A tribute to Bruno Etienne Written by Florent Giehmann

Thursday, 10 September 2009 11:20

World Religion Watch's editorial team is finally posting here a vibrant homage to Bruno Etienne written by a former student. Our warm thanks are due to Florent Giehrmann for this long text. I was struck with grief when I received the news of the passing of Professor Bruno Etienne, one of my inspirational and formative Masters. The Grand Maestro', as his students affectionately called him, was no longer of this world. This seemed almost impossible to me: that a man I had known so grand, so charismatic, so vivacious, could succumb to death. I received this sad news even as I work to complete the doctoral thesis that is the fruit of the long adventure upon which the Maestro had launched me. This adventure brought me to the far shores of the Island of Java, into the arms of my beloved Javanese, to study their rich mystical culture - the Javanese expression of the squaring of the circle', to quote one of the Professor's favourite expressions. During my undergraduate studies at the Institute of Political Science of Aix-en-Provence (Institut d'Etudes Politiques d'Aix en Provence, or IEP Aix) I had the privilege of following Professor Etienne's lectures and writing my undergraduate thesis under his supervision. The direction and purpose that my life has taken ever since owes a great deal to the Maestro's tuition, inspiration, and influence. I will forever be grateful to him for having inspired my passion for Anthropology, for having motivated me to pursue this passion as my career, and for having enabled me, through his support, to continue my postgraduate studies in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University and the London School of Economics here in the United Kingdom.

I will always remember the words of the revered Maestro when I asked him for his suggestion as to a possible subject for my doctoral thesis, at the conclusion of the viva examination for my master's thesis at IEP Aix. My Javanese friends would call these words his berkah, a Javanese derivation of the Arabic barakah, meaning 'assent' and 'blessings'. To my question, the Maestro answered:

"Your research subject; the quest upon which you have embarked with your Master's thesis, is to elucidate the mechanisms underlying magical coercion in Javanese culture and Indonesian politics".

The Maestro was referring here to one of the central questions springing from his reading of Max Weber's and Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Religion: How does one explain the patrimonialcharismatic power and authority exercised by shamans, healers, prophets and other 'independent entrepreneurs' specialised in the dispensation of 'soteriological cures' and operating at the 'intersection of the religious and political fields'? How does one account for this form of noninstrumental power and authority that flows from culturally and historically constructed conceptions of legitimate order transmitted and objectified by the cosmological symbolism of traditionally prescribed ritual practices - a form of power which escapes, and often subverts the logic of modern rational-bureaucratic authority? How does this form of charismatic power relate to 'traditional' patrimonial hierarchies (priestly, noble, or otherwise), and to 'modern' powerstructures? Most centrally, how does one explain the voluntary servitude of the many to the name and will of One (be that One' a religious specialist, a patriarch, a king, a prophet, a deity, a nation, or an eschatological finality)? This last question concerning the problem of voluntary submission is, as Professor Etienne often repeated, the seminal and founding question and problematic of Political Science, first posed by Etienne de La Botie, whom the Maestro often singled out as the true founder of the discipline.

Professor Etienne's answer to my question - his berkah, blessing', his bene-dictio (Latin for blessing' and benediction', meaning) beneficent speech', and his pneuma (ancient Greek, meaning), 'spirit and inspiring breath' - along with the inspirational impulse I received from the spirit of his teaching, launched me upon my lengthy hermeneutical ascesis' as an anthropological researcher of Javanese ritual, mystical, and political practices.

Hermeneutical ascesis' - this was one of the Maestro's idiosyncratic expressions. Anthropology and Political Science, Professor Etienne often declared, indeed the practice of the Human Sciences in general, (should) constitute an ascesis and a hermeneutics': a self-imposed ordeal in the social scientist's search for the hidden mechanisms underlying the outward surface of social epiphenomena - an ordeal which in many respects is analogous to the ascetical disciplines and initiatory 'traumas' observed within the societies and religious cultures that social scientists commonly study.

The epistemological ascesis and hermeneutics of social scientific enquiry, the Maestro taught us, is epitomised by the practice of ethnographic participant-observation and anthropological analysis - the critically subjective experiencing, analysis, and evocation of the objectification of

subjectivity. Through this epistemological process, Professor Etienne taught us, the social scientist gains an empathic awareness of the logic and sense of what Bourdieu called the habitus (socio-culturally determined dispositions and modes of habitual practice) and doxa (socioculturally determined systems of naturalised, unquestioned and unquestionable beliefs and categories of understanding of the order of things) of the social groups under examination, that is, of the common structured and structuring', objective and subjective, social and symbolic structures of social relationship, representation, practice and discourse, that shape the subjectivities of the members of these social groupings.

Professor Etienne taught us that through the epistemological process of empathising with the radically other', the social scientist gains an objectifying - read here a deconstructive awareness of the very social and symbolic structures that produce and shape his own subjectivity. The practice of social scientific analysis, and most particularly of ethnographic participant observation, Professor Etienne explained, constitutes a sort of schismatic trial of the social scientist's self and conscience through the experience of alterity - the experiencing of the self as other and as object, and of the other as self and subject. This objectification of subjectivity and empathy towards the Other brings about a transformation of the researcher's conscience through the dialectical mirroring and confrontation of the subject with and through the object, and of the object with and through the subject - subject and object being, in the Human Sciences, as the Maestro so often underlined, the two sides of a single coin.

