Theology & Sexuality

ISSN: 1355-8358 (Print) 1745-5170 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yths20

Ekstasis as (Beyond?) Jouissance: Sex, Queerness,

and Apophaticism in the Eastern Orthodox
Tradition

Brandy Daniels

To cite this article: Brandy Daniels (2014) Ekstasis as (Beyond?) Jouissance: Sex, Queerness,
and Apophaticism in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition, Theology & Sexuality, 20:2, 89-107

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1355835815Z.00000000044

Published online: 27 Jun 2015.

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 theology & sexuality, Vol. 20 No. 2, 2014, 89 – 107

Ekstasis as (Beyond?) Jouissance:

Sex, Queerness, and Apophaticism
in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition
Brandy Daniels
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Vanderbilt University, USA

Ekstasis (ecstasy) is central to Eastern Orthodox theology, an encounter that

sets the self on the way towards knowledge of and union with God. Ekstasis is
fundamentally apophatic — achieved through the eschewal of cognitive
knowledge, and experiential — precipitated by practices that foster self-
renunciation and transcendence. This article examines how this notion of
ecstasy, as narrated in the Orthodox theology of Staniloae and Lossky, can
aid, and be aided by, queer theoretical claims regarding sex. Through
examining Lacan’s notion of jouissance and Bersani’s utilization of it, as well
as Williams’s analysis of sex as ‘‘the body’s grace,’’ this article explores how
sex, particularly orgasm, can function as a spiritual resource, as a site of and
practice towards ecstasy. This article concludes with a brief examination of
the ethical implications of this frame.

keywords jouissance, ekstasis, Eastern Orthodox, apophaticism, theosis,

antisociality

[S]ex, and particularly homo-sex and receptive sex, is a death drive that undoes the self,
[and] releases the self from the drive for mastery and coherence and resolution.
(Leo Bersani)

Deification through the knowledge of the divine energies is not possible in our present
state of being other than in ecstasy, by the abandonment of all created things and even of
oneself. (Vladimir Lossky)

There may, however, be a “beyond jouissance” . . . just as the death drive does not
eliminate the pleasure principle in Freud, what we have in mind would not erase
jouissance but might play to the side of it, supplement it with a pleasure at once less
intense and more seductive. (Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit)

ß W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2015 DOI 10.1179/1355835815Z.00000000044

 90 BRANDY DANIELS

Despite a plethora of perspectives and opinions on sex and sexuality in

contemporary North American culture, an assumption that pervades many
otherwise (vastly) divergent perspectives is that sexual acts, and particularly sexual
intercourse, unite — and even complete/make whole — its participants.
In “secular” and popular culture accounts, this is evidenced perhaps most notably
through the ever-popular “rom com” (romantic comedy), a genre that, while
perhaps no longer dominating the box-office or cable box (or streaming internet
site), nevertheless pervades said mediums.1 Although it is now almost ten years old,
the five-times Academy Award nominated movie Jerry Maguire still remains one of
the highest grossing romantic films — no doubt in large part due to the now
famous scene where Jerry (Tom Cruise) tells his assistant-turned-lover Dorothy
(Reneé Zellweger), “You complete me.”2 Though this scene is perhaps the
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most blatant and overt example of this sentiment, it is not by any means alone.3
Despite Christianity’s tendency to often be critical of Hollywood’s portrayals of
(and views about) sex, there are surprising similarities in regard to respective
understandings of the ends of sex. The catechism of the Roman Catholic Church
affirms the encyclical Humanae Vitae of Pope Paul VI that, in addition to asserting
that through sexual activity “husband and wife are intimately and chastely united
with one another,” speaks at length about married love being “a love which is
total.”4 Likewise, Protestant communities across the political and theological
perspective emphasize “sexual wholeness,” from conservative injunctions to avoid
pre-marital sex for the sake of marital unity and purity, to more liberal, broader
calls for “sexual wholeness” and health.5 Despite the cultural and religious
emphases on sexual unity and wholeness, this essay will suggest that sex can be
spiritually significant — that sexual acts can be spiritual practices that bring one
closer to the Divine — not because it is unifying or self-formative, but because it is
the opposite of such, because it is self-transcending, even, perhaps to some degree,
self-shattering. Eastern Orthodox reflections on theosis and apophasis, juxtaposed
with queer theoretical reflections on “antisociality,” offer a framework for my
argument, in their respective analyses of ekstasis and jouissance.
Turning first to the Eastern Orthodox theological tradition, I will examine the
concept of ekstasis (ecstasy) in the apophatic methodologies of Vladimir Lossky
and Dumitru Staniloae, exploring in particular how ecstatic self-transcendence is
connected to closer union with God, what Eastern Orthodoxy calls theosis, and
how said ekstasis is engendered through practices that lead to experiences. From
there, I will turn to the “antisocial” work of queer theorist Leo Bersani, examining

1
Amy Nicholson, “Who Killed the Romantic Comedy?” LA Weekly, February 27, 2014.
2
Cameron Crowe, dir., Jerry Maguire (1996). As of 2014, Jerry Maguire is the fourth highest grossing romantic
movie, with lifetime gross earnings reaching over $150,000,000 (surpassed only by Pearl Harbor, Ghost, and Titanic,
which still holds the record for the second highest grossing movie of any genre).
3
See, for instance, The Notebook, Titanic, Casablanca, etc. (read: basically any non-satirical/ironic romantic movie
produced in the United States).
4
The Catholic Church, Catechism, 629. Cf. n, 152; 623ff; Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, sections 9, 11, and 12.
5
Mark Regnerus, Richard Ross and Donna Freitas, “Premarital Abstinence,” ChristianityToday.com, January 6,
2010; Kate M. Ott, “Sexuality, Health, and Integrity,” in Professional Sexual Ethics: A Holistic Ministry Approach,
ed. Patricia Beattie Jung and Darryl W. Stephens (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2013), 17.
 EKSTASIS AS (BEYOND?) JOUISSANCE 91

his reading of Jacques Lacan’s account of jouissance and its relevance to sex. I hope
to show how Bersani’s account of sociability and sex in his essays “Is the Rectum a
Grave?,” and “One Big Soul,” align with and elucidate aspects of apophatic
ekstasis.6 Together, I suggest, these accounts point to an account of sex as de-
stabilizing and self-transcending in a way that is spiritually formative, as well as
affirming the inverse, that transcendence — rather than completion — of the self
can be spiritually generative. While Bersani’s account of jouissance proves useful, in
the latter part of this article I examine the limits of this juxtaposition, turning finally
to a comparative analysis of Rowan Williams’s account of “the body’s grace,”
alongside the themes of ekstasis and jouissance. Departing from, but nevertheless
still relying upon, both Bersani and the apophatic Eastern Orthodox theological
tradition, I argue that sex practices can be generative precisely in and through the
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self-transcendence they engender, and it is in this way that they can function as a
form of prayer. I conclude with a brief examination of potential ethical implications
of this frame.

