ABSTRACT
In a section from Mystique non-philosophique entitled "Axiomatic of the Desert", Francois Laruelle focuses on a central metaphor in mystical texts – that of the desert. As Laruelle notes: "in its most arid forms, speculative mysticism experiences the divinity of God, his sur-essence, his ground without ground as 'desert'". The desert is for Laruelle more than a poetic metaphor for God; it is a stand-in for the problem of divine immanence, though it stands-in in different ways. Laruelle suggests a tactic of appropriation and transformation, an approach perhaps more indicative of non-philosophy, in which non-mysticism and the language of the mystique-fiction takes mysticism and mystical language as its raw material. Laruelle delineates three facets of the desert, three ways in which immanence is thought: the desert as metaphor for philosophy, the desert as what he calls an "epekeinaphor" for mysticism, and finally the desert as the absence of any "phoricity" whatsoever, leading to a practice Laruelle provocatively terms mystique-fiction.
