SubStance

Over the past several years, I have been rereading and writing about Deleuze in the context of developing a concept and practice I have christened "itinerant spirituality."¹ Itinerant spirituality is nomadic and contingent—it does not happen in any specific kind of space, and depends to a large extent on circumstance and spontaneity. Itinerant spirituality could be termed an "outsider spirituality," in the sense of outsider art, in that it does not partake of any particular spiritual—let alone religious—tradition, and is created idiosyncratically by a person according to methods they develop as they go. The term "itinerant spirituality" conjures a practice dependent on and embedded in itineraries, in the sense of both the route of the journey and the written record of the journey. Itinerant spirituality thus encompasses both sojourns that culminate in singular experiences of a spiritual nature, and the thinking/writing that these experiences stimulate.

I have drawn on Deleuze's work to derive a framework for conceptualizing these experiences and for imprinting some systematic shape on them. Adopting Deleuzian terms, itinerant spirituality begins when an "encounter" produces a "shock to thought," and poses a "problem" that "perplexes the soul." Such perplexity engenders a "learning process" that involves thought-experiments: "[I]f one sees something that traverses life, but that resists thought, then one must force thought to think it, make it the hallucination point of thought, an experiment that does violence to thought" (Dialogues, 69). The ultimate stakes involved in itinerant spirituality, what it strives toward, is what Deleuze calls a "belief in this world."² Itinerant spirituality opens a space in which thought experiments become "belief experiments," from which issue reveries that re-enchant the world. To mobilize Deleuze's thought in this manner is to (re-)read Deleuze's writing as an ethico-spiritual (not theological) discourse. This move hearkens back to Deleuze's Stoic roots, situating him as an author concerned with "philosophy as a way of life" and "the care of the self," who provides tools for fostering both intellectual rigor and spiritual health.

When he journeys into particular territories or domains (art, cinema, literature, science, philosophy), Deleuze proceeds methodologically by [End Page 115] constructing the plane on which such discourses and practices operate. Since he did not explicitly construct a plane proper to spiritual or mystical contemplation, one must synthesize such a plane out of Deleuze's work. The reading of Deleuze I present here--an experimental remixing of different episodes in his thought--is part of a larger itinerant spirituality belief experiment originating in an encounter with Lloyd Wright's Wayfarer's Chapel (a "National Memorial to Emanuel Swedenborg). This encounter lead to a "learning process" in which the chapel, Swedenborg's mystical visions and theosophy, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's image of the "transparent eyeball" all became crystals, numinous microcosms, that provide access to and place the itinerant spiritual seeker on a visionary plane where matter and spirit become indiscernible, and one apprehends bodies composed of light. Islamic scholar and Swedenborg commentator Henry Corbin calls this the "Imaginal plane," where "'the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual'" (Corbin, 4). In this context, my specific task became how to reframe Deleuze's "plane of immanence" as a version of the Imaginal plane, which, echoing Deleuze's plane of immanence, I call the plane of luminance. In drawing out elements in Deleuze's work that open onto this plane, we see how the figure of the philosopher becomes enmeshed with the mystic—which in turn underscores the proximity of Deleuze's philosophical discourse to a mystic-spiritual one.