Ekstasis as theosis: Apophaticism and Eastern Orthodox Trinitarian

theology
A, if not the, key concept in the Eastern Orthodox tradition is that of deification, or
theosis (which, if translated literally, means “ingodded,” “becoming god”). Built
off of a rich theological tradition — from Athanasius’s assertion that “He was
incarnate that we might be made god,” to Irenaeus’s similar invocation that “If the
word was made man, it is that men might become gods” — theosis reflects critical
theological reflection in the areas of Christology, theological anthropology, and
Christian discipleship.7 While it is well beyond the scope of this paper to delve into
the details of, and debates within, Eastern Orthodox reflections on divinization, it is
important to note that this doctrine stresses the distinction between God’s energies
and God’s essence, the latter being definitively not what divinization is about, as the
Orthodox church upholds an account of God as transcendent and eschews
pantheism.8 Thus, within this dual-emphasis on union with God and the
transcendence of God, a prominent cluster of themes in Eastern Orthodoxy is that
of apophasis — negative theology, the process and act of unknowing — and
experience. God cannot be known, but can be experienced, and one can and should
move, through practices, towards greater union with the Divine.
Moving towards greater union with the unknowable but nevertheless
(paradoxically?) relational God is a movement of renunciation and thus
transcendence of the self. In his essay on Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky,
Rowan Williams explains that this process of the soul being united with God

6
Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (1987): 197– 222; Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, “One Big Soul,”
in Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: British Film Institute, 2004).
7
Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 167; Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, Book V, pref. col. 1035.
8
For more on this, see chapter 11 on “God and Humankind,” in Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2nd ed.
(New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 208– 38.
 92 BRANDY DANIELS

“is in no sense knowledge; the soul in ecstasy . . . knows nothing, and only
outside ecstasy can the experience be identified.”9 Williams continues,
explaining that, “The source and end of apophatic theology for Lossky is,
therefore, a fully conscious (though non-intellectual) relationship of personal
confrontation between man and God in love; and the importance of [ecstasy] in
the attainment of this relationship is very great.”10 Negative theology, then, “is a
primordial theological moment, the moment of stripping and renunciation.”11
Dumitru Staniloae’s apophatic theology, though significantly different from
Lossky’s in many respects, similarly highlights the significance of ecstasy and
experience. This knowledge through experience is truly apophatic because God
is “experienced as a reality which transcends all definition.”12 One of the
distinctive aspects of the apophasis of Eastern orthodoxy, as opposed to the
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negative theology of the West, is that it is not knowledge of God from a distance,
but rather “a theology of participation in various degrees which are ascended
through purification.”13 The erotic desire for God, Staniloae asserts, grounds the
intellectual pursuit of theology, and thus various practices (i.e. fasting,
confession, etc.) are paramount to theological work, enabling and opening up
the individual to self-renunciation and transcendence.14
Despite the differences in their theologies, Vladimir Lossky and Dumitru
Staniloae’s apophatic methodologies stem from/are rooted in the “neo-patristic
synthesis,” a movement founded (and term coined) by Georges Florovsky, the
Eastern Orthodox parallel to the Roman Catholic ressourcement, which sought to
return to the writings of the Church Fathers.15 Aristotle Papanikolaou explains that
the motivation for this return to the fathers stemmed, at least in part, from what
these theologians saw as problematic trends in theology — that is, the problems
with “scholastic captivity” of Orthodox theology, the way these trends “give
priority to reason over experience in theological epistemology.”16
Whereas other Orthodox theologians whose methodologies are in line with the
neo-patristic synthesis emphasize different points — Papanikolaou’s text on this
topic, Being in God, explores the differences and overlaps between the apophatic

9
Rowan D. Williams, Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2007), 12.
10
Williams, Wrestling with Angels, 13.
11
David F. Ford, The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology Since 1918 (Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 13.
12
Dumitru Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: The Experience of God, Vol. 1: Revelation and Knowledge of
the Triune God (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1998), 99.
13
Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 112.
14
While negative theology in the West isn’t exempt from a focus on experience and practices, especially if one considers
the historic significance of the female mystics of the West such as Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, and Hildegard of
Bingen, amongst others, the influence of scholasticism in Western apophatic theologies (most notably in
Thomas Aquinas) reflect a set of commitments and emphases that make the experiential ethos of Eastern
apophaticism distinctive. This distinction is assumed (and perhaps perpetuated) by many of the Eastern apophatic
theologians, including Staniloae and Lossky. See, for instance, Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology:, nn. 26 and 28.
15
Georges Florovsky, “Patristics and Modern Theology,” Diakonia 4.3 1969 [1937]: 227– 32. Cited in Aristotle
Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (South Bend, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2006), 9 n. 1.
16
Papanikolaou, Being with God, 10.
 EKSTASIS AS (BEYOND?) JOUISSANCE 93

emphasis of Lossky and the communal emphasis of John Zizioulas, a student of

Florovsky — a shared, and key, emphasis of this neo-patristic synthesis is union
with God, what Papanikolaou refers to as the “principle of realism of divine-human
communion.”17 As this article is focused on the apophatic strand of the principle
of realism of divine –human communion, it is important to attend here to
how Lossky and Staniloae articulate the relationship between apophaticism
and theosis.
Papanikolaou explains that, for Lossky, “the goal of apophaticism is not to
conclude that nothing can be known of God,” but rather, it is “to propel the
aspiring Christian to a deeper union which lies beyond being and thus beyond
thought.”18 Because God is beyond being, God can only be known in and through
mystical experience: experience that is concomitant with and leads the person on a
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path of deification, experience that is necessarily ekstatic. As Papanikolaou puts it,

