Abstract

The aim of this paper is to critically display the notion of ecstasy in Elvio Fachinelli’s work, delineating both the psychoanalytical applicability and the ethico-political horizons of it. The first part of the work concentrates on the definition of Fachinellian ecstasy, defining its meaning and its application: Fachinelli refuses a unitarian conception of ecstatic, that is too much confined in mysticism or inappropriately inscribed in the aesthetic circle of the artistic creativity; rather, Fachinelli opts for an open definition of ecstasy, which embraces forms and experiences that are structurally different. These apparently unmeasurable phenomena have something in common: the constructs of timelessness, perceptual expansion and the abolition of the conscious Ego. The second part of the paper will face the political implications of ecstasy, answering to the accusations that sees Fachinelli as one of several emancipative and anti-repressive thinkers and then referring to the elaboration of the fundaments of narcocapitalism, moving it away from its eschatological opposites. On the base of this premises, in Fachinelli ecstasy reveals as a trans-historical notion, fundamental to make a wide criticism of the “apologies of defense”: all discourses and theories that sells an ideological vision of the subject, who is seen as constantly vulnerable and harassed by the need to protect himself. The notion of ecstasy, that in Fachinelli’s work seem to tend to the psychedelic tout court, not only problematizes the well-known relation between psychotropics and psychopathology in a nonmedical way, but it also questions the notion of subjectivity, giving back to it its constitutive ambiguity that the current occidental individualism has culturally “abduct”.