By placing himself, through the practice of ethnographic participant observation, at the interstices - what Jacques Derrida called the semiotic hinge' and Gilles Deleuze the fold' between subject and object, between self and other, between differing identities, between identity and difference, the social scientist gains an objectivising awareness of the differentials, both subjective and objective, between the praxeological and doxic structures that shape his own subjectivity on the one hand, and those that shape the subjectivities of the subjects/objects of his research on the other. This special perspective constitutes the condition of possibility of Social Science qua scientific method and analysis and not mere cultural production (although it never truly escapes the latter's field). It is also thanks to this specific epistemological process that the sociologist, political scientist, anthropologist, or social-psychologist can be said to be a clinical examiner not only of the social and cultural others he studies, but also, through them, of his own society and culture.

The process through which the social-scientist gains this special awareness and perspective, the Maestro warned, is painful, and, in many senses, self-sacrificial' in both the literal and figurative sense - hence his characterisation of it as an ascetical ordeal' or initiatory trauma'. It is painful because it forces the social scientist to critically objectify, examine and question his own socioculturally inculcated preconceptions, value-judgements, and moral and political engagements, thereby becoming aware of the true depth of the conditioning of his subjectivity by the social and

cultural structures of which he is a product and agent. This ascetical-hermeneuticalepistemological process of social-scientific enquiry is 'self-sacrificial', the Maestro taught us, because it entails the 'death' of a certain mode of self-conscience and social-conscience - a false consciousness', to use Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engel's terminology, to which one's sense of identity and value are fastened. This false consciousness relies, in its operation, as the Maestro taught us, following the ideas of Bourdieu, on unconscious ideological and praxeological blindspots that ensure the dissimulation, misrecognition, and naturalisation of the symbolic violence' that is implicit in the socially constructed and subjectively internalised symbolic taxonomies through which we recognise the world and ourselves. These taken-for-granted and internalised taxonomic structures ensure one's social integration and recognition within, as well as one's voluntary submission to (and one's contribution to the perpetuation of) the social power-relations of which one is a subject, product, and agent.

Later in my academic journey, through the trials of ethnographic fieldwork and writing, and after having spent much time rubbing my mind against those of thinkers who spoke to my research interests, I would come to understand something that the Maestro had deliberately left tacit in his teaching - true to his Socratic teaching method, he often conveyed the most important points of his lectures implicitly, indicating without revealing, goading his students to infer crucial implications for themselves: the crucial implication being here that the ascesis and hermeneutics of the Human Sciences, when followed through fully, dissolves and resolves that misrecognition of the nature of subjectivity upon which hinges the social production of the subjected subject the subject of subjection. The social scientist comes to realise that these structuring and structured social structures', in particular those that have emerged from Occidental Modernity and Capitalism, by their very operation, cause the subjectivities they produce to misrecognise their reflexive-conscience and understanding as those of a necessary, naturally given, transcendental, self-present subject. There is no a-priori, transcendental metaphysical subject, I', Self', or Ego', present-in-itself, essential, and pre-existing; there is only a constructed subjectivity - a narrative centre of gravity' composing an -postriori composite self', to use the expression of American philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett - that is, in the words of Deleuze and Derrida, the emergent surface effect' of the interlinked, structurally homological play' of differences/deferrals (what Derrida designated as diffrance and Deleuze named diffrentiel) on the psycho-biological, socio-political and semiotic fields.

This deconstruction and dissolution of the transcendental subject lurks in the thought of many of the Maestro's matres--penser - thinkers who also became the main beacons of my theoretical landscape - as well as in the writings of other thinkers whom I discovered further along in my studies. The first bold, though tentative and incomplete, expressions of what we might call the episteme of the deconstruction of the transcendental subject appear in the works of Hume and Spinoza, as well as in the anti-Cartesian, anti-Kantian, and anti-Hegelian philosophies of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger - particularly in these latter three thinkers' assertions of materiality, psycho-biological impulses, sociality and inter-subjectivity as the conditions of possibility preceding the formation of the subject', spirit', and logos'. Another major current of

thought in which this episteme sees its parallel development is in the structuralism of de Saussure's semiology, Durkheim's, Mauss', and later, Levi-Strauss' sociological and anthropological work, and Lacan's psychoanalytical theories. The work of deconstruction of the transcendental subject takes on its fullest expression, however, with the "post-structuralist" critics and heirs of the aforementioned authors: Bourdieu, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari.