“Created being is marked by limits and finitude. To unite with the uncreated means
to transcend the limits of a created being in an ecstatic union with God. Ekstasis
(extase) is the going beyond, the transcending of the limits of one’s nature in order
to unite with the divine.”19 Or, as Lossky himself puts it, “Union with God through
the knowledge of the divine energies . . . is not possible in our present state of being
other than in ecstasy, by the abandonment of all created things and even of
oneself.”20 Or, finally, simply to stress just how vital ecstasy is for Lossky’s theology,
Rowan Williams sums it up well in his chapter on Lossky in Wrestling with Angels
when he notes that the “source and end of apophatic theology for Lossky is,
therefore, a fully conscious (though non-intellectual) relationship of personal
confrontation between man and God in love; and the importance of ekstasis in the
attainment of this relationship is very great.”21
It is also important to briefly note that ekstasis does not simply stem from
apophasis, but both are rooted in a Trinitarian framework in Eastern Orthodox
theology. While it is beyond the purview of this essay to address the complex
speculative, metaphysical logic of Trinitarian doctrine within Eastern Orthodox
theology, it is through an understanding of the three persons of the Trinity that
deification, and thus ekstasis, is comprehensible.22 Papanikolaou explains:

17
Papanikolaou, Being with God, 11. Papanikolaou extrapolates on the difference being a matter of emphasis.
He explains “For Lossky, the emphasis is on Dionysius and Gregory Palamas as the two great synthesizers of theological
apophaticism and the essence/energies distinction, both demanded by a theology that attempts to express the realism of
divine-human communion in the incarnation. For Zizioulas, the emphasis is clearly on the Cappadocian fathers and
their clarification of a trinitarian, relational ontology of personhood that is grounded in the eucharistic experience of
God in Christ” (11).
18
Papanikolaou, Being with God, 18 (emphasis mine).
19
Papanikolaou, Being with God, 23.
20
Papanikolaou, Being with God, 23 n. 51.
21
Williams, Wrestling with Angels, 13.
22
For more in this regard, see Vladimir Lossky, “Apophasis and Trinitarian Theology,” in Daniel B. Clendenin,
Eastern Orthodox Theology: A Contemporary Reader, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 149– 62. While
it remains beyond the scope of this essay to delve too deeply into an examination of the relationship between apophasis
and the Trinitarian doctrine of God, this is nevertheless a topic integral and deeply related to the claims I seek to make in
this essay and bear further reflection. Staniloae also writes at length on this relationship. See Staniloae, “The Holy
Trinity: Structure of Supreme Love,” in Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 245– 80.
 94 BRANDY DANIELS

Person as ekstasis, or freedom from nature, signifies that God’s Trinitarian being is not
linked to the necessity of an impersonal substance. God is not trinity because God’s
nature is necessarily identified with an attribute such as love or goodness. To be a
person, then . . . is to be free from the necessary determinations of nature.23

It is through an understanding of the Triune God, as understood and

defined through the Chalcedonian creed, that union with God as the ascent of
the self is able to take shape. Just as the divine persons of the Trinity “freely receives
the ecstatic movement toward their person,” so too we can have moments of
ecstasy with God and with another — moments that, as Lossky articulates,
engender love.24
In the first volume of his Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, The Experience of God,
Dumitru Staniloae, in a similar vein to Lossky, discusses knowledge of God in the
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context of apophasis. Whereas Lossky articulates how it is through ekstasis and

apophasis that we move closer into union with God, Staniloae is helpful for
furthering this essay’s claim, in that he especially emphasizes the significance of
experience as it relates to apophasis and deification. Apophatic knowledge is able to
move the individual towards mystical union with God because, Staniloae explains,
“for it the attributes of God are not merely objects of thought, but are to a certain
extent experienced directly.”25 After expressing the significance of apophasis as a
way to and of higher knowledge of God (in a way quite similar to Lossky), Staniloae
turns more directly to the language of experience. In narrating the difference
between apophatic and cataphatic knowledge — and in delineating a Western
apophasis from an Eastern Orthodox account — Staniloae writes:
That cleansing from the passions and the acute sense of one’s own sinfulness and
insufficiency are necessary conditions for this knowledge shows that it is not a negative,
intellectual knowledge as has been understood in the West, that is, the simple negation
of certain rational affirmations about God. It has to do with a knowledge that comes
through experience.26

“In fact,” he goes on to say, “the Eastern Fathers prefer the term ‘union’ to
‘knowledge’ when dealing with this approach to God,” precisely because of its
experiential, relational nature.27 To emphasize his point about the significance of
experience and encounter with God and the differences between this approach
compared to a Western model, Staniloae explains: “If Roman Catholic theology
reduces all the knowledge of God to knowledge from a distance, Eastern theology
reduces it to a theology of participation in various degrees which are ascended

23
Papanikolaou, Being with God, 132.
24
Papanikolaou, Being with God, 138. Papanikolaou writes that “Love, which is the force of communion and unity,
requires freedom or an ekstasis from oneself toward the other. This freedom in communion does not become division
but true diversity or otherness” (139). He continues, now quoting Lossky, explaining that a person exists “not by
excluding others, not by opposition to the ‘Not-I,’ but by a refusal to possess the nature for himself . . . Personal
existence supposes a relation to the other; one person exists ‘to’ or ‘towards’ the other” (139 – 40 n. 36).
25
Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 95 (emphasis mine).
26
Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 101.
27
Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology.
 EKSTASIS AS (BEYOND?) JOUISSANCE 95

through purification.”28 God is not knowable, but God can be experienced, and
that experience is part of the process of deification.
Through what practices does one come to experience or encounter God — or, in
Lossky’s terms, how does one have an ekstatic experience that brings one closer into
union with God? Staniloae addresses this very question to some degree in his
section on “Knowledge of God in the Concrete Circumstances of Life.” If it “is in
apophatic knowledge that people grow spiritually,” he asserts, “than this . . . -
knowledge is essential for all Christians in their practical life.”29 Staniloae muses
poetically on how we know and experience God through God’s “leading through
judgment” (quoting Maximus the Confessor), through “qualms of conscience” and
through “the help [one] receives . . . in overcoming . . . barriers and difficulties.”30
Staniloae suggests that it is through these life experiences themselves that we
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encounter God: that these “circumstances urge us toward more deeply felt prayer”
and also “during this kind of prayer the presence of God is more evident to us.”31
So prayer functions somewhat circularly for Staniloae — it is both the result of as
well as the cause of our encounters with God.
It is interesting to note, however, that neither Staniloae nor Lossky set strict
parameters as regards to what prayer consists or looks like, or what shape ekstatic
experiences must take — quite contrarily, Staniloae emphasizes everyday, lived
experiences as those that urge and reflect our relationship with God, and that this
itself reflects apophasis, as intimacy with God occurs through experience as
opposed to through general knowledge. Regarding prayer, Staniloae notes that the
“state of prayer is a condition in which through an increase of sensibility we
apprehend God as a ‘Thou’ who is present.”32 Prayer is that which enables us to
move beyond ourselves ekstatically and the result of that movement. How does this
relate to sex? This is the topic to which I now turn, beginning by exploring how sex,
within queer theory, is also seen as a practice that is ekstatic and apophatic.

