I Think Therefore I Am Not Mystical Desire and the Dispossession of the Cogito

Abstract

This article sets out to question the understanding of religion as a purely spiritual relationship with God by focusing on the mystical experience of ecstasy, an experience that has often been described as leaving the body behind in a moment of spiritual rapture. Using psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s work, this article will set out to show that it is not the body that is left behind in mystical ecstasy, but rather a certain understanding of selfhood constituted by autonomous reason that will come to be conceptualized as the Cartesian cogito. The body figures as the site of an unknown that accepts having been constituted by another unknown, a God that cannot be sublated or grasped by reason alone. In this sense, the goal of psychoanalysis will be shown to overlap with an apophatic and embodied relation to the divine.