An Immanence Without The World On Dispos

An Immanence without the World
On Dispossession, Nothingness, and Secularity
alex dubilet
Dissociating Immanence from the World:

On the Semantics of the Secular
What follows is an attempt to put into question a basic conceptual

distribution that, in one form or another, is operative in countless
theoretico-historical accounts of modernity. It seeks to trouble the
all-too-obvious conceptual association that binds immanence to
the secular, to the worldly, and to the human—in opposition to tran-
scendence, which acts as a sign of the divine or the religious. This
basic distribution undergoes complex permutations and conflicting
evaluations in the accounts of the legitimacy or, by contrast, the
essential nihilism of modernity. Nevertheless, it remains consistently
operative, functioning not only in genealogies of modernity but also
in more speculative registers—for example, in the thought of Emma-
nuel Levinas, where immanence remains a conceptual name for the
enclosure of the (secular) world and the suppression of all genuine
relation to transcendence.1 But it is precisely the seeming obvious-
ness of this distinction and its pervasive use that must be questioned:
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What work of elision or justification is occurring in the deployment

of this opposition? What occurs if we fundamentally rethink the con-
ceptual associations that bind immanence to the secular and oppose
it to (divine) transcendence?
When immanence is thought of as closure, as merely worldly and
human, it inevitably secretes desires for transcendence, however min-
imal or secularized. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari critically
diagnosed the situation, the reversal of values has gone so far that
transcendence is exalted as a means of salvation from the enclosure
of a solipsistic cage.2 The suspicion is justified. Is the articulation
of immanence as a closed and self-sufficient frame or totality (that
can be opened to something beyond it) not imbricated with a latent
desire for a transcendence to affirm? The reduction of immanence to
worldly totality in some cases seems to be nothing but a narrative
effect of a disavowed commitment to some form of transcendence.
This seeps even into those accounts that explicitly theorize the emer-
gence of the secular as something more complex than just a narra-
tive of loss. Even there, the distribution remains: without transcen-
dence, secular life looks enclosed (if not claustrophobic), unsatisfying,
empty. The specters of transcendence—whether as plenitude or as
minimal negativity, and even in theoretical accounts that imply that
the identification of the religious with transcendence is itself a product
of modern secularity—incessantly cast a shadow over immanence,
determining its morphology and delimiting its conceptual force.
What follows is an experiment with dissociating immanence from
its correlation with the world. What if immanence is not another
name for the (Christian-secular, modern) world, but indexes instead
what, on the one hand, is excluded from and by the world, and, on
the other, is governed through a theoretical dissimulation that repla-
ces it with enclosure and totality? What if immanence is divorced
from this conceptual opposition between the world and its openings
to (divine) other(s), between enclosure or totality and the trace of a
transcendent outside? Through such dissociation, immanence may
come to index something else entirely than one term in this reversible
opposition, thereby challenging the basic distribution of concepts
that is collusively shared by many secularists and defenders of religion
alike. Immanence would then become a mechanism of delegitimation

Dubilet: An Immanence without the World 53
that allows the apprehension of modernity itself as a multifaceted

transcendent apparatus, which at once forecloses and appropriates
immanence for its own ends. To disentangle immanence from secu-
larity (and even more so from secularism) entails a radical redrawing
of the lines of demarcation that structure and organize interdisciplin-
ary debates on the status of secularity, and secularism and numerous
debates in contemporary philosophy of religion.3 This would involve
asking about what is effaced in the division of the real into the (sec-
ular) enclosure of the world and a transcendence to be affirmed. In
turn, immanence might come to intimate (atopic) sites that precede
and exceed the field established by that boundary, its construction
and enforcement, along with the subjective, affective, and political
effects that it engenders.
Following this line of thought, modernity would be less definable
by the creation of an immanent frame than by an imposition of a
world that excludes immanence from it. Perhaps the secular was
never what materialized or gave voice to immanence, but instead
what authorized a certain co-option: a substitution of an ersatz im-
manence through the production and the distribution of enclosures
and totalities at the expense of real immanence. The constitution of
the world—with its distribution of concepts, its normalizing and nor-
mative regimes of intelligibility and modes of visibility, its grammars
of expression and logics of thought, its delimitations of agency and
determinations of the subject—never spoke or lived immanence, but
always remained premised on its foreclosure.
It is worth recalling that Martin Heidegger offers a vision of
modernity as the age of the world picture. In Heidegger’s account,
the metaphysics of modernity do not merely offer a new representa-
tion of the world; rather, they produce the very preconditions for
the possibility of the totalization of the world as such. What is
worth noting, however, is that if Heidegger seeks to critique the cor-
relation between the subject and the world, between the coherence of
the subject as ground and the totality of things represented to it, he
does so in order to open up the world as a phenomenological hori-
zon. While the question shifts from a totalizable world picture to
being-in-the-world, the fundamentally worldly character of exis-
tence is reaffirmed.4 The status of the world is altered, but its priority

remains, and this shift illuminates the two modalities of the world
generally regnant in the Western philosophical imaginary: world
as organized totality and world as phenomenological horizon of
meaning.5 But the givenness of the world, as either totality or phe-
nomenological horizon, renders invisible the structurations and ex-
clusions that it constitutively imposes, not only epistemologically,
but precisely ontologically. More broadly, the legitimation of the
modern world against theological and metaphysical contagions has
tended to remain blind, sometimes willfully so, to the ways that it is
constitutively built around enforcing zones of nonbeing.6
It is this dimension that is lost in attempts to recover a critical sec-
ularity that insists on something like “the this-worldly nature of all
human belief and a critical practice of unbelief.”7 To affirm the world,
however, is not only to phenomeno-methodologically bracket deities
but also to overlook the sites and states of worldlessness. The world
is not an innocent indexical but a performative violation of what is
radically excluded from it, for the world and ontology delimits what
counts, what appears as intelligible, what is visible and legible. In-
deed, the correlation between the subject and the world raises the
question of what or who is granted the capacity to inhabit the status
of a subject-in-the-world and, obversely, who or what remains ex-
cluded from the domain of the world, as too poor to be in the world.
Not everything can enter the secularity of the world, the imaginary
homogeneous and empty time of the englobing space of the saecu-
lum. In opposition to the desire to affirm worldliness or secularity—
which inevitably functions through a disavowal of the violence that
founds and maintains the world—what is needed is an immanence at
once against the world and the gods that it variously attempts to
combat (or, at other times, to use for its own benefit).
All attempts to affirm the world must be confronted with the fact
that the world is built not only on the death of God but also on the
victims of its constitutive violence.8 The violent occlusions at the
heart of the world have found their most potent theorization in
the work of Black studies scholars who have diagnosed a fundamen-
tal anti-Blackness as the precondition for the coherence of the world
and its semantic and political fields, as well as the theological and
philosophical discourses that underwrite them. The entire political

ontology of humanism, civil society, and ultimately the world as a

whole, as Frank B. Wilderson III has argued, is based on (and repro-
duces itself through) the violent exclusion and death of Blackness.9
Violent expropriation and exclusion is the condition for the propa-
gation of the field of possession, recognition, and mutuality, and the
world is essentially and irrevocably unethical insofar as it cannot
confront the fact that what it lets live is premised on death.
Secularism, as a politics of the world, has never been a politics of
immanence but has always operated as a mechanism of transcendent
mediation that is fundamentally grounded in sovereignty.10 Secular-
ity, as the broader metaphysics, structures of feeling, and conceptual
logics that undergird secularism, has likewise never really instanti-
ated immanence. What might arise if immanence is severed from
its association with secularity, if it ceases to be merely another con-
ceptual support in secularism’s metaphysical armature, and instead
becomes a force decoupled from the normative and political fields of
sense and affect produced and reproduced, enforced and reinforced
by modernity’s secular formation? This question, along with the oth-
ers posed above, is pursued in what follows through the construction
of a field of resonance across a variety of materials and frameworks,
including, among others, medieval mysticism, anthropological cri-
tiques of the secular, Black studies scholarship (with a special refer-
ence to the thought of the undercommons), critical theories of the
subject, and François Laruelle’s non-philosophical thought. This
practice of theoretical constellation is not meant to assert an iden-
tity or produce homogeneity between the different frameworks and
engagements. Rather, it enacts a reading practice (fully elaborated
in the final section) that challenges the secular imperative to organize
and discipline texts, thoughts, and archives by means of repeated de-
limitations and divisions between what is deemed secular and what
religious. In defiance of the disciplining operations of orthodoxies
and their policing of canons, such a reading practice would be an
enactment of undiscipline that abdicates logics of possession, self-
sufficiency, and the proper in the realm of thought. Thinking with
and across the various materials of this heterogeneous assemblage
will yield an immanence that is not secular but heretical, worldless,
or acosmic. The line of study pursued in what follows will link