Ekstasis and/as jouissance: The shattering of the self (on Bersani,

part 1)
Staniloae suggests that the “existential experience of God is combined with the
apophatic experience of him.”33 Are these necessarily two discrete forms of
experience, or, perhaps, can there be practices that are both existential and apophatic?
How might queer theory — particularly Leo Bersani’s queer appropriation of
Lacanian psychoanalysis — be useful for envisioning and understanding ekstatic
practices? The queer appropriation of the Lacanian jouissance, I argue, does precisely
this by its narration of sex as an apophatic, ekstatic experience.

28
Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 112.
29
Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 117.
30
Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 117– 18.
31
Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 119.
32
Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 119.
33
Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 122.
 96 BRANDY DANIELS

The Lacanian notion of jouissance is a difficult term to define — there is a reason,

some scholars point out, that it appears in English texts un-translated, as it is
impossible to really provide an English equivalent.34 Lacan’s notion of jouissance is
rooted in his theorization on the structure of the psyche — on the relation between
the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary — a discussion that, like theosis, is also
unfortunately far beyond the scope of this article. However, it is possible here,
I believe, to situate jouissance in relation to sex, pleasure, and the self. In this
section, I will demonstrate how Lacan narrates jouissance as an ekstatic experience,
and how orgasm functions as a paradigmatic example of jouissance. Later, in the
final section of this paper, I will come back to the implications the “beyond” of
jouissance has for ethics — how the ekstatical provides a way to re-envision the
ascetical.
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Lacan first proposes the term jouissance in his 1959 –1960 seminar The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, in a discussion of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Lacan
argues that Freud’s notion of enjoyment and pleasure does not adequately take into
account the contradiction inherent in pleasure, how “it aims, on the one hand, at an
absence of pain and unpleasure and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong
feelings of pleasure . . . The task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining
pleasure into the background.”35 Jouissance, then, is that enjoyment which is
beyond pleasure as it is connected to our drives. Jacques-Alain Miller offers a brief
definition of this unwieldy term as Lacan situates his theory in relation to Freud.
He explains:
Jouissance is Lacan’s name for what’s beyond the pleasure principle. That is to say,
what? Why a new name? Because, it is displeasure, it is pain, it is suffering . . . Jouissance
in this sense, is enjoyment in breach of the pleasure principle, because it brings no
pleasure, but discontrol, discontent, malaise . . . Hunger and thirst are urges you can
satisfy; the urge recedes when you satisfy it. What is incomprehensible in the Freudian
drive . . . is that the satisfaction of the drive brings only the demand for more, for
“again,” as Lacan said, “for encore.” Jouissance is the Lacanian name for the
satisfaction of the drive, as distinct from instinct.36

For Lacan, the experience of orgasm in sexual intercourse is a paradigmatic

example of this notion of enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle.37 This theme, of
jouissance and/as “beyond the pleasure principle,” is one that Bersani explores and
utilizes throughout much of his work.
One of Bersani’s earliest, and perhaps most notable, uses of the Lacanian theme is
in one of his earlier, and now (in-)famous, essays “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” where
he explores the “antisociality” and aversion of/towards sex in relation and response

34
Jacques-Alain Miller has joked that, given the difficulty/inability to adequately translate French Lacanian terms such
as jouissance, English speakers familiar with Lacan may eventually end up speaking French, despite themselves.
See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Did You Say Bizarre?” Lacanian Ink 15 (1999): 18.
35
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2010), 76– 77.
36
Jacques Alain Miller, “A and a in Clinical Structures,” The Symptom 6 (1988).
37
For more on this topic, see Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian
Unconscious,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 281– 312.
 EKSTASIS AS (BEYOND?) JOUISSANCE 97

to the then-very-much-current AIDS crisis.38 Here, Bersani not only calls bluff on
the practice of gay sex as counter-culturally redemptive — scoffing at the notion
that gay bathhouses are some sort of “Whitmanesque democracy,” and pointing
out that subversive effects do not presuppose subversive intentions — but also
trenchantly critiques the ideology behind the notion of (gay) sex as redemptive, a
false ideology that has been “rendered obsolescent,” which has been one of the
fortunate, however ironically, byproducts of “the homophobic rage unleashed by
AIDS.”39 For Bersani, the rectum is a grave, in that the “passivity” of gay male sex
is “suicidal,” because, pace Foucault as well as John Boswell, “there is a legal and
moral incompatibility between sexual passivity and civic authority. The only
‘honorable sexual behavior consists in being active, in dominating, in penetrating,
and in thereby exercising one’s authority.’”40 Bersani points out that this is
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evidenced even in “anatomical considerations,” which reflect not essentialist claims

but recognition of the effects of power. As Bersani puts it:
Those effects of power which, as Foucault has argued, are inherent in the relational
itself . . . can perhaps most easily be exacerbated and polarized into relations of mastery
and subordination in sex, and that this potential may be grounded in the shifting
experience that every human being has of his or her body and its capacity, or failure, to
control and manipulate the world.41

In short, for Bersani, the (hetero-) normative “ideological exploitations of this

fantasmatic potential” for mastery and power is a reflection of male power, and for
gay men — or women (gay or straight) — to embrace it is to reify said power.42
Instead, Bersani suggests that gay men (and presumably all women) should embrace
what the discourse (or lack thereof) on gay male sex during the AIDS crisis reflects
— the “loss of control” in sex, the “radical disintegration and humiliation of the
self,” epitomized by the “seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high
in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.”43 This, to put it
(overly, perhaps problematically) simplistically, is jouissance.