The Maestro thus strove to show us, tacitly, how the ascesis and hermeneutics of the Human Sciences dissolves - indeed sacrifices' - the transcendental Ego, bringing about the painful yet liberating understanding that the internalised idea of this transcendental, self-present subject, along with the habitus and doxa (Bourdieu's terminology), the body without organs' and socius' (Deleuze & Guattari's terminology), and the disciplinary technologies of self' and regimes of truth' (Foucault's terminology) that ensure the reproduction of this misrecognition of subjectivity, constitute the conditions of possibility for the social production of subjection - that is, for the formation of social institutions of power, authority, domination, and exploitation, and the phenomena of voluntary submission to these institutions.

This is why Social Science, the Maestro cautioned us, can only be achieved though what he called the cold' and clinical' analysis not only of the psycho-biological, socio-political, moral, conceptual and symbolic structures underlying the societies, cultures, and psyches examined by the social scientist, but also through the clinical analysis of the structures that underlie the social scientist's own analytical discourse, along with the relation that these structures entertain with regard to the socio-cultural productions of the researcher's own society. This clinical' approach clinical' in the sense that it is methodologically rigorous, epistemologically self-conscious, unfailingly rational, mercilessly critical, uncompromisingly empirical (i.e., evidential), and strictly agnostic - is necessary because, the Maestro explained, as had before him Marx and Bourdieu, socio-cultural values, symbols and concepts are 'nomadic' entities that furtively and implicitly shed and acquire different socio-cultural and moral valuations as they slip and shift between discursive fields (of science, media, politics, religion, etc.). Inherent to these furtive operations underlying the 'play' of symbolic and taxonomic systems is a misrecognition and dissimulation of the relations of power that these symbolic systems implicitly play-out and reproduce.

But this hermeneutical process, the Maestro explained, is also a maieutic: it leads, by putting into light the subjective blind-spots that hide from conscience the objective conditions of production of socially-conditioned subjectivity, to a rebirth of the spirit'. The renewed conscience that emerges from social-scientific enquiry, the Maestro taught us, is an emancipating conscience: it is a science that has the power to free Man from the alienation brought about by false consciousness, from the perils that his own confusions create for him, and help him overcome the nefarious contingencies of his condition - in other words, Science has a soteriological

dimension. It is in this sense that the Maestro described his own method of teaching, following Aristotle's method, as a maieutic: a 'birthing of spirits'. Through the ascetical violence' of his teaching style, the Maestro often told us, he sought to shake us - his students, us "little ignorant illiterates", us "little capitalist guard-dogs", as he addressed us in simultaneously affectionate and angry invectives - out of the slumber of our false-consciousness, in order to "pull us upwards from above", as he often put it.

The intense joys, pains, bewilderments and epiphanies of anthropological fieldwork would later make me realise - not merely understand, but real-ise - the profound truths contained in the Maestro's wise admonitions.

The assignment and mission that the Maestro summoned me to undertake in response to my question - that index finger pointed to the horizon - to study the cultural and semiotic modalities of the production of perceived legitimate socio-political order and of voluntary submission to power, has remained until this day, after more than 10 years of studies and research, the central subject and object of my thesis and of my research interests as a social anthropologist.

It is through the lan vital thus imparted by the Maestro that I was led to discover, as a social anthropologist, the practice of Javanese mystical asceticism. As an ethnographer, I experienced Javanese asceticism through the mirror and refraction of the objectifying practice of the "hermeneutical ascesis" of ethnographic participant-observation. It is this mirrored, re-doubled asceticism that enabled me to discern the subtle sense of the teaching and tenet that lies at the very heart of Javanese mystical philosophy; a teaching most vividly conveyed by the following sung verses of Javanese poetry, which would have fascinated the Maestro:

Nglmu Iku, Kelakon kanthi laku, Lekas lawan kas, Teges kas nyantosani, Setyabudya pangekes dur angkara

Translation:

True Science, Is realised - is "put through its paces" - by walking the path of its ascetical exercise. It is realised through a self-abnegating strength of spirit and determination of will, That is to say, that tranquil and appeasing force, That firmness, loyalty, and constancy of character that alone is capable of destroying [the lowly passions that nurture evil and suffering.

The Javanese mystics, healers and gurus (Javanese term of Sanskrit origin meaning) spiritual preceptors', with whom I worked often quoted these verses as encapsulating the essence of their teachings.

Javanese-Islamic mysticism, as my Javanese gurus taught me, is above all an injunction to seek out nglmu batin (Javanese inflexion of the Arabic 'Ilm al Batiniyyah), meaning 'esoteric/metaphysical knowledge', that is, knowledge of that which is not given directly to the senses yet which is the source and condition of possibility of that which appears to us through our senses and is thus indirectly betrayed by outward signs (and which the untamed senses and ignorant mind, prone as they are to illusion and error, often falsely dissimulate, belie, or misrecognise). The seeker of nglmu, 'science/ true knowledge', according to Javanese mystical teachings, seeks knowledge of that which is of the order of the batin, the 'hidden interior', and which underlies and brings about the lahir (Javanese derivation of the Arabic zahir), the world of 'manifest appearances'. It should be noted that, taken in its widest sense, this understanding of Science can apply just as well to the modern Physical or Social Sciences as to mystical knowledge: Professor Etienne saw both forms of Science - his own discipline as well as the Mystical Sciences, which count among the preferred objects of Anthropological study - as exercises in peering beyond the epiphenomenal (both sciences', of course, differ vastly in their respective purposes, methodologies, metaphysics, etc.).

