the ‘“return” to a stage in psychological development which is before the acquisition
of language, thereby undoing the self that is constituted in and by language.... A
break is caused with the established order at a basic level, however temporary’
(Rietveld 1993:65). Emphasizing its alinguistic character, Rietveld’s argument
implicitly correlates ecstasy to the Lacanian Real, a period of undifferentiated
sensations chronologically prior to the development of the ego. To simplify grossly:
children in this model are initially unaware of their physical distinctiveness and are
thus ‘at one with the universe’. This phase ends only when they successfully identify
and internalize their mirror-image, thus birthing the category of ‘self’ or T in
opposition to the ‘other’ of everything else.
Serving as the border between the chaos of the immanent interior and the
provisional stability of the transcendent exterior, this body image, according to
Lacan, is the primordial seed from which all language and identity emerge,
inasmuch as the categories of ‘self’ and ‘other’ act as the foundational model from
which all other linguistic oppositions evolve. Consequently, language and the self
are so intertwined that, in the psychoanalytic view, ecstasy’s transgressive
relationship to binary thought stems from the rave-assemblage propelling its
participants into the Real, a cognitive space ‘beyond’ the ego and its organizational
structures. Indeed, facilitated by the metronomic mandala of electronic music,
whose repetitive beats reinscribe temporality as the dancing ecstatic ‘trances out’
(Reynolds 1999:203), the music-drug-dancing interface ‘sings to a very visceral,
ancient part of us deep down inside. It draws us out, perhaps from the “reptilian”
brain, past our egos, and beckons us to dance with abandon, to surrender ourselves
to the beat’ (Casey 1993), a beat beyond language and subjectivity
The Lacanian approach, though, useful as it is, must be understood within the
context of its manifold difficulties. For, apart from Lacan’s rampant phallocentrism
and mis/appropriation of women, his linguistic turn, the basis for so much of
postmodern and contemporary thought, draws around human subjectivity an
impenetrable linguistic immanence that forever taunts us with an unobtainable
Real, an impossible, transcendent and unavoidably lost reality. What’s more,
Lacan’s approach cannot fully explicate intersubjectivity (Fielding 1999:186).
Enmeshed in the Symbolic Order, and subsequently unable to bridge the
epistemological and ontological gap between itself and the other, the Lacanian mind
cannot escape itself.
Merleau-Ponty and the corporeal schemaA critical dilemma for Western philosophy, the problem of intersubjectivity and its
shadow, solipsism, can be summated as follows: since ‘I cannot witness your cogito, I
cannot know that you exist as a thinking thing. Consequently if one defines human
beings as res cogitans, the only human being I can be certain is a human being is
myself’ (Dillon 1997:112). A frequent philosophical enterprise, explorations of
intersubjectivity have failed, according to M.C.Dillon, because of their inability to
resolve the immanence/transcendence divide (ibid.:114–29). Inevitably rooting
114 JAMES LANDAU