immanence more intimately with dispossession than with the sub-

ject’s self-possession—and will see it more intimately reside in the
undercommons, as the atopic lowest place, rather than partaking
in the nomos and topos imposed by the (modern) world and its re-
gime of the proper. As a result, rather than a weapon in modernity’s
endless self-justifying polemics with religion, immanence will instead
open forth trajectories of its destitution and delegitimation.
Becoming Nothing: The Dispossession

of the (Christian/Secular) Subject
One result of the project to critically reassess secularity and secular-
ism, elaborated by scholars such as Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood,
has been a renewed emphasis on the centrality of techniques of self-
formation, disciplined practices of self-cultivation, moral practices of
inquiry, ascetic regimens, and spiritual exercises in the (self-)making
of subjects.11 Putting into question the presumed givenness of indi-
viduated subjects, invested with agency and interiority, this scholar-
ship has asserted the primacy of processes and techniques of their
formation. As Mahmood describes it in her explorations of Islamic
piety, subjects are produced through a set of specific material and
ethical practices that comprise processes of subjectivation, which
engender pious subjects only as a result. The broader methodologi-
cal insight holds that all subjects must be seen as the result of reiter-
ative practices through which they form themselves and are formed
as subjects—and this applies even to those subjects who insist on the
primacy and purity of subjective interiority.12
The theoretical tools for analyzing subject formation are of course
not new. It was Michel Foucault who, in Discipline and Punish and
related writings, laid the groundwork for questioning the primacy
of interiority by uncovering its modes of production and enforce-
ment, before going on to explore the techniques of self-subjectivation
under the rubric of technologies of the self. If technologies of power
produced subjects through a set of disciplinary and subjecting tech-
niques and strategies, then technologies of the self allowed “individ-
uals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a cer-
tain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts,

conduct, and ways of being, so as to transform themselves in order

to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection,
or immortality.”13 Subjects are formed both through technologies
of power and through sets of ascetic practices and regimens they im-
pose on themselves. The scholarship mentioned above has deployed
this insight to critically reassess the standing of the secular-liberal
subject along with its presuppositions, its disavowals, and its modes
of formation. Subjects are never given; they are always interpellated
and self-interpellating, molded and self-molding, disciplined and
self-disciplining.
Even as this focus on the ethical and affective subject formation
and material mediation has productively served as a critical rejoin-
der to liberal interiority and the presuppositions that undergird the
secular subject, it has also rendered theoretically insignificant, if not
completely unthinkable, movements of subjective destitution and dis-
possession. How would understandings of immanence and the sec-
ular be transformed if they were linked to explorations of the loss,
undoing, or emptying of the subject instead of to the presumption of
its givenness or the investigation of its ethico-material formation?
How would a theoretical insistence on paths of desubjectivation
transform the structuring conceptual grammar and categories that
govern our understanding of the secular and its subjects?
Rather than prioritizing ascetic logics and sources, such a line of
inquiry would be more closely aligned with mystical archives and
their textual production, precisely because mystical modes of speak-
ing and writing have repeatedly arisen in proximity to dispossession
and loss. In what follows, I will explore these questions by focus-
ing on one particular figure, the medieval mystic and theologian
Eckhart von Hochheim, who is more commonly known as Meister
Eckhart—a figure whose orthodoxy is debated to this day but whose
writings are often taken as the epitome of speculative mysticism and
the origin of German speculative thought more generally. Eckhart
will serve as a central textual and conceptual site (though constel-
lated with a diverse array of others) through which to rethink the
link between the subject and immanence and probe the relation of
becoming nothing and dispossession to the problematic of secular-
ity.14 I turn to Eckhart in particular because his vernacular sermons

offer a rich terrain for an inquiry into the logics of annihilation, dis-
possession, and becoming nothing. Moreover, Eckhart’s articulation
of these logics is, as I will explore below, importantly singular in the
ways it works against dominant theological logics that bring togeth-
er transcendence and subjection in order to reaffirm them in their
unity. The anachronism inherent in a choice of a medieval thinker
for the broader theoretical investigation outlined so far should be
read as an attempt to liberate materials from the iron grip of orga-
nizing hermeneutic principles of tradition, discipline, and period. As
such, it purposefully resists the periodizing and historicizing imper-
atives relentlessly imposed by secular modernity, its political imagi-
naries and reading practices. For, as Kathleen Davis so magisterially
argued, secular modernity is constituted through self-legitimating
acts of self-constitution and self-narration, and its claims of period-
ization are irreparably entangled with its claims to sovereignty.15
The Eckhartian path, however, is hardly exclusive. The relevance of
mystical archives to such questions is detectable elsewhere. Other
potential trajectories would include Michel de Certeau’s explora-
tions of mystic speech as one of loss and errancy at the origins of
modernity; Stefania Pandolfo’s redeployment of de Certeauan logics
to grapple with speech and madness in the postcolonial contempo-
rary; Charly Coleman’s reconstruction of the cultures of disposses-
sion as the other side of the Enlightenment; Leo Bersani’s intertwine-
ment of early modern mysticism of pure love with practices of
barebacking through the prism of subjective destitution; and Fred
Moten’s explorations of a mysticism in the flesh.16 Mystical modes
of writing and speaking and their speculative declarations intimately
experiment with trajectories and wanderings that arise out of the
breaking down of the subject (which may or may not be elaborated
in terms of an experience of the divine). They remain in intimate
proximity with encounters of dispossession that have the power to
put into question the ordering of space and time and the hierarchical
distributions of beings. Refusing the destiny of imposition and reg-
ulation, they enact forms of exodus or flight and unruly and disindi-
viduated modes of living and acting.
Across his vernacular sermons, Eckhart generates an entire lexi-
con of annihilation and dispossession, which takes on numerous

rhetorical forms, including being equal to nothing, being truly poor,

becoming nothing, detachment, releasement, forsaking the self, and
self-emptying. These operations do not render the soul a site for tran-
scendent effects, nor do they make it a space of receptivity for alter-
ity. They do not follow the logic of dispossession that has always
been, in one form or another, central to Christianity—a logic accord-
ing to which the subject is undone toward divine transcendence, in
pious humility and (when permitted) transient ecstasy. Something
radically different is articulated in this heretical discourse: becoming
nothing is not an affirmation of transcendence, nor a submission to
it; rather, it discloses a life without qualities or properties and thus
stands as a proleptic refusal of the imposition of the modern regime
of the proper and property. No longer a question of receptivity or
subjection, this inhabitation of dispossession and spiritual poverty
insists instead on a life as nothing as a friendship with God, in abso-
lute equality: “Those who are equal to nothing, they alone are equal
to God” (6; 82; EE, 187).17
In contrast to all ethics of self-possession or self-cultivation,
Eckhart elaborates what should be called an ethics of radical
(self-)dispossession without reserve, an ethics of becoming nothing,
discarding the self in order to inhabit the generic namelessness of the
uncreated: neither a self-cultivating (or self-possessing) subject nor a
subject piously self-cultivating by means of material practices in rela-
tion to a transcendent other, but the affirmation of desubjectivation
and a dispossession lived as nothing. Notably, Eckhart critiques the
status and standing of mediation and works, but he does so without
prioritizing the sincerity of belief or faith, instead elaborating oper-
ations of becoming nothing as disclosing a dispossessed life without
principle. Spiritual poverty and becoming nothing do not establish a
heteronomous relation to transcendence; rather, they enact a refusal
of the destiny of subjection by insisting on an indifference to the
imperatives of labor and accomplishment, to the logics of unification
and synthesis. Eckhart’s is not a discourse of subjection under God
but a discourse of freedom, an uncreated freedom from the destiny of
subjection to transcendence: it speaks of a nothing that, in its anni-
hilation, asserts an immanent antecedence to all difference between

