007: Debased + Exalted, II

On Simon Critchley's "Mysticism," Robert Eggers' "Nosferatu" + Lars von Triers' "Breaking the Waves." And some thoughts on knowledge and technology.

This month’s essay has been published in two parts. This is Part Two. Make sure you read Part I before continuing here. — Michelle 🩸

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I don’t think I can separate knowing from writing. I can only write what I know and I only know what I write. If I want to know more, I have to write around it. I don’t pretend to separate my writing from my reading, either. My writing grows out of everything I read. It starts as marginalia, then it metastasizes, spreads across notebook pages until it’s big enough to excise and display on its own. Any literate person will recognize that this excision is the hardest part of writing — you nurture something within yourself and then work delicately to extract it from your insides so it can survive on its own. Writing requires a lot of separation: brain from body, thought from brain, thought from words, words from writing. 

But we didn’t always see ourselves as completely separate and disconnected from the world around us: “This dualism of subject and object, mind and nature, has come to be seen as definitional of what philosophers call with great confidence, ‘modernity’” Simon Critchley writes. “It leads to the dogma that reduces philosophy to epistemology. The most important question is assumed to be how a subject can have knowledge of objects.”¹ Knowing is, can be, and has long been more than a process of translation, assimilation or recognition between distinct entities. In Touching Feeling (2003), Eve Sedgdwick and Adam Frank write that “Any theory, to be a theory, requires or produces figure/ground relations.”² They compare this to how shame itself introduces “a particular boundary or frame” into an otherwise continuous mass. Despite requiring a separation between knowing subject and knowable object, writing as knowledge-production ostensibly aims to dissolve that line.

“Mysticism is, to begin with, an anachronism,” Critchley writes in his latest book, aptly called, Mysticism.³ “It retrospectively identifies, reduces, and petrifies a complex web of hermeneutical, liturgical, spiritual, somatic, and ritual practices into something called ‘religious experience’ that one either has or doesn’t have.”⁴ I’m not interested in miscategorizing what I feel when I write as a “religious experience” and that is certainly not what attracts me to the proto-gospel of Mechthild of Magdeburg. “The concept of mysticism” Critchley continues, “arises in the context of the modern, enlightened worldview which is deeply suspicious of the apparently spirit-seeing claims it appears to advance.” Something remains when we segregate the disciplines and turn the religious into a distinct and separate category of its own. What we do not know through science we become unable to know by any other means. Mysticism steps in to hold some of those remains. 

In Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024), systems of knowledge knock against each other and a struggle for supremacy. The plot is propelled by a series of seismic events that push monsters and curses up through the gap between a dark, medieval past and an Enlightened future. What these characters don’t know, what they think they know, and what they actually know is pushed onto new planes of instability, turning assertions of fact into questions no one body of knowledge or discipline of study can answer.

But Ellen Hutter always knew. She knew it in her mind, in her body and in her soul. “I know him,” she tells Thomas after he returns her to their home. “I know it must be me,” she tells von Franz in the alley. And yet, to borrow from Critchley’s Mysticism: “All visions, inspirations, and ecstatic experiences have to be submitted to the tribunal of reason,” that had newly asserted itself at the turn of nineteenth-century Wisborg. In the world of Nosferatu, religious knowledge was recast as superstition and Ellen’s testimony is repeatedly struck down by modernity’s tribunal of reason. As von Franz told the other men, “we have not become so much Enlightened as we’ve become blinded by the gaseous light of science!”

In their joint essay, Sedgwick and Frank describe what they call the “cybernetic fold,” as a moment in the history of systems theory “when scientists’ understanding of the brain and other life processes is marked by the concept, the possibility, the imminence of powerful computers.”⁵ It marked “a fold between postmodernist and modernist ways of hypothesizing about the brain and mind.” But these writers don’t focus on the cybernetic fold because of all the fun things we dreamt up when advanced computation was imminent. They ask: “What was it possible to think or do at a certain moment in time that it no longer is?” That moment in intellectual history opened us up to new questions, new lines of inquiry and new ways of knowing that — despite not congealing into dominance — contain “unrealized possibilities.” The cybernetic fold is but one example of how our established ways of knowing and thinking have, in the past, been able to suture together an expanding version of the known and a blossoming sense of the unknown. The lesson: New knowledge doesn’t always have to make old knowledge redundant.

The plot of Nosferatu is set in its own kind of fold, marked by the concept, the possibility, the imminence of the vampire’s existence. Faiths were tested, sciences were challenged and what had been deemed impossible reasserted itself as al too likely: Dr. Sievers’ medical knowledge only manages to diagnose Ellen with “melancholy.” He calls for Professor von Franz to contribute his insights on esotericism. Herr Knock loses himself in his dark practice and its teachings, while Friedrich Harding’s business know-how (”I’m a ship man”) can make little sense of any of it. And his wife Anna can only offer a gentle knowledge of her Christian god (“that is His power!”).

