Rapturous Visions: Mysticism, the Sublime, and the Discourse of Sacrifice

Wright, Patrick (2007). Rapturous Visions: Mysticism, the Sublime, and the Discourse of Sacrifice. PhD thesis University of Manchester.

Abstract

In this thesis I set out to trace an episodic history of sacrifice to/for an absolute Other, often represented by the metaphor 'abyss'. My trajectory is chronological, though I am principally concerned with deconstructing a speculative opposition: between a medieval abyss of divine Love (exemplified by courtly love-inspired beguine mystics), and a modern abyss of horror and depression (which is a trigger for the discourse of the sublime). Though I will examine the historical conditions which distinguish the valencies of medieval and modern abysses, I wish to emphasise a resemblance. In other words, both mystical and sublime discourses participate in a restructuration of the sacred (which I read as a transhistorical phenomenon, like the experience of mysterium tremendum), and are organised around the 'Thing', which is at once an object of attraction and repulsion. Therefore, though charting a gradual 'darkening', from an abyss of Love to an abyss of horror and melancholia, I will suggest that sacrificing oneself to an absolute Other, or Thing, is always ambivalent and entails a great deal of risk. At the same time, it will be my proposal that those who seek (in both periods) to embrace the sacred are borderline subjects, social outcasts, or pharmakoi (scapegoats). This subject position I read as analogous to the kind of reconfigured subjectivity, one open to the Other, which is regularly celebrated by poststructuralist and feminist critics alike. Nevertheless, by illustrating the various and often tragic fates or destinies of such beings, I wish to problematise what I consider to be an abstract and frequently utopic ethics of the real, and, especially, its valorization of an anti- or non-Oedipal subject (often signified by the figure of Antigone). What I propose, then, is a history of the present, using examples from the past in order to destabilise rose-tinted theories of welcoming alterity, and the sublimatory conditions which allow such theorisation to take place.