (but seemingly long) history of minor ruptures of the EU this century mentioned at the outset—from mass enlargement to the 2019 Parliamentary election in which 10% of the representatives were considered to be far right politicians—further crowd out a once-coherent European narrative. This has prompted Verovšek to reflect on the broader EU legacy. As the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was founded in 1951 upon the experiences of total war to create a more peaceful, inclusive future, does the current crisis of European identity ("potentially existential," he adds) rest upon the fading of this once-shared memory? And if so, what are the agitators of a changing EU identity? If Duncan Bell is right, and I suspect he is, then memory...

The relationship between pir and murid in sufism

The article describes the development of the theoretical foundations of mysticism at the beginning of the IX century the formation of practical, spiritual and psychological exercises of the Sufis, the methods of self-education and tempering, the emergence of sects with their own clear rules and hierarchical structure in the XII century. Sufism, which at first seemed to be the personal spiritual life of the Sufis, gradually became a socio-social state. Until the end of the X century, the relationship between teacher and student was informal, and the students, who made the idea of spiritual purification and attainment of God the main idea, sought to learn from several master-sheikhs at the same time. From the XI century onwards, however, the relationship between teacher and student became more serious, the distance between them increased, and the demands on the student intensified.

Omówienie mistycyzmu nazistowskiego w polskiej debacie naukowej

Discussion of Nazi Misticizm in the Polish Scholarly Debate
 The article presents the theoretical foundations of Nazi mysticism, in the works of Polish scholars of the subject. It focuses on the emergence of the NSDAP party, discussing its philosophical and mystical origins. The essential components party mysticism are debated as well. The article refers to the development of mysticism in the theoretical and political principles of Nazism.

“I’m Making the Streets Safer Ma’am”: Race, Coloniality, and the Redemptive Theologies of Pastoral Police Power

A number of scholarly studies have focused upon mapping the relationship between race, police power, and the sovereign capacity of law onto the coordinates of repressive force. No doubt, the racialized circuits of police violence, underpinned by the mystical foundation of sovereign authority, constitute a coercive apparatus that is marshaled by risk and security. However, rather than reduce mythic police violence to the singular vector of repression, I suggest that the propensity to punish the racialized body and make it suffer through police practices of the confessional and pastoral power imbricate with the pre-liberal Christian theology of redemption and atonement. Upon consideration of decolonial and theological-political concepts, I suggest pastoral forms of racialized police power have been articulated to utilitarian secular-liberal democratic justifications to increase community safety, suppress crime, and reify social and political solidarity through the appropriate dispensation of suffering, and, potentially death.

El límite. Sobre la segregación urbana en contextos locales

En 1965 N. Elias y J. Scotson realizaron una investigación sobre la localidad inglesa de Winston Parva, que lentamente se ha vuelto clásica. En ese estudio examinan las figuraciones en torno a las fronteras sociales entre quienes residían en un territorio y los llegados posteriormente, a partir del estudio de la sensación de inseguridad provocada por los vecinos más recientes. Desde esa situación buscan aislar una configuración que pudiera extrapolarse en un modelo a otras circunstancias parecidas; en ese ánimo se triangula aquí con otros dos estudios de caso en las localidades de Magdalena, en Manaos (Brasil), y de Valderas, en Montevideo (Uruguay). Los casos estudiados presentan similitudes y ciertas diferencias con Winston Parva, que acumulan en el carácter paradigmático y demuestran la vigencia del análisis de Elias. Pero además, en estos casos, la situación añade un elemento: vecinos organizados construyen una división material entre los grupos —un muro, un portón—. La radicalización respecto a Winston Parva lleva el asunto al límite e invita a profundizar dos discusiones eticopolíticas, subyacentes en el trabajo de Elias y Scotson: los momentos de indecidibilidad y el fundamento místico de la autoridad en esas decisiones, que muestran que la segregación entre nuevos “marginales” y “establecidos” más prósperos es un diferendo que solo provoca víctimas, de distintos tipos.

Law, institutions, and interpretation in Jacques Derrida

Abstract In this paper, we would like to advocate for a certain reading of Jacques Derrida’s thinking about law, against the grain of most of his reception in legal studies. In this process, we aim to develop a better theoretical understanding of the dynamics of how law institutes itself, and continues to function as an institution, through interpretive practices that must, on one side, respect the rules of the institution and, at the same time, re-institute it on new grounds, as Jacques Derrida points out in his lecture “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’” The problem under investigation is how law manages to differentiate itself symbolically from violence and what are the consequences of this concerning legal interpretation. This paper’s partial conclusion is that ultimately we are better off viewing interpretation as neither fully determined by nor fully free from text and/or context.

