Theology and Sexuality: Jouissance, Generation and The Coming of God

Theology and Sexuality
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Jouissance, Generation and the Coming of God

Ralph Norman
Theology Sexuality 2008 14: 153
DOI: 10.1177/1355835807087059
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Theology & Sexuality
Volume 14(2): 153-80
Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore
http://TSE.sagepub.com
DOI: 10.1177/1355835807087059
Jouissance, Generation and the Coming of God
Ralph Norman
ralph.norman@canterbury.ac.uk
Abstract
This essay explores the place of jouissance in recent theory, traces its roots
in Romantic conceptions of the Sublime, and contrasts it with alternative
interpretations of orgasm in theological tradition. The key problem with
jouissance is that it can act as a cipher for the silencing of women in
theological discourse. More positive interpretations of orgasm place an
emphasis on generative pleasure—such interpretations were an important
part of an older theological tradition including Tertullian and Hildegard. It
becomes possible to draw on traditional sources when constructing liberative
theological interpretations of sexual activity. As Aristotle argued, orgasm
is pneumatic.
Keywords: Irigaray, Lacan, Burke, Kant, Schelling, orgasm, jouissance
Ever since Jacques Lacan developed Georges Bataille’s reflections on

sexual orgasm and transcendence in Encore,1 the notion of jouissance has
played an ever increasing part in a variety of critical discourses. The
1. J. Lacan, Le Seminaire, Livre XX, Encore, 1972–1973 (Paris: Editions de Seuil,

1975); J. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (trans. B. Fink;
New York: Norton, 1998). All references in this essay will be to the English translation;
nevertheless, following the pattern of much Lacanian scholarship, I will refer to the
text as Encore. On the relationship of Lacan and Bataille, see J. Lacan, Feminine
Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Fredienne (ed. J. Mitchell and J. Rose; New York:
Norton, 1985), pp. 74-98; E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co. A History of Psychoanalysis
in France, 1925–1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 513-15.

154 Theology & Sexuality
work of French feminist writers influenced by Lacan—Julia Kristeva,

Luce Irigaray, Catherine Clément, Hélène Cixous—has helped embed
jouissance in postmodern feminisms, and from thence jouissance has been
transmitted—often via writers like Judith Butler2—to wider circles of
American and British feminist theory. One of the tantalizing features of
the spread of jouissance is that it is often accompanied by religious lang-
uage. Avowedly secular theorists, perplexed or intrigued by the ‘theolo-
gical turn’3 that particular postmodernisms now face, are being drawn to
religious accounts of affective mysticism. Meanwhile, feminist theologies
and thealogies have been increasingly busy harvesting the fruits that are
there for the taking. Amy Hollywood’s recent work is especially impres-
sive—perhaps, at least for the moment, definitive—in this respect.4
Likewise, the work of Cristina Mazzoni and Tina Beattie cannot be
ignored.5 But special mention should also be made of Grace Jantzen—
she was, it should be remembered, among the first English-language
writers to critically discuss the promise and problems of jouissance in
theology and the philosophy of religion.6
Jane Marie Todd’s explanation of the word is succinct: ‘Jouissance, a
term with a very weighty past in French psychoanalytic and feminist
theory, signifies extreme pleasure, including sexual pleasure and even
orgasm, to the point of losing control or consciousness’.7 It has become
2. See, for instance, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990).
3. The phrase ‘theological turn’ is especially associated with the work of
D. Janicaud. For examples of how recent French critical theory has interacted with
theology, see D. Janicaud, P. Ricoeur, J.-L. Marion, J.-L. Chretien, M. Henry, and
J.-F. Courtine, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2001); H. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion
(Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
4. A. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of
History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For an extensive review of
Hollywood’s book, see J.J. Kripal, ‘Mystical Bodies: Reflections on Amy Hollywood’s
“Sensible Ecstasy”’ The Journal of Religion, 83.4 (2003), pp. 593-98.
5. C. Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); T. Beattie, ‘Carnal Love and Spiritual
Imagination: Can Luce Irigaray and John Paul II Come Together’, in J. Davies and G.
Loughlin (eds.), Sex these Days: Essays on Theology, Sexuality and Society (Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), pp. 160-83.
6. G. Jantzen, ‘Feminists, Philosophers and Mystics’, Hypatia 9.4 (1994), pp. 186-
206; G. Jantzen, Becoming Divine (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999),
pp. 47-48.
7. This is Jane Marie Todd’s translator’s footnote to a letter written by Julia
Kristeva to Catherine Clément. See Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine
and the Sacred (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 15, n. 4.

Norman Jouissance, Generation and the Coming of God 155
customary (excepting, sometimes, ‘bliss’8) to leave jouissance untrans-

lated, partly to reflect the structuralist insight that there is no direct
English equivalent (‘bliss’ does not suggest orgasm, ‘jouissance’ does),
and partly to emphasize the perplexing idea that jouissance—lying
beyond the limits of conscious control—cannot be expressed. These are
two quite separate issues, of course, albeit ones which hinge on questions
of language; and although both points are semantic, they are, nevertheless,
acute. Notwithstanding the complication of there being two separate
reasons for this peculiar refusal of translation, I will focus here only on
the second issue, namely, the seemingly apophatic qualities of jouissance.
To take one example—that of Roland Barthes—it is clear that jouissance
ruptures language. ‘Pleasure can be expressed in words, bliss cannot’, he
states. ‘Bliss is unspeakable, inter-dicted’.9 And if this is how jouissance
operates in the thought of Roland Barthes, so much can also be said for
Jacques Derrida:
Every time there is ‘jouissance’ (but the ‘there is’ of this event is in itself
extremely enigmatic), there is ‘deconstruction’. Effective deconstruction.
Deconstruction perhaps has the effect, if not the mission, of liberating
forbidden jouissance. That’s what has to be taken on board. It is perhaps
this jouissance which most irritates the all-out adversaries of ‘decon-
struction’.10
I quote Barthes and Derrida simply as illustrations of the place of

jouissance in French literary theory. Nevertheless, the great theorist of
jouissance is undoubtedly Lacan—and, before Lacan, the feminist Simone
8. When an attempt is made to translate jouissance, it is—following Richard

Miller’s translation of Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text—most often rendered ‘bliss’,
usually accompanied by an editor’s explanation of the sexual and orgasmic senses of
the French word. Jouissance lies somewhere between ‘bliss’ and ‘come’ (in the sexual
sense). See, for instance, Richard Howard’s ‘A Note on the Text’ which prefaces the
American edition of The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), pp. v-vi.
9. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 21. Corbett and Kapsalis provide an elegant
explanation of the place of jouissance in The Pleasure of the Text: ‘Barthes defines
representation and bliss as mutually incompatible terms. Bliss is the limit of selfhood
and the threshold of the text; it runs parallel to and is incommensurable with
pleasure. One cannot, according to Barthes’s schema, represent bliss since bliss is the
destruction of representation. With the experience of rapture of jouissance, the codes of
orderly rhetorical representation are scrambled and the comfort and safety of
interpretation are violently punctured … Bliss interrupts language. An orgasm: the
blessed-out sound of broken-down speech’ (J. Corbett and T. Kapsalis, ‘Aural Sex: The
Female Orgasm in Popular Sound’, The Drama Review, 40.3 [Fall 1996], pp. 102-11
[102]).
10. ‘An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida: Acts of
Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 56.

de Beauvoir, and the eroticist, George Bataille. These three figures shared
complicated personal relationships: Beauvoir, together with Jean Paul
Sartre, attended Bataille’s exotic parties in the closing months of the war;
Lacan was to go on to marry Bataille’s ex-wife, and is cited in Bataille’s
Eroticism as an earnest and active supporter of his work.11 Each of them
write about jouissance as a distinctly religious bliss; indeed, a religious
sense seems to be vital to a genuine understanding of jouissance as a term
symbolizing encounter with the transcendent. More recently, jouissance
has become the term for religious ecstasy; some theorists even seem to
consider it a fundamental aspect of religion. For Catherine Clément, for
instance, human encounter with transcendence is intrinsically sexual,
and orgasm is an expression of Romain Rolland’s ‘oceanic feeling’.12
‘Orgasm, like music and ecstasy, seems indescribable; there are few
words to depict it, always the same ones: explosion, eruption, earth-
quake, ascent, rending, bursting, vertigo, and the stars …’ In sum,
‘Human jouissance requires that one lose one’s head; that is the
foundation’.13 ‘A noticeable weakness, perhaps, but a sacred one’.14
Jouir, jouissance, jouissances: my vocabulary is ambiguous. Sometimes it
applies to the jouissance in orgasm, sometimes it tips over into something
else, ego orgasm. It is not the same, and yet it is the same. It is not the
same: one would have to be stupid or angelic to confuse the jouissance of
orgasm with its sublimation in syncope. And yet it is the same: one would
have to be naïve not to recognize, in ego orgasm, the overt jouissance that
inspires it. The human race has the strange privilege of being able to seize
the jouissance of sex and transform it into an intimate explosion, diffuse
and generalized. Ego orgasm cannot be localized; it invades the body, the
skin, the consciousness. It has everything that the other orgasm has, except
the coupling.15
My intention in this essay is to explain why jouissance has come to be

associated with mystical ecstasy, and explore critical issues which arise
from such language. I will show that the concept of sacred orgasm is a
key feature of Romantic interpretations of religious experience, and may
be contrasted with older, more traditional, theological accounts of orgasm
as a symbol of generative pleasure. We shall see that the older under-
standing of the theological dimension of orgasm is embedded in the
thought of early Christian writers. Ultimately, I want to suggest ways in
11. Bataille, Eroticism, p. 9.

