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Mystical Bodies: Reflections on Amy Hollywood's "Sensible Ecstasy"

Put much too anatomically but nevertheless instructively, Sensible Ecstasy is a book about sexual organs and the twentieth-century French attempt to theorize them, to deliver (derive and liberate) critical thought and philosophy, as it were, from sexual morphology. As the double entendre of its title suggests, the book is also an elaborate call for the further dialectical deconstruction-and, so, transcendence-of a long series of binary oppositions that have haunted Western culture and religious thought from the beginning: body/mind (the two senses of "sensible"), male/female, sexuality/ spirituality, inside/outside, God/human, and, more recently, academic/ mystic. To accomplish all of this, Hollywood examines in considerable detail four important French intellectuals (Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray) and their ambivalent but quite significant relationship to medieval mystics (and, just as important, to psychoanalytic theory). Why is it, Hollywood asks, that such resolutely secular thinkers, often themselves quite hostile to traditional religion and the problem of belief, are so theoretically and textually involved with medieval mystical literature, and particularly with that written by or about women? Hollywood is careful not to offer any simplistic answers to such a complicated question, although the core themes of sexual difference and the violence of history (the fresh memories, if not actual experiences, of World War II loomed large for all of these thinkers) run throughout each of her eight chapter studies. Hollywood does not finally privilege any one of her four major thinkers, although it is possible to detect a particularly deep appreciation for her first and last case studies, Bataille and Irigaray, whose somewhat opposing philosophical positions on the mystical as trauma or jouissance form a kind of symmetrical balance or mutual intertextual critique within the book (they also each merit three full chapters, whereas Beauvoir and Lacan garner only one each). In Hollywood's reading, Bataille intends to mimic or reenact mystical literature through his own meditative and writing practices, especially in their desire to effect the dissolution of the subject via the traumatic repetition of horrific events (Christ's crucifixion, the terrors of Hiroshima, or his own ritual meditation on the photo of a contemporary Chinese man's