Aequitas — Abbild der unendlichen Gerechtigkeit im Recht

Enquiring the sources and the legitimacy of Derrida’s statement “Law {droit) is not justice” from his essay “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’ ” (1990), the paper analyses the three notions of “justice”, “equity” and “concordantia” (in Cusanus). Part I explains historically how the difference between the limited and changing human laws and the eternal justice of God was gradually being perceived and acknowledged in Antiquity. Part II illustrates how the virtue of equity was called upon to compensate for the insufficiencies and contradictions of human laws, mainly by Aristotle. Part III explores the conditions how and argues for the possibility that the notion of “concordantia” as developed by Nicolaus Cusanus for the Council of Basle could work as a mediating principle of legislation among conflicting interests and thus provide for temporary justice by means of an equitable procedure of legislation.

Lei Natural, Lei Positiva e os Tupinambás nos Ensaios de Michel Montaigne

This article aims to present the vision of the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne about natural law and positive law in the work The Essays where the Tupi- nambas serve as stylistic resource for the author to expose his ideas about nature. In the book, Montaigne devotes a chapter to the Brazilian Indians in order to demonstrate the Europeans distante in relation to natural law and also the impossibility of civilized people to access natural laws. As a result, Montaigne understands that positive law is self -referential, a mere product of art characterized by “mystical foundation of the laws au- thority,” a term that indicates the impossibility of transcendent foundation for the laws.

The Exercise of Deconstruction

After his, however reluctant, appropriation of the term with which his thought had become identified, Derrida repeatedly insisted that even though deconstruction has a ‘logic’, or a way of proceeding, of its own, it is not an act or operation, and, especially, not a method. On other occasions he has emphasised that deconstruction is something that happens, or takes place, without an active agent as its source. For this reason the reference to the expression ‘the exercise of a deconstruction’, in ‘Force of Law. The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, comes as a certain surprise. Derrida writes here:

CARL SCHMITT AND THE CHALLENGE OF SPINOZA’S PANTHEISM BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS

Focusing on Carl Schmitt's early work, this article argues that Schmitt's relatively unfamiliar mystical interpretation of Spinoza's pantheism, in combination with his use of the abbé Sieyès's notion ofpouvoir constituant, deeply informed his particular conception of anti-liberal, dictatorial democracy. Although it is often argued that, in Carl Schmitt's view, Spinoza heralded the end of political theology, this essay suggests that, even though it may be correct to say that Schmitt by 1938 deemed Spinoza “the corrupting spirit of modern liberalism”, there is a prior crucial, yet relatively unexplored, story to tell about Schmitt's reading of Spinoza—a story that leads to the heart of Schmitt's reconceptualization of democracy. While in Schmitt's view Spinoza's pantheism was detrimental to divine and kingly transcendentalism, it also served as a bold mystical foundation of Schmitt's notion of democratic homogeneity that would be capable of competing with contemporary “political theories of myth”.

The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–1550)

The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–1550)

On the Concept of Authority

On the Concept of Authority Pablo Oyarzún R. (bio) Authority is or presupposes some specific type of power. The mark of this particularity, the one that everyone will spontaneously agree to identify as such, is the index of recognition that accompanies authority, and makes of its power a legitimate one.1 It is commonly understood that with this is linked the genesis, the status, and the regime of authority with the liberty of the subjects who attribute authority to a certain bearer. This way, the power of the authority is distinguished from every other form or type that involves violent coercion, which gravely restricts or suppresses the liberty of those who are subject to it. Otherwise said, authority is not only constituted as such on the basis of sheer imposition: there must be reasons to lend this quality to a person; the liberty of those who lend it reveals itself eventually if these reasons—which may be of very diverse nature (needs, aptitudes, competences, responsibilities, delegations, traditions, and so on)—are no more available, by virtue of which the recognition may be withdrawn, with the consequent collapse of the corresponding legitimacy index. [End Page 225] However, it is clear that this explanation lies far from the actual character of authority. Although it can be granted that sheer imposition and naked force are not sufficient to constitute authority (though they can be concurrent to form its first installment), authority itself—whether it is vested in individuals or in offices—is imposing and enjoys a force of its own, which finds its only suitable responses in respect and obedience. When one pays attention to the mode in which these responses are concretely exercised by the subjects of a determinate authority, one can easily observe that the recognition that is at its basis does not require, but rather excludes consciousness of the reasons that may be involved in it. It is as if authority by itself were the sole depository of the reasons that establish it as such. The properness of an authority in full competence consists in that its resolutions and commands are not discussed. As Hannah Arendt conveniently points out, "Its hallmark is unquestioning recognition by those who are asked to obey; neither coercion nor persuasion is needed" (1970, 45). Consequently, what binds the subordinated to authority, less than an explicit set of reasons, is a belief in which the active forces are essentially affections: respect, reverence, awe, admiration, fear. There is, then, a multiple and complex determination—social and psychological, to mention only these aspects—at the foundation of authority, and this invites us to consider it, as Arendt herself does, as "the most elusive of . . . phenomena" to which political science applies, compared to the notions of "power," "strength," "force," and "violence" (1970, 45, 43). To this extent, if on the one hand, it is foreseeable that the concept of authority will resist attempts to elucidate it precisely because of its evasive complexity, then on the other hand, the attempt to determine the specific type of power and the specific relation of power in which authority consists gives the opportunity for an exemplary test in view of the possibility of shedding light on what I would call the general economy of social power. In the following I will try two ways of approaching this phenomenon. The first outlines an examination centered on the structural and generative aspects of the type of power and of power relation that would be characteristic of authority in the context of its relevant social processing. This examination seeks to make clear that there is a plus of power in which authority consists. In the second way I shall discuss this plus from the standpoint of a renowned [End Page 226] dictum of Montaigne on the "mystical foundation" of the authority of laws, paying attention to the commentary that Jacques Derrida devotes to this dictum in Force de loi. I. As I suggested in the preamble, in every analysis of social power—and this means by now of all institutionalized power—the concept of authority appears as a central idea. There is no social power without authority, or (what amounts to the same) social power...

