For Michel de Certeau, believing was rooted in a foundational experience, situated in a Christian tradition where the relationship to scriptures is central. Now, in this immense inheritance, he chose as object of election and familiarity mystical texts, not ‘mystical experience’ but the writings of mystics, that is, a particular type of writings implying a mode of believing. He loved the mystics not because they would be ‘elect’ but because he saw in them the wounded and often the relegated to the margins of the social group, disgraced people, the monastery idiot in the patristic tradition (see chapter 1 of la Fable mystique), Surin long regarded as mad by his Jesuit brethren and whose writings were dispersed, corrected, partly lost. There, in shame and suffering, madness or defection, the ‘corruption’ that haunts President Schreber in Freud,’ something essential is tied between believing and its defection. It seems to me, to take up an expression he employed about Foucault, that that is the ‘black sun’ of his thought and that it explains the turn to ‘history of mysticism’ as well as the turn to ‘cultural anthropology of the present’ in his work.

The platform that provided the force and originality of I'Invention du quotidien was the reflection on believing, beyond ecclesial institutions on every side. The disclosure of ordinary life as ‘mystical', in the proper as well as figurative sense, inspired the analysis of practices. He hoped to complete volume 2 of la Fable mystique in 1986 and counted then on writing an Anthropology of believing , which he had already announced as the theme of his seminar at the Ecole des hautes etudes in 1985-86.

‘I am a traveller’, Michel de Certeau liked to say. This he was literally, ploughing Europe from one university to another, or America, from north to south, from campus to conference; and even more, figuratively, moving from one place of knowledge to another, using in turns different modes of writing, or mingling several disciplines in order to explore one and the same subject more deeply. Thus, he was disturbing. He was never where one sought to catch him. He appeared all the more a stranger to any classification inasmuch as he had the art, in every thing he approached, to make something strange emerge from the reassuringly familiar, where the very ones who call themselves ‘researchers’ willingly stop. He moved rapidly, sometimes a little feverishly, from one place to another, always departing and in transit, as if he guessed that his days were already numbered. He never travelled, literally or figuratively, out of mere curiosity, still less by incapacity to settle in one place, but to learn something new and, much more, to share other experiences, the experience of others, out of passion for the human and the other. And what he questioned relentlessly, in human experience at its deepest and most ordinary, was the passion for believing. In this passion he perceived the very place of otherness and of the search for the meaning of existence and of history. This questioning was his own quest for God.

Michel de Certeau was bom in 1925, of an old Savoyard family. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1950, and followed the usual course of training until ordination as a priest in Lyons in 1956 and solemn profession in Paris in 1963.

Heterology is Michel de Certeau’s great unfinished project. Begun while still in the U.S., it was put on hold so he could complete his work on mysticism,—and regrettably—never resumed. This work holds such great promise that the thought of continuing his project, of somehow bringing it to fruition, has long been a fancy of mine. But besides the obvious difficulty of creating what is practically a new epistemology, there is the more immediate difficulty of establishing just what heterology is meant to be. Since Certeau died before he could formulate either a specific thesis, or a particular method, we have no certain way of knowing what he actually meant by the term, or indeed intended it to mean. So until now the fancy has remained idle. However, it now occurs to me that it may be possible to construct a workable impression of what heterology is by determining what it decidedly is not.

While it is true that we do not really know what heterology is meant to stand for, there is one thing, at least, of which we can be certain and that is what Certeau did not want this book “we will never ready” to be. It is quite clear from his existing work that he wanted to steer what at the time of his death was then emerging as cultural studies away from what might be called, to coin a phrase, ‘interpretative semiotics’. He objected to ‘interpretative semiotics’ not because its result is more allegory than analysis, but because it presumes that the state of affairs called culture is, through being composed of ‘symbols’, a purely relative, or else quid pro quo, structure, without any substantive base.

This article is based on a number of texts written by Michel de Certeau between around 1969 and 1974. These texts all explore the ways in which a lucid Christian belief may endure as a resource in contemporary societies. They also indicate a form of transition. In comparison to the probing but orthodoxly circumscribed analyses of L’Etranger, ou Bunion dans la différence (1969), we see the emergence of a more open (more exposed but also freer) mode of reflection. Although Certeau would rarely return in his writings after the mid-1970’s to the question of contemporary Christian belief as such, the analytic and figurative frameworks generated by this reflection continue to inform his thought. They help us to make sense of the apparently disparate heterogeneity of his subsequent publications, taking us as they do in a series of significant zigzags between, say, The Writing of History, The Mystic Fable and The Practice of Everyday Life.

Christianity was, in Certeau’s view, in the process of ‘shattering’. While this may have seemed a provocative diagnosis in 1974, it appears today as a basic premiss for a scrupulous sociological analysis. Moreover, Certeau suggests that there is nothing intrinsically new about this process. He recalls elsewhere the major scissions already at work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Christendom broke ‘into pieces’, producing here and there new generations of believers ‘without a church’. What is unprecedented, he argues, is now the sheer extent and scale of this shattering. This development is not necessarily synonymous with an imminent extinction of Christian belief, but does modify radically the conditions in which such belief must find a voice and a horizon for action.

I

Blessed and cursed by a peculiar “hopelessness,” Christians claim fellowship with Christ who suffered outside the city gate, and are called to follow him into that wilderness beyond the camp, that region other than the earthly civitas, from which we might discern another city. This other city shows the structures of this world, which seem so solid and so real, to be afflicted with an ephemeral quality, a kind of unreality, so as to make them a source of anxiety rather than a resting place for our restless hearts (Lk. 12: 12-34.)- And so we exist in a state of perpetual pilgrimage to our true patria, following “Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2).

“Christian epistemology links mystic knowledge to language. God has spoken,” Michel de Certeau writes (M.F., p. 114) Two extended metaphors for the economy of this speech act are common in the tradition. In the first, God is Speaker, Christ is the Spoken Word, the Verb grafted upon this world (M.F., p. 150) and the Spirit is the breath (pneuma) which makes this communication possible. In the second, the Spirit is explicitly linked to the writing of the Spoken Word. God is Writer and creation is His book. Certeau, as we will see, examines both these metaphors (with the economies of revelation and redemption that they imply). The speech act is fundamental to his understanding of history, creation, subjectivity and the practices of daily living. And yet, as a thinker who draws upon and develops the poststructuralism of Lacan, Foucault, Bourdieu and Derrida (to name only a few), this privileging of the voice is somewhat at odds with poststructural denunciations of the author and critiques of the metaphysics of presence subtly organised around the hierarchy of speech over writing.