"In 20th century and contemporary film and television, the experience of orgasm is almost invariably depicted by images of waterfalls and fireworks. The classic example is probably the scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) in which a romantic dialogue between the two main characters, played by Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, is cross-cut with images of multicoloured fireworks. Many recent productions present analogous images. In The Notebook (2004) by Nick Cassavetes, the two lovers fall into one another’s arms in a pouring rain; and massive waterfalls frame crucial romantic encounters in several popular movies, such as Roger Donaldson’s Cocktail (1988), Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). They allude to sexual climax, which thus appears as an explosive or overflowing event that falls upon us like natural upheavals and mechanical eruptions.

This echoes the literary and art historical portrayals of orgasm as ‘ecstasy’ or ‘ex-stasis’ in its various registers – aesthetic, religious-spiritual and existential. The images of overflow and explosion provide a naturalistic interpretation of the core idea of stepping outside oneself and transcending one’s limits that has fascinated Western culture since antiquity.

One type of the ecstatic experience of self-transcendence is visually captured by Italian Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini in his statue The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (1647–1652), nestled inside the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Wrapped in the fabrics of her own robe, Theresa collapses, throwing her head back and closing her eyes. A cupid-like angel figure gently holds her up by one corner of her robe while aiming a golden arrow at her heart. The dynamically folding fabrics of Theresa’s own robe surrounding her from all sides and the bronze rays that rain down on her from an unseen source above convey the experience of ecstasy. The religious setting does not compromise the sensuous qualities of the scene but on the contrary draws attention to the fact that transcendence is involved in all forms of ecstasy - religious, aesthetic, erotic and sexual. A very similar image of a dynamic whirlpool of passion is presented in more prosaic form by Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005): in a freezing cold night, two lovers are wrapped in multiple layers of moving fabrics that issue from their clothes, sleeping bags, tent canvases.

In philosophical terms, these pictorial and verbal imageries can be understood by analysing the phenomenon of flow. In his Phenomenology of Perception, the French philosopher Maurcie Merleau-Ponty draws attention to the dual powers of flowing elements. He points out that on the one hand flows tend to spread out boundlessly, in several directions, but on the other, they also have the capacity to carry themselves like a stream in one direction, yet without limits. Crucially orgasm involves both forms of sensuous expanse and can thus be characterised as a multidirectional flow.

So, the two aspects of flows are crucial to all experiences of ecstasy and climaxing. The female orgasmic pleasure in particular is not a local excitement that stays in the area of stimulation, however intense it may be; it is an eruption of enjoyment that spreads throughout the whole experiencing body. Pleasure springs from sensuous sources but then traverses in a cumulating or explosive manner literally from head to toe. Moreover, when sensuous pleasure reaches the peak of jouissance, the wave of orgasm carries itself forward without any additional stimulus or catalyst.

Merleau-Ponty argues, however, that it is not just particular experiences that have the character of ‘flow’. Rather, what is flowing is temporality itself as a common structure of our way of experiencing the world. Experience is constantly in the dynamic state of formation and generation, and at each moment it presses itself toward the next moment and further toward an open future. It always proceeds, completely irrespective of its specific contents, as a flow. So, in addition to the sensuous flow of pleasure across the climaxing body, characteristic of orgasms, there is the flow of time itself, shared by all experiences.

This argument allows us to pay heed to another aspect of orgasmic enjoyment: it has the capacity to interrupt the ordinary course of life and throw us outside of time. Most other experiences clearly display a threefold temporal order of past, present and future, carrying traces from earlier experiential life and referring to an anticipated future. But orgasmic experience does not manifest the threefold structure of experienced time, nor does it settle in the temporal order of our practical lives. It dislocates the experiencing subject temporarily and seems to raise her above time or press her underneath its surface.

In this respect, orgasm parallels fainting, loss of consciousness, dreamless sleep and, ultimately, also death. The French use the term ‘la petite mort’ for it, referring to the state of weakening awareness or fading presence which essentially involves the disruption of the temporal flow of consciousness. Artistic inspiration, divine illumination and certain forms of insanity or madness offer further analogue states. In all such frames of mind, we divert from the temporal order of our normal lives, from their practical and social engagements, and transcend or submerge – not just our own personalities – but time itself..."

Sara Heinämaa*

https://iai.tv/articles/the-phenomenology-of-orgasm-and-desire-auid-1123



Discuss. :)





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*Sara Heinämaa's recent publications include:

"On the transcendental undercurrents of phenomenology: The case of the living body,” Continental Philosophy Review, Special issue on Methods, eds. Steven Crowell and Anthony Fernandez, vol. 54, no. 2, 2021, pp.237–257.

"Values of love: Two forms of infinity characteristic of human persons,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 19, no. 3, 2020, pp.431–450.

“Varieties of normativity: Norms, goals, values,” in Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity: Norms, Goals, Values, eds. Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo ja Ilpo Hirvonen, London, New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2021.

“Phenomenology as vocation – A project instituted and habituated by the will,” The History of Habit, eds. Komarine Romdenh-Romluc and Jeremy Dunham, forthcoming 2021.

“Self – A phenomenological account: Temporality, finitude and intersubjectivity,” in Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and the Social World: The Continued Relevance of Phenomenology, Essays in Honour of Dermot Moran, eds. Anna Bortolan and Elisa Magri, Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2021. In French as “Une approche phénoménologique du moi: temporalité, finitude et intersubjectivité,” trans. Kaisa Sivenius, Diogenes / Diogène – Revue international des sciences humaines, no. 269–270, 2021/1–2, pp.81–94.

“Cartesian Meditations: Husserl’s pluralistic egology,” The Husserlian Mind, ed. Hanne Jacobs, London: Routledge, 2021, pp.38–49.

Two orders of objectification: The look and the touch,” in Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Sciences, eds. Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, James Jardine and Dermot Moran, New York, Oxon: Routledge, 2020, pp.44–62.

“Objectification, inferiorization, projection: Phenomenological insights into dehumanization,” co-authored with James Jardine, in Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization, ed. Maria Kronfeldner, London: Routledge, 2021, pp.309–325. In Spanish, trans. Agata Bak, in [Phenomenology of Sexual Violence], eds. Macela Venebra and Agata Bak, forthcoming in 2021.

“Epoché as a personal transformation: On the similarities between the philosophical change of attitude and religious conversions,” Phänomenologischen Forschungen, Special issue on Phenomenology and Pragmatism / Phänomenologie und Pragmatismus, eds. Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, Niels Weidtmann and Sebastian Luft, forthcoming 2019.

“Normality,” with Joona Taipale, The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology, eds. Giovanni Stanghellini, Anthony Fernandez, René Rosford et al., Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2018.

“Strange vegetation: Emotive undercurrents of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November,” SATS, Nordic Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming 2018.

“Embodiment and bodily becoming,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2018.

“Descartes’ notion of the mind-body union and its phenomenological elaborations,” with Timo Kaitaro, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2018.

“On the complexity and wholeness of human beings: Husserlian perspectives,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, 2017, pp.393–406.

“Love and admiration (wonder): Fundaments of the self-other relations,” in Emotional Experiences: Ethical and Social Significance, eds. John Drummond and Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, London: Rowan and Littlefield International, 2017, pp.155–174.

“Ambiguity and difference: Two feminist ethics of the present,” in Differences: Rereading Beauvoir and Irigaray, eds. Emily Anne Parker and Anne van Leeuwen, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp.137–173.