NICOLA MASCIANDARO 253 Mysticism or Mystification?: Against Subject-Creationism NICOLA MASCIANDARO In the abandon in which I am lost, the empirical knowledge of my similarity with others is irrelevant, for the essence of my self arises from this—that noth- ing will be able to replace it: the feeling of my fundamental improbability situ- ates me in the world where I remain as though foreign to it, absolutely foreign. - Georges Bataille' Nature is much greater than what a man can perceive through the ordinary senses of his physical body.The hidden aspects of nature consist of finer mat- ter and forces. There is no unbridgeable gulf separating the finer aspects of nature from its gross aspect. They all interpenetrate one another and exist together - Meher Baba^ To preserve a place is to preserve distinction.Therefore I pray God to make me free of God, for my essential being is above God, taking God as the origin of creatures. For in that essence of God in which God is above being and distinc- tion, there I was myself and knew myself so as to make this man. Therefore I am my own cause according to my essence, which is eternal, and not accord- ing to my becoming, which is temporal. - Meister Eckhart3 I n response to the many points addressed in Timothy Morton's exuberant and phenome- nologically faithful description of what the subject, among other things, is, I will try to develop the one idea which I consider to be its most important possibility.This idea, which Morton's thinking both entertains and occludes, is best expressed in the negative: the sub- ject is not a product of the universe. Or, as the American sage Vernon Howard expresses it, "A body came into the world, but it wasn't you."" Morton's essay moves towards this prin- ciple insofar as it understands the subject as deep, that is, profoundly complicit and secret- ly constituted with the nature of everything. Neither a secondary emergence from things nor a transcendental precondition for them, the subject is universal and found everywhere as "the withdrawn strangeness of objects as such."^ At the same time, Morton's essay moves away from the idea of the non-produced nature of the subject insofar as it under- stands the subject as flat, as everywhere ontologically the same and essentially inessential, something that consists in nothing other than its own withdrawnness or impotentiality to be exhausted by events and appearances, a pure locality. Neither a self nor not a self, the subject is not at all a real or substantial ground of anything (not a soul), but only the hyper- situational.core of that which exists in a "crowded bunch ... of strange strangers all the way English Language Notes 50.1 Spring / Summer 2012