38
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” This essay marked the beginning of a prominent set of approaches in queer theory
dubbed as the “antisocial thesis.” As Robert Caserio explains in a panel on the theme at the 2005 Modern Language
Association convention, “Bersani’s formulation and others like it have inspired a decade of explorations of queer
unbelonging.” For an edited transcript of the panel that includes reflections from Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam,
José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean, see Robert L. Caserio et al., “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” PMLA
121.3 (2006): 819 – 28. One of the most oft-quoted texts used to reference the antisocial thesis comes from “Rectum,”
when Bersani, in the context of examining the work of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine Mackinnon, writes: “Their
indictment of sex — their refusal to prettify it, to romanticize it, to maintain that fucking has anything to do with
community or love — has had the immensely desirable effect of publicizing, of lucidly laying out for us, the inestimable
value of sex as — at least in certain of its ineradicable aspects — anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing,
antiloving” (215). Finally, it is also important to note that “Rectum” was written and published in the 1980s, and
Bersani was especially examining the AIDS crisis through the lens of the “peculiar exclusion of the principal sufferers,”
read: gay men, and how “AIDS has made the oppression of gay men seem like a moral imperative” (203 – 4).
39
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 206, 213.
40
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 212. Bersani here references Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 2, specifically
chapter 4; see Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 212 n. 16.
41
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 216.
42
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 216. This ideology, Bersani asserts, has “a long and inglorious history,” reflected
in and through male power.
43
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 217, 212.
 98 BRANDY DANIELS

Bersani’s account of jouissance builds on Freud’s speculation that “sexual

pleasure occurs whenever a certain threshold of intensity is reached, when the
organization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective
processes somehow ‘beyond’ those connected with psychic organization” (an idea
that, as noted earlier in this essay, was taken up with even more attention and force
by Lacan).44 Bersani explains that this is where “the sexual emerges as the
jouissance of exploded limits, as the ecstatic suffering into which the human
organism momentarily plunges when it is ‘pressed’ beyond a certain threshold of
endurance.”45 This shattering of the notion of selfhood — in psychoanalytic
terms, the shattering of a stable and coherent ego — is especially significant for
Bersani in that he recognizes and affirms the Foucauldian insight of sexuality as a
regime (techne?) of power. As he so eloquently suggests, “The self which the
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sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power.”46
Continuing, he argues that “it is perhaps primarily the degeneration of the sexual
into a relationship that condemns sexuality to become a struggle for power.
As soon as persons are posited, the war begins. It is the self that swells with
excitement at the idea of being on top.”47 Sex, demonstrated in and through male
homosexuality, highlights and affirms “the risk of self dismissal” and Bersani
suggests that, “in doing so, it proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a
mode of askesis.”48 While ascesis has taken on a more secular valence in
contemporary theory (most notably, perhaps, in Foucault’s later lectures on “the
courage of truth”), the language that Bersani employs here is striking in its
spiritual undertones.49 It is especially striking when juxtaposed with Staniloae’s
and Lossky’s reflections on theosis, with the shared emphases on the
ecstasy/ekstasis of the self, as well as overlapping critiques regarding the mastery
of the self.
Recalling, then, Lossky’s claim that “union with God . . . is not possible in our
present state of being other than in ecstasy, by the abandonment of all created
things and even of oneself,” and Staniloae’s articulation of prayer as both the source
and result of ecstatic experience, as well as his emphasis on practices in order to
engender said experiences, can one then understand sex as performing a similar
function that prayer does?50 Or, even further, can sex be understood as a form of
prayer? In the next section, I hope to show that yes, it can, and to explore these
similarities as well as the divergences of the respective discourses in more depth
through a turn to Rowan Williams’s essay “The Body’s Grace,” and Bersani’s more
recent essay “One Big Soul.”

44
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 217.
45
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”
46
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 218.
47
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 218.
48
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 222
49
See, for instance, Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (Lectures at the College de France), trans.
Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
50
Papanikolaou, Being with God, 23 n. 51.
 EKSTASIS AS (BEYOND?) JOUISSANCE 99

Recycling the shards? Sex, the (shattered) self, and spirituality

(on Bersani, part 2)
In the late 1980s, before his consecration as Bishop of Monmouth (and over a
decade before his consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury), while serving Oxford
as a chaired Divinity professor and as Canon of Christ Church, Rowan Williams
gave a lecture for the UK Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement titled “The Body’s
Grace.” Williams addresses the question of same-sex unions through examining sex
itself, asking “Why does sex matter?”51 Williams begins with an examination of
Paul Scott’s four-part novel series, Raj Quartet, honing in on the character of
Sarah Layton.
Williams narrates how, in the second novel, Sarah is lovelessly seduced and then
abandoned by the tragic character Clark. The encounter has within it a tenderness,
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but “that is not really that of lovers,” an encounter that ultimately results in a
pregnancy, followed by an abortion, followed by “continuing loneliness.”52
Yet, after this tempestuous encounter, the author narrates, Sarah looks into the
mirror and sees that “she has entered her body’s grace.”53 Williams probes this
interesting phrase in the context of this tragic tale, and explains, that, despite all of
the pain, we discover that “it is still grace, a filling of the void, an entry into some
different kind of identity. There may be little love, even little generosity, in Clark’s
bedding of Sarah,” Williams explains, “but Sarah has discovered that her body can
be the cause of happiness to her and to another.”54 From here, Williams extrapolates
on what he means, in a moving passage that is worth citing at length. He explains:
It is this discovery which most clearly shows why we might want to talk about grace
here. Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on
knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted. The whole story
of creation, incarnation and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells
us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to
God’s giving that God’s self makes up in the life of the trinity. We are created so that we
may be caught up in this; so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by
learning that God loves us as God loves God.55

Sexual desire, and the fulfillment of that desire through the sex act itself, Williams
explains, is a key way in which we experience the body’s grace, as we see in the story
of Sarah.
There is thus a clear overlap between Williams’s account of the body’s grace and
an apophatic, ekstatic account of sex as prayer.
In many ways, Williams’s account strengthens and cements the link that this
essay has already sought to make between ekstasis and jouissance. A key way
Williams’s argument does this solidifying work for my argument is through his

51
Rowan D. Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” in Eugene F. Rogers, Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary
Readings (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 310.
52
Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” 311.
53
Williams, “The Body’s Grace.”. Williams here cites Scott, The Raj Quartet, 950.
54
Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” 311.
55
Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” 311 – 12.
 100 BRANDY DANIELS

discussion of sex as risk. Williams situates risk in the realities of sexual desire and
activity. Citing the philosopher Thomas Nagel, Williams argues that “sexual
‘perversion’ is sexual activity without risk, without the dangerous acknowl-
edgement that my joy depends on someone else’s, as theirs does on mine.”
He continues, noting that “distorted sexuality is the effort to bring my happiness
back under my control and to refuse to let my body be recreated by another person’s
perception.”56 Williams’s account of sexual pleasure engendering risk and a ceding
of control and mastery — as this is precisely where grace, for him, is found — aligns
with the notions of the self-transcendence of ekstasis found in Eastern Orthodox
theology, as well as the self-shattering of sex, of jouissance, found in Lacan and
Bersani. It is through the risk of encounter with an other that we experience
ourselves as occasions of joy and delight in and for another, and thus are able to see
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ourselves as occasions of God’s joy and delight.