In the end, it was their collective failure to enjoin their varying ways of knowing that sealed Ellen’s tragic fate. On his way to Orlok’s castle, Thomas was disgusted and alarmed by the “superstitions” of the nomads living along the Carpathians. And Count Orlok had always planned to exploit the fold: “How I look forward to retiring to your city of a modern mind, who knows nothing of nor believes in such morbid fairy tales.”

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Ellen Hutter is lying on her back, mouth agape, slowly stirring into movement with a series of pleading sounds that are as desperate as they are orgasmic. Then it all turns to torture as one horror follows another until the credits roll and it all fades back to black. She tells her husband Thomas about the dream she had the night before: “It was our wedding, yet not in chapel walls… Standing before me, all in black, was Death… We exchanged vows, we embraced and when I turned around everyone is dead… the stench of their bodies was horrible. But I’d never been so happy as that moment, that I held hands with Death!” 

Nothing could be more Gothic than these perverted confusions, these wild swings between debasement and exaltation; good and evil; human knowledge and immortal power. Ecstasy slides into decay and death grows into a promise of eternity. And true to Gothic form, the Hutter’s marriage is the plot’s center of gravity. after Thomas sets off to Transylvania because “a new husband requires new wages,” Count Orlok seeks to replace Thomas as Mr. Hutter — he even completes the paperwork, “asks” for Ellen’s hand, takes her in her wedding dress and remains on top of her until death did them part. For his part, Thomas’s blinding sense of duty, his recurrent and “variant allusions to the marriage vow function as maledictions or curses, moving diagonally through time and space, not preventing marriage but poisoning it.”⁶

Against the backdrop of technological and political transition, where knowledge — be it scientific, carnal, spiritual or intellectual — collapses under the weight of petty absolutes, it is the Hutter’s young marriage that plays host to the demise of the entire city of Wisborg. It’s the open wound that lets Orlok in, the site of the original infection, the heart that circulates the contaminated blood with every beat. Or as Eve Sedgwick put it: “Marriage [is] a kind of fourth wall or invisible proscenium arch that moves through the world.”⁷ 

For her role as Ellen, Lily-Rose Depp looked to Isabelle Adjani’s award-winning performance as Anna in 1981’s Possession. This Anna wears dresses that match her apartment’s varying shades of deoxygenated blue and her husband Mark, a professional spy played by Sam Neil, seems entirely unaware that everything around him is slowly bleeding out to death. As young husband and wife, Anna and Mark swing through emotional extremes — screaming, shouting, slapping, grunting, moaning, crying, shoving. Stills of Adjani in character roaming around a decrepit early-eighties West Berlin in various stages of bleeding and sobbing have turned Possession into a mood board staple. A 1983 review in the New York Times called the film “one long anxiety attack” that “traumatized” Cannes for how Mark and Anna “knock each other violently around,” playing most of their scenes “in one state of bloodiness or another.”

left: still from "Possession" (1981). right: still from "Nosferatu" (2024)

Anna wants out of the marriage. But Mark wants her to stay. “You will let me go!” she insists. “I’m a monster! I’m a whore!,” she yells. Mark’s possessiveness manifests not in the ways he seeks to physically restrain Anna, but in what he insists on knowing about her — where she goes, who she talks to, who she socializes with. He does not care to know what she thinks or feels unless it helps illuminate any of his other questions.  

They communicate through oblique positions: He is turned to her, but she is facing away. Or they sit with their backs to each other at a restaurant. Or they both stare wildly in the same direction. He asks all the wrong questions. She speaks in circles and ellipses. The one time she does speak to him plainly, he’s disgusted: “For the first time you look vulgar to me.” He insists on knowing her on his own terms, while she remains gruesomely unknowable, even to herself.

Ahead of the film’s infamous subway scene, Anna kneels before a crucifix in a chapel — she whimpers, pleads and cries. As she walks into the subway station, her silence erupts into laughter, evolving into hysterics, exploding into sobs, then screams. She falls into grunts, convulsing and then screaming again, before finally rolling, excreting and oozing. “I am at war against women,” Mark tells his son’s school teacher (also played by Adjani), “There is no foresight, there is nothing about them that is stable, there is nothing to trust, they’re dangerous.” He thinks them unreliable sources of information, he resents the opacity of Anna’s apparent disorganization and the untranslatability of whatever it is she knows that he doesn’t. “When you’re away,” he tells her, “I think of you as an animal or a woman possessed.”

He takes the ineffability of her torment as a sign of her weakness, instead of as an indicator of what’s to come. Like Ellen Hutter, Anna is afflicted by an evil her husband is unable to recognize until it’s too little too late. And as we grow closer to understanding Anna’s affliction, her monstrosity shifts to martyrdom: “No one is good or bad, but if you want, I’m the bad one.”

***

The tragedy of Nosferatu becomes clear when Professor von Franz tells Ellen Hutter that “in heathen times, you might have been a great priestess of Isis, yet in this strange and modern world, your purpose is of a greater worth.” The professor seems too eager to let Ellen pay the price of everyone else’s unbelieving, too swift to abandon her to what she knows, too comfortable outsourcing the pain. Even if he does recognize her pain-knowledge, he only does so from a safe distance at the opposite end of the alley. He’ll return to her deathbed with a notebook, ready to take notes for his own records. All Ellen ever wanted was to not be abandoned for what she knows. When we first hear her speak she is praying for “a guardian angel” or “a gentle spirit of any celestial sphere.” And she was left to die alone.