creature and creator, between subject and transcendence, and is also,

to deploy a Deleuzian-Eckhartian amalgam, a life without a why.
The contours of such claims come more clearly into view if we sit-
uate them in relation to the theoretical primal scene of subjectivation
and subjection. In Louis Althusser’s classic staging of interpellation,
the subject comes into being through a turning around, a conversion
to the hail of the other. The scene of the police hail—“Hey, you
there!”—is a staging in the sense that it temporalizes and narratives
a logic that is always already functioning: the subject is always al-
ready subjected. The dramatization of the movement of specular rec-
ognition and capture, however, helps explain how subjects come to
operate without external coercion, “all by themselves,” how subjects
come into being as subjects while feeling themselves free. This con-
stitution of the subject as at once free and subjected in relation to an
interpellating transcendence is, as Althusser makes clear, a logic
shared across the theopolitical divide. The subject recognizing itself
in the call of a transcendent voice is at the heart not only of the police
scene but also of Moses’s interaction with God, which Althusser
centers in his discussion of “Christian religious ideology.” God calls
and Moses, who recognizes himself as the one called. It is in this rec-
ognition of being really the one called that one becomes a subject:
“And Moses, interpellated—called by his name, having recognized
that it ‘really’ was he who was called by God, recognizes that he is
a subject, a subject of God, a subject subjected to God, a subject
through the Subject and subjected to the Subject.”18 With this, the
subjecting effects of transcendence are revealed as neither purely sec-
ular nor purely theological. Together, the two scenes disclose a shared
structure—of freedom-in-subjection, established in specular inter-
play with transcendence—a theopolitical linking of transcendent
interpellation and subjection in the constitution of the subject
(freely) obeying authority.19 The subject is individuated and called
into being, into a double subjection—to the other and, insofar as it
works freely in obedience, to itself: “There are no subjects except by
and for their subjection.”20
Against this background, Eckhart’s exhortation to forsake the self
and become nothing should be read as fundamentally a deinterpel-
lative proposition. Eckhart’s sermons elaborate desubjectivation

unmoored from transcendence, empty and free, detached of the self

as proper and property. Nowhere is the refusal of the entire matrix
that unites the subject and transcendence more clearly seen than in
his famous prayer “Let us pray to God [biten wir got] that we be-
come free of God [daz wir gotes ledic werden],” which occurs in
his speculative rendition of the figure of “the poor in spirit [die ar-
men des geistes]” (52; 554; EE, 200). The spiritual poverty of the
poor in spirit does not entail making one’s will the site for the desire
of the other, a site in which transcendence can operate; instead, “if a
person wants really to have poverty, he ought to be as free of his own
created will as he was when he was not” (52; 552; EE, 200). To be as
one was when one was not is a statement of decreation: to refuse the
destiny of subjection under transcendence requires a detachment
from the interpellative hail and force of the (divine) other. For Eck-
hart, being poor in spirit, experiencing the true poverty of the one
who “wants nothing, and knows nothing, and has nothing” (52;
550; EE, 199), entails an anoriginary refusal of the entire servile
mechanism that binds the subject to (sovereign) transcendence and
is reproduced through the subject’s labor of mediation (in practices
and works). The figure of spiritual poverty makes a claim on living
otherwise than interpellated, created, and subjected, entailing the
subversion of the individuated subject on which both the secular
and theological imaginaries rely.
The subject, an effect of interpellation that misrecognizes itself as
a free cause or agent, is never first or is only first within the enclosure
of the world or, in Althusser’s language, within ideology. Eckhart de-
clares an impossible-yet-real antecedence to the historical time of
this enclosure, a “before” that indicates an eternity of what is uncre-
ated and unsubjected: to be as you were when you were not. This is
at the heart of Eckhart’s daring formulation: “Before there were any
creatures [die crêatûren], God was not ‘God,’ but he was what he
was [er was, daz er was]” (52; 554; EE, 200). Before—in an anteced-
ence that is not temporal, as it marks a priority to the very imposition
of historical time—before the other was other and the self was the
self, there was an ante-ontological immanence of dispossessed uncre-
ated life of those who are not (one). Becoming nothing incessantly
inaugurates a subtraction from the imposition of the subject form,

revealing the “everlasting truth” of ante-ontological equality “in

which the highest angel and the fly and the soul are equal [glîch
sint]” (52; 554; EE, 200). Prior to individuation and any proper
self, there is an uncreated freedom of the dispossessed-in-common,
without properties, without hearing the calls that subject and indi-
viduate. Heeding Harney and Moten’s caution that the real danger
in the face of dispossession is recourse to (self-)possession, Eckhart
and other medieval heretics, like Marguerite Porete, make audible a
collective claim on dispossession: in becoming nothing, they refuse
the allures of possession and affirm a life without qualities.21
The history of the production of subjects who work “all by them-
selves” is fundamentally a violent and coercive (and ongoing) one—
a history of colonialism, slavery, and their afterlives—in which self-
possession is only made possible and real with the dispossession and
the repossession (as property) of the other.22 The (self-)possession of
the subject is predicated on the dispossession of the other, which is
appropriated as surplus, its phantasmatic solidity requiring an other
who is contained under negation, or in captivity as a being for.23 This
is why the real problem is upholding the value of possession, an oper-
ation that has, as its obverse, the perpetual production of violent and
violating—racialized and racializing—dispossession elsewhere than
the subject. Indeed, the production and reproduction, the mainte-
nance and regulation, of the modern human subject essentially re-
quires dealing with the terror of nothingness, which arises with the
subject’s claims to solidity, coherence, and futurity—a terror that, in
modernity, has been displaced on Blackness.24 It is this asymmetrical
coerced dispossession (and domination) that is disavowed by the
claims that the subject is given, always just there, naturally. Delink-
ing dispossession from the normative dream of possession—from
the entire dialectic of possession and dispossession, in which posses-
sion is premised on dispossession that locks the other in place as a
thing—opens forth the embrace of a generalized dispossession that
places the entire subjective and appropriative apparatus under its
sign. What is thereby disclosed is a nothing without dreams of becom-
ing something, a dispossession without fantasy of appropriative
possession.
In the midst of a different mysticism, a mysticism in the flesh, Fred
Moten has written, while describing what it means to embrace

Blackness, that “it is a kind of ethical gesture to claim this disposses-

sion, this nothingness, this radical poverty-in-spirit.”25 In refusing
the lethal imposition of the subject’s (self-)possession, Moten pro-
posed the endless improvisational experiment “to live among one’s
own in dispossession, to live among the ones who cannot own, the
ones who have nothing and who, in having nothing, have every-
thing.”26 A carrier and harbinger of dispossession, the flesh troubles
the theoretico-material primacy of the subject. It marks a ground
and a negative condition of the subject that is barred to it qua subject
and self-possessed. Subjects are constituted such that the flesh itself is
rendered invisible, almost spectral. The flesh, always elsewhere to
the subject, indexes what is excluded by the structuration and indi-
viduation of the subject in the world and what is inscribed as by-
product and remainder of those operations. The commonness of
the flesh is torn asunder, always already missing, precisely because
with the subject it is taking place elsewhere. In the vicinity of the sub-
ject, flesh is always the flesh of the other and thus always abject flesh.
Here the flesh is marked for death, carrying the burden of exposure
to nothingness.
When Hortense Spillers makes the distinction between body and
flesh, she notes “before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree
of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under
the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.”27 I under-
stand this “before” as indicating not simply a chronological prece-
dence but a theoretical priority. The flesh precedes and exceeds bod-
ies, which are produced in distributions of individuation. Though
flesh is produced and reproduced as abject flesh in and by the world,
it retains a force that precedes that enforcement and coding. For
flesh, unlike the body, is not properly individuated; it declines the
specific individuations that are repeatedly attached to the body. It
troubles the parameters of individuation entailed in the symbolic
and political grids that distribute subjects across civil society. Its fail-
ure to be properly individuated strikes horror into the domain of the
differentiated and the ordered, the domain of names, bodies, and
subjects, which disavows that it is constitutively built on the (re)pro-
duction of abjection. The flesh, in its “dislocative immanence,”28 is
what is barred from entering into the metaphysics of the proper or

