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10 - Encounters of Ecstasy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

By
Patricia MacCormack
Edited by
Frida Beckman
Patricia MacCormack
Affiliation:
Anglia Ruskin University
Frida Beckman
Affiliation:
Linköping University
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Summary

Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form … He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire … In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one can not possibly wish it to cease, nor is one's soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it – even a considerable share.

(St Teresa of Avila 1957: 210)

‘Sexual liberation is a mystification.’

(Guattari 1996: 56)

One of Deleuze and Guattari's great contributions to the philosophy of post-metaphysical humanist subjectivity is premised on the shift from sexuality to desire, incorporating the inflections which catalyse subjectivity to connective intensifications, opposition to relation, individuation to becoming part of a pack. Projects of becoming, while not posited as oppositional to the non-becoming of a being, are underpinned with a certain jubilance, a vitalism in the liberatory nature of creative alliances with the unlike, a genesis mythical and non-restorable, which is configured instead as the immanent larval, and a future based on the opening of thought to the outside.

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Chapter
Information
Deleuze and Sex , pp. 200 - 216
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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