unreflective perceptual awareness free of oppositional thought, and therefore of any
thematized concept of ‘difference’, the task remains to explain this continued sense of
separation and identity. Cognizant of Pini’s shortcomings, we must recognize as
well that neither the Deleuzo—Guattarian BwO nor the Lacanian Real, with their
smooth, undifferentiated terrains, can adequately address this tension. And neither,
in truth, can a model based solely on Merleau-Ponty’s tacit cogito. If, though, we
conceptualize the reversibility of the flesh as an innate bodily knowledge, as an aspect
of what it means (in a non-thematic, subconscious way) to be a living organism,
then we can begin to apprehend how the ontology of flesh can adequately address
this tension within the heart of the ecstatic ‘experience’.
For, no different than ‘knowing’ what it ‘means’ to blink an eye or to have
weight, the body ‘knows’ in a pre-reflective manner that it is one entity, just as it
‘knows’ it is also a part of the world. Without being told, and in a non-linguistic
manner, the body understands the thesis of reversibility and the difference-within-
identity of flesh because it itself is of the flesh. Similarly, the body understands the
‘distance’ inherent to perception. Indeed, it is this gap that ultimately serves as the
template for binary thought. For rooted in the inherent distances of perception, the
self/Other dichotomy is the thematization of this bodily knowledge such that, during
ecstasy, when all themes and conceptual models have disappeared, only the body’s
subconscious, non-linguistic ‘knowledges’ remain. Destabilizing and eventually
dissolving the boundaries between such fundamental oppositions as self/Other,
mind/body and here/there, ecstasy frees the body from its thematic veil so that it can
become aware again, at a ‘deeper’ level, of identity and difference.
Accordingly, we can now resolve the ambiguous yes/no response from above. For
if the ecstatic raver is indeed an anonymous body of textless flesh, one that has shed
its identity, ideology and language, one that has either divested or radically altered
its culturally inscribed body image, then the thematic boundaries that normally
delineate our edges are destabilized and perhaps even dissolved. Dancing amidst a
crowd of ecstatic bodies, the raver is consumed not only by an immediate
‘experience’ of the phenomenal world, but also by his or her body’s subconscious
knowledges of unity and alterity (not to mention genderless sexual specificity)—
knowledges that are quite different from those of self-reflective thought. Lost in the
reflexivity and natural transgressivity of the flesh, in its indeterminacy and
interwovenness, the raver is a mute witness to the blurring of once clear
demarcations between himself and the crowd, between herself and the rave. For, as
Merleau-Ponty asks, ‘where are we to put the limit between the body and the world,
since the world is flesh?’ (1968:138).
ConclusionIn this chapter I have attempted to explore ecstasy and the rhetoric of unity that
surrounds it through a variety of theoretical approaches. Most of these have
understood ecstasy as desubjectification, an understanding with which I agree. My
own situating of ecstatic raving within a phenomenological framework ultimately
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