In the midst of the similarities — striking if only because of the breadth of the
chasm between the discourses — there are, less surprisingly, key differences
between the Bersani of “Rectum” (/Lacanian jouissance) and Williams (as well as
Lossky and Staniloae). While Williams articulates risk in such a way that provides
clear links between ekstasis and jouissance, between sexuality and spirituality, he
also implicitly exposes some of the differences — one of the most salient, and
perhaps most significant, differences is found in the respective teleologies. Central
to Bersani’s employment of jouissance is precisely the eschewal of a telos, that
orgasm (especially of the “passive” partner) is interruptive and shattering. For
Williams and Lossky and Staniloae, conversely, ekstatic experiences both reflect
and “propel the aspiring Christian to a deeper union, which lies beyond being and
thus beyond thought.”57 The telos of ekstasis is deification.
Williams exposes some of these differences by explicitly pointing to a teleology in
his account of what sexuality is and is for — that sex enables us to “be caught
up . . . into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves
God,” that sex helps us see and experience “the body’s grace.”58 That being said,
Williams also suggests that sex performs this aim precisely in the lack of aims it has
— that this is a grace, that it is gratuitous. Sex is something we cannot get right but
something we experience; it is a risk. “How do we manage this risk, the entry into a
collaborative way of making sense of our whole material selves?,” Williams muses.
“It is this, of course, that makes the project of ‘getting it right’ doomed . . . Nothing
will stop sex being tragic and comic.”59 Moreover, Williams highlights how same-
sex love is particularly relevant in this regard. He explains:
Same-sex love annoyingly poses the question of what the meaning of desire is — in
itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process, such as the peopling of the
world. We are brought against the possibility not only of pain and humiliation without

56
Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” 314.
57
Papanikolaou, Being with God, 18.
58
Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” 312.
59
Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” 314.
 EKSTASIS AS (BEYOND?) JOUISSANCE 101

any clear payoff, but, just as worryingly, of nonfunctional joy — of joy, to put it less
starkly, whose material “production” is an embodied person aware of grace.60

While sex has a telos for Williams, its productiveness is not quite something one can
control or determine in advance, but instead it establishes and reflects grace
precisely through our failure to “get it right.” Nevertheless, Williams’s account does
admittedly diverge from Bersani’s account in “Rectum” in this assumed telos,
which signals a kind of redemptive account of sex. This is a marked divergence from
Bersani’s argument that “the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of
efforts to redeem it.”61 Despite this difference, however, both Bersani and Williams
point to an account of sex that, like prayer and practices in Eastern Orthodoxy,
move one outside or beyond the self via ecstasy.
Another key, and related, difference between the Bersani of “Rectum” and my
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reading of Williams/Eastern Orthodoxy is the respective accounts of precisely what

it is that sex does to the self. While both accounts speak to the ecstasy of the self in
and through sex and/or prayer, the spiritual accounts, being that they are more
redemptive in their telos, call not so much for a shattering of the self as a
transcendence of it. Papinikaloau reads Lossky’s account of ekstasis as the “going
beyond, the transcending of the limits of one’s nature.”62 Similarly, Williams
explains:
Thinking about sexuality in its fullest implications involves thinking about entering into
a sense of oneself beyond the customary imagined barriers between the “inner” and the
“outer,” the private and the shared. We are led into this knowledge that our identity is
being made in the relations of bodies, not by the private exercise of will or fantasy: we
belong with and to each other, not to our “private” selves63

Such accounts at the very least take on a different tone and emphasis from Bersani’s
assertion that “women and gay men spread their legs with an unquenchable
appetite for destruction,” or when he states later, in his book Homos, “I call
jouissance ‘self shattering.’”64 Yet he does not stop there, but continues, explaining
it is a shattering in that “it disrupts the ego’s coherence and dissolves its
boundaries.”65 Despite the divergences between the various accounts, Bersani’s
analysis speaks to the reality, and importance, of the moving beyond oneself that
the Eastern Orthodox accounts of deification call for. If, for these Eastern
theologians, prayer is that which moves one outside of and beyond oneself, Bersani
aptly articulates how sex does precisely this. Williams’s articulation of sex as the
body’s grace serves as an affirmation and elucidation of this connection, and I am
proposing here that his analysis of sex and spirituality is a resource that enables one
to read Bersani and Eastern Orthodoxy as more than just an intriguing
juxtaposition, but rather as, in some key ways, mutually constitutive.

60
Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” 318.
61
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 222.
62
Papanikolaou, Being with God, 23 (emphasis mine).
63
Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Being, 317.
64
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 211; Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 101.
65
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 211.
 102 BRANDY DANIELS

However, as has already been explored through Bersani’s and Williams’s

divergent teleological ends, Williams holds to a relational ends and means that the
Bersani of “Rectum” does not, with his lauding of “the inestimable value of sex
as . . . anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving.”66 Bersani’s “anti-
social” account here speaks to the susceptibility of aggression towards (and from)
the neighbor — quoting Lacan, he speaks of “harmful, malignant jouissan-
ce . . . which poses a problem for my love.”67 However, Bersani’s later work, Forms
of Being, co-written with Ulysse Dutoit, speaks to ecstasy beyond simply self-
shattering, speaking of a beyond jouissance (which I have as an epigraph above).
This is especially evidenced in Bersani and Dutoit’s essay “One Big Soul,” which
offers a unique, and somewhat unorthodox and provocative, analysis of the movie
The Thin Red Line, Terence Malick’s fictionalized account of the World War II
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Battle of Mount Austen.