from being appropriated by the proper subject, regulated by the re-

gime of property and possession. One could say that what is inter-
pellated into being proper subjects are individuals or bodies, but one
could also say what is (mis)appropriated in that act is the flesh. For
the act of interpellation itself individuates, subjects, and renders
functional—in a double operation, simultaneously violent (a cap-
ture, a subjection) and also purportedly generous (bestowing recog-
nition or assurance); and everything that evades and escapes that
interpellation, that persists on the obverse side of it, insisting on ano-
nymity or impersonality, remains in the shadows of the world. But
here again the flesh is “before,” but with an antecedence that cannot
be counted, since like the subject and the world, temporality is itself
produced in the moment of conversion, which casts subjection as al-
ways already happened, as never having a (temporal or spatial) out-
side: flesh carries an impossible-yet-real precedence.
Flesh renders the subject’s self-possession always, in the last in-
stance, a failure, an unattainable violent illusion—one that has pro-
duced, as the result of its relentless determination, the flesh as what is
dehumanized, as what has to pay the price for the impossibility of
the subject’s purity, mastery, and coherence. As the obverse side,
indifferent to the economy of redemption, the flesh indexes an im-
manence that decenters its arcs, its subjects, and its ontologies. That
is, the inscription of the intimacy of the flesh as ontological lack
(whether to be eliminated or redeemed) enacts the codes of the world
itself and thereby reinforces its hold. But the flesh carries a differ-
ent intensity. Embracing the flesh or claiming its monstrosity—
most powerfully proposed by Spillers—entails asserting its ante-
ontological primacy to the world that renders it abject. Its exposure
carries an insurgent challenge to the primacy of self-possession—
something powerfully elaborated by Alexander G. Weheliye. As he
has written, “to have been touched by the flesh, then, is the path to
the abolition of Man,” and “to fully inhabit the flesh might lead to a
different modality of existence.”29 The immanence of the flesh is not
the immanence of the subject or the world but of what is foreclosed
by the imposition of the world. It is, if we follow Moten, “in its un-
locatable immanence, because it is nowhere in being everywhere.”30
It is an immanence that remains foreign to the transcendent forma-
tions that unite the subject to itself, to the world, and to horizons of

civil and political society. Flesh carries in it a certain freedom in

exposure and dispossession that has been incessantly negated and
violated by the world: not the weaponized freedom of self-subjection
and alterity-abjection, but a freedom that can be seen, to invoke a
gnostic idiom, as acosmic or worldless, where this worldlessness
names both a violent exclusion from the world and an anonymous
ante-ontological force against it.
The Immanence of the Lowest Place (the Undercommons)

One of the decisive theoretical moves of Laruelle’s “non-philosophical”
thought is to axiomatically decouple immanence from the world and
to insist on thinking from this radical immanence, rather than think-
ing toward it, redoubling, and positing it as an ideal (and thus a tran-
scendence) to be reached.31 Here, radical immanence is not equat-
able with all there is, the philosophical One-All, but indicates what
is always already subtracted from the enclosing structure of the
world.32 Such a formulation is directed at Deleuze, who most prom-
inently wrested immanence away from notions of enclosure, reacti-
vating it as an organizing principle, a mode of causality, and a set of
practical affects. Yet Deleuze’s decoupling was matched by the align-
ment of immanence with philosophy, as opposed to religion and
theological formations, which remained allied with transcendence.
Laruelle’s approach to immanence allows for the provincialization
of the opposition between the secularity of the world and the tran-
scendence that takes on varied theological forms. It discloses the two
as a unified bilateral apparatus that forecloses radical immanence,
rendering it invisible by their structures of meaning and ontological
distributions.33
By posing radical immanence (which in Laruelle’s philosophical
lexicon is equated with the One or the real) as separated from the
All, from ontological totality and the phantasmatic solidity of the
world, non-philosophy suggests not only a critical diagnosis of
the world’s persecution, harassment, and violence but also an axi-
omatic thought that resists giving the world’s authority and self-
declared self-sufficiency the final power over coding that real as neg-
ative. Rejecting the imposition of the normativity of the world, it no

longer ascribes negativity to what the world persecutes, disclosing

the world itself as the force of death, destruction, and negation.
The consequence of this disclosure is a refusal of the world’s power
to code radical immanence as negativity—a coding that stands as
the final ruse of the world itself. To think from radical immanence
means to relativize the judgment and norms, the very symbolic hold,
of the world.
Radical immanence, in this articulation, is neither coconstituted
with the world nor oriented toward the world and its proposed uni-
versality; it retains the characteristic of autonomy, or “the non-
relation of unilaterality.”34 Yet throughout, radical immanence is
inconsistent, without ontological solidity or security, persecuted
and appropriated by the world’s hallucinations. But it is even more
fundamentally without lack, needing nothing from the world. What
is enacted thereby is a shift of perspective, from that of the world to
that of radical immanence, that underdetermines the world and its
stranglehold. This perspective is not a second perspective, totalizable
within a unified field with that of the world, but one that relativizes
the perspective of the world. It is a standpoint that is not a stand-
point, because it lacks the fixity of one, of a subjective site that would
be positioned within (or against) a totalizable field or open (onto) a
horizon. Radical immanence indexes what does not transcend to-
ward the world and its valuations, toward the phantasmatic onto-
logical solidity granted by it. A force that stays vectorially within it-
self insists rather than exists, as Laruelle would put it, or immanates,
precisely insofar as it does not transcend toward the world’s domin-
ion but instead under(deter)mines its claims. To such a force, which
is not something divided and projected into a mediational field, tran-
scendence names not what is beyond the world that can supposedly
save it but the very opening that constructs the world and its hori-
zon. Immanence, as separated from the world and its valuations, is a
nonreactive force, one that is not, in the last instance, determined by
subjection.
Even as Laruelle’s explorations of the theoretical ramifications of
decoupling immanence from the world and its ontology prove use-
ful, his ascription of autonomy to radical immanence requires qual-
ification and ultimately modification. Although autonomy theoret-
ically specifies a certain independence from the world, a primacy

vis-à-vis it, both the auto- and the nomos are, in the end, all too
worldly terms to be intimately aligned with radical immanence.35
It is instead decisive, pace Laruelle, to render immanence neither
as autonomous nor as heteronomous, but to see it as carrying a force
of the antinomian or even the antenomian: that is, a force that pre-
cedes while refusing the imposition of the nomos of the world. In this
way, it eschews the names and normativity of the world while also
avoiding becoming a reactive, derivative force against the asserted
primacy of nomos, an assertion whose persistent lie it repudiates.
It is, as an index of the real in rebellion against the world, what
puts the nomos in unending suspension.
To elaborate further, immanence acts as a dispossessed and dis-
possessive force that “comes under”36 the world, unceasingly ques-
tioning the nomos of the world. It indexes nameless, dispossessed life
in common that anamorphically exhibits the world to be, in Moten’s
words, “the fundamentally and essentially antisocial nursery for a
necessarily necropolitical imitation of life.”37 What the world and
its field of individuation and intersubjectivity codes as life is but
the endless production of death, a necropolitical machine that is
imbricated with the violence of immunization that supports the
self and community.38 And the world apprehends the immanence
of the undercommons only by coding it negatively, trying to manage,
individuate, and subjugate it, when not to outright eliminate it. To
think from the undercommons, from a generalized dispossession in
common, is to affirm a common force that “comes under” the world,
the imposition of its mapping, its structures of power, its civil and
political society, its individuations and distributions of subjects
within the grid of the proper. And dispossessed life is not the life
crafted, immunized, and assured by sovereignty but something that
underdetermines that very grid, its very distributions of life and
death, exclusion and inclusion, into “the unmapped and unmappa-
ble immanence of undercommon sociality.”39
The intimate proximity of dispossession embraced with and in an
undercommon immanence was, in its own way, elaborated by Eck-
hart. The soul that “has utterly abandoned [it]self” (48; 504; EE,
197), the annihilated one without what is proper to itself, without
qualities and properties, inhabits the lowest place. Let us hear this:

