The Ghostly Gait of Michel de Certeau

Abstract

In his essay “L’énonciation mystique” (1976), collected in the English volume Heterologies (1986), Michel de Certeau discusses a famous encounter from Book 1 of the Aeneid: Venus, disguised as a young huntress, assures her son of the safety of his ships and encourages him, not without an air of reprimand, to continue on his way to the queen of Carthage. She then turns to leave. Only in the particularity of her step as she retreats into the woods does Aeneas belatedly recognize his mother: “And by her stride she showed herself a goddess” (Aeneid 1.551).1 For de Certeau, who will reprise this verse from time to time throughout his critical works, the gait of the goddess fi gures several aspects of the “mystic” style he endeavors to reclaim from a reductively historical description of mysticism. “In the beginning,” he writes of his critical project,