Such true knowledge, or nglmu, according to Javanese mystical teachings, affords those who hold it great powers over the world, over themselves, over their becoming, as well as freedom from the evil and suffering caused by the turmoil of the human passions.

The ascetical process of empowerment and attainment of Truth, my Javanese gurus taught me, is a long and perilous journey, marked by multiple stations and stages of enlightenment - moments of epiphany where the layers of the veil of illusion are gradually lifted, each time letting in a little more light.

The ascetical act enables this empowerment and enlightenment because the conscience that arises from its practice overcomes, sublimates, appeases, and neutralises the turmoil and conflicts that afflict the human condition - a turmoil which results from the illusions of the human senses, the ego, its worldly attachments, and from the confusion and cacophony of the unbridled passions and desires that, as my Javanese gurus described it, "pull in opposite directions and quarter the human heart", thus preventing awareness of the Truth. This appeasing conscience and awareness arises through the direct exercise of ascetical rectitude - ortho-praxis and self-mastery, and through the intuitive, spiritual, and embodied realisation of this ascetical practice's meaning. This realisation and understanding, in turn, is achieved through the subjective experiencing of the practical objectification of asceticism's intent - the real-isation of ipt (Javanese inflexion of the Sanskrit itta), the creative, conception-nal', faculty of the human spirit, of human intentionality.

This conscience furthermore, arises through the harnessing, the suspension of the seeker's will upon the Transcendent - upon the ultimate object, purpose and end that is the salutary overcoming of Man's initial, lowly state of confusion, conflict and impermanence - an anchoring of the will upon an Absolutely Other Being and Will with which the seeker longs to merge his own. The ascetical act accomplishes this work of transcendence-of-self by manifesting the will to transcendence of the seeker through the fulfilment of vows of abnegation and mortification painful self-imposed ordeals, acts of violence perpetrated by the will against the passionate and instinctive dispositions of the body - identifying the moral and spiritual purity of the Transcendent-Divine with the capacity of the ascetic's faculty of will, that is, his spirit, to deny and overcome the carnal and affective compulsions of his body. Javanese ascetics invariably describe how, during their mortifications, they come under attack from monstrous apparitions that seek to goad them into abandoning their mortifications by inspiring in them a mortal terror spiritual apparitions that represent the metaphysical forces that animate the passionate impulses of Man. To achieve this process of transcendence of self, one must accept to pay the ultimate price that Transcendence can exact upon its seeker: death, ultimate expression, in Javanese Islam, of the Khodrat Illahi (Arabic term, meaning) 'Divine Predetermination' over human destiny.

Through the seeker's ascetical enactment of this Will-to-Power', this willingness to face all hardships unto death for the sake of transcendence, the ascetic experiences himself as another, as

subject in the object and object in the subject. He experiences a schism of the self: a doubling which juxtaposes and confronts a detached Self-Master, fearless of others' powers and of the spectre of his own death in the total surrender and dedication of his being to the Transcendental Will - embracing death, even, in his complete possession by the Will-to-Power - and the passionate Self-Slave, fearful of death and submissive in his worldly attachments. The inner Master, within the ascetic's person, through his total investment in the will-to-power, faces down and embraces the idea of his own death, at the moment where it is reflected' to him in his own eyes', in the instant of his ascetical self-confrontation, facing the one who will become, in this confrontation, the Self-Slave; in the same moment, the self-Slave becomes such because, unable to face the will-to-power that inhabits the glare of the Self-Master, he disengages, unravels himself, becomes disjoined, effaces himself, dissipates, and avers himself to be a mirage, a false (id)entity, produced by the unified turbulence of the passions, desires and affects, incapable of holding up against the will of the Master - an interiorised Javanese version of the Hegelian dialectic of Master and Bondsman.

By remaining steadfast before the terrifying apparitions that evoke his death, the inner Master foils the disguise: the inner Slave is revealed to have, in a last, desperate attempt to save its empire, wrapped itself in the garb of death. Through its spiritual (cognitive-affectiveexperiential) violence, the ascetical act reveals the true nature of his Slave-Ego to the consciousness of the ascetic: that it is a composed singularity - in fact, a series of singularities masquerading as a unit - a weaving-together of desiring, affective, productive and consumptive impulses of the body and of its machine-like connexions to the material and social world - a narrative progression made of series of movements, of desiring/productive connections and disjunctions, of consumptions/consummations, and productions (nutritive, sexual, communicative, etc.) instigated by the conflictual game of the desiring compulsions of the body one impulse, at times, dominating the others, making the body swerve onto an alternative routing, at other times joining others and reinforcing a given trajectory -; a narrative progression which, through its own unconscious self-recording, projects (and retro-jects') itself as the product of a transcendent and sovereign subject. Through this merging with the Absolute Otherness of the Transcendent, through this embracing of death, death strikes the ascetic graciously: it is the lower self - the Inner Slave - that dies, the passions that become extinguished, the illusory Ego that dissolves.