12. Clément, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994).
13. Clément, Syncope, pp. 14-15.
14. Clément, Syncope, p. 200.

which the more traditional model—generative orgasm—may serve to

overcome some of the key critical issues attached to the modern notion
of jouissance.
Jouissance and French Feminisms

To begin to understand the place of jouissance in French feminisms,16 one
needs to look back to one of the monuments of twentieth-century women’s
literature. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex of 1949 provides a good
example of how female orgasm has been constructed in French feminist
culture. ‘Feminine sexual excitement can reach an intensity unknown to
man. Male sex excitement is keen but localized, and—except perhaps at
the moment of orgasm—it leaves the man in possession of himself;
woman, on the contrary, really loses her mind’.17 Beauvoir describes
female orgasm as having a ‘magical and fearsome quality’ capable of
bringing about a metamorphosis of the woman: ‘the turmoil that she
experiences transforms her more radically than his aggressive frenzy
transforms the male’.18
Sex pleasure in a woman … is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete
abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is
broken. This is one of the reasons why the woman closes her eyes … She
would abolish all surroundings, abolish the singularity of the moment, of
herself, of her lover, she would fain be lost in a carnal night as shadowy as
the maternal womb. And more especially she longs to do away with the
separateness that exists between her and the male; she longs to melt with
him into one … Being more profoundly beside herself than is man … she
retains her subjectivity only through union with her partner.19
16. Acknowledging that French feminism is a contested term, I have chosen to

refer instead to feminisms, and intend that this should signal that there are clear and
obvious distinctions between the writings French women philosophers discussed. See
the introductory remarks on the construction of ‘French feminism’ in M. Joy,
K. O’Grady and J. Poxon (eds.), French Feminists on Religion: A Reader (London:
Routledge, 2002), pp. 1-4.
17. S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (trans. H.M. Parshley; Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1972), p. 411.
18. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 411-12.
19. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 417. The image of the woman melting into the
male partner is quite consistent with Bataille’s notion of dissolution—as is the idea of
the passivity of the woman, her secondary status in a sexual activity centred on the
male. As Bataille observes: ‘Dissolution—this expression corresponds with dissolute
life, the familiar phrase linked with erotic activity’, writes Bataille. And, just as for
Beauvoir, ‘In the process of dissolution, the male partner has generally an active role,
while the female partner is passive’. Bataille is quite clear about the gender inequality

The fluidity of feminine sexuality—at least as it is understood by Beauvoir

—helps constitute its quasi-religious character. This is because feminine
sexuality is, like God, uncircumscribed. It is here that the sexuality of the
woman comes to be seen in terms more reminiscent of negative theology.
In woman … the goal is uncertain from the start, and more psychological
in nature than physiological; she desires sex excitement and pleasure in
general, but her body promises no precise conclusion to the act of love; and
that is why coition is never quite terminated for her: it admits of no end …
Feminine enjoyment radiates throughout the whole body; it is not always
centred in the genital organs … Because no definite term is set, woman’s
sex feeling extends towards infinity.20
And, of course, Beauvoir is quite adamant that feminine sexuality is

mystical.
… the act of love requires of woman profound self-abandonment; she
bathes in a passive languor; with closed eyes anonymous, lost, she feels as
if borne by waves, swept away in a storm, shrouded in darkness: darkness
of the flesh, of the womb, of the grave. Annihilated, she becomes one with
the Whole, her ego is abolished … woman can gloriously accept her sex-
uality because she transcends it; excitement, pleasure, desire are no longer
a state, but a benefaction; her body is no longer an object: it is a hymn, a
flame.21
Abandon becomes sacred ecstasy … it is not that mystical love always has
a sexual character, but that the sexuality of the woman in love is tinged
with mysticism. ‘My God, my adored one, my lord and master’—the same
words fall from the lips of the saint on her knees and the loving woman on
her bed; the one offers her flesh to the thunderbolt of Christ, she stretches
out her hands to receive the stigmata of the Cross, she calls for the burning
presence of divine Love; the other, also, offers and awaits: thunderbolt,
dart, arrow, are incarnated in the male sex organ. In both women there is
the same dream, the childhood dream, the mystic dream, the dream of
love: to obtain supreme existence through losing oneself in the other.22
involved even in the process of sexual-mystical un-selfing. And for both Beauvoir and
Bataille, sexual-mystical union remains asymmetrical: if the two partners become
one—even one with the cosmos—then this is achieved through the woman becoming
one with the man, not the opposite. Even in the moment when the subject is de-centred,
the male takes the lead role: ‘The passive, female side is essentially the one that is
dissolved as a separate entity. But for the male partner the dissolution of the passive
partner means one thing only: it is paving the way for a fusion where both are
mingled, attaining at length the same degree of dissolution’ (Bataille, Eroticism, p. 17).
20. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 416.
21. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 658-59.

Now, you do not have to be Mary Daly to raise an eyebrow at this

kind of thing—criticism of Beauvoir’s theory of orgasm from the
perspective of later feminisms need not really detain us here.23 And, of
course, Beauvoir herself is quick to reassure us that ‘No man really is
God’, and, in addition, ‘The relations sustained by the mystic with the
divine Absence depend on her fervour alone’.24 Nevertheless, ‘Woman is
habituated to living on her knees; ordinarily she expects her salvation to
come down from heaven where the males sit enthroned’.25 Little wonder,
perhaps, that Jacques Lacan was ready to learn from Beauvoir’s picture
of female mystical sexuality—he takes her ideas of feminist philosophy
and draws them into the orbit of psychoanalytic discourse.
Lacan, God, Woman, Jouissance

Lacan’s writings are marked by a fascination with religion which goes
beyond anything found in Freud.26 Religion is not just a symptom for
psychoanalysis to analyse. There is the possibility—a possibility that
demands serious consideration—that psychoanalysis is itself religious.27
Moreover, theology intriguingly mirrors the critical issues relevant to
psychoanalysis, provides a constant conversation partner, and even,
occasionally, fosters an insight relevant to analysis. All this is most
apparent in Encore, and especially in the seminar on ‘God and Woman’s
[barred] jouissance’. Jouissance is associated directly with the mysticism
23. As it happens, Daly is extraordinarily complimentary about Beauvoir. See, for

instance, M. Daly, Outercourse (London: The Women’s Press, 1993), p. 55: ‘I found
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in a bookstore—probably in Cambridge. I
remember standing there reading it—drinking in great gulps like a woman who had
been deprived of water almost to a point beyond endurance. My gratitude to her was
enormous’.
26. For discussion, see E. Wyschogrod, D. Crownfield and C. Raschke (eds.), Lacan
and Theological Discourse (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989).
Catherine Clément has remarked on Freud’s resistance to mysticism, and it is
precisely at this point that the difference between Freud and Lacan becomes sharpest.
Clément writes: ‘strangely enough, this man [Freud] who was constantly confronted
with the syncopal symptoms of hysterics, and who vainly struggled to clarify their
mystery, rejected, throughout his life, what syncope brings … Freud failed to
recognize the existence of the oceanic feeling: it was not part of his theory’ (Clément,
Syncope, p. 248). By contrast, for Lacan, ‘it is not psychiatry that is capable of explain-
ing human jouissance but the mystics’ (p. 201).
27. See J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London:
Penguin, 1994), pp. 264-65.