Whither Fanon?

Whither Fanon?

Verging on divine: The matter of Benedictine silence and the justification of law and language

The article explores the matter of Benedictine or monastic silence in relation to the possibility and irrepressible force of justice as deconstruction, particularly as it relates to the limits or the justification of law and language. The possibility of a fertile consideration is suggested or signaled by the phrase “silence walled up, walled in” used by Derrida to refer to law's mystical authority in his widely known “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority”’ (1990) and it is proposed that deconstruction as justice has to do with its being made known as silence because when deconstruction takes place what is to be found, sensed or discerned is the silence of ruins. Inasmuch as silence wrought by deconstruction is the silence of ruins and the outcome of violence, the silence prayed for by Saint Benedict is the anticipation, appeasement or forestalling of deconstruction or else the sacrifice of mortal will that might otherwise bring about speech or discourse that is susceptible to deconstruction. Furthermore, the matter (i.e. the relevance and meaning) of Benedictine silence has profound implications for the prospect of authentic being, freedom or sovereignty, as well as the possibility of discovering law and language as verging on divine.

The limits of corporate responsibility standards

I explore the limits of corporate responsibility standards – for example Social Accountability 8000 (SA 8000), the Global Reporting Initiative, the Fair Labor Association workplace code – by looking at these initiatives through Derrida's aporias of justice as set out in ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’. Based on a discussion of SA 8000, I uncover the unavoidable aporias that are associated with the use of this standard. I contribute to the literature on corporate responsibility standards in general and SA 8000 in particular by showing (a) that attempts to standardise corporate responsibility can only be successful insofar as we recognise that compliance with SA 8000's rules requires a ‘fresh judgement’ every time they are applied, (b) that SA 8000 should not be pushed down the supply chain as such coercion does not require a truly responsible decision by suppliers and eventually leads to moral mediocrity and (c) that the necessarily time‐consuming reflections about the singular contexts within which SA 8000 is applied challenge the urgent need for implementing this standard. I discuss the implications of my analysis of SA 8000 for corporate responsibility standards in general.

Seized by the Spirit: The Mystical Foundation of Squatting among Pentecostals in Caracas (Venezuela) Today

Research Article| May 01 2008 Seized by the Spirit: The Mystical Foundation of Squatting among Pentecostals in Caracas (Venezuela) Today Rafael Sánchez Rafael Sánchez Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2008) 20 (2): 267–305. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-026 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Rafael Sánchez; Seized by the Spirit: The Mystical Foundation of Squatting among Pentecostals in Caracas (Venezuela) Today. Public Culture 1 May 2008; 20 (2): 267–305. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-026 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPublic Culture Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2008 by Duke University Press2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The laws of fiction:

This essay addresses arguments from Derrida's ‘Force of Law: “The Mystical Foundation of Authority”’ in order to formulate an alternative approach to ‘law in literature’ which could be called ‘literature as law’. Its main interest lies in the way literary texts use the critical representation of law and legal rhetoric to establish the superiority of their own rhetoric and the laws of ‘literary evidence’. As an example, the essay will discuss central passages from James F. Cooper's The Pioneers (1823).