“I say the same about the man who has annihilated himself in him-
self and in God and in all created things; this man has occupied [be-
sezzen] the lowest place, and God must pour the whole of himself
into this man, or else he is not God” (48; 504; EE, 197). God must
because the annihilated are in univocal immanence with the divine.
To be equal to nothing, to inhabit the lowest place, as dispossessed
and uncreated, in an ante-ontological prior-priority to the created
field of being and time, is a disruption to the (created) world, to its
claims of exhaustive spatiotemporal ordering. An immanent force of
nothingness in precedence to creation (which is also to say to subjec-
tion and the imposition of the order of the world) inhabits this lowest
place, which might also be seen as nothing but an underground, or
“that utopic commonunderground of this dystopia,”40 a dystopia
that also carries the name of the (created) world.
The lowest place is more of a nonplace than a determined topos,
which is why true spiritual poverty, Eckhart insists, implies that one
“should not be or have any place in which God could work,” be-
cause “to cling to place” is to “cling to distinction [underscheit]”
(52; 560; EE, 202). “The most intimate poverty” is the inhabitation
of the fundamentally atopic, an inhabitation that, by opening up a
certain abyssal impropriety, undermines every proper place and
every ontological hierarchy. Becoming nothing entails entering “a
strange and desert place, and is rather nameless [mê ungenennet]
than possessed of a name” (28; 322; CW, 131). True spiritual pov-
erty moves from fixing a proper name that would install one into the
intersubjective symbolic grid of the world to a namelessness that re-
mains impossible in the terms of the world, but is no less real for that.
Eckhart’s insistence on the dimension of namelessness—which he
figures variously as the desert place, the spark, or the little town—
ties his discourse explicitly to the apophatic tradition, the sayings
and unsayings of divine names. But the Christian apophatic tradi-
tion, at least in its foundational form, given to it by the Syrian
monk Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, engenders a rather different
set of effects and affects. There, anonymity characterizes the ineffa-
bility of divine transcendence, producing in its wake a prostrated pi-
ety, a reverence and exaltation toward a hyperbeyond that remains
beyond all speech and understanding. By contrast, in Eckhart, divine

namelessness is shared and inhabited absolutely, without reserve,

by the uncreated soul. The soul, as uncreated (that is, as annihilated
and dispossessed), is as nameless as God. The anonymity of the un-
created is a namelessness in common, a strange atopic desert place
whose aridity desiccates all names, determinations, and attachments.
We hear something of this in Eckhart’s proclamation:
I have often said that there is something in the soul that is so

closely related to God that it is one and not just united [ein ist
und niht vereint]. It is one and has nothing in common with any-
thing, nor does anything created have anything at all in common
with it. Everything created is nothing. But this is remote and alien
[verre und vremde] from all createdness. If a person were com-
pletely like this, [one] would be completely uncreated [ungeschaf-
fen] and uncreatable. (12; 146; TP, 269)
So an absolute heterogeneity or equivocity holds between the uncre-

ated and the created, but this difference is no longer mappable onto
the difference between God and the soul, between divine transcen-
dence and the subject: in the uncreated and the uncreatable, abso-
lutely foreign and removed from creation, God and the soul are
absolutely indistinguishable. And it is not achieved by means of
mediation and synthesis, by means of the overcoming of diremption:
it is not united but one (with God). There is “something in the soul in
which God is bare . . . it has no name of its own . . . because it is
neither this nor that, neither here nor there” (24; 278; TP, 285):
that is, a something that is a nothing, and a place that (as “neither
here nor there”) proves to be radically atopic, a disturbance within
the spatiotemporal distribution of the world. However apophatic his
language, Eckhart’s radicalization of divine namelessness ultimately
strips it of all transcendence, making the soul, as uncreated, also fully
lose its proper name and determinations.
In this innermost atopic lowest place, no one claims what is one’s
own, for everyone is a no one, sharing in their nothingness. “All
creatures are a pure nothing [lûter niht]. I do not just say that they
are something small or something at all [sie kleine sîn oder iht sîn]:
They are a pure nothing” (4; 52; TP, 250). This lowest place, then,
is a kind of divine underground, inhabited by the annihilated ones,

indifferent to mandates of individuation, subjection, and topogra-

phy: the nothing of the no place without aspiration for the transcen-
dence of the proper place, but with an anti- and antenomian antag-
onism to the individuating distributions of the proper. In articulating
the dispossessed, ante-ontological equality against hierarchy, as the
inhabitation of the lowest place that is atopic, Eckhart, along with
those poor-in-spirit friends of God and free spirits who came after
him, enacts a heretical and mystical moment of the undercommons.
This uncreated namelessness, this desubjectivation, remains fur-
tive, underground, and illegible to the theopolitical calls that would
force it to appear in the arenas of subjection and agency; it refuses (or
never hears) the hails that would subject it into a theater of action.
Thinking from this nameless lowest (non)place of dispossession,
moreover, is not only atopic but also, in a sense, utopic, because it
entails an immanent experimentalism of the anti- or antenomian re-
fusal of the necropolitical imitation of life, devoid of the support of
(and in general antagonism to) the topos of the world and its philo-
sophical and political legitimations.
Without a Why—without a Future
Affirming, in a mystical idiom, that “dispossession is what we are

and what we have in common,”41 Eckhart gives voice to an under-
common tendency that modernity, as the imposition of the proper
and of the subject form, will repeatedly seek to eliminate under the
enclosure and spatiotemporal emplotment of the world. These anni-
hilated ones, in their atopic freedom, might be said to be, in Moten’s
words again, “the ones who disavow possession, the ones who, in
having been possessed of the spirit of dispossession, disrupt them-
selves.”42 Uncreated immanence, arising out of a perpetual intimacy
with nothingness, insists in intensification. Not an equality through
possession and recognition, this is “the most intimate poverty” of
dispossession, of being “as empty as that nothing is empty that is nei-
ther here nor there [alz daz niht ledic ist, daz noch hie noch dâ enist]”
(1; 14; TP, 240).43 Prior to all hierarchical distribution of being and
subjection, there is dispossession in common, a wandering atopic
nothingness, with the power of the divine not as a transcendent telos,

but as the immanent abyssal ground. Neither a transcendent power

nor a mechanism of legitimating order, authority, and hierarchy, the
nameless divine ground(lessness) discloses the impossible-yet-real
uncreated dispossession that annihilated souls hold in common.
Becoming nothing, as we have elaborated it so far, does not open
onto transcendence, but inhabits the lowest place, as an uncreated
and uncreatable (which is to say, unsubjected and unsubjectable)
immanence that insists in itself and destabilizes the phantasmatic
imposition of secular and divine transcendence. What is lived in
such dispossession is not the life of the subject, but an empty life
without a why, free from all properties and attachments. This why-
lessness of the anonymous (under)ground is what is violently oc-
cluded by the imposition of the destiny of the subject in the world.
And, as uncreated and uncreatable, it is also necessarily eternal—but
not in the eschatologically transcendent sense as what is to come
after or as the realization of history. Rather than being displaced
into a transcendent horizon, to be appropriated and lived as the
afterlife, Eckhart’s dispossessed life, as divine and eternal, discloses
the ruse at the heart of futurity and teleology. Its eternal now, which
has “neither before nor after [weder vor nor nâch]” (52; 556; EE,
201), marks not something hoped for or worked for, but precisely
what, in its antecedence, perforates and abjures the imperatives of
hope, desire, and labor, diagnosing them as the subjugating effects
of a promised future to (never) come. It thereby refuses the logic
of temporal transcendence or the not-yet, which is arguably funda-
mental to the (modern) world and naturalizing of the structures (and
strictures) of history and futurity.44 It murmurs the truth that striving
itself is a product of an apparatus that divides the real (the univocal
nothingness without a why) and projects it into a transcendent fu-
ture, thereby necessitating and justifying mediating affects and oper-
ations (of hope and labor): these become the medium and means of
fulfilling a dreamed-for synthesis or unification that always remains
constitutively deferred. The poor in spirit insist without a why, with-
out mediating transcendence into actuality: they refuse the individ-
uating imposition of the subject that works all by itself and that, in
undertaking that labor of mediation, only reproduces the world but
thereby does not live, because, to slightly alter Eckhart, only what is
without principle (im)properly lives.