—especially with that of Hadewijch and Teresa of Avila. That this

should be the case is not surprising: the extraordinary experiences of
affective mysticism among women has long been (mis)associated with
mental or psychosomatic illness, and this association accounts for the
relationship of mysticism and hysteria in the history of Western medical
thought. Hysteria had long operated as a catch-all, indefinable, complaint,
suffered by women yet diagnosed by men, which probably amounted to
nothing more than the more-or-less normal functioning of female sexual-
ity. That Lacan should associate hysteria, sexuality, mysticism, and
religion is nothing new. He observes, rather flatly, that, ‘What was
attempted at the end of the last century, in Freud’s time, what all sorts of
decent souls around Charcot and others were trying to do, was to reduce
mysticism to questions of cum’.28 In fact, such understandings of female
religious experience which reduce such phenomena to the level of psycho-
sexual problems alone (in the guise of either hysteria, or emotional
imbalance) are at least as old as Hume (that, at least, is the underlying
assumption of Hume’s critical account of miracles, even if it is not
usually admitted by the literature on the subject).29 It is all the more
28. Lacan, Encore, p. 77.

29. Although Hume’s critical arguments concerning miracles are a staple of
modern philosophy of religion, little scholarly effort has been made to locate what he
says against the background of contemporary gossip about strange religious practices
and female sexuality. Rachel Maines has (all too briefly) touched on the connections
between Hume’s essay ‘On Miracles’ and religious hysteria in her monograph on the
history of vibrators. (Such devices, of course, were originally designed as medical
apparatus for the treatment of hysteria before becoming simply sex toys.) Maines
outlines how Enlightenment thinkers became suspicious that commonly accepted
treatment for hysteria (namely, clitoral masturbation) might be exploited by less-than-
scrupulous individuals, and stir-up sexual passions among women. The most cele-
brated example of such malpractice in Hume’s day involved the ecstatic convulsion-
aries at the chapel of Abbé Paris. (See R.P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria’,
the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction [Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999], p. 33 and p. 139, n. 44). Apparently, ‘great immorality pre-
vailed in the secret meetings of the believers’ (C.K. Mills, ‘Hysteria’ in A System of
Practical Medicine. V. Diseases of the Nervous System [ed. W. Pepper and L. Starr;
Philadelphia: Lea Brothers, 1886], p. 224). When Hume remarks in ‘On Miracles’ that,
‘There surely never was a greater number of miracles ascribed to one person, than
those, which were lately said to have been wrought in France upon the tomb of Abbé
Paris, the famous Jansenist, with whose sanctity the people were so long deluded’, his
readers would presumably have known he was drawing links between miracles,
immorality, and female masturbation (D. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human
Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),
p. 124). In an extensive note, Hume refers to the healing of Mademoiselle Thibaut, and
to the healing of Pascal’s niece recorded by Racine. He concludes with what must be a

interesting, then, that Lacan should side with the mystics, and even place
his works in the ‘same order’ as that of Hadewijch and Teresa. But when
explaining this, he says that it is not quite because he believes in the
traditional God of Christianity. Lacan’s creed is an interesting one:
I believe in the jouissance of woman insofar as it is extra [en plus] …
Doesn’t this jouissance one experiences and yet knows nothing about put
us on the path of ex-sistence? And why not interpret one face of the Other,
the God face, as based on feminine jouissance?30
Quite unlike Anders Nygren (‘no stupider than anyone else’), who
privileges agape over eros in religious discourse, Lacan emphasizes the
erotic dimensions of Christian theology so that ‘it gets red hot!’.31
‘Christianity naturally ended up inventing a God’, says Lacan, ‘such that
he is the one who gets off [jouit]!’32 The reason for this is actually
straightforward: God is the Other, but anyone trained in Freudian
psychoanalysis will inevitably interpret the Other—the theme of
‘otherness’—in terms of sexuality and sexual difference.
I am … going to show you in what sense the good old God exists. The way
in which he exists will not necessarily please everyone, especially not the
theologians … I, unfortunately, am not entirely in the same position,
because I deal with the Other. This Other—assuming there is but one all
alone—must have some relationship with what appears of the other sex.33
The association of God with woman’s jouissance in particular is made

precisely because female orgasm is an absolute mystery as far as any
man is concerned. ‘It is insofar as her jouissance is radically Other that
woman has more of a relationship to God than anything that could have
been said in speculation’.34 No man can have direct experience of female
orgasm any more than he can have direct experience of God. It is always
mediated to him through signs which may be misinterpreted. At the
same time, man faces the anxiety that he may be incapable of bringing a
woman to orgasm; this means that he is always unsure whether he is
really enjoyed by her. Is man sure that he is desired by woman, or is she
thinking of someone else? No man can have any knowledge of female
orgasm. Lacan’s theology is based on the anxiety that she might be
faking it.
deliberate joke: ‘that miracle was really performed by the touch of an authentic holy
prickle’ (Hume, Enquiries, p. 346).
32. Lacan, Encore, pp. 75-76.
33. Lacan, Encore, pp. 68-69.

Further French Feminisms

Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray have come to personify feminist appro-
priation of, and reaction against, Lacan’s theology of female orgasm.
Kristeva’s Tales of Love allows us to see the carefully measured qualities
of her analysis: the fine sensitivity with which she describes the jouissance,
the ‘amatory ecstasy’, the ‘seizure’ suffered by Bernard of Clairvaux;35 or
the delicacy with which she distinguishes between the ‘discreet
jouissance’ of Aquinas, and the ‘radiant, innovative one’ of Spinoza.36
Irigaray is less delicate, but more challenging than Kristeva—and more
radical. Her discussion of the mysticism of Angela of Foligno in Speculum of
the Other Woman, begins by placing jouissance beyond reason:
This is the place where ‘she’ … speaks about the dazzling glare which
comes from the source of light that has been logically repressed, about
‘subject’ and ‘Other’ flowing out into an embrace of fire that mingles one
term into another, about contempt for form as such, about mistrust for
understanding as an obstacle along the path of jouissance and mistrust for
the dry desolation of reason.37
Irigaray’s development of her theme—which has drawn much academic
comment38—associates the cross of Christ with the ‘lips of that slit where
I recognize myself’.39 The narrative turns into a masturbatory fantasy
about Christ:
And if in the sight of the nails and the spear piercing the body of the Son I
drink in a joy that no word can ever express, let no one conclude hastily
that I take pleasure in his sufferings. But if the Word was made flesh in this
way, and to this extent, it can only have been to make me (become) God in
my jouissance … that the one is in the other, and the other in me, matters
little since it is in me that they are created in rapture … Mystery, me-
hysteria, without determinable end or beginning … She is transformed
into Him in her love: this is the secret of their exchange. In her and/or
outside her, as, in her jouissance, she loses all sense of corporeal boundary.40
35. Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 161 and p. 164.

36. Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 187.
37. L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1985), p. 191. For an interesting discussion of this quotation, see T. Beattie, New
Catholic Feminism (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 168.
38. Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria, pp. 150-55; Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, pp. 198-203;
Ward, Christ and Culture, pp. 129-58.
39. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 200. Elsewhere, Irigaray develops the
association of the cross with female lips: ‘Two sets of lips that … cross over each other
like the arms of the cross … The mouth lips and the genital lips’ (Irigaray, An Ethics of
Sexual Difference [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993], p. 18).
40. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, pp. 200-201.

‘God’ will prove to have been her best lover since he separates her
from herself only by that space of her jouissance where she finds Him/
herself’, writes Irigaray. ‘He never restricts her orgasm, even [if] it is
hysterical … Her divine companion never tires of praising her and
encouraging her (auto)eroticism that has so miraculously been redis-
covered’.41
The Sublime and the Beautiful: Burke and Kant

I want to move from Irigaray’s theological masturbation to a discussion
of the Kantian sublime, described in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement,
section 23. The move is actually very simple to make, and Clément,
Žižek and Butler have all made this connection.42 As Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick has rightly pointed out in her important essay, ‘Jane Austen
and the Masturbating Girl’, ‘the Aesthetic in Kant is substantially
indistinguishable from, but at the same time definitionally opposed
against, autoerotic pleasure’.43 So, the question arises, in what sense is
the Kantian aesthetic similar to masturbatory pleasure? The answer is to
41. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, pp. 201-202.

