Niklaus Largier is Chair in the department of Comparative Literature, is a professor in the departments of German and Comparative Literature, and is affiliated with the Programs in Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory.
His scholarship covers an extensive range of interests, including the intersections of literature, philosophy, theology, and other fields of knowledge within medieval and early modern German literature. Professor Largier’s work delves into topics such as ascetic practices, eroticism, and the literary imagination, as well as the influence of mystical traditions on German thought. In this interview, we discuss his research, including his focus on the history of fantasy, emotions, and sensory experiences across medieval, early modern, and modern cultures, and his recent projects on the stimulation of the senses—particularly taste and touch—within diverse cultural contexts.
Firstly, can you tell us a bit about your research interests, and possibly about your current or recent projects?
We can start all the way at the beginning, how I got interested in what I am fascinated with—which is usually called mysticism. As a graduate student, I started doing research on mystical texts, on mystical traditions, raising questions of what we mean by that. People use the term ‘mystical’ somewhat loosely, usually referring to intense experience in religious contexts. In the Christian tradition, in the Jewish tradition, in the Muslim tradition, you always see a distinction between the more ‘common’ believers and of an area where people talk about mystical experience as something with a specific intensity, as a feeling of being in touch with the divine. On the other side, there is a use of the term when people talk about poetry or music and point, for example, to feeling one with nature, especially since the Romantics. I’m not so much interested in the divine side of these experiences per se, and I’m also not really interested in the question of whether it has to do with faith or not. I focus more on how this area that we call mysticism in its history can be read as a place where people explored subjectivities, possible experiences, even some gender-bending or gender-switching ways of inhabiting the world, and what kinds of installations or devices they invented to produce that intense, imaginative, excessive experience.
What I was fascinated by from the beginning is the audaciousness of mystical texts in experimenting with different forms of perception and a critique of the everyday world. For example, this becomes quite interesting when you look into the history of prayer. We think that people just pray a certain text, and when they pray a certain text they ask for something, or they care about something, or they hope for the future, or they try to tell a divinity something, or a God something. But when you read prayer texts closely, and when you read texts about the practice of prayer, you often see that it is more about ways of shaping one’s own experience in that moment and of getting out of a certain mindset or of a way of being bound up with the self and the world. It’s about composing a text that evokes certain emotions in you, often intense, overwhelming, absorbing emotions within, against, and beyond everydayness. In these forms of prayer you can see that something we call “mystical” in terms of getting in touch with the divine is actually on the other side very tightly connected with cultural practices of shaping perception. It’s a cultural practice which serves a certain purpose—namely, shaping how you feel at the moment, or giving shape to the landscape of your soul more generally; giving shape to your emotions, giving shape to your fears, to your hopes, moving through certain emotions and bringing you to a certain point of intense experience that exceeds the everyday.
In this regard, you can compare the practice of prayer to listening to a piece of music which makes you feel a certain way and transports you into a different sphere. In a similar way, mystics talk about prayer in the Middle Ages, and they talk about it as something you use in order to move through certain emotions, even to produce excessive feelings of being beyond yourself and of risking it all. That’s what I became very interested in, and what I did most of my research on: how such practices developed historically, what they entailed in terms of imagination and of giving shape to the senses and emotions, and how they critically established perspectives of experiencing and understanding the world differently.
Can you speak more on aesthetic experience? In what ways is aesthetic theory connected with the history of the study of literature?
Just to go back to a previous point: you can see that forming sense experience and forming affect and producing a new relation to yourself and the world is very much at the center here. What you can also discover, somewhat unexpectedly, is that in these religious contexts, people start experimenting with language—use of language, use of images, use of music—in order to produce these new experiential states, in order to change how they perceive the world. Very early on in the Western tradition theologians started to use the term aisthesis in this context. They say that it’s not about “knowing” the divine, but it’s about a kind of experience. Aisthesis in the beginning just refers to perception and the modification of it, but then over the course of the past centuries, the Greek word has taken on a new meaning which is connected to the experience of art in particular. There is, however, a connection to religious practice that is fascinating, that is: a similarity of the way of producing the sensing and feeling and knowing of the divine, and of the experience of a work of art. In the Western Christian traditions we can observe, as in other traditions also, how the experiments with music and images and literary texts, poetry in particular, play an important role in order to produce such aesthetic effects. That’s where you already get the “aesthetic experience.”
From a modern point of view, we think of aesthetic experience as something that is entirely different from the religious experience. I always work a little bit against that. Aesthetic experience that we nowadays think of as entirely secular—when we look at a painting or when we listen to a piece of music— has nevertheless, from that vantage point, resonances with this religious tradition and its elaboration of media that stimulate and shape experience, still somewhere in there.
You are the Director of the Program in Religious Studies. Can you speak more on this program, or whether there are opportunities for undergraduates interested in learning more about religious studies?
