On Catherine Clément's theory of creative ecstasy: "Escaping into syncope was, for them, a scandalous escape from rationality. But this removal from time and space can bring a great joy, an unlocatable but generalized elation which Clément, borrowing the expression from the British psychologist D. W. Winnicott, calls, "an orgasm of the self," different from but related to the physical orgasm....It is thus normal for the artist to be schizoid, to be aware of and open to an 'entre-deux syncopé'." (Michael Finn in Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits, and Pornography: Fin-de-Sciècle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde)
(When a tongue, the physical organ in all its complexity and simplicity, is overtaken and even annhiliated by a superfluousness of nonsensical decoration, does this connote a beginning or an end, or is this diving right into the midst of the precious, baroque syncope? The same might be asked of a life theatricalized, aestheticized, and suppressed/expanded by excess, which contracts and expands with limited regard to history and its liquid, shifting politics.)
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