42. For developed studies of jouissance and the Kantian sublime, see Clément,
Syncope; A. ZupanĀiĀ, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000); S. Žižek,
Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993). The connection of these themes is sometimes presupposed,
but not explained in detail. See, for example, J. Butler, Gender Touble, p. 76.
43. E.K. Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, in P. Bennett and V.A.
Rosario II (eds.), Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of
Autoeroticism (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 134-35. Kant’s prejudice against
masturbation is well known (it merely fulfils typical eighteenth-century fears of
onanism). The idea that orgasm shortened life had a very long life indeed, stretching
from the ancient world through to Kant and beyond. Kant warns against mastur-
bation in Ueber Pädagogik, § 111: ‘Nothing weakens the mind as well as the body so
much as the kind of lust which is directed towards themselves, and it is entirely at
variance with the nature of man. But this must not be concealed from the youth. We
must place it before him in all its horribleness, telling him that in this way he will
become useless for the propagation of the race, that his bodily strength will be ruined
by this vice more than by anything else, that he will bring upon himself premature old
age, and that his intellect will be very much weakened, and so on’. (Immanuel Kant,
On Education [trans. Annette Churton; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.,
1899], p. 117). Kant’s solution to the problem of lust, like that of the ancient Christian
monks, is ascetic: disciplined attention to constant occupation and no more than
necessary sleep will solve the problem. For details on the history of fear of mastur-
bation, see J. Stengers and A. van Neck, Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror
(trans. K. Hoffmann; New York: Palgrave, 2001); T. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural
History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2004).

be found in the almost orgasmic language which Kant uses to describe

the pure moment of sublime bliss:
the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that only arises indirectly, being
brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces
followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful…delight in the
sublime does not so much involve positive pleasure as…negative pleasure.44
Studies of ancient and renaissance theories of male orgasm have revealed

that the ejaculation of semen was understood as an expenditure of the
life-giving soul of a man, the loss of his seeds of reason and life-energy.
‘Discharge’ of ‘vital forces’ could only mean male orgasm to Kant. Also
notice the inexpressibility and transcendent quality of the Kantian sublime:
that which…excites the feeling of the sublime, may appear, indeed, in
point of form to contravene the ends of our power of judgement, to be ill-
adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to be, as it were, an outrage on
the imagination, and yet it is judged all the more sublime on that account.45
Although held in distinction to the sublime, the beautiful is also

described in orgasmic terms. As is well known, Kant’s discussion of the
sublime and the beautiful is in part moulded by his critical interaction
with Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the
Beautiful of 1757. As such, when describing the beautiful, Kant quotes
directly from the German translation of Burke’s work. The orgasmic
imagery is unmistakable: ‘the relaxing, slackening, and enervating of the
fibres of the body, and consequently a softening, a dissolving, a languor,
and a fainting, dying, and melting away for pleasure’.46 Kant proceeds to
comment that such psychological observations of the phenomena ‘are
extremely fine, and supply a wealth of material for the favourite investi-
gations of empirical anthropology’. In addition, such representations are
‘in the last resort corporeal’, and inextricably linked to the ‘bodily
organ’.47
Consultation of Burke’s original work reveals that he conceived of the
orgasmic quality of aesthetic bliss in universal terms: ‘Who is a stranger
to that manner of expression so common in all times and in all countries,
of being softened, relaxed, enervated, dissolved, melted away by
pleasure?’48 Kant’s source positively revels in sexual imagery. The
44. I. Kant, The Critique of Judgement (trans. J.C. Meredith; Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1952), p. 91.
45. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, p. 91.
46. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, pp. 130-31.
47. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, p. 131.
48. E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Penguin,
2004), pp. 177-78.

language that Burke uses is unmistakeable. Take, for example, Burke’s

philosophical bedroom scene:
the application of smooth bodies relax; gentle stroking with a smooth hand
allays violent pains and cramps, and relaxes the suffering parts from their
unnatural tension; and it has therefore very often no mean effect in removing
swellings and obstructions. The sense of feeling is highly gratified with
smooth bodies. A bed smoothly laid, and soft, that is, where the resistance
is every way inconsiderable, is a great luxury, disposing to an universal
relaxation, and inducing beyond any thing else, that species of it called
sleep.49
The masturbatory imagery is plain, and the sexual trope may be
extended if one remembers that Burke found the smoothness of the skins
of ‘fine women’ beautiful.50 Quite obviously, it is exactly the smooth
hand of a woman which relieves Burke’s swelling organ, and the resulting
gratification surges into the Kantian aesthetic. For all of his patronizing,
gentlemanly remarks about the ‘fair sex’ (sic) having the ‘greatest
beauty’,51 it is clear that Burke’s motivation is sexual. Of course, this is
exactly why it needs to be recalled that his Sublime and Beautiful was
written in the same year as his marriage to Jane Nugent (though what
she thought about it is another matter). Burke is quite lost in the moment
of his gaze, transfixed by the beauty of Jane’s body (or, rather, particular
parts of her body):
Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most
beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the
easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the
smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady
eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried.52
For both Burke and, following him, Kant, the sublime and the beautiful
are gendered.53 (According to some Lacanian studies, reading Kant
creatively in the light of the construction of gender relationships in
Lacan’s work, Kant’s philosophy is unknowingly gendered at a number
of other crucial points, besides the aesthetics; but such gendering is
clearest in the Critique of Judgment).54 The sublime is masculine, the
49. Burke, Sublime and Beautiful, p. 179.

51. Burke, Sublime and Beautiful, p. 134
53. See C. Klinger, ‘The Concepts of the Sublime and the Beautiful in Kant and
Lyotard’, in R.M. Schott (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (University
Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1997), pp. 191-212.
54. See, for instance the argument regarding the gendering of the Kantian
antinomies in the Critique of Pure Reason in Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, pp. 56-58.

beautiful is feminine.55 However, in post-Kantian German Romanticism,

and especially in the work of Schlegel, the Sublime and the Beautiful
became androgynous.56 This de-gendering process allowed the feminine
to represent the sublime as well as the beautiful, and explains how
Lacanian theorists and French feminisms are now able to point to the
traditional association of the Kantian sublime with women’s jouissance.
That there should now be an often exclusive association of the sublime
with female rather than male jouissance is, however, more difficult to
explain: perhaps the particular association of women with the sublime is
due to the patriarchal identification of both with irrationality?
John Milbank has argued that such notions of sublimity are typically
modern,57 and, following Milbank, it becomes possible to see that post-
structuralist accounts of the inexpressible bliss of jouissance represent the
recovery of themes first developed in the course of European Romanticism.
55. This is absolutely the basis of Mary Wollstonecraft’s attack on Burke: ‘you
have clearly proved that one half of the human species, at least, have not souls; and
that Nature, by making women little, smooth, delicate, fair creatures, never designed
that they should exercise their reason … The affection they excite … should not be
tinctured with the respect which moral virtues inspire, lest pain should be blended
with pleasure, and admiration disturb the soft intimacy of love’. M. Wollstonecraft, A
Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 47. Wollstonecraft develops her criticism of
Burke with reference to the Christian-platonist tradition of eros: ‘if beautiful weakness
be interwoven in a woman’s frame, if the chief business of her life be … to inspire love
… her duty and happiness in this life must clash with any preparation for a more
exalted state. So that Plato [Symposium, 178-85] and Milton [Paradise Lost, VIII, 589-92]
were grossly mistaken in asserting that human love led to heavenly, and was only an
exaltation of the same affection; for the love of the Deity, which is mixed with the
most profound reverence, must be love of perfection, and not compassion for
weakness’ (p. 48).
56. See G. Verstraete, Fragments of the Feminine Sublime (New York: SUNY Press,
1998), pp. 37-53; C. MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from
Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998), pp. 52-90.
57. J. Milbank, ‘Sublimity: The Modern Transcendent’, in P. Heelas (ed.), Religion,
Modernity and Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 258-84. Milbank argues that
the Kantian sublime, unlike the Platonic Beauty, represents a concept of transcend-
ence grounded in the subject, potentially without reference to any objective, extra-
subjective, transcendent reality. See also G. Ward, ‘In the Daylight Forever?: Language
and Silence’, in O. Davies and D. Turner (eds.), Silence and the Word (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 159-84. For an overview, see C. Crockett, A
Theology of the Sublime (London: Routledge, 2001). Burke resolves not to ground the
sublime and beautiful in God on empirical grounds, ‘When we go but one step
beyond the immediately sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depth’ (Burke,
Sublime and Beautiful, p. 160).