Paradoxically, it is through the ultimate alienation (becoming-other) of total surrender to the Transcendent, through the death of the Ego, that the ascetic recognises and frees himself from the hitherto misrecognised, alienating sway that social others and their material productions had, until then, held over him through his Ego and worldly desires. The spectre of the illusory Ego, alienating and alienated, sustained by the passions' enchainment to the material world, suddenly dissipates, and along with it dissolves the alienating submission of the Will to the power that others wield over it. Master of his passions - capable of suppressing and denying the compulsions of his desires and affects through the sheer force of his will to transcendence, by his will to self-overcoming, to becoming, to power, even unto death if necessary - the accomplished

ascetic frees himself from his subjection to matter and to social others. The ultimate alienation' of the ascetical surrender to the Transcendent is, in other words, a deliverance from the illusory self of false-consciousness, giving way to one's rebirth: the birth of an empowered spirit.

Through their ascetical mortifications, the great ascetics of Javanese mythical-history were reborn as World Conquerors, Intercessors of the Transcendent, Seers of the Logos, Layers-down of the Law, Saviours of the Suffering, and Punishers of the Wicked. The accomplished ascetic, importantly, becomes a guru, a 'guide/teacher', to other seekers of truth: as one who has glimpsed the Truth, the accomplished ascetic becomes the wayfarer who opens its tarikat (Javanese inflexion of the Arabic tarikah), the Path/Way' to those who seek it. The guru, to his murid (an Arabic derived Javanese term meaning) his 'seeker/student', becomes an incarnation of the Murad (also a term of Arabic origin), the 'Sought-after' who, through the maieutic of his teachings and his exemplary orthopraxy, pulls the seeker upwards by lifting the veils of illusion that surround him, layer after layer.

While their respective cultural groundings, discursive modalities, ontological assumptions, and teleological engagements may differ, one can clearly see here the parallels between the Javanese vision of mystical science and asceticism and the "ascesis and hermeneutics" of the Social Sciences as Professor Etienne envisaged it.

For the Javanese mystic, as for the Maestro, the practice of Science is quintessentially soteriological. The soteriological, liberating power of both the Javanese Mystical Sciences and the Western Human Sciences is the outcome of their ability to bring about a similar realisation in those who practice them: that there is no transcendental subject, no self, no ego; there is only the surface effect of the immanent play of difference' - a narrative centre of gravity' that emerges as a synthesis and a resolution of the cacophonous inner dialogue of often conflicting, sometimes mutually consolidating, passions, drives, and intentions, and whose outcome is conditioned by the play' or game' of differential relations on the field of social interactions - the structurally homological mirroring of the external game of differences by the play of internal differences contributing to the formation of the Me' (the [ga]ME).

Both forms of asceticism, furthermore, are equally ambiguous.

Javanese asceticism achieves its dissolution and re-birthing of the self by harnessing personal will to a singular project of self-overcoming - a Will-to-Power - which it identifies with a Transcendental Will, conceived as an emanation of Divine Conscience - First Cause' and Final End'- that both transcends the worldly realm and at the same time pervades the world and the human soul as its immanent principle. Thus while Javanese asceticism, through its ability to empower and liberate its practitioner by dissolving the Ego (and thus the condition of possibility of social subjection), has a profoundly revolutionary and liberating potential (particularly in times of personal or socio-political crisis), its reliance upon a transcendental Divine Subject makes it an equally powerful instrument of social domination: this fundamental ambiguity marks the central role of asceticism as part of the system of power formation in Javanese society, particularly as the means of the creation, maintenance, and overturning of charismatic power. Javanese asceticism thus works both as a means of liberation and empowerment and a means of consolidation of social modes of domination.

This is equally true for the Human Sciences, which, the Maestro warned, following the admonitions of both Foucault and Bourdieu, can equally be co-opted to serve the interests of the ruling classes who hold the reins of State power, thus being turned into a means of legitimation of State-defined disciplinary regimes', and regimes of truth' (to use Foucault's terms) that define the boundaries of normality and otherness, and set the parameters for internalised norms and techniques of identity-formation and self-discipline, and thus, of the conditions of production of voluntary servitude. This cooption of Social Science for the cause of hegemony, as in the case of Javanese asceticism, is made possible through the furtive reintroduction, within their respective conceptual apparatuses, of subjugating transcendental identities as both conceptual and teleological anchors - the singular Ego and soul as the defining essence of the social person defined as individual', subjected under God, the Nation, and the State, advancing towards the Final Judgement, the After-life, the divinely determined Destiny, or the Historical Necessity; etc.

Thus we find a common tension that undergirds both Javanese mysticism and Occidental Science, between (and here I employ Deleuze's and Derrida's terminology) an immanentist metaphysics of difference on the one hand and a transcendentalist metaphysics of identity and self-presence on the other: between a metaphysics which affirms the chaosmos' of the immanent play of difference/differentials as the a-priori condition of possibility and of the emergent production of Being(s), and a metaphysics that seeks to derive order from the tacit repression of difference and the concomitant affirmation of the ontological primacy of transcendental identities and origins (in the sphere of Platonic Ideas, of the Logos, and/or the Divine).