Eckhart’s articulation of anonymous, dispossessed life without a

why enacts, to borrow a formulation from psychoanalytic queer the-
ory, “a refusal of the coercive belief in the paramount value of futu-
rity.”45 But rather than instantiating a radical negativity in relation to
the symbolic, it relativizes the entire structure of totality and nega-
tivity (whether that negativity is taken as dialectical or as resolutely
resistant to dialectics) in order to affirm the dispossessed immanence
of nothingness irreducible to the world. To merely decouple negativ-
ity from productivity and futurity while retaining it as negativity is to
retain the valuation imposed on it by the world, remaining in a neg-
ative attachment to it. Rather than a transition from productive neg-
ativity that participates in an economy of sacrifice to unproductive
negativity, what is required is a relativization of this whole concep-
tual matrix. To give up hope, hope for a realization, is not necessar-
ily to encounter the failure of futurity but may also mark a radical
disinvestment from the world and the necessity of deferral that it pro-
claims. Dispossession and becoming nothing affirm the priority of a
radical antenomian force of immanence that is no longer synonymous
with the secular time of history, nor simply determined as a void, as
the negative of the world. Or, if one insists that it is the void of neg-
ativity that breaks up the world and its history, one must at least add
that it is “the fullness of the void, something that one cannot silence,
occupying all of space, the uninterrupted, the incessant.”46
The immanence of the lived nothing, without qualities and with-
out a why, refuses the imperatives and affects imposed by temporal
transcendence—the last transcendence that secular thought allows
itself to avow—and undermines the heroics of the subject’s projec-
tive temporality and its claimed powers of actualization. Indexed
to eternity, as a dislocated nowness, this dispossessive and under-
common immanence is otherwise to the empty, homogeneous time
of secular history that is grounded in the “particular formation of
the modern subject” as its agential, productive, narrative center.47
With “neither before nor after,” this immanence is decisively not
that of the world or history or world history, but in its impossible-
yet-real anteriority, it carries a force to subvert the grip of the world
(across the amalgams of possibility and actuality that make up its
history) and the subjects that populate its cartographic order of coher-
ence. No longer oriented toward the dream of restitution from an

imposed alienation, it instead undermines and underdetermines the

narrative logics of salvation, the narrative arcs of disalienation, re-
appropriation, and recuperation. Not to be achieved, it anamorph-
ically reveals the temporal deferral of historical time to be a subject-
ing ruse that ceaselessly converts the now into a never-to-arrive after
(which nevertheless will require actualization). This is why, at least
in part, this real immanence has no part to play in the secularization
narratives that endlessly play off the transcendence of God against
the immanence of the world or of history—and do so to legitimating
ends. There is no salvation in history or at the end of history, but only
as an irruption into history, one that embraces dispossession against
the ontotopological coherence of the world, from the divine (under)-
ground of history. Indeed, it may be “thought and spoken about as
utopian and uchronic,”48 enacting what Laruelle might call the in-
surrection of the victim, that “intimate nudity [that] can act and top-
ple all transcendences, those of the earth and of the sky, into a more
radical immanence.”49
The exigency of radical immanence is a thought not from the
world, but either from prior to its origin (as Eckhart’s logic suggests)
or from its end. The latter, rather than being imagined in a temporal
register (as what is to come, in the future), can be taken as what is
ceaselessly enacted by the order of the world as such. The end of the
world has always already been occurring, across the entire genocidal
catastrophe of its history. The end of the world and of history has
always already taken place, in the endless wake of its constitutive
violence. To think that it comes after is to fall prey to the collusive
parallelism between secular investments in futurity and the theolog-
ical deferral of the eschatological end-of-the-world.50 The world has
ended for the worldless who have always accompanied its worlding,
as what is excluded and rendered ontologically incoherent, but as
what entails the eternal threat of inaugurating a general disposses-
sion. This would be an embracing of worldlessness, “a nihilistic
worldlessness (a-cosmism)” that challenges being “overdetermined
by a norm of worldliness,” as Jacob Taubes, redeploying a Gnostic
mythologem, has suggested.51 Inhabiting the lowest place against
all hierarchy, such an acosmic revolt would deny all legitimacy to
the world—and its concatenation of topos, nomos, and chronos.

Originating in a displaced fashion from the insight that the end of the
world has always been ongoing, such an acosmic revolt would be an
anti- and antenomian refusal of the imposition and ordering of the
world and its unfolding history, in a way that abyssally abjures all
search for salvation in ecstatic movements outward or in forms of
receptivity to the outside.
Unsettled Traditions
Disentangling immanence from its secularist appropriations allows
for a redrawing of the basic conceptual parameters of the debates in
the study of secularism and philosophy of religion. The decision
would no longer be between a secular immanence enframed and a
transcendent beyond, nor between a subject of interiority and belief
and a subject formed through material practices of ethical self-
cultivation. Rather, immanence would index a dispossessed, anony-
mous nothingness that comes under—in ante-ontological anteriority
that incessantly puts into question—the constitution of the world
and its subjects. Immanence would be the groundless ground, the
underground, coming underneath the semantic and conceptual log-
ics of the (Christian-modern) world, its normative order of things,
and life lived according to its distribution. Irreducible to this world
and those divine things posed as transcendent, it would refuse the
collusive polemics perpetually played between the secular metaphys-
ics of modernity and the theological logics that position themselves
(and are positioned) as its enemy.
Uncovering affirmations of such immanence in sites and archives
deemed religious as much as those deemed secular upends the bound-
ary regulations on which secularism relies. In contrast to any polem-
ical opposition erected between the secular and the religious, it is
imperative to trace how both sides of the divide frequently impose,
enact, and uphold powers of subjection and transcendence. If re-
ligion is secularism’s self-appointed and self-constructed other, a
thinking that would be an insurrection against the secular might
take a different form than a turn toward a specific tradition deemed
religious, enacting instead a radical reappraisal and reconstella-
tion of the very archives that are currently organized by the clearly

demarcated distinction between the secular and the religious. The

proposed practice of thinking and reading would seek out and col-
late fragments within various discursive archives, regardless of the
way they are organized along the secular/religious divide. It would
reimagine assemblages by tracing figures of desubjectivation and dis-
possession, forms of thinking and speaking that refuse the interpel-
lative imposition of subjection found across the secular/religious di-
vide. The interpellating transcendence that imposes the subject form
as destiny is at once a theological, moral, and political imposition,
populating the intersubjective field with individuated, agential sub-
jects laboring toward a promised future. Whether accomplished by
secular or religious apparatuses, the result is an entanglement (with
varied emphases) of obedience and freedom in the subject form in a
way that renders invisible and unthinkable all that is dispossessed
and anonymous, all that is acosmically immanent in an insurrection-
ary refusal of the world’s distribution of the proper.
Against the background of a distinction elaborated by Asad be-
tween secularism as a political doctrine and the secular as a set
of epistemological and ontological presuppositions that subtend
it, Mahmood characterized secularity as “the shared set of back-
ground assumptions, attitudes, and dispositions that imbue secular
society and subjectivity.”52 In relation to this definition, the set of
quasi concepts that this essay sought to think with—immanence
without the world, dispossession, becoming nothing, flesh, life with-
out a why, undercommons—inhabit a rather peculiar status. They are
quite clearly at odds with the dominant logics of secularity, troubling
its basic presuppositions of free, individuated subjects, along with
their investment in futurity and their politics of (self-)possession—
no less than the general enclosure and spatiotemporal emplotment
of the world in which they operate. Yet if they are not secular insofar
as they stand in a subversive relation to secularity (and its mutually
reinforcing relationship with secularism), this hardly renders them
obviously religious or allows them to partake in a coherent histori-
cally articulated discursive tradition. Their doubly excluded status
works against the very mechanism of secularism that manages,
enforces, and polices the demarcations between the secular and the
religious. Indeed, the repeated reproduction of the line between the

