Sensible Ecstasy. Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History by Amy Hollywood (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 230 external entity or “foreign commodity” that invades the body. Further, Harris reads Volpone’s frequent references to drugs, one of England’s chief exports, in the context of Timothy Bright’s and Thomas Milles’s protectionist narratives. Harris shows how the “transmigratory” pathology of Volpone parallels the emergent “transoceanic” economy. In chapter 6, hepatitis, castration, and treasure meet pirate drama. Certainly one of the more creative combinations Harris attempts, the argument is basically consistent with the remainder of the book: seventeenth-century pirate drama is infected with mercantilist discourse and utilizes metaphors of the physical body, in this case hepatitis and castration. In Harris’s own words, “early modern medicine and mercantilism shaped each other’s horizons of discursive possibility” (162). Though castration is not technically a disease, it does work well to represent loss of treasure. In this chapter, Harris plays out his argument in the textual realms of Edward Misselden, Gerard Malynes, Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West and Philip Massinger’s Renegado. Chapter 7 opens by examining economic and pathologic meanings of the term “consumption” in the early seventeenth century. The Roaring Girl, cowritten by Thomas Mun and Thomas Dekker, provides the dramatic context here, as Harris shows how modern understandings of the term ‘consumption’ and even the national economy itself are indebted to the interplay between mercantile and medical discourses. Finally the afterword brings Harris’s observations and claims more fully into a contemporary context, as he considers anthrax , cyberworms and the “new ethereal economy.” By extending his observations regarding mercantilism and disease in early modern England into the contemporary world, Harris displays the strength of many aspects of his analyses. However, the dramatic piece of the puzzle is missing from the modern realm. Even if one agrees with Harris that economic pathologies are narratives, not simply vocabularies, he or she might question why economic pathologies were expressed dramatically in early modern England . Further, what is the contemporary generic equivalent, if it exists? At times the book does become repetitive, either with respect to an individual point or etymology or on a larger scale with respect to its organization (each chapter reiterating the fundamental argument using different texts and diseases), which encumbers the read. Regardless of these minor criticisms, however, Harris has successfully argued a decidedly unique angle of interpretation. What may have initially struck the reader as an impossibly broad scope of inquiry is revealed, through rigorous textual analysis, as an intriguing interdisciplinary perspective that will certainly impact subsequent scholarship. TANYA LENZ, English, University of Washington Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy. Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2002) xiii + 371 pp. Amy Hollywood’s Sensible Ecstasy focuses on the deep interest in extreme forms of Christian mysticism among a group of twentieth-century French intellectuals . Special attention is given to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray. The author maintains that mystics such as Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila were very REVIEWS 231 important to these thinkers, and asks why resolutely secular, even anti-Christian, intellectuals are attracted to affective and widely denigrated forms of mysticism, and why these thinkers are so attentive to forms of mysticism associated with these particular women, whose mysticism is seen by these intellectuals as a unique experience for their capacity to think outside of the contradictions that torment human understanding of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. Through the mystical experience it becomes possible to unify action and contemplation , emotion and reason, and body and soul. The book is organized in three sections. The first section is dedicated to Georges Bataille, “whose fascination with mysticism is fundamental to his work” (13). Considering Inner Experiences, Hollywood affirms that this fascination is related to his radical rethinking of politics, history, and communication . The introduction gives an historical and ideological context—the experience of fascism—that directed Bataille to mysticism. Chapter 1, a consideration of Sartre’s critique and misunderstanding of Bataille’s works, explores the “scandal” of Bataille’s work through an analysis of his understanding of “experience ” (14). Attention is focused on Bataille’s early novel Story of the...