The desert principle gains strength at the moment when Christianity has ceased to be a religion of resistance; only after the end of martyrdom does the psychagogic and psychopolitical potential of monotheistic humanforming techniques unfold in its full seriousness. The inequality between the One God and the lonely soul is subverted through lifelong asceticism, finally producing the saint [88] who stands before all eyes as an equation and parable of the impossible. Thus the desert becomes a metaphorical institution. The first Christian icons are not painted on tablets but carved from reluctant human flesh through transfiguring self-mortification. Therefore, these athletes of divine mimesis, warriors of the One, soul workers and iconsculptures in their sleepless enclosures, belong to the exertion-history of the western subject—even if modern workers have trouble admitting to themselves their at least indirect descent from these emaciated anti-producers.

[…] Whoever goes into the desert seeks out the worldly location that is uniquely suited to the minimization of the world. The desert is the option of acquiescing only to the world’s unavoidable remainder; the least evil place in the evil world is that which is most hostile to life. The desert forms only a translucent film of being holding the souls back from immediate disappearance into the ultimate ground [Grund]; it is the real almost-not-being that demands no interest for itself but stands open like an empty cosmic therapy-room for the staging [Inszenierungen] of the soul. It is the pure projection-space in which the experience of self and God, including what foils and interrupts it, can be brought to emergence. 

[…] Where nothing grows, spurious Becoming is also deprived of its foundation. [96] In its place, the desert offers itself as a stage for exclusive adventures into fusion [Verschmelzungsabenteuer]; these lead, if one believes the aretalogies or glorious speeches concerning the stars of the desert, through sufferings and euphorias to an ever-higher grade of purity, to an ever more empty and sublime form of drunken soberness. If it is the virtuosity of the saints to challenge the desert, then it is the virtuosity of the desert to be amply gruesome in order to induce or elicit or call forth a salutary desperation; wherever she gives her best, there the desert becomes the bad-enough mother.⁹ By giving nothing more than barrenness, scantness, she gives the sovereign emptiness. The desert is hostile and strenuous enough to agitate individuals to a permanent commitment to the extension of the struggle for divinization; it is raw and inhumane enough to exterminate all tenderness for fleeting things. As a zone on the margins of the inhabitable world, it can house the paradoxical movements that want no other status than that of disappearance.

Peter Sloterdijk, Out of This World