Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Sensible Ecstasy investigates the attraction to excessive forms of mysticism among twentieth-century French intellectuals and demonstrates the work that the figure of the mystic does for these thinkers. With special attention to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, Amy Hollywood asks why resolutely secular, even anti-Christian intellectuals are drawn to affective, bodily, and widely denigrated forms of mysticism.

What is particular to these thinkers, Hollywood reveals, is their attention to forms of mysticism associated with women. They regard mystics such as Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila not as emotionally excessive or escapist, but as unique in their ability to think outside of the restrictive oppositions that continue to afflict our understanding of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. Mystics such as these, like their twentieth-century descendants, bridge the gaps between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, and body and soul, offering new ways of thinking about language and the limits of representation.

Language: English

Pages: 384

Format: Paperback

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Release: January 01, 2002

ISBN: 0226349527

ISBN 13: 9780226349527

Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Sensible Ecstasy investigates the attraction to excessive forms of mysticism among twentieth-century French intellectuals and demonstrates the work that the figure of the mystic does for these thinkers. With special attention to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, Amy Hollywood asks why resolutely secular, even anti-Christian intellectuals are drawn to affective, bodily, and widely denigrated forms of mysticism.

What is particular to these thinkers, Hollywood reveals, is their attention to forms of mysticism associated with women. They regard mystics such as Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila not as emotionally excessive or escapist, but as unique in their ability to think outside of the restrictive oppositions that continue to afflict our understanding of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. Mystics such as these, like their twentieth-century descendants, bridge the gaps between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, and body and soul, offering new ways of thinking about language and the limits of representation.

Language: English

Pages: 384

Format: Paperback

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Release: January 01, 2002

ISBN: 0226349527

ISBN 13: 9780226349527

More books from Amy Hollywood

The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart

3.8/5 ( ratings)

Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler

3.8/5 ( ratings)

The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism

4.4/5 ( ratings)

Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures

Religion, Emotion, Sensation: Affect Theories and Theologies

sprig: desire (number 2)

Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature, and Political Imagination

The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart

Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body

Rate this book!

Write a review?