These common underlying tensions, and the many other parallels between Javanese mysticism and Western Social Science, the Maestro would say, are not a mere coincidence: he often reminded his students that Nietzsche, Durkheim, Eliade, and Foucault, through their archaeologies and genealogies of ideas, have shown how modern Western science plunges the

roots of its development into the rich soils of the religious ideologies that preceded it. One might be surprised to learn that the Occidental Social Sciences and the Javanese-Islamic mystical sciences both share some of their genealogical roots in ancient Greek philosophy, particularly the philosophies of Plotinus, Plato, and Aristotle, not to mention more ancient Indo-European and Semitic socio-cultural patterns, although most of these roots reach through different historical streams of ideological transmission - those of Christianity for the Occident, and those of Hinduism and Sufi Islam for Java - they do merge most singularly together in the Medieval Islamic translators of the Greek philosophers, without whom there would be no St Thomas of Aquinas (whose philosophy was particularly inspired by the writings of Aristotle, transmitted via his Muslim translators) to found the metaphysical foundations of Occidental Christian thought (together with his predecessor St Augustine, who was also influenced by Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus), neither would there be, subsequently, a humanist Renaissance, or an Enlightenment to mark the final separation between religious and scientific knowledge, nor, furthermore, would there be, on the side of the "Orient", any Ibn el Arabi or Al Ghazali to lay down the foundations of Islamic-Sufi metaphysics.

Much like that of Socratic philosophy, the ultimate station sought by Javanese-Islamic mysticism is "pati sampurna" (Javanese expression signifying) the "perfect death". To prepare for the good death', one must first endure, as one classical Javanese mystical poem expresses it, "pati sajeroning urip, urip sajeroning pati", the ascetical experience of "death within life and life within death" and the rebirth of conscience and spirit that it induces.

The Javanese landscape is dotted with sacred sites where legendary ascetics are reputed to have been graced with mystical revelations or to have performed miracles as a result of their ascetical mortifications. Each of these sacred sites represents a station of renewed enlightenment along the mystic's life-path. For each great mystic one can trace long mystical pathways snaking through the Javanese landscape, each pathway made up of a chain of shrines commemorating the series of ascetically induced deaths and rebirths marking the mystics' life-quest for enlightenment and empowerment. All of these mystical pathways lead to these great mystics' final resting places or to the spots where the bodies of a select few of them are believed to have miraculously disappeared and their souls ascended to heaven (a miraculous act named moksa, a term of Sanskrit origin, designating in Hinduism the total liberation of the soul from the cycle of death and reincarnation) - final stations erected as sacred shrines or mausoleums that mark the eschatological summits of mystical quests: the point where the seeker's being finally merged and dissolved forever and completely into the that of the Sought After, the Transcendent.

Pilgrims, retracing the exemplary steps of such great mystics, visit their shrines to pay them homage. There they perform ascetical regimens, to purify themselves, to manifest the firmness of their will to transcendence, and to express their prayers. As they burn incense, they recite Javanese and Quranic incantations, invoke the tutelary saint of the shrine to intercede on their

behalf with God, and pray for their mutual salvation. They then sprinkle fragrant flower petals over the sanctuary's altar - most often the saint's tomb - to evoke the fragrance of his final spiritual station. The disciples of dead mystics perform the same rites at their masters' tombs, as do the living at the graves of their dead ancestors.

In Javanese culture, the lives of all men and women constitute eschatological and mystical paths - paths carrying the soul from its spiritual differentiation from the divine Matrix at birth, through the ascetical ordeal of life, and on to their final return to its Maker in death. The concept of this eschatological and mystical path, in Javanese mysticism, is called sangkan paraning dumadi', the first cause and final end of becoming' - the human search for in-dwelling divinity through the ascetical ordeal of life.

The classical mystical imagery, as taught to me by my Javanese gurus, portrays the yet unborn foetus as a hermit meditating in a pool of water within the goa-garbaning rahiim ibu, the mother's womb-grotto'. The Arabic-derived word, Rahiim, my gurus pointed out to me, in Javanese, designates both the womb of the mother, and one of the names of Allah: the Beneficent, the Compassionate'. There, sitting submerged in the pool within the womb-grotto, my gurus explained, the child receives a revelation from God. He whispers into her ears that she is none other than His reflection in the grotto's pool. He tells her of all the good and evil, the joys and the pains that she shall experience after her birth. Finally, He warns her that she shall begin to forget, inexorably, all of these truths as soon as she emerges from the womb; that this forgetting will deepen as she grows and dons the clothing of the worldly Ego, woven as it is with the desires and affects that bind it to the world, blinding her from the Truth with the veils of worldly illusion. This, my gurus explained, is why all babies are born crying, their fisted hands held over their ears: for they come into the world with the knowledge of a sublime Truth that they also know they are destined to forget. They are born with the knowledge that their life will be that long ascetical struggle whose purpose is to reclaim this lost knowledge.