While the details of the movie and its analysis are beyond the scope of this essay,
in short, Bersani and Dutoit use the film to offer an account of “the reworking of the
individual within a new relational ethic,” for new forms of being (as the text is aptly
titled). 68 Bersani, again relying and building upon both Freud and Lacan, continues
his work of examining how the “blind fury of destructiveness” embodied in/by/as
jouissance both forms subjectivity and offers release from it.69 Yet, as Bill Schafter
so aptly puts it in his review of the text, this “material is rehearsed . . . only in order
to set up the possibility of articulating a mode of subjectivity that transcends its
terms.”70 Whereas in “Rectum,” Bersani’s emphasis is on how jouissance shatters
the self, in “One Big Soul,” Bersani and Dutoit suggest that, though jouissance may
very shatter the self, it does so in such a way that doesn’t quite (necessarily?) totally
obliterate the self but shifts the self’s relation to the world, to the other. 71 Here, they
note how, curiously, within Freud’s own work, as well as aesthetically epitomized
by The Thin Red Line, this destructiveness “is accompanied by an ecstatic sense of
haven broken down the barriers between the self and the world.”72 The destruction
of the self is followed/accompanied by the transcendence of the self.
Moreover, just as prayer for the Eastern Orthodox thinkers addressed earlier is
both that which engenders ecstasy (and in their framework, union with God) and
stems from the moments of it, the shattering of self in relation to the other that
Bersani speaks of here also functions in a similarly circular manner. Not only does

66
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 215.
67
Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 60– 61. See Jacques Lacan,
Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: 1959 – 1960, ed. and trans. Jacques Alain-Miller
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 187.
68
Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Being, 135.
69
Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Being, 172.
70
Bill Schafter, “Book Review: Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit,”
Senses of Cinema 36 (2005).
71
While this essay only explores this shift as it is evidenced in “One Big Soul,” Bersani addresses this topic in a number
of texts, some of the more notable being “Shame on You,” in Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, After Sex? On Writing
Since Queer Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 91– 109 and “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic
Subject,” in Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 139 –53. I am
thankful to Kent Brintnall for not only pointing me to these sources, but also for his insight regarding this shift and
Bersani’s relation to the “antisocial thesis,” and the work of Lee Edelman.
72
Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Being, 172.
 EKSTASIS AS (BEYOND?) JOUISSANCE 103

the self-shattering of jouissance engender receptiveness to the world, but

receptiveness to the world also leads to such shattering. As Bersani and Dutoit
explain in discussion of Witt, one of the main characters of the film, in relation to
this idea of “beyond jouissance”:
Psychoanalysis describes the human drive to destroy relations; jouissance “rewards” the
illusion of having abolished the distance, and the difference, between the subject and
the world. Witt’s absorptions have nothing to do with this murderous ecstasy. On the
contrary: they enhance the world’s existence — give it its shining aspect — by never
ceasing to locate him within it. To be that extraordinarily receptive to the being of the
world is perhaps inevitably to be shattered by it (an ontological truth that Witt’s death
metaphorises) — shattered in order to be recycled as allness.73
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Through their analysis of The Thin Red Line, Bersani and Dutoit articulate how the
shattering and destructiveness that jouissance engenders also opens up space for
something beyond that very destruction. Thus, in the midst of the still-persisting
differences in the respective accounts, Bersani’s account of jouissance has much in
common with Williams’s account of what sex does as “the body’s grace,” and
actually strengthens Williams’s argument, their queer theoretical reading of
Lacanian jouissance providing a frame for envisioning a shattering beyond mere
destruction.
Additionally, Bersani’s vision of sex as destabilizing, especially when it shifts
from an emphasis on destruction to that of displacement, not only aligns with and
strengthens Williams’s vision of sex (and, by extension, Eastern Orthodox notions
of prayer and theosis) in such a way that it creates a frame for understanding of sex
as a form of prayer, it also importantly fortifies and elucidates Williams’s claims.
Whereas Williams is clear to express that sexual desire and the sex act itself
evidence the body’s grace, it is unclear at points the mechanisms of how sex does
this — he acknowledges how and why this occurs in sexual desire, that it is about
risk and the experience of another, but is not explicit about the mechanisms of how
this functions in the sex act itself. For all the attention Williams calls to sex and its
function, he ironically speaks of sexual intercourse itself very little. Bersani’s
emphasis, then, on how it is in and through orgasm that self-transcendence and self-
shattering occurs only builds upon Williams’s point. Bersani’s discussion of the self-
shattering of jouissance, then, provides meat for the bones of Williams’s argument
as regards to sexual intercourse itself. Bersani emphasizes that jouissance “takes
orgasm as its vehicle,” that self-transcendence occurs through “the experience of
our most intense pleasures.”74 Finally, not only does this notion Bersani posits of
orgasm as paradigmatic of jouissance add to Williams’s claims about the spiritual
significance of sex, it also as serves as a corrective to both Christian ascetic

73
Bersani and Dutoit, Forms of Being, 174– 77 (emphasis mine).
74
Annamarie Jagose, Orgasmology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 14; Bersani, “Is the Rectum a
Grave?” 216. In his collection of essays of the same title, Bersani notes how jouissance is not limited to orgasm or even
to only erotic pleasures. Nonetheless, he highlights orgasm as a way of thinking and experiencing jouissance in his essay
on “Sociability and Cruising,” writing that “the envied sexuality is the lived jouissance of dying, as if we thought we
might ‘consent’ to death if we could enter it orgasmically.” See Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? 61. AnnaMarie Jagose
explores Bersani’s thinking of jouissance through and in orgasm in greater depth in Jagose, Orgasmology, 14ff.
 104 BRANDY DANIELS

theologies that correlate the renunciation of the self with a renunciation of desire
and pleasure, as well as to the predominant Christian narratives of sex as unitive
that I alluded to at the beginning of this essay. This reframing of the culturally
dominant Christian accounts of acsesis and sex are the final topics of this essay, to
which I now turn.

