(submitted for: Animals and Humans in the Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, The Twenty-Second Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Conference, December 4, 2010, Barnard College, NYC)
“Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is”
—Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
“The concept of Life . . . has the structure of negative theology”
—Eugene Thacker, After Life
In the Book of Privy Counsel, a work of contemplative instruction by the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, animal consciousness performs the somewhat surprising task of exemplifying the essential, factical faculty of mystical work, the ability to experience, not only what, but that one is: “For I holde him to lewyd and to boistous that kan not thenk and fele that himself is, not what himself is bot that hymself is. For this is pleynli proprid to the lewdist kow or to the moste unresonable beest (yif it might be seide, as it may not, that one were lewder or more unresonable then another) for to fele the owne propre beyng. Moche more than it is proprid to man, the whiche is singulerly endowid whith reson aboven alle other beestes, for to thenk and for to fele his owne propre being.” The example is all the more striking given the Cloud-author’s explicit understanding of this contemplative capacity as definitive of the very process, the ontic task of specifically human being: “For this is the werk . . . in the whiche man schuld have contynowed yif he never had synned, and to the whiche worching man was maad, and alle thing for man, to help him and forther him therto, and by the whiche a man schal be reparailed agein.” While maintaining an official distinction between human and animal, the example performatively throws the animal/human boundary into a significant, profound, and I think very purposive confusion, rendering the difference between human and animal an object of apophatic unknowing. That which all animals can feel is termed as unavailable to the ‘lewd’ humans who are implicitly ranked at once below and within a category of the animal that excludes them by not admitting of difference. This problematizing of the animal/human boundary is registered at the rhetorical level, wherein speaking of the animal necessitates a conspicuously literal instance of what Michael Sells, in characterizing apophatic discourse, calls the language of unsaying: “yif It might be seide, as it may not . . .”
I propose to take the Cloud-author’s significant aside about animal consciousness as an index of deeper affiliations between animals and apophasis, affiliations that are traceable across several points of medieval culture and contemporary discourse: Augustine’s understanding of animals as site of theological wonder, Pseudo-Dionysius’s concept of superlative life, neoplatonic panpsychism and Ibn Arabi’s theory of bewilderment (hayra), Giorgio Agamben’s explication of the mystical structure of Heidegger’s definition of the animal as poor in world, David Williams’s reading of medieval monstrosity as a deformed discourse that apophatically kept open the “question of the adequacy of the intellectual concept of the thing in relation to its ontological reality,” Bataille’s definition of animality as “immediacy or immanence,” on which Jill Marsden comments: “This animality, of which we are a part yet from which we strive to distinguish ourselves, hovers at the edge of consciousness, extending its glimmer into a night of unknowing”—to name a few. In pursuing what might thus be called the apophatic animals of medieval and modern texts, I am above all interested in the interplay and phenomenal intersections between, on the one hand, the human experience of the animal as site and object for its own unknowing, and on the other, human openness towards understanding animal being and consciousness as itself grounded in unknowing. Understanding this interplay will entail analyzing the relationship between the various modes and moods of unknowing (questioning, wonder, aporia, abandonment, etc) and the what/that distinction so fundamental to ontology. In addition to explicating the conceptual function of the animal within the Cloud-author’s work, and the tradition of negative theology more generally, I hope my paper will also contribute towards understanding unknowing as an essential category for thinking life across all forms of being, as well as articulating the function of the animal as apophatic object, the deus absconditus of contemporary critical discourse.
 “The transcendentally originating Life is the cause of all life, produces it, brings it to completion, gives it specific form. When we speak in praise of it our words must be drawn from all of life, for we have to remember that it teems with every kind of life. It may be contemplated and praised amid every manifestation of life, for it lacks nothing, or, rather, it is overflowing with life” (Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names).
 “The whole world is intelligent, living, and speaking—in respect of the unveiling that breaks the customary views of people. . . . They stop with what their eyesight gives to them, while we consider the situation differently” (Ibn Arabi, Meccan Revalations).
 “The animal is at once open and not open-or, better, it is neither one nor the other: it is open in a nondisconcealment that, on the one hand, captivates and dislocates it in its disinhibitor with unmatched vehemence, and, on the other, does not in any way disconceal as a being that thing that holds it so taken and absorbed. Heidegger seems here to oscillate between two opposite poles, which in some ways recall the paradoxes of mystical knowledge-or, rather, nonknowledge. On the one hand, captivation is a more spellbinding and intense openness than any kind of human knowledge; on the other, insofar as it is not capable of disconcealing its own disinhibitor, it is closed in a total opacity. Animal captivation and the openness of the world thus seem related to one another as are negative and positive theology, and their relationship is as ambiguous as the one which simultaneously opposes and binds in a secret complicity the dark night of the mystic and the clarity of rational knowledge” (Giorgio Agamben, The Open.)
 This paper will build upon some current and recent work: an article and book-in-progress on the Cloud of Unknowing, “The Sorrow of Being,” Qui Parle 19 (2010), and “Labor, Language, and Laughter: Aesop and the Apophatic Human” in Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism, eds. Eileen A. Joy, Betsy McCormick, and Myra J. Seaman (Ohio University Press, forthcoming 2010).