Posterities of Michel de Certeau: The Mystic Question

Résumé 0

Within the profound but widespread legacy of Michel de Certeau—the dissemination of which reflects the unfinished nature of his oeuvre (and the direction the latter would have taken after The Mystic Fable is anyone’s guess)—the question of mysticism is indeed one of the most troubling topics. This is because it examines Certeau’s relationship to history and his own situation with regard to the tradition of which he is part—that of a four centuries-old religious institution, the Society of Jesus. As we will show here through two particular writing and reading examples, the question of mysticism is no doubt the one that draws together the two major directions of Certeau’s research as a historian of the early modern period and a social anthropologist of the modern world. This is because it mobilizes a semiological gesture that he adopted on these two stages. Yet how, from there, does one preserve this gesture in the force of its enunciations, and carry forward Certeau’s legacy?