Within Javanese mysticism's immanentist conception of being, human life is the mystical path of Divinity as the immanent principle of creation searching for Its own Self-Realisation through creation's reflexion. From the divine creative principle each human springs forth, carrying the Divine spark within them throughout their life, and dissolving into the Divine in death. Each and every tomb, my Javanese gurus taught me, constitutes the final flower-strewn trace of that passage.

The Maestro too, has reached his Final Station, his Orient

I could not contain my sorrow and my tears when I learned of the demise of my venerable master.

I deeply regret not having contacted him since my leaving the IEP. I will not have the chance, as I had hoped, to express to him, once my thesis is completed, my tasyakur (Arabic term meaning) gratitude': to say to him "thank you Maestro, see here the tree that I have grown from the seed that you gave me".

Thus, in the wake of your final passing, Grand Maestro, I pronounce this eulogy and homage, to express my tasyakur, and to voice my niyah ziyarah (Arabic for) 'vow of pilgrimage':

[In the text below, I use the following abbreviations: Ar. for Arabic'; Jav. for Javanese'; Skt. for Sanskrit'; Gr. for ancient Greek'; Lat. for Latin'; Heb. for Hebrew'.]

Godspeed O sheikh [Ar.], master', O guru, 'teacher', O murad, 'one who is sought after', Heir and Transmitter of the barakah that has flowed through three great silsilah [Ar.], 'genealogies of transmission' of 'ilm al batiniyyah [Ar.] 'esoteric science'. Three genealogies of knowledge that merged together in your person and your teachings in such an inspiring and masterly way. The first of these: the chain of tarikah fi ilm al tasawwuf [Ar.], the way of the esoteric science of the mystics, wearers of wool'; a chain which counts amongst its links the great Amir Abd-ElKader, one of the major subjects and objects of your research, and his eponymous predecessor, Abd-El-Qadir Al-Jailani - heirs and transmitters of the secret teachings of the Nabi [Ar. & Jav], 'prophets', the awliyah Allah [Ar. & Jav], 'friends of God', and of their loyal disciples. The second lineage of knowledge: that of the Brother Masons, builders of temples, carvers of stones, engravers and keepers of secret symbols. The third great dynasty of knowledge: that of the Human Sciences, counting amongst its members such illustrious masters as Bourdieu, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari, Foucault, Clastres, Lvi-Strauss, Eliade, Lacan, Jung, Heidegger, Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Freud, Otto, Feuerbach, Hegel, Kant, Descartes, Tocqueville, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, La Botie, and so many others in a genealogy harking back to the philosophers of the cities of Antiquity - so many great seekers and founts of knowledge whose voices resounded within your lectures.

Point of confluence of these three great streams of knowledge, your science, your teaching, constituted the refraction, the holographic image of this conjunction of signifying traditions, florescent with meaning: science of the hermeneutics and exegesis of symbolic systems; study of the political power, the meaning-producing potency, and of the social-structuring force emerging from the articulation and conjunction of the signifying parts of the signifying whole - total and encompassing system of signs of recognition of the self, of others, and of the world, catalyst of the social bond: / sum-ballein [Gr.], the act of 'throwing-together' parts of a whole, which thus conjoined, mutually complete each other to produce a sign of recognition. O Murad, you have now passed into the heart of Absolute Otherness, over and into the horizon of the Orient. Your name and your memory - your spirit, your speech, your breath, your pneuma - have today merged into the forbidden and ever-separate and bounded sphere of the , / Shekhinah [Heb.] / Sakina [Ar.], the tranquil dwelling of the hidden Parousia (Greek term meaning) 'Presence' of the sacred, the Numen [Lat.] the Logos [Gr.], the Divine - simultaneous presence and non-presence always and forever hidden within the shadows of the sacred signifiers that evoke it. From the bricoleur and tinkerer of symbolic machines whom you were, like the shamans, sorcerers, and psychiatrists you so often analysed; from the reader and deconstructionist of signifying structures; you have now become part of the numen that sacred symbols evoke without ever bringing about their presence - spectres of non-presence that haunt the sign while at the same constituting the condition of possibility of its meaningfulness. O murad, thus is my niyah [Ar.], my vow': I shall, in pro-fanum [Lat.], facing the sanctuary', meditate before your grave, as does the Javanese murid, the 'seeker-disciple', before the tomb of his lost murad, 'the sought after' - the master ever-sought-for, forever-after lost, yet always simultaneously present, resonant, like a mahdi [Ar.] hidden behind the illusory curtain of the manifest. As do the Javanese murid for their deceased guru, I shall perform a ziyarah, a pilgrimage, to your makam akhir [Ar. & Jav.], 'final station'. And, to echo, through the practice of ritual, the spirit of your teachings, I shall visit your grave, as do the Javanese murid for their lost guru, to perform dzikir [Ar.], 'rites of remembrance'. There, as do the Javanese murid for their lost masters, I shall burn frankincense while reciting a Javanese mantra [Jav.-Skt.], incantation', consecrating the fragrant offering in the syncretic name of AUM-ILLAHI (juxtaposition and conjunction of the Sanskrit-Hindu and Arabic-Islamic terms designating the Divine) in dedication to your spirit and name, through the intercession of "Kyai lan Nyai samara bumi" [Jav.], "Sire and Lady guardians and lovers of the earth"; I shall then recite the Fatiha, the verses of the Quranic Opening, followed by the tahlil [Ar.] - "La Illaha Il-Allah" (Quranic expression signifying "there is no [other] God but God") - repetition of the double negation affirming the Oneness of the One; I shall intone the Asma'Al Husna [Ar.], the ninety-nine of the hundred names of the One, of which only the One knows the hundredth,