There used to be a Berkeley undergraduate major in Religious Studies, which doesn’t exist anymore. I was the director of that program when it still existed. We have been trying to reinvent it, but it doesn’t exist at the moment.
There is the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, though. It is currently run by Duncan MacRae and Carolyn Chen, and I’m part of that. It’s a designated emphasis for graduate students, with a focus on the significance of religion in culture more broadly.
Berkeley doesn’t have a Religious Studies program, but it does have great resources. Many people teach on topics that are connected with religion. I think for undergraduates, looking at the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion website is a great resource to see which faculty are affiliated and are working on the study of religion, and also to see the events that are happening throughout the year. There are faculty in History, in Anthropology, and all of the literature departments, who work in one way or another on religion.
My interest really is how religious traditions shape the imagination in other areas—how these moments that we connect with religion actually migrate into other contexts, so that when you read 20th century poetry and you don’t necessarily think about religion, there are still elements in there, ways of thinking and of thinking about the modification of our perception of the world, which are inherited from these religious traditions even when we don’t recognize them anymore.
And what are the complications of studying sensation through written text? What are the limitations to that approach, and how do you overcome that?
That’s always a challenge. One of the basic problems emerges when we try to write the history of things that are not obviously documented in a way that we can read. With the senses, and with emotions, we deal with a specific challenge: we can never really know how people felt, or how people perceived a certain sensation. That’s one side. But on the other side, we have many artifacts that testify to this, and we have texts that talk about this. The way around the impossibility to know how people felt or perceived things is to see how people talked about their sense perceptions and their emotions, and also how people talked about evoking sense perceptions and emotions. In the history of Christianity for example, they talk about praying certain texts or reading the Psalms, then they start introducing music and talking about the fact that when you sing the text, it touches you differently. In addition, they talk about the different emotions that are being evoked, and they might say that they can’t really define the emotion, but they still go through the movements of attempting to grasp what is happening. So, indirectly you can reconstruct the importance of emotions for these people in the past, and you can grasp certain aspects of how they gave significance to these emotions, and you can reconstruct to a certain degree how they perceived those emotions. Most importantly, we can discover that people saw affects and sensation as something that can be modified, that can be experimentally played with, and that can be explored in excessive forms of pleasure.
It’s even more complicated with taste. Emotions are easier but taste and hearing are more difficult. But there are, especially in literary texts, rich archives of how sensation is seen and valued. That then brings back a certain attention to the contexts or environments in which certain sensations are produced. What I find remarkable, when looking at these historical documents and artifacts, is that people are highly aware of how both sensations and emotions are always mediated. They use certain devices in order to stage the emotion or to make it happen. You can think about religious liturgy and space. We usually think of going into a Church as a historical artifact, but when you read the documents about how people conceived of these spaces, and the way in which images and configurations of visual, sound, and textual elements work together, there you can see how it is more similar to what today we would call an art installation. Now we would call it an immersive experience. You can reconstruct that to a certain degree with the help of historical documents.
How can you define what a religious experience is as opposed to what would be considered a secular experience?
There are many other ways of analyzing what I call religious experience here. There are neuro-scientific approaches and psychological approaches to much of that material, particularly in recent years. That’s a different way of approaching that question. It’s a really hard question to answer what would be a religious experience, in contrast to a ‘purely secular’ experience. There are certain artworks we could think about: Mark Rothko’s paintings for instance, in Houston—these monochrome paintings in a Chapel which is a sacred space, carved out of the world. In that sense, a place is isolated from everydayness, or pulled out of that everydayness, and viewers look at these monochrome paintings which one would say do not have any meaning but are staged in that space which is conceived of as a contemplative space, that is set off against the busyness of the world. There, an experience is being produced that somehow transcends and questions the ordinary perception of the world, and where you could not, in my opinion, distinguish between ‘secular’ and ‘religious.’ You could say that this installation is to be understood as supporting a practice of contemplation that entails an experience and a modification of perception and thought; that this goes beyond the distinction of religious and secular, maybe against the norms of secularity; and that at the same time this contemplative practice is not bound up with faith and belief. Some people would call this ‘post-religious.’ You raise, however, a very difficult question, and it has to be said that many people from many cultures could not work with any kind of distinction between religious and aesthetic experience, pointing to the fact that what they do is to be understood in terms of practices and not of a categorical difference between a religious and a secular sphere. The latter really came about in the Western world at a certain point and in a specific cultural formation where it got established as a normative framework. In thinking about mysticism and contemplative practices, we should certainly not be caught up in it.
What book would you recommend to everyone reading this interview?
That always changes. Right now it would be a book that Eric Naiman recommended to me. It’s by a Russian author, Platonov, called Soul. It’s an amazing book. I also just read Toni Morrison’s Jazz. That was suggested by a student in a graduate class I teach, and it also has a deep connection to mysticism.