If jouissance is a masked version of the Kantian sublime, and the Kantian

sublime is, in turn, an expression of Burke’s aesthetics, then the final
excavation of the intellectual archaeology of jouissance reveals its founda-
tions to be buried a long, long way from contemporary French postmodern
theorizing—in the anti-revolutionary ‘cherished prejudices’ of Old Tory
values.58 Curiously, someone resembling Jane Austen’s D’Arcy provided
the original idea of postmodern jouissance.59
Schleiermacher, Schelling and the Divine Orgasm of Forces

Following the argument pioneered in Kant’s Critique of Judgment that
symbols are capable of sustaining more thought than concepts can con-
ceive, European Romanticism revelled in the discovery of the fullness of
symbolic forms.60 Predictably, Schleiermacher interprets the sublime
orgasm religiously in the acclaimed sex-scene from his Speeches:
I wish that you were able to hold on to it and also to recognize it again in
the higher and divine activity of the mind. Would that I could and might
express it, at least indicate it, without having to desecrate it! It is as fleeting
and transparent as the first scent with which the dew gently caresses the
waking flowers, as modest and delicate as a maiden’s kiss, as holy and
fruitful as a nuptial embrace; indeed, not like these, but it is itself all of these
… I embrace it, not as a shadow, but as the holy essence itself. I lie on the
bosom of the infinite world. At this moment I am its soul, for I feel all its
powers and its infinite life as my own ... With the slightest trembling the
holy embrace is dispersed, and now, for the first time the intuition stands
before me as a separate form … now for the first time the feeling works its
way up from inside and diffuses itself like the blush of shame and desire
on his cheek. This moment is the highest flowering of religion.61
58. As Burke wrote, ‘instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish
them to a very considerable degree … we cherish them because they are prejudices …
Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency … it does not leave a man
hesitating in the moment of decision’ (Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The
Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 8 [ed. L.G. Mitchell; Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989], p. 138).
59. Although attempts have been made to bring Sedgwick’s celebrated essay, ‘Jane
Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ into theological discussion, perhaps only an
analysis of the Burkean sublime and the jouissance of D’Arcy can expose its true
significance. This point seems to have been missed by Stephen Moore—see his God’s
Beauty Parlor and Other Queer Spaces In and Around the Bible (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2001), pp. 13-14. The original essay may be found in Sedgwick,
Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 109-29.
60. See D. Tracy, ‘Literary Theory and Return of the Forms for Naming and Thinking
God in Theology’, The Journal of Religion, 74. 3 (1994), pp. 302-19 (309).
61. Schleiermacher, ‘Second Speech: On the Essence of Religion’, in On Religion:
Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (trans. R. Crouter; Cambridge: Cambridge University

‘Observe the Sabbath of your heart: free yourself or perish’, writes

Schleiermacher in his ‘Catechism of Reason’ addressed to ‘noble feminine
hearts’ (a ‘deliberate sacrilege’ according to Clément).62 Schleiermacher’s
holy orgasm is but one example of religious interpretation of the sublime.
Orgasm in Schelling’s philosophy of myth is another example of this
symbolic turn, but with Schelling, a curious new development arises.
Schelling’s willingness to describe God’s generation of the Word and
creation of the world using symbols of Divine orgasm makes his mythical
language especially interesting. To explain: whereas Schleiermacher had
used the symbol of orgasm to illustrate the separation of intuition and
feeling that allows for religious consciousness in the human being,
Schelling uses the symbol of orgasm to illustrate the separation of the
Word from God that allows for the creation of all that stands beyond the
blind unity of the originary Monad. Schelling makes Schleiermacher’s
religious man (sic) into God himself (sic). God’s orgasm creates the world.
This aspect of Schelling’s work has, of course, been the subject of a
recent study by Slavoj Žižek, providing an imaginative Lacanian analysis
of Schelling’s God in the moment of generation and creation.63 For
Schelling, it is arguable that Jouissance is not just a phenomenon by
which the human subject encounters the sublime; it is also something
which God experiences when generating the intra-trinitarian life.64
Schelling’s ascription of orgasm to God is found in the third draft
(1815) of his so-called ‘lost masterpiece’, Ages of the World; but it is
already implied, if not quite explicitly stated, in the second draft (1813).65
Press, 1988), pp. 112-13. Such themes of ‘spiritual voluptuousness and sensual beatitude’
are derived from Schlegel: see Lucinde and the Fragments (ed. P. Firchow; Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 44.
63. S. Žižek/F.W.J. von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Ann
Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 3-89.
64. Schelling, of course, was a key influence on Tillich, and it might be important
to realize that the orgasmic language used in Ages of the World provides some intel-
lectual context to Tillich’s use of pornographic material which included religious
symbols. See the discussion in M. Daly, Gyn/Ecology (London: The Women’s Press,
1979), pp. 94-95. M. Althaus-Reid has more recently suggested more favourable ways
of thinking about Tillich’s S/M activites. See M. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology
(London: Routledge, 2000), p. 88: ‘What is to be condemned and regretted is not that
Tillich was a sadomasochist, but the fact that he did not find “the courage to be” out
of the closet of his sexuality’.
65. For the third draft, see F.W.J. von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom (trans. J.M.
Wirth; New York: SUNY Press, 2000). For the second draft, see the translation by
J. Norman, published together with Žižek’s interpretative essay, in Žižek/von
Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, pp. 113-82.

In the third draft, Schelling chooses to describe the highest unfolding of

the whole with reference to an ‘orgasm of forces’ within Being itself. It is
‘the orgasm of forces’ which brings beings trembling into existence, and
trembling for existence in fear of the chaos from which they have
arisen.66 This is, perhaps, an odd choice of terminology, and Wirth has
recently tried to explain Schelling’s language.
Schelling described the explosion of the madness of freedom within the
carefully guarded walls of the ego’s fortress with one of the more remark-
able categories in the history of Western Philosophy, namely ‘the orgasm
of forces’. The Greek root of the word ‘orgasm’ itself stems from … an
organ or tool. In the orgasm of forces, the organ swells, but it cannot hold
onto itself and it explodes in a frenzy of excitement … All erectile organs,
female as well as male, human as well as nonhuman, sentient as well as
nonsentient, explode in the frenzied excitement of their demise.67
Schelling is attempting to describe a process which explains why God,
eternally and perfectly at rest in himself, began to stir, willed the genera-
tion of relationship within himself, and, further, willed the creation of
the world. Language is stretched as he tries to write about ‘events’ before
the creation of time; indeed, the whole argument audaciously seeks to
describe the generation of the archetype of all relationship, namely, the
primordial self-relationship of God to God. Faced with this task, Schelling
takes the option of describing the process in poetic, or mythical, language.
A full account of Schelling’s argument needs to be mindful of a number
of key philosophical ideas taken from the broader remit of his theological
thought. His concepts of infinity, of the panentheistic connection of the
World and God, of God as the Ground of Being, of divine freedom,
personality and irrationality, and of (proto-trinitarian) duality in God, all
bear on the subject in important ways.68 It is also important to realize
that, writing nearly three decades before the publication of Feuerbach’s
critique of theological language,69 Schelling is quite explicit that
66. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom, 3rd draft, p. 95.

67. J.M. Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time (New
York: SUNY Press, 2003), p. 172.
68. For an overview of these and other aspects of Schelling’s work, see P. Clayton,
The Problem of God in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 467-508.
69. The first edition of Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christenums appeared in 1841.
For details of Feuerbach’s relationship to post-Kantian and Hegelian philosophy, see
K. Barth’s introductory essay in L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (trans G. Eliot;
New York: Harper & Row, 1957), pp. x-xxx. Barth’s essay, however, should be treated
with some caution. Barth, like Feuerbach, assumes that any statements about God
constructed from the desires of the human heart cannot be genuinely theological. As
Denys Turner has pointed out, ‘in Feuerbach everything depends upon the logically
complete, and overtly theological, disjunction: either God or the human, but not both’

Christianity, in a panentheistic mode, bases its language of God on

analyses of human personality. ‘Everything divine is human … and
everything human is divine’, and, as such, ‘we can hope to approach the
truth by relating everything to man’.70
But the most substantive point is this: when Žižek draws attention to
Schelling’s prefigurement and anticipation of the Lacanian theme of
jouissance in Ages of the World, he simultaneously returns Lacanian
jouissance to its original source in the post-Kantian Romantic sublime. It
suffices to say in summary that there may, after all, be something quite
acutely perceptive in Marx’s otherwise apparently specious remark that
‘Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to
one another as onanism and sexual love’.71 The development of modern
notions of the sublime were accompanied by a parallel development of
modern notions of orgasm, whereby, as Thomas Laqueur has argued,
‘orgasm became simply a feeling, albeit an enormously charged one,
whose existence was a matter for … armchair philosophizing’.72 As
Laqueur says of Lacan’s work, ‘jouissance … is a distinctly modern
possibility’.73
Jantzen and Laqueur: Orgasm, Generation, Expression

