Sensible Ecstasy
Subtitle: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Religion and Postmodernism Series)
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: January 1, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 384
ISBN-13: 9780226349510
Subjects: Christian mysticism; Literary Criticism; Religion - Church History; Central Europe; Mysticism; Religion / Mysticism; American - General; 20th century; History; Philosophy, French; Psychology; Women mystics
First sentence: On a day sometime in the late thirteenth century, a woman came through the portals of the church of St. Francis in Assisi and began to scream.
Description: '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.