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ERNESTO LACLAU

scends all particular engagement, namely, the education of the class, the constitution of
its revolutionary will. On the one hand, the latter transcends all particular engagements
and, in that sense, requires that the class be detached from them; on the other hand,
without serious engagements in particular events there is no constitution of the revolu-
tionary will. Paradoxically, it is the detached nature of what is invested in a particular
action, its purely contingent link to it, that guarantees that involvement in that action will
be a serious one. Let us allow Eckhart to speak for a last time:

We must train ourselves not to seek or strive for our own interests in anything but

rather to find and to grasp God in all things.... All the gifts which He has granted

us in heaven or on earth were made solely in order to be able to give us the onegift,

which is himself. With all other gifts He simply wants to prepare us for that gift,

which is Himself.... And so I tell you that we should learn to see God in all gifts

and works, neither resting content with anything nor becoming attached to anything.

For us there can be no attachment to a particular manner of behavior in this life, nor

has this ever been right, however successful we may have been. Above all, we should

always concentrate upon the gifts of God, and always do so afresh.^12

Let us draw two important conclusions from our brief exploration of mysticism. The
first concerns the specific problems involved in naming God. God being ineffable, we
could use whatever name we might want to refer to Him, insofar as we attribute no
determinate content to that name. Eckhart says that, precisely because of this, it is best
just to say ‘‘God,’’ without attributing anything to Him. So the name of God, if we are not
going to soil His sublime reality (and our experience of it), has to be an empty signifier,
a signifier to which no signified can be attached. And this poses a problem. Is ‘‘God’’ such
an empty signifier, or is this name already aninterpretationof the sublime, of the absolute
fullness? If the latter is the so, to call the sublime ‘‘God’’ would be the utmost irreverence.
In other words, while the mystical experience underlies an ineffable fullness that we call
‘‘God,’’ that name—God—is part of a discursive network that cannot be reduced to this
experience. And in actual fact the history of mysticism has provided a plethora of alterna-
tive names to refer to that sublimity: the Absolute, Reality, the Ground, and so on. There
have even been some mystical schools—like some currents of Buddhism—that have been
consequently atheistic. If the mystical experience is really going to be the experience of an
absolutetranscendens, it must remain indeterminate. Only silence would be adequate. To
call it ‘‘God’’ is already to betray it, and the same would be the case for any other name
that we choose. Naming ‘‘God’’ is a more difficult operation than we would have thought.
Let us now move to our second conclusion. As we have seen, there is an alternative
way of naming God, which is through the self-destruction of the particularized contents
of an equivalential chain. We can refer to God by the names ofstar, stone, flesh, soul,and
clodbecause, insofar as they are part of a universal chain of equivalences, each of them

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