Grace Jantzen has criticized constructions of mysticism which link
female experience to ineffability:
(D. Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004], p. 299). This typically protestant model of grace and nature (either God or
World) is not commensurate with catholic models (both God and World). In actual fact,
the real difference between (a) catholic accounts of naming God through the via
eminentiae, and (b) Feuerbachian constructivism, lies precisely in whether God and
creation are conceived as mutually inclusive, or mutually exclusive. Lacan’s comments
on Aquinas are telling here (as are Irigaray’s on Feuerbach). As Lacan says in Encore, ‘I
roll on the floor when I read Saint Thomas (Aquinas), because it’s awfully well put
together’ (p. 114); ‘Saint Thomas had no problem … coming up with the physical
theory of love … namely, that the first being we have a sense of is clearly our own
being, and everything that is for the good of our being must, by dint of this very fact,
be the Supreme Being’s jouissance, that is, God’s. To put it plainly, by loving God, we
love ourselves, and by first loving ourselves … we pay the appropriate homage to
God’ (pp. 70-71).
70. Žižek/von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, p. 157.
71. Marx, German Ideology (MECW V.236; MEW III.218), cited in P.J. Kain, Marx and
Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 107.
72. T. Laqueur, ‘Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology’,
Representations, 14 (Spring, 1986), pp. 1-41 (1-2).
73. T. Laqueur, ‘Orgasm’, p. 2.

the alleged inexpressibility of mystical experience correlates neatly with

the silencing of women in the public arena of the secular world: women
may be mystics, but mysticism is a private intense experience not commu-
nicable in everyday language and not of political relevance … Feminists
have every reason, both historical and current, to be suspicious of an
understanding of mysticism which allows that women may be mystics, but
which makes mysticism a private and ineffable psychological occurrence
and which detaches it from considerations of social justice.74
In Saint Hysteria, Mazzoni draws the link between Jantzen’s argument

and Lacan’s ideas of jouissance.75 For Mazzoni, it is Lacan in particular
who is responsible for associating women’s silence with mysticism: ‘Lacan
… reduces the mystic to a forever silent statue, frozen in the moment of
ecstasy or jouissance, which, as long as it lasts, precludes speech’.76 And
Mazzoni is quite right: Lacan’s notion of women’s mysticism is not,
primarily, based on reading what Teresa herself expressed in written
words; he is, apparently, not interested in any extensive reading of
Teresa’s theological works; rather, he is primarily interested in Bernini’s
representation of Teresa, the iconic statue of Teresa in the Cornaro
Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria. When Lacan writes about woman’s
mystical jouissance, he is writing about his interpretation of another
man’s representation of a woman. And, as Mazzoni says, ‘The choice of a
statue as the icon of mystical discourse is significant, the marble
doubling by its hardened immobility the silence of the ecstasy’.77 Or, as
Grosz observes, ‘If Lacan’s interrogation is directed to a man’s stone
representation of a woman, i.e., to Bernini’s representation of St Teresa,
it is not surprising that “she” has nothing to say!’.78
This is where I want to discuss an older, more traditional theological
account of orgasm which may be contrasted with the modern notion of
jouissance and which is not hampered by some of the same problems.
When Laqueur, in his essay, ‘Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of
Reproductive Biology’, observes that, ‘The existence of female sexual
pleasure, indeed the necessity of pleasure for the successful reproduction
of humankind, was an unquestioned commonplace well before the
elaboration of ancient doctrines in the writings of Galen, Soranus, and
the Hippocratic school’,79 it is worthwhile dwelling on the significance of
74. G. Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1995), p. 326.
75. Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria, p. 48.
78. E. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 146.
79. Laqueur, ‘Orgasm’, p. 4.

what is being claimed. For much classical biology, orgasm was more
than just a pleasant sensation, or feeling; according to Laqueur, it was a
‘deeply embedded sign of the generative process’.80 Orgasm, and, as I
will show, female orgasm in particular, was not equated with private
religious experience—the blessed, blissed-out, inexpressible gasp of a
woman deprived of her rational faculties. Female orgasm was not, as
Lacan says, meaningless, signifying nothing; neither was it a luxury
item. Actually, female orgasm was a vital pleasure expressing the crea-
tivity, and pro-creativity, of a woman’s body. Orgasm was not jouissance,
but a sign of creative delight (or, to apply Grace Jantzen’s terminology at
the risk of a strict, if, nevertheless, informative anachronism, orgasm was
viewed as a sign of women’s natality).81 As Philo said, ‘apart from
pleasure nothing in mortal kind comes into existence’.82 And as Wis. 7.2
reveals, King Solomon was conceived ‘from the seed of the man and the
pleasure of marriage’. Take away pleasure, take away orgasm, and new life
is impossible.
To begin to explain the idea of generative orgasm, I will begin to look
specifically at male orgasm in the theologies of a selection of Church
Fathers, before looking at how a broadly similar interpretation was
applied to female orgasm by Hildegard of Bingen in the medieval period.
But before I do this, I have to explain the notable exception to the rule of
early Christian writing, for Augustine does not acknowledge the genera-
tive power of orgasm. For him, orgasm is something relentlessly negative.
At the same time, the parallels between Augustine’s orgasm and jouissance
should be clear to see.

81. Now, it is not my intention to understand female orgasm reductively as a sign
of generation alone. As Valerie Traub has argued, with reference to a similar biolo-
gical model which developed in the early modern period, ‘although … [such] anatomy
treats clitoral orgasm as vital to reproductive success, it also emphasizes the clitoris’s
capacity to provide autonomous female pleasure’ (‘The Psychomorphology of the
Clitoris, or, The Reemergence of the Tribade in English Culture’ in V. Finucci and K.
Brownlee [eds.], Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and
History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe [Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2001], pp. 153-86 [159]). All I am suggesting is that Laqueur’s emphasis on the
generative significance of female orgasm stands in distinction to the apophatic in-
significance of jouissance. Such historical insight helps female orgasm to be interpreted
as a feature of positive (cataphatic), as well as negative (apophatic), theology. The risk,
of course, is that female orgasm is seen as a symbol of natality and ‘motherhood’ which
perpetuates a patriarchal understanding of the function of women.
82. Philo, Leg. All. 2.7.

Augustine and Orgasm

Perhaps the most famous reference to orgasm in Patristic literature comes
in Augustine’s City of God 14.16:
lust … disturbs the whole man … the [internal] mental emotion combines
and mingles with the [external] physical craving, resulting in a pleasure
surpassing all physical delights. So intense is the pleasure that when it
reaches its climax there is an almost total extinction of mental alertness; the
intellectual sentries, as it were, are overwhelmed.
For Augustine this is a bad thing; holy men, he says, ‘would prefer, if
possible, to beget children without lust of this kind’. Augustine fears the
loss of mental awareness, the loss of intellectual control of the body
(1 Thess. 4.4-5). In his opinion, the power of emotion and physical craving
to disrupt and disturb intellectual control is contrary to the proper order
of things; the mind should control the body, not vice versa. The ability of
the body’s desires to take control of the mind is a result of the fall of
Adam. In paradise, before sin, ‘the man would have sowed the seed and
the woman would have conceived the child when their sexual organs
had been aroused by the will, at the appropriate time and in the neces-
sary degree … not excited by lust’;83 ‘the instrument created for the task
would have sown the seed on “the field of generation” as the hand now
sows seed on the earth’.84 Adam and Eve’s sex life in Eden aroused the
same amount of passion, excitement and ecstasy as serious-minded
gardening.
In contrast to the devastating loss of intellectual control over the body
in orgasm, Augustine points to those individuals who are able to exercise
self-control in a way which others find remarkable: accomplished farters,
for instance, provide evidence of the potential of the mind to control the
body in an unexpected fashion. ‘A number of people produce at will
such musical sounds from their behind (without any stink) that they
seem to be singing from that region’.85 Clearly, some people are more in
control of their bodies than others, welcome examples to us all of what
can be achieved when the human body is under the full direction of right
reason. Although Augustine does not say it, it can be deduced from this
that after the resurrection, when the saints obtain their spiritual bodies
(bodies completely and perfectly controlled by the intellect) such abilities
will be within the power of all. Musical farting is heavenly; mind-
numbing orgasms are not.
83. Augustine, The City of God, 14.24.


