this entails). Holding the self as an offering in a consumed moment of surrender,
were we to pursue this logic, recalls in turn mysticism: another high-intensity area
of religious experience. Sacrifice, when the violated offering becomes the self and is
no longer symbolized by an outer object, opens on to the ultimate sacrifice, that of
subjectivity, in utter renunciation and abandon of will. Here sacrifice bridges into
mysticism, of which it can be argued to hold the seed (Gauthier 2001a). We can
now fall back on the problem of defining the techno-induced trance. In other
words: where in the array of these differently orientated logics of consumption—
outward or inward—does the rave experience lie?
All analysts seem to have noted the intensity and particular nature of the rave
experience, variously referred to as being ‘beyond words’, ‘iridescent’, ‘oceanic’,
‘empty’, ‘pure presence’, ‘a pure space of non-thinking’, ‘intense, more abundant
life’, and even ‘mystical’, ‘comparable to a mystic’s trance’ or ‘peak of human
experience’ (Collin 1998). What this reveals is that, essentially, for the protagonists
normality is clearly transgressed and transcended. Furthermore, the fact that ‘re-
entry’ from this state is known to be ‘notoriously difficult’ (ibid.:38) indicates that
this experience is a savage, hardly domesticated quest for the instituant.
In essence, then, the rave experience amounts to losing oneself, preferably in bliss.
Can we conclude that it is an experience of the sacred? First, it is important to
reconfigure the debate on the sacred. If we want to be able to understand fully what
is at stake here we must draw away from theorists such as Mircea Eliade and Rudolf
Otto, for the sacred is not an essence, and even less a ‘thing’ even indefinable—that
could by itself ‘erupt’ into the profane.^24 We must also put the axe to conceptions
of religion and the sacred riven with obligations to such phantoms as divinities,
gods, the supernatural or any unattainable transcendence—conceptions that are
still, in many respects, hostages to Christian theology.^25 Rather, the sacred is a
fundamental anthropological category, since any social or cultural order has an
exteriority, an otherness. Therefore, all societies, all cultures involve the sacred,
which can be experienced—to varying degrees—by individuals as a structuring and/
or dangerous force.
The instituant rave experience, because of its intensity, otherness and singularity,
then, is clearly one of the sacred. Yet there is no God here, nor ‘spirits’. This is not a
possession trance, unless perhaps possession by ‘nothing’. But ravers do not feel
‘something’ (or indeed ‘nothing’) is overcoming them. On the contrary, it seems
this overwhelming feeling originates from within, only they cannot say how or
where. To agree with Duvignaud (1977), the festive trance is one of destructuration,
not possession. Through this ontological disorientation, the rave experience
generates more pleasure than one can handle, and it is this overflow that ravers feel
the need to share with others. By contrast with other ecstasies, such as those brought
by seduction, the source and direction of this pleasure (jouissance) remains unknown
and consequently difficult to deal with (Joos 2001).
Compared with monastic mysticism, where trance and ecstasy are generally
obtained through silence, isolation and immobility (all these being excesses, but of a
‘negative’, hypo nature), the techno trance is possible only because of the ephemeral
THE ‘INSTITUANT’ RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF RAVE 75