CfP Ecstatic Bodies in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Examining the intoxicating properties of Amacher and Ashley's compositions. Treating the compositions as drugs and understanding these drugs as, through intoxicating and hallucinogenic properties, enhancing our awareness and perceptions. Similarly, Amacher and Ashley themselves can be understood as mobilising this intoxication and thus exhibiting aspects of secular shamanism within their practices and performances. Succumb to their intoxication. Accompanying CD unavailable due to online format.

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2013

In this article a number of approaches toward ecstasy or ecstatic spirit possession are explored that take a decisively non-sociological approach to the subject. They stress the importance of acknowledging ecstasy and related phenomena not as by-products of social struggle but as actual experiences that are events with meaning and importance in the biographies of those who experience them. Some of these are psychological theories (exemplified by Abraham Maslow), some are theological (Teresa of Ávila), and some stand in between (Martin Buber). These psycho-theological theories contribute to understanding ecstasy and have to be taken into account. Emphasised at the end of the article is the need to reconcile these views with the seemingly contradictory theories of ecstasy such as that of Lewis.

The aim of this essay is to compare the theories of Max Weber and Georges Bataille on the construction of the erotic sphere in the cultural imagination. Weber and Bataille share several basic premises, especially in their recognition of the connection between religious ecstasy and erotic union. They differ, however, in a crucial factor. Although Bataille acknowledges symbol-making as a basis of erotic expression, he resists the systematic rationalization of mystical states of ecstasy and relies on a kind of naïve naturalism in his theory of eroticism. Weber, on the other hand, argues that all forms of so-called inner experience derive from the same irrational source and must be transformed intellectually, through a creative power, to appear natural and pure. This transformation produces what Weber calls the 'erotic sacrament', which, paradoxically, allows lovers to believe in an erotic union 'eternally inaccessible to rational endeavor'.

The method of active imagination … is not a plaything for children."-Carl Jung Late Antiquity's definitive text on divination, sacrifice, and spirit possession must have been missing from the library at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, or left unread. For if Harry Potter and his friends had studied Iamblichus' De Mysteriis, 1 they would have understood what happened when Harry involuntarily moved across a room "as though he were on castors" and spoke Parseltongue (snake language) to prevent a giant snake from attacking a classmate. 2 What remained a mystery to Harry, and made him suspect in the eyes of his classmates, is explained by Iamblichus as a form of divination, for which, he says, "the more simple and the young have a greater aptitude." 3 He also explains that the causes of divine possession are lights and spirits that descend from gods. When they penetrate us, he says, we are entirely under their domination and control: "[T]hey surround everything in us and completely expel our own thinking and movement, speaking words that are not understood by those who pronounce them. " 4 Harry's disturbing sensation of being involuntarily moved and spoken through was an experience of otherness and displacement that was quite familiar to antiquity's theurgists. * I would like to thank Peter Durigon and Richard Frankel for their comments and questions. Most especially thanks to Dan Merkur for his editorial suggestions; all flaws and errors in the essay are my own.

FocaalBlog, 2019

The experience of dissociation of the subjective individual marks all techniques of ecstasy—be it conceptualized as a religious drama, overwhelming emotion, or self-induced practice of alienation and/or expansion of consciousness. In all its devastating power and unpredictability, the rapture and frenzy of ecstatic experience continues to exert an unbroken, if not amplified, fascination. Even though the two exhibitions could have hardly been more different—in scope as well as ingenuity—they both set out to fathom this fascination and its many facets. While the exhibition in Geneva directly refers to Lewis and focuses on religious ecstatic experience on the African continent and among the African diaspora, the proclaimed aim of the show in Stuttgart is to move beyond religion and to consider profane varieties of ecstasy.

2002

From "The Birth of Tragedy" to his experimental "physiology of art", Nietzsche examines the aesthetic, erotic and sacred dimensions of rapture, hinting at how an ecstatic philosophy is realized in his elusive doctrine of Eternal Return. Jill Marsden pursues the implications of this legacy.

Journal of Religious Ethics, 2011

Georges Bataille agrees with numerous Christian mystics that there is ethical and religious value in meditating upon, and having ecstatic episodes in response to, imagery of violent death. For Christians, the crucified Christ is the focus of contemplative efforts. Bataille employs photographic imagery of a more-recent victim of torture and execution. In this essay, while engaging with Amy Hollywood's interpretation of Bataille in Sensible Ecstasy, I show that, unlike the Christian mystics who influence him, Bataille strives to divorce himself from any moral authority external to the ecstatic episode itself. I argue that in his attempt to remove external authority he abandons the only resources that could possibly protect his mystical contemplation from engendering sadistic attitudes.

eHumanista. Journal of Iberian Studies, 2023

To introduce a theme on which, on a variety of aspects of historical Iberian spirituality, and beyond, the essays here collected will offer many insights, I would like to propose some reflections on three keywords –representation, possession and ecstasy– in the hope that they may help to add some common ground and opportunities for debate on top of the shared scholarly traditions to which current research belongs.

2022

Addiction, 1974

2011

Max Weber Studies, 2007

The aim of this essay is to compare the theories of Max Weber and Georges Bataille on the construction of the erotic sphere in the cultural imagination. Weber and Bataille share several basic premises, especially in their recognition of the connection between religious ecstasy and erotic union. They differ, however, in a crucial factor. Although Bataille acknowledges symbol-making as a basis of erotic expression, he resists the systematic rationalization of mystical states of ecstasy and relies on a kind of naïve naturalism in his theory of eroticism. Weber, on the other hand, argues that all forms of so-called inner experience derive from the same irrational source and must be transformed intellectually, through a creative power, to appear natural and pure. This transformation produces what Weber calls the 'erotic sacrament', which, paradoxically, allows lovers to believe in an erotic union 'eternally inaccessible to rational endeavor'.

Performance Research, 2009