and which, as you have now migrated beyond the veils of illusion - beyond the hijab [Ar.], veil' of the manifest world, behind which hides the face of Al Haq [Ar.], the Truth' - you now, perhaps, also know. Then, finally, as does the Javanese murid at his master's tomb, I shall spread fragrant petals of red and white flowers over your headstone, to evoke, as say the Javanese, the gondo arum, the 'fragrance', of your teachings, the 'fragrance' of your quest and final station to which this quest has led, and to invoke the fertile and creative duality - immanent play of differences/deferrals - that renews and transmits the barakah of Ceation.

When I received the sad news of the revered Maestro's passing, I was all the more stricken with grief that I had, only a few hours earlier, learnt of the loss of another guru, one of my Javanese informants and friends, the kind and gentle Pak Karto. Pak Karto had been a guide, a teacher, and an adoptive uncle to me during my fieldwork. In his passing, Pak Karto joined his good friend, also an esteemed guru, the generous and jovial Pak Surat, who had passed away little more than a year prior. Pak Karto and Pak Surat had been founding members of a choir of enthusiasts of Javanese sung matjapat poetry. During my fieldwork, they had, on many occasions, warmly welcomed me into their houses, where I would come regularly to hear them sing traditional Javanese verse. I keep a fond memory of these meetings: time would often stream imperceptibly past into the small hours of the night as we pleasantly discussed JavaneseIslamic mysticism and religious philosophy while sipping sweet Javanese tea - such evening vigils being a form of 'social asceticism' in which the Javanese take great pleasure.

This is one of the greatest treasures that Bruno Etienne's barakah brought me, and for which I will forever be indebted: by launching me upon a long and fascinating anthropological quest, it would lead me to encounter many other gurus - teachers - who would also, in turn, bless me with the barakah of their knowledge and support. The beauty in this gift is that it resonates with a core Javanese mystical injunction: to go to the kblat papat (a Javanese expression, derived from the Arabic word kiblah, direction', and designating here) "the four cardinal directions", "the four corners of the earth", to learn nglmu, science' from all the gurus one encounters along the way, and to seek out one's Guru Sejati (Javanese-Sanskrit terms meaning) True Teacher'. As my Javanese gurus interpreted this injunction, the Guru Sejati, symbolises both all the teachers one encounters in one's life, most particularly one's wisest and most revered masters, as well as the inner Truth, the inner Master and true self that one's ascetical quest for knowledge leads one to uncover within oneself. Professor Bruno Etienne was, to me and to many others, a Guru Sejati.

The Maestro's barakah thus propelled me first to Cambridge, and the London School of Economics, where I would benefit from the invaluable guidance, teaching, wisdom and support of my research supervisors Dr. Leo Howe, Dr. Fenella Cannell, Dr. Rita Astuti, and Professor Maurice Bloch - Professor Bloch in particular, like Professor Etienne, has had an enormous influence not only on the formulation of my research problematic and focus, and my understanding of the data I collected, but also on my way of thinking more generally. Bruno

Etienne's barakah, combined with that of my subsequent teachers, then took me to Java, where I would be so graciously welcomed by the soft and mellifluous barakah of the Javanese poems sung by Pak Karta, Pak Surat, and their fellow choir members. I will never forget when I first heard the beautiful polyphony of their voices so gracefully carry the very same verses quoted above, "Nglmu iku kelakon kanthi laku", "True Science is realised by walking its ascetical path". During my fieldwork, I was initiated to the Javanese esoteric sciences by two venerable mystics and traditional healers who also became my guru and murad, and my adoptive Javanese grandfathers, Mbah Djiwo and Mbah Ismantoyo, to whom I also owe a great debt of gratitude and knowledge, and whom I look forward to seeing again soon when I next visit Java. These two guru's teachings, combined with those of Bruno Etienne and Maurice Bloch, have given my thesis its soul. When I listened to Mbah Djiwo and Mbah Ismantoyo explain the central significance of the beautiful verses of this Javanese mystical poem to me, and when I heard Pak Karta and Pak Surat sing them, I recognised in their words the familiar spirit of the teachings of the Master and Professor who had set me upon the path that had led me to them. In those moments, something magical - an epiphany - seemed to unfold: I felt as though a "circle had been closed", as the Maestro himself often liked to say.

From a murid mourning his murad, Florent Giehmann, PhD Candidate, London School of Economics and Political Science Department of Anthropology.