Lars von Trier’s 1996 film, Breaking the Waves, tells a similar story set in a remote fundamentalist community living in the Scottish highlands. Bess begins her journey as a young woman praying for love. She has her own history of melancholies and she can talk to God. The people around her think of her as innocent, childish, simple, and passionate. When her husband has an accident at his job at an oil rig, he asks her to sleep with other men — Is it God or the brain injury talking? When Bess refuses, he gets sicker and when she begins sleeping with other men, his health improves — Is it God or coincidence? Bess knows it’s God and sleeps her way towards more dangerous and debasing escapades and saves her husband.

A frequent teller of debased-women-as-martyrs stories, von Trier is often accused of misogyny. But at least his women-martyrs are brave, “they make things happen; they keep their promises,” per Slate’s Jessica Winter. “They are sinned against and sinning. Whether admirable, pitiable or repellent, they are also interesting.” Indeed, the story of Bess is told as if it were the story of an uncanonized martyr and von Trier’s love of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (1927) supports this assertion. But Winter also adds that Lars von Trier’s men (and to that I add the men of Possession and Nosfetaru) are “all somehow enfeebled in mind, body, or circumstance; they are pathetic, weirdly passive creatures who stage manage the suffering of women for their own selfish purposes,” just like their directors. Debasement exalts the women while exaltation debases the men — only the latter lives to tell the tale.

left: meme from @avocado_ibuprofen, right: meme from @weirdprada

What could it mean to know something wholly and bravely like Ellen, Anna or Bess did — and not die from it? The three films are all distinctly Gothic in their struggle between modernist reason and medievalist mysticism. They mirror the wild swings between mania and depression made popular online by meme pages like @avocado_ibuprofen and @weirdprada. A fan of all of the above is easily imagined to inhabit this girl-woman persona — I am specifically thinking of anyone who has been recently compelled to read Clarice Lispector, Simone Weil, Georges Batailles, or Andrea Dworkin. Or watch any Isabelle Huppert or Catherine Breillat film. Or experiment with niche fragrances that smell like dirty tights, rotting flowers or 20th century écriture féminine — that fashions herself as both feral and delicate, passionate and gross.

This all gestures towards ways of thinking, knowing and feeling that are closer than most to both God and animals in ways too lazily attributed to women. But there is no need to turn a mystical connection to extremes of feminine rage, abjection, shame and euphoria into the foundation for another gender essentialism. When we give these overly stylized struggles between modernity’s paternalistic reason and a hyper-feminized (spiritual and carnal) knowledge too much weight, we displace the work of knowing far from the thinking person herself. If she knows something he does not, she’s either an “animal or a woman possessed.” If we can learn anything from the richness of debasement and heaviness of exaltation it’s that to turn those connections into overarching laws and essentialisms would be to squander their gifts.

Why can’t we accept that it is possible to know something in the sobriety of our thinking mind and in the heat of our living body? Most formalized knowledge demands we abandon one form of knowledge before extending into another. We expect new insights to replace old ones. Science is measured in progresses and advancements, ranked into “technology” or “craft” according to the usual biases. We struggle with contradiction and differences, and we insist on assimilations and translations. Our knowledge is confined to the digital registers of “on/off,” known or unknown, proven or unproven, reasonable or unreasonable. But, “theory is a detour on the way to somewhere more important.”⁸

There are other ways of thinking and knowing, including low theories, “no more than a creole language for negotiating different ways of living and producing knowledge.” I want to take cues from the intensity and excess surrounding the cult of these stories and characters to map out something like a low theory of mysticism or writing — something to give credence to how writing-knowing feels like a mystical experience. First draft: Intensity gives knowledge its specificity — making it dense and heavy where it stands. If we feel it in our veins or in the backs of our throats, it’s because that is where the insight lies. What is known is always unique to when and how it’s known. To lead with excess is to indulge in wider, more spreadable eruptions of queer-feminist excesses. Imagine: more femininities, more rot, more transcendence, more mysticism, more reading, more writing, more eating and more living. 

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🔗: Rest of World’s Digital Divinity, an editorial package about technology and religion in the 21st century — “A Rant About ‘Technology’” by Ursula K LeGuin — “Whose Weil? Simone, Patron Saint of Everybody”, an essay from The Drift — “Myth, Magic, Mysticism in the Age of Information,” LARB — Haxan, a 1922 video essay about medieval demonology (free to watch) — “A Demonstration” (2022) short documentary film about “taxonomies of monsters in early modern European science” — “Witches” (2024) a essay-documentary about witch trials and postpartum depression.

1. emphasis my own.

2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” (2003), 116.

3. Simon Critchley, Mysticism (2024), 39.

4. Ibid., 234.

5. Sedgwick and Frank, 105.

6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (2003), 74.

7. Ibid., 72.

8. as Stuart Hall famously wrote.