Ever since the idea of salvation rose to power in certain traditions, a radical world-critical spark smolders in the world-consciousness of high-cultural peoples. Wherever salvation is taken to be possible and desirable, the thought that all the signs of nature can and must be reversed gains power. The distinction between death and life grows shaky, for this greatest of all subversions teaches that a true death is preferable to a false life. Along with the demand for salvation, the possibility of negating the world enters the world as well—recall that we are dealing here with a holy negation, one that attempts to repel itself from the deception of profane existence. Now the spirit is dizzy in view of the reversibility of all signs—the suspicion that the world as a whole in its status quo is altogether wrong and or upside-down condenses in doctrines of otherworldly true paradises. The redemption-seeking spirit sets out to invalidate “this world” like a false premise. Whoever plays with the fire of salvation is never far from the fantastic temptation to turn his back on the worldedifice and leave it to its ruin—apocalypticism even goes so far as to preach its destruction and, if only it were possible, to set it on fire by one’s own hand.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, it is obvious to remark that with the break-in of the Christian and gnostic ideas of liberation, the spirits of primal negation were awakened in the Western psyche. Even if the official Christian piety toward creation toiled over efforts to shelter the goodness of the world from the goodness of its architect against the insurrection of negativity, the awakened primary masochistic and sadistic world-critical forces would never be put to sleep again. The smooth fit of subjects into benevolent totalities is disturbed once and for all. The soul discovers itself as the discordant factor—as the other in everything and opposite to everything. The greatest psychologists have always had to make concessions to the suggestive wisdoms of dualism. From the gnostic-Manichaean nuclear fission of the Godhead to the Freudian theory of the death drive, the Western tradition has not lacked attempts to metaphysically or meta-psychologically substantialize the great negation of world, body and self.

In our context, what matters is to show that the gnostic movements of late antiquity—combined with tendencies of anachoretic psychology and negative theology—represent the first flareup of a nirvanological impulse on Western soil. Gnostic acosmism—the doctrine of the soul’s unbelonging to the world of matter and to the celestial demons—was an effort of the late antique psyche to self-therapeutically detach itself from the powers of “this” grotesque and malignant “world”; it was an attempt, however precarious, to render the pneumata or spirit-souls homeless in the given, in order to open for them a prospect of innermost healing through heavenly self-reintegration. The soul, which now understand itself only as a stray here, passing through and returning home, enjoys from the moment of anamnesis and conversion [Kehre] the certainty that its postexistence will resemble its pre-existence: both signify immersion in a sphere flooded with light and rapture. From the point of view of the phenomenology of religion, a certain affinity between gnosticism and Buddhism is evident.²³ If the gnostic insight deregisters the subject from the cosmos to repatriate it in an original worldlessness, consequently in a being-in-God, this is an unmistakable equivalent of the Buddhist’s transition into houselessness. Both are gestures of an ontological resettlement, which is supposed to lead to a kind of world-flight or world-weaning. With the help of the great ascetic negation, the sufferingproducing mechanism, the world-addiction, is healed and the greed for worldly power is mitigated. By loosening its world-attachment, the subject holding itself and things as possessions finds its way back into contact with the truths of nomadic life: world-traversing beings travel best with light luggage.

Peter Sloterdijk, Out of This World