secular and the religious as a question, a tension, and a problem is a

means of foreclosing ways of thinking and acting that would affirm
an undercommon immanence in defiance of the epistemic domina-
tion of the secular no less than of the authorities that proclaim a
coherence (if not purity) of their traditions.
This suggests a form of indifference to secular difference that
might be called, following Hussein Agrama, asecular.53 Something
convergent was expressed by Walter Benjamin when he invoked a
tradition of the oppressed, a tradition without continuity or coher-
ence, by interweaving materials from revolutionary Marxism and
messianic Judaism against the conformity of secular time and secular
politics. Divine commandments interweave with the general strike,
in ways that would infuriate both secular and religious authorities,
in order to struggle against the interlocking regimes of law and the
state. In the same decade, W. E. B. Du Bois resisted separating revo-
lutionary and theological logics into different traditions, instead en-
visioning the enactment of abolition through the prism of the general
strike in intimate relation to exodus and the coming of the Lord.54
Rather than appealing to authoritative discursive traditions that
have the capacity to form subjects in relation to a past and a possible
future through a normative set of structuring practices and theoreti-
cal understandings,55 the question that arises concerns the status and
deployability of traditions in the wake of modernity’s irreparable
ruptures and devastations, disinheritance and loss. Rather than eth-
ically structured subjects in relation to a history and a future, what
kind of poetics of weaving together of fragments, and ethics of read-
ing, thinking, and living would be required to avow that languages
are fragmented, that histories are shattered by discontinuities, and
that the dislocations of modernity cannot be undone through
redemptive conclusions to come? What would it mean to have a tra-
dition such as that of marronage, a fugitivity against the world, a
constant activity of flight against the normative fixity of world, an
incoherence of a common immanence, without masters or sover-
eigns, no longer primarily concerned with modes of subjection and
enforcement, or even piety and virtue?56 Such a tradition would be
indifferent to the theological or philosophical nature of materials
deployed—anything in a common dispossession to struggle against

the incessant catastrophe of history. Beginning each time anew, it

would be enacted without the assurance of continuity, without the
assurance of the spatiotemporal coherence of the world. This would
be a dispossession held in common, punctured by discontinuity and
dislocation, yet instantiating a utopian and heretical immanent exo-
dus and acosmic insurrection against transcendences that violate,
dominate, and subject. Against mediational imperatives, this tradi-
tion would embrace materials looted from the world, deinstrumen-
talizing its materiality for mere use, indifferent to the divisions im-
posed by authorities busy constructing majoritarian canons and
normative orders, by constantly entering a dispossession in common
against the world.
......................................................
alex dubilet is assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt
University. He is author of The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and
Immanence, Medieval to Modern (2018) and editor, with Kirill
Chepurin, of Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question
of Political Theology (2021). He is also translator, with Jessie Hock,
of François Laruelle’s General Theory of Victims (2015) and A
Biography of Ordinary Man: On Authorities and Minorities (2018).
Acknowledgments
My sincere appreciation to Joseph Albernaz, Amaryah Armstrong, Kirill
Chepurin, and Ross Lerner for their insightful comments on this essay. I
would also like to thank Kyra Sutton and the Qui Parle editorial board
for their vital feedback.
Notes
1. See Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind.
2. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 47.
3. For a convergent theorization of immanence in relation to the prob-
lematic of political theology, see the introduction to Chepurin and
Dubilet, Nothing Absolute. For a different attempt to free immanence
from the secular, see Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God.
4. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground.”

5. On the transformation of the philosophical conceptualization of the

world, see Gaston, Concept of the World.
6. On zones of nonbeing, see Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
7. Mufti, “Critical Secularism,” 7. For a convergent position, see Gour-
gouris, Lessons in Secular Criticism.
8. For a speculative rendition of this claim, see Laruelle, General Theory
of Victims.
9. See Wilderson, Red, White, and Black.
10. For secularism as transcendent mediation, see Asad, Formations of the
Secular, 5. For the centrality of sovereignty to secularism, see Agrama,
Questioning Secularism. For a discussion of the interaction of media-
tion and sovereignty as it relates to the question of secularism and
political theology, see Dubilet, “On the General Secular Contradiction.”
11. Asad, Genealogies of Religion; Mahmood, Politics of Piety.
12. See Keane, Christian Moderns.
13. Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 225; see also Foucault, Herme-
neutics of the Subject.
14. My reading of Eckhart here is partly based on a fuller hermeneutic
engagement with his work offered in Dubilet, Self-Emptying Subject,
23–91.
15. See Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty.
16. Certeau, Mystic Fable; Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul; Coleman, Virtues
of Abandon; Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies; Moten, “Blackness and
Nothingness.”
17. For the purposes of accessibility, the German is taken from Eckhart,
Werke I and Werke II. For English translations, I use Eckhart, Meister
Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and De-
fense; Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher; and Eckhart,
The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. The citation in text
is first by sermon number (standard Quint numbering), then by page in
the German edition, then by page in the English editions (referred to as
EE, TP, and CW, respectively). I have modified the available transla-
tions silently whenever necessary.
18. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 267.
19. This draws on a longer elaboration of the significance of Althusser’s
theory of interpellation for political theology, focused on questions of
individuation, the call, and reproduction, which I am currently com-
pleting.
20. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 269.
21. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 17.

22. See Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Free-

dom”; on the afterlives of slavery, see Hartman, Lose Your Mother.
23. For the imbrication of property, personhood, and humanity with
Blackness and slavery, see Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. For captiv-
ity and being for, in particular, see Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s
Maybe,” 67. Roberto Esposito has argued that the dispositif of the
person—the originary site of which resides in Roman law—is essen-
tially connected to “depersonalization, which is to say being reduced to
a thing, which is implicit in the concept of person” (“For a Philosophy
of the Impersonal,” 125); see also Esposito, Third Person.
24. This is the argument offered by Calvin L. Warren, who explores the
ways the metaphysics of the modern world deals with nothingness
through a set of operations—disavowal, projection, and ultimately vio-
lent domination—and does so fundamentally through anti-Blackness
(such that, significantly, “antiblackness is anti-nothing” [Ontological
Terror, 9]). For Warren, the dreams and fantasies of the human/
subject—including projective freedom, a certain claim to coherence,
possession, and mastery—are premised on ontological violence against
the nothingness imposed on Blackness: “Antiblack violence is violence
against nothing, the nothing that unsettles the human because it can
never be captured and dominated. Blacks, then, allow the human to
engage in a fantasy—the domination of nothing” (21).
25. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 774. Indeed, such an embrace of
radical nothingness should be connected to the powerful exhortation
voiced by Frederick Douglass (which serves as the epigraph to Warren’s
Ontological Terror) to own nothing.
26. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 756.
27. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.
28. Moten, Stolen Life, 181.
29. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 138, 112. On a discussion of the figure of
Man, which converges with my discussion of the subject, see Wynter,
“Beyond the Word of Man.”
31. For a summary position, see Laruelle, “A Summary of Non-philoso-
phy.” For the most theoretically inventive introduction to Laruelle’s
thought, see Smith, Laruelle.
32. As Laruelle explains: “The One that is at issue here, the radical im-
manence in terms of which we define it, is above all not the One-All,
whether ‘close’ to Spinoza or not, but rather a One-without-All, or
even a One-without-Being, which we call the One-of-the-last-instance,