Why is this? Augustinian mysticism avoids ecstasy insofar as it is

understood as a disruption or displacement of the intellect. The mind,
coolly controlled and focused, recognizes the truth which transcends it.
The more the mind is united to God, the more rational it becomes. This
union is ruptured by the desires of the flesh which call the mind away
from its proper contemplation of God. When describing the disruption
of contemplation, Augustine quotes Wis. 9.15 in Confessions 7.17.23: ‘The
body, which is corruptible, weighs down the soul, and earthly habitation
drags down the mind to many things’. ‘With a groan I crashed into
inferior things. This weight was my sexual habit’, he explains.
Augustine’s problem with orgasm is that it is a loss of control. His fears
fit neatly into those described by Foucault, namely, fears that orgasm was
costly and dangerous: ‘in sexual activity in general man’s mastery,
strength, and life were at stake’.86 According to the Hippocratic text, The
Seed, one theory thought that sperm originated in a man’s brain, and
travelled from there through the bone marrow to the genitals. Surgical
incisions below the ear were thought to inhibit the flow of sperm, leaving
a man sterile.87 For Galen, in On the Usefulness of the Parts (14.9), pneuma,
formed in the brain, is ejaculated with sperm, robbing the man of breath.88
The convulsion of orgasm is likened to epilepsy, a spasm which blocks
the brain. As Foucault observes, ‘orgasm has the form of a brief epileptic
seizure’.89 Theories which saw sperm as containing vital life-giving prin-
ciples had important consequences for the way ejaculation was perceived:
it could mean a costly expenditure of elements necessary for a man’s
existence.
So what is Augustine’s positive understanding of sex? At this point it is
informative to refer to the work of Slavoj Žižek. Actually, discussion of
Žižek is unavoidable in any discussion of theology and jouissance: as a
Lacanian theorist, and as someone who has (uniquely) collaborated with
both John Milbank and Judith Butler, Žižek has a distinct reflection on
the theological dimensions of jouissance. Now, Augustine’s picture of
self-controlled, pre-lapsarian, non-orgasmic and rational sex has recently
drawn comment from Žižek. Sex without some level of abandonment,
that is, sex in which the type of pleasure becomes the pleasure of mastery
and control, is potentially all about control and submission to order. Is
this not the sex enjoyed by a sadomasochist?
86. M. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 125.

87. See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 130.
88. See M. Foucault, The Care of the Self (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 109.
89. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 126.

The assertion … that there was sex in Paradise, that Adam and Eve did
copulate, that their pleasure was even greater than ours … the only and
crucial difference being that, while copulating, they maintained proper
measure and distance, and never lost self-control—this assertion unknow-
ingly reveals the secret of Paradise: it was the kingdom of perversity …
When the sadomasochistic pervert stages the scene in which he partici-
pates, he ‘remains in control’ at all times, maintains a distance, gives
directions like a stage director, but his enjoyment is none the less much
more intense than that of immediate passionate immersion.90
If Augustine argues that any (potential) erections of the pre-lapsarian
Adam’s penis were (speculatively, if not actually) controlled by Adam’s
reason, and that they occurred (which, of course, they did not) not for
pleasure, but as a means to an end—cool, rational reproduction (the
preservation of the species—which, of course, was not necessary before
death became the wages of sin, and, if not necessary, then not reasonable,
and therefore impossible)—then, as Žižek has argued, they—Adam’s
(purely speculative) pre-lapsarian erections—should best be seen as
instrumental. The penis is a tool, not a toy. It is to be used, not played
with. No spontaneous pleasure is involved. Now, Žižek argues that for
most men, the primary organ of ‘instrumental activity, of work and
exploration’ is not usually the penis, but the hand. So, argues Žižek: ‘In
this precise sense, fist-fucking is Edenic; it is the closest we can get to
what sex was like before the Fall: what enters me is not the phallus, but a
pre-phallic partial object, a hand’. As Žižek points out, ‘No wonder fist-
fucking, in its physical features, almost overlaps with the way a doctor
examines the rectum … we are back in a pre-lapsarian Edenic state in
which … sex was performed as just another instrumental activity’.91
The Alternative to Augustine

As I said above, a number of Church Fathers happily engage in theolo-
gical reflection on semen and male orgasm. Clement of Alexandria,
Tertullian and Methodius all agree that orgasm has a spiritual quality.
Clement associates the generative power of semen, which is formed of the
blood, with the regenerative power of the blood of Christ.92 Methodius,
too, suggests that the generative power of semen may signify the genera-
tive power of the Word, and adds to it reflection on religious dimension
of the ecstasy of orgasm which is lacking in Clement.93 For Tertullian,
90. S. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), p. 15.

91. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 16.
92. Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor, 6.
93. Methodius also has a positive view of sexual generation and the orgasmic
pleasures which accompany it. He writes, ‘at present man must co-operate in the

semen is a production or expression of a man’s soul. His description of

orgasm and ejaculation, caused by the ‘warmth of the soul’ in the ‘heat
of extreme gratification’ makes clear that he thinks the process is
intrinsically spiritual.
Now let no one take offence or feel ashamed at an interpretation of the
processes of nature which is rendered necessary (by the defence of the
truth). Nature should be to us an object of reverence, not of blushes. It is
lust, not natural usage, which has brought shame on the intercourse of the
sexes. It is the excess, not the normal state, which is immodest and
unchaste: the normal condition has received a blessing from God, and is
blest by Him: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, (and replenish the earth)’ (Gen.
1.28).
…in this usual function of the sexes which brings together the male and
the female in their common intercourse, we know that both the soul and
the flesh discharge a duty together: the soul supplies desire, the flesh
contributes the gratification of it; the soul furnishes the instigation, the
flesh affords the realization. The entire man being excited by the one effort
of both natures, his seminal substance is discharged, deriving its fluidity
from the body, and its warmth from the soul.
I cannot help asking, whether we do not, in the very heat of extreme
gratification when that generative fluid is ejected, feel that somewhat of
our soul has gone from us? And do we not experience a faintness and
prostration along with a dimness of sight? This, then, is the soul-producing
seed, which arises at once from the out-drip of the soul, just as that fluid is
the body-producing seed which proceeds from the drainage of the flesh.94
In each of these cases, orgasm is spiritual significant primarily because

it is associated with generation. Indeed, Methodius describes the death
of Christ in terms of orgasmic ecstasy, and Tertullian describes the
inspiration of Adam, the breathing of life into the clay of his flesh, as an
ejaculation of the Holy Spirit. For catholic tradition, unlike Romantic
philosophy, the primary significance of orgasm is that it expresses
generative capacity.
forming of the image of God … for it is said, “Increase and multiply” [Gen. 1.28] …
we must not be offended at the ordinance of the Creator … the casting of seed into the
furrows of the matrix is the beginning of the generation of men’. He continues: ‘When
thirsting for children a man falls into a kind of trance, softened and subdued by the
pleasures of generation as by sleep, so that again something drawn from his flesh and
from his bones is … fashioned into another man. For the harmonies of the bodies
being disturbed in the embraces of love, as those tell us who have experienced the
marriage state, all the marrow-like and generative part of the blood, like a kind of
liquid bone … is projected through the organs of generation into the living body of
the female’. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (eds.), Ante-Nicene Fathers (Edinburgh: T & T
Clark, repn, 1997), VI, p. 314.
94. Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul, 27 in Ante-Nicene Fathers, III, p. 208.

Next, female orgasm. A fine illustration of the importance of pleasure

to generation may be found in Hildegard of Bingen’s descriptions of
heterosexual intercourse in her Causae et curae, 78a-b.95
When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain,
which brings with it sensual delight, communicates the taste of that delight
during the act and summons forth the emission of the man’s seed. And
when the seed has fallen into its place, that vehement heat descending
from her brain draws the seed to itself and holds it, and soon the woman’s
sexual organs contract, and all the parts that are ready to open up during
the time of menstruation now close, in the same way as a strong man can
hold something enclosed in his fist.96
As Peter Dronke observes, Hildegard appears to be describing ‘vaginal

contractions, and the squeezing of the man’s organ by the vaginal
muscles’.97 But notice that the man’s ejaculation of semen is caused by the
woman’s pleasure. It is her pleasure that induces his ejaculation, and it is
the heat descending from her brain which embraces his sperm. Now,
male semen was commonly thought to be connected with a man’s brain,98
and Hildegard appears to be thinking about intercourse and conception
on the following lines: the female brain starts a process which leads to
the ejaculation of an element derived from the male brain, which is then
absorbed into her body; once the spermatic expression of his brain is in
her body, her brain embraces his. In other words, conception seems to
rely upon her brain absorbing his brain (or, at least, a spermatic expression
of it), her soul absorbing his soul, so that a new co-mixed soul may be
supplied to the foetus. In any case, the female brain is the beginning and
end of sex. Female pleasure is beginning and end of human reproduction.
Take away female pleasure, and the process can neither begin nor end.
Or, as Wis. 7.1-2 says, ‘in the womb of a mother I was moulded into flesh
… from the seed of the man and the pleasure of marriage’.
Notice that such pleasure does not differentiate between body and
mind. It is physical and spiritual. Moreover, it is positive, creative, pro-
95. Latin text in P. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of
Texts from Perpetua (†203) to Marguerite Porete (†1310) (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), p. 244.
96. Trans. P. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 175.
97. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 176.
98. Elsewhere I have developed themes from Foucault with a sharp focus on the
connection between a man’s brain and sperm in Platonistic biological doctrine. See the
discussion in my ‘Sexual Symbolism, Religious Language and the Ambiguity of the
Spirit: Associative Themes in Anglican Poetry and Philosophy’, Theology & Sexuality
13.3 (2007), pp. 233-56, esp. p. 242.

