social effervescence in which it takes place and the ‘positive’, hyper nature of its
excesses. Yet it is not a collective trance (this could be the case in a homogenous
society where the trance would be inserted into a common defined mythical frame),
but rather an individual trance enabled by the presence of others. Sensitivity blushes
to the surface of the skin and subjectivity opens indefinitely, as rubbing with the
collective whole. Abandon is measured in openness, bringing meaning to being-
together:
The extreme moment of static pleasure...‘the rift’, when you are absolutely
dispossessed of any goal, any expectation, any centre, is also the moment of
greatest sociality, because at that moment the opening of the surface [of both
skin and subjectivity] is as wide as possible. And it’s precisely at that moment
that you seek eye contact and recognition from the other in order not to be
alone with your pleasure, and to say that because your bodies are one, you can
open up indefinitely.
(Joos 1997:12)In mysticism, desire for the sacred is stretched as a teleology, even though it is the
sacrifice of this very desire that leads to the ultimate levels of bliss. Here, inserted in
the festive context of rave, the ecstatic state arrives, in a sense, ‘out of the blue’: out
of the confusional scape of a rupture turned rapture. The experience is therefore
unhinged from a defined and institutionalized—and therefore explicit—religious
system that could explicate its meaning. By contrast to a mystical experience, the
techno trance is sought in itself and for itself, detached from any defined meaning,
aim or purpose. This parallels Roger Bastide’s savage trance, applied to
contemporary youth movements. He writes that today’s savage, instituant-seeking
trance, unlike that administered by religious institutions, is ‘dysfunctional’, as it does
not seek any result. Pushed to its furthest limit, this quest can even become suicide.
This trance is the desire for pure instituancy, pure experimentation with an
otherness that remains confused and diffuse—a purely gratuitous act, or a simple
gesture of revolt. It is not release, compensation or catharsis in violence and delirium,
as psychiatrists would have it, for the trance would then be functional again, and
would lose its revolutionary edge. But it is, paradoxically, both an insurgence against
limits and a recognition of the anthropological necessity of limits (Bataille 1986) on two
levels: on the social level by transgressing the forbidden; and on the individual level
by ‘raising from its depths the anarchic herd of censored desires’ (Bastide 1997:
225), which are consumed in the non-desire of the techno trance. The savage, as a
quest for purest instituancy, is above all decomposition, destructuring, the essence
and aim of a counterculture that, paradoxically desires not—a priori—to be
instituted in a new definable, and therefore possibly recuperated and commodified,
culture.^26
A mystical experience is not reducible to intensity. If it does share some sort of
kinship with the rave rift, folly or other experiences that occur at the limits of
human experience and language, mysticism, as a limit-case of the religious, requires
76 FRANÇOIS GAUTHIER