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

Abstract

MLR, 99.3, 2004 791 Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference,and the Demands ofHistory. By Amy Hollywood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002. xvi + 320pp. $19. ISBN 0-226-34952-7. In this engaging and original analysis of works by Bataille, Beauvoir, Lacan, and Iri? garay,Amy Hollywood explores the figureof the mystic in writers who?implicitly or otherwise?recognize its association with female empowerment. The text opens with the screams of thirteenth-century mystic Angela of Foligno, experiencing a moment of extreme union with Christ in the church of St Francis in Assisi. Considered at first to be in the throes of demonic possession, she subsequently convinced a Franciscan friar,who transcribed her witness accounts, that she was in intense communication with God and her screams were due to his unwelcome withdrawal. The emotional process at work here, of extreme experience followed by desolation, or what Holly? wood calls 'intensifying spirals of abjection and ecstasy' (p. 12), has appealed to a number of twentieth-century thinkers, who have incorporated their own fascination with emotional, bodily, and excessive forms of mysticism into their philosophical work. In exploring the possibilities mysticism holds for overcoming the boundaries of self and other, for subverting the distinction between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, or body and soul, and for the unusual form of agency and voice it offers to women, mysticism speaks enticingly to a number of modern theoretical preoccupations. Hollywood deftly mines this rich seam of critical thought, producing a series of convincing and lucid analyses of some key French thinkers who work surprisingly well in tandem. The result is a compelling and illuminating text, which offersexciting new perspectives on well-known theorists. There are some genuinely intriguing insights here: for instance, the recognition that psychoanalysis and mys? ticism share a similarly doubled structure?both are founded upon a language and an experience of (divine) presence, but both equally subvert that unity through the positing of an unassimilable remainder, a mystical affect that goes beyond 'the all' (p. 153); or the understanding that witnessing, in Bataille, is profoundly ambiguous, encapsulating the ethical desire to experience the other's suffering,but also the relentless and solipsistic desire forself-shattering ecstasy. The readings ofthe divine in texts by Irigaray and Simone de Beauvoir are also masterful, weaving their way through complex intertwinings of mysticism, belief, the body, and sexual difference. In short, this is an excellent volume; continually provocative and consistently accessible, it offersan array of illuminating and refreshingly differentcritiques. St John's College, Cambridge Victoria Best A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano's Postmodern Fictions. By Akane Kawakami. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2000. 166 pp. ?32.95 (pbk 15.95). ISBN 0-85323-526-0 (pbk 0-85323-536-8). The picture of Modiano to emerge from Akane Kawakami's study is of a rather withdrawn figure, a writer who is suspicious and even dismissive of 'high literature' and especially ofthe academic interest itgenerates. Almost as a response to this attitude his own work has yet to receive any lengthy,serious critical attention from the academic establishment in France. Not only is he dismissed by many as a 'popular novelist', but he is seen to be a writer who consciously reworks his themes and situations to produce 'le roman Modiano', ensuring himself high sales and a permanent place in the best-sellers' list (p. 111). Certainly Modiano's presence on the literary scene by the early twenty-firstcentury is undeniable; to date he has produced twenty novels, numerous short stories, filmscenarios, and children's books, and ifan observation by Alain Robbe-Grillet in an Apostrophes programme from a few years back is to be ...