the better to contrast it to the convertibility which it refuses, of the One

with Being, as well as to the Spinozist reversibility of the One with the
All” (“‘I, the Philosopher, Am Lying,’” 48).
33. For further elaboration of this point, see Dubilet, “‘Neither God, nor
World.’”
34. Laruelle, Mystique non-philosophique, 22.
35. I have previously formulated a different though related reservation
about Laruelle’s vocabulary, in connection to the question of individ-
uation and his use of the syntagma Man-in-person. For the argument
about immanence as impersonal and in-common because individua-
tion takes place in and through the world, see Dubilet, “(Non-)human
Identity and Radical Immanence.”
36. Laruelle deploys the term sous-venir (as a mutation of the memorial-
izing relations of memory, souvenir), which Jessie Hock and I render
in our translation of General Theory of Victims as “coming-under,”
thereby maintaining a felicitous echo with Harney and Moten’s
undercommons.
38. See Mbembe, “Necropolitics”; and Esposito, Immunitas.
40. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 51.
43. To continue the textual and conceptual interlacing of Eckhart and
Moten, one might place in paratactical proximity Eckhart’s descrip-
tion of the poor in spirit as the one who “wants nothing, and knows
nothing, and has nothing” and ultimately inhabits the “most intimate
poverty” (52; 550; EE, 199, 558; EE, 202) and what I take to be one of
Moten’s (Eckhartian) prayers (proclaimed by and at the party of the
ones who are none): “I, who have nothing, I who have no one, adore
you and want you so; I’m just a no one, with nothing, to give you, but
o, I love you” (Stolen Life, 189). Or, to make audible the resonances, a
different appositional intimacy may be introduced: Eckhart’s exhor-
tation “You must give yourself up, altogether give up self, and then you
have really given up [dich selben lâzen und gar lâzen, sô hâst dû rehte
gelâzen]” (28; 318; CW, 130) next to the exhortations Harney and
Moten make when they write: “The only owning is unowning. Give
everything away until you have nothing. Give it all away until you are
nothing. You got to give up” (“al-Khwāriddim, or Savoir-Faire is
everywhere”). Creating this field of resonance, I hope, refracts in

surprising ways in both directions. And if these connections seem too

fanciful, one can recall that Eckhart’s gelâzenheit (releasement, but
from the same root as the “to give up” in the above quote) appears and
inflects Moten rumination on nothingness. See, for example, Moten,
Poetics of the Undercommons, 22. Gelâzenheit, which entered into
general theoretical discourse by means of Heidegger, is one element of
Eckhart’s broader lexicon of becoming nothing, forsaking the self, and
dispossession—in which annihilation and abandonment of what is
one’s own is articulated in such a way that the annihilated is no longer
“closer to itself than to anything else” (6; 82; EE, 187).
44. For the relation between the not-yet and the structure of the world, see
Albernaz and Chepurin, “The Sovereignty of the World”; and Che-
purin, “Suspending the World.” On the critique of the logic of temporal
distension, incompleteness, and teleology, see Chakrabarty, Provinci-
alizing Europe, chaps. 1 and 3.
45. Edelman, No Future, 6.
46. Maurice Blanchot, quoted in Foucault, “The Thought from the Out-
side,” 152.
47. On secular universal history, historicism, and the modern subject, see
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 72–77.
48. Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia, 10.
49. Laruelle, General Theory of Victims, 127.
50. For one example of a theologically informed defense of such an
eschatological deferral that stands directly in opposition to my position
here, see Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute.
51. Taubes, From Cult to Culture, 102–4. In his essay “Notes on Surre-
alism,” Taubes explores the parallel acosmic revolts of the Gnostics
and the surrealists. The problem is how to think this conceptual con-
vergence across the divide marked by the Copernican Revolution,
when, in Alexandre Koyré’s formulation, the closed world became an
infinite universe, resulting in the loss of self-evidence of previous ap-
peals to (divine) transcendence. Although Taubes acknowledges that
the modern revolt against the world “can never achieve a beyond of the
world in a strictly topographical sense” (106), he disagrees with Hans
Blumenberg’s conclusion that therefore no convergence can be drawn
across the epistemic divide of modernity. The key question to pose is
why worldlessness or the acosmic needs to be formulated in relation to
a beyond at all. It is also important to stress that although the hierar-
chies of being of the pre-Copernican cosmos were dissolved into the
homogeneous space of the infinite universe, hierarchy was not thereby

dismantled; rather, it became instantiated on the level of world itself,

through epistemic shifts resulting from the Middle Passage, slav-
ery, and colonialism. As Sylvia Wynter has argued, for example, the
Copernican Revolution and the concomitant invention of the modern
European figure of “Man” were only “fully effected by the parallel
invention/instituting of the new categories that were to serve as the
physical referents of Man’s Human Other” (“Unsettling the Colo-
niality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” 305). (For further theoriza-
tion of hierarchy as produced through racializing assemblages of
modernity, see Weheliye, Habeas Viscus.) Perhaps, then, the lever of the
acosmic must be seen not so much as beyond the world but as what
comes (in an atopic fashion) below the world—precisely within the
worldlessness imposed by the world and not in relation to any tran-
scendence (divine or otherwise). This would mean that radical imma-
nence is the nowhere from which an acosmic insurgency occurs.
52. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1–26; Mahmood, Religious Differ-
ence in a Secular Age, 181.
53. For secularism as repeatedly producing religion as a problem and for a
theorization of the asecular, see Agrama, Questioning Secularism, 1–
41, 230–35.
54. For a reading that productively brings together Du Bois’s Black Re-
construction with Benjamin’s theorization of divine violence, see Ford,
Thinking through Crisis, 123–92.
55. For tradition as a discursive formation in relation to Islam, modernity,
and secularism, see Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam”; and
Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 113–17.
56. For a powerful conjuring of fugitive dreams, see the final chapter of
Hartman, Lose Your Mother. For a recent theorization of marronage,
see Roberts, Freedom as Marronage.
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An Immanence without the World

On Dispossession, Nothingness, and Secularity

Dissociating Immanence from the World:

What follows is an attempt to put into question a basic conceptual

qui parle Vol. 30, No. 1, June 2021

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What work of elision or justiﬁcation is occurring in the deployment

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that allows the apprehension of modernity itself as a multifaceted

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ontology of humanism, civil society, and ultimately the world as a

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immanence more intimately with dispossession than with the sub-

Becoming Nothing: The Dispossession

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conduct, and ways of being, so as to transform themselves in order

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rhetorical forms, including being equal to nothing, being truly poor,

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creature and creator, between subject and transcendence, and is also,

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unmoored from transcendence, empty and free, detached of the self

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revealing the “everlasting truth” of ante-ontological equality “in

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Blackness, that “it is a kind of ethical gesture to claim this disposses-

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from being appropriated by the proper subject, regulated by the re-

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civil and political society. Flesh carries in it a certain freedom in

The Immanence of the Lowest Place (the Undercommons)

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longer ascribes negativity to what the world persecutes, disclosing

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namelessness is shared and inhabited absolutely, without reserve,

I have often said that there is something in the soul that is so

So an absolute heterogeneity or equivocity holds between the uncre-

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indifferent to mandates of individuation, subjection, and topogra-

Without a Why—without a Future

Afﬁrming, in a mystical idiom, that “dispossession is what we are

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but as the immanent abyssal ground. Neither a transcendent power

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Eckhart’s articulation of anonymous, dispossessed life without a

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imposed alienation, it instead undermines and underdetermines the

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demarcated distinction between the secular and the religious. The

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secular and the religious as a question, a tension, and a problem is a

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the incessant catastrophe of history. Beginning each time anew, it

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5. On the transformation of the philosophical conceptualization of the

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22. See Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Free-

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