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Michel de Certeau's ‘Spiritual Spaces’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Graham Ward
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Extract

The phrase ‘a spiritual space’ is used by Certeau at the end of his brief analysis of hagiographic material in ‘A Variant: Hagio-Graphical Edification’. The essay is one of three explorations in the production of certain topographies of the other found in The Writing of History. The spiritual space is another of Certeau’s non-places. Hagiography announces that a “non-place is here a discourse of places.” That is how he concludes the essay. What I wish to demonstrate in this essay is the way spiritual topoi govern Certeau’s understanding of the production of space both in its heterological and non-heterological forms. These spiritual spaces are profoundly theological in character and liturgical in economy. The direction of my argument, therefore, emphasizes, again, the importance of reading Certeau’s project theologically.

‘Spiritual spaces’ are not at the centre of Certeau’s work; they make that work possible. Other forms of space are focused upon and it is by mapping out these spaces that alternative places are opened up. I wish to examine three kinds of space explored, in fact, produced, in Certeau’s work. They correspond to three different epochs of time and three kinds of utopia [which, following the work of Louis Marin on Thomas More needs to be understood as both outopia (no-place) and Utopia (a good place)]. In outlining these three spaces, Certeau’s concerns with ethnography, speaking and texts at the dawn of modernity come more clearly into focus.

The Rational Utopia

The first space I will term, after Certeau, the ‘rational utopia’. It is the space produced by the closed system, what Certeau will describe as “a bubble of panoptic and classifying power, a module of imprisonment that makes possible production of an order.”

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 79 , Issue 932 , October 1998 , pp. 428 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 The Writing of History, tr. Conley, Tom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 182Google Scholar.

2 See “The Voice of the Other”, New Blackfriars, November 1996. 3 Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (New Jersey: Macmillan, 1983), p. xv.

4 The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Rendall, Steven (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 111Google Scholar.

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6 ibid., p. 96.

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8 The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 117.

9 See La possession de Loudun, Paris: Gallimard, 1970Google Scholar.

10 His younger contemporary, Louis Marin, will term this ‘spatial play’ in his analyses of Utopias. Marin's concern with ‘utopics’ bears a close relation to Certeau's concerns with ‘mystics’, as the cross‐referencing in the work of both authors bears out. See Utopics: Spatial Play.

11 The Mystic Fable, p. 299.

12 The Mystic Fable, p. 43.

13 The Mystic Fable, p. 2.

14 The Mystic Fable, p. 1.

15 The Mystic Fable, p. 2.

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17 For a further examination of space in St Teresa's work see Hughes, Sheila HasseU, 'A Woman's Soul is Her Castle: Place and Space in St. Teresa's Interior Castle', Literature and Theology, vol. 11.4 (December 1997), p. 376‐84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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38 Corpus Mysticum: Ľ eucharistie et Ľéglise au moyen Cage, Paris: Aubier, 1948Google Scholar. See the Introduction, p. 13‐19 where de Lubac points out that it is only with Book III of William of Auxerre's Summa aurea that corpus mysticum designates “n'est autre que ľ Eglise” (p. 18). Before this, with references found in the C9th, “elle. s'entendde ľ Eucharistie” (p. 19).

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40 The same move occurs in Henri Lefebvre's Production of Space, where the kind of space created in the Middle Ages becomes the basis for assessing the capitalist spaces of modernity. See, p. 58, 252‐78.

41 Corpus Mysticum, p. 33.

42 It eludes it primarily because it does not entertain “a rift between discourse and the body (the social body)“ which Certeau rightly understands to be a product of modernity”s fetishizing of the written. See The Writing of History, p. 3.

43 Corpus Mysticum, p. 32.

44 Corpus Mysticum, p. 34.

45 This is surely why semiotic accounts of the eucharist come to the fore with the Reformation and why the Reformation (both Catholic and Protestant) is one with the dawning of modernity.

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47 The Writing of History, p. 2.

48 The Writing of History, p. 14.

49 The Mystic Fable, p. 284.

50 Lefaiblesse de croire (Paris: Seuil, 1987), p. iv.

51 ‘Feux persistants’, Esprit, (Mai, 1996) p. 151.

52 See Moingt, ‘Traveller of Culture: Michel de Certeau’, New Blackfriars (November 1996), p. 479‐83; and Bauerschmidt, Frederick, ‘The Abrahamic Voyage: Michel de Certeau and Theology’, Modern Theology, 12.1 (1996), p. 1‐26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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54 The Mystic Fable, p. 285.

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59 The Mystic Fable, p. 299.

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61 ‘White Ecstasy’ tr. Bauerschmidt, Frederick and Hanley, Catriona, in The Postmodern God, ed. Ward, Graham (Oxford: Blackwell 1997) p. 157Google Scholar.

62 How do we read this? The panoptic has been something which Certeau, like Foucault, has criticised as the dream of rational Utopias. There is something disturbingly ironic in making this visitor, this ‘other’ the fulfilment of modernity's desires. Does Certeau succumb to his own incubus here?

63 The Mystic Fable, p. 17.

64 ‘White Ecstasy’, p. 157.

65 See Pickstock, Catherine, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 253‐66Google Scholar.

66 The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 188.

67 Corpus Mysticum p. 329. p. 329