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In Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, there are two direct accounts of “bodies of the void”, that is, of “apophatic bodies”, that conceptualize the “bodying of the apophatic” (in the second sense). Both concepts undercut any negation of bodying, but negate its dualistic construction of identity and unity. A better way of phrasing it might be that they uncover bodying in its apophatic dimension of becoming, and they insist on multiplication as the veiled event in all structuring and subject-creating of the body. In bodying the apophatic, these bodies live only by the traversing multiplicities of their becoming. Apophatic bodying, hence, is the caring about multiplicity, the love for the multiple. Its event of becoming is polyphilic. In God's apophatic activity, God is the event of theoplicity, of insistence on multiplicity, in being the apophatic bodying of multiplicity, in being the polyphilic Eros of initiation and, at the same time, the polyphilic salvation of the self-created multiplicity of the World of Creative Act, thereby insisting on its diversity.

The problem of the “body”, apophatically speaking, is perspectival and linguistic. It is a problem of language, a language whose nature petitions a discourse that gives quality without concretizing that value in an object. What may be needed is an apophatic (nonliteral) manner in which to speak of bodies in order that the discourse itself be apophatically “speaking away” without being less expressive. An example of this kind of discourse can be seen in the writing of Wallace Stevens, for whom poetry is such an apophatic “speaking away”. So it is with the apophatic body that is no body. It is an embodying perspective that can give valence to life and meaning, a vertical dimension in which ordinariness incandesces, flaming and flowering. The body that is no body is incandescence.

This chapter considers the theme of apophatic body as enunciated in the contemplative mysticism of the branch of east-European Hasidism known as Habad or Lubavitch. Habad emphasizes cogitation as the supreme form of mystical piety. The more effective nomenclature to capture the cosmological viewpoint of Habad in all of its subtleties and ramifications is either apophatic panentheism or acosmic naturalism. These terms imply that the world is not thought to be an illusion vis-à-vis the hidden essence as much as it is conceived to be a veil through which the illusion can be apprehended and thereby unmasked for the illusion it appears to be, an unveiling in which the hidden essentiality is (un)veiled. The doctrine of incarnation that is the basis of Habad cosmology and that also serves as the foundation for the ethical ideal of mystical quietism, the suffering of world through eradication of existence, rests on affirming that it is only through the garment that one can see without any garment.

This book suggests that the phrase “apophatic bodies” disrupts the conventional binary of transcendence and materiality. In this chapter, this disruption is examined by focusing on ancient Christian representations of the bodies of the saints. In so doing, it addresses a particular problematic in late ancient Christianity that developed in the course of the burgeoning of the cult of the saints in the fourth and fifth centuries. In the light of such images, the chapter argues that late ancient hagiography accomplished the transformation of the literal body into a deeper truth. Holy bodies like Saint Thecla's are epiphanies of transfiguration that occupy a signifying space between transcendence and immanence; and just as they avoid idolizing the material, so they also deconstruct naive or insipid notions of spiritual presence in the world. Theophanic and human at the same time, the subtle embodiments of late ancient hagiography were supremely indirect, and in that indirectness lies their unsaying, their sidestepping; in short, these subtle embodiments are the hagiographical version of apophasis.