The Ekstatical as ascetical: An ethics of eros

In her monograph Victims, Gender and Jouissance, feminist theorist Victoria Grace
offers a succinct summary of an important aspect of what Bersani emphasizes about
jouissance. She explains that
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jouissance takes place where and when pleasure meets its limit in pain, where and when
an exquisite abandon of any coordinates of existence as the “self” that others anticipate
us to “be” is met by its inevitable limit, with the necessary reassertion of those
coordinates if we are to remain speaking subjects. Jouissance is as much about this
inevitable loss, an ecstatic desire, as it is about pleasure or enjoyment.75

Bersani’s work in “Rectum” and “One Big Soul,” amongst his other work on these
themes, speaks trenchantly and pervasively to the paradoxes of desire in and
through jouissance, of the way sex reflects the psychic tendencies both towards
selfhood and the destruction of the self, and, by extension, the eschewal of the
dichotomization of pleasure and pain within the Lacanian concept — a dichotomy
that has been deeply historically and culturally embedded within Christian
accounts of ascesis as the renunciation of pleasure.76 In light of Lacan and Bersani’s
insights, then, in tandem with Eastern Orthodox accounts of theosis, what might it
mean to think of ascesis as the renunciation of the self, which we might experience
in the act of sex, whether we seek and like it or not — an act that embodies both
pleasure and pain in and through the shattering/transcendence of selfhood, a
shattering that is an ekstatic experience that leads one into closer union with God,
as opposed to a renunciation of pleasure? This question is meant to be a leading
one, of course, but it also leaves many details unaddressed, specifically the
particulars that ethical reflection often demands.
Through my juxtaposition of Bersani, Eastern Orthodox theosis, and Williams,
I have sought to demonstrate the what and how of sex — that, in the self-
transcending ekstasis that it engenders, it is like, and even can be a form of, prayer.
In making this analysis, I have, though less explicitly, also spoken to some aspects of
the question of the who of sex — how, though by way of vastly different discourses,
both Bersani and Williams offer a theoretical and theological rationale for the
significance of queer sex, specifically through highlighting passivity or lack of
“productivity,” respectively, as they are commonly understood, thus reframing how
we think about what sex does (and does not) do. But what about the different kinds
of what and who questions — that is, for sex to engender ecstasy, and thus to

75
Victoria Grace, Victims, Gender and Jouissance (New York: Routledge, 2012), 7.
76
Regarding Bersani’s reflections on these themes beyond the two texts I’ve examined in this essay, see sources listed in
note 71 above.
 EKSTASIS AS (BEYOND?) JOUISSANCE 105

potentially be a form of prayer, does there need to be two people involved, as

Williams at times seems to suggest?77 Can masturbation, solo sex, engender the
same kinds of ecstatic experiences? What about sex involving more than two
people? And what kind of sex fits within this frame? Does violent and/or coerced
sex? What about sex that does not result in orgasm, that “little death” that is read
by Lacan as paradigmatic of such self-transcending ecstasy?78 These are significant
ethical questions that my analysis gestures towards but does not (yet) answer, and
that thus merit further consideration that is unfortunately beyond the scope of this
particular essay. These ethical questions do not only call for attention to the
particulars in and of themselves, but also raise broader questions about ethics and
everyday life, of which sex is just a part (at least it is for most), and of which self-
transcending, mind-blowing, orgasmic, jouissance-inducing sex is likely an even
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smaller part, if a part at all!79 This essay suggests sex as a form of prayer
in/through/because of jouissance, but what implications does this have (or not have)
for spirituality and ethics in relation to other forms of sex? What might it mean to
think about spirituality, the transcendence of the self, and ethics in relation to the
mundane and quotidian? These are important questions that call for further
reflection.
In The Experience of God, Staniloae, in a discussion comparing apophatic
knowledge with cataphatic and existential knowledge, writes that “through these
three kinds of knowledge, the personal interest God shows toward man, together
with his mystery and greatness that are beyond understanding, come into relief.
Through all three, God is known as lover according to the measure of our love for
him and for our neighbor.”80 I have hopefully demonstrated in this essay that,
precisely in and through its ekstatic, apophatic nature, sex can and, at least at times,
does function as a way of and towards this love, of God and neighbor, and in and
through this love, towards knowledge of, and communion with, the Triune God,

77
Williams’s analysis points to the necessity of two individuals for this grace to occur in his very definition of
“the body’s grace” as “a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as
significant, as wanted,” sex with another being a way “we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that
God loves us as God loves God” (311, 312). He builds upon this assumption of the necessity of two individuals through
invoking the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s work on sexual desire and perception, as well as Susan Griffin’s critique of
pornography, which he also frames as a matter of the significance of perception by and of another. See Williams,
“The Body’s Grace,” 312 n. 3, 320 n. 8.
78
The French term for orgasm is “la petite mort,” which, translated literally, means “the little death.”
79
The existence of asexuality — an orientation marked by the absence of sexual desire — as well as celibacy elucidate
the limited scope of this essay, as does the fact that sexual pleasure is by no means limited to orgasm, not to mention the
reality that about ten percent of women experience anorgasmia, the inability to orgasm. While I suggest jouissance-
inducing sex as simply one amongst many resources for/as prayer, this essay is especially limited in this regard, in terms
of what is considered as engendering ekstasis. For more on the problems of how we limit discourse about sex, see
“Axiomatic,” in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008),
1 –63. Sedgwick begins her groundbreaking text by offering a number of assumptions — axioms — that underlie the
“chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” (1). The first axiom Sedgwick offers is “people are
different from one another,” and she goes on to point out the uniqueness (absurdity?) in the gender of one’s sexual
interest being defined as the marker of sexual orientation, and offers an extensive list of ways that “people who share all
or most of our own positionings along these crude axes [race, sex, gender, familial bonds, etc.] may still be different
enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species” (22, 25). Elizabeth Wilson builds upon this
axiom, analyzing its truth in a feminist and biological/neurological register, in Psychosomatic: Feminism and the
Neurological Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), see especially chapter 3, “Hypothalamic Preference
LeVay’s Study of Sexual Orientation,” 49– 62.
80
Staniloae, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, 122.
 106 BRANDY DANIELS

not in the fulfillment of the self, but in the movement beyond the self that is
jouissance, but that, in the openness towards the neighbor and world (and God)
that it engenders, is also somehow beyond it.81 Or, as Trent Reznor of Nine Inch
Nails puts it in the song “Closer”: “Help me get away from myself. I want to fuck
you like an animal . . . My whole existence is flawed. You get me closer to God.”82

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81
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Notes on contributor
Brandy Daniels is a PhD candidate in Theological Studies and a Fellow in
Theology & Practice at Vanderbilt University. Her dissertation places theological
and queer theoretical analyses of time (eschatology and queer temporality) and
space (anthropology and antisociality) in conversation to speak to the intersection
of spiritual formation, theological method, and belonging. She is also under care for
ordination in the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church).
Correspondence to: Brandy Daniels, Vanderbilt University, Graduate Depart-
ment of Religion, 411 21st Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37240-112, USA. Email:
brandydaniels@gmail.com