creative. For the woman, at least, orgasm cannot be viewed in terms of a

withdrawal or emptying of the mind.
Postmodern Hildegard
How is this relevant to contemporary feminist theologies? In a discussion
of how natality is best interpreted, Liz Stuart99 has drawn attention to
Irigaray’s observation that a woman’s generative capacity may also be
understood as giving birth to ‘love, desire, language, art, social things,
political things, religious things’.100 And, in this context (as Stuart also
mentions), Tina Beattie’s argument that ‘the clitoris might even symbolise
a culture that celebrates playfulness and nurtures small delights in the
loving and patient encounters of daily life’ seems fitting.101 Notably,
Cixous, too, argues that:
[Woman’s] libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide: her
writing also can only go on and on … she goes and goes on infinitely …
Her tongue doesn’t hold back but holds forth, doesn’t keep in but keeps on
enabling … I am spacious singing Flesh.102
Female orgasm—be it clitoral or vaginal (or both, simultaneously)—is

being interpreted as a sign of generous, generative, pro-generative capa-
city. Moving beyond the silent women of Bernini and Lacan, I suggest
that Shannon Bell’s feminist interpretation of female ejaculation may
assist in the construction of more creative theological readings of female
orgasm. It would seem some useful divisions may be drawn between the
apophaticism of senseless jouissance, and expressive ejaculatory enjoy-
meant. For ejaculation means something like spontaneous expression
(witness the ‘Ejaculatory Prayers’ of traditional spiritual manuals). As
Shannon Bell has argued, ‘Female ejaculation is about power over one’s
own body … If feminists are going to appropriate and reclaim the female
body, it is very important that women provide feminist scripts of the
ejaculating body in control of ejaculation’.103 She draws a clear distinction
between female and male ejaculation:
99. L. Isherwood and E. Stuart, Introducing Body Theology (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim
Press, 2000), p. 76.
100. L. Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993),
p. 18.
101. Beattie, ‘Carnal Love and Spiritual Imagination’, p. 180.
102. H. Cixous and C. Clément, The Newly Born Woman (New York: I.B. Tauris,
1996), p. 88.
103. S.S. Bell, ‘Feminist Ejaculations’ in A. Kroker and M. Kroker (eds.), The Hysterical
Male: New Feminist Theory (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 155-69 (163-64).

To avoid identification with a male phenomenon, I argue that the term

[‘ejaculation’] should be kept while using the distinctive characteristics of
female ejaculate to redefine and rewrite the meaning of the term: female
ejaculate is not ‘spent’; with stimulation one can ejaculate repeatedly; and,
a woman in control of ejaculation may ejaculate enormous quantities.104
Or, as Tina Beattie suggests: ‘a woman’s orgasm is a form of arousal

rather than depletion. A man might expend himself in his first coming,
but the second coming is a uniquely womanly affair’.105 (Beattie is refer-
ring to clitoral orgasm, not female ejaculation, but the playful abundance
of female climaxes make her observations relevant to Bell’s analogous
interpretation of female ejaculation as a symbol of plenitude).
Now, as Bell describes, ‘The expulsion of female fluids during sexual
excitement was thought by a number of Greek and Roman doctors and
philosophers to be a normal and pleasurable part of female sexuality, the
debate evolving around whether female fluids were or were not progeni-
tive’.106 Laqueur, too, discusses the relation of female ejaculation to the
generative process in classical biology:
The author of the Hippocratic treatise The Seed maintains … that heat in
women builds up more gradually, resulting in a pleasure at once more
sustained and less intense than the male’s. Though her orgasm occurs
whether she emits before or after the man, it is most intense if it occurs at
the moment the sperm and its heat touches the womb. Then, like a flame
flaring when wine is sprinkled on it, the woman’s heat blazes most
brilliantly … Orgasm’s crescendo bears witness to the Galenic-Hippocratic
two-seed model of conception in which women, contra Aristotle, actually
‘seminate’ at the peak of their sexual raptures. Like men, women also give
forth their semen in response to imaginary friction in the heat of youth or
in the quiet of the night. The limbs and back of a widow who has not been
with a man for some time ache, Galen reports, from the build-up of semen
until she discharges a viscous semen and feels the kind of physical pleasure
she would have experienced in intercourse. Others, similarly situated,
discharge a thinner, more urine-like liquid—one presumes the secretion of
the paraurethral glands.107
Laqueur’s reference to the paraurethral glands is rather bland. Bell

gives some description of the operation of 31 ducts on either side of the
urethra and around the top of the vagina which express female ejaculate,
and the ‘powerful, pleasurable kinaesthetic visual, and auditory exper-
104. Bell, ‘Feminist Ejaculations’, p. 163.

105. Beattie, New Catholic Feminism, pp. 144-45.
106. Bell, ‘Feminist Ejaculations’, pp. 155-56.

ience’ which, in her own experience, accompanies ejaculation.108 Accor-

dingly, when describing female orgasm, Aristotle also writes about the
association of ‘fluid discharge’ and ‘pleasure’. He describes a ‘secretion of
the uterus’, and mentions that, ‘Its quantity … is sometimes out of propor-
tion to the emission of [male] seed and far exceeds it’. Such fluid emission
is constituted by the accompanying emission of pneuma, which is the
true basis of the ‘occurrence of pleasure in intercourse’. For Aristotle,
then, female ejaculation is pneumatic.109 Perhaps now is the time to see it
expressed, inscripted, and printed in theological discourse also?
108. Bell, ‘Feminist Ejaculations’, p. 165.

109. Aristotle, De generatione animalum, 1, 727b.34 -728a.12. For translation, see
Aristotle, De Partibus Animalum I and De generatione Animalum I (trans. D.M. Balme;
Clarendon Aristotle Series; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 49.

Theology and Sexuality: Jouissance, Generation and The Coming of God

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Theology and Sexuality: Jouissance, Generation and The Coming of God

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Theology and Sexuality

Jouissance, Generation and the Coming of God

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Jouissance, Generation and the Coming of God

Keywords: Irigaray, Lacan, Burke, Kant, Schelling, orgasm, jouissance

Ever since Jacques Lacan developed Georges Bataille’s reflections on

1. J. Lacan, Le Seminaire, Livre XX, Encore, 1972–1973 (Paris: Editions de Seuil,

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work of French feminist writers influenced by Lacan—Julia Kristeva,

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customary (excepting, sometimes, ‘bliss’8) to leave jouissance untrans-

I quote Barthes and Derrida simply as illustrations of the place of

8. When an attempt is made to translate jouissance, it is—following Richard

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My intention in this essay is to explain why jouissance has come to be

11. Bataille, Eroticism, p. 9.

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which the more traditional model—generative orgasm—may serve to

Jouissance and French Feminisms

16. Acknowledging that French feminism is a contested term, I have chosen to

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The fluidity of feminine sexuality—at least as it is understood by Beauvoir

And, of course, Beauvoir is quite adamant that feminine sexuality is

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Now, you do not have to be Mary Daly to raise an eyebrow at this

Lacan, God, Woman, Jouissance

23. As it happens, Daly is extraordinarily complimentary about Beauvoir. See, for

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—especially with that of Hadewijch and Teresa of Avila. That this

28. Lacan, Encore, p. 77.

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The association of God with woman’s jouissance in particular is made

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Further French Feminisms

35. Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 161 and p. 164.

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The Sublime and the Beautiful: Burke and Kant

41. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, pp. 201-202.

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be found in the almost orgasmic language which Kant uses to describe

Studies of ancient and renaissance theories of male orgasm have revealed

Although held in distinction to the sublime, the beautiful is also

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language that Burke uses is unmistakeable. Take, for example, Burke’s

49. Burke, Sublime and Beautiful, p. 179.

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beautiful is feminine.55 However, in post-Kantian German Romanticism,

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If jouissance is a masked version of the Kantian sublime, and the Kantian

Schleiermacher, Schelling and the Divine Orgasm of Forces

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‘Observe the Sabbath of your heart: free yourself or perish’, writes

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In the third draft, Schelling chooses to describe the highest unfolding of

66. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom, 3rd draft, p. 95.

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Christianity, in a panentheistic mode, bases its language of God on

Jantzen and Laqueur: Orgasm, Generation, Expression

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the alleged inexpressibility of mystical experience correlates neatly with